Category Archives: General

Who should you vote for?

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Just did a quick political quiz. Results unsurprising:

Who Should You Vote For?

Who should I vote for? v2

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour 3
Conservative -27
Liberal Democrat 43
UKIP -19
Green 43

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

You should vote: Green

The Green Party, which is of course strong on environmental issues, takes a strong position on welfare issues, but was firmly against the war in Iraq. Other key concerns are cannabis, where the party takes a liberal line, and foxhunting, which unsurprisingly the Greens are firmly against. The Greens are also anti-Europe.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

I voted neutral on the things I don’t really know that much about, like Europe – I don’t have an economic mind, but I didn’t vote against a ban on public smoking. However coming out as a Lib Dem and Green voter doesn’t surprise me.

I think the Labour party have come up with an interesting argument against voting for the Lib Dems. They know they’ve pissed off a lot of their supporters who will now vote Lib Dem, but they’ve tried to strike fear into them by claiming that if 1 in 10 Labour voters were to vote for the Liberal Democrats, then it could let the Conservatives into government, which I don’t think many people want at all. FUD. It might be true, many people now view the Lib Dems as the rational alternative to the Labour party who many have lost faith in, unlike the Tories who are the sinister right-wing alternative. Labour will lose far more votes to the Lib Dems than to any other party. The outcome will be interesting. I think I might bring forward my plans to live in another country if the Conservatives win the election, or the BNP win any seats. Horror of horrors. Or might it be called a Holocaust?

Busy doing everything and nothing

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As always.

I’ve got a million things going on and not enough time to do them all. My cold has now gone thankfully, but I’ve spent the last week in a flurry of activity.

I’ve been trying to restore some order to the wreckage of my degree, but none of my lecturers seem to be replying. I’ve been trying to salvage myself from financial disaster by finding a job and selling everything I don’t need, thats spare machines, a lot of books etc. Although this is early in the process, again nobody seems to be replying. I think it’s overdraft extension time again, but this will max out the overdraft as far as it will go. I really don’t know where my money has gone. I know I’ve bought a few expensive things but they went on my credit card. I looked at my bank statement and can’t see what I bought. Food. A few nights out. Nothing that extravagant. I now have to tax my car and live on the change until I can find a job. Now consider that I don’t officially finish uni for another 6 weeks and I have bills in that period that total £220 (phone, laptop repayments, internet connection, credit card repayments…) not counting car tax, food, travel or entertainment.

Hopefully my ass on a street corner near you will not be amongst those things for sale…

So aside from all that I went away to Shrewsbury for the weekend 2 weeks ago (cost free!), with my girlfriend and a load of people from uni, which was great. I’ve been trying to give up smoking again and have been getting through a load of nicotine gum, though I’ve nearly run out and buying some more isn’t an option.

My beloved TFT monitor is being collected today as I’m sending it back for replacement as the image ghosting is not good enough for me, I spent a lot of my credit card company’s money on it and I’m not going to settle for an imperfect picture. So now I’m back on my big, dull, 1983 looking, uncomfortable feeling 17″ Dell monitor at 1024×768. Man, does it feel pokey and up-close after having a nice 17″ TFT sitting at a comfortable distance away at 1280×1024. I’ve been spoiled after only 2 weeks.

I’ve also spent a couple of days trying to sort out a decent CV and covering letter for my girlfriend who has been offered a place on a dental nursing course. To take up the offer she has to find her own placement in a dental practice, except all of the ones she’s phoned have just told her to fuck off. She’s never done anything like this and I’ve always been pretty good at getting jobs and doing interviews and so on so I did all the letters and CVs and prepared them all for being mailed out. The very day after the mail out she got a call offering an interview so I then spent the night prepping her for the interview before going for a few drinks with a friend of mine who has had some bad news about a family member.

On Saturday night I went with a few people to a friend’s house for a few late night beers. I don’t think anyone was sober but my friend started to embarrass me by making claims about my sexual habits in front of a few people I’d never met before. I decided to give him some back, which pissed him off and we ended up arguing and he asked me to leave. Prick. Seems it’s ok to say embarrass me in front of my new girlfriend and some people I’ve never met before, but another question entirely when I do it back, backed up by some evidence.

Today and yesterday I’ve mostly been trying to sort my life out as much as I have done every other day for the last few weeks. The list of things to do doesn’t seem to get smaller. Tasks for the next few days include go to the doctors to find out whether I’m losing my marbles or not, vote, go to the dentist which I can’t afford to pay for but they were going to take me off the register and I’d have to find a new dentist because I haven’ t been for so long, make some PCs to sell so I can keep my ass a narrow passage, try to get in touch with my lecturers again and try to find a job.

I think I have to go to Huddersfield this weekend, the petrol looks like it will be paid for but it’s still something I could do without as it will involve a night out and I can’t afford it.

Oh, I just remembered the main thing I wanted to talk about in this otherwise depressing post. Yesterday the former lead singer of my band gave me a call for the first time in a long while. He now works up in the Laked District as a sound recording lecturer at a college. He asked for my opinion on a band that he recorded.

