When I was still at school I had a big thing for PC and video games. I used to run a Counterstrike clan, played a lot of random FPS/RTS/wtf titles and had a great time doing so. On the console side I’ve always been a bit behind the times - had a SNES quite some time after they came out, an N64 (with GoldenEye, of course) the Christmas after they were released, and more recently a GameCube and some borrowed time on my brother’s PS2. I didn’t even get a Game Boy until the Color version came out. But I was usually reasonably up to speed with PC gaming, from the days of Doom onwards.

In the last few years, more particularly while at Uni, I’ve lost touch somewhat with the gaming industry, only really touching on the new Valve titles (HL2/Episode One/Two/Portal) and dabbling in others (BF2, COD4). The impending release of GTA:IV last month prompted me to have a long, hard think about re-entering the scene, and having a friend circle placed firmly in the Xbox 360 camp pushed me in that direction from the outset. With the timely arrival of a pay packet from work and the associated shot of consumerist euphoria which that usually brings, I set about hunting down the best 360 deal I could find.

I settled on Play.com’s (now withdrawn) offering of the Premium console plus GTA:IV, ringing in at a buttock-clenchingly attractive £199.99 delivered. I put in an order, together with the official VGA cable (HDTV isn’t yet something I’ve felt compelled to shell out for, so I figured I’d get the best picture on my LG 19″ TFT), and set about grokking everything I could find about the 360, Xbox Live, the accessories, GTA:IV and so on, hoping to make up for being a relative latecomer to the “seventh generation” by being one of those giant irritants to existing product users, the excitable newbie positively bursting with questions about this, that and the other, “I read on this site that…”, “is it true that…”, ad nauseum. My 360-veteran friends were remarkably patient, and after the initial buzz wore off, I settled down to await the arrival of the goods. What followed was an episode that would have stretched the patience of a saint, the events of which I reproduce here for the benefit of anyone else unlucky enough to find themselves in the same boat, either wholly or partially.

• Wednesday April 30th - Order placed with Play.com for Xbox 360, GTA:IV and MS VGA cable


• Thursday May 1st - Received notification of order despatch from Play.com


• Tuesday May 6th - Slightly delayed due to Bank Holiday, package arrives from Play.com. With the reverence of a priest witnessing the Second Coming, I unpack the box, connect the console, and run through the initial set-up and configuration. After registering for Xbox Live and setting up just about everything there is to set up, I load up GTA:IV and start playing. Around half an hour later as, in-game, I respond to an MSN message on the whatever-blade, I hear a popping sound from the 360 and the console shuts off. Upon switching on again, I see to my horror… the fabled RROD. Now this doesn’t seem to be a normal RROD - I know (from my obsessive pre-arrival grokking) that the usual RROD is born of overheating, and that the console’s fans etc spin up before showing the lights. In my case the fans did not start, and the power brick showed a red light, indicating some sort of power-related fault. I call Play.com, who tell me that regrettably they can’t offer the same bundle any more, as they don’t have any Premium consoles left and GTA:IV is now out of stock, so all they can do is take both items back for a refund. This doesn’t wash with me (it looked like I would have difficulty laying hands on another copy of GTA:IV for at least two weeks) so I call Microsoft. The guy on the end of the phone gets quite excited when I tell him about the red light on the power brick, saying that this almost certainly means a fault with the brick, not the console. He creates a fulfilment order for a replacement power brick - no charge - but says that if possible I should test the 360 with someone else’s power brick in the meantime, just to make sure. I believe him and decide the console is almost certainly not dead.


• Wednesday May 7th - I find a friend with the newer breed of PSU and head over in the evening to test my console. No joy - exact same behaviour. I am not happy.


• Thursday May 8th - I call MSFT again and report my results. The agent cancels the order for the replacement PSU and creates a new one for my 360. He gives me the shipping options, and I decide the quickest one will be the email-me-the-packing-label option. He tells me the label may take 24h to be issued. I am not happy.


• Friday May 9th - The label arrived by email some time after close of business yesterday (taking less than 24h) so I phone UPS in the AM. Arrange collection for between 1 and 5pm and head out to buy a suitable box and (yay) bubble wrap. UPS arrive and take the 360 around 4pm.


• Monday May 12th - I receive a package. It’s the cancelled replacement PSU! I chuckle. I will use this anyway on the off chance my original PSU was damaged by the 360’s death rattle.


• Wednesday May 14th - Package reaches MSFT in Frankfurt in the AM according to UPS tracking info.


• Thursday May 15th - Receive an email in the evening reporting that my console has been repaired and is on its way back to me - 7-day estimated delivery window. I have a new UPS consignment number.


• Saturday May 17th - Package is with UPS, shows a scheduled delivery date of Tuesday 20th. Yay.


• Tuesday May 20th - UPS deliver my repaired Xbox. Enclosed letter reports the motherboard was at fault and has been replaced and extensively tested. I’m also given a free month of Live Gold. Confirmed that I got the original console back and not a replacement (I made a small mark on the back before I sent it off).

