Monthly Archives: February 2005

Ubuntu Jingle

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I decided to do an Ubuntu jingle for LUG Radio. If you don’t already know, LUG Radio is a Linux radio discussion show that goes some way to recreating the loud, opinionated and very funny nature of our Wolves LUG meetings.

The jingle was to be based on a running joke from LUG Radio and our LUG meetings, where Aq would sing Ubuntu to the Um Bongo theme tune. Um Bongo is a kids fruit juice drink with the coolest advert ever, available when we were kids and judging by the site, it’s still available now.

So, I set about making a proper version for a jingle. As a test case, I was determined to use open source software, in this case the Hydrogen drum machine software for Linux to make the drum track (thanks to Mr Ben’s reply on the LUG Radio forums) and the Eastern Hip-Hop drumkit.

After having trouble getting the JACK server to start, I had to abandon Rosegarden and Ardour, so I decided to use Audacity instead. It’s not that complex a project to require serious multi-tracking anyway.

So, export the drum track as a .wav out of hydrogen, create a click track in Audacity and import the .wav. All cool. Plug in my crappy PC mic into the mic slot of my soundcard, try to record my hideous tribal “Ubuntu Ubuntu” chanting. Play it back. Umph. Sounds like a crap, crackly mess with heavy breathing and unintelligable, slightly out of time words. You can’t really tell I’m talking at all. Try another 2 crap PC mics and get the same result. Double check Gnome sound controls, no problem there. Try Dynebolic Linux, a Linux sound recording Live CD, same problem but less out of time (probably to do with the low latency patches that help with sound recording issues under Linux). Try Audacity under Windows, even worse (ie no recorded sound at all).

So, I dig out my ‘proper’ mic from my musician days and buy an adapter to connect the quarter inch jack to a 3.5 mm soundcard input. Same problem. Shit.

So there lies my problem. I think this jingle would be really cool, I even had plans to make a version to submit to Ubuntu as a sound test wav file or something. No go. I think the latency problems with Linux sound recording can be overcome by using Dynebolic, but I think the main problem is my crap Via VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (to quote lspci ;)).

So my fantastic project is on hold for now, until I can work out how to record a decent vocal track. I could maybe dig out my old 4-track tape recorder and use my mic through that and into the line-in or mic socket, but thats a major ball-ache.

Linux Sound Recording (with reservations) 1 – 0 Crap Hardware.

UPDATE 17/02/2005:

Dynebolic can’t play the file back without significant stutter on my laptop. It will boot on my dad’s machine but can’t recognise his bog standard Creative PCI 16 soundcard which I vaguely recall uses one of the ensoniq modules. Modprobing either ensoniq module supplied with dynebolic produces an error about depending on a PCMICIA module which blah blah… Audacity under Windows works great with my microphone on my dad’s machine. This means the problem with my machine is the soundcard.

I’m running out of machines. Don’t make me use Windows…

UPDATE 21/02/2005:

The latest developments are in another post.

What do you do?

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You know when you ask people what they like doing and they list their hobbies and interests? And they say stuff like browsing the Internet, watching TV, listening to music, playing the XBox/Playstation/Game Cube and so on. I’m thinking, “Shit. Don’t you do anything productive?”

In the words of Lance Armstrong, 5 time Tour de France winner and cancer survivor, “People ask me what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike 6 hours a day. What are YOU on?”

I couldn’t imagine not having some kind of output. I’d go crazy. Maybe I’m just blessed with an inquisitive mind and time to use it. I couldn’t just go to work, come home and then watch TV, I’d feel like I was rotting away.

What do you do?

Lethargy

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I feel tired and fuzzy all the time. I have often wondered whether it is normal to feel so rough all the time and obviously the answer is no. I compare my state of energy to other people and often ask myself if they are feeling the same. Jono seems to have more energy for doing things than I could ever imagine. He is on the go all the time, I don’t know how he does it.

So I was interested to read that Steve Kemp has a similar problem. While he thinks his problems might be an undiagnosed condition, mine are most probably not.

I have long thought it might be a result of some illness that has gone unnoticed, like diabetes (I drink a lot of fluid and react strangely to lots of sugar), or thyroid problems (some days I feel ok, some days I can’t get out of bed) or even as a result of the oxygen starvation I suffered during the multiple cardiac arrests I had when I was a newborn (the doctors thought I would be brain-damaged). I have asked my doctor and also analysed my lifestyle myself. My doctor’s answer was to eat more dark green vegetables. This would help, but my diet isn’t that bad, though it could be better.

