My old friend Jonathan, following up on an old post of mine, quoted me saying, “it is reported as absolute fact in most of the press that the world is getting warmer because of human activity”, and replied:

So, 2 and a half years later, now that pretty much everyone agrees that it IS caused by human activity, what’s your standpoint on this?

I don’t think pretty much everyone does agree. There are plenty of people who don’t.

Besides, even if everyone did agree, that still wouldn’t mean anything.

My position is that we don’t understand the climate well enough to say that global warming is happening at all. Furthermore, I agree with Michael Crichton that the science is contaminated by politics.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Enviro-Mentalism at 7:48 PM EDT

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I’m going to tell a bit of a long winded story about a major headache I’ve been having getting my Nokia N80 to talk to a web server on my the wireless LAN in my flat. It’s a bit of an obscure problem and it might not affect you even if you’re trying to do something very similar to me, but it might be of some interest to geeks and it might help someone one day with the same problem.

I recently set up a little fanless Mini-ITX PC and set it up as a headless Linux server (with Ubuntu Dapper Drake LAMP server). I have all kinds of uses for it, but the most fun was to set up MPD. MPD is Music Player Daemon and it’s a network controllable music player. I connected up a big USB hard disk that has all my music on it in lossless FLAC format, and the Mini-ITX board has an S/PDIF output that connects nicely to my home-cinema amp to avoid using the rather noisy analogue sound you normally get from a PC.  As well as playing my CD collection, MPD will even play Shoutcast streams, making my little PC an internet radio too.

Next I installed phpMp2 which is a web interface for MPD, so I think you can see where I’m going: I want to control my music from my Nokia phone, the main advantage being I don’t have to turn on my big, noisy, main PC when I want to listen to music, and another advantage being that it’s really cool to be able to make up a playlist when I’m on the tube and be able to have it already playing when I’m coming through the door!

So I got most of this working when I was at work, installing software by connecting to my little PC by SSH with MidpSSH (a cool Java SSH client for phones) and testing it all out over 3G.

The trouble started when I got home, used my phone in WiFi mode to connect to my server over the local WLAN, and the phone rebooted. I tried everything: installing alternative web interfaces for MPD, adjusting my WLAN security settings, using Opera instead of the built-in browser; using my PSP’s web browser instead… Interestingly the PSP’s browser just hung there and eventually timed out.  The phone rebooted every time.

Which was odd, because my main PC connected just fine, even over WiFi. And I could connect okay over 3G, just not WLAN. And why did it affect the PSP as well as the phone? The phone and the PSP can both browse external web sites just fine, the problem only affected the local LAN. Even MidpSSH crashed occasionally when connecting over WLAN. It had to be something about my local LAN.

I tore my hair out for about three days. In the end I found kind of a solution: avoid the local LAN by setting up the web interface on a web site I have hosted in the US. This worked, but it was slow, and sending a message across the atlantic and back when I wanted to skip a track just seemed wrong.

Then tonight I had a brainwave: I remembered about MTU.

MTU is a term that was bandied about a lot when I was hanging out on a broadband forum trying to get the most speed out of my net connection. It stands for maximum transmission unit, and is the maximum number of bytes that a given network medium can transmit in one go. It’s important in IP (Internet Protocol) networking because IP packets have to traverse different physical types of network with different MTUs. IP copes by fragmenting big packets up into smaller ones, but this sometimes doesn’t work well because a packet that’s *just* too big to be sent in one go gets split into a big packet and a small packet, and this can happen over and over again and affect network speed.

Anyway, it just so happens that Ethernet (which is how my Mini-ITX PC is connected to the network) has an MTU of 1500 bytes, and WiFi has an MTU of 1492. This means lots of packet fragmentation. What if this was affecting the phone and the PSP somehow? Both are portable devices and probably have cut down implementations of IP, maybe they’re not coping so well with all the fragmentation.

You can easily tell Linux to change the MTU of a particular interface with a command like: “ipconfig eth0 mtu 1492″. You can probably do this in Windows too, with an obscure, deeply nested dialogue box somewhere, or regedit.

Anyway, one little command, and suddenly everything worked! Eureka!

I learnt a few lessons: one tiny command in Linux can fix almost any problem, you just have to know the right one; and if a problem gets the better of you, ignore it for a few days and the answer might just pop into your head when you least expect it.

You may not experience this problem because it may be something to do with the particular WiFi router I’m using, or the cables, or the fact that my flat is really untidy, or the weather, or for some strange reason getting numerous gadgets to work together in new and interesting ways isn’t your cup of tea.  Also, I never got round to upgrading my phone firmware, so that might have fixed it, too.

But anyway, I hope that this story is of some interest to someone. If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

Posted by Rob Fisher as Geekism at 10:47 PM EDT

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Wikipedia strives to maintain a neutral point of view, and to that end they have various policies. One such is to avoid the use of weasel words, and they have a page explaining exactly what that means and why they’re a problem.

Weasel words are words or phrases that smuggle bias into seemingly supported statements by attributing opinions to anonymous sources.

[…]

Weasel words don’t really give a neutral point of view; they just spread hearsay, or couch personal opinion in vague, indirect syntax.

They are phrases like, “some argue”, “research has shown” or “many people say”. I’ll be keeping an eye and ear out for such phrases in the mainstream news media from now on.

Posted by Rob Fisher as General at 10:25 PM EDT

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