Steve Hemingway

I joined this on the suggestion of Tania Dimitrova. She is a valued friend, and I was impressed at the quality of the people on the site.

I thought I'd use it to make contact with people who can collaborate with me in my new venture to invest in Chinese real estate in the Pearl River Delta area (Zhuhai, Shenzhen etc.).

I am looking for a webmaster/SEO expert and someone with accountancy skills as well as someone who would like to create content for my website (i.e. a writer).

I bought myself another laptop when I was in Hong Kong the other week. I am a complete sucker for technology, as you will already know if you ever bother to read my various blogs over the years.

It is a Lenovo Thinkpad T61. It has the Santa Rosa chipset, whatever that is, 2MB RAM, 160 GB disk, and Windows Vista. It also has a nifty Nvidia graphics processor. It is reputed to be able to run Second Life! Vista seemed a bit of a struggle to get going, and I am yet to connect it directly to my printer (a Tally Genicom 8008), but I can connect via another PC in the house, and generally it seems much better than the reports. I have yet to find any significant software that it will not run.

It has a wide format screen, which I am growing to like, slowly. I got the shop to put a screen protector on it, although it is not touch-sensitive like my Motorola Ming phone, or a tablet PC. The protector may be tough, but it is very reflective, which makes the PC difficult to use in strong light.

Anyway, the PC is pretty good. I paid about HKD 13000, which is pretty good, I think, certainly more than I've seen it for in the UK. It is a very new model, but cheaper than the T60p, which is what I thought I wanted. I got it from Protech. A very helpful and knowledgeable guy called Marco Wong served me. They are based in the Mong Kok computer mall - floor and floors of computers and components.

I have been fiddling with the fingerprint reader. I have never used such a thing before, and I consider it a bit of a gimmick. In fact it is linked to a local security vault, but like all password managers, it makes you totally dependent on it and incapable of using any other PC, particularly one in a cyber cafe.

The one think of tremendous value I have found about the PC is moisten your fingertip before trying to use the fingerprint reader. My old skin, in the relatively dry atmosphere of the UK just is not recognised at all. Although humidity here is usually high, the relative cool of interiors means that skin is often quite dry. I suppose I should start using moisturiser.

I am on Linked In. Tania Dimitrova invited me originally. I am beginning to see the use of such a system. I may use it to find people I can collaborate with in the future. Maybe people will find me through my profile on it. I would certainly like to find people who would like me to source Chinese real estate for them right now as I'm about to travel to China on a shopping expedition.

This is Steve Hemingway's public profile on LinkedIn. If you know me and are not in my contacts, then please click the relevant links to add me. You can just create a free profile and link to me, I'm pretty sure.

When I contacted Ian Wilson to link to him on Facebook yesterday his response was "I was probably the last person on the planet not on Facebook!!"

I think that this is not strictly true, but Facebook must be on a path to overtake MySpace in a timescale measured in weeks. Certainly Rupert's relentless plugging of MySpace in The Sun will have done nothing to attract it to People Like Us.

Steve Hemingway's Facebook Profile

Here is Ian Wilson's profile (I think you need to be logged in to view this, or you can just search for Ian's facebook profile on Google.

The tiresome fact about this type of site is that it gets sold on by the originators to an old-media corporate with lots of money but no understanding of the Internet with the result that everyone decides to leave and go to another one. This has happened with Friends Reunited (bought by ITV) and with MySpace (bought by News International).

This blog entry reckons that Meraki is poised to offer an alternative to ISPs and mobile operators.

This article indicates that traditional 'muni-wi-fi' has many problems, but even the FT's dopey IT correspondent was able to set up his Meraki mesh network, so there is strong evidence not only that it works, but that you don't need a maven to set it up (and presumably to keep it going).

I'm not going to throw away my 802.11g routers yet, but I am definitely interested. Even in my modest brick and wood house coverage is pretty patchy, so a mesh system sounds an ideal alternative to having to run cables everywhere just to connect the routers that serve the area that would otherwise be dead spots of coverage.

If you live near me (SG3 6PG approx) in Knebworth and you are interested in sharing my cable modem connection, drop me a line to an obvious address, or give me a call 0845 299 0113.

This post by Ben Laurie on the contribution of 'many eyes' to fixing security bugs makes very interesting reading. MS is a powerful organization, but it seems clear to me that for one more reason, in the long term its prospects are fairly modest. It is now a behemoth, and as everyone knows, behemoths can't write software. For the time being I will continue to use some MS software (particularly Windows) but open source seems to me to be slowly but surely pulling ahead.

