Normally the WAG54G2 doesn’t give very advanced ADSL line stats which isn’t much use if your on an fault finding mission. However, using the following URL you can get much more detailed information:
http://192.168.1.1/setup.cgi?next_file=adsl_driver.htm
This should give you:
DSL Noise Margin
DSL Attenuation
DSL Transmit Power
I’ve just realised we’ve not officially thanked our sponsors of the Royal Cornwall Show Webcam. The camera was a massive success, with over a thousand unique viewers tuning in to watch the camera pan around the grounds.
I’d like to take a moment to thank Chris & co at Kernow broadband for providing a dedicated internet connection for the camera. Stefan at Davey electrical provided his cherry picker on which we mounted the camera. Without the fantastic help of these people the camera wouldn’t have been possible!
We hope to be back next year to provide even better coverage of the grounds.
I recently installed a Windows XP virtual machine under MacOS using virtualbox, only to discover that Outlook 2007 would hang when opened (unable to connect to exchange). It seems the issue has been documented in the following ticket but no resolution has been posted. Outlook 2003 seems to works without a problem.
Update: I’ve discovered that Outlook 2007 works fine if you switch the networking options in virtualbox from “NAT” to “Bridged”. It also fixed some other issues I was having (mapped network drives and group policy didn’t get applied. For reference the domain controller is a Windows 2008 SBS server.
This year the Royal Cornwall show is taking place on the 4th, 5th & 6th of June and for the first time in the shows history, Tanist Computer Systems will be providing a live camera feed allowing you to view the show from the comfort of your desk.
The camera will be capable of panning a full 360 degrees and will be positioned some 30 feet above the showground. The live stream will be viewable for the duration of the event on www.showgroundlive.com
We hope you enjoy the show, even if you’re not there!
I was just churning through my documents and discovered a short description of my first ever snowboarding holiday with snowtrex. It’s not complete but it makes an interesting prologue.
Day 1 - Set off at 5am from Exeter, having stayed the night at Reg’s flat. I was trying to convert his Navman S30 to run TomTom - However it took 5 hours, so I didn’t actually get any sleep at all. We set off and I managed a whole 30 mins before handing over to Reg. By 9am we had made good progress, scooting around the edge of London. Then, disaster, the low oil light came on in the car. We pulled in and bought some oil for a quick top up which seemed to fix the problem. In no time at all we were queuing for the ferry. We were way to early so had to wait about an hour and a half. We finally boarded the Norfolkline - cheap but very impressive inside. We left at 12pm, The sea was flat and the crossing was very smooth. Unloading the ferry took a while and we were soon getting used to driving on the right hand side. We forgot to fit the GB sticker and headlight adapters, and passed some police looking extremely uneasy. We pulled in as quick as possible to get the stuff fitted.
We soon settled in to doing about 80mph with the cruise control on. Then a bright flash, what on earth was that. It looked like a mobile speed camera! No! I’m sure I was sticking to the limit, and I had just been overtaken by a french car going faster than me. I don’t know what it was.
Arriving at the resort we were met with stunning views of the alps. There seemed to be a major lack of toilets so we stopped to make some yellow snow. About 15 mins and we were there. It was snowing and the roads were icy. We parked up and soon found the car became stuck. We had to fit the snow chains to make any progress at all.
Check-in took a long time but we paid the 300 euros deposit and picked up the key to the apartment and lift passed no problem. We also picked up the snowboards, and paid an additional 10 euros insurance for the week. We entered the apartment and wow, it was way above expectations.
Day 2 - Very keen to get on the slopes. We soon found some green slopes and went down for our first real run. Ouch, lots of falling over and high speed crashes. I fell off the drag lift. We went back for lunch and then went for a much larger green slope. This was impressive and took about 2 hours to complete, by the time we reached the bottom we were ready to call it a day. My leg was already hurting quite a lot. We returned to the apartment and soon went out for some drinks with the polish.
Day 3 - Keen once again, this time aiming a bit higher at the Jandri express. We met up with the polish and went up Jandri 1 and Jandri 2, right to the top. Then we took the underground train to the very top. The run down was amazing, but my leg was seriously hurting and walking was very painful. Jay realised the camera had gone missing, so he went back with Reg to look for it. I stayed at the 3600 cafe and shared a jug of wine and some potato thing with the polish - yum.
We took a chair lift back up, and Kasia was super scared having never been on one before. As we got off she managed to punch me in the face and I heard a nasty cracking noise in my face. Seems like I got away without a broken nose.
We made our way down to about 2600 and then it was getting late, so we took a big cart (technical term) down and then the tiny white lifts. Reg took his board in for repair after the binding broke.
Just noticed that all the computer clocks on a network were 5 minutes out. Went to the server (Windows Server 2008 Standard), to check the internet time synchronisation only to find that the usual Internet time tab on the clock/date control panel was completely missing. I didn’t bother investigating exactly why this is, but found the following solution.
w32tm /config /syncfromflags:MANUAL /manualpeerlist:time.nist.gov
w32tm /config /update
Obviously you can use your preferred time server instead of time.nist.gov, but run these two commands and wait a few minutes, and you should see your clock correct itself. The process will show ‘time-service’ events in the system event log to confirm your changes.
