Just Uber

It happened again!

Karoo - the demon spawn ISP of Hull’s much bemoaned monopolistic telephone overlords KCOM - has managed to yet again destroy the city’s ability to connect to the t’interweb.

From piecing together odds and sods from various sources (and from being one of the poor buggers having to use KC) it looks like the outage downed all internet services delivered by KCOM.

The fault which lasted over 8 hours, is alledged to have downed essential services, residential broadband, and businesses utilising credit card equipment connecting back through an ADSL connection.

As usual users from the unofficial karoo forums have jumped onto the problem and are debating it, so if you’re interested, jump in and have your say!

Karoo last dropped Hull off the internet in January this year, and August last year. Bad times.

The Register are covering the story here.

Do you ever have one of those days when no matter what you try, you just can’t get a web application to work? I suffered the angst of this recently when trying to install SugarCRM 5 on a Plesk based shared hosting server.

No matter what I tried, in step 2 of the installation process I got an error about the writable session save path not being valid. I checked the path in the /etc/php.ini file, created a php test page using phpinfo() and checked that the php session location was writable. Still, the installer brought up the same error message.

Finally I resorted to hacking the install script. I thought I’d share the hack with you here just in case you suffer the same error as I! Open up the install/installSystemCheck.php file. Check out the example below, and notice that seventh line from the bottom, I have changed the variable $error_found = true; to $error_found = false;

That should move you onto install step 2.

// session save dir
$session_save_path = session_save_path();
if (strpos ($session_save_path, “;”) !== FALSE)
$session_save_path = substr ($session_save_path, strpos ($session_save_path, “;”)+1);
if(is_dir($session_save_path)){
if(is_writable($session_save_path)){
installLog(”Session Save Path is “.$session_save_path);
}else{
$save_pathStatus = “<b><span class=’stop’>{$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_WRITABLE']}</font></b>”;
installLog(”ERROR:: {$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_WRITABLE']}”);
$error_found = true;
$error_txt .= ‘
<tr>
<td><strong>’.$mod_strings['LBL_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH'].’</strong></td>
<td class=”error”>’.$save_pathStatus.’</td>
</tr>’;
}
}else{
$save_pathStatus = “<b><span class=’stop’>{$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_SET']}</font></b>”;
installLog(”ERROR:: {$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_SET']}”);
$error_found = false;
$error_txt .= ‘
<tr>
<td><strong>’.$mod_strings['LBL_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH'].’</strong></td>
<td class=”error”>’.$save_pathStatus.’</td>
</tr>’;
}

Take a deep breath, unwind and relax. Setting up your Ubuntu Linux powered PC for mobile internet access isn’t half as hard as you thought it’d be.

My brother just got a £7.50 a month deal with Three, for 3 GB per month of internet access over 3G (HSDPA). I installed Ubuntu onto a PC for him and had a bash at getting the 3G dongle up and running.

Here is the easiest way to get this up and running.

1.) Plug the dongle into a spare USB slot and restart the computer.

2.) Download the Vodafone Mobile Connect Card Driver for Linux. The version I’m using is 1.99.17 (Beta) and comes as a .deb package.

3.) After installing, run the Vodafone application that you’ll now find in Applications > Internet.

4.) If the application doesn’t detect your dongle restart your PC and try again (although it should).

5.) Insert these settings if you’re using the Three (UK) network. Leave the DNS settings empty to allow dynamic configuration of DNS.

Username: three
Password: three

Preferred connection: 3G preferred
Authentication mode: Default
APN host: 3internet

6.) That’s about it. You should be able to see a signal strength bar at the bottom of the app screen, and connecting to the internet is a simple as pressing the big green connect button.

The vodafone application itself is pretty good. Particularly useful is the usage indicator. It allows you to restrict the amount of data transferred to help ensure that you don’t breach your monthly limit. Check out the screenshot below. Cool eh?

Enjoy mobile internet on Linux!

Hull for those of you who don’t know - it is a city which is trying really hard. Hull is working its arse off to drag itself out of economic and social decline and to establish itself as a ‘top 10 digital city’.

After years of treating this as back page news, the local media really seem to have got behind the people to protest about the Kingston Communications monopoly here in Hull.

The Hull Daily Mail have published details of a poll on the Prime Ministers Petitions site urging:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to scrap the monopoly that Kingston Communications hold in Hull for broadband users.”

So far, the response has been pretty good. As I write this, there are 1,259 signatories. That’s over one thousand in the single day the petition was advertised by the Hull Daily Mail.

The BBC are helping out too. Check out this video giving some background on the problems we face here in Hull.

The more publicity we bring to this, the better our chances of fighting against the suppressive monopoly that stifles the economic development of Hull. If you can, I ask that you take the time to write on your website or blog a little piece on what’s happening here in Hull to help spread the word.

For more information, you can always check out the unofficial Karoo Forums website.

Thanks for reading.

The BBC have quietly made public their new web 2.0 style homepage. It looks good, but under Ubuntu + Firefox I´m finding it pretty slow.

Personally I see a performance hit when trying to drag a content box. Id find it interesting to discover whether or not this is because I’m using an old machine, because I’m using Firefox/Linux or if its just because this is a beta and isn’t ready yet.

Has anyone else tried it out? If you have access to a Windows machine check it out and compare the performance (I don’t at the mo as I’m not at work).

Don’t you just love it when the small guy socks it to ‘The Man’?

In the few days since Pandora closed its doors to UK listeners, a website has been created to circumvent Pandora’s IP address blocking scheme.

As you’d expect, the owner of the globalpandora.com site has registered the domain anonymously. No surprises there then. What is surprising however is that the web server is hosted by OVH.com, a French dedicated server company.

I wonder if this server is acting as a front end to access Pandora via some US TOR proxies perhaps?

What on earth is the difference between ‘Funwall’ and ‘Superwall’, and why do I keep using Facebook when it’s so bloody dodgy in the first place?