Archive for June, 2008

A reply from East Midlands Trains!

Just 24 hours after accusing East Midlands Trains of not replying to my letters, I received a reply. I feel I should apologise to East Midlands Trains, and Tim Shoveller in particular.

In his reply, Tim (Managing Director of EMT) asserts:

On average, fewer than 1.3 people join or alight each train calling at Aslockton

(I paraphrase slightly)

1.3 people eh? There are 21 trains which call at Aslockton every day, so you reckon that there are no more than 38 journeys in to or out of Aslockton every day? That’s just 19 people making a return trip?

Riiight. We’ll see.

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Filed under transport : Comments (0) : Jun 30th, 2008

East Midlands Trains: proposed timetable changes, December 2008

East Midlands Trains run regular services between Nottingham and Skegness, which stop at many smaller stations en-route. These commuter services to and from small stations are used by many dozens of people every day. EMT propose to make significant changes to these services.

Headline changes:

  • More services to run from Nottingham to Skegness via Grantham
  • Fewer services to stop at small stations
  • 50% cut in weekday services at smaller stations (Netherfield, Radcliffe on Trent, Aslockton, Elton and Orston and Bottesford - to name but five)
  • 75% cut in Sunday services at smaller stations

For me, this would be a disaster, and would leave just two trains out of Nottingham on a weekday evening: the first would leave at 17:34, which is too early for people who finish work at 17:30. The other train leaves at 20:45. (No, that’s not a typo - it would mean a three-hour wait every evening to get the train home).

Commuters in Aslockton, Elton and Orston and Bottesford would be most affected, as the last bus service from Nottingham to Aslockton is at 17:32, and there are no bus services at all to Elton, Orston or Bottesford. Significantly, residents of Bingham would be affected too, as the town is already suffering from an on-going parking problem - which would surely increase if commuters would be forced to catch the train from Bingham instead.

Are you affected?

You’re directly affected if you commute to or from:

You’ll be indirectly affected if:

  • You drive along the A52 (east of Nottingham) at peak time - rail cuts will certainly mean increased road traffic
  • You visit Bingham and need to park in the town centre - commuters from surrounding villages such as Aslockton will have little choice but to park at Bingham and take the train from there
  • You live in Bingham - especially near Bingham station - and would like to be able to park in front of your home!

I’m affected! What now?

If you’re affected by these proposed changes, you need to make your feelings known. The following people may be able to convince EMT to keep services running as-is.

Is this letter-writing making progress?

Firstly, my local MP and County Councillor are both on-side and share our concerns.

Margaret Lanyon from the Department for Transport described the proposed timetable changes as “providing improvements”, and said that they would give “a performance gain which will improve robustness”.

East Midlands Trains hasn’t responded to any letters.

The Nottinghamshire Campaign for Better Transport are supportive, as are the people at Railfuture.

And what next?

I’ve no idea. After handing out leaflets on trains, and putting up notices at stations, I’m starting to feel we’re losing momentum. We must keep petitioning East Midlands Trains and the Department for Transport, but I fear that it’s all falling on deaf (or closed) ears.

The Department for Transport seem to want to wash their hands of the whole situation. Describing the proposals as “providing improvements” is utter bollocks. East Midlands Trains aren’t replying to letters.

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Filed under transport : Comments (8) : Jun 29th, 2008

Voyager 2110 router / Plus.net / disconnects / firmware

(Not the most imaginitive post title, but…!)

I stupidly upgraded the firmware in my BT Voyager 2110 router to the latest version, 3.03c. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “If it ain’t broke…”, etc.

The 3.03c firmware has fails to automatically reconnect whenever the line drops, as it does regularly around these parts. So I had three options:

  1. Whinge, moan, drink whisky, kick the cat
  2. Write a script which automatically hits the [Connect] button in the web interface every minute
  3. Find some firmware which doesn’t have the problem

Given that I have no cat, and absolutely no desire to write a shitty script to fix a stupid problem, it ended in a firmware hunt.

Turns out that the nice folk at Andrews and Arnold have seen this problem before. And they’ve got the GPL’d sources from BT and fixed the problem too. Nice work chaps! (Now all you need to do is fix the crufty rebranding exercise in the admin web pages of the router - which looks like it was done by a 5 year-old)

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Jun 24th, 2008

Scheduled throttling of torrents

I switched to plus.net, partly because I fancied a change, but also because the previous ISP was charging 25 quid for a similar service. PlusNet, like most providers nowadays, have a usage allowance - but usage between midnight and 8am doesn’t count. So that sounds like an ideal time to run those Ubuntu ISO torrents at full throttle.

rtorrent can be configured to run internal commands on a schedule, so it’s pretty east to tweak rtorrent’s throttling automatically:

# initial rates
schedule = upload_throttle_default,0,0,upload_rate=1
schedule = download_throttle_default,0,0,download_rate=1
# free period starts at midnight
schedule = upload_throttle_free_start,00:01:00,24:00:00,upload_rate=25
schedule = download_throttle_free_start,00:01:00,24:00:00,download_rate=200
# free period ends at 8am
schedule = upload_throttle_free_end,07:59:00,24:00:00,upload_rate=1
schedule = download_throttle_free_end,07:59:00,24:00:00,download_rate=1

And since the Kurobox is a stratum 2 NTP server, I reckon it’ll throttle at just about the right time…

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Jun 20th, 2008

Battery problems with Ubuntu Hardy

Well, it was all working fine with Gutsy, but since the upgrade to Hardy, the gnome-power-manager applet shows bad data. To be honest, I’d rather see no battery status at all.

It seems that the problem lies with HAL, in that it only samples battery data from ACPI when it receives an ACPI event. So I remove the AC adapter, HAL gets the event, and discovers “on battery, 100%”. But it doesn’t update until there’s another ACPI event.

This type of stuff really should “just work” by now, and I find it hard to forgive the introduction of a regression like this. Many users have reported similar problems (which are sometimes solved by installing more recent releases of HAL) but some folks - myself included - still suffer.

Yeah, I know, I should get off my lazy arse and investigate the problem. I could hack HAL scripts, tinker with ACPI and kernel config. But my Slackware days are long gone and life’s too short. Besides, the risk of “surprise battery death” makes life a little more exciting.

Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jun 8th, 2008