Tomorrow we’ll call Laura Ashley and try and rearrange delivery, but sadly it’s yet another issue with City Link. Yes, the courier company that seems to try harder than any other courier to ruin the reputation of any company using them strikes again

Just to clarify the situation

• City Link have delivered to this address before
• Laura Ashley have the correct address as the previous order arrived here
• We were here during the period the deliveries allegedly took place
• Our neighbours were also in continuously during the alleged deliveries
• City Link routinely leave parcels with them if we’re not in (this is what happened to the previous delivery)

So, why no delivery???

Towards the end of April we opened a new account with Halifax to try and get a better savings rate for our money. The account was, like so many these days, an online only account. To get the better rates of interest this seems like a reasonable compromise and given we already had internet banking setup didn’t pose any problems. We setup the account and arranged the transfer of some money from our older savings account that was paying 1/30th the amount of interest! All seemed to go OK and the account said it was setup.

When I checked our accounts online earlier this evening I was surprised to find no mention of the new account. I had received no confirmation or details of the account, but as it was an internet only account that wasn’t unexpected, but for it to not be listed was a surprise. When I tried calling their support telephone number I was greeted by a message telling me that it could be 20 minutes before they answered. Deciding to persevere I waited and after 30 minutes I was finally connected to an operator. After explaining the problem his initial reaction was
"I think I know what the problem is. We had a technical glitch last month."
Not being filled with confidence I went through security and after providing the details of the new account I had gleaned from the transfer details (having no other information the fact the details were listed was a relief) he confirmed that the account had suffered from “the glitch“.

As he explained it, “the glitch” basically removed all of my details from the account. The account was still there but was no longer associated with me! PARDON. So basically the bank had suffered an issue that meant a large amount of my money was no longer my money. They knew about it and hadn’t bothered to try and trace those affected. Had I not contacted them the account would have just sat there – with no apparent owner. I did check and it’s not April 1^st, but surely this had to be a joke? One of the largest banks in the UK had managed to loose my money? In 2012?

To say that I’m astonished and very concerned about this is a mild understatement. Every time there is an issue with HBOS I say I should move my money, but after this it really is time to move.

The operator took my details and said the account would be reattached to my “profile” which should mean that within 48 hours I have access to and control of my money again. Time will tell.

Update
The account has been linked and is now available.

I bought 2 2Tb drives and copied the data from the small array onto the larger one (there was only around 100G of data). Removing the old drives and inserting the new ones proved to be exceptionally straightforward thanks to the design of the BBS2. The screwless drive enclosures are great.

When the machine was rebooted I found the disks available as /dev/sdd and /dev/sde. What follows is what I *should* have done, but it took me a few attempts to get it done in this order thanks to missing a vital step Thankfully until the drive was happy following reboots I didn’t copy any data to it

Before starting I should say that the BBS is running Ubuntu 10.04 Server edition.

Prepare for Disk Change
Before shutting down to replace the disks I needed to prevent the system trying to use the 250G array when starting. (If you don’t then it generates errors and stops the boot requiring console access.) I did this by

1. commenting out the /dev/md0 entry in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
2. commenting out the entry for it’s mount point in /etc/fstab

Once these changes had been made, I shutdown the system

sudo shutdown -p now

Disk Setup

1. sudo fdisk /dev/sdd
   Create a new primary partition using the entire disk
2. sudo fdisk /dev/sde
   Create a new primary partition using the entire disk
3. sudo fdisk -l
   Check the 2 disks (sdd and sde) show the same partition details

At this point a check of /dev shows the expected sdd, sdd1, sde and sde1 listings.

Create the Array
I use /dev/md0 and /dev/md1 for the first 2 arrays, so decided to use /dev/md2 for this array.
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md2 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1


This resulted in

mdadm: size set to 1953513472K
mdadm: array /dev/md2 started

To follow progress I watched the output from /proc/mdstat using

watch cat /proc/mdstat

The output looked like this

md2 : active raid1 sde1[1] sdd1[0]
1953513472 blocks [2/2] [UU]
[>....................] resync = 0.0% (875136/1953513472) finish=855.2min speed=38049K/sec

It took slightly less time than initial predictions, but I left it running overnight!

Once it has finished /dev/md2 will exist and be available for formatting, but as I had experienced problems I decided to be cautious and ensure the array was usable through a reboot before formatting it, which meant I needed to add the details to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf (yes this was what I forgot to do when I experienced issues).

