The problem (after I fixed the missing ptys) manifest itself as a series of entries in /var/adm/messages with varying IP addresses but all of the form:

sendto(1.2.3.4) (fd=53): Not owner

and a random delay (or packet drop) to the time responses that meant I was deemed to be unreliable.

I spent a long time with truss and Google and didn’t come up with anything useful, but narrowed the behaviour down to something peculiar with my routing – I have three NICs in my OpenSolaris box: one of them with a public IP and one with a NATed one, although both end up at the same router (no – best you don’t ask why). To prevent NTP requests arriving on my public IP and then departing by the default route (via the NAT) I have used an odd looking IPFilter rule for Transparent Routing, which enables packets matching a rule to be sent to a specific NIC – in this case, all packets with a From address matching my public IP were being forced back out of the public NIC regardless of the routing table entries. This had worked for months on 2009.06, and after a lot of poking, appeared to be doing the right thing on snv_129 as well.

Most of the Google comments suggested that it’s perfectly acceptable to ignore sendto errors in most cases, but I couldn’t figure out where they were being sent from until I started poking around with ndd (in a failed attempt to find source based routing for UDP packets), and tucked away in the /dev/udp collection was exactly the setting I needed, so after issuing:

pfexec ndd -set /dev/udp udp_sendto_ignerr 1

The time started to flow again, and so far over 12 monitoring periods the step has generally been under 0.005 – with a nice stable ADSL line overnight I should be back in the UK pool by morning I’m not sure what changed in the network as I haven’t gone back to my 2009.06 BE to take a look at the original ndd settings, but I was never as happy with my ntp score on OpenSolaris as I had been with my Qube 2 so this could have been the reason all along.

“You have failed the practice citizenship test.

Questions answered correctly: 13 out of 24 (54%)

Time taken: 02 minutes 46 seconds “

Life in the United Kingdom – The Official Practice Citizenship Test does say it should take up to 45 minutes, but it’s flawed in so many ways it’s a joke. There were about 5 questions that were on subjects that I would want applicants to know something about and the rest were culled from the reject pile of I Want To Be A Millionaire.

(via Scaryduck)

zoneadm -z zonename attach -F

Oh dear: that was a bad idea. The zone appeared to attach but zoneadm -z zonename boot failed and then I discovered it was impossible to delete, rename or reconfigure the zone.

After a few attempts to recover things, the correct answer turns out to be to manually edit /etc/zones/index to change the state of the zone to read configured, and then it’s trivial to reattach the zone with:

zoneadm -z zonename attach -u -d path/to/zonename/ROOT/zbe

at which point it automatically upgrades the zone to 2009.06.

Updater fails on beadm create, and manual attempts also fail: Boo !

After a lot of grumbling Googling down plenty of dead-ends it appears that beadm in 2008.11 gets very upset when there are Zones attached. A set of zoneadm detach commands later and the updater completed without any problems at all.

So first up, Cambridge Botanic Gardens. I should note that the only entrance I’ve ever known to be open is the one at the far end of Bateman Street near Trumpington Road (on their map).

The Fitzwilliam is the largest museum in Cambridge, but you will need to leave your bags at the desk when you arrive and I think they don’t allow photography. The Sedgewick is smaller and used to allow non-flash photography. Plenty of museum info all in one place.

If you walk along the river bank from Jesus Green (where they often have open-air Jazz in the Summer), past Midsummer Common (often full of cows, as it is Common Land and also where the November fireworks and various Fairs (and Fayres) are held) and up to Coldhams Common where you can cross the foot and cycle bridge to the Green Dragon which serves food and has a garden next to the footbridge, or you can carry on over the grass up to the High Street in Fen Ditton.

