Wow, I turn 30 in about 3 weeks, on the 26th October to be exact. I would like to be quite detailed and retrospective, but that will have to wait for another time, but for now, let me suffice to say that I am happy with what I have done over the last 30 years. I have few regrets and have achieved many things that I think few others will. I have certainly done most of the things I would like to have done by the time I’m thinking of retiring.

I have had a fantastic time over the last 12 years. I’ve also had some of the darkest periods of my life during that time, thankfully they have been few. What I want to do next is find some stability and some roots. Yes, I am getting old and sensible, many people never thought that would happen, I’ve always been a rolling stone and gathered no moss. I am a little too self-sufficient for my own good and am fiercely independent. It’s time to get serious, lay down some roots somewhere and make plans for the future. There are many things that I should be organising for the rest of my life which I have done little about. Contrary to that idea, I really would like to travel more, it’s always been one of my goals. So far I have yet to make it out of Europe.

That’s it for now. More thoughts another time.

I’ll be on a long overdue holiday between the 4th and 19th October so if you want me during that time I won’t be available. Also, if you need me urgently before then, you’re pretty much out of luck as I’m at work during the day and working on my CCNA for the next 2 evenings. So there 😉

Eek.

I’ve just been called by the Anthony Nolan Trust, a UK bone marrow donor register, as I am a potential match for someone in need of a transplant. I announce this in a heady cloud of trepidation and the feeling that I could be saving someone’s life if my samples are a good enough match.

I signed up in June or so, when a colleague in need of a transplant himself organised a mass attendance at a testing session. In short, I’m really nervous as I’m pretty squeamish but how can you turn down the opportunity to save someone’s life?

There is a real shortage of blood, bone marrow (particularly male and ethnic minorities) and organ donors in the UK and I urge you to actively go out and give blood and bone marrow samples and sign up for a donor card. You could be saving somebody’s life.

Yes, thanks to Stuart Langridge, I now have audio previews in Nautilus, the Gnome file browser.

It turns out that, according to this comment, the key to audio previews in Nautilus, is Sox. I didn’t know that and nothing about the sox entry in my package manager, be it apt or Synaptic, suggested that this might be the case.

So, thanks for that 🙂

Does anyone know why audio previews in Nautilus don’t work for me? They work for Jono and we’re both running Ubuntu Dapper. I remember him showing me some Ubuntu features way back around the time of the Warty stable and Hoary development versions whereby if you mouse-over an audio file in Nautilus, you get an audio preview, right there in Nautilus.

I run a pretty much stock Ubuntu configuration and don’t mess with audio and Nautilus preview settings, but still, I’ve never had this feature work for me and seeing Jono’s machine a few times recently reminded me of this fact. Bastard 😉

As per default, my preview configuration plays audio previews for local files. Does anyone know of any other issues that might be responsible?

Anyway, I can’t complain too much about Jono as he took 2 hours out of his day to teach me about GStreamer so I can help out with Jokosher and he also rescued my Everybody Loves Eric Raymond t-shirt which I left at LUG Radio Live.

I’m going on a long overdue holiday in 3 weeks and I want to take a good Linux book or 2 along for the ride. I’m going for 2 quiet weeks and so I’d like something for the downtime or when I’m not feeling sociable.

Last time I went on a longish holiday I took this copy of Rebel Code by Glynn Moody, though it seems there is a newer edition now. In many ways, it was the most influential Linux book I’ve read. I was on a quiet, near 3 week holiday with plenty of time for for taking stock and making decisions for the future. I was just getting serious with Linux and this book sealed it for me as it matched my level of understanding at the time. It was at that point that I decided I wanted to make my career in the Linux field.

So this time I’m looking for something equally influential and I’m asking you for recommendations. I read the Richard Stallman biography, Free as in Freedom which painted a pretty good portrait and I’ve also read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond and was bored to tears, I never did finish it.

Programming or other real tech books are no use because I don’t think I’ll be taking a laptop with airport security the way it is at the moment and there’s no way I’m putting one in the luggage hold. I don’t think I’ll find Python, PHP, Perl, Bind or Exim in a Cypriot Internet cafe.

What do you recommend?

I have said this to a few people recently so I thought it would make a reasonable post:

Heh, not quite the guitar God I thought I was. Since buying all of my gear I have come to a number of realisations.

1) I can’t sing.
2) I can’t sing and play guitar at the same time.
3) I’m not as good on the guitar as I thought.
4) I can’t play much lead.
5) I can play some lead better than I thought.
6) I don’t know how to write songs.
7) I have an obsession with 70s bands (The Clash, The Who, The Sex Pistols) and hairstyles (Clash and Pistols).

Which make the grand master plan a little harder.

