I’ve finally got my photos sorted out and uploaded into Gallery 2. Hence there is now a Photos page available on the links bar above. In addition I’ve trawled through a number of existing posts and linked them through to picture albums in the Gallery.
The latest incarnations of Wordpress, Gallery 2 and WPG2 make integration a lot easier than when I did it a few years ago. I seem to remember there being lots of script editing and hackery involved last time.
Got 4 x 500GB disks for my broken Terastation this week and managed to fit all its pieces back together to get it working again. The disks I got were Seagate Barracuda 7200 11ms which should be fast and reliable. With RAID 5 configured (following 12 hour disk check) there’s now roughly 1.4TB of space and of course the safeguard of RAID 5 being that any one of the 4 x 500GB disks could fail and all my data would still be perfectly safe. I did consider using 750GB disks but read somewhere that the operating system wouldn’t take anything larger than 500GB. However, as there are 4 x IDE ports potentially it would be possible to just get some new cables and add another 4 x IDE disks as slaves, meaning a potential 2.8TB :). To do this though would require rigging up some kind of external caddies to house the new disks and also cutting a seriously large hole in the TS to get the cables out. And it would also need an additional power source.
As soon as the TS was back online I got round to hacking it. The following links were extremely useful in doing this…
So now my TS is serving as a (very quiet) torrent box and media server :).
Due to unsuccessful hacking it was necessary to disassemble my Buffalo Terastation NAS and try and fix the damage by mounting the drives on a Linux box. Somehow in doing this I managed to destroy two of the 400GB disks. This means that about 1TB of movies, music and data has been lost :(. Hopefully I can get some of it back from various backups but it will take a while.
So now I have a technological dilemma. Buy another two 400GB replacement disks (which have incidentally been discontinued) for a premium price, or start again with something else… I keep having an idea about building a new home-server Linux/RAID 5 box. Hmmm, is it possible to get 4×750GB SATA II disks into a small form factor case?
Time for an early night.
Last October (2007) I cancelled my parent’s existing broadband service, due to Tiscali failing to process an order I placed that would upgrade to a package that included phone and broadband for less money. Normally most utility and service companies (even the kind that employ dreadful outsourced customer services) are quick and efficient at taking new orders and billing you asap, but not Tiscali. No, they were so incompetent that they managed to completely lose all traces of not one, not two, but three orders I made (one via Internet and two via direct telephone conversation with their sales dept.). Having waited several weeks for the new service to be connected I phoned them to ask them what they were doing about it. They told me that the reason all my orders had been ignored was that the 8MB package I wanted was not available as the line at my parents house would only support 2MB. Why they could not have phoned/emailed me to tell me know this, god knows… Needless to say, for having wasted weeks of my time, and several pounds on phone calls (at 10p per minute) I phoned up and cancelled the existing Tiscali broadband service. As a replacement we chose a package from TalkTalk that included phone and broadband for a reasonable price. TalkTalk sent my father a handy information pack as soon as our order had been placed which in addition included the activation/promise date of November 2nd. And sure enough, on November 2nd the TalkTalk service was switched on (I know this as I had to change the uid/password on the router to connect).
All had seemed to have gone according to plan, until my father was billed by Tiscali for November and then December (we did not notice this was still happening immediately). I phoned Tiscali on December 18th to find out why they were still billing us for a disconnected service. I was assured by Danni (from India) that the Tiscali service would be immediately cancelled and we would receive a full refund for the billing payments incorrectly taken by Tiscali after 28 days. So, thinking this was the last of the matter, my parents continued to enjoy the service from TalkTalk.
Recently we noticed that the 28 days had passed and still no refund had been received. In fact, Tiscali had in fact billed my father again for January (for a service that we are no longer receiving).
This evening I had the displeasure of spending 3/4 of an hour on hold waiting to speak to Tiscali. The person I spoke to was named “Colin” (who had an unusual cockney/Indian accent). Colin told me that my both my requests to disconnect the service had both been (in his words) “rejected” as the MAC code for the phone line was still in use. When I asked why nobody from Tiscali could have told me this, Colin went all quiet and then quickly changed the subject (the useless toss*r). Colin then proceeded to tell me that it was in fact my fault (!!!!!) the service had not been disconnected, due to TalkTalk not using the MAC code provided. He said I should then speak to TalkTalk and ask them to refund my bill as they had made the mistake. I was not convinced at this, and made Colin open another cancellation/refund case on my account.
