Entries by Ian P. Christian

My old vacuum cleaner (a cheapish Electrolux 1600w bagless thing) just wasn't cutting it anymore. The small filter in it clogged up quite easily - causing it to loose suction reasonably quickly.

I decided to buy a new one, and spend some time searching. The first and obvious choice is of course the Dyson. I looked at the DC08 - however there were mixed reviews (ranging from fantastic to awful, most complains appeared to be about support or build quality, not functionality). However, the main factor for me not buying one was the price, I wanted a 'turbo/turbine' brush (spinning brushes) and to get this on the DC08 it was quite an expensive model. So.. I looked for alternatives.

I eventually found the Morphy Richards Performair 1900w Bagless Pets Cylinder on amazon. Reviews for this that I could fine were good, as is the price. Amazon took too long to deliver it to me, firstly quoting a 1-2 weeks wait, and at the end of 2 weeks emailed to say it would be another 2 weeks, so instead I got it from argos for the same price.

On opening the box, I was confused as to why there were 2 hoses. Turns out one of the hoses is designed for cleaning stairs, it's super stretchy - a really good idea. It also comes with 3 main heads - 1 large turbo head, 1 small, and 1 large standard head. The turbo heads have spinning brushes that apparently help remove pet hair from the carpet, however I found the standard head worked better for me.

It comes with 2 filters - which can be washes under warm water to clean. This means you should never need to buy new filters , they have a lifetime warranty. On top of that, as you can see in the photo (click to enlarge) there's a yellow circular bit you can turn that effectively shakes the filter removing any dust from it. You can also see a tiny little brush in the picture if you look close enough, I guess that's for cleaning the filter. The dust bin is huge (3.8 liters) which is great. Emptying the canister is very simple, remove it from the unit, take it to be bin and press a button which opens the bottom of the canister and everything calls out - couldn't be easier. Another nice feature is that the cleaner comes with little smelly tablet type things, which you drop into the canister after you empty it, so that whilst you're cleaning the cleaner emits a lemon smell, apparently good for eliminating the pet smell in your house.

The vacuum cleaner is 1900watts, so it really does have great sucking power, it had no problem sucking up a sock of mine. There's a built in tool compartment to hold the smaller tools. The metal pole is telescopic, halving it's length for storage. The cable has a bit of yellow table at the end of it to warn you're nearing it's maximum length, and a bit of red tape to tell you it's fully extended.

Overall, I'm really pleased with it, I've actually not found fault in it yet. If I do, I'll be sure to update this page.

I've recently got a N73 on Three - and I'm using the X-Series plan which gives me unlimited (with limits.. go figure) access to MSN, Skype and.. other things.

I'm sorry to report that this phone is really quite buggy.

I know there are methods to upgrade the firmware yourself, however it's unclear to me the risks involved. Have a read of my currently unanswered post on allaboutsymbian.com

Here's my mail to 3 - I'll update if/when they reply

Hi -

I've recently got a N73 from you, and it's amazingly buggy.  It
occasionally will crash when I answer calls, sometimes reboots, often
tells me I don't have enough memory and should close some applications.
 Not very usable at all.  My phone shop is going to replace my handset,
but I'm almost certain this is related to the Firmware you use.

My N73 is running v2.0628.0.0.1, which is a known buggy version of the
Nokia firmware.

If you look at this site, it shows a list of bugs:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/archive/t-51669.html

Notice here that in the firmware you are currently using it has a memory
leak in gallery (would explain my out of memory errors), frequent
reboots, applications not closing properly and more.

When will you be updating your firmware to the latest Nokia release so I
can have a phone which doesn't require rebooting every few days of usage?

Many Thanks,

It works in current CVS of gimp-print! Download the CVS...

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@gimp-print.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gimp-print login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@gimp-print.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gimp-print co -P print

compile it

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --host=i686-pc-linux-gnu --mandir=/usr/share/man \
 --infodir=/usr/share/info --datadir=/usr/share --sysconfdir=/etc \
--localstatedir=/var/lib --enable-test --with-ghostscript \
--with-user-guide --with-samples --with-escputil \
--disable-translated-cups-ppds --enable-nls \
--with-readline --enable-lexmarkutil --with-cups \
--enable-cups-ppds --enable-cups-level3-ppds \
--without-foomatic --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu
make

If this fails (it did for me), edit the Makefile, find the line below and remove 'docs' from it.