They’re all 16, school dropouts on behavioural grounds, have been together for around 4 weeks and to be honest are quite possibly the best unsigned band I’ve ever heard. Now I was a professional musician for 5 years, I’ve seen almost as many unsigned bands as the entire A&R department of Sony and EMI etc put together. The songs are great, the musicianship is flawless and they have a male vocalist, a female vocalist and male rapper who all sound great which means they can pretty much do anything they want to. This is not some cheesy, bunch of shit, thrown together, ‘lets play crap pop songs’ effort. These guys are for real. After giving him my opinion, which was essentially (though naturally I was far more verbose at the time) that they’ve got it made if they can hold it together when the spotlight falls on them and that they are allowed to mature physically a little (they look young and their voices sound young), he asked me if I would be willing to get involved. I’m quite excited by this, people who know me well enough will tell you that my opinion on music is brutal and mostly right on the button. I either love it or hate it, which means they are great or it just may not be my taste, the alternative is that I don’t care which means they weren’t good enough to provoke a reaction. I have no real middle ground with good bands and this band amazed me. Unfortunately however, with all my crap going on I can’t really do much for now. I need a job and I need to sort out my degree. Then I’ll be able to think about it, but I won’t waste too much time looking a gift horse in the mouth. I think I can really help this band go somewhere and I think they’d appreciate my attention to detail and my ability to focus them into a cohesive unit and saleable product, which in terms of career prospects and their own success, is what needs to happen for them right now. Lets see how this one develops.

Anyway, I better call it a day for now. Apologies for the depressing drivel.

Peace.

Ill

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I have a cold. It’s all my friend Carl’s fault. He was blowing his snotty nose all weekend. Admittedly I’m not exactly dying, it’s what people might call ‘Man Flu’, but I feel pretty rough.

It’s all Carl’s fault.

New Hardware

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Always a good thing 😀

I treated myself. I’ve been after a TFT monitor for ages as I have to keep my curtains closed due to the sun hitting my monitor and it’s quite large and so has to sit in the corner of the desk causing me to crane my neck at a slightly uncomfortable angle. I remember a friend telling me that the prices were due to fall in early 2005, so I checked and checked and saw no sign of this until Monday night, when I saw a 17″ LG L1715S on www.ebuyer.com for £150.01 inc VAT so I pounced on a whim. It’s a little extravagant for someone with no money and a credit card but I spend about 10 hours a day staring at my monitor so it’s worth the difference it will make.

I also treated myself to a 24 port US Robotics 10/100 ethernet switch as my old 8 port switch is pretty much full and I anticipate needing something with more ports for taking to events like What the Hack and LUG Radio Live 2005.

Both of these arrived today and I dropped the switch in for the old 8 port switch within about 15 seconds. The VGA cable for the TFT monitor wasn’t long enough to stretch around my desk, luckily it’s detatchable and I have a longer one spare. So far the monitor seems great, I have set it up with the proper horizontal and vertical refresh rates in xorg.conf and added 2 extra resolutions of 1280×1024 and 1152×864 alongside the usual 1024×768 et al. 1024 made my GUI seem too large and 1280 makes the web look too small, I haven’t tried 1152 yet, maybe that will be more comfortable.

The only real criticism I have of this monitor so far if that there is a small amount of faint left to right ghosting, about 1cm wide. It’s predominantly along the left-hand screen edge, apparently to do with the backlighting, but other than that it’s great. Played Wolf ET with no problems at all.

The other day, after being refused the free mobile phone upgrade in the O2 store that I was entitled to as part of my contract, I received a letter from them offering me a free upgrade. Pricks. So I took it and I now have a nice shiny Sony Ericsson K700i as recommended by Aq.

As my old phone was a Nokia 8310, I had to work out how to transfer my contacts from it to the K700i. The K700i imported all of my contacts from the SIM card but a while back my Nokia went weird and started saving everything to the phone memory rather than the SIM. I don’t have any bluetooth devices, a cable, or mobile internet connectivity in my contract and the only IrDA devices are my laptop (Ubuntu), my sisters old WinME PC and the two phones themselves. I couldn’t work out how to do it by direct phone to phone IrDA though I didn’t try very hard. I looked at MultiSync but it doesn’t seem to do Nokia, I tried to find Gnokii in my Ubuntu repositories but I must have spelt it wrongly because I couldn’t find it last night, though I could today when it was too late.

So anyway, I had to use my sister’s Windows box and the Nokia Phone Suite (I used an old version apparently) to get my contacts etc off the phone and onto a PC, then to my Ubuntu laptop. I couldn’t get MultiSync to talk to my K700i via IrDA so I ended up typing the missing numbers in by hand. Meh. I should have used the Windows only CD that came with the K700i but I couldn’t be arsed. I obviously wasn’t thinking clearly.

Recommendations for a Linux compatible bluetooth dongle are welcome. It’s not something I know about.

While we’re on the subject, I also found this link for all things Nokia under Linux. And this one for using the K700i with Linux.

Also the weird hangs and power-offs haven’t occured since I took the side panel off my PC so it looks like it was a cooling issue, I’ll have to get some more fans.

Well anyway, I have a new phone, a new 17″ TFT monitor and a new 24 port network switch so I’m quite happy. Just don’t tell my credit card company 😀

Oh and volunteers to do my uni assignments, a free holiday in Barbados, a guaranteed £50k a year job messing with Linux and being sexually abused by Michelle Trachtenberg (aka Buffy’s sister, Celeste from 6 Feet Under and the chick from Euro Trip, who I happen to think looks like my girlfriend at times ;)) are the only things that could make me happier at the moment.

