Welcome to the January 2005 edition of BeechLog.
Here we are again. My apologies for the non-appearance of the November
issue. Work and domestic excuses, I'm afraid. If anyone feels that they
could do better....
A happy new year to you all. As I write this, 2005 is a couple of days away
so here am I with a few days off work sitting in front of the PC. Of course
it has caused me a bit of trouble as usual - this time I had problems with
my olde version of Photoshop Elements. I installed it as Administrator, changed
the scratch discs as requested and lo! Next time I started it as a normal user,
It told me that the 'file is locked'. What file I have no idea. But pressing
shift-control-alt as Photoshop starts allows me to delete the settings file,
so now it's working again. These things try us. Running Nero was also changing
the desktop from XP theme back to Classic theme, goodness knows why!
Anyway, I solved that one with the help of the Nero Burning Rights control panel
thingummy.
As I write, beechlog.org.uk is under threat. It is coming up for renewal on the
5th of January. The company who are doing this managed to lose me beechlog.co.uk
a while ago, so fingers crossed. I still have two domains registered with this
outfit, so if they lose them I shall re-register with a better company when they
becoma available again. That's all for now, I hope to see you all again soon,
provided my shifts tie up with club nights again.
Roger GØHZK,
Editor
Contents
Ramblings on technology and radio
Aaargh, bloody computers
More reviews
Peace on earth
Ramblings on technology and radio
It is interesting how some technologies advance while others do not. I've
written before about the lack of progress in the amateur radio field, change
has been so limited that it would be difficult to detect what the operator at
the other end of the QSO is using. It is perfectly conceivable that his
transceiver might be thirty years old, and provided it had been maintained
well you would be none the wiser. In fact a good many radio amateurs prefer
to use such ancient equipment.
One would be surprised if they also used any other 1970s technology. Yes I
know there are plenty of Quad II systems driving the 'firescreen' speakers.
Basic audio reproduction was at a fairly high level, within certain
limitations, towards the end of the fifties, and although most of us listened
to an ECL82, a pair of KT66 or even EL84s could give a performance as good as
most domestic kit today.
But looking around the house there is little sign of elderly electronics. I
have a Psion Organiser 2 from the early eighties, and a Sinclair Cambridge
calculator - goodness knows how old that is. The boiler timer has been in use
here for about 20 years, although the boiler was replaced quite recently. The
audio gear I use varies a bit in age. The amplifier goes back about 20 years,
although I still have most of my homebrew 1971 Hi Fi News amplifiers and even
the Tobey & Dinsdale precursors from about ten years earlier. Every few years
I think about getting these going again, but finding OC35 transistors for the
Dinsdale might be a trifle difficult.
My music source all those years ago was the 12 inch vinyl disc. I had a
variety of things to play them on, including a Thorens turntable and SME arm.
I went through a succession of pickup cartridges before I found one that
worked well in the low temperatures of my unheated bedroom, it was a
Danish Ortofon. I guessed
that Denmark was a coldish country, so they were the best bet.
Today most audio comes from CDs which presumably don't mind if it's a bit
chilly. But it is curious that this field of optical devices is suddenly
advancing. I've been clearing out piles of old magazines, and looking at the
computer bits it is quite evident that certain things are moving at different
rates.
PC Magazine from 1996 is full of first generation Pentium machines, with
clock speeds up to 200MHz. Not all of the new models had CD drives, and there
were very few CD writers. The cheapest I found cost £399 plus VAT for a
double speed device, although there were some at four times speed for between
£500 and £800 + VAT. By this time last year we had 48X CD writers, now they
seem to have hit a plateau at 52X, although the price has come down to about
£15 to £20.
The 1996 mag also featured a 2.6 Gig optical drive, but no prices were
mentioned! This must have been a fabulous machine, given that PCs current at
the time had hard drives half that size. DVD writers were still a few years
away, alas I didn't keep any magazines that show their introduction. However
about a year ago the prices started coming down, under £100 for a 2.4X drive.
Now we find 16X drives for less than £50, and the drives handle both popular
disc types, including dual layers.
