It has been an extremely interesting week for not only the British music industry, but also for the internet and social media. The battle for the UK Christmas number one single has been fought on many topics. I won’t hide my point of view here: I thought the X-Factor’s offering was painful at best, and I am delighted to have such an entertaining song at number one from RATM, but I would like to focus on how it happened.

Tracy and Jon Morter, a couple that I’d never heard of before, started a Facebook group originally titled “Rage against the x-factor“. It strived to get members to buy RATM’s “Killing In The Name“, in the hope that it might outsell the X-Factor’s single. Given that the power of traditional broadcast media and interruption marketing has meant that every X-Factor winner from 2005-2008 had been number one, this seemed like quite a task. Yet, although it was close, that campaign succeeded.

As I write, that group has just shy of 1,000,000 members. The initial growth was completely viral. Tracy and Jon invited their friends, who invited their friends, et cetera. This wave swept through my Facebook account. I can’t remember which of my friends appeared in my news feed as having joined the group, but it was enough to convince me, which means my other friends may have also seen it in their news feed, and so on.

Twitter became a vital key, attracting the attention of the likes of Stephen Fry and Bill Bailey. With retweets from celebrities came a massive following, with #ratm4xmas trending, and eventually crunch point: media attention.

Suddenly Jon Morter was being interviewed live by Jo Whiley on Radio One. Rage Against The Machine were interviewed and played live on Radio 5 – predictably ignoring their promise to keep the version clean – which of course attracted yet more attention.

Zach de la Rocha, Rage Against The Machine’s lead singer, was interviewed when their number one success was announced, and said something quite inoffensive that raised my eyebrows. He referred to the “UK kids” having “spoken”.

Here, I think he’s got it all wrong. Facebook’s insights would be able to confirm. If we consider kids to be those under 18, I wonder how many of them changed their usual music buying patterns as a result of this campaign. Aged 30, I am confident that I and my peers changed ours a lot. Prior to this week, I hadn’t bought a music single in over a decade. Why would I? Albums, yes. Yet for everything else there’s the likes of Spotify and Last FM.

Social Media has torn traditional marketing apart. It has reached to all ages. It got people’s attention when it suited them – when they checked Facebook or their Twitter feed. Traditional marketing relies on people observing bus shelter adverts, wanting to listen to radio DJs, wanting to buy a magazine or newspaper to see the adverts. In this case, it also relied, heaven forbid, on people wanting to spend their Saturday evening watching the X-Factor.

Yet Social Media marketing arrives as a message from your friends, when you decide you want to see it. Your friends have already done the research, they’ve shown an interest, and maybe you would like to as well. Simon Cowell and the X-Factor will be back – presumably at number one next week. This campaign has of course been a flash in the pan, but for Social Media, it is perhaps a coming of age. It’s a marketing tool that can be ignored no longer.

England’s soccer fan-base is still rocking from the news that the next competitive match, this Saturday, will not be available to view on the television. Due to the collapse of Setanta, the rights for the match against the Ukraine have been snapped up by a firm called Perform, who will be streaming their live coverage to a million viewers on the internet.

The question is, has this really been thought through? I’m a big fan of internet technologies, and I’m absolutely subscribed to the idea that computers will provide to gateway to future TV style entertainment. BBC’s iPlayer concept is fantastic. I’m aware that Channel 4 got there first, but the BBC now have a significantly more advanced product, and their commitment to formats such as the PS3 has got me hooked. I watch much of my TV just like this – PS3 connected to TV:

Catching up on Question Time is however a completely different kettle of fish to watching an England match live. I have visited www.ukrainevengland.com and checked the ‘HD’ stream. I have a number of issues with the concept:

1) Sport is especially good in HD, and is certainly best on a big screen. This ‘HD’ test stream was about 50% of the size of my 720p display. That’s not HD. 1080p is HD. This is significantly worse than standard telly.

2) Internet video streaming is still a bit ropey. The PS3 is hard wired to my good 20mb network, but I don’t trust it with something like a live competitive sport. If newsnight fails to stream, it’s no biggie. If I’ve got a load of mates around to watch the footie and the feed fails, it matters.