Add the array details to mdadm.conf
To create the lines needed there is a nice shortcut command
sudo mdadm --detail --scan
This will create output similar to this

ARRAY /dev/md1 level=raid1 num-devices=2 metadata=00.90 UUID=xxxxxxxx:xxxxxxxx:xxxxxxxx:xxxxxxxx
ARRAY /dev/md2 level=raid1 num-devices=2 metadata=00.90 UUID=xxxxxxxx:xxxxxxxx:xxxxxxxx:xxxxxxxx

To add the lines to mdadm.conf I simply did
sudo mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

Of course nothing in life is as simple as it first appears, so the file needs to be edited

1. I removed the duplicate line for /dev/md1
2. The metadata value doesn’t seem to be recognised as ‘00.90‘ but is happy with ‘0.90‘ so I removed a leading zero.

After saving the file it was time to reboot the machine and make sure that all worked as expected.
sudo shutdown -r now

After restart a quick look at /proc/mdstat showed all was well

cat /proc/mdstat

Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md2 : active raid1 sdd[0] sde[1]
1953513472 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md1 : active raid1 sdc1[1] sdb1[0]
976759936 blocks [2/2] [UU]

unused devices:

Formatting the new disk
I formatted the new disk as ext4 using

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/md2

After this had completed I needed to add the mountpoint and an entry to /etc/fstab

sudo mkdir /storage/2

To add the entry to fstab I generally use UUID’s, so I needed to find the UUID for the new disk.
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2012-04-25 15:05 xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx -> ../../md2

The fstab entry then looked like

UUID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx /storage/2 ext4 relatime,errors=remount-ro 1 2

To test that all was working as expected, I simply did

sudo mount -a

No errors were shown and a quick check showed the disk mounted and the sizes as expected.

df -H

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
…
/dev/md2 2.0T 205M 1.9T 1% /storage/2

Before copying any data across I decided to make sure that a reboot wasn’t going to cause trouble and so once more I restarted the machine

sudo shutdown -r now

Everything worked and all expected devices were available, mounted where I expected them to be.

Summary
It’s taken me a little longer than I expected to get things fully setup, but as last time I did it I didn’t bother noting what I did that’s not a huge surprise. The links below were helpful in figuring out what was needed

• http://www.ducea.com/2009/03/08/mdadm-cheat-sheet/
• http://ascend4.org/Installing_Raid_1_on_Existing_Ubuntu_Server

The problems started when we tried to arrange an appointment to check some information for the mother in law. It was all pretty simple stuff but she likes the face to face contact that going into a branch gives. I rang and spoke with someone who seemed to be having a hard time understanding what it was we wanted, then telling me there were appointments available, but if you want that, then, oh, no, sorry we’re really busy and there’s no appointments available. This seemed like a poor result after 3 phone calls (first 2 rang out) and a 5 minutes phone call involving me sitting waiting on hold for 4 minutes. Still, we decided just to ignore the stuff that involved asking questions and just pop in and do the simpler stuff.

When we arrived at the branch we were asked to wait for an “adviser”. Rosie had a question about a letter that had arrived at lunchtime so she showed the advisor the letter and asked for an explanation. The head scratching began. Several possible options were offered – but as Rosie had discussed these in her explanation of the problem we weren’t impressed. listening was not one of his strengths. He went off to talk to a colleague who gave him a form to do something that we had already done and, indeed, something that Rosie had explained we had already done in her explanation. His grasp of the issue appeared very weak and seemed to be getting weaker. Eventually he talked himself into a corner and decided there was nothing he could do. Rosie got her letter back and will simply do what seems right.

The mother in law then started trying to get her small task completed. As it turned out the account we were trying to transfer into didn’t allow transfers, but when it was setup this wasn’t explained! Oh. Can we say poorly advised?

Returning home we decided to simply use the online service. Resetting the access details was required and went OK. For the first time in 6 months the online access worked and we were able to do some of the things we needed to. Buoyed by our success, we tried to open a new account for her online. Oh boy.

Suddenly there was a cryptic error message being displayed

Unfortunately there has been a technical problem. This transaction has not been completed.

whenever we tried to login to open a new account. Sometimes we could login to the accounts page, but often we couldn’t. Removing the cookies sometimes worked, sometimes it didn’t. To say this was frustrating was an understatement.

Apparently the Halifax don’t want our money.

This isn’t the first time that they’ve displayed poor service, but the level of failure shown today has been beyond anything I could have imagined. Our decision to move our day to day banking to First Direct was one of the best we’ve made and in the last 3 years their customer service has not failed once. If they only offered better savings product we wouldn’t even consider using another bank, but there are better places for savings

The mother in law is of a generation that remembers their bank managers and has fond memories of banks and building society branches. The weekly visit to pay in wages stick in their minds and are recounted fondly whenever we visit, but even she is starting to dread having to deal with them. Online banks such as First Direct may offer a great solution for us, but for her the thought of not having a branch is just a step too far.

Surely there must be another bank in the UK that still knows what service is and can deliver it consistently?

UPDATE: It’s now impossible to login to the accounts with every attempt resulting in the same cryptic error message.

