PSP Homebrew Update

Feeling brave?

Fed up with having a version 2.0 firmware and missing out on all the homebrew, emulators and piracy that could be down with 1.5 firmware?

Visit PSP Updates and follow the instructions in how to downgrade your PSP from 2.0 to 1.5. Over 500 comments with nearly 100% working. Need to download some files and there are torrents available to help spread the load. I’ll stick to 2.0 for the time being. If your up for it a guide with pictures is probably of more use.

Site Stats

I’ve been wanting to have some sort of site monitor tool for a while. One that will tell me who’s visiting the site and when and some other bits and pieces about their visit. Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been trying two out – Delineate and Mint. The most obvious difference is that Delineate is free (for the moment – it is in beta) and Mint costs $30.

Delineate Visitor LocationsDelineate is accessed remotely from your webspace. The information is presented clearly and with a lot of depth. For example you can see all the visitors to your site, the browser and OS they used and which specific page they visited. The site also makes good use of Google Maps to try and map their location. A nice feature is the last 100 visitors to your site mapped – good to see it really is a world wide web. If you wonder why they visit you can also see the search terms used to find your site. I really like this app although I’m not so sure about accessing another web app remotely – would prefer to host and see the stats local to my site.

Mint - SparksMint falls into that category. Once you’ve paid your $30 you download the app and install on your host site. One limitation is that the $30 only covers one domain name – if you mange other sites and want to use Mint it’s $30 per site – pretty steep. Once installed and configured the beauty of the website really hits home. Fast and configurable the layout will adapt to whatever browser size you use as long as it’s not IE – Mint doesn’t like IE at all. Out the box Mint has as much information as Delineate. However Mint is expandable via the Pepper API. This allows other dev’s to code small add-ons to Mint, for example Outclicks which monitors outgoing clicks from your site and XXX Strong Mint which displays visitors IP address. Nice.

Although costing $30, Mint wins hands down. I love it’s expandability and the fact that it’s hosted locally. I’m also surprised by some of the results so far. 74% of visitors are still using IE. Most shocking 66% are using a res less than 1280×1024. Nevermind – get Mint – thoroughly recommended. If your not fussed about expandability and hosting remotely then save $30 and go for Delineate instead.

 

Rants

I’ve got quite a few posts to put up but really have to get a few moans out of the way first – think of it as cleansing.

  • Plusnet. Although I’ve moved to Freedom2Surf that doesn’t take place until the 6th of October so I still need to suffer. Not only is the Usenet speed slow during the day as well, but they are wanting users to vote for them in the PC Pro 2005 awards. Cheeky bards. What’s worse is that they can e-mail all their users about voting for them and how they could win prizes yet they can’t e-mail them to say that their pricing is changed or their accounts are totally different from when they signed up. Apparently there is a communications opt out checkbox hidden in the terms and conditions but nobody mentioned that the checkbox had been added and unless you visit the forums you won’t know it’s there or how to opt out.
  • Why does the new Apple Nano in black come with white headphones. Just looks daft. I guess it’s so the adverts still work.
  • In the same vain – why did the black PSP come with white headphones and white adaptor. It looked cheap Mr Sony and was white because of the iPod.
  • The Xbox 360 – 2 different versions of the hardware is impacting on how games are being developed and what features are added. See this article for more info. Fools.
  • Rangers are mince. Watched the game yesterday (for free on Freeview – nice) and they were woeful. Lucky it wasn’t a heavier defeat. Bring on Inter!!
  • It’s a holiday weekend. Off Monday & Tuesday. The weathers crap and I’ve got work from the office to do. Bah.
  • Why does plaster soak up so much paint. Even though I put two coats of sealer on it’s still soaking up the paint. Oh well – time to put on another coat.

And relax…

And Like That….

Plusnet’s announcement was a damp squib. They brought in a sustainable usage policy. If this had meant maximum usage from your account until a certain limit was met then fine, especially as I was no where near there cap limits. However the caps and punishments were on top of the shaping applied to my account. All week Usenet has been dog slow.

So I voted with my feet, grabbed my MAC code this afternoon and filled in the form at F2S. Hopefully be on at least the same speeds but uncapped in a couple of weeks. With some luck I may even be migrated to 8Meg as my exchange is one of the lucky few. Fingers crossed. I’ve also made sure I’m on a monthly account just in case there are more issues with F2S than I can currently see. At least they seem to communicate more efficiently than Plusnet. Even today when I phoned to get my MAC key they said there were no issues with shaping at their end and what I was seeing was limited to me – the forums are awash with Usenet issues at the moment. Head in the sand I fear which is a shame as the support from Plusnet was generally excellent.