I’ll update this as and when I get more information. I just figured it would be useful for others like me banished to the service-level backwater known as the UK to have some idea how long the repair process really takes. I was somewhat embittered to see that US Xbox customers can expect a 4-day complete turnaround time on their repairs (with packing box supplied), whereas we seem to be looking at 10-14 days. The MSFT agent told me, and the info seems to support this, that the repair operation itself doesn’t take long - it’s the carriage to and from. And considering that the UK repair centres are so overloaded that my unit had to go to Germany (others report Czech Republic and further afield), it’s not surprising.

There was a silver lining for me at least - I got time to get some work done instead of thrashing away the hours in Liberty City. I just hope that having had this initial bad luck, my console won’t die again for some time to come. It would be just too ironic for the thing to come back having had a $1 fuse replaced in Frankfurt only to RROD again in a few months due to the overheating problem. That’s the tradeoff you get for buying online I guess - saved a few quid but lost the convenience of being able to take the thing back to a high-street shop to swap it over. Ah well.

So anyway. Hopefully when this is all over I’ll be able to guilefully reinsert myself into the gaming scene, just like the good old days. Halo 3 anyone?

The last word: So a total turnaround time of 11 days - not bad considering the logistics. Exactly two weeks from the original turning up to the repaired unit being returned to me. And I got free stuff as well. Everything seems to be working okay now, though I had to re-configure a bunch of settings on the console (those which are obviously stored on-chip rather than on the HD/Memory Unit). Got myself a second controller and Forza 2 yesterday, and started playing via my projector. Hurray for games.

Thought I’d just post this since I didn’t find an authoritative answer on the web. Those using exim4 on a Debian testing or unstable system might recently have found their system broken after doing a dist-upgrade to version 4.67-7, with exim4-config failing to configure with a message similar to the following:

Exim configuration error in line 28 of /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated.tmp: malformed macro definition.

This is caused by the installer being unable to handle customised sections of your config files as it attempts to migrate them to the new version. In my case it was a bunch of configuration to support mailman that was causing the trouble. All I did was copy my entire /etc/exim4/ directory to another system, remove all exim4 packages (and --purge), reinstall exim4 and restore the relevant parts of my config (if you’re using mailman, use this guide). Mail service restored in about 2 minutes.

For those yet to do the upgrade to 4.67-7, copy your config files (/etc/exim4/) somewhere else, do a dist-upgrade, and accept the changes to your files the installer recommends. I haven’t done this so I don’t know if it will succeed in adapting your customised settings, but it should stop the package breaking. If necessary you can restore your settings from the backup you just took.

You may also wish to take a copy of your /etc/aliases file, though I found this wasn’t touched by apt when uninstalling exim4, even with the --purge option.

I’ve been having a lot of problems recently with my home Debian server locking up, with Apache processes swelling up until all RAM is eaten up and CPU 100% utilised. The box stops responding until I can get local access and restart Apache. This used to happen several times a week, despite actual load on the server being very low with hardly any web requests.

I put this down to the age of the install and some dodgy Apache settings and didn’t look too much into fixing it; I turned the child process settings down a lot which didn’t improve things, so I just set a cron job up to restart apache every so often. It was only when I came to install Debian on a brand-new server at work that I realised something was afoot - the Apache/PHP install on this new server was doing the same thing - locking up several times a day for no apparent reason and in the exact same way. Both servers would suddenly experience massive CPU and RAM utilisation; additionally Apache would take several minutes to get from startup to actually accepting requests, with huge CPU use in that time. Incidentally, my home box is testing/unstable and this new server is Etch (stable).

I spent a few minutes going through the config files for Apache, PHP and MySQL (also installed on my home box) in an effort to optimise the install, and examined the extensions list in php.ini to see if there were any I could remove. I unfortunately suffer from over-enthusiasm when installing things like PHP, XMMS and so on, whereby I read the list of related packages and install everything that I might possibly need someday or that could be useful at some point. In this case this included php4-clamavlib, which I installed thinking it might be good to play with on a rainy day.

A quick apt-get remove php4-clamavlib and I restarted Apache; to my surprise it came up in about two seconds as opposed to the three minutes it was taking before to stop using 100% CPU after being started. I watched the box carefully for the rest of the day and it had no problems. Upon getting home I did the same thing on my own server and it too appears to be cured. So if you’re having problems with Apache suddenly choking, check to see if you’ve got the ClamAV library for PHP installed. If you don’t need it, lose it!

Google Maps UK just updated a swathe of their satellite photography, and guess what’s shown sitting outside where I currently reside? My awesome motor car!

In other news, the year has reached its end; stay tuned for commentary on this latest emotional upheaval, &c.

Started before Christmas, mothballed until last week, finally completed. jayphoto.co.uk, my attempt at a “professional” web front for my photography, is finished.

The site showcases all of the photos available as prints from my deviantART page, while hopefully avoiding some of the slightly less professional elements of the dA site and helping the visitor get through the selection checkout process with the least difficulty. Hopefully it will help me get some exposure and sell some art; my main motivation to get it done was the looming on the horizon of a couple of higher-profile photo jobs that I’ll be tackling in the coming weeks - details will be forthcoming.

Techie note: The Flash used on the main landing page is a heavily modifed version of the “Gallery Tween” sample application included with Flash 8. It reads in a randomly ordered list of image filenames from XML (generated by PHP from the site’s image database) and then displays them on the Stage, using a one-frame loop with ActionScript to shift them from side to side. If people are interested I’m happy to publish the code.