Waiting for power

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Are we so far gone down the electronic entertainment rabbit hole that people have forgotten what else to do?

A few times recently we’ve had power cuts and I’ve observed a number of people sitting there in front of the hi-fi/TV/PC/games console/whatever waiting for it to come back on. Just sitting there. Waiting. Waiting for the electronic entertainment to start again. Sometimes for an hour or 2.

My god. Am I the only person that knows about things called books and other non-power dependent activities?

Guilt…

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I just discovered that What The Hack, for which I have a ticket, coincides with my girlfriend’s birthday, the first one for either of us since we got together. We’ve not been together that long so I’ve not really known her birthday until recently. Thankfully she’s not laying the law down to me and at least I can try to work out what to do. I’m not sure whether the ticket is refundable or transferrable to someone else but I would feel terrible if I missed her birthday. I think she’s willing to forgive my discovery if I buy her a car 😉

This reminds me a lot of the scene from Trainspotting in the nightclub where Tommy is telling Spud about his girlfriend Lizzy going nuts at him for forgetting her birthday and buying a ticket for an Iggy Pop gig which is on the same night. The scene is intercut with shots of Lizzy in the nightclub toilets talking to Spud’s girlfriend Gail explaining the same situation. The scene closes with Lizzy and Gail returning from the toilet and interrupting Tommy and Spud’s conversation by saying, “What yoo talkin’ aboot?”, they look nervously at each other and reply, “Football. What yoo talkin’ aboot?” to which they smugly respond with, “Shopping.” Sadly this is the penultimate milestone on the road to the end of Tommy’s relationship with Lizzy, the beginning of a downward spiral that results in Tommy becoming a heroin addict like his friends and ultimately his death.

Hopefully the same will not come of me.

Other people’s blogs and my own sanity

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It seems other people are saying more interesting things than me at the moment.

Firstly, Ade went on a course at Microsoft’s UK HQ in Reading on single sign on and *nix to Active Directory authentication etc. Which is something I would like to be able to deploy using free/open tools.

Also Aq reminded me that hotkeys provides similar functionality to lineak. Which is that it makes those extra Internet or multimedia keys on your keyboard do something useful. I’ve used lineak for this before with decent results, but lineak’s gui config frontends are not in Ubuntu at the moment and the lineak team has stopped supporting the Gnome frontend, leaving only the KDE one (or text editor).

He also has an excellent post about the poster campaign by the Conservative Party (aka the Tories, or Tory (singular)) for the forthcoming UK political elections. The Conservative Party are focusing on several contentious issues for their election campaign, one of which is that of immigration. These posters have caused enough outrage that they are being vandalised to great comic effect. Aq has produced a little web app to enable you to create your own Tory poster. Here is mine:

Tory Poster

Disclaimer: No Tories were hurt in the making of this poster and no offence is intended to genuine victims. Humour style a la Doug Stanhope, not to be taken literally and I don’t care about your political opinions, I will not approve any screaming insults in my comments.

This brings up an issue that worries me a lot. With the flames of racial tension being fanned by several highly read, sensationalist tabloid newspapers screaming about the issue of immigration, the Conservative Party, as the mainstream right-wing political party and nearest rival to the governing Labour Party, are attempting to draw in some of the extreme right-wing voters to boost their chances of election by campaigning hard on the immigration issue.

After seeing a fantastic documentary about violent racial tensions between 2nd and 3rd generation British blacks and Asians and also between existing UK residents (black, white or Asian) and new, commonly South Eastern European, North African, Middle Eastern or Eurasian immigrants, such progressively violent racial attitudes trouble me deeply.

As for me, I feel pretty good today, which is surprising given recent events. I’ve been living under a dark cloud for some time, mostly to do with the increasingly insurmountable university workload. I reached critical mass with my project report (aka dissertation) and got to the point where I thought I was on the brink of genuinely cracking up. I’ve decided that if it makes me that unhappy, it’s not worth the pain and have resolved to go and see my personal tutor to see where I stand. This has lifted an enormous weight from me and I feel a lot better. I have yet to see what state this leaves my degree in. Bad probably.

Just as this occurred and I began to feel well again, my girlfriend’s sister moved from Wolverhampton to Huddersfield and I was the transport. After a heavy farewell celebration on Thursday night, four of us went up there on Friday night, went to a club, slept over and the girlf and I travelled back yesterday evening, before showering, eating and watching the Shawshank Redemption which is an incredible film. It was a pretty hectic few days and I didn’t get to just sit and contemplate my future which I really need to do, but I feel better for the break. I just need to figure out where my future lies now.

I’ve always been a pretty steady, level-headed person and this has really shaken me. The value of your own sanity is not to be underestimated.

Hideously disconnected 4am thoughts

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This is going to be random…

First of all I’m in a whirlwind. I have so much uni work to do I don’t know what I’m going to do. After a serious period of inactivity I’ve actually started and made some progress with my uni assignments. The major ones at the moment are my Web Based Information Systems PHP assignment and my dissertation draft report, both conveniently due on 8th April. Shit.