Where did it all go wrong?

Maybe I’ve just been lucky. In general I’ve had no major issues with my broadband providers. BT certainly were poor with support and since joining PlusNet I’ve never had any major issues. Great reliability, consistent speeds, good pricing and importantly a good support service and staff that are willing to talk and share information. Since Jan 2004 it’s been pretty refreshing. I’ve even recommended then and got the referral discounts to prove it. However April this year saw some changes for Plusnet. These have only got worse over the last 6-8 weeks.

Some background – Plusnet operate 3 accounts – Pay As You Go, Plus and Premier. The first two are for average users, not going to download much and hence have traffic shaping applied. This basically means that p2p and Usenet downloading is restricted to fairly low speeds. You knew this when signing up so can’t complain that when sharing or downloading using these two methods that it’s slow. Premier accounts were to be free from shaping. No download limits either.

First issue was back in April when Plusnet cancelled the roll out of it’s fair usage policy. This was the idea that £22 a month gave you a 30Gig download limit but at the fastest speed possible from your exchange. Therefore when Max DSL is launched a potential 8Meg speed for £22 was being offered. £30 got you 80Gig, £40 got you 150Gig. Sounded great and for most users made sense. Some of the big downloaders (greater than 100Gig every month) felt this was robbery. However I felt it was fair to pay for your usage of the service as 0.5% of the users were using 20% of the available network bandwidth.

Plusnet removed this scheme before it was launched instead reverting to £22 for speeds up to 2 Meg, £30 for 4Meg and £40 for 8Meg. The problem was they told no-one about it instead putting the details in a forum posting. At this stage (and to this day) 4 & 8Meg wasn’t available. They said people could keep paying this rate and that would get them first on the list when Max DSL is launched. What a con. People to this day are still paying £40 not realising they could be getting the same service for £22. The reason – nobody from Plusnet has officially told them their account has changed and Plusnet say it is illegal for them to e-mail the users and let them know of the changes. Plusnet also say they can’t move people to the cheaper account as that’s illegal too. Profiteering at it’s most blatent. It’s scary to think how many people are un-aware of this and paying almost double what they should be.

Since then the mis-communication has continued. Around six weeks ago the Plusnet and ADSLGuide forums were awash with premier users saying that p2p speeds had dropped – is there shaping being applied. This was denied for around 10 days before an official (forum) announcement that to protect the service for everyone and not just the nasty few people who download torrents shaping had been applied to the Premier service too. However the impact was alleged to be neglible – around an extra 5 minutes for every hour you download. Fine I thought – no biggie and not much impact. However I couldn’t help feeling slightly peeved that they had changed the terms and conditions of my account again without any prior notice or warning and had done so by using a forum which the majority of users will never visit.

Next came idle timeouts for Pay As You Go and Plus users. If Plusnet detect your connection as being idle for more than 30 minutes they will disconnect you. This helps then reduce network bandwidth and better manage the network. Should have no real impact on end users although some will have to re-boot their modem to get a new connection. WHAT?!?! The whole point of broadband was to provide a fast and always available internet connection, especially if you invest in a router that is likely to be never switched off. While not affecting me I think this is a crazy decision and like the shaping, who know’s if it will apply to Premier accounts one day.

During all this, Plusnet kicked out two users who asked too many questions and also ditched a few ‘bad boys’. These were users who used too much bandwidth over a few months of use. Plusnet repeatedly failed to publish how much is too much saying that there were no caps. After a few weeks a figure of 100Meg was published (in the forums only) and even to this day the forum post is quoted by Plusnet as ‘official guidelines have been published and known by users for months’. That means 6 weeks a go we posted a figure that was lost in amongst 100 other postings that were read by a few thousand users out of our greater than 100,000 userbase.