3) I’m a long way from being convinced by England’s broadband capacity. I figure that on Virgin Media’s fibre I stand a pretty good chance compared to those on traditional copper fed DSL, but in both cases, how can we be sure that when it comes to the crunch, the transfer capacity will be there? Gloomy autumnal Saturday afternoons are peak internet traffic zones – add the significant weight of 1,000,000 users, many of whom wouldn’t normally load the internet much at all, loading up on video streams, and I think we’ll hit our biggest contention problem to date.

4) This video stream isn’t technically permitted in pubs. Pubs aren’t well known for internet savvy landlords and big internet connections, so even if it were permitted it would present issues. I know that some pubs will acquire potentially dubious foreign satellite feeds, and while this may not be entirely legal, it makes a lot of sense. For all the reasons listed above, a landlord needs to do whatever it takes to keep punters happy.

5) There will certainly be a lack of community spirit about these matches. The very fact that pubs shouldn’t be showing it means that social football viewing will be decimated, but equally, not many homes have the capability to show internet video on a big screen. Are fans supposed to crowd around tiny computer screens to catch the atmosphere? And worse still, if you’ve got a big computer monitor like my 24″ Dell, at 1920×1200 the apparently ‘HD’ stream looks nothing short of revolting.

All this said, I’ll go into this with an open mind. I’m going to get some friends round, and hope that all the technology works. I’ll need to log in to the site on my PS3 with the details I purchased earlier in the week. The provider’s server will need to be able to support 1,000,000 streams. My internet connection will need to hold up for 2 45 minute periods. The quality of the stream will need to be good enough to reveal the sport correctly when upscaled to a 40″ 720p screen.

This isn’t a big ask. I can watch some premier league matches on ESPN HD on real 1080p HD at no extra cost, where the image is pin sharp. I predict a bit of a fail here, but I’ll let you know. I am certain about one thing though: I’m glad this match isn’t crucial, and that this effective trial will be out of the way before the World Cup Finals. I believe this is the future, but we’re simply not technically or socially ready for it yet.

We’ve got a 40″ LCD TV made by Humax. We paid about £500 for it in early 2007, and up until recently I’ve been really very pleased with it. My mind has been changed because the remote control was becoming less and less responsive, and now it does nothing at all.

I had dismissed issues such as flat batteries and dirty lenses on transmitters and receivers, and so turned to the internet for help. Here’s an interesting way of telling whether your remote control is broadcasting anything at all. This is a photo taken with my SLR, of my point-and-shoot camera pointing at the end of the remote control.

Button not pressed:

And now when the button is pressed:

It’s faint, but you should be able to see a dim blue light in there. Due to this flickering it’s very hard to take a photo, but when looking at the point-and-shoot’s screen with the naked eye, the flicker is very bright indeed.

Anyway, this proved that the remote was at least firing. It is possible that it is broken in some way, but I can’t check for that so I’m going to proceed on the basis that the remote is fine. So I turned my attention to the TV.

Getting the TV apart was quite easy. I was generally impressed by the engineering and the way in which it is screwed together.

Eventually I got to the IR board.

I fired up the TV and tried pointing the remote directly at the receiver in the hope that the TV case was dirty, but no luck. I took the multimeter to the pins on the IR receiver and found 5V, earth, and a third pin that wobbled around 3.5V regardless of remote control interaction – I guess I need an oscilloscope to get any further there. I re-flowed the solder on the IR receiver’s three pins to be sure there were no dry joints, but still no luck.

So at this point I’ve put the TV back together and have sent an email to Humax’s support department to see if I can source a replacement IR board. What’s interesting is that the TV’s buttons are connected to the left of that board, and the cable on the right leads into the TV proper. So as the TV’s buttons work (it’d be useless now without those!) I’d have thought the problem is localised to the IR receiver or the few components around it.

Should be pence to fix really, but without more knowledge and assistance it looks like we will have to buy another TV. In this age of vast consumerism that seems quite a shame.

Anyway, for now the TV at least works. I can certainly use the exercise generated by the lack of remote control.