This change over the last year seems quite significant. My old drive wrote a
2.4X DVD in about half an hour, or a bit more if there were a lot of files.
Now I can fill an 8X DVD in just over 6 minutes. 16X discs are available in
Slough, although I've not tried them. But the difference between six and
thirty minutes is quite an advance, think of it as a saving of 24 minutes.
It's the difference between not having time and a quick job.
A 16X DVD should write in the same time as a CD. This must be close to a
practical ceiling. I don't know how fast the DVD rotates at, but the data
transfer rate is approaching that of a hard disc. Well, my hard disk anyway.
I measured this at about 38,000 KB/s. The 16X DVD speed equates to 21,632
KB/s. There will overheads that bring the hard drive speed down - data has to
be fetched from all over the drive, files will be fragmented so the hard
drive rate will be slower as it assembles and streams each file to the DVD.
Note that a CD drive is much slower, a 48X drive reads/writes at 7,200KB/s.
I have also seen dual layer DVD+R discs in Slough. These are all 2.4X speed
at the moment, although current drives can handle 4X. I imagine an 8.5GB dual
layer disc will tale twice as long to write as a standard 2.4X DVD-R, so that
8.5 GB will take an hour or so to write.
As well as speed increasing, prices of media are reducing too. Looking in the
local shops, you can get 25 8X DVD+R Philips discs for about £15. Last year
they were about three times the price. Slower discs are cheaper.
The rewriteables are cheaper too, I bought 10 4X DVD+RW for under £10 in
Dixons yesterday. That would have been £35 for 2.4X discs a few months ago.
And all these discs can be much cheaper mail order via the net, I've seen 25
DVD+R 8X at less than £6!
In the near future blue laser discs will be getting cheaper. Current drives
can manage a bit over 20 GB, but hopefully things will improve. In a couple
of years we should expect 50 GB discs on sub-£100 drives. At current fastest
DVD rates, a 50 GB disk would take over an hour to fill.
The optical drive in the 1996 magazine was capable of backing up the entire
contents of a typical PC at the time to one disc, with room to spare. Should
we expect the same today? Hard disk sizes in todays PCs are around 200 MB.
There are 500MB external hard drives, but removable storage of similar size
seems years away.
This is a pity because in these days of constant attack from virus and
trojans, the risk of data loss is rather worrying. Of the various PCs I have
been asked to fix over the last couple of years, none had a backup of any
sort. I manage with a combination of hard drive, CD and DVD backups, but it's
a bit fiddly to do this, so often gets neglected. I've been meaning to build
a low-power silent PC for backup over the network, but haven't got round to
it yet.
I'm surprised that there are almost no inexpensive boxes available for this
purpose. USB hard drives are so-so, but you really want to site your backup
far from your PC, where it will be less like to suffer the same fate as your
PC, such as burglary. A kitchen cabinet, broom or airing cupboard, or even
the garage or shed.
Going back to radio, there was a chap on Cix the other day who wanted to
record some radio programs. Various suggestions were made, but it appears
that there has never really been a radio equivalent of the video recorder. I
suppose that since most stations provide something like non-stop-pop (or
these modern genres that sound like they have been composed by a computer),
no-one would really want to record that stuff anyway.
There is a recent DAB receiver called The Bug or something similar, that can
actually record programs to a flash memory card. I don't know whether it has
a single or multi event timer, but it sounds like a glimmer of hope. Whether
there is a market for such radios I don't know. If most of the worlds radio
broadcasts are of the background music type, then it seems unlikely. Which is
a pity.
Someone else on Cix wanted a car radio with a record button. He said that he
often listened to Radio 4 while driving, and the button would come in useful
when he arrived at his destination half way through an interesting program.
Many a time I have arrived home and sat in the car for another ten or fifteen
minutes listening to the radio. It just cemented my wifes assessment that I
am not normal.
Aaaargh, bloody computers
This is a story about computers and radio, and it all happens because of my
children. Just one of them this time. He is 13 and has been sharing my PC up
until now, which means I had restricted access until he went to bed. So I
have been looking out for a machine that he could use, freeing up mine.