For me this week has seen a new low. Since Monday any Usenet downloads between 18:00 and early morning are being shaped drastically. A download from a newsgroup started at 17:30 with a speed of 230k/sec. Nice. By 18:10 the speed had dropped to less than 100k/sec. By 19:00 it was hovering around 70k/sec. That’s not a kick in the teeth off a 1/2 Meg account. Plusnet are denying that anything is wrong or has been changed. They say to increase number of connections to the news server – 10 connections took the speed of one user to 110k. At any other time the speed with just 2 connections was 230k/sec – nothing going on? While defending their position Plusnet pointed out some stats that have been published by the people who make their shaping and management hardware/software – Ellacoya. This report highlights the amount of traffic seen in Europe broadband accounts. Nearly 2/3rds of all traffic is p2p file sharing. That’s a lot. Surprisingly Usenet made up 2.3% of the traffic. Yet Plusnet are drastically throttling Usenet access. While I understand Plusnet are a business and have to manage their networks in the most cost effective way possible this seems crazy.

Whether I download 1Gig or 100Gig if it’s during the core usage hours my speed will be throttled. Like the idle disconnects, is this really what a broadband society was to deliver? When I move to a 24Meg ADSL2 service next year, what’s the point if I’m throttled to a 1/2Meg service? Do gooders will point out that all p2p and Usenet is illegal and well done Plusnet for stamping it out. Blizzard deliver weekly patches, sometimes over 50Meg via p2p as do many other game developers. Many download sites now encourage users to use p2p to download demos and trailers as it reduces their bandwidth requirements. Many beta’s are released via p2p and Microsoft are developing their own p2p release mechanism.

The current model really has to change back to the proposed fair usage. Fast speed for all but a capped service unless you want to pay more. So for my £22 I get 2Meg ADSL, can download 30Gig a month but after that it’s throttled to a speed that will either encourage me to download at another time, pay more for an increased download limit or put me off altogether. The more I use – the more I pay. If this isn’t adapted then everyone is punished by shaping whether they download 1Gig or 100Gig

Again Plusnet are spreading gossip in forums that these issues will be addressed ‘in the near future’, possibly this week. They’ve also said that those paying £30 and £40 have increased download limits and that’s always been the case – crap. A forum post two weeks ago confirmed this for the first time even though the pricing structure has been in place since April. My biggest beef is the underhand way in which the terms and conditions are being changed without any pre or post notification. It really is a shocking way for a technology firm to behave especially when they have so many ways of communicating with their user base. If they can’t e-mail users why not flag up the changes when a user logs in to the Plusnet website instead of hiding important updates in various forums.

What grates is that I’ve recommended Plusnet to other people – I wouldn’t at the moment until things settle down. I still rate their support service and from reading elsewhere, Pipex and Demon who are two companies with great reputations are going through troubling times also. I’ll stick with Plusnet for the time being and can only hope the next announcement brings a bit more sense and stability to their offerings – if not it’s time to switch. Maybe all these announcements are Plusnet moving from being a broadband provider to a value broadband provider where those that only use a few gig a month deliver most profit. Time will tell.

Microsoft PDC

Microsoft PDC is taking place at the moment and after years of talking about Vista and some other new technologies there are finally some products and beta’s to grab and install.

Codename Max allows you to view and share photo’s with other users. To me this isn’t much of an app as such but more a tech demo – a chance to see how future windows products will look and feel. It requires an install of WinFx which is the graphic model to be used in Vista. First impressions are shaky as the install isn’t the best. The Codename Max blog even mentions to ignore the error message. Once into the app you can’t help but admire the user interface – it’s gorgeous. There’s a really nice ‘mantle’ feature that displays a few photo’s from you list as they look on a mantle piece – click on a photo to swoop and zoom in. But then you look for what’s in the app – photo management, any manipulation tools, how do I publish the photo’s. There’s none. I can create a photo ‘list’ and share it but it’s not immediately obvious how a friend views the photo’s.

Ouch – they need to download the Max client to their pc, install it and then my photo’s will be downloaded to their client machine. I know it’s just a tech demo but that just seems so wrong. Also, you need to sign up to Max with a MS passport account. They then send you an e-mail allowing you to share data. Pity Hotmail threw the Codename Max e-mail into the junk folder – obviously Hotmail is more intelligent than I thought.

Putting that aside the GUI really is a step up from XP. Another difference which I guess is deliberate is the language used in describing the app, the website and the blog. It’s so not Microsoft….much more Apple – even more laid back like Flickr. Refreshing especially when you think how many people will be moving to Vista in the next couple of years.