Aside from this, I’d like to thank everyone who emailed, IMed and commented after reading the last post. Thanks for showing an interest. It warms the heart to know that people actually give a shit 🙂

Also, and this is specific to my closest friends (RACHEL!), just because my blog is mostly about Linux and other bits of computing nomenclature, doesn’t mean you should feel precluded from posting comments and saying hi. I expect you to leave a comment if you have something to say on what I’ve written. I’d be very sad if I thought my oldest friends weren’t leaving me comments, even when the posts are nothing to do with Linux/computer stuff, just because all of other posts are. My blog is specifically about me, it just so happens that Linux is what I spend most of my time doing and most of the other commenters are the same. You can comment on the other stuff if you have something to say. It lets me know you’re still out there and care about what I have to say.

I’m going to go give myself a warm, fuzzy hug 😉 No, not the private kind 😉

Well, I’m quite pleased with myself.

Ever since I was about 17 or 18 I’ve always wanted a couple of guitars in particular. A decent quality Les Paul and a Telecaster. Plus a great sounding amp. On Sunday I went to Birmingham to buy a new VCR (my old one is dead and I have some stuff on VHS which I’d like to save digitally). You’d be surprised how hard it is to get a reasonably priced one these days, nobody wants them and they’re legacy equipment so the prices are higher than for a DVD player. Anyway, so I shopped around and I could get a good VCR for 20 GBP less from Birmingham than anywhere else so I hopped on the train as they won’t deliver to anywhere other than the card billing address.

I was on my way out of Birmingham New Street station, walking down Queensway towards Richer Sounds when I saw a guitar shop over the road. I decided to have a look around and took a fancy to 2 guitars. I mooched around for a few mins, bought some strings for my appalling, lowest common denominator, won’t stay in tune Squier Strat that I bought a few years back and headed off to get my VCR.

On the way back to the station, it occured to me that I could afford, on an impulse buy, to get one of the guitars I wanted, a red sunburst Squier Telecaster Custom with a neck humbucker. I went back into the shop, had another look around and asked if I could try the Squier Tele and an Epiphone Les Paul Custom Black Beauty through a Fender amp and a Marshall.

While Marshall is the king of rock amps, I really like The Sex Pistols guitar sound, raw, raunchy and tangy and so I was interested to hear a Fender amp. I also thought the Tele might sound nice through it. I tried the Tele and liked the feel of it, solid and workman like, which is what I wanted it for. For those that don’t know, guitars sound different to each other. It’s in the wood, the components, the circuitry and the the pickups. A Fender Stratocaster sounds warm, clean and pingy, a Telecaster sounds cold, thin and scratchy. A Gibson Les Paul sounds warm, thick, powerful and bluesy – the archetypal rock lead guitar. A Gibson SG sounds thick and tangy (think AC/DC). Each guitar has it’s own sound and they are useful for different things. Telecasters, despite my description are great for rhythm or backing guitars, while Les Pauls are great for lead and the two sound particularly good when complementing each other. Due to the high cost of Fender and Gibson guitars, many companies have made their own copies, including Fender and Gibson themselves, branding their own copies as Squier and Epiphone respectively, which would rank as semi-pro standard.

Anyway, back to the plot. So I played this Tele and I probably would have bought it anyway. It felt good but sounded a bit shit through the Fender amp. So the shop guy recommended I forget the Fender and try it through a Marshall. Amps again have different sounds, depending on the circuitry of the pre-amp, the speaker quality and whether it uses valves or transistors. Valves sound way better (to me at least) but sometimes blow and aren’t cheap to replace.

I noticed an immediate difference through the Marshall and was set on buying the Tele when the guy came over and passed me the Les Paul Custom. The cool thing about Les Pauls through a good amp is that you can just give it a kind of deadened chug and you get this heavy purring hum come back from the speakers that hits your stomach. I did just that and I started to shake with the sensation. Fucking hell. I played some riffs and some lead parts and the shaking didn’t go away. I was blown to pieces by the sound. I stopped playing and thought for a second. I looked at the guy and told him to price the lot up for me, with guitar bags, spare strings, a couple of guitar stands and plectrums. I’m not going to say how much it was in public, but it was more than a quite a lot. I weighed it up and bought the lot. Plus a Shure SM58 microphone for recording. SM58s are best for vocals and I wanted an SM57 also for miking up the amp, but they didn’t have any, so the guy showed me a trick for turning an SM58 into an SM57. Very useful that and saved me 80 GBP.

The only problem was getting it all home. I’d left my car at Wolves train station and so had to carry everything. After much deliberation and exploration of options I decided that I would have to collect the amp next weekend by car and carried the rest by hand. It was a near nightmare carrying 2 guitars, 4 guitar stands, a microphone box and a VCR but I made it to the car shortly before I breathed my last breath and quietly expired.

