It's been a while since I updated this site, but I figured I'd post about a new guitar that I have. It's an Ibanez Talman (Electro-Acoustic). This by no means replaces my Gibson Les Paul, but it's nice just being able to reach for a guitar and play without having to amp-up!

It provides a very nice blues sound and works well as a slide guitar (since the action is pretty high compared to my gibson). There isn't much treble when it's not amped, however when it's plugged in it sounds great!

I'm really amazed at the build quality, for just 169.99 GBP it features a mahogany body, an ash top and a rosewood finger board and bridge. The build quality feels better than my Gibson and a quick look in the sound hole shows extremely good craftsmanship both inside and out.

My only complaint is that it's a little hard to play with the fairly high action, but I'm sure I'll get used to it!

Full specs can be seen here.

With it being my birthday today, I decided to spoil myself and get a new Guitar. I got the Gibson Robot Guitar in Manhattan Midnight blue. For those who don't know, this guitar tunes itself. No, I don't suck at tuning and can tune by ear to some degree... I would just rather play something than spend 5-10 minutes tuning (tuning with a tremolo takes a long time). As with my last guitar, it arrived broken. This time, rather than a snapped neck, one of the "Powerhead" machine heads didn't work (I could tune it manually, but it wouldn't turn automatically). I managed to prove it was receiving power by shorting two of the guitar strings together - when this is done, a white LED flashes to warn you that there is a short. I then tried swapping two Powerheads over, and even when swapped to a new place on the headstock, it didn't turn. The only option left was to open the defective Powerhead. Upon inspecting the innards, it was obvious immediately what the problem was - there was barely any solder on the motor contacts AND the contacts that make contact with the PCB on the headstock were too recessed to do so properly. After 5 minutes with a soldering iron and a flat-bladed screwdriver (to push the contact further out) I'd fixed both problems. When I reassembled everything, it worked perfectly!

I'm not that impressed with the Powerhead design; the contacts aren't springloaded, which could lead to problems down the line if there isn't enough pressure between them and the PCB on the headstock. I'm also not too impressed with Gibson as when I opened the guitar case, I noticed there was no mains adaptor for the charger. I assumed this was a packing mistake and called up the shop and told them about the missing mains adaptor and the broken Powerhead. However, upon doing some research, I found that everyone in Europe was missing the mains adaptor. Gibson, apparently, decided not to include one in Europe as, according to them, we all use different voltages, which just isn't true (we all use 230v). To make things worse, the charging unit had no specifications on it as to the input voltage, current or polarity. Thankfully, someone from America was nice enough to post the details displayed on his mains adaptor on a forum and I was able to find an old mains adaptor that worked perfectly.

Anyway, problems aside, it's a really nice guitar. It sounds really crunchy and full. The sustain goes on forever compared to my Ibanez and the sound feels much tighter and cleaner.

So without further ado, here is a photo of it:

About 3 months ago, a couple of days after the launch of the 2008 MacBook Pros, I went into an Apple store and decided to take the plunge and get a shiny new MacBook. Just before I handed my credit card over to the sales person, I was informed that as I was buying a MacBook, I was entitled to a heavily discounted iPod. With Christmas just around the corner, I jumped at the offer as it'd make a cheap Christmas present. The catch? The discount had to be claimed as a rebate, which means paying the full price up front and then claiming the money back via post.

Before I even unpacked my MacBook, I went online and filled out and printed the rebate form, stapled my receipt and barcode label to the form, put it in an envelope and stuck the envelope in the post. One thing I noticed was that the offer was called the "Back to School" offer. I thought to myself "Is this offer for students only?". To put my mind to rest, I returned to the Apple store and asked for clarification from a sales person. They assured me that I was still eligible despite not being in education.

Christmas came and went, my mother was very grateful for her gift of an 8GB iPod Touch. Another month passed, and I suddenly recalled the rebate and the lack of communication regarding it for 3 months. The very next day, I received an email from Apple's promotions department stating that the offer was intended for students only and that I'd need to provide some form of identification proving that I was in full time education. Rather than getting out my old student ID and photoshopping the dates, I decided to be honest and explain exactly what had happened. The promotions department representative told me that I had to take this up with the manager of the store where the device was purchased from.