WBIS has been slow since I am pretty much learning PHP from scratch. Thankfully Jono from Open Advantage, Wolves LUG and LUG Radio gave me a 2 days beginners course in using LAMP in January (people looking for a pre-configured version of Apache, MySQL and PHP, Perl and a host of other stuff with a nice installer for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris should check out XAMPP). The bad thing about this is that I haven’t been able to make the most of what I learned until this assignment and I’ve pretty much had to start from scratch. Fortunately the one thing that has stuck in my head is the syntax. My knowledge of available functions is pathetic however. I discovered late last night as my girlfriend slept beside me that I have spent about a week trying to use drop down boxes to limit user input so that I didn’t have to faff with various date formatting and then validation, when there is a function that checks if a date is valid called checkdate() which will pretty much (I assume, haven’t had chance to try it yet) take any input and give you a yes or no on whether the input is a date and whether it is a valid date (ie it picks up Feb 29th on a non-leap year). I also spent a day trying to work out how to get PHP to give me the first and last line of a ~500MB log file so I could explode them and work out the first and last date/time entries. In dispair I posted to the Wolves LUG mailing list asking if there were PHP functions similar to the Unix head and tail commands and was informed that I should use head and tail from within PHP. A quick google and there I was with shell_exec(). I’ve been going for a week and I have a week to go, I still haven’t got a D grade :-/ I’ve still got to do all the DNS lookups and chart drawing in PHP and if it it takes me a week to get a web form that doesn’t link to it’s results page yet… I just wish I had someone sitting on my shoulder to assist when I get stuck. It would speed me up by 100% easily. My girlfriend (not computer literate at all) has had to endure hours of relentless ranting about things she doesn’t understand, which usually culminates in me explaining the intricate details of things she will never understand, or need to. I know quite a lot about programming theory for an almost non-programmer and she just looks at me like a light that went out. Poor girl.

Oh, btw the way when I say I have been working on something for x units of time, you should take for granted that this time is liberally sprinkled with cigarette smoking, head scratching and frustrated swearing…

I’m really enjoying this assignment though, I haven’t written any code in maybe 2 years, I’m a terrible programmer, mainly because I’ve never taken the time to sit and learn any language properly, just enough to hack an assignment pass together and forget about. As a consequence I’ve started tentatively rewriting my site in php, I’ll do the lot before it goes live, it’s too big a job to do in public. Just working with the raw code lays bare how bad all of these WYSIWIG web editors are at writing html. I’m a real beginner at this but I can see how bad it is. Bascially Frontpage and Dreamweaver have made paragraph, font, bold and whatever else tags with alignment added for good measure to pretty much every individual item of text on every page. I’ve cut the page sizes (in KB) by around a third while keeping the same layout. Appalling.

The assignment I’m doing means I have to learn to use a language that fits in with my idea of the kind of things I need to know, which is that to be a good Linux sysadmin, I need a scripting language and some decent web coding to start the money rolling in when I finish uni. I think I’m going to have to fix Windows machines for ~£20 a throw when I leave uni so I have some money while I wait for my first proper job. I’m very good at hardware and software issue resolving to be honest. It’s a valuable skill to have.

I have been surprised to see that my html is pretty good, if basic. I’ve never sat and learned html, it’s amazing how much you pick up without noticing. Not that it’s hard of course. I’m certainly no web guy like Jono or Aq though. The good thing about this assignment though is that it will be easily portable to my project as an end-user style log reporting web interface for a black box internet firewall appliance. It will also be very easy to move to different log files so I will be able to display simplified log information for a range of network services to the kind of person that just wants to see if it works and if anyone has done anything nasty to their machine.

My draft dissertation is in a worse state. Because I’ve spent all my time on the PHP assignment, I’ve hardly touched my report and I now need around 8,000 fully researched words in a week. Fuck.

In other news… I bought a V Festival ticket. I went last year, it should be great. I just missed the selling out of the tickets though, we had a power cut and my alarm reset so I didn’t get to the box office, I tried to get one online but they were all sold out so like last year, I had to pay probably a third on top of the retail price to get one from ebay.

I’ve been scan reading some blogs tonight, trying to get my unread count down below 2,000 (I’m subscribed to a lot of Planets). I’ve decided that I should get up to date with some cool Mozilla Firefox extensions, like Google and ebay search extensions. I read some stuff the other day but I lost the link, so I can’t say what. It was a list of cool Firefox search extensions with feature comparisons. If anyone knows what this blog link is please let me know. It mentioned an academic one for searching ACM etc.

I finally wiped the evil that was my OEM Windows XP Home installation from my laptop and installed a preview of Ubuntu Hoary, prompted by the need for mobile tools to do my PHP assignment like Bluefish, gFTP, Apache and PHP to test it in a disconnected environment (ie my girlfriends house). It’s great apart from the installer barfed on my 2GB /var partition while downloading updated packages, so I reorganised the partitions and redid the remaining steps only to see it refuse to install GRUB. I lost about 3 hours to that and had to leave it overnight and finish up in the morning. It’s been great ever since though, I’m using it now. It sometimes feel a little sluggish but it’s a 1GHz Celeron with 256MB SDRAM, so it’s going to feel that way whether I run Windows or Linux.

I have to say, I really like Bluefish and I think gFTP is the best FTP client I’ve used on any platform.

