I wrote out an epic page or so on ITS a couple of weeks back and ironically it was too long for Facebook to deal with and I lost it all. I’m back for another try but perhaps i’ll keep it to more bite-size chunks this time.

In my vast experience of ITS, they’ll consult with students but won’t do anything they haven’t thought of themselves. I was the student representative on the last Strategy Working Group, they came in thinking they were going to open certain firewall ports for Games, and they did – and that’s lovely. Needless to say the quality of *residential* internet i.e. in colleges is vastly substandard when compared to other institutions. Some companies even subcontract all their residential internet out to a third party and have their IT services run the secure internal/’commercial’ network.

They know a lot of people want IMAP (there was a great IMAP petition which got it enabled for postgrads only) – they threatened to throw me out of the university indirectly through my supervisor because I caused too much of a fuss about it (by fuss I mean a few emails to the IT Director which were largely ignored or ‘we’ll see’ responses and the odd facebook group). Be careful dealing with ITS they’ll just take you down if they don’t like you.

You can try using the DSU, but they really don’t pay any attention to students – for little things maybe and they’ll always be really nice and all smiles but significant change has to be driven by academics. If you complain to your departments via SSCs or face to face, lead a departmental campaign for change and get the department to elevate those concerns you may seen real results.

I have yet to see DSU achieve a major IT-based campaign victory and that’s not because they’re not trying, there seems to be a very capable IT officer and great president in there at the moment. It’s purely because students are powerless at the end of the day – what can we do? Withhold the IT charge that is automatically part of our college levies? Run a protest? (Could we even get enough people to hold protest about IT?). We’re just not a threat and they know that, they can isolate us and force us out and they know that as well.

Out of about 10 complaints or even comments i’ve only had one answered by the new ‘Communications Officer’ – they know they can ignore you. I realise all this talk of emails to higher ups and things makes me come off as some sort of rabble-rouser but many of my opinions and various ‘campaign points’ are covered in the comments on this group – email frequency etc was often a cause of being ignored or being given a completely vague and unsatisfactory answer.

Like anything in life if you report a problem it should be put on a list and approached within a certain timeframe, not vaguely hinted at that at some point in the future maybe it will be solved – which is the ITS’ entire strategy at the moment.

A master password

I like saving passwords, it’s something I never used to do because of the inherent security risks but thanks to Firefox’s encrypting master password system i can be confident that incursions into my PCs hard disks wouldn’t reveal all my sensitive passwords to everyone and that people sitting down in front of my PC and firing up a browser couldn’t access my most important accounts.

So where is this relatively simple feature in Chrome? Nowhere to be seen, an old post on the Chrome ‘help’ forum which hasn’t been responded to and no announcements in sight. I can’t in good faith switch to a browser that will make my entire internet experience significantly more insecure.

Otherwise, I love Chrome – I’d be its biggest exponent, if only it had a way of protecting my security online.

1. Interfaces appear in ‘ifconfig’ but do not establish connection/accept DHCP address

Most people with this problem say add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/forcedeth.conf (which may need creating):

options forcedeth msi=0 msix=0

Then issue the command (as root) – be warned this is potentially dangerous but assuming you’ve made no other changes should be fine:

update-initramfs -u

Reboot. This is the permanent fix but if you wanted to try it out temporarily, from a terminal as root type:

rmmod forcedeth
modprobe forcedeth msi=0 msix=0
/etc/init.d/networking restart

2. Interfaces don’t appear in ‘ifconfig’ or only appear intermittently

This happened to me a lot of the time and it took a long time to figure out a workaround. Somehow the interfaces get deactivated, and they can’t be bought back online by the OS. I think perhaps booting to Windows which never seemed to recognise my wired ethernet might influence this but have no evidence to back this up.

The ‘fix’ is to power down the the PC and wait at least 10 seconds to clear everything in the board’s EPROM before powering up again – when I do this I also turn off the PSU but I don’t know that this is necessary. Usually then when I reboot the devices appear in Ubuntu. Your mileage may vary but do let me know how this goes/if you think anything should be added in the comments.