It seems to me that software like MS Office, browsers, operating systems databases, web servers are moving towards the regime of market cost pricing. I have been waiting for this for thirty years, and we are not here yet, and we may not quite get there in my lifetime, but the days when DEC could sell a FORTRAN compiler for a VAX for more than five thousand early-eighties pounds are long gone. At the time one could have bought a luxury sports car for that kind of money - there can hardly be a piece of software on the market that costs so much now. Only complete systems like SAP and Oracle Financials cost serious money, and I think this is more about deployment and support than actual software licences.

I am a great fan of our Panasonic SD253 breadmaker. The only thing that has gone wrong with it in the many years we have owned it is that the non-stick coating on the kneading paddle has largely worn off, which results is a golf-ball lump of bread being torn out of the bottom of each loaf we bake.

I was looking around for a replacement paddle, which I discover will set me back at least 15 pounds, when I cam across this review, which I urge you to read. The reviewer is more thorough than I would have believed possible. I was thinking of adding a short review myself, but confronted with this, and because the model is now obsolete, I refrained.

I often write blog entries about economic incentives, and moaning about the failure of government policies that fail to recognised the importance of them, but it is quite clear that not all focussed effort is the result of a slap from the invisible hand.

I am not the only person who is impressed by this piece of Japanese engineering - I just came across this review page where the verdict is confirmed. It is not the case that all bread makers are even nearly equivalent: the previous Breville model that we had was completely useless.

Wonderful!

This tool from the Microsoft download center seems pretty cool. It seems to be approx equivalent to SyncBack, which I use. Both are free.

I just wanted to use something to sync my accounts, which are on a USB thumbdrive, with my Vista notebook. My first instinct was to use the Vista Sync Center, which seems to do a reasonable job of keeping a local, synchronised copy of a SMB share. Unfortunately I couldn't get the Sync Center to recognize my thumb drive as a data device (as opposed to an MP3 player or similar) and therefore when I tried to synchronize it, it just kicked off Windows Media Player version 99 to search for and synchronize media files, which was the last thing I wanted.

I get similar problems with Picasa 2 which refuses to stop its bloody media detector, with the result that whenever I plug in the thumb drive, it eagerly scans it for images, coming up with just a few icons and logos. I have told it to disable the media detector, in the obvious place, many times.

I have failed to make any sort of entry for a very long time. I have no real excuse. Some interesting things have happened recently, but the only entry I felt I had time to make was this one. How sad.

I think that the government doesn't care much about our personal liberties. I think it is the instinct of all those in power to control those of us who are not. The government doesn't really need an excuse to do this, but when one is available, such as the perceived terrorist threat, they seize it for all they are worth.

Thus the ID card scheme was born. It seems to me that this is a classic case of IT mission creep. As a one-time programmer I know in my bones that a lean, spare, flexible system with proper interfaces is much more powerful than one which is cross-braced with a myriad of special bells and whistles added too early in the design cycle. Most government IT systems seem to be of this latter type, particularly the computerisation of the NHS.

David Birch, in the current edition of Prospect Magazine, has proposed a brilliant design sketch (intro here). This provides a means of associating an individual, defined by an appropriate biometric signature, with a number. This is really all that is needed, and addresses all the problems about security and confidentiality at a stroke. The essential idea is that we are simply allocated a unique number (a classic database primary key) by an iris scanning machine. The first time we use this machine we are allocated a new number. The next time we simply get that originally-allocated number back. These machines could be installed widely in public places. The database backing this system would be extremely compact - just the biometric signature and the key.

Other systems which required positive identification could then use this key. Perfect!

IBM Keyboards were awesome. They are very interesting in that they are PC peripherals that stopped getting better some time before the PC got going, and amazingly, they can continue to be used with the latest desktop, and in principal, laptop, PCs.

There is a lot of stuff about keyboards on the web. Wikipedia is a good place to start. Clickykeyboards.com (inevitably) is another good place to look. Dansdata.com is a great read. It's so wonderful to read a guy whose feelings about keyboards are like mine. I got here because I borrowed a colleagues PC and was appalled at how bad the rubber-dome keyboard was. I replaced it with a Compaq Model RT-102 keyboard, P/N 120664-001 A. This is no match for an IBM tank, but I am pretty sure it has the buckling-key mechanism that is so satisfying to type on. As Dan says, it's so nice it just makes you want to type.

I should be working, not looking for keyboards, but they do make a difference. For a long time I resisted moving to a laptop because I knew that that the keyboard would be useless. I was right, as my fingers tell me now.

I have split out the China content from the Herts Lettings website and loaded it into a new website, mingwei.co.uk. This now is my China property investment website.

It uses, Drupal, just like Herts Lettings. I loaded the SEO Checklist module, and the modules that it recommends, such as google sitemaps. It has the Printer-friendly pages module, as well as TinyMCE.