Apologies to the petrolheads out there for whom this will be gobbledegook, but I’ll try to make this comprehensible as I hope it will help others travelling the ‘net. My home server appeared to break itself while I was away this weekend. That may seem like an outrageous claim, but really – it was fine, I switched it off, I went away, I switched it on again, and it was broken.

Being a scientific sort, I’d better define broken. It booted, but the graphical user interface (GUI) wouldn’t start. It turns out that last week I applied a yum update (a bit like Windows update) which updated the X server (the graphical interface part of the server). This wasn’t properly tested for a hardware configuration similar to mine, and it broke everything.

A bit of internet research soon showed that other people had suffered the same problem, and today a kind soul has posted i386 fix instructions. I’ve adapted these for x86_64 users (like me):

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=215255#13

Honk honk! 

As I’ve mentioned before, I run a home server here. It has three main roles:

1) Redundant media store for music, video, and photos

2) Web server for Diane’s website development

3) Media sharing (playback) on the lounge TV

I’ve decided to go with a Linux solution, partially because I’m familiar with the OS professionally, partially because it is free, but mainly because I believe it is the way forward. As such I thought I’d document the process here.

This is the third time I’ve built this server in six weeks. That’s a pretty bad statistic, but I lay the blame firmly at the door of the HDDs I chose. I want as much redundant storage as I can get, and my chassis had room for 4 SATA drives. I found 4 1TB drives on eBuyer at a reasonable price, which at RAID5 gives me 2.7TB of storage where I can afford to lose any one drive at a time. This sounded great, but sadly a drive had bad blocks. So I replaced it. I then tested the replacement, and found that was bad too. This was still fine, but at that point I chose to test the other three drives and sadly one of those was wrong. The problem I then had was that the system marked two out of four drives as bad, and decided that as such it couldn’t continue.

I then rebuilt into a test configuration and finally (I hope!), I’m rebuilding it tonight on four discs that have checked out okay. There’s a difference with this install though. Thanks to Stuart Wallace, who has provided me with both the idea and the IDE to CF converter, the machines six drives are:

IDE 1: DVD rewriter
IDE 2: 4GB compact flash card
SATA1: 1TB HDD
SATA2: 1TB HDD
SATA3: 1TB HDD
SATA4: 1TB HDD

The CF card is a master stroke because I’ve carved it up into a 200MB /boot partition, and the rest is the machine’s swap space. Hopefully the machine should never need swap space as it has 4GB of RAM (although due to the hardware being a bit elderly it only sees 3.6GB). The great thing is that the machine can boot on the CF card, it should rarely need to write to it and so should not wear it out, plus I’ve got a spare CF card that I’ll back up to, so if the main one ever fails I can just swap them over and get going again. This may all sound unnecessary, but if you’ve ever had a knackered boot partition before you’ll see the value!

Let’s have a picture break. Here’s the machine with the spare CF card. As you can see, I’ve just finished installing FC10 (64 bit) and am now recovering my data from my external USB drive and my old server.

So while copying files across the LAN, and from the USB drive, building the RAID and doing a vast yum update, the machine gets a bit sweaty.

Annoyingly it has proved me wrong by swapping already, but hopefully this will rarely be the case! I’ve removed host and username information as a security precaution BTW. Good to see plenty of disc space available.

I’ve got a lot of work left to go before I get any real use from this server, but it’s good to know that matters are underway. Keeps the 40″ TV entertained anyway.

Finally, on another note we’ve got the 106R’s spare wheels boxed up ready for shipping. Doesn’t our living room look lovely!

Over the last few months my perception of online presence, both professionally and socially, has changed quite a bit. Everything is becoming more interactive, and from the point of view of someone who publishes content, it’s really great to know that people are reading your ramblings, and constructive feedback is vital to enhancing that experience. This can of course be taken too far – for instance my hatred of radio show phone-ins (I don’t care what Gary from Hounslow had for breakfast!), but in the case of the comment functionality on this site I think it’s marvellous.