Well, it just so happened that they had a clear out at work. This summer they
bought about 100 new machines, and eventually they ended up with a room full
of the old ones. So they decided to remove the hard drives and sell the rest.
A sale date was advertised, but it was a day I was on the late shift, so I
almost forgot. Anyway when I got to work I rushed down the road to the building
where they were having the sale, in time to see people struggling to their
cars loaded with laser printers and the like. There were a few PCs left, so
I grabbed the cleanest looking one. How much? Twenty quid? So I now had a
diskless HP Vectra.
When I got the thing home I discovered that it wasn't a bad bargain. Hardly
used, it had a 800MHz CPU and 256MB RAM. My stock of spare hard drives had
almost run down, but I slapped in a huge 127MB drive circa 1995 just to
verify that it worked. So all I needed was to get hold of a bigger drive
and that was that. So a moved some data around in my PC and removed the
second drive, a 20GB model. This was bolted into the 'new' machine, loaded
with an OS and Alex had his own machine.
The next job was to get him connected to my network. The Vectra had an Ethernet
port, but I had a slight problem with cabling. Now is the time, I thought, to
get rid of all these wires and go wireless. Well, these things are quite easy
these days, so soon a second router was added to the network, and Alex was
connected. Over the next couple of weeks I put wireless cards into two other
machines, and then had a bit of fun.
If you've ever installed any type of network, fun is to be expected. I wasn't
disappointed. Everyone was complaining about connections coming and going,
and it took a couple of days to sort it all out (crossed fingers). Having
two routers made things a bit more tricky that they should have been, especially
as I connected the new one as a client of the original router. Using the DHCP
servers on both routers, everything worked at first, until I decided that it
would be better if the new router was given a static address. Then the whole
thing fell apart and I lost contact, and thus the ability to reconfigure the
main router. So extra cables were run about the house, and I managed to get
it all working again.
There were still a few problems. These seemed to be resolved when I let the
wireless client software govern the PCs, rather than the default option to
let Windows manage the client cards. Windows XP SP2 has a new facility which
is supposed to do this, but it worked best if I turned this off! Except of
course the machine with XP Pro, which could not find the network until I
re-enabled its wireless client service and removed the OEM client software.
Why Home and Pro should differ, goodness knows.
Of course, it doesn't end there. A couple of weeks later I got a new hard
drive to replace the one I installed in Alex's PC. I set this up and reloaded
Windows. Everything seemed to work OK, except that the machine seemed to have
slowed down. It wasn't a dream, for I ran a bit of software called DriveSpeed
which revealed that the new drive was running at a tenth of the speed of the
older one! Now this last month I have had to return about three other faulty
devices to shops, so I was gearing for a repeat trip. But I found what was
wrong. The new drive was an Ultra ATA133 type, but Windows had set it up to
run its PIO (pathetic in-out) interface.
When this sort of thing happens, you don't think of the obvious, which in
the case of Windows is to remove the suspect kits drivers and let Windows
rediscover it. But I did find an interesting tale. Apparently this problem
is quite common with CD/DVD drives. Windows is clever (too clever), and if
it gets more that six consecutive read errors, it switches off the DMA
interface and enables PIO. In my case it had obviously had detected the
fact that I hadn't plugged in the data lead properly. I cured this with a
registry equivalent of removing the hardware.
All seemed to be working now, perhaps working too well. While kipping downstairs
one night I was woken by the modem dialling out. I popped upstairs to see who was
responsible, and found all PCs were turned off. And of course, the evening before,
there had been an item on the news about people hacking into wireless networks.
Now the wireless router keeps a log of all the user activity, but lo, there were
no entries at the appropriate time. The log in the dialup router is much shorter,
but also showed no activity. So what was going on?
The problem was solved a few days later, when the thing dialled out while I was
eating breakfast. This time the log revealed all, the wireless router was
connecting to a Japanese time server, to correct its internal clock. So nothing
to worry about after all.