One note: in the UK if it really is an active Common then that means grazing is permitted (well, probably city residents: I’m not sure on the full bye-laws), so if you’re not on one of the paths don’t expect the grass to be mown, and do watch out for animal droppings (as it’s mainly cows grazing in Cambridge, they’re not that small…)

Fen Ditton has two pubs that I’ve been to, one is the Ancient Shepherds which is indeed in an old building (the original cottages date from around 1540 AD) but it’s not open all day, and the other – The Plough – has recently been turned into a Gastropub (more Restaurant than Pub); they will take you without a reservation if they have space, but might be worth calling ahead if you are certain you want to eat there.

If you just can’t stop walking, then you can go up the riverbank to Clayhithe (on the edge of Waterbeach) and stop off at The Bridge which is a Pub that concentrates on food. Can be busy at peak times, but more of a Pub vibe than The Plough. If you carry on up the road into Waterbeach then just as you get to the village (0.25 miles or so from the pub) you come to the railway station and can catch a train back to Cambridge (journey time 3 to 6 minutes – waiting for a train, well, urm, check an online guide for weekend train frequency !). They also have an instant ticket machine on the platform.

Also note that the footpath along the river switches sides using the footbridge by the Green Dragon, so if you want to go to Fen Ditton then that’s fine – you can say on the same side as you did on the way from Jesus Green, but if you decide to go for Clayhithe then you’ll need to cross the river before you get to Fen Ditton. After crossing the bridge by the Green Dragon turn right and keep walking past the end of the road, staying on the right. Rejoin the river a little further along.

If you’re staying in town, then although it’s a boring walk up a busy road (although you can get there from the far West edge of Midsummer Common on quiet backroads), then The Wrestlers on Newmarket Road does excellent Thai food (the Green Chicken Curry can be challengingly hot for a wimpy Brit like me, but I keep coming back for more !), and the last time I went The Hopbine (close to Midsummer Common and the Grafton Centre) also had nice Thai, although they do serve more English food than Thai.

Having said that, tweak the Info.plist if required in order to remove or reduce the CPU MHz limit, and then open up /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture file in 0xED and jump to the offset 0x6f7bfc and change the text in right hand pane from performRequirementsCheck to performLicenceCheck and then add five hex 0x00 to make the strings equal length.

Amazon blocks Phorm adverts scan: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7999635.stm

I hadn’t previously bothered to do this, as it seemed to be too early to say how Phorm would turn out and the implementation of the opt-out is so braindead and full of marketing BS that it just made me angry. Yeah, I want to ban all search engines so Phorm doesn’t scan me – right… What about all the other User-Agent strings that robots.txt can handle so nicely ? Oh yes – that’s right: if it was trivial then no-one would let their content be abused in this way.

So email sent: multiple domains and all subdomains thereof requested blocked. See what happens next.

In case anyone else has been tripped up by this whilst using pkgsrc (complaints that .lai files can’t be found when it should be looking for a source lib ending in .la) you can fix this with the following diff:

--- /usr/pkg/bin/libtool.orig        2009-02-06 19:30:08.492465367 +0000
+++ /usr/pkg/bin/libtool     2009-02-06 19:30:15.072304479 +0000
@@ -6532,7 +6532,7 @@

        # Install the pseudo-library for information purposes.
        name=`$echo "X$file" | $Xsed -e 's%^.*/%%'`
-       instname="$dir/$name"i
+       instname="$dir/$name"
        $show "$install_prog $instname $destdir/$name"
        $run eval "$install_prog $instname $destdir/$name" || exit $?

E: You know that house on the TV where they have all those arguments ?
N: Big Brother ?
E: No, the Houses of Parliament

What is 20% off $35?

which is rather neat, and would make a mockery of most of what my Maths homework consisted of if I had a time machine (but I digress).

What would be really neat would be to add a voice interface to that and shove it on an iPhone – forget comparison shopping via taking pictures of barcodes, just pull out your phone and talk to it, and work out those pesky exchange rates (including credit card %age markup), or complicated discount scheme without having to peck around on a keyboard and try to remember how the % button is supposed to work.

