Andy's blog

Our broadband line at home failed this morning, taking with it access to our websites. It also means we can’t reach our email, hence why this message is being sent via Google Mail.

Suddenly the idea of sending everyone details of this weekend’s events via a our website doesn’t seem like such a good idea !

Hopefully some of you will have printed out the details or committed whe whole website to memory. But for those of you less organised or without savant levels of memory, here are the details again:

What

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We are having our 10th wedding anniversary celebration (and Eryl’s 50th birthday) at Colehayes Park, near Bovey Tracey in Devon. There should be about 60 of our friends and family there for the weekend of 5th-8th February 2010.

We have put together this small website to give you more details of what we are doing, where and when.

We are providing all the food for the weekend, but there will be a few things you need to bring with you.

Where

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Colehayes Park is a granite built Georgian mansion, it is big, grand and slightly worn at the edges. But it looks like a great place for a party.

We have the whole house, with its many rooms and bedrooms to ourselves for the weekend.

The house is just outside the town of Bovey Tracey on the edge of Dartmoor in South Devon.

There is plenty to do in and around the house: with table tennis, a snooker table, table football and 20 acres of grounds to explore. Hay Tor and the rest of Dartmoor is also nearby.

When

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You can arrive from any time after 2pm on Friday 5th February. We have to leave the house by 11am on Monday the 8th.

We’d strongly encourage as many people as possible to get there on the Friday so we make the most of the weekend.

On Friday afternoon we’ll have tea and cake as people arrive. Later on we’ll have soup and pie to warm people up.

On Saturday evening we are cooking dinner for everyone. And whilst not formal, Eryl would be delighted if people wanted to dress up (Andy will of course be in his jeans).

Martin and Steve have bravely volunteered to be in charge of breakfast on Saturday and Sunday. Monday’s breakfast will be a largely bread based affair, to leave us time for packing up to leave by 11.

We will have plenty of bread and sandwich fillings for people who want to have lunch in the house. Otherwise there are some lovely pubs nearby for those feeling more adventurous.

What to bring

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Bedding is provided, but towels are not, so you need to bring your own towels.

Colehayes looks like it will be a comfy place to spend a weekend, but it also looks like it could have the odd draught or two. So bringing a selection of warm clothing is a good idea.

Lyn, Steve, Debs and Martin have generously offered to provide wine for our meal on Saturday night. We will be providing some real ale.

All your other alcohol “needs” will have to be supplied by yourselves. For those of you coming by train, we can organise a run to an off licence/supermarket on Saturday.

Getting there

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The nearest train station is Newton Abbot, which is about 7.5 miles away from Colehayes. The train takes about 3 hours from London Paddington.

The house has a 0.75 mile drive leading up to it, so if you arrive by taxi you will want to make sure the driver takes you all the way to the house unless you fancy the walk. We’d strongly recommend taking a print out of our directions with you.

There is plenty of parking for anyone who drives.

SatNavs don’t appear to be very useful when it comes to the last bit of navigating to Colehayes, largely thanks to its long private drive. So here are some directions from the end of the M5:

* take the A38 towards Plymouth

* when the road forks after a couple of miles, stay on the A38 towards Plymouth

* after about 10 miles take the A382 North towards Bovey Tracey

* stay on the A382 for two miles, then turn left onto the B3387 towards Haytor and Widecombe (you will turn at a roundabout next to a small Fire Station)

* after 0.5 miles take the left hand fork, still towards Haytor and Widecombe

* after another 0.5 miles you will come to a cross roads, with the Edgemoor Country House Hotel on your right

Almost directly opposite you should be the entrance to Colehayes. There are a pair of granite gate posts and a sign for the Colehayes Field Study centre.

Enter between the gate posts and up the 0.75 mile drive. You’ll go over a couple of speed bumps, past the lake, over the bridge and then Colehayes is on your left.