So what did I finally decide to do?

One a Day

The site is very simple. One picture per day, given it’s day on the home page and then an after life on a url defined by the date it was displayed. I came to realise that when I added a number of pictures to flickr only the final few were ever looked at and even fewer were really ever “looked” at.

Older images are displayed in date order. Images may have a title, but don’t need to have one.

It’s minimalist. But that was what I wanted. I wanted the site to be about the pictures. Not how I took it. Not where I took it. Not when I took it. It’s the picture stupid.

The machanics are even more straightforward. Upload an image (optionally with a title) and it finds the next available date to display it and makes the smaller versions (according to a defined list). Every day the front page finds the image for that day and displays it. A tweet gets sent every day with the title and a link to the permanent url for the picture. Simple.

I added support for pingbacks and added an RSS and an Atom feed. Twitter and Google+ buttons followed (but are never used).

The results are interesting. I’m getting as much feedback as I ever did from posting at flickr. The number of views of images is higher (only by a small margin) than the better pictures on flickr.

It’s a work in progress, but so far I’m happy with my choice and have found the self imposed limtation to be liberating rather than restrictive.

1. Power off the phone (remove the battery)
2. Start the phone in recovery
3. Use adb to view the dmesg

This gives you the previous boot dmesg and hopefully more information about what went wrong

The recent release of the Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) code has led to the usual raft of releases of third party ROM’s based on the ICS code, but for many devices the changes have been too large to allow easy transitions. The complete change of the camera interface has meant few older phones have decent camera support and the utter lack of information from the manafacturers means this isn’t likely to change anytime soon. The kernels need to be updated, the AOSP source needs to be tweaked and lots of patches and work arounds need to be found – all of which delays the adoption of ICS for older phones. In fact the adoption rate on more recent phones via updates from the phone manafacturers hasn’t been great either. Change is good, but the cost appears to be great.

I have some sympathy with the hardware manafacturers as we, the end user, are not their customers. We didn’t pay them money or sign contracts with them, we bought phones that had been developed and built using their components. Companies like Qualcomm guard their IP closely and whenever they are asked for details of their devices they defer saying that they can’t release details as they are “commercially sensitive”. They release binary files that require specific versions or patches of kernels to work and claim to be “doing their bit”. HTC are no better and in many cases even worse. At least Texas Instruments have actually released source for many of their components and even have it included in the AOSP tree as it’s needed for the Google phones.

A simple eearch on Github will reveal a huge number of forks of forks of forks of the AOSP code and even more of the same for kernels to support AOSP builds. There are so many to choose from it’s a little bewildering. Some are very old and abandoned, some are kept up to date, most are somewhere in the middle. If one of the strengths of git is that it fosters a culture of easy forking and branching, that’s also one of it’s real weaknesses when it comes to developing a consistent codebase. I can understand why AOSP is focussed in the way it is, but surely it would be in the interest of Google and Android to have a central repository of all things Android? Take the AOSP tree and accept patches and improvements from the open source world. There are a lot of people spending a lot of energy to get older devices working, often with very little attention and with their work repeated or forgotten as it’s easy overlooked in the noise that is the AOSP ROM universe. A single, definitive repository with a well explained path to submit patches would allow everyone to participate.

Like many people, I won’t submit a patch unless I can test it, a requirement that makes any direct involvement in AOSP less likely as the source tree I have is actually a collection from CyanogenMod. The Gerrit instance for patches isn’t AOSP, it’s CyanogenMod’s. While AOSP is a good thing, it’s more fo a half way house and really could be so much better.

In todays world people expect updates. One of the attractions of an Android phone is the promise of updates and improvements. Each release gets a lot of attention and hype, but it’s always accompanied by the knowledge that by the time it arrives on your device the next version will be arriving. It’s not what people expect and damages the Android brand.

My last 2 phones have run Android and been made by HTC, but my next one probably won’t be from HTC and may not even run Android. The idea behind Android is amazing, but the vision is not being matched by reality. Until the manafacturers start to be more open and Android itself becomes more coherent it will fail to be what it should be. Qualcomm may take pride in their hardware, but their attitude towards openness and community means that my next phone will not feature any of their products. I’ll vote with my money and would encourage others to do the same. In some enchanted land, far, far away, if enough of us did it they would change their ways

Today I took the big step and started a github repository with the code. Hopefully others will look at it and fork the repo to help out, but that might be expecting too much. Time will tell. There are significant steps to overcome and so far all I’ve done is the easy parts If you can help or know someone who can, point them at the code and lets see if we can’t overcome the reluctance of Qualcomm and HTC to release the information that’s needed.

https://github.com/zathras777/msm7x30_camera_hal

On a computer attached via a USB cable with USB debugging enabled, simply do

adb shell cat /proc/kmsg


Simple when you know how