Planet WYLUG

Virtualized Storage Talk at WYLUG

2008-11-10T16:47:32+00:00

I’m doing a talk tonight about virtualizing your storage with LVM on Linux at the West Yorkshire Linux User Group. Sorry about the short notice here (it was announced earlier in the week elsewhere though).

My mate Paul Brook is talking about RAID on Linux too.

Come along for the talk, or the beer, or the socialising - or all three.

New jokosher goodness

2008-11-03T23:24:53+00:00

Life has been busy of late but I found the time recently to update the subversion checkout of Jokosher that is sitting in the Fedora repositories. The previous one was from April and there has been a slow trickle of improvements announced on the mailing list that made it worthwhile. Plus I wanted to see how much I remembered of how to push an update. It went really well so after letting it sit in updates-testing for a while I requested the push through bodhi to -stable. I just wonder if anyone actually _uses_ it!

Halloween Pumpkin Carving

2008-10-31T19:56:25+00:00

Small pumpkin I carved today, with a carrot for a nose. It seems that I missed all the trick or treaters though. More chocolate for me and Louisa then.

Louisa is cooking a lovely smelling soup with the innards from him. A couple more photos here.

Mercy and Grand: The Tom Waits Project

2008-10-27T22:50:02+00:00

DISCLAIMER: I know nothing about music, can’t play any musical instruments and only sing for the cats. I have the utmost respect for people that can play or sing.

We (= me, John and Tom) went to the West Yorkshire Playhouse last night to see ‘Mercy and Grand: The Tom Waits Project’.

It’s an Opera North thing and to quote the blurb from the WYP’s website:

Mercy and Grand brings together ten songs by Tom Waits, a handful of numbers by Kurt Weill, a sea shanty, a hymn, a couple of instrumental gypsy tangoes and a classic Fellini film score, all arranged for an extraordinarily versatile ‘circus band’ ensemble.

The band was “extraordinarily versatile” (Dai Pritchard on a range of woodwind instruments and Simon Allen on percussion were the most versatile - the latter playing drums, a marimba (I think), a saw (!) and something that make a woo-werr noise that can only be described as FRICKIN’ AWESOME) but I didn’t feel the “ensemble” thing as much. As I described it to the guys on the way home, sometimes it felt like we were watching eight people masturbating separately rather than having a musical orgy. It was Tom Waits-y so I probably would have been disappointed if it had been polished like a Girls Aloud song but at times, the disjointedness was awkward. It just didn’t work for me and on some occasions, actively annoyed me.

I had similar feelings towards the choice of singer. I can see why they didn’t go for a male singer (the temptation to Waits-out probably would have been too much and that would push it into tribute band territory) and it is an Opera North performance thing, but the singer’s (albeit really amazing) voice was too clean, too pure for the dark tone of most of the songs. When she did try to rough it up or whatever, it reminded me of a (reasonably well-spoken) old boss of mine who used to go for a fake gruff, Northern accent when trying to be ‘one of the girls’ — and I didn’t think the technique worked in either circumstance. Tom suggested a more sultry singer would have been better and I thought either that or someone singing bawdy falsetto like the Tiger Lillies’ Martyn Jacques.

Between the singing style and moments of musician self-love, I felt the whole thing was lacking in … voom. Energy? Confidence? Passion? I’m not sure what exactly I mean but it was something like all those things. It felt a bit by-rote it’s-a-job-squawk! rather than a band coming together for the love of it.

All in all though, I’m glad we went though. I very much enjoyed watching the percussion guy go about his work, making all different sorts of sounds - I was amazed by how bowing a saw sounded like a voice and the shiver of bowing a cymbal - and we got white Magnums (an essential WYP visit treat) at the interval too.

Afterwards, we gave Tom a lift home and had an impromptu stinky cheese-fest with him and Paul then watched some clips of David Icke doing his crazy thing on YouTube. An evening of diverse sensory stimulations.

Learnings

2008-10-20T21:27:32+00:00

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been learning to drive, belly-dance and crochet. Not at the same time, mind you.

The driving thing came about because I’d said in, ooh, 2002 that I’d get around to driving one day. In July, Katherine thought six years was long enough for me to arrange my own “one day” and very nicely bought me some lessons with her driving instructor neighbour to force me into it.

Now the thing about driving lessons is this: it turns out it involves piloting a tonne of metal around the roads surrounded by other tonnes of metal. It’s SCARY. Speeds feel a helluva lot faster when I’m behind the wheel. 30mph feels like I’m about to break the sound barrier, which at least would distort the sound of my own screaming.

I’ve had four hours of lessons so far (got another one tomorrow morning) and about an hour going around in circles in an empty car park with John to practise my steering. It’s going … ok. I’m not a natural but given I had nothing except the vaguest idea about driving before (”a brake is for stopping, you say?”), I think it’s going ok. I’m looking forward to being a bit better on the roads so I can practise just tootling around with John instead of fannying around in a circle on an industrial estate.