Let’s face it, graze.com is a wonderful idea (for those that don’t know, they basically post you a healthy lunch) and I love the novelty of not knowing what’s inside. However, £60 a month is a bit steep (£3 x 5 days x 4 weeks) and seeing as I’m going around the supermarket anyway, I could just pickup the ingreedients and make my own! I could even reuse my existing graze box to get the correct portions.
So what’s required? Well today’s box consisted of:
I’d welcome any more suggestions and I’ll create a list.
A teacher at a school we work for recently found the free Ikea Home Planner software. It looks like a great bit of software to help children learn about 2D measurements and design. We decided to install it on the school network, however, we came across one major problem. The software would not run unless the user was an administrator, instead quitting with the following error:
The application stops due to an unforeseen situation, for example an error in the database.
It turns out that the application tries to write to various files that are installed in Program Files, which of course normal users do not have access to. Obviously giving the entire userbase rights to modify things in this way was out of the question, so we decided to try some other methods. We have a ’software’ share on one of the servers for software that can be run directly from an installation directory, so we tried that. The same problem existed, as users were still not able to write to the install directory.
In the end, our solution was to create a new share, to which users have write (update) access, as we did not want to compromise the existing software setup, when everything was running smoothly. Once we had shared the software in a user writable directory (and published it in the form of a shortcut on the default desktop), everything worked!
It would be nice to see an update to the software to allow it to run without administrator rights, as I am sure there are situtations where a solution like ours would not be feasible.
Update 24/03/2009:
We have found that although this solves the problem of running the software, it does not allow you to run more than one instance at a time - useless for a network application like this one. The software must be putting a lock on its files, very annoying!
It must be 3 weeks now since my beloved 2.5 V6 TDi Passat brokedown on me. Actually, that’s not entirely correct. The injection pump broke down on me, the Passat just happened to be cursed with the not so popular Bosch VP44 Injection pump.
My car was running great, freshly serviced by myself, I had no complaints - smooth and effortless, it was business as usual. Then, at the drop of a hat, it was crippled. The power rapidly faded away to nothing. It didn’t even have the guts to top 5mph.
“That’s it” I said. “The Passat is dead!”. Well, I was pretty much correct. The injection pump had pressurised its last atom of fuel before packing up for an extended holiday.
The gear indicator which usually displays the currently selected gear lit up red and the gearbox started shifting really violently. Initially I thought this could be a gearbox fault, but I later discovered this is simply a side effect of the car entering “limp mode”.
The car made quite a lot of smoke and the engine also sounded a lot more rough than usual. I noticed air in the fuel line too. A quick scan with Vagcom revealed 00550 - Start of Injection Regulation - Control Difference - Intermittent (also known as error code p1248).
I was genuinely hoping for a straightforward repair of the pump, but the reality was I needed a whole new one. I found a guy who really knew his stuff when it came to Bosch VP44 pumps, his name was Peter over at King’s Lynn Auto Diagnostics. He offered a prompt testing service for £70 and discovered the body (housing) of my pump was worn beyond repair, causing loss of fuel pressure. Wear in the pump housing means the pump is pretty much a write-off.
dieselbombers.com describes a similar problem:
The housings on the VP44 wear out due to low fuel pressure from weak lift pumps causing the diaphragm in the front of the VP44 pump to rupture. This causes the steel timing piston to vibrate in the aluminum bore of the housing and the result in a short time is the housing wears to the point that fuel bypasses the piston and full advance cannot be accomplished
Peter managed to source me a replacement pump, although he made sure I was sitting down before telling me the price, because it came in at an eye watering £762. He thought the damage to the housing was probably due to mileage more than anything.
I must admit, that was almost enough for me to seriously consider writing the car off. It has 180,000 on the clock and market value of the car is probably not more than £2000. But anyway, I decided I needed my car repaired. The exact model of the pump was 0470 506 002 - These seem rare and consequently expensive.
I’m still waiting for the pump to arrive (should be early next week). Peter assured me the new pump would be “virginised” so that it didn’t need to be coded to the car (watch out of this if you get one from a scrap heap)
It took the local garage about 3-4 hours to remove the pump, which just happened to be on a separate belt on the V6 TDI, so the cambelt did not have to be removed.
So the grand total for the pump failure comes in at about £1152 including fitting. I can only conclude this article by saying that under no circumstance buy a car with a Bosch VP44 injection pump, although if you’re reading this, the chances are it’s too late, you already did. Just take a quick look on the internet and there are pages and pages of people with similar problems. Good luck, you’ll need it.
I stumbled upon an annoying bit of IE7 behaviour recently. Whilst putting together an enquiry form, I used normal divs to contain my text input elements. The divs had a left-margin defined, but for some reason IE7 would render the left-margin correctly, but in addition to this it would then apply the same width as if it were a left-padding on the div, or as if it were a left-margin on the text input element.
The following example should show that no gap is present between the left of the text input field and the red border of the div (in browsers other than IE7 of course), this is the behaviour I expected.
http://blog.tanist.co.uk/files/iemargin.html
I found the fix to be to put a zero-width space before the start of the input tag, this makes IE7 behave as per the other browsers. I have tested the example in the IE8 beta, and it does perform as per everyone else.
Has anyone else had the same problem?