So why am I doing all this? Well, I’ve wanted to get into home music recording for years. I was a professional musician for 5 years and have barely played since. I’ve wanted those 2 guitars and that kind of amp since my late teens and now I can just about afford them. With Jokosher getting ready to rock the world, I have the software to do it at no financial cost. I’ve been readying myself to do this for years but have never really gotten to grips with my old tape based 4 track recorder. I already have a bass guitar and a drum machine and I came to the decision that my old strat is just not up to anything useful. I’ve decided to do another jingle for LUG Radio and that was all the excuse I needed to go out and get some gear and be serious about setting up a home studio. Also it might be said that perhaps I’ve missed my chance to make another attempt at a serious recording career by feeling burnt by the last time and hiding under a stone ever since and now I’m deciding to resurrect my musical interest now I’m nearly 30 and having an early mid-life crisis. I’ve already damaged the speaker on my crappy little Fender practice amp that came with my Strat by playing too loud.

I’m not going to try to conquer the world. I can sing in tune, but don’t have an interesting voice and I can’t write songs for shit, but it will be fun just playing around and recording stuff. When I try to write, it either sounds like someone else or I try to overload it with depth of meaning and get lost. I can’t remember the last time anybody said anything useful in a song, not since The Clash and Pistols anyway and I always try to say too much before losing the original point.

After taking a recommendation from Jono and some of the other #Jokosher guys on IRC, I bought an M-Audio Delta 44 sound card for recording. It arrived yesterday and I had a play with it briefly but I will have to read the manual as there are too many capabilities, inputs and outputs from a software point of view to understand before I am able to use it properly. I also took great joy in getting my old guitar effects pedal board and drum machine out for the first time in maybe 6 or 7 years. My drum machine still holds a set of patterns stored as a song for a song I tried to write 8 or 9 years ago, I may have to finish it.

While avoiding going back to the shop and buying a Squier Precision bass and Epiphone SG, I need some good recording headphones and a set of proper studio speakers. A decent bass amp and a midi synth would be nice too, but will have to go on the wanted list with the Precision and the SG, speakers and phones come first. I could also do with sorting out my mess of an office into a PC area and a recording area, only then will the world be mine aaaahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaa.

So, I’m pretty fucking chipper at the mo. Photos of the guitars will follow when I have my amp at home. It will be time for some cheesy ‘gear’ photos 🙂

Well, hello.

A few bits of post LRL info and personal stuff. Firstly I’ll be starting a Cisco Certified Network Administrator course in September which should be cool and hopefully not too hard. I guess I must be the prime example of the UK government’s plan for lifeling learning and ‘upskilling’. Maybe I’m bored of sitting on my arse. Maybe I wanted to do it anyway and my company offered to pay 😉

Wolves LUG meeting at the Pie Factory in Tipton last night which was great. I ordered a Desperate Dan Cow Pie, complete with pastry horns on top and it took me about 45 mins to eat. I was so full I couldn’t sit comfortably afterwards. Had to leave early as I was shattered after a late night on Tuesday too.

I picked up a Creative Soundblaster Live Platinum from Wolves Freecycle which is great news. I’m trying to do another jingle for LUG Radio and last time was a nightmare. The good news is that Jokosher has now been packaged for Ubuntu Edgy and I have a sound card with accessible quarter jack sockets. I have already written the drum pattern so now I just have to set up an Edgy machine or take another look at running CVS gstreamer, as the instructions on the Jokosher site didn’t work for me last time.

A few notes on LRL. It appears that TonyTiger didn’t like my suit and I don’t blame him at all. I don’t plan on doing it again next year. He also detailed the first conversation I had with him. Yeah that was pretty much on the nose. That’s a great description of my conversational style when I’m drunk, though at that point I wasn’t that drunk, or at least I didn’t think I was. The thing with this is that when he said the thing about being Jono’s cousin, I missed a few words from what he said and thought he was Jono’s cousin and Jono’s never mentioned any cousins interested in Linux. I didn’t realise he was the Internet’s TonyTiger. Sorry Tony.

Tony also wrote that one of the great things about the Free, Open Source and Linux world is that nobody has any pretensions of grandeur within the community and everyone hangs out together. You can be chatting to someone at the bar or around the venue and then you realise it’s someone whose software you’ve been using for years like Bastien Nocera or someone whose software you’ve been looking at for ages waiting to use it, like Mirco Muller. These people are just like me and you, just happy to talk about this and that and discuss ways we can improve our software, it’s mad. It’s like hanging out with your favourite musicians, or pop stars, or hanging out with the players from your favourite football team as if you’re one of them, or the people at the top of whatever your field of special interest is. I’m honest, I’m a pretty humble, grass roots Linux user. I’m reasonably technically capable, but I’m no developer, I’m no star of the show. I’ve always been a facilitator rather than a leader, I help other people do what they’re good at. It’s really cool that you hang with all of these amazingly intelligent, talented people and they don’t even think to segregate themselves, because we’re all in it together, sharing the same world, same code, same ideals. Wow.

Ok, so it’s been a week since LUG Radio Live 2006 and was it good? Fuck yeah 🙂

As with last year we met up on the Friday night in the Hogshead pub and it was great to see everyone from last year again. MrBen, Bruno, Neuro, Bastien Nocera and Jon (without an ‘h’, still haven’t worked out your surname yet though Jon) from Red Hat, Aquarion, Pickle, Russ and Jen, Michael Erskine, Robert Postill, Xalior and Lejt, Jonathan Riddell who I did my level best not to drunkenly hassle, plus a whole host of Wolves LUGgers. I have to say, my promise not to drink as much as last year was just about fulfilled, it was a close thing though. Oh and by the way, Michael Erskine is definitely the hardest bloke at LRL and a genuinely lovely bloke too.

