OldBlogger

Recently I purchased an I-Mate Ultimate 8502 smartphone. Seems the company has gone under or at least dormant, so Expansys were selling the handsets off cheaply. Was just what I wanted, a smartphone with no contract, not locked to any network.

Setting the phone up I wanted to set the today screen wallpaper, seemed simple enough go to Start/Settings/Today and use the browse and tick the Use this picture as the background box. Except that all the images I tried to use appeared whitish, turns out that is the transparency setting, and there was no option to adjust it when setting the wallpaper that way.

There is another way to set the wallpaper, open the File Explorer program, navigate to the folder that contains the image you want to use, click on the image you want to use, it will be displayed, click the menu option at the bottom right of the screen, click the Set As Today Background option, it then displays a thumbnail of the image with a selection box over it to select the area of the image to display, and a box to select the transparency, set 0 for no transparency, then click OK at the top right of the screen.

This works for me, your mileage may vary.

A little while ago I rebuilt the home Linux server, it used to have two 160GB Sata drives arranged as a software RAID 1, 2 2GHz Xeon Processors, 2Gb of RAM and was running Fedora Core 3 so you can see when it was last rebuilt.

I went for Centos 5, as I wanted longer term support for the OS, and upgraded the hard disks to a pair of 500GB Sata drives, had a bit of an incident with the 160GB drives which resulted in one of them dead, which is another story, but wanted more space anyway.

After getting it all set up with software RAID1 and LVM I then wanted to allocate more space to /var partition which is one of the LVM volumes. After looking around a bit it is actually quite simple, just two commands, which you need to be root to run. lvresize then resize2fs, below are examples of how I used them to add another 103GB to what is my /var partition, I had already added 200GB to this using this method and then decided to add the rest of the available disk space to this partition.

/usr/sbin/lvresize -L +103G /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01

/sbin/resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01

If you attempt to add more than is available with lvresize it simple gives you an error message saying how blocks are available and how many you asked for, so you can adjust your request and simply try again.

man lvresize and man resize2fs will show you all the options available for these commands.

Another idea for a Christmas present for girls I found today was My Life a portable console game from Flair a UK based toy manufacturer.

To quote the manufacturers blurb My Life is a virtual life simulator designed especially for girls! It’s the ultimate digital pocket games console combining the charm of virtual fashion dolls with the ever increasing interest in video games.

This should keep one of the girls in the family happy, may even get more than one as they can interact with each other a bit and the girls can play together, now that would be a first :-).

Well at least another one of the Christmas list, plenty more to go though and its getting nearer all the time.

Starting to look around for ideas for Christmas Present this year, I was looking at what are tipped to be the top 10 sellers this year.

One I came across that is tipped to be a hit this year is the Elmo Live animatronic doll from Fisher Price.

Elmo is a popular character from the long running childrens TV program Sesame Street, this doll mimics the mannerisms of the TV character and talks and sings, it looks kinda cute and would probably make a great gift for some adults as well.

Well that is one present off the Christmas shopping list, Elmo Live, plenty more left to get yet though.

Today I was looking at the call log in my FritzBox which is a ADSL Modem Router with VOIP and PBX capabilities, and I saw hundreds of anonymous incoming telephone calls of 0 seconds duration.

Our FritzBox is configured to reject anonymous calls so the 0 duration was because of that, we had some problems with silent calls a while ago which is usually tele sales auto dialers with no one available to take the call if it is answered so we had BT (British Telecom) enable the caller ID service on our phone line and set the FritzBox to reject anonymous calls and any other annoying number.

Also set up its do not disturb feature so only certain numbers can get through between the hours of 10pm and 8am, marvelous it is, taken control of the telephone again, we receive the calls we want, when we want.

