So as the customer is switched off and goes across to (NBNCo) fibre, we get a payment.

Copper lines are already being dropped at a massive 8% pa, but you can help accelerate this drop and save your taxpayer dollars as well as your own line rental costs in the process. Moving to VoIP over fibre, merging multiple lines into VoIP services and migrating to mobile phones will all help you save your hard earned tax dollars.

Safari Develop Menu

Do you want to see what an iPad user sees when they look at your website? Well there is a simple way to check it out without buying an iPad on either Windows or Mac:

1. Download and install Safari (if you don’t already  have it)
2. Edit -> Preferences (or Safari -> Preferences on a Mac)
3. Go to the Advanced tab
4. Check the “Show Develop menu in menu bar” option
5. Close the preferences window
6. A new “Develop” menu option will appear
7. Select “User Agent” and then “Mobile Safari 3.2 – iPad”

It isn’t perfect (hard to simulate rotating the device) and you should also disable Flash, but it gives you a rough impression.

1. Connect your phone to your PC via the USB cable
2. Disable all syncing with your PC by clicking Tools -> Options
3. Click the Settings button and add your Exchange (Apps) account (do not check “Detect Settings”) and check Email syncing only
4. Sync
5. Edit the Exchange settings and check “Detect Settings”
6. Sync
7. Edit the Exchange settings again and check Calendar and Contacts (no tasks in Apps remember!)
8. Sync again

And there you go! Not sure if this is a bug in Activesync, the phone or Apps, but it sure is annoying. At least it only occurs on setup, after that everything seems to keep up to date with no problems.

It appears that I am not the only one, there is a large thread that is continuing on the Apple Discussions forum. There are a bunch of other people reporting the same issue, but Nvidia doesn’t have a solution yet. In fact, they have flat out said there are a huge list of unsupported (and will NEVER be supported) features. The following are from page 16 of the 190.62 Nvidia drivers release notes:

The following are features and functionality that were available in driver releases
supporting Windows XP, but are not–and will not be–available in driver releases for
Windows 7:
• High resolution scaling desktop (HRSD)
• MultiView Display Mode (for NVIDIA Quadro NVS graphics cards)
• NVKeystone
• Unified back buffer (UBB) controls
• OpenGL Video Overlays – This is an operating system limitation.
• Overclocking – GPU overclocking is no longer supported in the default GPU driver control panel. This feature is available in the NVIDIA System Tools software, which you can download from NVIDIA.com.
• GPU Temperature Monitoring – Temperature monitoring is no longer supported in the default GPU driver control panel. This feature is available in the NVIDIA System Tools software, which you can download from NVIDIA.com.
• AGP Settings Adjustment
• Video Zoom
• Pan & Scan ‐ the process of panning across the desktop in order to display a desktop on a monitor with lower resolution
• Per‐display Desktop Color Setting Adjustments – For Clone mode, the desktop color setting adjustments through the NVIDIA Control Panel can only be made across all displays in a system, and not on a per display basis.
• Per‐display Video Color Setting Adjustments – For Dualview mode, the video color setting adjustments through the NVIDIA Control Panel can only be made across all displays in a system, and not on a per display basis.
• Edge Blending
• Run display optimization wizard
• Run multiple display wizard
• Run television setup wizard
• nView Horizontal and Vertical Span Modes – Due to architectural changes in the new Windows Vista Window Display Driver Model (WDDM), span mode cannot be supported in NVIDIA graphics drivers. NVIDIA recommends using the built‐in Windows Vista multi‐display modes.
• Display/Connection Wizard (such as was provided with Windows Media Center Edition)
• DVD/MPEG Extensions (such as was provided with Windows Media Center Edition)
• Audio Extensions (such as was provided with Windows Media Center Edition)
• NVIDIA nView Desktop Manager – The nView Desktop Manager will not be included in drivers for GeForce products.

If you are seeing this post then you have reached the new server for my blog. I moved to Crucial Paradigm as I found their Windows VPS servers to provide good HDD limits and low Australian pings. Please let me know if you experience any improvement in speed or accessibility. This is all part of my plan to improve the exposure and performance of my blog this year, as well as launch other paid services.

Guam Beach Cable Hole

The first is that Pipe have put up a blog tracking the progress of the cable installation. You can view it at pipeinternational.com. As with their DC3 data centre blog they have uploaded a ton of photos and commentary on a very regular basis. I am sure customers, creditors and other participants in the Australian networking industry appreciate the transparency of information delivered through these blogs. It is fascinating to see that, in the end, the data is flowing through a rather unglamorous combination of copper, concrete, seawater and sand. It is also great to see a company recognise the power of blogs as PR delivery mechanisms. I am sure they raise the public profile of the company significantly.