Katherine is to blame for the belly dancing too. Well, partially to blame. We decided we were going to do a course together this year and after drawing up a spreadsheet listing all the possibilities (location/day/requirement of no fish involved), we ended up with belly dancing. It’s also going … ok. Again, we’re not naturals; in fact, we’re considerably less coordinated than we ever thought and it’s scary showing off that lack of coordination in front of a room full of people - but most important, to ourselves in giant mirrors. Gah. But it’s something new and it’s exercise, and my my, some of the pelvic circle and shifts feel nice on my rather stiff lower back.

Crochet is much easier than driving or belly dancing, and involved far less clutch control and jigging about. I wanted to learn how to do it after the wirework workshop in Liverpool last month - I thought it was a really nice technique for use with wire so thought I’d try it out on yarn first. In my first week, I made a large number of circles using the double crochet and triple crochet stitches (which instantly became cat hats) to practise but then found some dishcloth cotton in a great green colour at the wool place in the market for 70p a ball and that inspired me to stretch myself and make a cotton shopping bag.

I kinda improvised around a random pattern I found. I started off with a square base rather than a round one, had 28 stitches/holes rather than 36 and did more rows - but the handle and finishing off instructions were great - very neat. (I reinforced the spots where the handles join the bag though. It didn’t feel strong enough to me.)

I’m very happy with the finished bag - it’s very stretchy and feels strong - and I’m delighted to have figured out how to do the holey/net stuff too. Double and triple crochet didn’t produce something different enough from knitting for me to be interested pursuing it but I like the idea of being able to do different things with it, like that net or granny squares.

On the knitting front though, I knitted two super chunky scarves for me and John yesterday (John’s is the orangey thing at the bottom of the string bag). Both scarves would have been better with a third ball of wool (I like them extra long) but are both fine - neat - with just the two balls I used. Each scarf took about two hours to knit (while I was listening to Joanna Bourke’s ‘Eyewitness: A History of Twentieth Century Britain’ - some of the accounts are a bit waffly but otherwise bloody excellent stuff) and is super snuggy. Bring on the cold winter.

VoIP For Network Operators Tutorial

2008-10-13T18:55:02+00:00

These are the slides that I presented at NANOG44 in Los Angeles on Sunday, “VoIP For Network Operators“.

This talk was for network operators looking to build voice segments of their network, and the slides cover

Voice Basics for SPs
Why Operators should care
Voice Peering
Metrics
VoIP Security

Git submodules in N easy steps

2008-10-12T14:41:47+00:00

Git has something called submodule support. This allows you to specify one or more other git repositories within another - a bit like svn:externals (except trickier, but more powerful of course :).

The git user manual describes submodules but it took me a while to figure it out, so I’m hoping these examples will help others (and me again when I forget and find my own page when googling about it :)

These examples deal with your_project and the project you’ll be adding as a submodule, other_project

Adding a submodule to your_project

$ git submodule add git@git.example.com:other_project.git other_project
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/john/dev/your_project/other_project/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 59, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (59/59), done.
remote: Total 59 (delta 22), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (59/59), 8.33 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (22/22), done.

This clones other_project and sets up the .gitmodules config to your_project and adds them both ready to be committed. You’ll notice that the other_project directory is added, not all the files within. Git just records the commit id from the other_project repository and uses that when cloning - a bit like a tag.

$ git status
#	new file: .gitmodules
#	new file: other_project

So now commit those changes:

$ git commit .gitmodules other_project -m "Added other_project submodule"
$ git push

Cloning a tree with submodules

Git doesn’t automatically fetch all your submodules, so you need to do the following after cloning your tree:

$ git submodule init
Submodule 'other_project' (git@git.example.com:other_project.git) registered for path 'other_project'

$ git submodule update
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/john/dev/your_project/other_project/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 59, done.
Receiving objects: 100% (59/59), 8.33 KiB, done.bjects:  91% (54/59)
Resolving deltas: 100% (22/22), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (59/59), done.
remote: Total 59 (delta 22), reused 0 (delta 0)
Submodule path 'other_project': checked out '6d5ca374208715501832eb33ed6a70022a3bb60c'

Updating a submodule

So somebody pushed some updates to other_project and you want them in your_project:

$ cd other_project
$ git pull origin master
Updating 6d5ca37..235996d
Fast forward
 5 files changed, 100 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
$ cd ..
$ git add other_project
$ git commit otherproject -m " Updated other_project submodule to latest HEAD"

If you want a particular commit rather than the head of master, then just specify that commit id on pull (instead of master). If you want the head of a particular branch then specify that branch name instead of master.