To be honest, my problem is most likely that I am under-motivated and find it easy to slip into a pattern of ‘late to bed, late up’ when I have a workload, or nothing better to do. I am in this phase at the moment. I am going to bed at 4am. Going to bed earlier means staring at the ceiling for hours. Consequently I can’t get up before midday, frequently more like 2pm. As a result I feel awful all day. The only answer is to force myself out of bed at some early, yet do-able time, like say, 10am, then force myself to stay up all day and go to bed tired at maybe 12am and then try to get up at say 9am, which is perfectly reasonable when you don’t have to get up and again stay up all day until perhaps 11pm or 12am.

The problem is that if I get up early as I did yesterday (11am *blush*), I feel so tired all day that I can’t keep my eyes open and by 3pm I have to take a nap in a bid to rescue some kind of productivity from the day, so I am able to do some work later on.

I have 4 alarm clocks. I can sleep through 3 of them. The other one I get out of bed and turn off without remembering, while I am barely conscious.

This is a pathetic state of affairs. It’s my own under-motivation that is the problem, but I’m sure if everybody else felt as awful as I do, then they would get up late or take a nap as I have to. I have to sort this out as it’s costing me my degree. I got some lousy grades last semester as a result of not being able to work in the daytime and having to work late at night.

When will someone invent human ACPI? I hear the army train you to fall asleep at will and then wake up again when you need to without feeling tired. Perhaps I need a boot camp.

Incompatibility Issues…

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So, it seems that my parents are separating. This has all happened in 48 hours. I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or not, but it will certainly do the rest of the world a favour. Sometimes I thought they think they might shrivel up and die if they weren’t able to blame the ills of the rest of the world on each other. I stopped listening to them arguing and complaining about each other around 10 years ago. Now, I just don’t care.

It’s not always as bad as it is now but it’s always been there. I’m 28 and can’t ever remember them being happily married. I don’t know why they didn’t do it sooner. At this very moment it’s weird because we are all still in the same house.

On a selfish point, this all kinda leaves me high and dry. I have 6 months of uni left and they have mentioned selling the house. I moved out about 4 years back and had to move back again about 18 months ago because my own housing contract ran out, the guys I was living with and I had had enough of living together (mostly due to the immeasurable pressure of living with someone with a mental illness) and I couldn’t afford to live alone. I now can’t afford to move back out as my student loan won’t cover it (I have a reduced loan as I live my parents – catch 22).

Sure, they probably won’t sell the house before the end of uni and my mum says I can live with her when she moves out (my dad is probably staying here until the sale), but given the circumstances, I don’t really want to live with either of them.

Guess I’ll just have to stick it out until the end of my degree…

Times, they are a-changin’.

Fucking robbing bastards!

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Don’t buy a computer from Time or Tiny Computers, now also known as The Computer Shop. For those of you outside of the UK, the above companies are part of the same group and are high street PC retailers, peddling generic build family PCs.

About 3 years ago I was looking for a laptop PC to make life easier while studying my Computer Science degree. I searched and searched for the best deal I could. I somewhat naively bought a laptop from Tiny Computers for around £900 which was the best deal at the time. I also paid for an extended 3 year warranty and a PCMCIA network card.

So within 2 weeks of my purchase Tiny went bust and were bought up by Time as they essentially occupied the same market. I still got my laptop and despite being under no legal obligation to honour the warranty, they did as I paid by finance agreement. Lucky me, all those that paid cash were left high and dry.

Within a month my network card became faulty and after about 8 or 9 calls, I was finally told they wouldn’t replace it. Fucking thanks. Not a biggie though, I bought a better quality and more robust card for £25. Its suddenly struck me though that I didn’t have a copy of the terms and conditions of my warranty agreement. Could I work out how to get one? Not a fucking chance. I got passed from department to department and gave up.

When I got comfortable with the way the machine was set up, I decided it was time to install Linux. The machine came with Windows XP Home preinstalled and no Windows disk. I needed Windows for my uni work. All of the installation was crammed into an inaccessible partition with a recovery CD to drag it out if it went wrong. So I phoned them up. “Hello, I bought my laptop with the intention of dual booting between Windows and Linux, the guy in the shop said it wouldn’t be a problem. I didn’t get a Windows CD, how do I wipe the hard drive and set it up again without a Windows CD? Can I drag out the installation from the hidden partition and put it somewhere, sort out the disk layout and put it back on the first partition?” To which they said no. If I want to install Linux I will have to lose my exisiting Windows installation and buy a new copy of Windows. “This,” I thought to myself, “is why people pirate copies of Windows.”

