A couple of weeks ago we went up to London to see Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn. Summed up by my friend Chris as “Physics and Nazis”, this new production is directed by Elly Green. I’ve known Elly (sorry, still Eleanor to me!) since we were born although this is the first time that we’ve met in about ten years. It was great to meet up, although the trains and timings of the performance meant that we didn’t get long to chat about stuff. Hopefully we’ll get another chance again soon.
Anyway, the production was great, with a very effective set and excellent performances. It received five stars in the Time Out review, which is fantastic. It runs until Saturday, so this post is horrendously late and apparently tickets are selling fast for the last few shows.
I’ve finished encoding and uploading the videos from the most recent HantsLUG meeting and they are available from the LUG website. This latest batch were recorded at Surrey University, which was a joint meeting with Surrey LUG. The presenters were Adrian Bridgett on Puppet and Alan Pope on UDS Boston 2007. I did a very short talk about bitlbee, the IRC to IM gateway.
OK, I’m struggling a bit for a witty and amusing title. A special Noprize to anyone who gets the reference. It’s all just an excuse to say that I finally hit 13 stone this week, which means that I’ve lost 3 stone since this time last year. That’s 42 pounds to our American readers and 19.05 kilograms for our European friends. That’s a stage weight and a half I’m not carrying around with me all the time. I hope that the slow and steady pace at which I’ve been losing weight means it will stay off with a sensible diet and regular exercise. Losing three stone was the original target I set myself this time last year, but I think there’s a bit further to go.
To celebrate, I decided to put on a pair of my suit trousers which I was actually wearing this time last year and see how they fitted.
I found this article very helpful when getting a 32-bit application running on my 64-bit Linux installation. Using the tips described here I was able to find which libraries the application was looking for but which weren’t installed in the 32-bit library root. In this case it was the USB libraries. I was then able to unpack them to the correct location, after which the application to started up and seems to work just fine. 
Force9 have been my ISP for about 5 years. Most of the time they’ve not been a problem, the service has been reliable. The customer support has been relatively unhelpful but I’ve not needed to use it very often. (Last time I did to report a slowly decreasing broadband speed they told me that BT wouldn’t do anything until I reached a miserly 300kbps!) They are a subdivision of PlusNet and PlusNet has recently been bought by BT. They have also suffered terrible cock-ups where they deleted tens of thousands of people’s e-mail and had their forum software compromised which leaked everyone’s passwords.
I regularly need to SSH into several remote systems. On some of these systems sshd is run on a non-standard port just to avoid port scans and brute force attempts. I’ve been noticing very sluggish SSH access to at least one box for some months now, whilst web access to it seems fine. I have traffic shaping on my gateway firewall which prioritises traffic to these non-standard ports, yet it is still painful to SSH to them.
Like many ISPs PlusNet traffic shape their connections, which completely negates my own traffic shaping to all intents and purposes. Although there’s a vague guide as to what sort of traffic gets “Platinum” priority through to “Bronze” on their website if you can work out which of the half a dozen or so broadband packages you have, there’s nothing as useful as list of ports and how they are prioritised. They don’t say anything useful other than that trying to circumvent it breaches their T&Cs.
So, what to do? I don’t want to breach their T&Cs, I just want to find out which ports I can run interactive SSH sessions on without them feeling like typing through treacle. I wonder if it’s time to move to an ISP that doesn’t treat customers like idiots.