It is important not to have a trailing slash when you add other_project as this will treat it as a normal directory, adding all the files within it to your_project and forgetting about it’s submodule status

Making changes to a submodule within your_project

To make changes to other_project within your_project tree, you need to explicitly checkout a branch first:

$ cd other_project
$ git checkout master
...make your changes...
$ git commit -a -m "Fixed a bug"
$ git push
$ cd ..
$ git add other_project
$ git commit -m "Updated other_project"

You need to remember to push changes to other_project before you push your_project else others won’t be able to clone your_project properly as it will reference commits to other_project that haven’t been published yet!

Happy Guitarist

2008-10-11T20:08:15+00:00

A few weeks back, we went to a friends wedding. The band were excellent, and I took some pictures:

Linux webcam development

2008-10-10T23:29:58+00:00

So I bought a cheap webcam from my local supermarket for 10 quid. Plugged it into Cadeaux, my desktop PC and .. nothing.

Noting that Hans De Goede was working on better webcam support for Fedora and Linux users in general, I thought it was worth a shot. So I emailed him.

A few emails back and forth and about 48 hours later the camera was working! A couple of weeks ago the commit went into the kernel and any distro based on 2.6.28 will get support out of the box.

Thanks Hans!

Ukepedia - our fun! new! project

2008-10-09T15:34:05+00:00

Back in August, I had earache. Otitis Media to be specific.

After I got back from having it checked out by my doctor, I wrote a Twitter about it. John was playing on his ukelele and looking over my shoulder at the time so sang the Twitter as I wrote it.

Then I went over to Wikipedia to read all about Otitis Media, and as I read, John sang. As it turned out, the Otitis Media article worked beautifully as a song.

So we made it into a song. And we put the song on a website. And a fun new project was born.

Like with ELER, after an initial flurry of action, we’ve been a bit slow on it of late - but other members of the Church of the Ukelele have been stepping up and the collection of videos is slowly growing.

If you can play the uke - or any other instrument - and fancy joining the cool kids club, there are full instructions on the site.

There are only about 2,576,419 articles to go - so hurry!

Our weekend in London in numbers

2008-10-07T21:18:57+00:00

20 - cost, in pounds of our return train fare (each)
15.1 - miles walked (above the surface)
16 - painkillers popped by John (who hurt his back on the way to the train station in Leeds)
7 - cost, in pounds, of a sundae in the Haagen Das restaurant (worth it)
5 - drinks drunk at The Chandos pub
4 - doughnuts eaten (between us)
24 - amount of doughnuts bought by the woman behind us in the queue, stocking up for her six hour journey to Devon (she is our new hero)
2 - meals eaten in Chinatown
5 - amount of times (out of 11) that Big Ben rang while we were standing DIRECTLY underneath it before we actually realised it was ringing
3 - scarves bought: one pink/blue, one turquoise and one green/orange
7 - cost, in pounds, of a small bottle of beer and half-a-coke at the Hippodrome bar while watching La Cirque
10 - inches, the diameter of the tennis racket that Captain Frodo of La Clique squeezed himself through
1 - number of joints he had to dislocate to be able to do that
0 - the amount of laughs the ‘Viva Croydon’ song in La Cirque elicited from us
32.50 - cost, in pounds, of stalls tickets for Spamalot from the tkts booth in Leicester Square
2 - the amount of people who pushed in front of me in the drinks buying queue at the Spamalot interval
2 - museums visited
3.50 - cost, in pounds, of our British Museum guide book
2 - time, in minutes, spent looking at British Museum guide book
10 - tube stations visited
2 - maximum time, in rounded-up minutes, that we had to wait for any tube train (probably more like 90seconds)
6 - number of times I jokingly complained about the waiting times on British public transport when arriving on a platform exactly as a train arrived
3 - amusing overheards*
1 - potential punfolio submissions about ghee

* #1 - “Did you tell her about the death? Oh good.”
#2 - “If we all thought like that, we’d all live in poverty.”
#3 - something in Spanish which we didn’t understand but accompanied by a spanking motion

Zach and Jeff versus The Meteorite

2008-10-02T18:27:04+00:00

I would like to introduce you to Zach and Jeff.

Last week, I went to Liverpool for a wire-working workshop as part of a fantastic “Recycle Into Art” week, organised by the city’s Red Dot Exhibitions.

The workshop was run by Alison Bailey Smith, a wonderful artist and thoroughly lovely person who I’d already featured on Recycle This - she makes jewellery, accessories and clothes using reclaimed wire (typically from inside old televisions) and other “rubbish”, such as tomato puree tubes, sweet wrappers and ribbon from bouquets.

The workshop was billed as learning how to decorate bags - to make better use of the time, some people chose to make jewellery instead but since I needed a new nice bag, I stuck to the original remit.