While on the line I asked another question. “Any chance of a run down of the hardware in the machine? Sound, graphics and motherboard chipsets, screen model and the like? It’s not available through your website or the documentation that came with the machine and the Device Manager just lists generic parts and rebranded part names.” “No.” “Thanks. Remind me to recommend you to my enemies.”

‘Fortunately’ for me, my uni has a deal with MS to offer a free copy of Windows to the Comp Sci students to allow them to produce new generations of Microsoft drones, grateful for what MS gave them when they were penniless students. So thats what I did. Wiped the disk, re-partitioned, installed a copy of Windows from uni and installed Linux. Thanks a fucking bunch Tiny. Good job I had that or it would have cost me £140 or whatever for a new copy of Windows XP.

After a year of owning the machine, the keyboard went haywire and started printing the wrong characters. Not a software problem, the fault exists in Windows and Linux. I phoned them up, they told me to fix it myself. Not too big a problem. They said it would be easier to just open it up and make sure the keyboard ribbon cable was seated correctly. So I did and it didn’t solve the problem so I phoned them up again, told them what I’d done, they started faffing, I started getting irate and they agreed to take it back and fix it for me. They did and charged me for the delivery. Bastards. On-site warranty my arse, free return to base my arse.

3 days after getting it back, the processor fan went and my CPU overheated within 30 minutes so I had to send it back again. Fair enough, this time they just fixed it and sent it back. No delivery charge. All is well except the laptop still runs hot and the fan clicks a little.

Whistle forward a year or so to about a month back. I noticed over christmas that the keyboard was starting to stop responding altogether. I opened it up, checked the cable and it made no difference unless I stretched it out. Obviously a damaged or dying line on the ribbon cable.

So I phoned them up. Explained to my very polite Indian call centre worker at the cost of £10 what my problem was. Indian call centre worker, no problem. 10 fucking quid when I paid for a deal that provided me with a freephone number not fucking cool at all.

So I had to send it back. Expected. My warranty had run out 3 days beforehand, fuck. My bad. Should have got around to it quicker. They would still take it back if I paid for parts, labour and carriage. Umm, well I have to, there is no way I can find the parts manufacturers and buy them myself. Best just to get the company that supplied it to sort it out. Yes ok, I’ll pay. They collected it the next day and said they’d phone with a quote when they had one.

A week later they did. “£160.” “What?” “£160.” “What the fuck for? A keyboard ribbon cable?” “No, a new keyboard, a new processor fan and a new copy of Windows as it is corrupted and thats the problem with the keyboard.”

*Growl*

“Right. First of all, I can’t afford that, I’m a university student. I have £400 to live on for 3 months. A new keyboard fine. A new processor fan? Well, it runs hot, but *you* put it in like that last year and it’s been the same ever since. A new copy of Windows? Not fucking likely. Look, it’s not a software problem, I have Windows and Linux on there and the problem is the same in both. It’s the ribbon cable, probably as a result of the poorly fitted processor fan causing it to run hot and melt the cable which runs just next to it, so you’d better replace that. I’m not paying for a new copy of Windows when I had to hose the one supplied cos the guy in the shop didn’t know what he was on about and I had to get a new copy anyway, which I have right here. Besides which, if the software were the problem, why are you replacing the keyboard?”

Tumbleweeds…

“Uhh, ok, I can tell them not to reinstall Windows.” “How much is it now?” “£96.xx” “Better.” So I handed over my credit card details. In truth, I could have argued the toss over the processor fan, given that they fitted it, but it was over a year ago and well I hadn’t complained at the time as I didn’t think it was a problem. “It will be back with you in 7 to 10 days.”

That was about 2 weeks before I had another guy phone up with the £160 quote and the same news. I told him I’d paid and I’d refused a new copy of Windows as I’d already had to get a new copy and besides Windows wasn’t the problem blah blah. So he apologised for the error of the repeat phone call and went away.

3 weeks on from the original fault call, I still don’t have my laptop back. Bastards.

They obviously have a policy of selling a new Windows license to every punter that returns a PC that doesn’t have the supplied version of Windows on it. Thats not fucking on. Besides I already have a copy of Windows and I don’t really use Windows anyway. As soon as I leave uni it will be off all of my machines. The thing is, if my machine only had Linux on it, they would have said that it was a Linux problem and they don’t support Linux so I will have to reinstall Linux or buy a new Windows license from them.

