IT Werkz Sometimes

Our project office has moved and for the better. We are now in a much larger open plan office with a lot of other IT people so if nothing else it does stop some of the juvenile behaviour.

We’ve just had 3 days to regression test the system and the part I was responsible for was by far the largest, functionalty wise. I did get some help and we actually managed to pass about 97% of the tests which was a miracle. Lots of happy management around right now. Some of the developers were involved and though they wrote the system a lot of them had a devil of a job proving stuff worked. Odd but true.  

I didn’t realise there was so much dislike of contractors by permies till recently but without us they wouldn’t get anything working.

I have a recurring problem with my Internet radio. Sometimes when I want to listen to English soccer on it I get a canned message saying how they can’t broadcast it for some legal reasons. I know what the problem is. When the radio connects to the BBC radio site it thinks I’m listening from outside of the UK and therefore due to the quaint licenses the BBC manage to get us to pay for it can only broadcast to the UK, hence the canned ‘we can’t broadcast to you’ message.  Now why does it think I am trying to listen outside of the UK when I am not. I assume there are some proxy servers in Yerp somewhere generating a bit of confusion.

A couple of months ago I phoned my ISP’s 24 hour helpdesk and explained to them this situation and the support person said that they didn’t have that sort of information to which I responded ‘you don’t know where your servers are?’. Obviously something happened after that as a couple of days later I could listen to live soccer on the internet radio.

The problem has now returned. No doubt there is one tiny little tweek somebody needs to make so that the outside of UK servers appear to be in the UK. I assume something fell over and when it was restarted the said tweek was not reapplied. This could go on for ages unless more people understand this problem and start phoning BT’s support desk and giving them an earfull.

An agent contacted me the other day about some contracts and he really did know what he was talking about, refreshing.

He was obviously involved in development once as we had a yak about UNIX and other stuff. I spoke to another agent earlier in the week and he was positively slimy. He had a requirement for someone to start in the next week and the client was obviously very desperate for someone, and I would have fitted the bill OK. But the creepy agent was trying to get some serious commitment out of me without him actually divulging much about the company. OK, he was keeping his cards close to his chest and all that, but I wasn’t getting much information on the position at all. Eventually he mentioned money and it was hopeless. Got a feeling the contractor rate was about half the company’s budget i.e. the slimy agent was probably keeping the difference. I just said ‘no way’. Oddly he appeared to appreciate my immediate no response.

I felt like asking to be removed from their database, not that they would actually remove you. They’d probably say you have been removed but how do I know. Heaven knows how many cruddy little databases I am stored on around the world. If they ever try and rationalise all of this data on all of these crumby little databases all over the net the result would be worthless.

The good agent mentioned a couple of positions which fitted me perfectly, though that has happened several times recently and I have got nowhere. Think my resume scares the bejesus out of some companies. Or I have more experience than the person hiring and they think I am overkill or even might take over their job.

Internet radio

The Internet radio is great. As there are so many radio stations it’s almost a pain finding one you like but the manufacturer has a web page where you can choose radio stations and add them to a ‘My stuff’ list. This is obviously some kind of text file of the URL’s of the radio stations you have decided you want added to your My Stuff list. Then when you switch on the Internet radio, at boot up time, and that involves unplugging and plugging back into the mains, the little critter looks for the My Stuff text file on the server, or whatever it is, reads the URL’s and displays those stations on the radio, for selection. 

Got an Internet radio today – Logik IR 100 – and setting that up was predictably fun.

It was only £42 ($84) which was half price. I don’t think Internet radio has taken off too well, hence cheap. I’m not sure many people even know what it is. Some people may also be confused by the price hike for playing music via net radio channels and which are threatening to price them off the net. These radio channels are net only, in that they do not broadcast via the airwaves at all. We are talking Pandora.com here. What I wanted the Internet radio for is to listen to regular radio channels that also broadcast over the Internet like the BBC and KCBS.

This is a great alternative to a DAB (digital) radio as digital radio is broadcast over the air and we have lousy airwave reception and of course Internet radio uses broadband. If you left it on for about 10 hours a day for 20 days a month you’d chew up ten’s of gigs of bandwidth. It’s actually not much different than listening to radio stations on the web, but for some odd reason I prefer to listen to radio on a seperate box. Weird but true.

Looks like a radio and is about the same size. I switched it on and got it to search for the wireless network, which it found, entered the WEP key and bingo it didn’t work. Got an error message, which I searched Google for, and the results said if the firmware version was less than a certain version then I needed to get a firmware update, and that update can only be performed over the Internet. Needless to say the firmware needed updating. Hmmm… problem is that the Logik Internet radio can’t see the wireless network to start with (This sounds very familiar. Ed).

I had to either switch off WEP or set it to Shared, instead of Open. Logged on to the router and set WEP to Shared. Then of course the PC’s couldn’t see the wireless network. Did loads of ‘puting and eventually realised that the PC network wireless properties needed amending to Shared as well. Did that. Wireless connection back on the PC.

Played with the Internet radio and managed to upgrade the firmware. Did a search of Internet radio stations and it found thousands in the US alone. About 500 in the UK and other stations in just about every country of the world.

Now the acid test. Logon to the router and change the wireless security from Shared and back to Open. And then the same with the PC. Can the PC see the rooter? Yes. Can the router see the Internet? Yes. Lastly, after the firmware upgrade and the change of WEP back to Open, can the Logik Internet radio see radio stations on the Internet and play them? Yes, yes.

Thought I’d leave out all the usual bum steers, false starts and dead-ends I went through as it is just too boring and predictable. The radio’s great though.

Quote of the day

‘A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn’t exactly been one of moderation’ Donald Trump (1946-)