As it went so well and it’s so close to official release time, I upgraded my main workstation from Warty to Hoary, I wanted the newer Bluefish, Gnome and Firefox and also an end to the boot slowing PCI hotplug errors that seem to be common to Warty, along with the ACPI_Power_Off called message that signifies that my machine isn’t going to power itself off. It went ok, there are a few cosmetic issues like a missing Home icon in Nautilus (fixed by a dist-upgrade about 8 hours after this post), a new Debian submenu that I don’t want and a load of KDE packages I didn’t ask for (now removed). The major bitch is that I seem to have done it at a time when various PHP packages including the apache module have been held back and can’t be installed due to dependency issues, so now I’ll have to do my assignment on my laptop until it’s fixed (fixed by a dist-upgrade as above). Xorg, which was my big fear works fine with my ATI card. I can now play Tuxracer and Tuxkart without extraneous polygons making it unplayable 🙂 I also seem to have been infected by Gnometris at a time when I could do with it the least. I had to uninstall Wolf ET and Bygfoot for this very reason. Hopefully the PHP stuff will be ok in a day or 2.

Incidentally someone has taken the last free release of Tuxracer and built on it to make Planet Penguin Racer. Sure to be worth a few wasted hours. As should Thunder and Lightning, a flight sim similar to FlightGear, with added aerial combat.

I still have to decide if I’m more productive in Linux or Windows. I think the main issue is my motivation to do the work, but after moving to Ubuntu as my main OS, I set off at a trail-blazing pace for a few days, citing the joys of Open Office.org‘s turned-on-by-default word auto-completion as a major factor, but I’ve really done little written work since, I’m not sure of this is environmental or just whether I don’t really want to do the work. On this note I have to say I am really looking forward to seeing Open Office.org 2.0 hitting my desktop and hopefully, that of many other people besides.

On the topic of work again, I’m really stuck with the practical side of my project a (Linux) black box Internet firewall appliance, with local network serving (web, mail, Samba, DNS, DHCP etc) capability and web admin interface (yes I am aware of the risks of having a firewall do this kind of thing). All that remains is spam/virus mail filtering (ClamAV and Spamasassin), firewall/NAT, web interface and a specialised kernel. Oh and probably tying fetchmail into the mail system.

The firewall I will probably do in Guarddog, not a problem, I just need to finish the rest first. A kernel and fetchmail I will do at the end if I have time. The web interface is in progress, thanks to my other assignment. The problem I have is that probably since Christmas time I’ve been trying to find a simple to read guide on tying ClamAV and Spamassassin into a Postfix mail system on Debian. There doesn’t seem to be such a document. I’ve read quite a lot (not enough as it seems to be written in Hebrew to my eyes) on the subject and still don’t have a a good understanding of what I have to do. A lot of the things I’ve read seem to be for Red Hat 8.0. And Debian do things differently. I had to abandon Cyrus-IMAP for this reason. Mail filtering is pretty core to my project, I wish someone would just fall from the sky and show me how to make it work, but I guess I’m just going to have to sit and read all of the ClamAV, Spamassassin and Postfix docs and work out what applies and what doesn’t. As if I wasn’t short of time already.

I think all this uni stuff adds up to the fact that I’m in deep shit and if I don’t fail, I’ll be lucky to get a reasonable degree at all. 6 years and �25,000 of graduate debt doesn’t seem worth it for a 3rd class degree and a crap job.

I think I’m near the end now. Aside from uni work, I have no money. Which is bad, I’m having to live off my Barclaycard at a highest-in-the-country ~19% APR. And it’s my best friend’s girlfriend’s birthday this weekend. My friend Lindsay is coming from London for the weekend, Chris wants me to accompany him on a night out, all on the same night and another friend, Rebecca who I used to work with is having a birthday drink on Sunday. Sadly I don’t have enough money for my friend’s girlfriend’s birthday as they’re taking a train to Birmingham (£30 return taxi fair), going for a meal and a night out. I feel bad but I just can’t make my empty pockets stretch to that. My friend from London is visiting her mum for her birthday which I can afford (ie no cost ;)), but I’m not sure if I can stretch to a night out afterwards with Chris or Rebecca. I’m back at uni after Easter on Monday so Sunday night will be panic night. Sorry to everyone who loses out (ie is pissed off at me for not going to their thing), but I just don’t have any money for these things, nor do I have the time to take out to do them. Saturday night is the one night I do take out for chilling (aka partying), but I’ve hardly been out in weeks with the cash shortage, so much so that when I bumped into Chris and Holdsworth almost by chance the other day, they hugged me like a long lost friend and looked at me with amazement that I was in front of them.

On one or 2 final notes. I attended the Wolves LUG meeting on Wednesday briefly, which was cool because I haven’t been able to go for some time. And also, I ought to trumpet LUG Radio Live once again. Linux stuff, Linux people, Linux jokes, getting drunk with Linux people and playing LAN games like Wolf ET are all up for the taking on June 25th 2005 at the Molineux Stadium, Wolverhampton, UK. Tickets are £5, people are coming from as far as France, Canada, Sweden and erm… Wolverhampton to be there. I am, are you? Read the Lug Radio Live forum, people are even trying to help you find a hotel in the area.

Speaking of events, Aq asked me at the LUG meeting if I was planning to go to What The Hack. I certainly am, it will be my first proper computer festival, in the music festival kind of way (ie sitting in a field with a laptop and a load of stoned geeks). I just have to raise some cash.

I think thats it. It’s 5:45am. If you read this before 3pm Friday 1st April 2005, I’ll add all of the links in later… I’ll also probably fix the typos and add all of the other things that my Swiss-cheesed brain had forgotten. I still have about 6 unwritten/unfinished articles waiting to be posted on here, some of which as are actually quite intelligent, unlike this one. This is just a bulk update.

