Virgin Media Outage Caused by a Cooling Fault

It appears that last nights Nation Wide Virgin Media Outage was caused by some faulty cooling in one of their main backbone racks.

This was explained in a recent resolution email I’ve received:

“Master Update: On Tuesday evening (17th January), Virgin Media Business experienced a network outage that impacted customers using IPVPN, Managed Internet, National Ethernet and broadband services. The problem was quickly traced to a failed cooling unit that had caused a core backbone router to overheat. Due to exceptional circumstances, other backup equipment also failed to activate properly. We’re are now working through a thorough investigation as to why this happened.

Engineers resolved the fault in about an hour. Virgin Media Business would like to apologise to all customers impacted by this outage.

If you have any queries regarding this update – please contact Technical Support.”

The issue was resolved mostly later in the evening on Tuesday but additional load issues due to having to bypass the problem was still causing issues for some people.

Hopefully Virgin will be able to identify why their contingency plan didn’t work.

VMWare vSphere 5.0 and an HP X1400 NAS Server

I spent a good while debugging this not wanting to change too much incase it was something bizarre.

Turned out to be something simple.

OSTicket Invalid Source Problem

So, we use OSTicket at work, and for the most part it works well. However, there are parts which are a little buggy.

One of these appears to be that, when we were trying to create a New Ticket using the New Ticket option when you’re signed in, it would highlight the Source field and give the error “Invalid Source”.

This happened no matter what option from the drop down you would choose.

I had a look at the code, and made a guess at the problem, at it appears to work:

In the file: scp/tickets.php

Change

Line 319:

if($_POST['source'] && !in_array($_POST['source'],array('web','email','phone','other')))

if($_POST['source'] && !in_array($_POST['source'],array('Web','Email','Phone','Other')))

This appeared to resolve my problem and the ticket was logged successfully without error.

Honeycomb, the Windows ME of Android?

Is Honeycomb the new Windows ME?

I’ve been playing around with my Hannspree Hannspad that I bought a few months back, and sure, its a budget tablet, but I think Ice Cream Sandwich will make it much better.

I don’t know what I’m holding out for, something between Honeycomb and Gingerbread. I’ve used a Honeycomb ROM on my Hannspad, and I’ve also tried Froyo and Gingerbread ROMs, and I’ve come back to Gingerbread since trying all.

I suspect that with very few Honeycomb specific apps around and ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich) just around the corner, development on Android Honeycomb will halt and ICS will be its successor.

What do you think?

New Theme

So, the old theme was getting a bit long in the tooth and everytime I looked at it, I was frustrated.

This new theme is called BlogoLife from wplook.com.

It is nice, simple and clean. Didn’t make many tweaks other then to add a few more items to the Widgets on the right side and replaced the header image with my AdSense code.

Let me know what you think of it if you like.

Quick and Dirty Plain text to ttx file generator.

I had the requirement for some tests to turn a big plain text file into a “more or less” formatted correctly ttx file.

Now, this is by no means something that you would want to open in Trados to start editing with etc, but it does surround the lines with Trados TTX tags in sufficient detail for me tests.

Get the script here: http://www.leenukes.co.uk/downloads/TXTtoTTX.py

Now I know, its messy, but I don’t care at the moment as it worked for me and saved me copying and pasting over 1400 tags to lines of text.

I also didn’t find anything online that would do this for me, hence me writing this. I’m not a programmer, and I know actually outputting XML using elementTree would be better, but it was more work to do that then I was willing to spend at the time.

This small piece of code would benefit from reading in language options from the user, and then slotting them into the tags and it would also benefit from a re-write to allow it to output XML correctly as at the moment it reads in the file stated, and outputs it wrapped.

Characters that are not valid XML still go through, for example if there is an & in the file, it will wrap that too, it doesn’t care. & isn’t valid XML amongst other characters and is commonly substituted with &

Call this script whatever you want, but I was calling it TXTtoTTX.py

So, what does it do?

Lets say you have a file with 3000 lines of text in it called mytesttext.txt, you would use this python script as follows:

python TXTtoTTX.py mytesttext.txt

this will then output it to screen for you to quickly check, then you can redirect the output to file like this to save it:

python TXTtoTTX.py mytesttext.txt > mytesttext.ttx

Spotify Linux Client Upgrader

So, it appears that Spotify haven’t gotten around to releasing their latest client for Linux unless you’re running Ubuntu (or Debian?).

So, I had a quick look at the contents of the .deb files and determined that it should be easy enough to get it to work in Fedora.

I had a quick go, and got it working, and wrote a script.

So here is that script for everyone, all it basically does is extracts the .deb files, then unpacks the tar files into the correct places.

You have to run this as root, or run it via sudo as it unpacks files into places only root can venture, such as /usr/bin and /usr/share.

Take a look at the comments in the script before running it.

Let me know if you have any problems and I’ll take a look, but no promises.

Download it here

Twitter kills Peep?

So it appears the updates to Twitter have killed Peep for HTC Desire and possibly other devices.

Is this the start of their “stop making Twitter clients” argument?

Unless Peep and HTC can update and get around it, I think HTC will have to remove the app, and no doubt this will delay the release of Android 2.3.2 for HTC phones.

Apple iPad 2 vs Samsung Galaxy tab 8.9 vs Samsung Galaxy tab 10.1 vs Motorola Xoom vs Blackberry Playbook

The tablet platform is hotting up with Apple releasing its iPad 2. I was never really interested in the iPad once I found out more about it, in fact, I was a little underwhelmed, I’m not sure why though.

With all the competition around now with Android 3.0, Blackberry and their Playbook and the “imminent” releases of HP’s WebOS based tablets everyone can actually have their own style of tablet, much like when the swathe of Android Smart Phones came out to challenge Apple for the iPhone crown.

I’ve created a run-down of the latest tablets in the below table, the details in it are as accurate as I can gather, prices are likely due to change though.

Tablet Comparison March 2011

Device:	Apple iPad 2 wifi/3G	Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9	Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1	Motorola Xoom	Blackberry Playbook
Price:	$499/$599/$699 wifi	$469	$499	$799	$499, $599 and $699
OS:	IOS 4.3	Android 3.0	Android 3.0	Android 3.0	Blackberry Tablet QNX OS
Camera:	720p Rear / VGA Front	3MP Rear / 2MP Front	3MP Rear / 2MP Front	5MP Rear / 2MP Front	Dual 1080p HD cameras
Height	241.2mm	230.9mm	256.6mm	249.1mm	194mm
Width	185.7mm	157.8mm	172.9mm	167.8mm	130mm
Depth:	8.8mm	8.6mm	8.6mm	12.9mm	10mm
Weight:	601g / 613g	470g	595g	730g	425g
Display:	9.7” (1024x768) 132ppi	8.9” (1280x800)	10.1” (1280x800)	10.1” (1280x800) 150ppi	7” (1024x600)
CPU:	1GHz Dual Core A5	1GHz Dual Core	1GHz Dual Core	Tegra 2: 1GHz Dual Core	A9 Based 1GHz Dual Core
Storage:	16GB/32GB/64GB	16GB/32GB/64GB	16GB/32GB/64GB	32GB	16GB/32GB/64GB
RAM:	512MB	1GB	1GB	1GB	1GB

LeeNukes

Linux and other orientated piffle