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Wednesday, 16 May 2012

Roomba 'Stuck' and creeping towards the base?


So I moved the schedule on my Roomba to a few hours earlier to reflect my change in working hours when I noticed that at around 4/5pm it would edge towards the base but seem afraid to proceed any closer to it.

I cleaned it and restarted it (the cause of most Roomba issues).. but it still didn't change how it behaved.

It turned out that the evening sunset was shining on the infrared sensor at the top which was causing Roomba to confuse it for a base (and causing the base LED to flash), with its sensors experiencing issues Roomba then falls back into a more conservative progression and treats any bumper presses as a hostile obstruction.

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Working Out How Long The Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool Takes


Recently I noted that the Windows MSRT can take an exceptionally long time on slower devices (i.e. Netbook computers), but I never seemed to be able to know exactly how long it would take.

It turns out every time the MSRT tool runs it modifies (by appending) a file in %WINDIR%\Debug\mrt.log (typically C:\WINDOWS\Debug\mrt.log) and writes the time the process began and when it finished. Looking at the previous results on my system this typically means it runs for 27 minutes. Handy to know when you're wondering when you can shut down and go to sleep.

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Monday, 16 Apr 2012

Letter To Harvester


So I realised I am old enough now that I can pretty much give constructive feedback to any organisation I am a customer of (and that the people reading my letters are probably just as bored of receiving mundane e-mails from customers as any other person). So at risk of appearing a total nutcase I just submitted the following (and no I wasn't drunk):

Hi. Few frivolous questions (and comments) for you to do what you will with them:

1. I read (I think it was in the Telegraph.. don't judge) that Mitchells & Butlers will be rolling out free WiFi. I frequent the Toby Carvery in xxx and that already has free WiFi (The Cloud I think..) do you know roughly when the xxx might get it so that I can connect up my phone and Kindle? On your website it says the roll out (...wait that could be a pun..) will be completed in October ( http://www.mbplc.com/newsandmedia/companyarticle/threeyeardealwitho2wifi/ )

2. I quite like the Harvester, but I always feel like the staff are so busy they don't really have time to interact a lot with customers, I notice that most of the time I or other customers are having to interrupt them from serving other customers.. it isn't like this in the Toby Carvery, the staff have more time to interact with customers and you don't feel guilty from interrupting your waiter who is clearly busy with far too many tables to manage (and I don't have any complaints on the service which is always surprisingly efficient). I'm sure there are other reasons the staff are overworked .. difficult job market.. cost savings etc.. but customers pick up on this sort of thing and seeing people having to rush around (and they *do* have to!) to maintain a decent service while you're eating can be distracting.

3. Why is my house number and postcode a required field on this form? We haven't even corresponded yet (and you might come round here while I sleep and leaflet me with *yet another* of those £1,000 questionnaires that I'm getting bored of shredding). Responses by e-mail will suffice.

4. Can your marketing department run some like twitter or facebook campaign or something to choose some more music (I probably know your playlist better than you do now..) for your restaurants? Lady Gaga is not a timeless classic.

Thanks,
Matthew

P.s. Depending on how bored you are I can happily cite songs I feel could be added to your playlist pretty much all day (well until I am mildly inconvenienced by having to go to work at least..)? We could start with "Enjoy the Ride - Morcheeba".

Let's see what happens...

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Sunday, 4 Mar 2012

Amazon.co.uk Free MP3 Downloads


In a similar vein to my Amazon.co.uk Free Kindle Books - Excluding "Classics" post (that lists the Amazon URL that performs a search on all the free Kindle books that are not marked as "classics") I have created the Amazon URL needed to see all of the free MP3 albums and tracks on the Amazon.co.uk site currently available:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?url=node%3D77197031&p_36=0-0

This lists all in the MP3 Downloads store that are from £0.00 to £0.00.

Hope this is useful!

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Thursday, 19 Jan 2012

Netgear ReadyNAS Duo Slow Performance 100mbps (~10MB/s) On 1Gbps Link


I have recently spent a considerable amount of time trying to work out why the read rate of my Netgear ReadyNAS Duo (using CIFS/SMB) was only giving me around 10MB/s. As this (well 12.5 MB/s to be precise) roughly works out at 100Mbps I figured it was clearly a networking issue. I tried all manner of things including playing with cables, network switches, driver versions, Flow Control, Jumbo Frames, TCP Offloading.. all of these had some effect on the transfer but not significantly enough to make the network card work harder than 10% of its full capacity. I have no other gigabit devices on my network so testing was rather tricky but I eventually managed to eliminate everything but the network card and the ReadyNAS.

Others who also had this device were reporting perfect speeds with it, so I became a bit attached to a forum post blaming Windows 7 for giving slow network performance (Why is Windows 7 so slow in copying network files?) particularly given a large percentage of the users listing their network hardware mentioned "realtek". As a result of one of the posts I even ended up buying a new gigabit network card:
There was a windows update that changed the driver a few months ago and I had problems after that (Realtek driver update for Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller 10/25/2010).

Then I found a chart that seemed to reproduce my issue quite nicely:
Chart showing ReadyNAS Duo slow performance with larger files
Source: SmallNetBuilder.com

Others I knew to have a ReadyNAS, so I then asked them to specifically test large files over SMB. They reported that though AFP transfers were fine, they too had an issue with SMB.

With a bit of searching, in the end it turned out to be the ReadyNAS' most recent firmware (V4.1.8) that introduced this problem.

Hidden away in the "Performance" section of the ReadyNAS forums is Performance halved at a stroke (ReadyNAS Duo, 4.1.8) ... and Performance drop after update to 4.1.8 Duo apparently the issue started somewhere between the last beta of 4.1.8 (T9) and the final release of 4.1.8 (Lion, AFP, 4.1.8-T9 vs 4.1.8).

The current public beta (test software version) fixes for not only me but also others according to 4.1.9 T2 Performance as for a test version 3 (T3) : "No T3 right now." (Source). You can download the test version here : *NEW BETA* RAIDiator 4.1.9 and I believe you should be able to downgrade. The current change log for it is the following:

Bug Fixes since RAIDiator 4.1.8

1. [T2] Fixed performance problem reported by forum members, specifically folks using the ReadyNAS over AFP.

I do not even use AFP, but I certainly found my SMB/CIFS read performance to be improved to a more healthy 29MB/s after trying the second test version of 4.1.9.

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