So what’s next? I’m sure most of us are familiar with Facebook, but how many of us use it to its fullest potential? As Robin is getting married in California in just a couple of months, the UK visiting party is using a Facebook events page to organise the logistics of the trip. Diane has a Facebook page to promote herself as a Graphic Designer (go on, surprise her and become a fan!); the firm I work for has recently done the same. It’s viral marketing, and due to the friendly, permission based growth, it really works. Wouldn’t you rather work with an honest, open, independent professional rather than sending your work out to an unknown designer at Reproprint who you’re not allowed to communicate with directly? Or to put it another way, if you want to know more about an M5 clutch replacement, BMW Vanos or swapping engines, wouldn’t you rather talk to someone who has no agenda rather than a garage owner who ultimately is just looking to fill their wallet?

Presenting all this content on the world wide web in an easy to digest format requires effort though. It’s a bit of a chore having to take a camera everywhere you go, and the write-ups take time. It’s also embarrassing, as mistakes happen and in hindsight they’re so easy to avoid. It can be very postive though, but not only do I hope to learn from my mistakes (all the more painful when pointed out by a more experienced reader!), but I hope others will benefit too.

How do I do all this then? Diane is a keen photographer and I work for an internet based company. This means we tend to have most of the required tools to hand. Diane has two cameras – a Nikon Coolpix S210 (responsible for the pictures in this post) and a Nikon D40X (did all the M3 engine swap and M5 clutch/LSD photos).  When I get back in from a day out on the cars, I retire to my laptop which is normally docked in a corner of our kitchen.

Note how I sit in easy reach of all the booze! I guess that picture exposes my extreme desire for desktop space. The laptop has a magnificent 1920×1200 display, but I like to make good use of my spare 1280×1024 display too – so much easier to have all the pictures I’m processing on one screen, and my blog admin window on another. Also, when cooking or cleaning in the kitchen it’s great to use the extra monitor to watch TV on BBC’s brilliant iPlayer.

So that’s computer 1 of 3. Yes, that’s right, two more. We take a lot of photos and each picture, especially those from the D40X, can be rather large – a few Megabytes each. Also, in Diane’s line of work she generates huge image files – we need to store all of these somewhere. Just before Christmas Robin gave me an old PC, and I decided to turn it into a home server. Upgraded to 4GB RAM and 4x1TB SATA HDDs, I assembled a Linux (Fedora Core 10) server with 2.7TB of RAID5 storage. Sadly, this hasn’t gone smoothly. One of the four 1TB drives failed, so I had to have it replaced. Since then, the replacement failed, as has another of the originals. So the server tends to look like this:

Open for maintenance. In fact right now, it looks like this because I’m restoring a load of files from my old server.

I bet you’re all pretty glad you don’t have this level of trash in your living room! So with this headache and a certain amount of laptop woes (not entirely unrelated to the BMW diagnostic kit I recently purchased – more on that when I know more!), I’m not having a good time of this high-tech life. Fortunately, as Diane is out I’m currently able to use her machine in her office upstairs – boasting two 1920×1200 displays. These things are GREAT!

I’m going to spend the rest of the evening getting all this sorted. I hope! My final topic in this meandering waffle is Twitter. I’ve mentioned in the past that my antipodean colleague Brenden convinced me that blogging isn’t such a sad thing to do any more. I follow Stephen Fry’s blog, and he is the man who has convinced me that Twittering is now socially acceptable too. To Twitter is to release a short (< 140 chars) statement that updates those who ‘follow’ you on your thoughts or actions.

Twitter was mentioned when Stephen was interviewed on Jonathan Ross’ comeback show. Twittering certainly gets plenty of negative comments, but I can’t see how it can cause offence given that one has to choose to ‘follow’ someone on Twitter; if someone you are following is Twittering in such a manner that it disinterests or offends you, simply stop following them!

The advantage it seems of Twittering in my context is that it takes me a day or so to put together a blog post with an update of car or adventure related activity. On the other hand, I can Twitter quick updates from my phone as the day progresses without the need for cameras, high speed internet connections and other paraphernalia. In the context of a football match, a blog post is the Match Of The Day review, where Twittering is live audio commentary. Sort of!

In any case, feel free to follow me: http://twitter.com/neilmukerji