SUBDIRS = include src samples test po man scripts

rerun make, and make install, and configure cups. YMMV, WFM - if it doens't work for you I'm unlikely to care, please don't email me asking for help

For those of you who know me you'll know I've been working on adslguide for a long time. It was written in ASP and hosted on windows using MS SQL for the backend - I've now managed to re-write it in PHP and is using MySQL for it's back end. Users seem happy about the change, with comments that it's running faster!

The site is written using Symfony, using Doctrine for the OR/M and saw over 1,000,000 page hits in the first week, with only a few minor technical glitches.

Feel free to check it out at thinkbroadband.com - a great place to find out about the UK's ADSL and broadband market, but then... I would say that

This is a video of my cat Spoon being stupid. Whilst talking to my friend on handsfree spoon decided to pick up the phone and walk off with it

Spoon has also brought in a whole collection of random things from outside.... look at my 'spoon gifts' gallery

How can something that appears so simple be so hard!

I don't know about you, but I've always had problems boiling rice. I've tried a couple of steamers, adding oil, frying the rice in butter first.... but results seemed to range. I've just come across an article that covers how to boil rice - http://shiokfood.com/notes/archives/000018.html

Basically, it seems you rinse it lots, soak it for 30 minutes, drain, put in pan with 1.5x the amount of water there is rice, boil it for 15-20 minutes (although.. my rice packet said 10, i did 15 and it came out perfect) with a tight fitting lid, DO NOT LIFT THE LID. once cooked, remove from heat and DO NOT LIFT THE LID for another 10 minutes.

I wrote the below about 3 months ago (mid july) and published it, but a day later decided to remove the post from my blog - one such exploit like this that was found before took myspace offline for a few hours. It appears myspace have now fixed (well, partly..) the issue I've documented here, so I now consider it safe to publish.

---

Seems I've foudn a way of exploiting a hole in myspace's XSS filters!

Myspace block all kinds of common XSS exploits from your profile, however, I've found a way around it! I did email them explaining that I took 2 hours trying to find it, and asking if they offered any incentive to report it to them - but I didn't hear back. I guess I might as well publish it then...

<div <img />
href="#" onmouseover="alert('moo')">w00t</div>

Using that foothold, I'm sure there's many things you could do....

I don't think this is exploitable, but here's the details that I reported to google...

Bug with your XSS filters. when viewing a view, you have a bar down the right hand side of the screen. There is a bug in what I presume is your cross site scripting filter. When it encouters a ' (single quote) within a string, it generates undesired results. For example: <a href="/videoplay?docid=2421984664875201064" onclick='setSessionCookie(VP_playlistCookieName, "...,", VP_cookieDomain); setSessionCookie(VP_playlistIndexCookieName, -1, VP_cookieDomain);' title="Steve Irwin How I" d="" like="" to="" be="" remembered="">Steve Irwin How I'd Like to...</a> Notice how the 'title' attribute of the <a> tag has been formatted, causing the title string to be formatted as additional attributes to the <a> tag

Last time a friend found a bug and reported it, it took a shockingly long time for google to fix it ...

i was playing with AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet) and I was having issues with one of the network clients showing 'down,closewait'. I had been using the AoE device with LVM, and the vblade server had rebooted and had various kernel upgrades to fix something else - and it broke the AoE on the client! aoe-stat showed this:

e0.0 0.000GB eth1 down,closewait

To fix, vgremove wasn't working, however using 'dmsetup remove aoe-X' where 'X' was each device in the 'aoe' LVM volume group.

This made 'aoe-stat' show the device as 'down':

e0.0 0.000GB eth1 down

As to how to get it back up again, I'm still playing

I wanted a certain file to be highlighted as a PHP file despite the fact it was a .html file, and do to this you use the 'modeline' feature of Vim.

To do this, on line2 of the file, I put the following

 // vim:set filetype=php: 

For me, it didn't work immediatly, the following command showed why though.

:verbose set modeline? modelines? 

By default in gentoo, the modeline is disabled in /etc/vim/vimrc, so either remove that line from there, or in your .vimrc put 'set modeline'. The modelines option tells vim how many llines to look at at the beginning and the end of the file.

For more information, type ':he modeline' in vim to bring up the relivent part of the manual