Time, Tiny and The Computer Shop. Thank you for fixing my laptop (I assume you are anyway) after the warranty has expired, but you fucking stink of sweaty, festering, mangey, flea-bitten camel arsehole. Really, you do.

You charged me £10 for the fault call because you moved your call centre to India so you can pay less than minimum wage to cheap third world workers. You build shit laptops that don’t stand up to regular usage and don’t provide any kind of hardware information, even on request. You fixed a keyboard and broke a processor fan. You fucked my machine up before and are charging me for a replacement of the part you didn’t fit properly which also caused another part to fail which you are also charging me to fix. And worst of all, you are charging me for something I don’t need because you thought I didn’t know what I was on about. Good job I do or I’d be 60 something quid worse off than I already am. What do you do with your regular customers that aren’t as technically aware as I am?

I think sloppy customer service from such companies is pretty endemic these days, particularly in the UK and from companies that are used to supporting people that don’t know anything about technical issues, but trying to charge your customers for things they don’t need is taking the piss.

Fucking robbing bastards!

Words of advice for lazy Linux users

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Learn to Search the Fucking Web (STFW) and Read the Fucking Manual (RTFM).

Now thats a terrible thing to say, especially to people that literally just stepped straight off the boat as it were. But now some rationalisation.

I’ve been annoyed recently by a few people who asked stupid obvious questions and displayed no effort to help themselves. Information that anyone could find out just by going to the website of the enormously well known software in qustion.

Sure, I’ve not been using Linux so long that I don’t remember my own mistakes, in fact I’m really happy to see they’re not archived any more. I certainly remember my early days when starting out with Linux seemed like staring up the North face of Everest, but having passed that stage I can tell you that there is no little secret that everybody else understands about Linux that you don’t. People that know a lot about how Linux works do so because they have read a lot.

Searching for answers to technical questions is hard when you don’t have the surrounding knowledge of the basic principles of what you have to do, but at least try. You can then say, “Aaah yes, I tried looking at that but couldn’t work out what it meant even after reading the man page, could you explain a little?” You are not expected to know the answers to everything. You are expected to try to help yourself before asking.

These incidents were different, this information was easy to find. Where do you download program xyz? What is the release schedule of distributor abc? Search the fucking web! One of these people is a very competent Linux user.

Now heres the thing. Learn how to help yourself, show some effort, show some etiquette and learn that subject headings like “Help me pleeeeeeeeease!” and “It doesn’t work!” mean nobody is going to help you because people get a lot of mail and they use the subjects to determine whether they can help you or not. If you get no answer it means nobody knows, it doesn’t mean you are getting ignored. Asking again means people might then start ignoring you. If you really need to ask again, do some more work on it yourself and leave it a few days before going back, apologising for repeat posting and explain that you have tried to solve it yourself by doing xyz but you really don’t understand what is wrong or how to fix it.

For a less crass and ill-tempered explanation of these ideas read

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way and

How to Report Bugs Effectively.

Seriously, these are the two most important things a Linux beginner can read. I learnt a lot from these and you learn how to get more help from people.

Next learn how to use google and the man command. To give you a head start, type

man man

at a command prompt.

Learn to do that and you’re already ahead of the game. Show some attempt to help yourself and people will be willing to help you because it shows you have tried to solve the problem yourself but it is beyond your skills. The contents of man pages may baffle the hell out of you for some time but at least you can show you tried and ask for someone to explain it to you.

Don’t forget to go back and thank the people that helped you when you fix something. A quick description of the solution and a thank you will do, it helps people close the issue psychologically.

Learn to trim replies to posts so that people don’t have to wade through acres of unnecessary quotes to read your single line reply. Write your comments below what you are commenting, not above. Top posting as it is called means that people won’t understand what you have written until they read what is below it and they will have to go back and read what was above it for it to make sense. Doing either of these will mean people will become less likely to read your mails as you are showing poor etiquette by making it hard work to help you. Don’t write single line “Yes I agree” posts. It wastes people’s time.

Don’t post anything other than text to a mailing list. Don’t post pages of code or output either. Put them on the web and post a link. Don’t ask people to mail you in private unless it is a sensitive matter and you have at least spoken before. Don’t email people privately with questions.

Also read a little about using the command line. If you can get your head around the ls, cd, mv, cp, man and su commands you are running on full steam. If you can get used to using bash file name autocompletion (type a few letters and use the tab button), command history (use the up and down arrow keys), and the difference between absolute file paths (starting at /) and relative paths (starting in your current directory) you are almost the master of your own universe.

