Measured Response

Originally uploaded by Steve Stone

Just got back from our church’s weekend away, and I thought I’d check out the work of the photographer we used, Steve Stone. Here’s one of his highly rated photos - really works well with the title ‘Measured Response’ and his dry commentary. Plenty of other striking photos in his flickr collection. I’ll now check out his iStockPhoto pics.

She was delivered yesterday, after a long wait. Martha and Emma are very excited, with me less so (at this stage). We’ve given her pretty continuous company so far, and she gets fractious when we go away for too long. But she didn’t sulk too much when we get guests round for lunch, and we had to shut her outdoors.

She tips the scales at 5 stone, so is rather large. And she already has grey eyebrows. But she does appear to be house trained, which is a big help. Confused enough?

Maggie is a rehomed 7-year old English Cocker Spaniel, who needed a good new home and lots of exercise. Hopefully she will get us all out more to the Park for some exercise.

Photos when I can get her looking relatively awake. Most of the time she is flopped out on the floor, recovering from her last walk.

In the last month or so I’ve fixed about 4 separate cases of computers not being able to access the internet. I thought it was worth a brief notes on the different cases, and the solutions, to help others who hit problems.

The various problems:

• Neighbour’s laptop - apparently couldn’t do anything.
• Dad’s PC - couldn’t browse the web, but one (and only one) email account was working.
• Martha’s Vista laptop - apparently could connect to wifi network, but couldn’t do anything on the internet
• my iPod Touch - could connect to wifi network, but couldn’t do anything on the internet

My general approach was the same in all cases:

1. What does the system think it’s connected to? For this I use ipconfig /all (Win) or ifconfig (Mac) to look at what network adapters are active, the IP addresses, the DNS servers it’s trying to use, and the gateway addresses. Some experience is needed here to work out what these imply. I’ll try and post a flowchart here at some point that helps with this.
2. If it’s connected to a broadband router OK, is everything not working or just some services? Here I use something like ping www.bbc.co.uk to see if basic DNS lookups are running, and ping 212.58.251.195 to see if basic TCP/IP services are connecting out through the server to the internet.
3. If these are OK, which higher level services are working (if any)? In Dad’s case, just email, but in all the others’, nothing at all.
4. Is there some sort of filter getting in the way? These could be “proxies” designed to help connections in/out organisations with restrictive networks (eg, schools, colleges) or firewalls being too aggressive or playing up.

In the neighbour’s case it was a proxy setting that had got turned on (which she then remembered about), which was redirecting internet requests to something that didn’t exist. A quick look under Control Panel > Internet Options > Connections found it and turning it off cured it immediately.

For dad it was his firewall misbehaving; turning that off restored the internet. A quick reinstall has hopefully cured the problem.

Nowhere near as easy for the laptop and iPod problems at home. One Mac laptop was fine on the home wifi, but the Vista one wasn’t, which made it sound like the laptop. A full hunt around showed that it was connecting OK to the router on wired or wireless, but all internet operations were failing, despite no proxy or firewall problems.

I was stumped. After much fiddling with some advanced ideas on dynamic allocation of receive windows and netsh tcp global configuration, it still wasn’t working. Grrr.

Reluctantly I looked again at the Sky router. All settings seemed fine. I tried turning authentication on and off, and fiddling with different wireless settings - all to no avail. As a last resort I tried nuking the box - restoring the factory settings. Bingo! the laptop and iPod then worked! This shouldn’t have worked, but clearly shows that the Sky Router can get itself into a state where it doesn’t service all connected clients.

I’ve been the very happy owner of the slightly updated iPod Touch for a few weeks now, so I thought I’d review how it’s gone so far.

However, it seems Apple is behaving badly, making life very difficult for would-be developers of apps to run on the iPhone/Touch. There’s bnen plenty of discussion about …, but now it seems that even rejections from the App Store are now covered by NDA. So some developers will now invest in the tools, spend many days or months struggling to develop something, have little ability to test it for real on a iPhone, submit it to Apple, have it rejected (maybe without a reason why), and not be able to tell anyone else about the whole process. Seriously, Apple, are you trying to put people off writing for the platform? I’ve not yet seen any convincing comment on why Apple are acting in this way. (Probably no surprise, given so much is covered by NDA.) This view is echoed by Dan Moren.

It will make it particularly difficult for small outfits, or hobbyist developers, to run the risk. Larger corporates will better be able to stand the risk. But still, is this any way to drive innovation?

You must have a reason, Apple, so please tell us.

[Edit: Between me writing this and me posting it, Apple have loosened the NDA somewhat. Good, but still no real reasoning why they did it.]

Mitch Joel has a fantastic post over at SPOS called 8 Reasons Why We’re Not Prepared For The Future. Using some data from recent enrollments at a college in the USA, he predicts:

1. Percentage of applicants who applied online last year: 89%.
2. Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, iPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus network by the end of the day on August 24th, the day they moved into their dorm rooms: 370 students registered 443 devices.
3. Number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14.
4. Number that brought iPhones/iTouches: 93.
5. Total number of students on campus this year that have landline phone service: 5.
6. Mac or PC? Of the four classes currently on campus the classes of 2009 and 2010 are more likely to own Windows, while the classes of 2011 and 2012 are more likely to own Macs.
7. Average number of emails received per day: 180,000.
8. Percentage of email that arrives on campus that is spam: 94%.

His main point is that

It’s painfully obvious that the workplace is not ready for these types of graduates. If you think blocking Facebook and access to YouTube is going to increase productivity, take a look at how these future employees work and what their expectations are/will be…

Very pertinent where I work. How relevant is it to youthwork, and in a few more years, the rest of what we do in our churches?

A real treat - Martha’s favourite concerto and one of my favourite symphonies and at our favourite concert hall the same night. Wonderful playing from the CBSO under the baton of Xian Zhang.

The concert started with Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, which I’d not heard before, but is gentle and beautiful.

Michael Collins was the soloist in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. The music just emerged as if he was thinking it into existence, not having to coax it from a single-reed wind instrument, with interesting register issues. Seriously impressive, and no wonder his recent recording of this has been winning awards.

And then after an interval, the orchestra doubled in size and the organ added in order to tackle Saint-Saens’ great 3rd Symphony. I was hoping for a little more volume and passion in places, but the speed was just right, and the orchestra wonderfully clear and precise. I heard lots of tones and ideas that I’d not heard before, and I realised just how many great ideas Saint-Saens brought to it, particularly interesting rhythmical differences between different instruments. No wonder that he was reported to say about it “I have given all that I had to give. What I have done I shall never do again.” Which he didn’t. Fantastic.

Xian has made the “improbably journey from a small town in China to the New York Philharmonic” [NYT] and then on guest engagements with lots of other orchestras. She didn’t draw much attention to herself whilst conducting, or in the various entrances/exits in the applause at the end, but she certainly drew some great playing from the CBSO. Difficult to know how much this is down to her, as they are a fine group, but I’d certainly be keen to watch her at work again. Shame we missed “Maestro” where she was apparently one of the tutors.