Squeezebox owners who also own iPhones or iPod Touches have been patiently awaiting the arrival of native apps to control their Squeezeboxes. The iPhone was an obvious candidate as a remote control for the Squeezebox and the iPeng web based remote interface has been available for quite some time.

While the iPeng web remote was very good, it was just too slow. Mobile Safari can only throw data around so fast.

In the last couple of weeks we suddenly have a flood of Squeezebox control apps hitting the App Store. The one I was waiting for is the native version of iPeng. It finally became available today for £5.99 ($9.99 in the US).

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This is the second part of my review of of the Squeezebox Duet, though all of this part focuses on the Controller part of the package. Part 1 is here.

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I’ve had an MP3 player for my car since I bought my first empeg back in 1999. The empeg is an absolutely brilliant MP3 player, but I’ve never had anything that compared for the the home.

I own a bunch of Rio Receivers, which were designed by the same team as the empeg, but the software on them is just too flawed (largely thanks to the Rio marketing department I fear) to make them anything other than mediocre MP3 players.

I’ve looked in the past at the Sonos system, but it is always looked very expensive and restricted in its functionality. I also looked at the previous SlimDevices players, but the big problem with those was that even though they had a clear bright screen I can’t read the screen from across the room without first finding my glasses.

So when I saw that SlimDevices (now owned by Logitech) were working on a system similar to Sonos, with a screen-less player and a Wifi enabled remote with a screen, I was very excited. So I bought one as soon as they became available.

Anyway, enough of the waffle, on with the review (the Duet has a lot of functionality, so we are going to be here a while).
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The Plan

I had hoped to give my parents a Wifi enabled digital photo frame for Christmas. For it to be usable by my parents it had to be very easy to use and robust.

Ideally I want to just point it at a set of RSS feeds and have the frame cycle through random images from them. It would be nice if it could fall back to local storage if the Wifi connection isn’t present (my Dad likes to turn off his router when he isn’t using it).

After researching various Wifi frames, I settled on the i-mate Momento 10 inch one. (more…)

Since the end of last summer my Subaru Impreza 2000 Turbo had the problem that it sounded like a diesel taxi when the engine was cold.

The sound was a real worry when it first started, it sounds rattly and very diesel like. Revving above 3,000 rpm made it go away and after the engine had run for five minutes it was just about gone.

Everyone that I spoke to, both online and at my Subaru dealer said the same thing. They all said it was caused by piston slap, which is apparently occurs when one or more of the pistons become slightly oval and bang on the cylinder walls until the piston expands when it warms up.

It appears this is a common issue on older Impreza engines but that it isn’t anything to worry about as long as it goes away when the engine is warm.

I did have one symptom that didn’t fit the piston slap case. Very occasionally, when using engine braking from 70mph+ down to zero, the diesel sound would reappear and go away when the engine was revved.

I had my 105,000 mile service the other week and asked them to take a proper look at the sound (I left the car parked round the corner from the dealer the night before, so that I could take it in with a cold engine).

Much to surprise I got a phone call later that day to say that it wasn’t piston slap after all, which brought on a brief moment of panic and thoughts of engine rebuilds. I needn’t have worried though, the problem was a faulty timing belt tensioner, which was banging against the engine block.

The tensioner had been fitted at my 90,000 mile service less than 12 months ago (when the timing belt was replaced), so it was replaced under parts warranty.

So my Scooby now sounds like it should again, no more taxi impressions every morning.

One of the guys I am working with at the moment uses the phrase “every day is a school day”. He’s not wrong, rarely does a day go past when I don’t learn something new about some bit of computing technology (typically finding out a new way that some piece of software is broken).

Today’s lesson was on Microsoft SQL Server. I was struggling to debug a problem inside a stored procedure that is buried deep with a nested set of other stored procedures. I was getting frustrated and thought to myself “it would be so nice if I could dump stuff to the Windows Event Log from within this stored procedure”.

