General
No longer stranded
I’m back in Germany now. I managed to get a flight back here on Thursday after the airspace reopened Wednesday. That means I was back at work on Friday. 1 day weeks are awesome. We should have them more often.
The flight was quite uneventful and we couldn’t see any ash they kept talking about. At least the engines didn’t cut out and we didn’t fall out of the sky. That’s always a plus.
Stranded
I’ve been at home in England for the last couple of weeks. I was supposed to be flying back tonight but given the volcanic ash cloud that has covered Europe; my flight has been cancelled. I suppose I’ll have to take a couple of extra days of work next week but with no signs of the volcano stopping it could be far longer.
I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. There isn’t a lot you can do about a volcano erupting.
Happy birthday blog
Just a short post to say this blog is one year old today. I was reminded by an email this morning, the receipt for the automatic credit card payment on the hosting.
Home server problems
In the last couple of weeks my Windows Home Server has been having a few problems. Nothing major, more annoying really. I think that I have it sorted now although it seems like it has a tantrum every so often and messes up again.
I don’t think that it is a problem with the OS, more a problem with the hardware. It is all quite old now and I built it out of salvaged parts from various different computers. I can’t remember the exact specification but I think that it is a 1.8Ghz Sempron processor, socket 754 I think. 2 Gb RAM and whatever cheap graphics card I had lying around. I think it might be a Radeon 7500. I don’t remember the make of the motherboard but I think that it is a cheap one.
Firstly the USB ports are temperamental, they will just stop working for a few days and then come back. They will refuse to work with some devices then work perfectly with another. I bought a PCI USB card to try to bypass this but that is just as bad now. It likes to kill hard drives as well. Even before I installed Windows Home Server and had XP on it, the hard drives would just die on me. I am on the fourth now I think. It has had just enough life in it to clone it to a new one but with read speeds less than 10 Mb/sec.
The latest set of problems seems to be with the connector software for Home Server. It would be connected fine, then the connection would disappear and not come back. I reboot the laptop and it was fine again. Everything else for connecting to the server would work, shared files, remote desktop etc. I could even login through the connector. The indicator icon was the only thing showing a disconnection and it wouldn’t run backups. I reinstalled the connector software several times to no avail and eventually had to delete the computer from the Home Server along with all the backups and then add it again. That seems to have worked. I have no idea what caused it though.
On Sunday I lost the network connection. Since there is normally no monitor connected to it, without the network I can’t see what is wrong. I tried rebooting it and it made all the right beeps while starting up. I could hear the hard drive churning away and the light was flashing. All seemed to be going well, then it made all the startup beeps again. I decided that I should get a monitor connected to it and by the time I had unplugged it, moved it over there and plugged it in, the server had rebooted itself again. This time, I watched it boot. No problems at all, went straight to desktop (I have it login to desktop on startup since it starts some backup programs etc. that run automatically). The only thing that was wrong was a message saying that some services had failed to start. I have no idea which ones or why. There was nothing obvious in the Event Viewer and I don’t know where else to look.
The final problem is that other people have trouble connecting to it on the network. I have set guest permissions on the shares but they still get an access denied. I think that is probably more of a configuration problem on my part but then the network in the flat is quite unreliable anyway it seems. I am loath to buy new hardware since we are leaving the country in the summer anyway. The ADSL modem/routers won’t work in the UK and they will all have European sockets anyway.
It’s not really a fault but I am running out of hard drive space. I would ideally like enough to be able to have folder duplication as well but I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon. I have it enabled on a couple of folders of irreplaceable data such as my photo collection but that is it. I haven’t tested them recently but hopefully they have some life left in them. I know that one of them at least is getting quite old. It must be nearly 3 years by now, at least 1/2 of that it has been in constant use.
I think that it might be time to get a new server. It will have to wait until the summer though when I am back in England. Hopefully it will last that long anyway.
Sony Pocket E-Reader
Last week I bought myself an e-reader, I’d been thinking of getting one for some time but never gotten round to it. After a small fiasco with the first one being faulty, seem to have corrupt firmware but I don’t know, I finally got a replacement and it’s brilliant.
The main reason that I don’t read more is the hassle of having lots of books. They take up a lot of space and are heavy. Especially this year in Germany, I would have like to have brought a lot of my programming books with me but I couldn’t due to luggage weight restrictions so I was forced to only bring a couple of them. With an e-reader that isn’t a problem. I can have several hundred all in a pocket-sized device.