Also on the PR front the Pipe Networks CEO, Bevan Slattery, participated in an interview with Business Spectator’s Isabelle Oderberg. This interesting interview starts off with a glimpse at how close the project came to collapsing, and concludes with some comments regarding the NBN process and goals. I do agree that the Government is tackling the problem from the wrong end, they should be starting at the core and moving outwards. I guess it is easier to present end solutions to the common voter, you can’t deliver bit size statistics like 50% more bandwidth will mean 50% wholesale price cuts which will mean 50% consumer broadband saving.

Maybe the same is also true for the NBN tenderers? If the tender was only for backhaul, could they be guaranteed enough customers to viably support duplicating the infrastructure? Do they need retail customers and the bundling of products to put together a firm business case and profit margin? Again the big question is, if this rollout is viable then why has no-one done it already? At the end of the day the problem always lies with Telstra, they simply own everything that matters. Scarily, this monopoly is now extending into the wireless spectrum. Backhaul competition is a great first stage, and perhaps with the current financial state the tender process should be limited to that for now. But there should always be a second stage planned, one that makes the whole end to end process competitive. Until that happens we will be facing different versions of the current monopoly.

Personally I believe that Telstra should be seperated and that the core infrastructure (backhaul, exchange buildings and ducts) should never have left the public’s hands. There is enough infrastructure around, it is just being crippled to maximise profit and prevent competition. Now we are either going to have to buy them back or build around it, either way this is not an efficient or cheap process.

So I dropped the bolt-on. Everything seemed fine, with the only noticeable change being that the email icon disappears as expected. Then I try browsing the web. No dice. Google Maps doesn’t work, even the Optus Zoo home page doesn’t work. I call Optus and they advise me that I need the Blackberry plan (with BIS – Blackberry Internet Service) or a 3G phone in order to get internet. Surely not!

Anyway after a bit of googling I stumbled on a couple of good sites. The first is Ross Barkman’s GPRS settings listing page. This gives me the APN name that I plug into the Options -> Advanced Options -> TCP -> APN: field (although I left the username and password blank). The second and really great site by Anworm provides some Service Book configuration files and neat Java tool. The basic steps are remove the browser, modify your Service Book, and then reinstall the browser. Although he doesn’t say this on his website, other apps such as Google Maps Mobile also need to be removed and reinstalled in order to pick up the new non-BIS settings. Interestingly not all apps require this Service Book hack, some other apps such as Opera Mini will find their own non-BIS way or working even without the settings. Who knows why? At least everything seems to be working nicely over GPRS now, just watch your data usage.

We have run into some issues lately in relation to the performance of the device over the network. Their general advice is to do a direct connect and check your network drivers, but this hasn’t helped our fault. When logged into the SSH server on the system I can see that the CPU is running at 90%+ pretty consistently during usage. These are smb processes running under the various usernames that have access to the file shares. Even when the desktops are idle they are chewing CPU cycles on the NAS.

After about 24 hours of usage the NAS starts to become unresponsive. In particular the web interface actually crashes the browser (both IE and Firefox). I am trying leaving oplocks turned off at the moment as some people have suggested, but I am not seeing any reduction in CPU usage. Apparently these problems have been fixed in the latest beta, with the next prod version due in ‘a couple of weeks’. It can’t come soon enough as far as I am concerned.

The relentless pace of technology is exciting, but sometimes this fast paced environment
leaves its past behind a little prematurely. I was on the receiving end of one such
problem this week.

I purchased a new ATI graphics card, the x1950Pro AGP version to work with my existing
nforce3 motherboard. It is running an Athlon X2 processor and has 2GB of RAM, so it
isn’t an outdated machine by any stretch. I plugged in the new card expecting everything
to go smoothly, however it kept failing with a code 43 “Device
failed to start” error. Vista recognised the card correctly, however it just would
not leave the graphical ‘safe mode’. I initially suspected the card was faulty, however
after a bit of googling I managed to find others with the exact same problem.

In fact not only did I find others, I found an acknowledgement
from Nvidia themselves of the problem. It was snuck in at the end of one of their
website FAQ’s and reads:

There is a known issue with ATI AGP cards with NVIDIA nForce3 and Vista. This
is currently being looked into and will likely be resolved with an MCP driver update.

In fact this problem has been known about and acknowledged since the start of this
year, and reported on the 7th of
February. Still nothing has been done, there is no MCP update and I am still left
sitting out in the cold. Nvidia has been infamously slack with their Vista drivers
in general, now they are blocking ATI cards too (Nvidia cards work fine)? I think
that is a little too convenient and completely unethical to be honest.