I also got chance to have a good chat with Mirco Muller about Lowfat and I hope to talk more about that later.

Well we were all supposed to go home when the Hogshead finally kicked us out and the whole LRL tribe hauled ass around the city centre trying to find somewhere else that would let us in. Thankfully, nowhere would and the responsible members of the LRL community sloped disappointedly off back to their respective homes and hotels. Not so for me or the Red Hat guys. We continued to to trapse the city centre and found ourselves at the dreadful and almost empty Planet nightclub’s downstairs room where I ponied up for a round of Red Stripes. The next hour or so was filled with me mostly hassling everyone with my camera, drinking Red Stripe and dancing to hideous rock music, though my request for Hysteria by Muse was thankfully fulfilled and I air bass-guitared my way through it in the “I’m the best and most important dancer in the room” way of the irretrievably inebriated.

The Red Hat guys tired of the incessant Red Stripe and rock music around half 2 or so and despite my initial and continuous complaints at not going home at 1, Carl kept me there until at least 3am, convinced that he was about to pull the girl that looked like Wurzel Gummage. Thankfully, Carl gave in and we retired, Wurzel free and got back to my gaff at half 3.

4 hours later I drunkenly awoke and prepared to spend a day being hungover and trying not to fuck up the audio recording for the second year on the trot. I dressed in my second annual disgusting suit and headed to the venue. As with last year my suit was met by a variety of bemused stares, “fucking hell”s and “oh my God”s. Perfect 🙂

So, rather than go through every talk blow by blow, I guess it would be best to say what I enjoyed most and what wasn’t so good. For the first 2 hours of the morning I was tied to one of the lightning talk rooms looking after the speakers and audio equipment. Sadly I didn’t make many of the BOFs or talks over the weekend that I had hoped to, but Mirco Muller on Lowfat was outstanding. Also fascinating was Bastien Nocera talking about where Gnome should be going. I agree completely that to compete we need our own web services which export and APIs that can be accessed from the Gnome desktop. Everybody is using del.icio.us and flickr and so on. With Google rampaging to make the OS irrelevent then we need attractive web services which we can tie in to. In the interests of a Free system, we need Free web services. And yes of course, those services need to help us get laid 😉

As I said I missed quite a lot of the stuff I wanted to see, either due to responsibilities or lack of steam, but I caught some of John Leach’s talk on Everybody Loves Eric Raymond, which was good fun, some of Kat, Jen and Phated’s talk on being women in Open Source, which highlighted some of the behaviours we men seem to take as normal which are actually quite offensive. I don’t claim to know the historical reasons for why IT is so male dominated but I guess we are in a status quo where we tend to behave like a big boys club and like in any sexual vacuum, we gravitate immediately to the few women around by being over helpful, rude, overtly sexual and irritating, which of course keeps women away. Think we can all think of circumstances where we could improve on that score, even the most enlightened of us. Take “a/s/l” and “are you fit?” off your list of things to ask girls on irc.

I thought that Simon Phipps of Sun made a great deal of sense in the Mass Debate, though I didn’t catch his own talk. I thought that Stephen Lamb of Microsoft was a good sport for putting his head in the lion’s mouth as it were, but as gamely as he tried, I didn’t take much of what he said as useful to my world. Again, I didn’t catch his own talk, I only saw him in the Mass Debate. He made a point about kernel modules needing checksums for security reasons and well it’s a great idea when your kernel is hacked to pieces with third party bolt ons and atom-bombed on a daily basis by every malicious software writer in the world, *and* when nobody at all likes you, *and* when you have an instrinsically broken, Swiss cheese security model. But I’d like to think we have years to go before we have to worry about the security of kernel modules, expecially as third party modules are few outside of your distributor’s kernel. Besides, packages installed using the Debian and Fedora Core package managers are checksummed by default. I’d be worried if we needed to checksum our kernel modules at loading time. I will also be worried if that comment comes back to bite me in the ass in the next few years 😉

The Live and Unleashed recording as always was great fun but maybe could have done with more of last year’s singling out members of the audience and publicly abusing them. Apparently, the guys were lambasted after last year’s show for not actually discussing anything about Linux in the live recording, so maybe this was a natural reaction. Besides, I’m being a little unfair as plenty of attendees were abused in front of everyone.