The last of these - a javascript html editor - is pretty cool, although it has strange effects on some linebreak filters.

The main improvement that I've made is to put in some proper navigation. What I never understood is that the Navigation menu is special - there is a block that can be used to display it in a way that cannot be replicated by any other menu. (There is no way to create a block that contains a specific named menu, that I have found).

Also there is a difference between a pure menu item and a page or story that is a leaf node. These display differently in navigation areas.

I still don't fully understand the operation of Primary and Secondary Links. The other odd thing is that a lot of administration links disappear when one logs out.

I am still learning about Drupal. I came very close to spending a lot of money on a web designer. I very much hope that Epsilis do the right thing when they start work on the Herts Lettings website.

Why is it that the performance and customer service of everything touched by Richard Branson is so execrable? There is no quicker way to vapourise customer goodwill. I never fail to be astounded when the grinning geriatric is named by so many young people as a role model.

For reasons I prefer not to think about I am a customer of Virgin Media. I used to be with NTL, and pure inertia prevented me from defecting to Sky when it was rebranded. The bill I receive is essentially a random number. I am theoretically getting a 20Mbit/s broadband package that never delivers more than one fifth of that download speed and a miserable 80 kb/s upload speed. Even when I test at a very quiet time (12:30pm) I get no better than that, and because the service is well used locally the contention is terrible: it is painful to browse a text-only website in the evening.

I rang to complain and after hanging around for about 20 mins I was offered a discount on my current package ('VIP' - I've never felt less like one!) from £85 to £67. I simply said 'my measured performance is terrible compared to what was promised, yet your technical department says there is nothing wrong with my connection' to the billing department. They probably hear this all the time, so if you are a customer want a to take advantage of the realism of the billing department I suggest you ring now. Please don't give them my name!

I have a confession to make. In spite of having blogged for a very long time now, I really don't get trackbacks. I have read the explanations at least a couple of times, but I continue to search for an understanding of exactly which problem they solve. I know they somehow allow a post to know about other posts that reference them, but I don't know how the connection happens. For example, if I put this trackback URL in my post here: http://mingwei.co.uk/cms/trackback/12 how does my mingwei page know that I've done such a thing. Do I have to click through on the link and depend on the referrer field being filled in correctly?

I feel daunted by technology. I don't really spend enough time with anything these days to feel I have a full grasp of it. I can remember many moons ago that I spent a lot of time reading books on Statistical Mechanics. I am not sure I ever got a full understanding of that. Almost certainly not. But I did feel that such an understanding was in my grasp, in principle. Now even something as mundane as the technology of the WWW seems beyond me.

I feel old.

I am frequently underwhelmed when I use some new software package, and even more so when I use hardware. I frequently complain, bitterly, about the defects in IT products that I have to use.

Today's post is about a product that works. The software is TaxCalc, the version that allows a small number of personal filings. This had a slight fault in that it would not print, but an email to the support desk soon sorted it out ('internal' printing doesn't work with Acrobat 7).

The task should be reasonably simple. I still don't understand why I have to enter all my personal data (UTR, NI No., DOB, address, etc. etc. ) when the Inland Revenue's database clearly already holds this info. However, the online filing went without a hitch, in contrast to the product I used last time (Tax Shield Solo).

The nifty thing about this kind of software, from the vendor's point of view, is that you get to sell a completely new version year after year after year. At 25 pounds is not exactly a bargain, given that the total size of the market must be in the tens of millions, but frankly I'd pay 25 quid to avoid filling in a paper form every time. Especially as they never give the supplementary pages, and there are always long delays before they deliver them.

I have been a user of Mozy Home Backup for a while now. It is one of a half a dozen similar services, none of which I've tried, having been introduced to it by Francis.

I signed up for another computer yesterday and I was asked to spam my friends with this link. If you simply click through on this link (while closing your eyes if you are afraid that the pitch you will see will end up persuading you to sign up to Mozy's paid-for service) then I am given an extra quarter gigabyte of backup quota. Pretty good deal, if you ask me!!

My main incentive for writing this is just to tell you about a genuine free service from an honest supplier. If you don't want to click through, I won't be at all offended.

I didn't think I'd ever have anything positive to say about Virgin (on the ridiculous) Media, but I have to confess that I am pleasantly surprised by my new broadband connection.

I was about 14 when a Miss Roberts, the Geog. said to Tim Griffiths and to me in 3rd form Geog: "So young, and yet so cynical". I wish I could remember what this was about. I was going to write something about how terrible it would be if the government bailed out Northern Wreck and subsidized one of Beardy's projects to the point of obscene profits, but I really can't be bothered. It's clear to me that the rich and the powerful don't care a damn about the ordinary citizens of this country as long as large amounts of ordinary citizens money is channelled their way, either through direct tax-funded subsidy (such as Virgin Trains) or via the denial of basic economic freedoms allows rent seeking to proliferate in all areas of life, but especially in financial services.

