Category: Work

Nexus One: Riding along on my pushbike, honey..

Posted by Martyn Drake – January 27, 2010

I’ve just discovered the greatest Android app yet.  It’s called My Tracks, and it records your movements via GPS and presents you with both real-time stats as well as a summary at the end.  Obviously if I’m cycling, I can’t see how fast I’m going, but I can gather some interesting stats about my journey.  Below is what My Tracks gathered about my route into work and plotted the track against Google Maps:


View Knaphill To Surrey Research Park in a larger map

And some stats about that journey:

Total milage: 7.56 miles
Moving time: 34 minutes
Average moving speed: 13.39mph
Elevation gain: 137m
Min. Elevation: 74m
Max. Elevation: 152m

Now, I’ve just got to find the right camera mount and borrow the work’s Sony HXR-MC1P camera (the same kind that Robert Llewellyn uses for his Car Pool show) to record the journey in glorious HD.

Technology/Post-Production company Thomson files for bankruptcy protection!

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 17, 2009

For six years between 2002 and 2008 I worked for The Moving Picture Company as a production systems engineer.  MPC specialises in high end digital visual effects for film, television, pop promos and commercials, and has won many industry awards for it’s work.

Thus I am shocked to learn that the company which owns it, Thomson SA, have just filed for bankruptcy protection against it’s $3.8 billion of debt.  Prior to Thomson buying MPC, it was owned by Carlton Communications.  Thomson also owns amongst it’s broad portfolio, Technicolor, Grass Valley (famed for it’s telecine kit), a share of the MP3 patent, and Alcatel (who manufacturer ADSL modems and other telecommunications equipment).

I’m hoping that Thomson will pull through this successfully as they are simply too large and important a company in the industries they operate to fail.  If nothing else, perhaps they should consider selling their share of the MP3 patent..

Protecting your data with SquirrelSave..

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 8, 2009

Making Cedric the Squirrel work harder, faster, stronger for you!

Disclaimer/Caveat: This is a personal blog, and all opinions within are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employers, Memset.  I provide support for the SquirrelSave service and therefore everything you read here is merely a personal view rather than official Memset opinion or documentation.

Online backups versus traditional backup methodology

Over the past few years, I’ve found online backup systems to be absolutely invaluable alongside backing up to DVD and Blu-Ray, as well as using external hard drives.  An online backup account allows you to instantly retrieve a deleted file from the Internet much faster than it takes to find the right discs, put them into the drive (or hook up the right external drive) and then copy the files across.

Additionally, with historical online backups, you can delete a file – forget about it for 30 days or more, and then suddenly realise that you need it again.  Big problem if you’re simply dumping/overwriting the contents of a backup on a hard drive.  Your physical backup may also die when you least expect it.  DVDs and Blu-Rays have a limited shelf life, and hard drives are quite prone to failing at any time for any reason.  Online backup services could be seen, in my eyes at least, to be like an extra insurance policy against both your computer and your physical media backups from failing.

Where SquirrelSave steps in

The service that I provide support for, SquirrelSave, has been successfully running for the past few years.  The datacentres in which data is stored are based in Reading, UK.  All data to and from the datacentres is encrypted between your computer and the backup server, and the filesystem in which your backups are stored is also encrypted.  But the real beauty and major advantage of SquirrelSave, for me, over all the other online backup providers (Jungle Disk, Mozy, Humyo, Carbonite, Backblaze, etc.) is that it’s based around existing open source software.  SquirrelSave essentially provides a GUI wrapper around SSH, rsync and SCP.

With SquirrelSave you define your Include and Exclude lists within the GUI (SquirrelSave ships with a set of sensible defaults – generally your C:\Users\<username> directory is set for backup, and many temporary/system directories are set for exclusion[1]) and then hit Start Full Backup.  This kicks off the long backup process which can take several days to several weeks depending on how fast your broadband provider’s upload speed allows[2].  You can specify a limit to the amount of bandwidth SquirrelSave uses if you find that Cedric the Squirrel is feasting a bit too much on your uploads.

Examining backed up data or restoring is simplicity in itself.  While SquirrelSave does not provide a web based interface for this, it does include the WinSCP client that makes it easy to navigate through the backup server directories to recover your files.  It is then simply a case of dragging and dropping directories and/or files over to your hard drive to restore them.  SquirrelSave also has multiple historical backups, so that if you do delete a file from your machine, you can restore a file from 2,4,6,12,14, etc. days ago (the historical data doubles each time).