A bit of background, this is an upgrade from an HTC Hero which is a brilliant, brilliant phone – but just a little slow in places. I’m hoping the Nexus One’s significantly beefier hardware will sort out this minor annoyance while keeping all the same awesome awesomeness.

The phone is great, everything works really nicely. The main reason for this post is a rant about lack of Sense UI in the Nexus. I didn’t realise how much HTC had added to the Android platform and I miss it now that i’ve made the jump. Just briefly here are a few things that I miss on the Nexus that are actually because of HTC’s great work and not part of the Android stock platform (which I had imagined they were):

• Keyboard, HTC’s keyboard is far superior to the standard Android one (i.e. the one that came with the Nexus) – and there aren’t that many available on the market.
• Where are all my widgets? I want a full page mail widget, a-la Hero – but there’s nothing to be found on the Nexus as standard, or in the Market. I’d also like a full page (google) calendar widget, same story.
• The top bar looks rubbish compared to HTC’s sleek black look, the default Android one is a little bit Elementary school, lots of big blocks and friendly letters with little thought about how attractive it looks.
• When dialing, HTC have an amazing system which allows you to type numbers to find names, e.g. to call ‘Henri’ I could start typing on the dialer ‘32 (H-E)’ and all matching contacts would appear, it was really fast finding contacts and a pleasure to use. At the minute I have to scroll my entire (400+) contacts list to find names, and THAT is annoying.

Everything else really nice at the moment, it’s definitely given me the speedboost I was looking for and i’m still an Android advocate, i’m just disappointed that a lot of what I thought Android is, was actually HTC’s Sense UI which I don’t think I can get hold of on my Nexus.

… vive la resistance

Install this in firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953

Add a site:

Site: wsj.com
Action, Custom: http://www.google.com/news/

Disable RefControl (right click on the little icon you’ll see at the bottom of your firefox window)

Go to:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703735004574569873588687170.html

you’ll see “TO CONTINUE READING, SUBSCRIBE NOW”..

Enable RefControl (spoof our referrer) and reload the page

I have a system with three screens across two nVidia graphics cards and a Creative X-Fi Xtremegamer driving the sound instead of the on-board. These are the hardware elements that usually prove contentions and in Karmic:

No other problems to report, great release for improving driver support and boot time.

Google Checkout no longer supports Maestro, I had read an article about this but it had slipped my mind. The Google Checkout page (App?) on my Android phone’s Market still lists Maestro as a viable option. I can only think that the phone’s trying to send the Maestro details, getting a weird rejection code which it deals with in a correspondingly weird way.

So if you’re having problems adding a card to your Google checkout account – switch to Visa.

On the same note, why Google decided to ban Maestro is beyond me, it’s certainly the card of choice in the UK – everyone seems to have one – I resent having to use my credit card to make all these purchases, usually because I forget to pay it off and suffer in the subsequent round of interest!

I hear Maestro imposes very large fees and this is a big knock back from Google, but the support for Maestro in high street stores presumably isn’t going anywhere so what’s going to happen in this old-school mexican stand off? I suspect Google Checkout, and its customers are going to end up losing out.

“In my childhood and more particularly  during my teens I sought solitude: it was a matter of choice not necessity. I was seldom unhappy and had many friends and enjoyable pastimes in the gregarious life of home and boarding-school, yet I needed, with a need almost like hunger or thirst, to escape on my own at frequent intervals. At first this need was unconscious and then, by degrees, rather than at any time I can pin down, I recognised its symptoms. All the closer friends I had in my later schooldays shared to some extent this quirk of temperament. We never talked about what we did with our solitude and yet some kind of understanding existed. It was as if there was a tacit agreement that our social selves were our superficial selves, that our real selves were private ,not to be talked about with-out embarrassment,. and that everyday language was inadequate for our real preoccupations. What we did talk about I do not know, but I am sure our conversation was trivial, facetious, sarcastic and freely sprinkled with slang and obscenity. We emphatically did not seek each other out as soul-mates to whom we could unbosom ourselves.”