Whilst something as drastic as a one-way inner ring road would certainly be bold, it’d also be expensive and the outcome might not be quite what was expected. One thing that hasn’t been done is try a very simple and fairly cheap experiment, which changes just one aspect of charging for parking: charge less the longer you stay.

All short stay parking in the UK that I’ve been in charges by a unit of time with increasing amounts for longer stays – a typical weekday tariff for Cambridge (Grafton East) currently is:

Up to 1 hour    £1.50
Up to 2 hours   £3.00
Up to 3 hours   £4.50
Up to 4 hours   £7.50
Up to 5 hours   £14.00
Over 5 hours    £19.00

To balance this out, the Park & Ride service is a flat £2.20 per adult (up to 3 kids per adult free), so based purely on up-front cost a trip to town for a family of four is cheaper by bus if they expect to stay for more than 2 hours.

So what is the purpose of parking charges ? It’s too expensive for residents to use instead of on-street parking, and it’s also not cost-effective for general shop workers to use so it must be intended for visitors to the city.

So what are these parking charges actually doing ? They’re creating a high number of short visits by multiple people, thereby increasing the number of cars on the road. The people who do drive in are also conscious of the cost per hour, and so are unlikely to linger but rather go to the shops they know they want to visit and then leave.

Right – now invert the charging structure:

Up to 1 hour    £19.00
Up to 2 hours   £14.00
Up to 3 hours   £7.50
Up to 4 hours   £4.50
Up to 5 hours   £3.00
Over 5 hours    £1.50

This has now given a huge incentive for shoppers to stay longer in the city, so coffee and food traders will see an increase in earnings. It encourages people to wander around the side streets and investigate small shops they might otherwise rush past, and supermarkets will tell you all about the money to be made from impulse purchases (look at the end-of-aisle promotions and stock next to the tills). Rather than rushing back to the car to get into a cheaper ticket rate, visitors would be encouraged to spend another 20 minutes instead.

It would also encourage shop workers to drive in – these people are essential to the centre of town as without them there would be no place for the money to be spent, so it makes no sense to exclude them, and yet given that living in Cambridge is so expensive most workers live outside and have to depend on public transport to get to work. There are many complaints about the lack of services at the times the workers need them, as there’s not the volume of people other than the workers wanting to catch the bus to make running early/late buses cost-effective.

But the most drastic effect would be on traffic volume – the morning and evening volume would be increased, but could easily be compensated for by having longer retail opening hours which would be made possible by the increased spend per person. Notice how in the current system a family needs to be in and out in 2 hours or less. Given a typical 9am to 5pm period of 8 hours that means that for each parking space there could be 4 cars in that time frame, but in the inverted model it would be likely just to be one car per space – 75% of the daytime traffic has been removed ! People just wanting to get one or two items would now be much better off using the Park & Ride, reducing congestion, increasing bus reliability and keeping the traffic on the surrounding dual carriageways and out-of-town car parks.

In order to ameliorate the morning and evening volumes, there would need to be encouragement given to retail outlets to open from 8am to 8pm and that specifically includes all food outlets. No-fee extensions to food/drink licences to match the new hours would be a good start, and other bureaucratic reductions should be enough to stimulate this move (eg: make business rates variable with opening hours, and make it cost more for retail premises to open from 9am to 5pm than from 8am to 8pm).

An 8am retail start would mean that shop workers would arrive before office workers, and with a 2pm shift change this should see a second traffic peak finish before the end of school traffic builds up. Having later opening in the evenings would make it far less important to get into the city at the weekend, and encourage families to meet up there, shop and eat into the early evening. Just as the idea of having a half-day on Wednesday and Saturday mornings has passed into the ‘quaint’ category, it’s time to question the sense of a single start and end time for everyone as it’s readily apparent that transport infrastructure can’t cope, but changing hours is far simpler than building roads.

Moving away from a single work day of 9am to 5pm and towards a split 8am-2pm/2pm-8pm working pattern would also make retail work more attractive for students able to fit in work around lectures as well as offering parents with families a chance to work around school hours without having to pay for expensive childcare or ask for special dispensation from business owners. This would then enable the start of a much bigger social change, and keep skilled and motivated employees able to work instead of being forced to choose between family or career.

