system-log:tyr

I’m on the train! Finally WiFi is free in standard class on the east coast mainline. So that’s at least one thing National Express have done right so far.

I’d always assumed that the train WiFi was supported by a 3G network, or something similar. However my outbound IP address is 217.28.34.132 which a whois indicates belongs to

inetnum: 217.28.32.0 - 217.28.35.15
netname: NSAB-NET
descr: NSAB backbone and address-pools for VPN Services
##########################
In case of improper use, please contact:
<abuse@nsab.se>
##########################


nsab.se redirects to SES SIRIUS AB which is a satellite broadband provider. Well there you go.

Now if only the train was on time…

P.S. Google comes up in Swedish

In the March 8th edition of The Economist this article appeared about Wikipedia. This section piqued my interest

Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that [the current Wikipedia administration and bureaucracy] deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia’s early days is giving way to hostility and infighting. There is already some evidence that the growth rate of Wikipedia’s article-base is slowing. Unofficial data from October 2007 suggests that users’ activity on the site is falling, when measured by the number of times an article is edited and the number of edits per month. The official figures have not been gathered and made public for almost a year, perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia’s health.

I thought ‘perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia’s health’ was a possibly a bit strong, especially against the lack of any properly referenced statistics. Whilst the official statistics might not be regularly updated at the moment a full export of the Wikipedia is still available at regular intervals. As such it’s possible, given a bit of work parsing the data, to generate some unofficial statistics. So that’s what I set out to do.

The results are at wikivitals.newswall.org.uk, or read on for more information about how they were created.

Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps not the most successful turn of the holiday

For me one of the most interesting aspects of the modern internet (Web 2.0, if you like) is the high availability and feature depth of APIs that websites make available to enable integration into a variety of systems. These range across the whole spectrum of websites from flickr to BetFair.

One API that has particularly taken my interest of late is the Facebook Developers API, this is the API used to build all Facebook applications. What is particularly interesting, and perhaps surprising, about this API is the amount of personal information that is made available about Facebook users.

In order to increase awareness of the information that Facebook makes available about you and your friends to every applicaiton you install I created a ‘What Applications Know About You’ application. Read on for more details.

Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I showed how I upgraded my Solaris Express system using Live Upgrade. Now it’s time to upgrade again. This time we do it a bit differently as a boot environment for the upgrade is already available. Read on for the full story.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been having some problems establishing DomU’s with my new Solaris Express install. Before spending to much time running into issues that may have already been fixed I thought it worth while to move to the latest release. Fortunately the default Solaris Express install is ahead of me and has saved a slice for a live upgrade boot environment. Here’s my experience of moving from snv_78 to snv_81. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought it was time I gave Solaris Express a whirl on my Mac Pro (2006 version), as the bare-metal OS, rather than just virtualizing in VMWare Fusion. The main motivation for this is so I can give the xVM technologies a whirl. xVM is basically Sun’s spin of Xen. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know about you but I find the myriad entrances and exists from Woodhouse Lane car park in Leeds city centre totally baffling, especially how they relate to the A58(M) Inner Ring Road.

For example if you drive up Claypit Lane and turn right onto the slip road for the A58(M) you can’t get across to the car park, rather you should have approached from the previous exit on the A58(M), or is it A64(M) at that point? Instead you must drive on past the turn for the Merion Centre car park, turn right, go all the way round the Dry Dock, through various sets of lights and enter via the north entrance.

In an attempt to better understand this most baffling of car parks I’ve put a map together which hopefully will help me plan the right trajectory that will allow access to the car park. The significant oddity that the map does not elucidate is that the exit to the south (city centre) is on level 1, the exit on the north (eventually eastbound) is on level 7 and the exit on the east side (eventually northbound) is on level 12 down a fabulous ‘they wouldn’t build it like that these days’ style ramp. Anyway here’s the first draft of the map.

The myriad entry and exit points of Woodhouse Lane Car Park

Update: Since publishing this I’ve noticed there is a further exit on level 8 on the east side of the building that connects with the ramp running down from level 12.