After using it for past week I have found that it is far better at novels rather than reference books. I had a few PDFs and while they open and work perfectly. It just isn’t as easy to search for what you want. It can be done, just a little awkward. If you stick to novels then it is brilliant, just open them up and read. It certainly filled the time on my flight back to Germany at the weekend.
The screen is very easy on the eyes, far easier to focus on for a long time than a LCD monitor and since it only uses power to turn the page then the battery lasts a very long time. A small amount of power is used to keep the device on standby but that is all. After a week of use and nearly 2 full books the metre hasn’t moved yet.
On the whole I think that it was a good buy and I’m happy with it. I will probably still be buying printed books for reference though.
Snow
So we’ve had a little bit of snow here in Britain over the last week. It seems that it has caused the entire country to grind to a halt. We aren’t fortunate enough to live on a road that the council deems important enough to grit. I can’t blame them for it though since there are probably less than 200 people living past the point in the village that they do grit too.
Living at the bottom of a hill doesn’t help, it can sometimes be a challenge to get up it and since the bottom is dead-end then it doesn’t help matters for getting out. Still, we seem to have managed it. I’m going back to Munich on Saturday to start work again on Monday and I don’t see there being any problems over there with the snow even though they have undoubtedly had more, but they are used to it.
Below are a few photos from around the house. The snow is about 2” deep. We keep having snow showers occasionally but nothing major. We seem to be in a bit of a black spot here for weather and miss out on all of it, whatever it is. It is never as cold, warm, wet or windy as the surrounding area. Go 10 miles in any direction and there is a foot or more of snow.
I hope that the airport is open on Saturday, I don’t really fancy being stuck in the airport for a few hours waiting for my flight because the runway has been closed. It is quite late in the afternoon so it may be the following morning before we go if it is delayed.
Despite all this, the weather in Munich looks to be much worse. It is colder and has more snow than here.
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas everyone. This is the closest that I can remember to having a white Christmas but I don’t think that it should count. The snow that is on the ground fell over a week ago and just hasn’t melted yet. We haven’t had any new snow since then. It is just ice now really.
The ponds are frozen for the first few inches at least. The dog was walking around on it yesterday and didn’t fall through but I wouldn’t like to take my chances and try myself.
This is a photo of the garden this morning. It may look nice and snowy but in reality it is just a sheet of ice.
Windows 7
This weekend I finally got annoyed with how slow my laptop was being and decided that it was time to format. Despite not being out in shops yet, I have been able to get Windows 7 Professional through the MSDN Academic Alliance with my university for about a month so after a long download on my 2 Mb connection, I have it running now.
I have only been using it for 4 days now but there is a definite improvement over Vista. I never had any major problems with Vista and have been using it for the past 2 years, both Home Premium on my laptop and Business on my desktop PC. Despite this, I thought I should try out Windows 7.
I never looked at any of the beta or release candidate versions of Windows 7 in much detail so this was really my first time with the operating system. At first I didn’t know if I liked the new task bar but after a few days of using it I have grown to like it. It has integrated the quick launch bar and the task bar into one and it works well. The task bar is a lot less cluttered even with a lot of windows open. This is the only major, visible change that I have come across. There are a few others but nothing significant enough to be worth noting.
I see that there are libraries now, collections of multiple different folders. The defaults are for documents, pictures, music and videos. They are both the users folder and public folder. I don’t really have much use for these since I only have a single user system and don’t use the public folders at all. I can see that libraries would be useful to a lot of users though, especially those on multi-user system. It does make the process of working with shared files easier. I store my photos on a network drive, I tried to add this to the picture’s library but it said that I couldn’t as the directory was not indexed. I looked into this and it seems that I would have to make it available offline. I don’t really want to have to do that so that was out.
I have also seen something called Home Group, I haven’t really looked into what this is but it seems to be a simpler way of sharing resources on a network. I have no use for this so haven’t really looked into it.
None of my day-to-day applications refused to work so no problems there. The day after getting everything set up though, I was having one problem where explorer would crash every time I right-clicked. It would recognise this and automatically restart but it was quite annoying. I found online that 7-zip caused this problem so I un-installed it and all was well. I have since re-installed it and there is still no problems so I don’t know if that was just a coincidence or not.