Possibly the real highlight for me was Bruno “He’s basically French” Bord’s talk – This Talk May Contain Swearing. A lively, humourous and outstandingly well told journey through the quality and quantity of swearing on LUG Radio, over an 11 episode sample. For someone who’s primary language is not English, his comic timing was excellent and the talk was outrageously funny. Bruno, you’re a king 🙂

By Saturday evening I slowly started to crumble from my painful, throbbing hangover, lack of sleep and inability to go anywhere safely due to my disgusting suit, so after getting extremely irritable with my friend Carl, we grabbed some food and Carl went out to meet friends and I pretty much fell asleep where I lay and missed the LRL party. Sorry about that. Once again, that will teach me a lesson for staying out late and getting wrecked the night before LRL.

Sunday morning I took my PC to join in the LAN gaming where I promtly spent most of the rest of the day getting my ass blown to pieces by various people, not least by Moitio whom I accused of having a blog full of photos of fit birds, but alas I was wrong and he showed me who was boss by blowing me to shit with endless mines. Arsehole 😉

And that was largely it. Thanks to the LRL guys for awarding me with a free game from Tux Games for my pathetically small amount of help this year. The final play out of the event was when pretty much everyone who was still in Wolves met up at the Quality (Ch)Inn. It was really good to unwind with everyone and I got chatting to Corey Something from NYC. Sorry man, you’re surname had too many consonants to remember 😉 Hanging out at the Chinn was a great way to end the weekend. Sadly I had to go home earlyish as I was at work in the morning, but the farewell made glad I’d turned up in the first place. We have a great bunch of people here.

New friends for this year are Tony ‘tonytiger’ Whitmore who is an absolute God send and really genuine guy. Thanks for looking after the audio recordings for me dude 🙂 Seb Payne who looks about 14 and gets teased a lot for it but spoke authoritively on iFolder, Bryn who was the square headed ginger mate of one of last year’s concessionees and is a cool bloke, Phated – well what can I say about Phated that hasn’t already been said? She came all of the way from Singapore and made quite an impact to say the least. Finally, having probably missed out a great load of people, there is Felim Whiteley who despite losing all of his luggage on the way back from holiday came down anyway and became my new nemesis 😉 It was good to meet you man, you are a legend 🙂

To finish up, my LRL 2006 photos are on flickr here and the LRL 2006 flickr group is here (including ones of my horrific suit in Ron’s photos). As a side note, my LRL 2005 photos are now here.

See you all next year 🙂

Bumholes. I upgraded WordPress to the latest stable version a few weeks ago and it’s being a bit weird ever since. I moved from a Fedora Core 4 server to a Debian Sarge server as the FC machine kept dying for hardware reasons and besides, I much prefer Debian. After moving machines, I then upgraded WordPress and all of my plugins.

This move necessitated exporting my blog database in MySQL 4.0 format out of a MySQL 4.1 server, so I could import it into the 4.0 server on Debian. I managed to do this after a few hours of fiddling, but new blog posts seems to produce database errors, which I fixed by making the ID field of each table auto-increment. I imported my blogroll from Bloglines, but don’t seem to be able to delete the ones I don’t want, or any duplicates.

So, to summarise, if you have any problems with my blog let me know.

Thought I better update the world with the latest and greatest achievements in my oh so very important life.

Well things have been kinda bumpy but are now settling down. First of all, I broke up with my girlfriend. Long story that I won’t be telling here. I thought I was going to have to find somewhere else to live for a while but it’s all settled now. I went out in Manchester 2 weekends ago, well the details might have been more in depth if I were writing this a day or 2 afterwards, but now I’ll settle for saying I had a great weekend but my hangover was shocking and lengthy.

This last weekend was LUG Radio Live and well I hope to post on that separately before the memories fade. Again the hangover was shocking and lengthy.

I have recently noticed how bad my hangovers are compared to before and they used to be really bad then. I don’t drink very often these days but it has to be said that when I do, it’s generally quite heavily. The problem is that I burn alcohol off very slowly and consequently wake up drunk with a hangover a few hours away while my friends wake up with a fuzzy head and feel clear by late morning, having drunk the same as me. I’ve always had very bad hangovers, but just lately I’ve really been laid low by a night on the tiles. A Saturday night out takes me until Wednesday to feel back to normal. I wouldn’t mind so much if I was drinking 12 pints of lager and a cocktail of spirits, but I’m drinking maybe 6 or 7 beers and possibly a JD and coke. Outrageous. Then again, I am 30 years old in October, sob sob 😉

See you all at the bar 😉

Thats right, from the heart of Wolverhampton, LUG Radio Live 2006 is this weekend, 22nd and 23rd July 2006 at the University of Wolverhampton’s Student Union bar and it’s only 5 of your GB pounds to get in, so you have no excuses for not being there. Tickets here.

If you’re not sure whether to come or not, you really should come. Last year was an absolute scream and made me feel very proud to be part of such a fun and welcoming community. There are some great speakers, including Mark Shuttleworth – Ubuntu head honcho and space travelling millionaire, Simon Phipps of Sun, Stephen Lamb of ahem… Microsoft, Michael Meeks of OpenOffice.org and many other things, ‘The Reverend’ Ted Haeger of Novell, Gerv Markham of Mozilla – one of last years highlights for me, Bastien Nocera of Gnome and Red Hat and Jonathan Riddell of Kubuntu.

