Spare Rooms To Rent

2 rooms available in a 5 bedroom house:

Normal single, £280
Small single, £250

Water bills are included, but other charges (TV, internet, gas, electricity) come to about £30-£40 per person per month.

Other tenants are a Ph.D. student at the University of Sussex researching video games, a self-employed IT handyman, and a winemaking student at Plumpton Agricultural College.

We’re looking for easy-going and sociable students only. No couple please.

The house has the following features:

WiFi throughout.
Virgin broadband and TV.
Good sized garden with patio and shed.
Double glazing throughout.
2 Fridge/freezers.
Washing machine.
Tumble dryer.
Microwave.
Gas over / hob / grill.
Comfy lounge with TV and games consoles.
Bath & shower with strong water pressure and quick heating.
Separate toilet.
Friendly and helpful landlord.
Convenient location for buses to university and the centre of town (e. g., 24, 25, 25A, 25B, 25C, 28, 29, 29A, 29B, 37, 38, 38A, 49, 49A, 49B, 49E, 74, 78, 81A, 81C, 88, 91, N25)
10 minute walk from the large Sainsbury’s supermarket at the Vogue Gyratory on Lewes Road.
Here’s a map of the local area.

Please contact Gareth to arrange a viewing,

Outside

Living Room

Kitchen

Kitchen Extension

Upstairs Spare Room £280 per month

Bathroom

Downstairs Spare Room £250 per month

Rear of house

Garden

EvilSexyGeek

A certain someone recently awarded me the dubious honour of the title “Evil Sexy Geek”, which I used for my Top Secret Dance-Off handle.

Google gives no hits, so I’m hoping it’ll pick up this page shortly.

Paper, Scissors, Stone

After a long day of study I finally posted this Tweet at around 01:50 in the morning,

“About to give up and let sleep beat work once again. If only I knew the third part of this Paper/Scissors/Stone-like triad…”

It couldn’t be easier: the final part is Play.

• Sleep beats Work
• Work beats Play
• Play beats Sleep

More TalkTalk Problems

So we got back online, but performance was really bad. On Monday I received an email asking to confirm that I was back online, which I did, but complained about the performance. Then today I received another email from tech support to let me know that they’d increased my line speed to 7MB. I verified this with a speed test which reported 6356 kb/s down and 684 kb/s.

However, I’ve noticed considerable line instability. The modem confirms this,

Data Path	Interleaved
Operation Mode	ADSL2+
Bandwidth Down/Up(kbps)	7476 / 435
SNR Margin Down/Up(dB)	6.0 / 6.0
Attenuation Down/Up(dB)	50.0 / 28.1

That Signal to Noise ratio margin sounds ok, but low for LLU, and the downstream attenuation is really high – I guess meaning that we’re physically a long way from the exchange, so subject to loss of power through dampening of certain frequencies?

There are more concerning stats from the modem,

WLAN Statistics
Tx Frames Count	3933560	Rx Frames Count	3869705
Tx Errors Count	10156	Rx Errors Count	7509746
Tx Drops Count	10156	Rx Drops Count	7509746

I don’t know what’s going on with the reception of packets, but the problem seems off the scale! These are WLAN stats, so does that suggest there’s (additionally) a problem with the built-in WiFi rather than the DSL itself? I recently swapped channels because the glorious KisMac revealed a clash with our neighbour, and after fixing it ping times halved.

FEC seems very high, though I don’t know what this is a measure of (FEC errors presumably), nor what are reasonable values. I imagine it’s a measure of how much data the modem is having to recalculate as a result of errors during transmission as a result of the poor signal quality on the line, and hence also perhaps an indication of why performance is bad – if the modem’s unable to rebuild this corrupt data then many packets may need to be re-sent.

CRC Down/Up	27 / 65408
FEC  Down/Up	31281 / 65193
HEC Down/Up	432 / 0

There does look like a consistent problem with upstream data though, but also perhaps HEC down? Incidentally FEC down was continually increasing by a couple of thousand each time I refreshed the modem stats every 5-10 seconds.

I think we’re experiencing periodic loss of DSL, but can’t be sure at what frequency. Looks like it might be every few minutes?