We started off with Alison showing us her knotting technique but I somehow kept forgetting how to do it in the middle (don’t ask, I can’t explain it), so when Alison suggested knitting it instead, I jumped on that. Then I spent the next hour knitting a strip - which in hindsight wasn’t a terribly good use of my time but I liked the finished strip.

I’d picked out a nice simple clutch bag from the selection of charity shop bags Alison had brought along for us to use and the copper strip looked nice against the black - but I wanted to add some features as well. I played with some of the different techniques Alison had shown us - such as wrapping scrap plastic with wire then coiling it - but nothing seemed to fit as well as Zach and Jeff. (I’d previously used their kin to make earrings. These guys were going spare.) Then someone pointed out the coil I’d made out of a lime green M&S carrier bag strap looked like a meteorite, and hey presto, a handbag with a story was born.

I sewed the wiry earth, the dinos and the meteorite onto the bag with thinner, darker wire (visible in parts on the finished item) and a curved needle - my, my, that was more difficult than I thought but everything seems pretty secure now.

When I showed John the finished item, he was sad because he thought that there was an inevitably unhappy ending for Zee and Jee but I pointed out they were plastic so it was beautifully circular.

I had a thoroughly great time at the workshop, learnt so much and was really interested to see how everyone took a different approach and came out with something different. Since then, I’ve also learnt how to crochet so when I finally get my hands on an old TV of my own, I’ll be able to do all kinds of fun stuff with the wire. Plus, I have a great new bag too.

Smash Smashing Smashed

2008-10-01T22:52:39+00:00

Louisa and I randomly came across this demolition in Armley back in July, 2007. I happened to have my big camera with me.

The Girl just keeps on … running

2008-09-27T10:05:14+00:00

The Girl running past the 1km mark of the Great Yorkshire Run, 2008

Hello. In a week’s time, my very lovely girlfriend will be dodging geordies in a monumental run around Tyneside. It’s all for a very good cause and one that is close to both our hearts.

Traidcraft has been working for a very long time to enable the poorest of the world’s population to work themselves out of poverty. They also buy in awesome coffee and other stuff as part of CafeDirect which many people buy in supermarkets around the U.K.

So yes, you’ve guessed it - this is a sponsorship request. Please visit http://www.justgiving.com/lauraglasel2008 for all the details. Enough said and thanks.

UK Spam laws largely useless

2008-09-25T10:33:37+00:00

I’m getting some spam from some UK companies to a personal email address. I called and spoke to one of them and they said it won’t happen again but it continues to do so. I looked into complaining officially, under the new regulations that make the EC’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications law in the UK.

Under the new law, spammers can be fined £5,000 in a magistrates court or an unlimited penalty from a jury.

Yet it appears it is really up to me to pursue charges through the courts. The Information Commissioners Office, who enforce the new regulations, appear largely neutered (as predicted):

If my complaint is upheld, will the organisation be punished?

If we think the organisation has breached the regulations, we can ask them to put things right, but we cannot punish them for breaking the law.

If my complaint is upheld, will I be entitled to compensation?

We have no powers to award compensation . If you have suffered a loss because an organisation or individual has broken the law, you may be entitled to compensation, but you must claim this through the courts.

The right to compensation applies even if you don’t report the problem to us. You can make a claim to the court whether or not we have agreed that the law has been broken.

No doubt this will cost a lot of my time and money. We should build a simple kit, with some form letters and instructions on pursuing compensation.

Or just take enforcement into our own hands and report them to something like Spamhaus.

Niall William Holden, born 18th September 2008

2008-09-18T03:54:27+00:00

This is our latest addition, born four and a half hours ago:

Berlin

2008-09-15T00:04:22+00:00

I went to Berlin with Team Brightbox last week (1st-5th September) and as much as KLM conspired to make it otherwise, I had a great time.

It took almost 24 hours to get there with the quote-unquote “Reliable Airline” because the flight between Leeds-Bradford and Amsterdam was delayed, causing us to miss the last connecting flight onto Berlin. Cue four tired, sweaty hysterical people trying to maximise our return at a “participating bar and restaurant” at the airport after being given “we’re sorry we messed up” vouchers worth 10euros a piece (we scored two glasses of champagne, a “luxury” mojito, a cola beverage and two giant slices of chocolate truffle cake). We then had an indescribable meal at the airport hotel and about three hours sleep before catching our onward flight to Paris at dawn the next morning.

Paris? Yes, because all the Amsterdam-Berlin flights were booked up so we had to go via Paris. And we found out when we finally reached Berlin that my suitcase liked it in France so much, they decided to stay there for an extra day. Sigh.