Of personal interest to me are Jonathan Haslam on DTrace, John Leach on Everybody Loves Eric Raymond, Matthew Bloch on Virtualisation and Mirco Müller talking about Lowfat, amongst many, many more.

And of course who could forget LUG Radio community heroes Ben ‘mrBen’ Thorpe and Bruno ‘he’s basically French’ Bord, aka kNo`. Aside from being community heroes, they really are great guys.

On top of all this, there is also LAN gaming, BOF (birds of a feather) sessions, where you sit and discuss with like-minded people about your chosen BOF topic, then theres the exhibition area with the likes of Gnome, Ubuntu, Debian, O’Reilly, Fedora, Novell, Linspire, Bytemark, OpenSolaris and heaps of other people.

Also in line are are a LUG Radio Live recording and the shaving of Jono’s beard in aid of Amnesty International (donate here), the biggest donor will get to do the shaving.

Rumour has it, there are even going to be some girls there. Real ones. But you shouldn’t stare as Kat Goodwin, Jen Phillips and Phated will be talking about women in open source and probably about the attitude of all us slack-jawed male gawpers.

The schedule is here. Got nowhere to stay? The accomodation section is here.

Please come, it’s a truly great, heart-warming time. You may even get to see me so drunk I can only open one eye (again, though I’ll try not to bother Jonathan Riddell all night this time) and possibly see me in the most disgusting suit in the world (again, again).

Be there or be != geek.

Yeah, I’ve been quiet recently, a lot of personal stuff going on and I didn’t feel inclined to go over it here, nor did I have the time, but my future is looking rather different now, not necessarily better or worse, just different. More details as they become apparent.

On the tech side, I have moved my domains to a new server. The old one kept dying in the heat, whether the PSU was faulty as has happened with many of the same servers, or the memory was bad or just the heat itself, the thing kept turning off so I moved it to my mail server which has been reliable despite being on the same kind of hardware. I also took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest versions of WordPress and all of my plugins.

The fate of the old server was sealed the other day when I spent 20 mins writing a post to tell you all to come to LUG Radio Live 2006 and the server went down just before I hit submit and of course the browser back button couldn’t save me. So let this serve as warning that you should go to LRL2006. I will post a proper notice soon 😉

Anyway, hope you’re all well.

Are you?

I upgraded to Dapper on Sunday as if it weren’t obvious by the XGL post. It really was easy. If you’re already running Breezy, just issue:

gksudo update-manager

from a command prompt and click the Upgrade button. Thats it. Of course Ubuntu Dapper was released properly today.

If you’ve never used Linux before, or tried it long ago and found that either it was shit, you didn’t like it or your hardware didn’t work, then you should try the Ubuntu Linux Desktop CD which will run when your PC boots and it won’t affect your existing Windows installation. It’s a great way to try Linux to see if you like it and to see whether it works on your PC. Please go and try it. if you like it, the CD allows you to install it, but you don’t have to, you can just reboot, take the CD out and go back to Windows.

Go on, you’re bored of not knowing what I’m on about all the time, give it a try, just don’t run the permanent hard disk installer once you’ve booted from the CD-ROM if you don’t want it on your PC.

UPDATE: I removed the ‘-d’ from the update command given above as it instructs the update manager to upgrade to the development version, which, once Dapper was released means you would be updating to a hideously unstable early development version. Apologies.

I’m loathed to put this as Part 1 or anything because then I’ll be obliged to make Parts 2, 3 and n.

Well I’ve been faffing with Asterisk for months now, slowly going nowhere, mainly due to having little or no time to put into it at work when ‘real work’ needs to be done, not having the time or the environment to concentrate on research properly or absorbing the docs, then having phones that don’t work, then having phones that work some of the time and well blah, blah.

About a month or so ago I had a breakthrough when phones actually started calling each other, which, stupid as it sounds took me ages to get right, what with never having used Asterisk before meaning I didn’t know when something looked wrong. Re-flashing the phones meant they picked up the server and then finding a commented out extension in a config file, even though I had added it using the web interface (everytime I added a new extension it would uncomment the previous extension and comment out the new one…).

Well yesteday, having been playing with incoming and outgoing calls via the PSTN using a Digium TDM-400 card, something didn’t seem right and, again, never having seen a working Asterisk box, I didn’t know whether some of the errors I was seeing were normal or not. It was only when I started playing with using the zaptel configuration tools that I realised that the error I was getting didn’t mean what I thought and why the thing wouldn’t dial out was due to the fact that the machine I was using wasn’t recognising the Digium card properly. A quick lspci revealed this to be true, I have no idea why, but possibly because I was using a cheap test machine with an SiS chipset as the Digium card wouldn’t fit in the case properly of the server I was going to use originally.