I’ve just received a reply from tech support. They agreed that attenuation was high, recommended connecting to the test socket, and suggested G.DMT instead of ADSL2 as being more stable. Unfortunately it disconnected almost immediately. The second time it stayed up for a couple of minutes only.

G.lite stayed up for about 5 minutes, and offered a bandwidth of 4MB down.

Multimode offered a bandwidth of 4MB down (each of these three modes all presented themselves as G.dmt in the other screen), and stayed up for 1 minute.

T1.413 did not connect.

ADSL offered 5MB down and stayed up for 1 minute.

Every time I’ve emailed I ask them to send an engineer to test the line. I’ll let you know how that goes!

14th Nov: They still haven’t replied, but I notice that my modem’s now been connected for over 5 hours, which is unprecedented! However, the line’s settings are different:

Operation Mode	 G.dmt
Bandwidth Down/Up(kbps)	 2720 / 64
SNR Margin Down/Up(dB)	 15.5 / 9.0
Attenuation Down/Up(dB)	 52.0 / 28.5
Power Down/Up(dBm)	 18.5 / 10.5
CRC Down/Up	 68 / 7
FEC  Down/Up	 51221 / 0
HEC Down/Up	 101 / 3
System Up Time	 18:36:24
DSL Up Time	 5:45:02

Speedtest confirms 1832 kbps down and 51 kbps up, which is pretty shoddy if you ask me.

TalkTalk Problems

For the last couple of months we’ve had problems with our ISP. After being regularly kept on hold for 30 minutes at a time, transferred across three continents, and having to speak to many operators who clearly don’t have a clue, they finally gave us a new modem. While I’m happy to have connectivity again, I’m concerned that the modem itself has performance issues. Either that or TalkTalk have really screwed up something in my local exchange or national connections.

As reported earlier, I’m now 1848m away from my exchange, which apparently should give me ADSL and ADSL2+ at approximately 4Mbps, which would be reasonable as it’s what I’ve clocked before.

However, when I run a speedtest I only get 431 kbps down and 82 kbps up!

Another speedtest reports 372 kbps down and 33 kbps

Hot Research!

This week I’m in Athens, presenting my first ever academic publication, “Toward Accessible 3D Virtual Environments for the Blind and Visually Impaired” at DIMEA 2008.

 

It’s all about the hotness: of the weather (34 C) and the post-grad researchers

 

Academic life so far seems to be characterised by poverty, international travel, autonomy, fulfilling research and meeting girls who are simultaneously hot and smart!

My prejudices are slowly and pleasantly being dismantled.

Graphics Card Upgrade

I’ve been thinking about upgrading my gfx card at uni.

First of all I needed to identify which bus my PC uses. CPU-Z is a useful little diagnostic utility which says I have PCI-E x-16

This means that I could go all the way to an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+. Tempting!

Actually, given the price I’ve ordered a 512MB NVIDIA 8800GT for £89.29 inc. VAT and delivery from Overclockers.

CiteULike, Zotero

Anyone using either of these products?

I’ve just created a CiteULike profile (currently empty).

Sounds interesting because the source is available for plugin development.

First Paper!

I’ve just received confirmation that my first academic paper has been accepted to a conference in Athens this year, DIMEA 2008: The 3rd ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment & Arts.

The paper’s called “Toward Accessible 3D Virtual Environments for the Blind and Visually Impaired” and is a little project I was working on when I started working as a Research Fellow.

I’m really pleased, but any credit is really due to my co-authors (my PhD supervisor and the director of our lab) for helping me tighten up my ramblings into something vaguely meaningful. I also submitted to another conference a paper based on my MA thesis. I didn’t want any help with that piece and guess what? It got rejected :-p

Interview Transcription

As part of a recent study I ran at University I had to interview some people. I did it over Skype because the participants were from various locations around the world, and so that I could easily record our conversations.

To do the recording I used Call Recorder, a commercial application which offers an unrestricted 7 day trial. Once that period had expired I just created a dummy user account on my OSX laptop, then installed it for them using the same Skype username: Instant 7 days more free use.

Once I’d recorded the interviews as .MOV files with a separate audio track for myself and the interviewee I then mixed them down to MP3s using FFMPegX, a shareware frontend to the command line ffmpeg.

To do the transcription I used Transcriber, a FOSS package that I initially ran on Windows, but since I’ve moved to Ubuntu I’ll use it here in the future.