From a performance point of view it is not much faster on my laptop, there is a speed improvement but then that was from a 2-year-old Vista install that was long overdue some maintenance so I don’t really know how fair of a comparison that is. I opted for the 32-bit version of Windows 7, I was reading online about it and found that the general consensus seemed to be that if you have 4GB of RAM, or might do in the future, then get 64-bit. Those, like me, with only 2GB then get 32-bit. I thought about buying more RAM but it would be about £70 for me to buy 4GB of laptop memory and it doesn’t seem worth it. Once I go back to England next year I will have my desktop PC again. I wouldn’t bother upgrading my laptop anyway, it is over 2 years old and doesn’t seem worth spending money on. Especially since new laptops are so much cheaper.
Windows 7 has integrated perfectly with Windows Home Server. The connector software is working without any problems and the backups are working so no problems there. I have seen that Power Pack 3 will include better support for Windows 7 but I am not having any problems running on Power Pack 2. It has not been waking up my laptop to run backups at night as it should, but this morning, I noticed that Wake On LAN was disabled in the network adapter’s drivers yesterday so I thought that might be something to do with it. I enabled the option but it still didn’t wake up last night to run the backup so I don’t know what to do now. I need to look around a bit for the problem but maybe it is something that Power Pack 3 will fix.
Overall it does seem to be a perfectly good operating system. Maybe people will now finally upgrade from the 9-year-old Windows XP. We will have to wait and see if tomorrow’s release goes better than Vista’s release date, but from my few days of using I can see no reason why not.
Sightseeing in and around Munich
This weekend we went for a walk around Munich and also went on a tour to the castles of Ludwig II, Linderhof and Neuschwanstein. The photos are below. The walk around Munich wasn’t in the best weather but we saw quite a lot and finished it off with a trip up the Olympic Tower in Olympiapark.
The tour out to the castles was fantastic, we went on the tour inside as well, although they wouldn’t let us take photographs. Linderhof was very over-decorated. Nearly every room was covered in gold. Neuschwanstein was very gothic, it also wasn’t finished. The tour took us to the rooms that were finished. It is a huge castle half way up a mountain. It took us about 25 minutes to get up to it on foot but once there, the view was magnificent.
Walk around Munich
View from the top of the Olympic Tower
Linderhof and Neuschwanstein Visit
Windows Home Server
A couple of weeks ago I had my server shipped over to me in Germany. The hassle that was caused by not having it and instead swapping between several different hard drives became more hassle than it was worth. Including my monitor and Xbox it was £110 to UPS it all. When it arrived, I thought I would try out using Windows Home Server after recommendation by Tom, and before today have had no problems with it. I am quite impressed with it so far, the problem I am having I think might be more due to hard drive failure than anything else. I might have to buy a new one and clone it on to it before it dies completely.
As for Windows Home Server though, I think the drive pool is a great idea. I have a lot of data and media and being able to just add more drives as needed and not have to worry about data being spread around multiple drives is incredibly useful. Until I switched I was using Windows XP in my server and I have to say that it is a great improvement.
The drive pool’s ability to have automatic folder duplication in case of drive failure is another useful feature, while I don’t have this enabled on all my drives, I do have it on the ones with important data that I would be lost without. I would use it on everything but don’t have enough space for that.
I have been using it to back up my laptop as well. Each day in the middle of the night, my laptop wakes up, performs a full system backup, and then, it should go to sleep again. For some reason it doesn’t but other than that it is an excellent system, I have been backing it up everyday for a week now and it is only taking up about 50gb on the server. It only saves the changes each day so the space used is very low. It then automatically maintains the backups as well so will delete them after a certain amount of time.
I have been having a lot of problems with this server’s hardware and think that when I’m back in England next summer I will build a new one. I was trying to remember what parts I have at home and think I might be able to build one with just a new system hard drive and motherboard. The problem is that the CPU I have is a socket 939 and motherboards seems to be increasingly rare. A new processor would then probably mean more RAM as well as it would need to be DDR2 but I figure there isn’t much sense looking into it now because hardware prices vary so much that it could be completely different in a years time.
In other news we have now booked our flights home for christmas, they were disappearing quickly so we thought we should get in there early, just 3 months left to go…