I’ve used SquirrelSave myself both at work and at home to recover files that I’ve been stupid enough not to back up manually first.  The most recent case was when I had to reinstall the Macbook due to serious rainbow beach ball issues upon start-up.  I recovered all of my documents, SSH keys, etc. within a matter of minutes of installing the SquirrelSave client.  Note: the Mac SquirrelSave client is still in development/testing at this time.

SquirrelSave Tip #1

If you see “Some files not completely transferred (23)” when performing a SquirrelSave backup, don’t worry.  This indicates that somewhere within your Include list, you’re backing up temporary files which existed when SquirrelSave (or rather, rsync) was compiling it’s list of files to back up.  By the time the backup started, those files were deleted or moved.

Restoring files to a new PC

There’s no right or wrong way of restoring files to your new/replacement PC.  But there are several ways of doing so.  My suggestion would be to ensure that you keep a backup of your local SquirrelSave config directory.  This is located (on Vista and 7 machines) under C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\SquirrelSave.  I’d make sure that you’re using something like WinZip, PowerArchiver or any ZIP utility to back up the contents of this directory and keep it safe.  Not a problem if you forget to do this, as you can restore without this data – but any customisations made to your Include and Exclude tabs will be lost.

On the new PC,  if you’ve kept the config files, then restore them to the same path as was on your old PC.  Install SquirrelSave.  If you don’t have the config files, you’ll be prompted to login and run the configuration file from your SquirrelSave online web account.  If this is the case it is VITAL that you pause/select backup later when prompted.  You do NOT want SquirrelSave to start backing up your new PC just yet.

Once SquirrelSave is installed and configured, you can then use the View Backup button to connect to your files and then copy them over to your new PC. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do not want SquirrelSave to back up these files again, or delete the contents of the current directory hierarchy on the backup server – make sure you copy these files back to the same paths on your new PC as before.  If you put files into different directories, SquirrelSave will think these are new and back them up.  Eventually the files in the old folders on the backup server will be deleted.  So files and folders must be like-for-like on the new PC if you wish to avoid these issues.

Once the files have been restored, you can unpause SquirrelSave and it’ll start to back up your new PC.

SquirrelSave Tip #2

The more advanced SquirrelSave user can use any SCP client to connect to their backup store.  Your private key is stored as ssh_key in the config directory (see above), and you can use this to connect to the backup store (the host that you need to connect to is formed from your SquirrelSave username, followed by .backup.squirrelsave.com).

There you have it.  SquirrelSave is a safe, easy-to-use, online backup service which costs just £4.95 + VAT per month (with 30 day money back guarantee) for unlimited storage.  While it is offered and supported on the Windows platform (XP, Vista or 7) at the moment, it WILL be expanded to the Mac and Linux platforms in due course.

If you need assistance with SquirrelSave, please do NOT contact me directly here – please use the official support email of support@squirrelsave.com.  We aim to reply within 2 hours of receiving your email (Monday-Friday in office hours).

Footnotes

[1] Users of Microsoft Outlook will need to explicitly declare the path to their PST files as SquirrelSave exlcludes the AppData path by default (this is because it can contain a LOT of unnecessary data).  To backup Outlook data on a Windows Vista/7 machine, you’d need to include C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook within your SquirrelSave Include tab.

That said, I HIGHLY recommend Outlook users consider buying a copy of AJ Systems OutBack Plus 97 which can bundle Outlook configuration and PST files into a single file, as well as other Windows application preferences.  The resulting file can then be backed up by SquirrelSave quickly and easily.

[2] I’ve found that Virgin Media customers are seriously disadvantaged due to the peak usage caps that they place on customers.  I would advise that Virgin customers seek another broadband provider if you’re wanting SquirrelSave or other online backup provider – regardless of whoever you choose, you will see major delays in uploading your data versus other providers who do not impose such limits.

Fine weather for pond ducks, but not for bicycling Drakes..

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 2, 2009

Nearly came a cropper this evening.