Anyway, we finally reached our hotel - me sans luggage - around 2.30pm on the Tuesday. My original - pre-airline farce - plan had been to take a bike tour of Berlin on the Tuesday morning with Fat Tire Bike Tours. I’m not usually one for tours but because I was completely on my own (John was tied up at RailsConf with Brightbox) in a strange city, I thought it might be a good way to get a lay of the land. I’d obviously missed the morning one but decided - despite the lack of clean clothes (hurrah for promotional tshirts) and sleep - I’d go on the 4pm one instead. Capsule review: awesome fun and I was so glad I went on it. Even though it was rush hour ish, there was less traffic than a normal day in Leeds and anyway, we spent most of the time on bike paths or down back-streets. It took about 4.5hours including a refreshment stop at a beer garden in Tiergarten and I got to see a few things I probably wouldn’t have found/bothered with on my own (eg the abandoned guard tower near Potsdam Platz). Well worth the 18euros.

On the Wednesday, I had to work in the morning (John did too) and just as we were leaving the hotel for our respective afternoon pursuits, my suitcase finally arrived and I just about hugged it. I then got a taxi with John to the RailsConf hotel near Friedrichstraße station and took a pleasant (burning, melting hot) stroll down Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz. From there, I took the UBahn to Magdalenenstraße at the former Stasi Headquarters. My my, that was a surreal experience (when I finally found it). Because it was a random Wednesday afternoon, there weren’t many people in there and it felt like I was trepassing in some governmental offices from the 1970s - which I guess I was. Away from the offices, the exhibitions are all in German (an English guidebook is available for 3euros) but even without knowing the language, I was moved by a lot of the displays and intrigued by all the former Stasi spying devices.

After I was done (and bratwursted up), I headed back into the city and to the exhibition underneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (as fascinating and upsetting as expected). After that, I got on the third wrong train of the day and ended up at Friedrichstraße so decided to take donuts to the Brightboxers at RailsConf. We all hung out in that hotel’s lobby for a few hours while John & Baz finished up some work then headed out for dinner with Deb & Rob, Paul & Charmaine. There was an irony travelling all that way and hanging out with Leeds people but it was a good night.

On Thursday, I went to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial. I had originally intended to take a tour with the non-profit group Mosaic Tours because it’s out in the sticks and given my train issues the previous day, I wanted some help getting out there - but when the tour was cancelled due to low numbers, I took some directions and went anyway. It wasn’t that hard to get to in the end - a train out to Oranienburg then a bus from the station to the memorial - but Oranienburg station was surreal: a beautiful picturesque station, complete with a McDonalds, a live DJ playing 1970s German disco, dancing drunks and someone dressed up as a cartoon Viking. Perfect mood setting.

When I got to the Memorial, I was glad I wasn’t on an organised tour - I realised I could more concentrate on the things that interested me and also I wouldn’t have to be constantly be apologising for my sometimes inappropriate sense of humour. I took the audio tour instead and found it thoroughly absorbing - I just wish I could have a recording of it to keep and listen to again because there was so much to take in. The museum exhibitions are equally thorough and this is where the “concentrating on things I wanted to learn about” thing was the most important - I spent a lot of time in some of the areas but barely any in others. I spent just over three hours there in total - all I could take in a single sitting - but I’d go back on another trip to the city and spend even more time there, absorbing more, learning more…

Thursday night, John & Jeremy had to meet some clients so I found a Thai place for food near the hotel - yummy tom yam gung followed by mussaman gai - then we all had dessert together in the hotel’s bar before contemplating the journey home on Friday morning. The Berlin-Amsterdam leg went ok but when we got to Amsterdam, they told us we wouldn’t all fit on the connecting flight and one of us would have to wait for the later flight. In normal circumstances that would have been fine - annoying but fine - but after the 24hour journey there and lost luggage issues, we weren’t particularly impressed at the idea - plus John had a gig later that evening and we didn’t think he’d be able to text/phone in his drum beats. Eventually, after having to wait for seat allocation at the gate, we were all allowed on together and got upgraded too (which doesn’t mean much on those cityhopper planes - we were just grateful to have seats).

I certainly do think we’ll go back to Berlin again - if only so John can see something other than the taxi ride from airport-hotel & hotel-conference. I’m surprised we hadn’t gone sooner to be honest given my 20 year long interest in the last century of German history. There is so much to see and think about with all the Nazis stuff and all the DDR stuff - but history aside, it is a great city anyway. Despite my repeated errors on it, the public transport system makes it super easy to get around (Potsdamer Platz = haaaaate) and I loved how bike friendly (and flat!) it was. While it’s big, it didn’t feel scary-big like Moscow and maybe it was just the people I met but there seemed to be a really laid-back vibe to it too. We’ll return - just not on KLM.