Well anyway, I wasn’t going to use this machine as a production server anyway, it was a proof of concept machine to see if Asterisk could do what we wanted (nothing that complicated to be honest). So, already sold on the idea, I made a fresh install of the latest Asterisk@Home (yeah I’m a wuss) on some proper server hardware and heh, I had it up in an hour or so, secured it and played with the PSTN again today. A bit of playing with the trunks and incoming and outgoing routes and I made my first calls in and out. I was really pleased to have it working, I left myself stupid smug answerphone messages.

The configuration is primitive at the moment, all calls out go over the PSTN and all incoming calls ring all extensions, but I guess thats to be expected. What I need to do now is assess call charges from BT and various SIP providers, analyse our call patterns and costs (mobile/international/regional) and then design a proper call plan. I also need to design a proper menu system and Digitial Receptionist so that people can get put through to the right person first time, sort out a default office voicemail, remote extensions over VPNs and arrange various out of hours and out of office forwarding to real home or mobile phones. This will be more evolutionary according to need, rather than revolutionary by designing everything from the beginning I suspect, but some planning won’t hurt at all, grumble…

I think thats about it on this subject, speak soon.

Woo, it’s fucking weird in here… Kinda like being a goldfish living in a bowl, with the whole wobbly windows thing.

Yeah, I know I’m late to the party, almost last I think, but yeah it’s cool. The spinny cube thing with the desktop changer is cool as hell and so is the OS X Expose thing with the F12 button. I will play with some more of the effects another time and maybe I will make it go to some extremes for extra trippy moments. Performance is ok on my 128MB ATI 9500 Pro, though admittedly I havent done much yet. Just a shame I need to run a proprietary driver…

All in all, cool as fuck and it will moisten the underwear of the hardest Windows monkey. OS X can take a spoon and eat my ass.

Yeah, fuck, it’s been nearly a month again. I’m sorry, don’t know what I’m doing these days, I just don’t seem to have 5 minutes to spare.

So first news is that I have a new car, a brand new BMW Mini:

So, woo for me! I gotta be honest, I’m not much into cars and I’m not into speed or high performance, so, Carl, stop telling me I could have had X, Y or Z, but I love it. I just want to get from A to B and in comfort and that I can now do. (Note, the front garden is a work in progress, hence dead weeds and various bits of scrap lying around waiting to be disposed of…)

Last weekend I went up to Manchester for my friend Celine’s birthday. We had a great time, it was good to catch up with Celine, Carl and Vaj again as I don’t think I’ve seen any of them since my house warming-cum-birthday party at the beginning of November (my birthday is at the end of October for eagle-eyed gift shoppers ;)). We went to club called 5th Avenue, which, while not being a cultural mecca or The Ritz, was my kinda club and I loved it, it reminded me of Friday nights in Wolverhampton’s Dorchester, a club so cool we are still having reunions nearly 10 years after it closed down.

On to this weeks film recommendations. I watch a lot of films, in the months since the last time I made some recommendations, I watched Jarhead which was excellent, probably the first in the next generation of war epics about Iraq. It reminded me quite a bit of Full Metal Jacket, my only criticism was that it didn’t seem to conclude anything. Syriana promised a lot but was something of a let down. It was a huge, sprawling, multi-threaded picture which was difficult to follow and didn’t seem to tie up at the end, leaving me to wonder what the point of some of the different threads was. The only conclusion was to display how sordid the power-hungry dual interests of oil and politics are when they combine.

More recently, Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic was unmissable, a great portrayal of a tortured, intoxicated, stumbling soul. Tristan and Isolde was excellent, reminiscent of a cross between Braveheart and Romeo and Juliet – take your partner to see this one. Slither was a fun, entertaining film to watch with friends, though not likely to change your life. It’s a witty, if not classic, light horror. I watched V for Vendetta the other day which I thought was great. I saw a number of parallels with 1984 and I really enjoyed it, never having read the original story. At times, it seemed a bit uncool, rather like those black and white 50s sci-fi series I saw as a kid, especially when V was talking in the Fawkesian mask and bobbed hair, but it was a really good film. And Natalie Portman, as always was blissful.

One other film I saw recently was Hostel, the Tarantino/Eli Roth horror. I saw it at the cinema and having missed maybe the first 10 minutes were only 15 or so minutes away from some real gut-wrenchingly brutal scenes. I’ve always been kinda proud of being able to stomach some really challenging films and I like watching stuff that will cause a strong reaction but this was too much for me. Being late and only really knowing it was a strong horror, I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw and in the middle of some really strong scenes I decided that if the film continued like this then we couldn’t watch it so we left. I have since found out that most of the really strong gore was over after that part and I regret leaving now, but man it was rough. Now I know the film doesn’t carry on like that throughout I will have to watch the rest.

On to more technical things, I spent the other weekend researching some spam filtering techniques and applied them. In principle, some were a little over the top and some were perfectly reasonable. The over strong ones were pulled out immediately when I realised they were blocking things that my users were perfectly entitled to receive. However, I noted a while back that all UK universities and AOL now block mail from systems where the forward and reverse DNS lookups don’t match, since most spam is now generated by virus infected PCs around the world, not legitimate mail servers that simply send out spam. So, I implemented this, I also blocked mail from domains which didn’t have DNS MX records, machines which didn’t have fully qualified domain names and any bounce messages that don’t contain my domain in the original message-ID.