More reviews
No not radio reviews. I keep asking members to send me their impressions of their
new radio kit, but no, nothing arrives at the editorial office. I haven't bought
any new stuff for years, so I can't make up anything relevent. But I do get involved
in other family things, and just yesterday I was asked to order a set of DVDs on the
net.
This was the first series of an American program, 'Quantum Leap'. This was aired in
the US in the spring of 1989, and now pops up from time to time on various
satellite channels. Anyway this was duly ordered, nine episodes for about £13.50.
Of course this comes under the heading 'cult', so there are various web sites
full of explanations and programe details such as
this one. It whetted my curiosity, so I sent my memory back much further to see
what I could find.
The classic British cult TV
series was 'The Prisoner', broadcast in 1967. This came to mind because there have
been adverts all over the telly promoting a series a DVD bearing magazines about the
series. Well, there were 18 episodes and you can get them all from Amazon for less than
£30, probably cheaper than buying the magazine. I have only the first episode so
here are a couple of frames for your perusal. This series quite annoyed my mother
who never managed to figure out what it was all about. The program makers never
volunteered any information either. I managed to catch part of a program on the
radio recently, where they were describing their efforts to inflate weather balloons
under water - apparently all but one exploded in the process.
Going back even further there was 'Danger Man', from 1960 - nearly 45 years ago.
You can buy all 39 half-hour episodes from the first series for £41, on six DVDs.
There is also a 13 disc set for about £75 plus anything Customs & Excise charge
when it arrives from the States, these being region 1 discs. I can't say I have seen
any of these for decades. They were the sort of thing that we looked forward to
back then, as this sort of stuff was pretty new, not really seen on the telly before.
The other main cult series
Monty Python dates from 1969, and of course their are numerous offerings available.
I have looked in vain for 'That Was The Week That Was', alas all that Amazon came up
with was 'How Green Was My Valley'. Not the same thing. Possibly some episodes of TW3
are recorded somewhere, who knows? But Python annoyed my mother, she didn't find any
of it remotely funny. My father watched it all creased up and shaking with laughter,
much to her disgust. She was really a book person.
Also from the Danger Man era was 'The Avengers' from 1961. Back then women were
supposed to be gentle and wear colourful dresses, so Honor Blackman (Kathy Gale) and
especially Diana Rigg (Emma Peel) wearing tight black leathers and throwing the men
around was really something. Women wearing trousers in public was really frowned upon,
especially on the other side of the pond. But to a 15 year old me... The 16 disc set
once again is an import from the US at £75 plus the UK government theft.
The series eventually petered out soon after the McNee/Rigg chemistry was split,
but was revived in 1976 with Joanna Lumley playing Purdey. But times had changed.
Along came a new breed of action, with women pushed back into the background.
All 57 episodes come on 16 discs for about £42, although Cowley, Bodie and
Doyle have hardly left the screen since 1977. Other stuff available include
'Adam Adamant' from 1966, 'The Tripods' from 1985, and 'A Very Peculiar Practice',
alas only the first series.
Me, myself? I have only watched a little television over the holiday. I watched
the likes of Little Richard and Chuck Berry blowing the minds of youngsters in the
fifties. That was a treat. I must have seen some other stuff, but I assume I drifted
off and watched it through closed eyes.
Peace on Earth
Over the holiday I have spent some time catching up with various bits and
pieces that needed doing. Beechlog is one example. I also have been updating
other web sites, including my Carabus site which contains locator and related
calculators written with Javascript. Every now and then someone sends me an
email asking how to do these calculations, so I spent some time producing a
worked example
that was easy to follow.
Having reinstalled Windows on my PC, I came across a slight oddity. As I
tested the code, I got security warnings from Internet Explorer, although not
from my usual browser. This didn't happen when I ran the code from my web
site. What is different? What have I done?
The warnings turned out to be due to Microsofts attempts to deal with a
security hole in its implementation of Javascript. The nature of this
scripting is such that it is unable to write to local drives, but Microsoft
in their wisdom produced other mechanisms which can react to broken
Javascript code and do naughty things. So the solution is to stop scripting
from running from your hard drive. Easier than fixing the problem, I guess.