>> Some of my photos

Edinburgh

2008-09-13T14:46:52+00:00

I have recently returned from Edinburgh, I caught the tail end of the Fringe festival. It was a good trip, and the first time I have had more than a day off work since February. I saw quite a few acts in the final 3 day.It’s been ages since I blogged and I’m out of the habit so I’ll just post loads of vids.
(more…)

Photos from PHPNW Meeting

2008-09-03T18:25:14+00:00

There are some photos from the PHPNW meeting last night on my flickr stream.

3038 Photos in Three Days

2008-08-29T18:21:12+00:00

A guy called Robbie shot 3038 photos whilst going about his daily business over three days, set them to music, and used them to make a video showing a slice of his life. The result is awesome:
3038 Photos in Three Days

Navigating the fictional but real world

2008-08-25T19:08:53+00:00

In Liverpool in 1998, I bought a book from a publisher clearance style bookshop called ‘The Breeders Box‘.

It’s set, primarily, in New York, around Greenwich Village - where I have never been - and for the first four, five times I read it, I had to imagine what the area looked like, how the streets fitted together and where things were in relation to each other.

The last time I read it - a couple of years ago - I realised I could look up the area on Google Maps and I could navigate all around, looking at the positions of stuff and blurry satellite photos of the tops of buildings.

This time I read it, I went back onto Google Maps, looked up the area then clicked for the street view - I could see the shapes for all the buildings in the area then plonk my little guy down where, say, the fictional eponymous club was on Spring St and look at the street itself, both sides and moving back and forth along the road.

I wonder how I’ll be able to interact with the real version of the fictional world in another ten years time.

Live search badness update

2008-08-23T11:10:49+00:00

So it seems that U.S.-based Fedorites don’t get the same thing. Perhaps the devil is in the details. U.K. users should try adding live search into their search engine list in Firefox (top right) and then searching for Firefox. Here’s what I get. (Sorry it’s grey, don’t get hosting with 1and1 - you get what you pay for).

Windows Live Search badness

2008-08-22T17:40:45+00:00

Its all about perception. Sometimes you get the idea Microsoft might be playing a little bit nicer.

Then you try doing a search for Firefox using Live Search. The first non-sponsored link is for firefox dot org dot uk (no, I’m not even linking to it) which bizarrely has no download link for Firefox and has the tiny disclaimer that it has nothing to do with Mozilla or Google. Instead it offers the Google Pack for download.

The second link is ie7.com which at least has a large firefox icon which then links directly to the proper firefox download site.

In fact, nowhere on the list of results do you get what would be considered a “good” result. Is this just the usual Live Search naffness or is it just another case for the European Competition Commission?

Loud Truth returns

2008-08-22T12:19:44+00:00

The old Loud Truth webzine has been reactivated at http://www.loudtruth.org.

Neil’s done a sterling job of picking it up, dusting it down, and bringing it into the world wide web of 2008 complete with RSS feed. I’m sure interesting links will be gratefully accepted.

Ukepedia: Wikipedia on the Ukelele

2008-08-16T16:28:17+00:00

Ukepedia is a new project by me and Louisa. Long story short: Ukepedia is Wikipedia articles performed on the Ukelele (or Ukulele if you prefer). The long story isn’t actually much longer than that.

Here is a video of me performing the Wikipedia article “Otitis Media” (which I also performed live at The Chemic Tavern on Thursday and at Bar Camp Leeds just today).

Record your own, upload them to You Tube and submit them to us!

James Reynolds of the BBC comes clean

2008-08-13T09:42:56+00:00

Admitting it for all to see on his BBC blog. Very brave of him:

Past horrors and mistakes do not seem to have weakened a servile belief in the ultimate benevolence of the state and a willingness to grant it unlimited powers.

In this country, if you start to blame the system itself - and the men right at the top - you tend to get into all kinds of trouble.

Unsurprisingly though, he’s talking about China and not the USA or the United Kingdom.

NHS connecting for health but not for IT

2008-08-08T12:22:30+00:00

Hello Firefox users,

Notice something about this page:

Slow hand claps all round. I’m probably taking it a bit far but if I was a tabloid journalist I would type:

“NHS treats Internet Explorer users only”

Time to get my clue-stick.

Update: I have to come clean. It turns out the online booking service is “not yet in service”. I don’t agree with web design based towards browsers rather than standards however.

Lastly, I don’t see any black helicopters but the NHS must have got a BIG discount for all those Windows licenses.

Vanilla and Blueberry…

2008-08-07T23:54:47+00:00

Now I’m no kernel buff but I get the idea of reducing the patch count and trying to follow upstream a little more closely. So it was with some interest I saw the following post from Mr. J. Boyer on fedora-kernel a couple of days ago

http://jwboyer.fedorapeople.org/pub/
Let the kernel installs begin.
Hopefully I didn’t fsck something up horridly. If I did, then I’ll fix
it for -rc2.
josh.