During a lunch break, I headed into Cambridge and stated my case. The staff, to their credit, were understanding, but said that the Apple store and the promotions department are separate companies with different tax codes and couldn't authorise the rebate. They did, however, offer me a refund. This was not the option I was looking for as it would mean taking my mother's gift back. I was told to contact the promotions department once again to explain that the device had been mis-sold and to see whether that would change anything.

After emailing the promotions department for one last time, I was told to contact customer service - there was no information about whether my case had been closed or whether it would be processed.

Today, I phoned customer services and was greeted by an extremely unhelpful person who explained, once again, that the Apple store, the online store and the promotions department are all actually separate companies and that had I bought the device from the online store, it would be within his remit to make right the situation, but as I had bought from a retail store, there was nothing he could do. He explained that the onus was on the store manager to remedy the complaint.

So, in summary:

1) Apple mis-sold me the iPod device. If I was a student, would I not have claimed a discount on the MacBook itself too? I made no false pretences about being in education.
2) Apple lied to me when I enquired about the offer upon returning to the store.
3) Apple's customer service is terrible. Everyone passes the buck and hides behind the excuse of each department being a different company. This really isn't the way to keep customers happy.
4) The Apple representative offering phone support claimed that as the device was 3 months old, it was outside of its return period. So by taking 3 months to query my rebate, Apple had effectively stripped me of my statutory rights. Apple's only saving grace is that they did offer me a refund, despite what I was told over the phone.

I believe I shall go back to the Apple store with my mother, iPod in hand, and ask the store manager to explain to her why he's taking her Christmas present back. If Apple is cold hearted enough to go through with the refund, I'll then purchase a brand new iPod (for the same price) from the same store to prove that money was never the issue and that it's the principle of the matter that counts.

I've been a faithful Apple customer for a good few years and have given them much business, but at the end of the day, it seems that the customer comes second.

* Update 02/02/2009 *
It pays to complain. The Apple promo status website now says:

"Thank you. Your record has been located. Details below:-

Your claim has been approved on 30.01.09 and is scheduled for immediate payment.

Payment will be issued in the amount of 95 GBP by cheque."

I'll take this as a quiet admission of fault. Thank you Apple for keeping your customers happy.

* Update 07/02/2009 *
I have, in my hands, a nice cheque from Apple.

This is something I probably should have posted up here a while ago... I decided to buy a guitar! I kinda got fed up with having programming as both a hobby and a profession (well, not fed up as such... but you know, variety is nice), so I figured learning the guitar would be a good distraction, and I wasn't wrong.

I bought an Ibanez RG370DX. It cost me 270GBP ($400), which is as much as my new server cost! It's pretty nice to play, though the locking tremolo makes it a pain to change tuning. I've had the guitar for about a month now - I'm still pretty bad at playing it, though not nearly as bad as when I first started (I couldn't even hit a chord without taking about 30 seconds to position my fingers).

There's a great sense of achievement when you manage to play a song that you know. I can play "Doesn't Remind Me - Audioslave" and "Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes" (both badly ;)) at the moment along with various other chords and scales.

To make sure I don't annoy people with my playing, I got a Behringer UCG102 USB Guitar Link. It lets me plug my guitar straight into my MacBook Air and I can play away and record with any piece of audio software. I find that Garageband is by far the best - it lets me add effects, choose from different amplifiers and add other computer-generated instruments, all without having to rerecord the track!

If anyone else out there wants to learn an instrument but is too worried about being bad at it, seriously... just do it. Yes, you'll suck when you start out, but so does everyone! Practise makes perfect. It's amazing how muscle memory works, I can go to bed not being able to play something without thinking about where my hand is. The next morning, it instinctively comes to me. The more you do the same thing over and over, the easier it becomes.

Playing an instrument is great fun if you don't take it too seriously. The worst thing you can do is get frustrated at yourself for not being able to play something immediately (I know this from playing the recorder and the violin). Just relax and keep at it, you'll eventually get it.