Had set off from work at roughly 4pm (started at 8am) when the weather wasn’t too bad.  It was spitting a little, but this has never been much of a problem even when the ground is still quite wet.  However, as I was heading down Aldershot Road (see map below), the rain picked up enough to completely obliterate my vision. In addition, the electric bike’s breaks barely worked. This resulted in me swerving across the road rather dangerously and then ending up clipping the kerb and falling off the bike. Thankfully I only banged my knee and shin a bit and not much else (in essence I managed to do some mad hopping off the bike before it hit the ground).


View Bike Disaster in a larger map

Since the rain was still coming down extremely heavily, I decided that I couldn’t risk cycling any more and walked the bike from that point upwards to the Worlpesdon stretch of the A322. This was not without further discomfort having had reckless drivers whizzing down the road and going straight through massive puddles causing me to become absolutely drenched (with the occasional mouthful of dirty rain water).


View Larger Map

Managed to ride the bike from that point using the cycle path up to Fox Corner when the rain started to hit heavily again (and once more, the occasional covering of water from passing cars) and I decided to walk the bike again up until Knaphill. It took a while, I tell you:


View Larger Map

Needless to say, I’m taking the bus for the next few days!

Ooh me frozen .. hands, PCI compliance and Thunderbird 3 rc1

Posted by Martyn Drake – December 1, 2009

Set off to work by electric pushbike this morning thinking that I wouldn’t really need my gloves.  How wrong I was.  In fact, it got so bad that I stopped off at Sainsburys and bought a £9 pair of fleece-lined leather gloves.  Legs were quite a bit cold despite wearing thermal lined leggings.  I think tomorrow I might need the under thermals as well.  Eek.  I think it’s safe to say it’s now PROPER winter.

Was very glad to receive an email at work from the University of Surrey asking for feedback from cyclists who cycle in and out of the Surrey Research Park.  Have sent back an email to the Uni telling them exactly what it’s like.  It’s not generally pleasant ever since the Royal Surrey Hospital opened it’s new car park.   That said,  it’s always been bad when you leave the Research Park around 4pm.  You see loads of cars all backed up around Occam Road waiting to get into Gill Avenue as everybody waits for cars to come out the hospital car parks, people crossing at the out-of-action traffic lights, and having to deal with a nightmare roundabout at the end of it all.  There’s not much point asking for cycle lanes as there is just no room for them.  The best I think us cyclists can hope for is a dual pavement/cycle access lane.  Who knows?

Have also been tinkering with servers to get them PCI compliant.  You’ll all be pleased to know that the miniserver this blog sits upon has passed with flying colours (albeit with some caveats).  I even recompiled and installed the very latest OpenSSH on this box to go above and beyond what is required by some of these PCI checkers.

Finally – after a good few days of solid use, I’m pleased to say that I absolutely adore Thunderbird 3 (albeit I’m running a release candidate!).  It’s far exceeded my expectations and I’ve even moved from Apple Mail on the work Macbook to Thunderbird 3.  No major issues encountered so far.

When a shortcut becomes a longcut..

Posted by Martyn Drake – November 21, 2009

Friday didn’t go too well for me.

I decided to leave the electric pushbike at home and embark by bus to Guildford (and consequently to the Surrey Research Park).  Sadly, after two buses failed to turn up and an ever increasing queue of old people and student-types, I decided to go by train.  This particularly journey didn’t go too bad.  Coming back: not so good.

By the time I got to Guildford train station, it had been announced that a car had hit a railway bridge which would affect trains heading into London Waterloo.  The announcement boards for incoming trains kept repeating this fact over and over again.  By the time a train did come in, all of us bundled into the nearest carriage and set off, thinking we were heading to Woking first.

Oh dear, no we weren’t.

We travelled all the way into London Waterloo where it turned out that the train was going back to Basingstoke via Woking.   Had to explain to the ticket inspector that there were no announcements or indications that the train wasn’t a stopping service.  The inspector was quite understanding and told me that she had spoken to quite a few people in a similar situation.  Got back to Woking close to 8pm and home about 8:30pm.  Two and half hours after I left work.

Back on the bike Monday..

Oh, to make matters worse – had to re-install OS X Snow Leopard on the Macbook as it’s been playing silly buggers over the past few weeks.  Lots of rainbow beach balls and no activity at all.  So had to spent an hour and half wiping and reinstalling everything again.  Thankfully our own SquirrelSave service saved me embarrassment when I realised that my SSH keys were wiped.  Thank goodness for Cedric the Squirrel!