You actually get a new bar appearing in IE which gives you the option of
allowing the script to run. How the average user is supposed to figure out
what is safe and what is not, goodness knows. He/she will either never click
on the bar, or always click it, and there goes the security.
I read today a short account of one mans Christmas in Athens in 1944. At that
time the Nazis were on the retreat, but civil war had broken out. The writer,
a child at the time, recalls how all sides of the war seemed keen on killing
others, however innocent. Spain was to follow the path a year later. I cannot
understand how justice can be achieved this way. We are blessed that such war
has not broken out in Britain for centuries. Unfortunately in Northern
Ireland there are still two communities with significant numbers of members
who wish to continue such actions. The tensions there also exist to a much
lesser extent in Scotland, whose citizens have managed to keep one step back
from violence.
What is it that allows groups with opposing views to live peacefully with
each other? Here in Slough there is such a mix of people that it seems
sometimes that I am the only one who speaks English as my native tongue.
Shopping in Tesco I often hear white Europeans chatting with each other in
unrecognisable languages. Where are they from? Latvia, Estonia, Croatia? But
we are all able to shop together quite happily. I for one am grateful that we
can live together peacefully whatever our differences, as the results of
civil wars are often not worth the cost.
If we believe opinion polls, the vast majority of Britains population all in
favour of being photographed, fingerprinted, and scanned, so that the state
can keep records of what we are all up to. And we must pay £85 for the
privilege. Quite what benefit there will be, I cannot figure out.
The record for state data systems is not good. Anyone who has to use state
services can tell you that the systems are often 'down', have no record of
you, or are just incorrect. Until recently the Inland Revenue had me married
to a woman whom I have never met. The NHS have not managed to get me a follow
up appointment after a heart operation I had over three years ago.
Hertfordshire Police claimed to have photographic evidence of me committing a
crime in Watford while I was at work in Reading. The employment service
claimed that I was not entitled to unemployment benefit because I had not
paid any National Insurance contributions, and besides, I had not registered
as unemployed.
It sems to me that an ID card scheme will be dogged by a non-working computer
system, probably contracted to the same company who have failed to produce a
working NHS system for decades. It will cost infinitely more than the sum
already projected. It will inconvenience law abiding people, while having no
affect at all on orginised criminals or would-be terrorists. Apparently
something like 200,000 British passports are lost or go missing every year,
one can only assume that ID cards will also suffer the same fate, but in
greater numbers.
I think that this is all empire building by the Home Office. It is amazing
that as all our employers have been reducing staffing levels, the Civil
Service has been growing at record rates, doubling their staff levels in less
than a decade. It is not surprising that government debt is growing, and
taxation is increasing. Regardless of your politics, something's got to give.
Back onto radio now. There has been a discussion on the net about
the legalities of a G3 who operated a UK voice over IP node (Echolink?) from
somewhere in Africa. Since his voice went entirely within the internet until
it reached the UK node, it was difficult to argue that he had broken any law
in Africa or the UK. After some megabytes of discussion, someone came to the
conclusion that as BR68 did not specifically state how his callsign should be
appended (if at all), then we should refrain from using this licensed and
Ofcom approved network.
What is up with amateurs today? When I was first licensed, the general
opinion seemed to be that anything was OK unless specifically banned. Now we
have amateurs saying that we should not transmit if others are unsure about
how to say our callsign. Defeats me.
Another thing that puzzles me is the attitude of some amateurs towards others
who call 'break' in order to join in a conversation. Goodness knows how they
would have managed twenty years ago on VHF. During busy times, all VHF
channnels were in use all the time, so it was often the only way to get a
QSO. It seems to me that these days some folk regard amateur frequencies as
their own private property, and stand by to repel all boarders.
The internet has a funny effect on people. There is such bad language,
rudeness, and point-scoring which I presume these people would never use face
to face with one another. Or perhaps I am wrong? Do people normally behave
like this? At school, at work? I live such a sheltered life, I guess.
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