At last! My new server is in place and running on a RAID1 with regular, remote backups! I lost a couple of hours to a stupid mistake that I made. I couldn't figure out why it refused to boot from the hard drives... and after much messing around with formatting, redeploying linux and trying to boot from USB, I discovered it was due to me not having set the boot partition to active!

All that's left to do now is recompile everything for the ATOM 330 architecture, then I can cancel my Linode subscription!

All of my server parts arrived today. It must be said that I'm not that impressed with the case. It's a real nuisance to open and remove the front panel (the only way to get hard drives in and out). Hopefully this won't be too much of an issue since I shouldn't need to change the hard drives often. After unpacking everything and disassembling the case, I noticed that LinITX had sent me hard drives with an IDE interface instead of SATA. So basically, my server is sitting here doing nothing until I can get some hard drives. To their credit, LinITX have sent the replacement hard drives already and will collect the incorrect ones when the new ones are delivered, which will be tomorrow.

Another disappointment is the set of stock fans that came with the case. They're loud. I'll have to order some from QuietPC. I'm thinking of getting these:

1x 40mm CPU
1x 60mm Top Case
1x 70mm Back Case
1x 80mm PSU

The BIOS of the motherboard feels pretty cheap. It's unresponsive, basic and ugly... but it at least does the job. Thankfully it's capable of booting from USB sticks - no need for a CD/DVD drive!

The CPU is impressive. Not only is the ATOM 330 a dual core CPU, but it also supports HyperThreading. This means that, to Linux, I have 4 CPUs (in laymans terms).

I have run Memtest86+ on the system, after 1h37m44s it had verified that there are no problems with my RAM... amazing! I normally end up with a bad stick of RAM whenever I buy PC hardware.

Some of you may have noticed the recent server outage. This has been due to faulty server hardware. It all started when I decided to migrate the server to a virtual machine (I was tired of the inevitable boot failures when compiling new kernels and having to move the server to a desk with a monitor in order to fix it).

Anyway, the first step in migration is to make a backup. Half way through the backup, the hard drive died. Not only did this mean that I lost a considerable amount of data (not much irreplaceable, mostly just configuration and stats files), but I also had to quickly drive to a local store and buy an (overpriced) hard drive so that I could resume operations as quickly as possible. 48 sleepless hours later, I had the server back up and running with minimal data loss (thanks to my scheduled, remote backups). So, just like any sane person, I decided to take a backup of the virtual machine. Half way through the backup, the new hard drive failed.

I refuse to believe this is a coincidence, my conclusion is that either my server's IDE controller is failing and destroying hard drives, or the power supply unit isn't regulating voltage correctly and is frying the drive... or maybe even the drive is overheating under the strain of backing up data. Either way, I can no longer trust my Mac Mini as a server.

As a stopgap solution, I am using a virtual private server from Linode.com. I've got to say, I'm very impressed with their service. I'm not being paid to type this, but their VPSes are fast, reliable and cheap. The administration website is also superb. Setting up the server at Linode took a further 24+ hours, since I had to start from scratch again.

While Linode seems like the ideal solution, I don't like trusting third parties with my data (I also don't like subscription charges), so I've ordered a new load of hardware to construct a new server consisting of:

Chenbro Mini-ITX Server Chassis
Intel D945GCLF2 Dual Core 1.6Ghz ATOM Motherboard
Kingston 2GB 533Mhz DDR2 RAM
2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 80GB SATA-II 8MB Cache Hard Drive

It's been a while since I bought any computer equipment (aside from my Macbook Air), but I find it pretty surprising at how cheap all of this is. When I built my first Mini-ITX system, it cost more than everything in this current order and was terribly under powered.

Notice that the new system has two hard drives - yes, I intend to RAID1 mirror my server now (granted, this wont save me from dodgy IDE controllers or PSUs, but it still makes sense).

Another option would have been the T7 ATOM 330 from TranquilPC, but this could only store 2x 2.5" hard drives, which would be more expensive. Had I not recently already bought a 5-Bay NAS, the BBS2 would also have been a possibility. I do, however, prefer to keep my server and my NAS separate.