Up, Up and Away!

Posted by Martyn Drake – November 2, 2009

Friday night turned into a bit of a fiasco, having volunteered to take over on-call while my colleagues went out for a free-for-all night out.  Sods law dictates that when this sort of thing happens, all hell breaks loose.  And that's what happened.  I even took a half day off that day and found myself working through that too.  By the time midnight came and went, I was still doing stuff for work.

Thankfully there was not emergencies throughout the night and we had a leisurely morning before heading off to Woking and Waitrose to pick up groceries.  Came back, dropped off the stuff, and headed out to Guildford to watch Disney/Pixar's UP in glorious 3D.

The only time 3D has ever really worked for me was Terminator 3D way back in 2000 at Universal Studios, California.  Since then, whenever I've seen 3D stuff, it's just not worked.  It's not helped that I have a slight squint and I have a lazy eye.  So watching UP in 3D was about as much good as watching the show in tap dancing clogs and lederhosen.

Lack of 3D action aside, Pixar have come up trumps again.  Absolutely loved this film.  Cried like a baby twice, much to Jennifer's amusement, but laughed uproariously at most of the gags.  This is a beautifully crafted film and has to rate as one of my favourite Pixar films of all time.

Just one Cornetto, give it to me..

Posted by Martyn Drake – July 30, 2009

Haven't done a blog post in a while, so here's one to tide us over for a bit.

The past few weeks have been very hectic at work, but we've now taken on board a couple more sysadmins and already the overall load is being balanced out nicely.  I can now actually get around to doing internal tickets and project work which has been otherwise thwarted by the ever increasing support queue.  Had annual review which went well and everybody seems to be happy with me and I with them.

The electric bike is holding up well, despite recently suffering a puncture on the way home on Wednesday when a twig with thorns managed to lodge itself in the front tire and causing the inner tube to puncture and deflate by the time I got to Brookwood Sainsburys.  Luckily the bike shop in Knaphill was open and got them to change the inner tube there and then.

Hope to have some good news about Jennifer's job hunting progress soon.

Current queue of Blu-Ray films to watch:

Wanted
The Colour of Magic
Sweeney Todd
Die Hard 4.0

I continue to be impressed with Blu-Ray's quality and versatility.  I was particularly impressed with the 1951 original version of The Day The Earth Stood Still.  Truly wonderful sound mixing, some interesting documentaries and the film itself was presented exceedingly well given it's age.

Off to see Les Miserables in London tomorrow evening.  Have only heard bits and pieces from the show, so it'll be good to put them in the right order and see what it's all about.

Of Jaffa Cakes and pushbikes..

Posted by Martyn Drake – July 12, 2009

Following up from the Heute Cusine post, the strawberry Jaffa Cakes were nice, but not as nice as the usual orange ones.  I also couldn't taste much Guiness in the Guiness chocolate..

Have slept most of the day due to the rather long and trying week.  I was also on-call the previous week and last weekend had a lot of on-call alerts.  So it was good to just sleep through most of Saturday even though this annoys Jennifer greatly. 

Next week should see my electric bike picked up and fixed, and the broken non-electric bike picked up.  We still need to build the replacement…

Adobe Creative Premium Production suite? £1,400. Activation goes wrong.

Posted by Martyn Drake – June 14, 2009

Recently my employers purchased £1,400 worth of software – the Adobe Creative Premium Production suite – for me to produce videos and to work on various video related projects on the new Dell XPS system that I have here at home.
Got it home, installed it, started to work on said video project. 

Hard drive issues with the Dell meant that I would have to do a re-install of the software at a later date.  So, closer to the time that I was going to swap out the hard drives, I deactivated the software.  Having experienced the wonders of online activation when hard drives fail without having deactivated first, this seemed the sensible option.

Dell came and fixed the hard drive issues and got home to do a big 6 hour re-install of the OS and applications.  Installed the Adobe stuff and activated it.  So far so good. Until I needed to install the software on a laptop in the office to do some of the work in the office for a week (which is permissible under the Adobe license – provided that both machines are not running the software at the same time, and there was no chance of that).  When the Premium Production suite was activated on the laptop at work, it deactivated the software at home.  This seems to go against what Adobe allows in their license.  And I'm especially annoyed that I properly deactivated the software prior to re-installing the software on the XPS machine.