That’s right folks. Courtesy of Josh and the Fedora kernel team, you can now run the Linux kernel “sans patches”. This has benefits a-plenty but basically means that when kernel developers ask you to “run linus’s tree” or “test with mainline” - you can soon do just that with:

# yum install kernel-vanilla

Well, you’ll soon be able to hopefully. It’s not in the repo’s quite yet.
For the moment you’ll have to grab it from Josh’s fedorapeople space.

It also means you’re following upstream more closely and we all know why that is a good thing.

How to grow your own cats: a beginner’s guide

2008-07-22T17:54:35+00:00

Cats are easy to grow, even in a reasonably exposed north-facing garden like ours - but benefit from early propagation in a greenhouse (see left).

When the cat is ready to be planted on, pick a large pot to give the cat sufficient room to root/curl up (see right top).

Cats are reasonably hardy but can be infected with the “evil virus”. If that occurs, remove the cat from the pot (to avoid cross-contamination) and leave it to “dry out” on an old doormat (see right bottom - tell tale evil signs can be seen, namely the staring eyes, the fact her head is on backwards and the slightly manic “I’m going to eat your soul” expression). The evil is usually eradicated/forgotten about within a few minutes and the cat’s growth will continue as normal again.

Cats will raise from the curled/lying position as they grow until they reach their final height (typically around 40cm). Cats who have been infected with evil early in the growth stage may retain a rather hunched appearance and maintain the soul-eating gaze. In actual fact, they don’t eat souls, they prefer Go Cat. And tuna.

Hello world, Debian style

2008-07-14T20:20:33+00:00


# apt-get install hello

# hello
Hello, world!

# hello --help
Usage: hello [OPTION]…
Print a friendly, customisable greeting.

  -h, –help display this help and exit
  -v, –version display version information and exit

  -t, –traditional       use traditional greeting format
  -n, –next-generation   use next-generation greeting format
  -g, –greeting=TEXT     use TEXT as the greeting message

£5/month for your digitial civil liberties

2008-07-11T18:54:02+00:00

The Open Rights Group are a UK based organisation fighting for our civil liberties in the digital age. DRM, e-voting, copyright term extensions, FOI, net neutrality, privacy, RIPA, creative commons etc.etc.etc.etc.etc. They’re like an English EFF.

They have a tiny staff and many other volunteers who are extremely dedicated to the cause and are working very hard for our freedoms. They are funded entirely by donations which pays for the staff, an office and expenses of running campaigns and pestering politicians. They’re currently hoping to push their income up so things are more sustainable.

So, please sign up and give them some money every month. Anything from £5 upwards would be super. If you use computers for pretty much anything, it will make your life better - or at least prevent it getting any worse.

Sometimes I forget that this blog is syndicated…

2008-07-10T21:54:22+00:00

My last posting about my linux-hater love sparked some good comments and mails. Though of course its a bit of hot potato so I’m not _that_ surprised. I was surprised by the amount of negativity that was generated - basically poor user experiences. In the vein of current feather-ruffling, perhaps the whole marketing aspect needs a re-think. Perhaps I should just subscribe to the fedora-marketing list.

Max Spevack declared about a year ago that he wanted to make sure that Fedora was never again accused of being a beta for Red Hat. Unfortunately I’m not sure that it will ever entirely shake off this moniker. I’ve read various blog posts regarding poor Fedora 9 install experience (mine has been nothing but exemplary) however these tend towards the “My $PROPRIETARY_APP/DRIVER failed” which I really couldn’t care less about. Fedora quite rightly sticks to its guns on not kow-towing to these vendors.

I think Fedora still has an identity crisis - one that started when Fedora Legacy closed its doors. It does what I want but what does it want to be?

Upgrades are for people with a surfeit of time…

2008-07-08T22:44:41+00:00

About a month ago I started reading Linux Hater. I have to admit I love it. It takes a few posts for the realisation to sink in that its actually written by someone who deeply cares about Linux, has a great deal of knowledge about the inner workings of a Linux distribution and actually wants it to succeed. He/She/They try to hide it beneath a barrage of bad language and breath-taking insults but its great to see someone voicing the anger which I’m sure some of us involved to any degree in Free Software all feel at times. A friend of mine who had a particularly awful experience with Linux recently (not Fedora thankfully, blame Lexmark) will no doubt enjoy it as much as I do. I think people who dismiss it immediately as insulting are missing the point. Linux Format magazine used to run a section (can’t remember the name) where an anonymous contributor voiced the fears and concerns that someone with a real name and face could not.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve read a lot of upgrade woes, relating to current distributions and their ability to complete and upgrade from a previous version. For anyone not understanding the process of upgrading an operating system I’ll say it once and only once.