I then phoned TalkTalk, got through surprisingly quickly, and spoke to an extremely helpful lady that explained that TalkTalk did not require MAC codes to switch provider, and that even if they did, one would not be needed as our previous phone line provider was BT and not Tiscali. In addition she told me that during a service transfer the losing provider (in this case Tiscali) would have been automatically notified to confirm the disconnection. The helpful lady then urged me to call Tiscali again and fully dispute the bill, which I did.
This time I was on hold for over an hour, but eventually spoke to a very helpful lady (in Glasgow) named “Senya”. Senya was actually very helpful. She checked the notes on my case and found that no requests for refunds had actually been logged by anyone at Tiscali……. (at which point I felt like banging my head against a concrete post to end the pain of dealing with these absolute total and utter idiots!). Senya then proceeded to do lots of typing at the other end, gave me yet another case number and told me we’d receive a cheque for the refund within 2 weeks. I’ve got my fingers crossed, but watch this space.
And Colin, make sure you look carefully left and right when you cross the road, as you may find a silver Volvo hurtling towards you at high velocity sometime soon if I ever track you down, you b**tard.
It’s easy to see why Britain is no longer Great Britain. With truly dreadful so-called “service” companies (such as Tiscali) ruining our lives, infuriating us and wasting our time, it’s no wonder society is a far more unpleasant place to be these days, and people like me who are planning permanent escapes to Canada, America, Australia or New Zealand, or in fact anywhere where you can pick up the phone and get decent and fair customer service.
And it’s not just Tiscali who fail to recognise the meaning of the word “service”. One day (maybe in 2012 when I get over this) I will tell you how Vodafone took nearly 3 months to install my landline, or how BT successfully managed to completely lose two orders I placed for phone and internet (and then contacted me four months later to see if my phone was working yet!? WTF?!!). For now though I am still far too enraged by their utter incompetence to make a coherent sentence on the matter.
Spent a good hour tonight checking out lots of WordPress themes, while listening to a pleasant band called “Slayer“… Hopefully soon one will stand out and choose itself.
Am also nearly 100% committed to booking myself on a skiing trip for February. Just have to decide which country to go to 
No, its not some long lost Bob Dylan song. A Buffalo Terastation is essentially a NAS box, of which I own and also recently found out runs Linux
Last week I hacked into it (using excellent info from here) and got root access by replacing the firmware with a hacked version. This means potentially I now have an extremely useful Linux box which I never knew I had!
So far I’ve upgraded samba to version 3 which has made a huge difference in disk sharing performance - can’t believe it! I’ve also installed TwonkyVision UPnP media server which allows media files on the terastation e.g. music, movies, pictures to be streamed to any UPnP capable device on the network, such as some unnameable games consoles that support HD TV…
My aim today was to try and get rtorrent working on the TS but this turned out to be a much bigger job than I’d anticipated. The software has to be compiled from source for use on the TS PowerPC processor and kernel. So far I’ve managed to get most of the dev toolkit onto the TS, and have all the source code ready. In order, I think need to compile:
Everything was going according to plan until I tried to compile libsigc++-2.0.0 and realised there was no space on the TS hda1 partition. This is a relatively small partition just used for system files, but with the PPC dev tools installed there isn’t any space left! Going to have to work out how to free some up, or even possibly the scary option of (oooohh!) wiping the system partition and reinstalling another Linux… Could be dangerous.
I’m feeling quite spaced out this evening. That’s partly due to lack of sleep and also something to do with listening to several hours of psychedelic “Yes“ music 
Just upgraded WordPress to 2.3.2, and now downloading a bunch of themes to play with. The hardest part is always finding the right one. It seems WordPress has come on a lot since I last messed with it.
Tonight I’ve been trying to transfer my domain samslife.com from Doteasy to Bluehost. Doteasy certainly haven’t made it “easy” to do this, but quite the opposite (you’ve got to email them and get them to unlock the domain first before anything can happen). I seem to remember trying to do this last year but gave up as they were so difficult to deal with! Anyway, this evening I managed to make some progress with moving the domain onto Bluehost. However, the Bluehost domain manager decided to prevent me completing the transaction until they’d “verified my account”. This meant an international phone call to the US…
Now having recently dealt with some of the most dire, pathetic, dreadful and appalling companies in the UK - notably BT (yes thats BRITISH TELECOM) and also Vodafone, I was supremely impressed with the speed in which my call was answered by a REAL PERSON (after 30 secs). This was followed up by a highly productive conversation with a Bluehost operator that sorted my issues out immediately (and who obviously enjoyed doing her job, not like the useless idiots that work for Vodafone and BT’s service companies). Oh…if only the service in the UK could be anything like the US…
Did a little run at lunch today and the 5 degrees C felt lovely and warm, despite the rain and strong winds. Must be because its been so cold lately. Miles run = 5.1.