In order to try and resolve this issue, I call the activation "hot-line" and am put through to an automated system which asks for the original serial number and an installation number.  What installation number?  The activation system does not helpfully provide it – only the serial number!  The phone system eventually (having to wait for three failed stabs at entering the installation number) puts you in a queue to speak to an operator, but no indication as to how long or where you are in the queue.
Heck, even Microsoft of all companies do this much better than Adobe.

Now, you could say I could have simply used the CDs to install a trial version of the Production suite on the office laptop, but the license says you can use two activations at a time, and maybe I might want to use it from time to time afterwards on the laptop and after 30 days.
Sigh.
Another thing.  I sent Adobe Customer Service a query the other day via the Adobe web site, and never heard a dicky bird from them until a message telling me that they felt my issue was resolved.  Replying to the email to tell them that it was certainly not resulted in an email bounce back telling me that it was an unmanned address – something not mentioned in the email I had just received from them!

Adobe Soundbooth is wonderful..

Posted by Martyn Drake – May 25, 2009

Today I am working on editing and improving some videos for a work-related project and I'm now using the full version of Adobe Creative Production Premium which comes with most of the major Adobe products.  One such product is Soundbooth which has worked miracles on reducing extremely annoying sound noise which was recorded with the microphone on overgain (hence lots of static, etc) – something I've done myself and am only too aware of.

The Dell XPS continues to impress, but am now a little bit concerned over the secondary hard drive which  is making minor beeping noises whenever it seems to be working a little too hard.  Western Digital haven't exactly been the most helpful (first they say it's normal, now they say it isn't and won't actually say what the beeping is supposed to mean). 

I'm thinking that I should get Dell to replace the other hard drive and hope that'll be the end of the mess.  In the mean time, I'm going to have to use something like Acronis TrueImage to back up the hard drive(s) for an easy restore – Dell do not provide 64-bit driver CD-ROM for this machine which requires a 3G dongle to get Internet access to download them.
Have managed to break the chain of my electric pushbike, so will need to go into work by bus all next week until I can get it fixed.  Hopefully the part is still under warranty.

Updates, etc.

Posted by Martyn Drake – May 13, 2009

Have just returned from two weeks away. 

We set off to Dubai for a week before heading to Tobago for another.  Photos of which can be found here (Dubai) and here (Tobago).  I'm in the process of sorting out the video, but here are a couple of simple shots taken from the Dubai Mall: Bagpipes, Dancers, Carnival.  Jennifer and I both had a wonderful time, and it's regretful that we're now stuck with rain all week after two weeks of glorious sunshine.

Work-wise, I've taken delivery of a Dell XPS M1730 laptop that consists of a 2.80Ghz Core 2 Extreme processor (overclockable through BIOS to 3.4Ghz), 6Gb RAM, 640Gb disk space (2 x 320Gb 7,200RPM hard drives in hardware RAID 0), Blu-Ray reader AND writer, 2 x NVIDIA 9800M GT 512Mb graphics cards in SLI configuration.  It's a wonderful system except that bloody Dell have supplied both a 7,200RPM 16Mb cache hard drive and a 5,400RPM 8Mb cache HD instead of two 7,200RPM drives.  What's even worse is that the primary drive is the slower 5,400RPM model.  I'm also a bit miffed that although they supply 800Mhz DDR2 memory, but the chipset only supports up to a maximum of 667Mhz thereby squeezing more money out of the punter who sees no additional benefit. 

Generally it's a very impressive rig, but it's let down by Dell's incompetence.
Am awaiting the arrival of Adobe Creative Production Premium suite for Windows to go with the laptop as I'm in the process of doing a lot of video editing and encoding for work at the moment.  The irony of this is that Adobe After Effects includes software from my previous employers who made me redundant.
My boss, Kate Craig-Wood, is interviewed by CNBC here which features me in a cameo appearance as "engineer who plugs in SSD drive into server".  Speaking of Memset, we have some very, very good miniserver pacakges at the moment.  Prices are incredibly competitive in my opinion.