Office is also getting refreshed for Vista and for once it looks like some serious changes are taking place. A screenshot for Word highlights the ribbon functionality that they are bringing in. While nice to look at I think the fact the file formats are moving to an open standard are far more important and open up the opportunity for some lightweight tools to steal some market share – it’s amazing how little functionality within the Office package is actually used. But then that’s the drive behind the UI change – see this Channel 9 video for a more in depth look. No drop down menu’s!

Finally – WinFS beta. This has been dropped from Vista but may be included after all and will eventually appear for XP too. The beta is for XP and will allow you to set-up some WinFS stores. Being a bit of a database geek I see real potential in dropping the traditional folder/file file system and moving to one powered by a db – the video they released last week shows hot it would work but didn’t really show much else. The danger is that moving to WinFS will result in no step forward for the end user. Search might be better but that advantage is diluted with the various desktop search tools. The video showed a really nice app that isn’t included with the beta but highlighted the strengths on WinFS – hopefully that will be released soon.

Overall a strong showing – there looks to be some substance behind the last two years of hype at last and an increased level of competitiveness from MS. I hope Vista will deliver more than just good looks though – need something like WinFS to introduce a step change in how we manage and organise our data.

The Ashes

This is something I didn’t see coming. I like cricket, I loved The Ashes series and well done England for winning. The middle three tests were great to watch and all had tense endings. The end of this match was a bit of an anti-climax but none the less entertaining. What struck home the most was the level of competition between the two teams but also the sportsmanship and respect on display – unusual to see from an Aussie team.

A cautionary note – I hope the players don’t turn into celebrities like footballers in general and the England team (with wives) in particular. I couldn’t care less about there off pitch life’s, who they are married to or how many of them stay in magnificent houses. Keep to the sport – far more interesting. Take the hint Mrs Flintoff although he must be a sure bet for sports personality of the year.

iTunes 5.0

New iTunes version 5.0 with a new look and some new features even for old iPod users. Playlists within folders, contact and calender synch with Outlook, far better search (allegedly like spotlight in OS X), shuffle options (woo), parental controls (woo – this is irony by the way) and album reviews in the music store. Was that really worth an update to a version 5.0.

On installing it seemed to update my whole library. On syncing with the iPod it’s refreshing ALL the tracks. That’s 22 gigs it’s writing back to the iPod. Strange. Even odder – some tracks won’t write to the iPod – they did yesterday. I updated the iPod firmware and all seems well by going from version 2.2 to 2.3.

The new search is great – fast and accurate. Folders are also nice as the parent folder will display a sum of all the child playlists. Not convinced on the new look which is better than the old brushed metal but seems to have an odd double pixel around the left and right window border.

It’s done

The windows have been installed and the mess is starting to clear. Took two guys three days to fit 13 windows and a new front door. While I’m pleased that it’s all done in a short time I hope it wasn’t rushed – it certainly looks like a good job has been done and they did work some really long hours – to be honest I can’t fault the finish and I’m really chuffed. Immediate differences are it’s quieter, warmer, less draughty and overall looks a hell of a lot smarter so I’ve absolutely no regrets. Luckily they were all fitted in the dry which is a bonus especially as it’s raining tonight. Just need a wet and windy day (shouldn’t be long to wait for that) to make sure everything is wind and watertight. Only job to do is for a plasterer to fix some gaps that have been left and for me to re-fit all the curtain rails and re-hang – weekend jobs a plenty for me!

*Update* – since the new door and windows there have been two people at the door looking for our neighbours. We’ve either blended in nicely or we’ve lost the ‘the ugly’ door tag that we used to have.

Moto GP3

This could quite possibly be my last game bought for the Xbox due to the imminent 360…yet I’ve owned it for 18 months. The reason – it’s no different from Moto GP2 except there are extreme tracks, a buggier Live interface and well…that’s it. 18 months development for that.

However the extreme track are great. Think a mixture of PGR2 and Ridge Racer tracks but with bikes and you get some idea what the extreme mode is all about. Strangely this has also seen a resurgence of friends playing online again – nostalgia has really kicked in. Well worth a purchase especially if you don’t own Moto GP2 – I’m off to set some new times.

*Update* – maybe I was a bit harsh as I’ve really enjoyed the last couple of hours with this. The extreme tracks are really good and there is some graphical polish thats been added to the Moto GP tracks. Online is great and the use of seed points well implemented. However the AI of the computer bikes is truly awful – they stick to their line no matter what you do which can be a bit frustrating. However with enough friends it makes for a great online racer.