Moving to BT Infinity Broadband

Tomorrow I'm moving from my Demon ADSL network connection to BT Infinity Broadband.  I wanted to do a quick test to see how much better this made my network link.  I did a few tests:

(1) Simple Ping to the BBC

ping -n 20 news.bbc.co.uk


Ping statistics for 212.58.244.59:
 Packets: Sent = 20, Received = 20, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
 Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 39ms, Maximum = 40ms, Average = 39ms

(2) Trace Route to the BBC

Tracing route to newswww.bbc.net.uk [212.58.244.59]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
 1 60 ms 99 ms 99 ms 192.168.1.254
 2 39 ms 40 ms 39 ms anchor-access-4-s2018.router.demon.net [194.217. 23.69]
 3 40 ms 39 ms 39 ms anchor-inside-3-g5-0-2.router.demon.net [194.159 .161.90]
 4 * * * Request timed out.
 5 * * * Request timed out.
 6 * * * Request timed out.
 7 * * * Request timed out.
 8 * * * Request timed out.
 9 42 ms 39 ms 39 ms bbc-vip104.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.244.59] 
 Trace complete. 

(3) Getting a 15meg file from my Rimu Hosting hosted server

  scp -v -P 9999 dave@myhost.com:goo.tar . 2>&1 | tee time.txt
  ...


  Transferred: sent 5408, received 15695080 bytes, in 28.0 seconds
  Bytes per second: sent 193.1, received 560422.6 

(4) Sending a 15meg file from to Rimu Hosting hosted server

  scp -v -P 9999 goo2.tar dave@myhost.com:. . 2>&1 | tee time.txt 
Transferred: sent 15694528, received 6008 bytes, in 201.9 seconds

Bytes per second: sent 77736.8, received 29.8

That's the tests done with ADSL. Let's see how BT fibre lives up to its billing tomorrow.

VirtualBox Time and Date

Learning point of the day:  I use VirtualBox to run Debian for playing with Python development.  I noticed that the time and date were always a long way in the past, presumably as the virtual clock didn't keep running when the virtual machine was turned off.  The solution was really easy:

apt-get install ntp

Powerline Ethernet

I've just got myself a pair of Solwise Powerline Network home plugs ( PL-85PE-TWIN_MK2 85mbps).  Despite the 1930's house wiring they seem to be working great so far.

Pee-Day and Penguins

Today boy #3 has been in 'special big-boy pants' for the first time.  He did quite well for a first day with only the odd accident.  Over to the wife for coping with day #2.

In unrelated news, I've been trying to get boys 1 and 2 interested in working out the economics of Club Penguin. We've got a stopwatch, and we've been timing how long it takes to earn a certain number of coins on different games.  It is a work in progress so far.  I emailed CP customer support to ask if they would let me have some stats for the overall games, but they said that was a trade secret.  Fair enough, if a little boring, I suppose.

Manga High Maths Games

The Math 4 Love blog has just pointed me at a fantastic looking site for educational maths games called Manga High.  Just setting up our 'school'.

Hiking from Llanberis

Just had an excellent day's hike from Llanberis over to Ogwen Cottage.  I've uploaded the GPX trace on to Ever Trail.

We stayed the night in Llanberis at the very reasonable Dol Peris bunk house.  In the evening the Llanberis curry house was too full for use to get in, so we ended up at the Welsh Curry House of the Year 2007.  And very nice it was too.

Towersey 2010

I'm late posting about our trip to the the 2010 Towersey Village Festival.  Here's the things for the memory banks:

• The children's story teller Tony Wilson was great
• Met Pete Coe who said that he was trying to get a CD out for Christmas with all the kids songs that he did in the 2009 Towersey kids-club.  Must keep an eye out for that for presents
• I've been inspired to try to play the guitar in open C tuning of C-G-C-G-C-D

Running Python 2.7 on Debian

Here are some quick notes about how I got Python 2.7 running on Debian.  The pointers come from the Python NW Google Group and the Debian documentation.

(1) Set up the apt/sources.list file as follows:

deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib


(2) Run aptitude and do an upgrade to refresh the package lists
(3)  I had 45 packages to update so I installed them all
(4) That left me with python 2.6 installed
(5) Searched in aptitude for python 2.7.  Marked it for installation
(6) Aptitude seemed to nicely manage all the dependencies.


With the above complete 'python --version' reports 2.6 and 'python2.7 --version' reports 2.7.

I'll keep the virtual box snapshot of the previous version about for a while just in case.

Multiplication Game they will Play

At last, a mathematics multiplication learning game that the boys will actually play.  Damult Dice from the Maths for Love blog.