It’s been a while since I last said anything useful on here so, this accounts for the last 2 weeks of blog inactivity, sorry to give it all to you at once, in no particular order and without suitable headings. God help Google when it tries to pull anything useful out of this lot for search results.

Oh, ok, that reminded me, one last thing. The search terms people use that have caused people to read my site and my blog are hilarious and quite impressive all at the same time. The impressive ones are the stuff about Linux, networks and computers in general, I never thought people would actually use them as any kind of authoritive resource (thats not say that they did). The funny ones include ‘Does Posh Spice take it up the arse?‘, ‘Prague Street Prostitutes‘, ‘ ‘most scorpios are murdered‘, ‘hopeless bastard‘, ‘world record ejaculation’, ‘world record for semen swallowed‘ and a worrying amount of hits for ‘ladyboy‘. I might link to the relevent pages when I get up so you can all read it again and see what pages people actually got.

Shit, I just did a word count on this post, about 2,600. That would do for one of my assignments.

I’m going to bed, goodnight 😀

V

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Wow.

Does anyone else remember the V sci-fi mini-series from the 1980s?

Maybe this will bring back some memories:

V

I used to love this show as a kid. I used to have to beg to stay up to watch it, I was about 7 or 8, it started at 10pm and ran for an hour. It really captured me at the time. There was the original mini series featuring the pilot and a second episode, followed a year or so later by the 3 part V: The Final Battle. These were shown in the UK on 5 consecutive nights during the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984. They proved so popular that after much pressure, there was eventually a weekly TV series that was never shown in the UK, but by all accounts it was rather poor and cancelled after the first series.

I last saw it when I was 17, a friend of mine had it on video. I came across a video clip last night and did some googling around it. It turns out that the series is still popular and has a quite an active following. The most detailed site at the moment seems to be http://thevisitors.info/ aswell as http://www.the-v-files.com/, Ilana’s V Celebrity Site and this one . It seems that most V sites are garishly decorated…

People are trading props and outfits from the show, it seem the original costume maker is still making the costumes to order (for several hundred dollars). There also appear to be several games based on V. There is a Commodore 64 game unsurprisingly called V (and isn’t very good), a Battlefield 1942 mod and V – Resist or Perish, a graphical adventure game which is as yet incomplete.

I really wish that some games company would see the potential of a proper 3d V game. I used to wish for a good V game, I even intended to write one myself when I was about 14. I imagine the ideal V game being something like a cross between the stealth and problem solving elements of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Deus Ex, the team elements of S.W.A.T and some network shooter action like RTCW or Wolf ET. Oh and some kind platform portability like RTCW and Wolf ET would be nice so I could play it on Linux.

Another thing that struck me while casually flicking through some of this stuff: some of these guys are real space nerds. Now I’m a Linux guy and there are is a real undercurrent of geeky, daylight fearing, text mode adventure playing, War Hammer card game owning obsessives in the lower echelon of the Linux world and I think quite rightly they get thoroughly derided by ‘normal’ people, but space nerds are another thing completely. Some of the bulletin board posts are signed using alien phrases from the show and they obsess about the fine biological details of the aliens. Someone had to actually point out that it was only a TV alien fantasy.

While I’ve never been a Trekkie or any kind of space geek, I think I could be persuaded to wear a V Shock Trooper outfit as I think it would get me laid by loads of weird space chicks 😉

V Shock Trooper outfit

It also appears that a new version of V, either a remake or a sequel is under development. Maybe I will try to apply some pressure to people like Activision or ID to make a game to coincide.

Soundcards, disk imaging and life in general

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My new Creative Labs Soundblaster Live 5.1 soundcard arrived today and… It works. Kind of. I have sound and no boot errors so thats a good thing. What I don’t seem to have is 5.1 surround sound on my 5.1 surround sound speakers, I just get left, right and bass woofer, all of which are on speaker output 2. Outputs 1 and 3, which are front and left and right rear respectively don’t seem to get any output. Maybe ALSA doesn’t do surround sound or you have to pass parameters to the module or something I don’t know.

The mic input, which is the point of buying a new card, seems OKish, but not perfect. I can hear myself through the speakers, but when recording in Audacity I get the same deeeeeeep, bitty ouput I had on my old Dell machine under Dynebolic when I mounted the hard disk as /home. Imagine a cross between an audio cassette being played back slowly and a video clip that is playing at the right speed but dropping frames like nobodys business. Something like that. Weird. I am optimistic however. The main problem under Dynebolic on my Dell machine was that it only had 128MB RAM and it ran out after about 4 or 5 audio tracks. At least on my main machine I have a GB to play with and should be able to do a reasonable job.

As a side note, Woo from Wolves LUG brought Agnula to my attention the other day. It’s a European Commission funded project to create an Open Source audio and multimedia development platform for both business and consumers. I’ll have to take a look some time when I’m not trying to escape the ever growing list of university work I should be doing.