I got so fed up in the end that I went off to see whether event logging from Transact-SQL was actually possible. It is, using the xp_logevent stored procedure (which lives in the master database).

This is the code that I am using:

declare @message varchar(255)
set @message = '@primary_contact_type ' + cast(@primary_contact_type as varchar(30))
EXEC master..xp_logevent 60000, @message


Two things to know to make this work:

• you have to declare the @message variable, you can’t just pass a string constant to the xp_logevent call
• your database user needs the relevant permissions on the master database to make the call

The xp_logevent stored procedure makes a COM call to log the message, so you probably wouldn’t want to leave the call in any production code (unless you put in a switch to turn it on and off when you needed).

I did two momentous things today. I unplugged our video recorder and CD player. They are now stashed in the attic.

A few years ago that isn’t an event that I could have predicted.

We no longer need a VCR and CD player in our living room. The VCR has been more than replaced by the combination of the DVD player and our Sky+ PVR. The CD player is redundant, because with the right hardware high bit rate MP3s are indistinguishable from CDs.

I still remember back in the eighties when my parents rented a series of Betamax VCRs. At time time they couldn’t afford to buy one outright.

At the same time I was buying albums on audio cassettes, complete with all their hiss and warbling.

Who would have believed then that both technologies would become obsolete within 20 years and that CDs would be going the same way.

If you have ever got involved with putting .NET assemblies into the GAC (Global Assembly Cache), then you will have come across gacutil.exe

There is a problem with gacutil.exe, it isn’t part of the .NET framework and therefore isn’t installed on machines that have had the framework installed on. It is actually part of .NET SDK and you aren’t supposed to distribute it with your own applications.

If like us you don’t realise until late on in your project that gacutil isn’t redistributable then you are faced with a number of options for registering your assemblies with the GAC:

• use the features in your installer (not an option for us as we were using a very old version of Install Shield)
• illegally redistribute gacutil
• write your own code to call the GAC API

I’m ashamed to say that we took option 2 as we were pushed for time and resources. At the time I couldn’t find C# code to call the GAC API and we didn’t have anyone around that could write a C++ version for us.

I have since found this C# code, which is supposed to achieve the task of registering with the GAC:

using System.EnterpriseServices.Internal;

string path = Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + "\\";
Publish publish = new Publish();
publish.GacInstall(path + "MyAssembly.dll");

So, enough about C#, today we are on to cars.

My year 2000 Scooby (Subaru Impreza) has been suffering from the symptoms that I seems that most of them have at some point in their lives. The symptons are inconsitent delivery of power, with flat spots in acceleration (feels like you have stepped off of the gas suddenly) and surging.

It seems that there is a long list of things that can cause these symptoms (or very similar symptoms), that include:

• failing lambda (oxygen sensors)
• failing HT (high tension) leads
• failing crank angle sensor
• failing or dirty MAF (mass air flow) sensor
• air leaks in various pipes

The most common one appears to be the last one, the MAF sensor (which measures the amount of air going into the engine). When the problems developed on my car I therefore checked the MAF sensor first.

When I pulled my MAF sensor it looked spotless, it was clean and I thought it was almost brand new. I ruled it out as a cause and plugged it back in.

Over the next month the symptoms got worse and my local Subaru dealer had a couple of failed attempts at diagnosing the problem (the ECU wasn’t reporting any fault codes, which didn’t help).

They finally fixed it this week, after having the car for three days to give them time to track it down. The main cause of the problem? Yes, you’ve guessed it, it was the MAF sensor failing.

So if I had just replaced my MAF sensor when the problems started (£60 and 10 minutes work) I could have saved myself £200 in labour costs.

So, next time something like this happens I’ll think carefully about just replacing the MAF sensor before looking at other things. Some Scooby owners replace their MAF sensor every year as a preventative measure (it seems that the MAF sensor on the “classic” Impreza is a fragile item), not sure I’ll go quite that far.