To me, these all seem perfectly reasonable, I already drop mail from anyone who claims to be my mail server, who opens with an IP only HELO statement, servers in a few reliable spam blacklists and anyone mailing viruses or banned file extensions. Unfortunately, my new policies seemed to break the whole world. Or more specifically, the whole world seems to be broken and playing by the rules means you don’t get to receive any mail. Genuine, legitimate mail from properly configured servers got through but it seems that loads and loads and loads of servers are badly configured. The spam rate dropped to almost zero, a few still got through, but the amount of genuine mail that failed was astonishing. I mailed a few sysadmins on postmaster and hostmaster addresses (an RFC requirement for mail and DNS servers!) to find that those addresses didn’t exist, in one case I trawled around and found and address for one admin and mailed him, he still hasn’t replied.

In the end some of my users were losing important mail from so many places it was impossible to whitelist every sender or coax every (well, any) mail admin to do anything about this stuff that I had to pull the rules and let the spam rain down. It appears that about 2 or 3 years ago, AT&T did the same thing and had to make the same climbdown. I was really fucked off.

People: if you are going to run a mail server make sure you have forward and reverse DNS lookups that match. Make sure you have webmaster, hostmaster, postmaster and abuse email addresses that actually point to a real person. Implement an SPF record in your DNS to say which hosts can send mail for your domain. Make sure your mail bounce messages contain the domain name of the sender or sending mail server.

In more geek news, I have to decide whether to go back to uni and finish my degree or not. To be honest I don’t think I can work and finish my degree at the same time and I can’t afford to not work, so I think that partly answers the problem, but also I don’t think a degree is particularly useful in career terms for what I want to do. I’m far more interested in doing a CCNA which I think will be inifinitely more useful. The only downside of not going back to finish my degree is that having a Diploma in Higher Education will be bad for my CV as it will look like I can’t finish what I start, which is not the case at all, it’s just that the whole thing made me so miserable I thought I was going to crack up and I chose my well-being above all else. It also looks like the Student Loans Company might be shafting me on the interest as my repayments don’t cover what I’m being charged in interest every month by about a third. Have to sort that out. And that…

The Blender project, an Open-Source 3D animation modelling and rendering software project has finally announced the release of their Orange project, Elephants Dream, an animated movie available for download free of charge. At this stage I have no idea what it’s about or whether it’s any good, but if it is it will surely raise the focus on Blender which has been plugging away for a few years doing great stuff without any real recognition from the major studios. Hopefully people will now begin to see that Blender is capable of results similar to it’s proprietary competitors. For non-geeks, did you know that most of the animated movies in the cinemas are rendered on Linux? No you probably didn’t, but off the top of my head, Toy Story and the sinking scenes from the Titanic certainly were, amongst many other household names you would recognise.

Non-geeks may now re-enter the room. Looks like I will be going on holiday for the last 2 weeks in June if I can get the right deal and time off work. I’ve been saving since Christmas for a nice holiday and can just about afford what we want. Originally we wanted to go the Caribbean (particularly the Dominican Republic) or Mexico, but we are on the brink of being ready to go and well, it’s winter/rainy season over there, which means it’s cheap, still warm compared to here, but also liable to have hurricanes, which is not my idea of a holiday. Besides I’d rather go when it was hotter there but I’m not prepared to keep waiting until November. So, it looks like it might be Egypt instead with lots of water sports etc. The only other issue to be cleared up here is to try not to miss the World Cup…

I’ve been green fingered recently. I’ve planted and grown pumpkins, carrots, peppers, leeks, brocolli, brussel sprouts, sunflowers, onions, spring onions and now I have strawberry plants. I also have a compost heap. Sad I know, but it’s fun watching stuff grow and know that you did it yourself. It’s also great for teaching kids where food comes from and weaning them off all of that horrible, processed meat shit they get served in burgers, sausages and chicken dippers. With help from my parents I’ve really started to get our enormously overgrown garden under control. It’s only halfway there of course but if we stay here for another year or two it should be in good shape.

Alongside recycling waste paper, glass and plastic, using energy efficient lightbulbs and driving as little as possible, composting is one the best things you can do for your environment. All vegetable kitchen and garden waste can go on the pile (never any animal waste or animal products!) and you can use it to plant stuff in. My friend Dan visited a community where they were completely self-sufficient, grew all of their own food in their own compost. Wouldn’t that be cool? People in the UK can get a cut-price composting bin from here.

I think that’s it for now, I’d better go and do something productive with my day. See y’all 🙂

This is a polite reminder that the URL for my blog is now http://blog.adamsweet.org/, not http://blog.drinky.org.uk. I have left blog.drinky.org.uk as a pointer for now but you should update your links to point the correct URL if you are still using the old one.

That concludes this public service announcement. Meh.