I spent ages today trying to create a disk image of my laptop so I can just wipe it and install Ubuntu. After all of the aggro I had with Tiny, I’m keen to keep a disk image of the OEM Windows install they did in case they ever give me problems about it again. So, first off, Norton Ghost doesn’t do PCMCIA network cards so I can’t do it that way, so I’m down to my 2.2GB mini USB hard disk. This was kind of ok, just slooooow. Plus the disk images were bigger than the USB disk so I had to unplug the USB disk move it to my desktop, copy the image over and then put it back in the the laptop to get the next part of the image. The pain in the ass was that for the last part of the process, it asked for the first image file, which meant copying the last part onto my desktop, putting the first part back on the USB disk, letting Ghost do it’s business and then copying the image back across to my desktop. This is fine but each transfer took about 8 minutes or so. Nevertheless I made a pretty comprehensive backup set. A little extravagant even.

I made an image of the restore partition, an image of the main partition with my own preferred setup, then one of the entire disk, should anything ever go wrong. The only problem was that the last image took something like 3 hours to create, including the copying process and then when I had to put the first image back in so Ghost could (I assume) write how many image files the whole image spans into the first image, it couldn’t recognise the USB disk again no matter what I did. I had to reboot it in the end and lose the image. I’ll try again at some point when I have time to burn (some time next century).

On that topic, I’m seriously getting snowed under with uni work. I think I might be in serious trouble soon, I’m getting further and further behind and I’m getting really worried. I would have tried one of the open source disk imaging options I listed the other day but I just didn’t have the time to learn the idiosyncrasies of a new piece of software, I needed to get it done, this wasn’t quite the case in the end of course, but that wasn’t the point…

As a final thing, I notice that U-Turn is on TV as I write this. Thats one of the weirdest films I’ve ever seen. The first time I saw it, my friend and I just sat there looking back and forth between the TV and each other going, “???”. We thought it was just shit. Or we had completely missed something and it was in fact a work of genius which we just didn’t get. But we were pretty certain it was the first option and told everyone who would listen. Then I saw it a few years back and it’s actually pretty good, if you can surivive how odd it is. It’s a really weird film crammed with huge names and uncomfortable cinematography. The opening paragraph of the above review captures the film almost perfectly. Weird film…

Pimping Nvu

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There has been talk about Nvu on the Wolves Lug mailing list recently (I still keep forgetting it’s pronounced ‘N-View’, not Un-Voo). Nvu is a redevelopment of Mozilla Composer which got orphaned when the Mozilla Suite was split up into Firefox and Thunderbird.

No doubt, it is the great white hope of WYSIWYG web editors on Linux and other open source platforms. Before I stopped using Windows, it was one of the things where I didn’t know what I would use instead of Macromedia Dreamweaver. I’m certainly no web developer, take a look at my website. Dismal design I’m sure you’ll agree. But the fact is that while I aim to move to proper CMS some time in the future, I don’t care enough about web design to put the effort into doing it all in html by hand in Bluefish or something. My blog is a brain-dumping ground. My website is a link, info and silly email dumping portal for myself and some of my friends. I’m not interested in writing it properly because I don’t have the time. I need a WYSIWYG web editor and a copy and paste function ;).

So I heard about Nvu on the mailing list and took a look. As I said in some pother posts, I started my website in Frontpage Express 5 years ago before I knew anything about web design, then I moved to Frontpage and then Dreamwaver.

Aq, who is seriously (and still an understatement) into his web stuff recommended that Peter Cannon write a review of Nvu as a Frontpage user, being that such a review from himself, a committed and experienced web developer whos uses a text editor, would not be as useful as one from a user of WYSIWYG competitors to Nvu, like Frontpage and Dreamweaver. And in that sense, that includes me.

I’ve edited a few existing pages in Nvu and also created a simple ‘this site has moved’ type page. I have admittedly, not created any substantial new pages. But my immediate thoughts were that it’s pretty cool with one or two things missing.

The main thing is site management. In Frontpage or Dreamweaver you define your local web directory and your remote server details. You edit a local copy of a file and then publish the file to your remote server.

In Nvu you define your remote server and edit exisiting files by pulling them down from the server and editing them locally before sending them back up. This is ok, but limiting I think. My server uses ftp to transfer the files and has a maximum simultaneous connection limit to protect from ftp (globbing?) attacks. As my the top level index.html page has a number of images in, this hits the maximum connections limit and means that I have to edit the file with half of the images missing. This isn’t good for judging the aesthetic appearance of your pages and may leave your page looking out of shape while you edit it.

This working with the files direct from your remote server also means that it’s easy to upload files with mistakes in them without realising.

Another nice site management feature would be some kind of site information cache, like an index of all files and links in the site. If you change the name of a file in the site, then Nvu could ask if you want to update all links within the site that point to that file. It could also point out any files which aren’t linked by any file in the site and any external links that are invalid (ie produce http errors – 404 etc) or can’t be resolved by DNS.

Further to those, or while waiting for the above, I would like it if Nvu could remember where the file I am editing came from on the server. I have more than once downloaded an index.html file from a subdirectory of my webserver, edited and uploaded it before editing the index.html in the top level directory of the site before uploading it again. The problem is that Nvu doesn’t remember where you got the current file from. Instead is asks you which directory you want to put it in, defaulting to the last directory you uploaded to. This is how I overwrote the index.html in my subdirectory with a new top level index.html and left the old top level index.html where it was, unchanged. Fortunately, I also went through the (slightly) laborious task of manually making a local copy of every edited file before uploading it.

One more feature that would be useful would be the ability to use SSH to upload files to the server, fewer and fewer people are using ftp these days, more people are using SSH’s encrypted SFTP method and Nvu should offer this.