It’s so simple and cheap (reprogram tickets machines in 6 or 7 car parks and reprint notice boards with new pricing for the same) that it could never possibly work, of course. Why ? The main looser is the council. Despite being a public body elected to serve the needs of residents and businesses the fact that the vast majority of the parking charges under this scheme would be very likely to fall into the £1.50 or £3.00 range would mean that it wouldn’t even be tabled as a serious motion. It’s a pity that the elected officials can’t see that some short term pain is required to actually create a solution rather than make it “Someone Else’s Problem”. I’d say it will cost more in real terms not to try this for 18 months and see what the results are: if it works well then the increased number of businesses in town generating income via rates should offset the parking losses.

(With many thanks to James for the retail hours/office hours split).

Other reasons for undertaking this admittedly time consuming task now are a combination of cheap storage, a decent quality video codec (ie: given a standard def. TV output the artefacts are negligible), a CPU that can manage a real-time encode of a DVD, and the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Marketing Department.

Yup – DVD’s are now as annoying as VHS became: true, I don’t have to rewind the DVD each time I want to watch it, but with copyright warnings, country limited liability screens, trailers, language selection, flying company logos, sound codec splash screens and other trash, actually getting to the film itself is an arduous task. Especially as some DVD players allow skipping, and some don’t, others permit fast forwarding of warning but not skipping, and others are brutal enough to simply trudge on until the main menu appears (as an aside, using Apple’s DVD Player application was a joy, as it at least allowed a bookmark to be set anywhere on the movie, and for the default action on playing a disc to be a jump to that point. Why do home goods have to be so hidebound and unfriendly to the viewer ? Must be a trade agreement somewhere…).

So how much storage is enough ? Well, if you’re using H.264 to the AppleTV preset in Handbrake then allow around 1.6GB for an hour, so at today’s prices a 1TB drive is 75 UKP which will give me an estimated 900GB of storage, or 562 hours of film, or in more ‘iPod friendly’ headlines, 375 films (assuming 90 minutes per film) and that’s comfortably more than I have right now.

On a slightly related note, I did see a pre-loaded MP3 player being sold in a bargain shop yesterday: the audio was free with the player (I think: might have been the other way around) but it was under a tenner in any case, so thank you for the crap on my DVD’s, and the incessant paper flyers for Blu-ray, but I’ll wait for the HD movies to come on an SDHC card so I can skip this tedious ripping step and just ignore the marketing more quickly.

Update: Not 3 minutes after posting this I caught up with my RSS, and found that I am not alone…

It’s not.

Having reserved a bike for my eldest at Halfords one Sunday morning last month, we all went down to collect it with the idea of building it together. The actual reservation was pretty straightforward, and I was quite impressed with the SMS reservation code they texted me within 2 minutes – the bike was in stock and available that day and the next and all I had to do was turn up and pay.

It wasn’t a good sign when the member of staff I showed the SMS to (it was a long number, so thought it’d help him being able to read it) looked very confused and after a long pause wrote down 3 or 4 digits on the back of his hand, ignored the terminal next to him and went off into the back of the shop.

10 minutes later he came back to ask when I’d reserved it, and then tried to tell me it took 3 days to assemble the bike. Eventually he got over his shock that I felt able to build it all by myself, agreed that I didn’t need to wait three days for a flat-pack box and vanished again.

He came back 5 minutes later saying that there was nothing in stock, and I must have seen the display model on the web site.

WTF ? It’s a stock photo, unless they move all their bikes into a perfectly white room with no obvious lighting each time they build one… I cut my losses at this point and left, although perhaps I should have been a typical outraged parent and demanded to see The Manager but I don’t subscribe to the idea that poor service can be cured by shouting loudly at someone else, and more importantly I didn’t want them to have my money: if they can’t even count bikes then what, exactly, is the reservation service for ?