I am in love with technology. I buy gadgets from time to time, half the time because I am so in love with the sheer engineering beauty of them.

I have had more wireless routers than I care to remember, and as more gadgets become wifi enabled (bt internet radio, eee PC, laptops galore, Playstation 3), the more I rely on them. I enthusiastically upgraded from 802.11b to 802.11g. I went to a MIMO netgear router. I carefully read reviews of various Pre-N routers, almost plumping for a D-link DIR-655, which seems to be highly regarded.

Unfortunately I just know that all of these will not address the fundamental problems of wireless routers in my house (an fairly large Victorian monstrosity with thick walls, some of them rendered with wretched expanded metal lathing. I found that the Netgear MIMO router had worse performance than my old Linksys WRT54G 802.11g router. Although new routers have much higher throughputs this doesn't really help me as my problem is with range.

Anyway, about a year ago I set up a router to function as an access point. Something went wrong with how this was configured and I ended up putting it aside and forgetting how I'd configured it. In such a situation I normally find that a quick search on google produces just what I want. The problem for me in this situation was that I'd completely forgotten that I was looking to simulate the behaviour of an access point.

Anyway, he most useful page I found was this one. I didn't really feel that it was detailed enough, but it seems to have worked for me. I did not disable RIP processing.

If you want to know exactly how I did this, drop me a line at steve.hemingway@gmail.com and I'll write the details as an extension to this entry. If you know of an existing page that covers this in more detail, or more specificially to a current router models, then please comment or email!

I have been using Vista for getting on for a year now. My overwhelming impression of the operating system is that it is unusably slow. Everything I read about it on the web is that is has some wonderfully clever technology to make it run faster.

I tried various performance tweaks. I have two gigabytes of RAM, which should be enough, but I put in a fast USB memory device to give my system a 'turbo boost', i.e. an extra (solid state) disk to hold the sectors cached by superfetch. None of this made any appreciable differerence and my system ran unusably slowly.

Finally I decided to bite the bullet and disable Superfetch all together (I used these instructions). This had the most astonishing impact on the performance of my system.

I do not know why superfetch does not work for me. "Your Mileage May Vary" as they used to say, but for me the impact of setting a byte in the registry from value 3 to value 0 has made an astonishing difference. I have a sneaky suspicion that it is because I have a *lot* of applications running the whole time. Certainly Word, Excel, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Nomadesk, Skype, MSN and so on and so on. Taskmanager informs me that I have 93 processes running. Other users I've observed seem to want to close applications when they've finished editing a document. My attitude is 'well, I'm going to edit another doc soon, or make further edits to the one that's already loaded; if the app is not used for a while it will be paged out anyway, so why would I bother to shut it down'. Maybe that's the wrong attitude. When it comes to Skype, YM, MSN messenger and Nomadesk.

Anyway, I'm too busy to make blog entries, but I just had to report this success as I've been searching for a way of making my Vista PC perform even approximately as fast as my XP machine for ages.

I am now tempted to switch off prefetch in Vista to see what happens.

I haven't made this kind of blog entry for a while, thank goodness.

My router failed the other day, and I decided to replace it. I have a couple of Grandstream Buge Tone 200 VoIP phones on the LAN, which work very well, in that they allow high-quality phone calls to be made to national and international destinations at low costs. I use Sipgate as the SIP gateway. They are very good.

The problem comes from having devices that really ought not to be hidden behind a NATS firewall. The problems are elegantly summed up on this page.

As the page quotes: "This protocol is not a cure-all for the problems associated with NAT. "

Stun seems a magic bullet, but really the magic bullet is to ban NAT routers and move to IP v6. Will this happen in my lifetime? I fear not.

There is a lot of port forwarding that Sipgate says is needed to run a VoIP phone behind a NAT firewall. See this page for details. Running two phones behind the same NAT router is virtually impossible. I seem to have managed it for the time being by making one of the devices a DMZ, and the other one configured as in the above page. Both are registered and working right now, but my experience in the past is that one tends to become deregistered.

I used this page as a starting point but of course this article doesn't describe which ports need to be forwarded to allow the second device to communicate with the STUN server. What is clear is that RTP and SIP ports for each device need to be unique otherwise there's no chance of those packets getting to the right phone!! I assume that the magic of STUN tells the server how to route them to the right machines, given that their externally-visible IP addresses are, because of the design of NAT, identical.

VoIP is lovely, and Sipgate is good. But running these things behind a NAT firewall is really not for the fainthearted.