Now those are some quite big things to request. As I stated [link removed] on the Nvu developer forums [link removed], I would be happy to write these features myself if I were a decent coder, I had the time and knew what I was on about.

Nvu is in it’s infancy and I’m being quite hard on it by expecting these features already. Besides my comments above, Nvu is a very capable WYSIWYG web editor. As I said, it is the best in its field on Linux at the moment and will only get better.

If you are looking for a WYSIWYG web editor for Linux, or a free replacement for Frontpage or Dreamweaver on Windows, go download Nvu now.

If you are a coder with a taste for web development, then go help the Nvu developers [link removed] right away! Writing my requested features is of course your first task 😉

Learning more Googling

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We all know Google is the best search engine and I use some of the advanced features quite a lot. My favourite trick is the site: search were you specify a website site to search. I noted on the Wolves LUG mailing list about 15 minutes ago that site: searches don’t like specified subdirectories like http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/ which I would like so I could search the Wolves LUG mailing list for specific things, which I do a lot.

Aq kindly pointed out that you can do this with inurl: searches which I hadn’t noticed before, so while I can do site:mailman.lug.org.uk wolves and still get a lot of non-Wolves LUG stuff, if I do inurl:mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/ [search term] then it will search the exact url for [search term]. I didn’t know this and as I told him, this has made my life complete 😀 Thanks Aq.

Now I must blush after telling a few people recently that they need to learn to search Google properly instead of asking obvious, easy to answer questions that are available at the end of a simple Google search. However, on that note, as I have previously ranted, if you learn to search Google, you will learn a lot more and also learn how to help yourself than if you just ask someone else for an easy answer.

Do you play Wolf-ET?

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Do you listen to LUG Radio? If so you should join in with clan.lugradio.org.

We play on Wednesday and Sunday nights from 8pm UK time. I’ve played for the last few weeks but the numbers are dropping. There were 3 of us this week and I had to bail early.

If you listen to LUG Radio and play Wolf-ET, please join in.

A Perfect World?

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Is it the nature of being computer people that makes us frustrated by real world inanimate objects’ refusal to do what we ask of them and means we are also the only people in the world that actually know how to follow instructions and put things like furniture or toys together?

I know Jono feels like this. Ask him about having to move his cooker with the broken door that refused to stay closed when he was moving house.

Inanimate objects drive me to distraction. They’re sooooo fucking stupid. I think this might be to do with the fact that I spend all day interacting with an idealised abstraction of a real world environment which behaves in the same way all the time. You can’t drop something on the floor when you remove the item that was on top of it from the fridge when you’re using a computerised environment, that kind of clumsiness is already taken care of for you. If this were going to happen, you would probably get a nice little warning message asking if you really want to drop the chicken on the floor, or leave it in the fridge. I believe Jono calls such idiotic objects ‘infidels’.

I also thought over Christmas that I was the only person in my house that knows how to follow assembly instructions for new furniture or my neice’s toys. My mum just gives up at the point electricity becomes involved, especially when she has to unplug something to plug the new thing in. Not for her to follow cables to see where they go, no. My dad is pretty good at putting stuff together but he is easily misled. I seem to be the only one who can do stuff like this without getting confused. I wonder whether this is also to do with my computerised existence. I spend a lot of time reading howtos, man pages, walkthroughs and so on.

Are we living in an overly perfected world that makes real life frustrating?

Blogging is bad for your academic productivity

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Trust me I know. My performance has nosedived since I started reading blogs. Admittedly I am far more interested in what I am picking up from blogs than I am in writing right outer joins in Oracle’s not completely ANSI standard SQL dialect or the economic impact of IT globalisation and offshoring. There is no Linux on my degree. There is on the years that follow mine, my year was the last of the old degree scheme. Isn’t that really weird? In an era such as this my only academic contact with a non-Windows operating system is telnetting a Solaris server to use Oracle.

I’m a Linux guy and blogging is far more interesting. Just don’t tell my lecturers…

Laptop Update

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So, regular readers (heh ;)) will know about my Tiny laptop saga. Well despite their 7-10 working day return time, 4 weeks from the day theI logged the fault call, I got my laptop back. And well, it’s great. Nice new keyboard and the processor fan doesn’t make the whirring, clipping sound it did the last time they changed it, so, all cool.

Except that after twice phoning me and telling me Windows needed to be replaced at the cost of ~£60 which I refused, they installed Windows XP Home anyway. Weird. It hasn’t shown up on my invoice or bank statement so it looks like they just did it anyway. We like free stuff :D. The fact that it’s Windows makes it less pleasurable, but well it now means I have a spare Windows license to put on something, which isn’t such a great thing, but at least I have it if I really need to.

When I logged the fault call they asked me for my Windows license key and I said I didn’t know because I had to wipe it. I forgot that the Windows sticker was on the underside so they must have just banged a new copy on and used my old license key. Why didn’t they just do this before instead of trying to charge me for it? Bastards.

Well, anyway, so now I’m back to square one. I have a copy of Windows on my laptop and want to put Linux, more specifically Ubuntu on it. I still need Windows to do some uni work and would prefer to use the copy already on there. So I’m back to this irretrievable partition problem. I think I’ll just set up the Windows installation how I want it, then Ghost the partition and use it to write the partition back after I wipe the disk and repartition.

Let the day soon be that I no longer need Windows…