I spoke to BT about all these anonymous calls and after a little investigation the conclusion was they are coming from abroad as that is the only way they would be as completely anonymous as they are, and basically there is nothing BT can do about it, they suggested keep a log and if it is a problem they could give us a new telephone number. I know BT offer an anonymous caller reject service, whether that would work in this situation I do not know, but the FritzBox does a great job and more beside, with dialing plans and some VOIP accounts set up, all our phone calls are routed over the internet via the cheapest provider saving us a fortune on phone calls as well, and combined with a Dualphone Skype/PSTN telephone system with a couple of handsets it is a good system tailored to fit our requirements precisely.

So back to my original question, I don’t really expect an answer, I expect a computerised auto dialing system has thrown a fit somewhere and I hope when the company receives their phone bills for all these useless phone calls that somebody gets a rocket for incompetence not setting it up and monitoring it properly, this has been going on for 10 days at the moment, that is thousands of calls to our number and presumably we are not the only ones getting hit like this.

The tele marketing companies use these overseas call centres to get around the TPS (Telephone Preference Scheme) and cold calling rules in the UK, as these overseas centres are not covered by them, then when they make a contact and get through their initial sales script they can hand the call to their UK based colleagues as it is no longer a cold call. Two ways to deal with these nuisance calls, hang up immediately or if you have the time waste as much of their time as possible. We have the automated hang up here, works a treat.

Have fun out there and stay safe.

Photos from my trip to Thailand in February to March 2007, we visited Hua Hin for a few days these were taken there.

Photos from my trip to Thailand in November to December 2007. Mostly snaps of the house and surrounding area, with some of Loi Krathong festival in Sukhothai.

Photos from my trip to Thailand in June to July 2007. Mostly snaps of temples and some other view around Old Sukhothai.

Recently I was attempting to open a Paypal account for my company. No problem doing that or at least there should not have been.

I created an account and was waiting for the confirmation email to come through from Paypal to confirm the email address but it never arrived, so I tried requesting it again and still no sign. So before attempting to contact Paypal I looked through the log files on the companies email server to see if it had arrived at the server. The companies email server runs Qmail on Linux, and there was signs of it having arrived but then a strange status 11 message in the qmail-smtpd logs.

After much searching on the Internet for ideas I finally found the problem.

The Qmail installation on the companies email server has the SPF patch incorporated and enabled, look at www.openspf.org if you want to find out more about SPF. I discovered a patch here http://qmail.jms1.net/patches/combined-details.shtml to fix a problem in the SPF patch which causes qmail-smtpd, the program that receives email to seg fault (crash) and return a status 11 return value on some installations, when it receives email from a sender who has a large SPF record, Paypal have a large SPF record.

To prove this was the problem I simply turned off SPF checking on our email server by putting 0 in the file spfbehaviour in the Qmail control directory. I then requested the verification email from Paypal again and through it came no problem. I also realised that I had not been receiving Paypal payment notifications for my personal account for quite a while, with hindsight since SPF was enabled on the email server, and they have started coming through again as well now.

So now I need to recompile our Qmail server with the updated SPF patch.

Having just had an annoying experience attempting to buy some items online I thought I would post my experience here and see if it strikes a chord with other people.

I went to a website to purchase some items for a forthcoming trip, they had just what I wanted or near enough to make no difference, so I put the items into the online shopping basket and clicked the checkout button.

First gripe, why do so many of these online sites want you to create an account, I do not want my details littered all over the internet on unsecured databases behind sites which I have purchased one item from once in my lifetime, in the current climate of identity theft and fraud it dones not seem the best thing to be doing.

So I created an account and got to the payment screen, I intended paying using my Visa Debit card, it used to be simple, select card Amex/Master/Visa/JCB possibly one or two others but it is immediately obvious what you need to select, now particularly with Visa there is a list of three or four different sorts of Visa card, I am not interested in twenty questions to simply make my payment, the payment system can work it out from the card number what type of Visa card it is, it could probably even work out what sort of card it is completely from that, so why do I need to make a guess as to what this site is currently calling my card and get an authorisation declined message when I get it wrong.

Bottom line, maybe its time for some of these sites to revisit there checkout systems, and do some useability testing on them, and design a system that actually helps people purchase items instead of making it as difficult as possible.