Activating Virgin Media Broadband on Linux

Yesterday I installed Virgin Media broadband at my new house. Virgin Media? Am I insane? Well, unfortunately my new house is 4.5km away from the exchange and the fastest ADSL connection is less than 2 Mbits, so Virgin was my only option. Anyway, I digress. The reason for the post is to help out any other Linux users who want to use Virgin Media.

When I plugged in the router and went to view a website on my computer, I was redirected to an activation page, where I had to enter my name and postcode and stuff like that. Except that the first page you go to checks to make sure you're running Windows or using a Mac. Thankfully, Konqueror and Opera both let me change my browser identification string so that Virgin's servers think I am using Windows. So far, so good. The next problem comes a few steps later when the 'Next' button doesn't respond. A quick view of the page's source shows that Virgin is trying to set the browser's homepage using some bad JavaScript. It also shows that after trying to do that, it was just going to redirect to another page anyway, so I was able to copy that URL into the address bar and carry on. I don't remember what the URL was, but if you look for the function called 'next()' in the source, you'll see it there. A few pages later it prompts you to download and install their special tools. There's no option to skip this, but if you click on 'Next', it starts the download and then goes onto the next page anyway. You can just ignore the download.

After all that, your connection should be activated. Mine was, anyway. Now I get about a 4 Mbit connection instead of the slow 2 Mbit ADSL connection. Which is still slow, considering Virgin Media advertise it as a 20 Mbit connection, but I wasn't expecting anything that good from Virgin Media. After all, they are just NTL with a new name.

An Update

So I have a baby. Joscelyn Eleanore was born two weeks ago, and is completely wonderful. And on Saturday Naomi, Joscelyn and myself are flying off to Canada so that the inlaws get to see their first grandchild. I'm really looking forward to it. Well, mostly. It'll probably be quite tiring - we're hiring a car and will be doing a huge amount of driving (around 3000 miles) so that we can see everyone Naomi wants to see. But it'll be fun.

My other baby (my seven year old laptop, Lazarus) is losing its memory. One of the memory slots decided to give up the ghost, so it now only has half a gig of RAM. One gig was already on the low side of comfortable, so now it's extremely frustrating to use. At least I'm running Linux on it and not Windows, since I generally find Windows likes to have around double the amount of RAM that Linux likes. It'd be a good excuse to put Lazarus in the grave one final time and get a nice, fast, new computer. But I can't afford a new computer and a new baby. Well, I could, but I just got a new 10-22mm lens for my camera and I want a new Line 6 box for my guitar, so I might just have to struggle on. Oh well, I'm in Canada for the next five weeks, so I don't have to worry about it at the moment.

KNetWalk

I'm trying to write an Android game, but I've been rather addicted to playing KNetWalk, which is slowing me down somewhat. I'm getting fast at KNetWalk though - I just did the Very Hard level in 59 seconds without any penalties. I think I might give up now, although I reckon I could probably do it in 50 seconds if I was very lucky.

tinyurl No Longer Breaks My Security Model

At least, not on my Android phone. I've just released Check Redirect on the Android Market (for free, of course), which intercepts view intentions on links, and if the link is a tiny url of some sort (the list of intercepted hosts is configurable) it pops up a dialog letting you know where the link redirects to, and asks if you wish to follow the link.

And when I'm using Linux instead of my phone, I found an extension for firefox which does a similar thing. I can't remember what it was called though.

tiny.url Breaks My Security Model

Since using twitter, I've noticed a lot of people use services such as tiny.url or tr.im in order to shorten URLs. There's a problem with this though: I now have no idea what website I'm about to visit. If someone I trust has posted the link I'm reasonably likely to click on it, but for other people I tend to avoid these shortened links because I have no idea in advance what they are.

What is really needed is for the shortener service to show you what site you're about to visit first, so you can make a more informed decision about whether to visit the site or not. Hmm, maybe I should be sending this as a feature request to those sites instead of randomly blogging about it...

Android Reloaded

On Monday night I got home from the pub, and my phone announced that there was an update available, and would I be so kind as to allow it to update itself. I said, 'Yes, that would be lovely', and my G1 proceeded to show me a nice updating screen while it changed all its software around.

There's not much to see for it. The Android Market now tells you when anything you've installed has an update available, which is nice. Google Maps is now version 3, but I can't tell the difference. The biggest changes though, have to be memory usage and power consumption. Previously, after using my phone on and off during the day at work, the battery level would generally be down around 40% when I came home. However, the last two days have seen it around 60% instead, which is a great improvement. The other change is that before the update, my /data partition had around 10Mb free on it, while after the update it has around 30Mb free. I don't know how they've done that. Perhaps shifted some space from the /cache partition? I never bothered noting the free space on anything other than /data before.

G1 Power Usage

After posting my last entry, I thought I'd elaborate on the G1's power usage. There's a useful little tool available on the Android Market called Watts, which logs the battery level and shows a graph of it. The image below is two screenshots from Watts.

The one on the left is the device's power usage last night, when I wasn't using the phone at all since I was asleep, but the phone was still checking my email and twitter regularly.

The one on the right was this afternoon, when I was watching the rugby at my parents', but also using my G1 a far amount for twittering, checking emails, texting, and looking up things like the words of 'God Save the Queen' and what a drop goal is.

As you can see, the standby life is pretty good, and you can probably get a good eight hours of reasonably intensive use out of the battery. Which is pretty poor, but I can live with it, since I don't usually use the phone that intensively.