An email to their customer services resulted in a reply a week later – in which, quite incredibly, they acknowledge that their system simply doesn’t work. Of course, they don’t come out and say it’s broken – PR people have been on a course, dontchaknow, and it’s all my fault for trying to shop there (their odd formatting left in):

Dear Mr Spray

Thank you for your recent e-mail regarding our Reserve and Collect service.
Halfords prides itself on offering a range of high quality products and
services and any concerns expressed by customers are treated very

seriously.

Our Reserve and Collect system is set up to use live data which allows us
to advise our customers of our stock levels right down to the last item.
Our colleagues in store aim to remove the item from sale as soon as the

notification comes through, however there will be the odd occasion where
someone will be purchasing the item at the time of reservation or indeed
the item turns out to be damaged / have a fault. As the accuracy of each

individual stock file is the stores responsibility, we have advised our
store colleagues to contact customers at the earliest possible point if
they believe there could be an issue, and to do anything they can to
rectify the

problem. This may include a suitable alternative or locating another item
from a local store. These guidelines are ‘as a minimum’ in line with other
retailers offering similar schemes.

Please accept our apologies if you feel this hasn’t happened in this case
and be assured that we will make your e-mail available to the Area Manager
for his information.

Kind Regards
<Name Redacted>

Halfords Customer Services

If they can’t manage to subcontract a simple race-free reservation system properly then they obviously don’t need my custom.

Oh wait, maybe they do…

“As we are trying to have a carbon free Christmas this year…”

So, no Coal as a gift this year ?

Bah. Humbug.

75g Butter
60g Demerera sugar
10ml Vanilla essence
15ml Golden syrup
60g Porridge oats
120g Jumbo oats

Mix everything except the oats together in a pan, and warm until the butter has melted. Stir in the oats until everything is nicely coated and then pat down into a greased baking tin. For a crunchy flapjack cook for 22-25 minutes at 180°C, and for a softer more chewy finish put the tin in at 170°C for 18 minutes.

Mark out into portions (if desired !) whilst warm and leave in the tin until almost cold.

Apple Retail Store Field Trip: http://speirs.org/2008/11/01/apple-retail-store-field-trip/

Whilst at first glance this does make it seem as though “Media Awareness” should now become a pre-school activity, take a step back and ask what passes for ICT in the majority of UK primary schools right now. I freely admit that without children of my own in such a situation I might not know, but unsurprisingly it’s pretty much a Microsoft shop – there are some glimmers of hope (some variants of free software have finally been approved for ‘purchase’) but basically you will be taught the MS way of working.

That’s fine, as a start. What is less nice is the drone-like creation of Word and Excel monkeys – nice skills to have, but not one that I feel is the right approach for generic education in Computing. Keep that as an option in “Business Skills” or something similar – what I want is for my children to be exposed to as much generic Computing as practical, so I naturally oppose any monoculture. A mix of Windows, Mac OS and Linux would be great (although I’d prefer BSD, but that’s my own personal problem…) simply to show that there is more than one way of doing things.

So the crux of the matter is that I pay (indirectly) for my school to buy Microsoft products, and be taught on MS packages. Apple provide for free (to me) an alternative view of the world that is arguably more exciting for the kids (it’s a trip, afterall) and appears from Fraser’s post to be a well thought out tutorial.

Excellent.

I’ve added some static pages for things like my reviews and Aperture hacks as they seem to be the most popular content, and I’m slowly going through the old posts to clean up bad quote marks, odd foreign characters and broken image links. Once that’s done I’ll remove this post from the front page and let it age gracefully…

A couple of my more immediate aims are to have the pages cached automatically so load times are greatly improved, automatic machine translation if you have a non-English language set in your browser (please let me know if this is a bad idea and you’d prefer to manually click on the translation flag), and the ability to open things up for guest posters, as a) it’s all the rage from 2006, and b) the number of posts might actually creep up above 1 per month.

Update: Pooh – Translation is bust Working on it…