Once the new hardware arrives (hopefully tomorrow), I'll get the fun task of migrating about 4GB worth of data from my Linode back home to my new server.

Lessons learned? Be damned sure to backup your "/etc" directory, unless you get pleasure from having to reconfigure EVERYTHING in the event of a hard drive failure. Luckily, I had everything else of importance backed up already.

All in all, this has been a pretty expensive and tiresome fiasco, and it's not even over yet!

It's vacation time again. This time I'm going to the west coast of America. I'll be visiting San Francisco and Los Angeles over the next 15 days. If I get time (and have an Internet connection) I'll try to post photos to my Mobile Me Gallery.

*Update*
I'm now sat in the departures lounge in Heathrow Terminal 5. The terminal is much nicer than T4 and it has free WiFi. Check-in took all of 5 minutes (usually takes me at least an hour) and security was about 30 minutes (again, probably a bit quicker than usual). The downside of everything being so fast is that I now have 2 hours until boarding!

I was recently given credit by Apple for discovering a security issue in their new Mobile Me service. I think it's very decent of Apple to give credit to people that find such security flaws.

It's been about 18 months since I switched to using Macs... and I feel quite guilty that I haven't taken the time to learn how to program using Objective C and Cocoa within the Xcode development environment. Well, with the iPhone SDK being released and international signups now being accepted, I decided it was time to give it a go. I've ordered two books, one on Objective C and the other on Cocoa (both sadly not immediately available). Due to the lack of availability, I decided to scour the web for tutorials and found two superbly illustrated (but lacking in in-depth detail) tutorials. Again, one for Objective C and one for Cocoa. These tutorials are okay if you grasp the basic concepts of C and Object Oriented programming, but will lead you into a false sense of security if you don't know of these concepts. Finally, another tutorial I found to be quite useful was Apple's own on Cocoa application development. Again, this tutorial is aimed at those who already know about programming and everything that goes with it (memory management, MVC pattern and OOP), but it's an incredibly useful resource for getting a feel for Cocoa and Xcode.

Anyway, what would a post discussing new development endeavours be without a screenshot? So here it is, the best Cocoa application ever created. My take on the currency convertor tutorial!


I'm impressed at how easy it was to get the application to look good. I can't claim any credit for the gradient background or the rounded widgets; it's all part of OSX! Without having any knowledge of Objective C and Cocoa, I'd say it took me an hour in total to get that application running (that includes reading all tutorials, messing around with Xcode's settings and then writing the application itself). The great thing is, if you know C or Java, you should understand how it all works because the principals are the same (in fact, Objective C is a superset of C, meaning everything in C is included in Objective C!).

Being serious, I know that this application is hugely trivial and that I have a vast amount of knowledge and experience to gain when it comes to Objective C and Cocoa, but I think I've achieved quite a bit for an hour of hacking. I'm also quite impressed with what I've seen so far in terms of Xcode and how it enforces the MVC pattern. Equally impressive are all of the little things which make development so easy, such as the way tab chain-of-focus is setup (see the Apple tutorial) and the way anchoring works (there is a superbly useful animation on the "Size" property window which shows what will happen to your widgets when the window is resized based on your current selections - take that Visual Studio!)

For anyone interested in following in my footsteps, I read the Objective C tutorial, followed by the Cocoa tutorial and finished with the Apple tutorial. This is probably the best order in which to read as each subsequent tutorial will make more sense after reading the previous one.

After years of using CVS, I decided to take the plunge and "upgrade" to using SVN based on seeing a project named Trac. Trac is a project tracking system that gives you a web front-end to manage issues, source code and Wiki entries pertaining to your project. The only problem I had was its incompatibility with CVS. Upgrading to SVN was a piece of cake thanks to cvs2svn and I have to say, I'm a lot happier with SVN than I was with CVS (the concept of "changesets" is very nice).

Back when I first started working on the SlX libraries and all projects that utilise said libraries, all I used for issue tracking was a ".txt" file and a text editor. Trac makes it so much easier for me to keep track of bugs and new features. If you are working on a software development project or are in a similarly semi-unorganised situation that I was in, I highly suggest that you check Trac out. It's never too late to implement good project management!