Ok, I’m going to stop now or I could be here for days. Read the above 2 links it will really make a difference and stop you getting torn a new arsehole. Learn to search the web, learn to use man, show some willingness to help yourself, show some etiquette and show some gratitude.

Who am I?

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Welcome to my blog 🙂

If it wasn’t already obvious my name is Adam Sweet, I’m 28 and I hail from Wolverhampton, UK. I’ve been meaning to set up a blog for a while now as I have a lot of stuff happening this year: I graduate (hopefully), my first graduate job (ditto), my project and so on. I’ll be making my first steps in the big, wide, graduate world, so here is the journal.

So who the hell am I? Well, I’m a final year BSc Computer Science student at the University of Wolverhampton but aside from that I’m also a musician. I used to play professionally in a signed band a few years back, but now I’m content to do it for fun.

My main interests are computers, girls and beer :). Computers are what I do. I’m not a coder, a web guy or any other kind of specialist, I’m a computer guy. Sure, my main interests here are networks and operating systems, particularly Linux and I will make somebody a great Linux sysadmin one day (job offers to my email address drinky76 at yahoo dot com ;)), but I basically enjoy getting dirty with troubleshooting faulty hardware, installing Linux on anything that sits still long enough and networking it. I collect old computer hardware that people are throwing out because I feel sorry for it and I’m a hoarder…

I’m in the middle of my Computer Science Project right now. I’m creating a Debian based SOHO Internet appliance from Open Source Software that will function as a webserver, file server, mail server with webmail front-end, DNS proxy, DHCP server and firewall, all configurable via a web interface. Similar pre-existing projects include Clark Connect, SME Server, Trustix, Smoothwall and IP Cop. This project doesn’t have a name or a website yet, but its going pretty well and I aim to make the project available under the GPL. I can’t create a public website or make my work available until it is no longer an academic project. I don’t have any megalomaniac plans for my own distribution just yet ;).

My Linux distro of choice is Ubuntu for desktops or Debian for servers. I’m a modern Linux user in the sense that I only had my first computer 5 years ago and it had Windows 98SE on it (a painfully slow Cyrix 133MHz with 40MB RAM and a 512MB hard disk which my cousin built for me). I have no Unix heritage to speak of and I used Windows almost exclusively for some time, but found Linux purely by chance within a year of my first PC and became fascinated with it. It seemed so obscure and I’ve always supported the underdog, even though Linux isn’t any such thing these days.

My first distro was Mandrake 7.1 which ran like a pig on my aforementioned machine, though I had a 4GB disk by this time. I also became a member of Wolves LUG. I used Mandrake 7.1 through 9.x for around 2 years until it’s bugginess finally annoyed the crap out of me and Aq’s evangelisation (British spelling ;)) of Debian finally showed me the light. Since then I’ve learned a lot, you learn a lot more when you have to configure everything with config files and a text editor. I recently moved Ubuntu on my desktop and haven’t touched anything else since. I still don’t know how other distros live without apt and debconf.

Away from computers and Linux, music is my big thing. I play guitar but I’m a bass player by trade. My musical preferences are pretty eclectic and very British (whether this is a consequence of culture or taste I don’t know), I like The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Stiff Little Fingers, The Who, The Stone Roses, The Sundays, Sugar and Bob Marley. Being into The Clash meant I listened to punk a lot, but also a lot of what we call(ed) Indie music in the UK. I won’t try to explain it for non-Brits, it’s steeped in British social idiosyncrasy.

As a person I’m a pragmatic realist. I enjoy having a lot of beers with my friends at the weekend, but I’m otherwise quite studious. I read a lot (mostly Linux documentation these days ;)) and enjoy good films, particularly foreign cinema. Politically, I’m a leftist-liberal according to The World’s Smallest Political Quiz, which is pretty correct.

People might tell you all manner of things about me. I’m an arsehole. Possibly true, but thats just my sense of humour. I’m a grumpy fucker, also probably true but very rarely. I have no sexual morals at all. Most true of them all :D. I revel in the scandal of an illicit affair. Thats not to say I’m a cad, a player or whatever else you might call it, I enjoy people’s company and thats all. So long as nobody gets hurt or upset and you keep yourselves safe, I see no problem.

Oh, before I forget, go listen to LUG Radio. Its a hilariously funny Linux Radio show recorded bi-weekly by several members of Wolves LUG. Prepare for a lot of swearing…

One last thing. Major thanks to Sparkes for hosting my blog 😀 My eternal gratitude is yours.

Well for now, it’s nice to have you here and I hope you come back.

Take care,

Adam