It’s not simple, may well break and if you don’t feel confident doing it then don’t.

One reviewer even bemoaned the fact that a system once running FC5 didn’t handle the upgrade from F8 to F9 well. So here’s a clue to those who just want to use a computer and not struggle with post-upgrade installation issues.

Backup /home, /etc, & /var and do a fresh install. The time reconfiguring your O.S. will be greatly less than fixing broken dependencies, repositories, packages and other issues. You will then never need to post about how you don’t understand why a new distribution with new toolchain, kernel, package management system and desktop environment doesnt work out of the box.

MoinMoin wiki on NGINX

2008-06-29T15:23:54+00:00

Further to my post about getting the MoinMoin wiki system working with FastCGI and Lighttpd, here is how to do the same with NGINX. MoinMoin is configured in FastCGI mode and listening on port 9005

All the fastcgi_param lines up to PATH_INFO are pretty generic and I have them in a separate include file that I pull in for any Fastcgi stanza.



  if ($uri ~ ^/wiki(.*)?) {
    set $wiki_url $1;
  }
  location /wiki {
      fastcgi_param  GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
      fastcgi_param  SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx;
      fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING       $query_string;
      fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD     $request_method;
      fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE       $content_type;
      fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH     $content_length;
      fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
      fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
      fastcgi_param  REQUEST_URI        $request_uri;
      fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_URI       $document_uri;
      fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;
      fastcgi_param  SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;
      fastcgi_param  REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
      fastcgi_param  REMOTE_PORT        $remote_port;
      fastcgi_param  SERVER_ADDR        $server_addr;
      fastcgi_param  SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
      fastcgi_param  SERVER_NAME        $server_name;

      fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $wiki_url;
      fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /wiki;
      if (!-f $request_filename) {
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9005;
      }
  }

I.T. and a healthy, balanced diet…

2008-06-19T00:47:57+00:00

The Girl tells me I should be “Eating breakfast like a King, lunch like a Prince and dinner like a Pauper.”

Lets see how Wednesday measured up.

Breakfast - cold toast, much of which scattered across keyboard whilst RDP’d into a client’s server
Lunch - Frapperlattimochachino thing, sipped whilst typing into a supplier’s “Live Chat”, trying to get remote backups to sync correctly
Dinner - Latte with side order of M&M’s, drunk and eaten at 80mph in the fast lane of the M1, heading north at 11pm.

Yeah, my body is a temple.

Louisa and the cats make a new shopping bag

2008-06-17T16:24:41+00:00

STEP 1
Take an old pillowcase, or in my case an new-to-me-but-old pillowcase, purchased for a very cheap price from a local charity shop. Get a cat (in this case Sili) to inspect it for quality and cleanliness.

STEP 2
See this picture of a pillowcase shopping bag on the internetz.

STEP 3
Find the instructions the red bag lady used to make hers.

STEP 4
As directed, fold in half along the diagonal, pin and cut. Do a better job than I did then have a cat expect your handy work. If you didn’t do a better job than I did, expect the cat to stalk off in disgust (a la Carbon).

STEP 5
Turn the pieces inside out (everything is pretty much done on the wrong side from here on in) then ask the nearest cat (still Carbon) to help fold and pin all the diagonals for hemming. You may think the cat is in the way but you are wrong: they’re making sure you don’t get too over-eager with the folding and that you listen to Martha and fold it in twice, about 5mm a time. Cats are stickler for detail and have claws to make sure you follow their instructions, even when they’re so disgusted with your efforts that they can barely look at you.

STEP 5a
Brief pause for a quick tickle with Carbon because, let’s face it, you’re not going to get any more work done while he’s in this mood.

STEP 6
When it’s all pinned up and ready to hem, have the hem inspecting cat (Carla) check over your work. If she approves, she’ll approach you for a congratulatory nose rub.

STEP 7
Hem away! Have a cat sat on your knee - between you and the machine - to keep an eye on the proceedings. For this step, I used a combination of Carbon and Boron.

STEP 8
Slip one of the hemmed triangles inside the other to form the basic shape of the bag. Pin it into place. Don’t forget: pins are sharp and can be dangerous, remember to ask a cat to supervise you to make sure you don’t hurt yourself. In fact, make sure you have a couple of back-up cats as well as the main supervisory cat in case of emergencies.

STEP 9
Sew along the diagonals where the fabric overlaps. Martha and the red bag lady seem to have only done the outside flap but I did the inside ones too, to make the inside neater (less likely for things to get caught up) and hopefully make it generally stronger too. Your cat may have a particular preference about this so don’t forget to ask.

STEP 10
Since this is such a critical step, two cats are required to inspect the work independently - in this case, Boron and Carla were drafted in.

STEP 11
Sew along the bottom edge - nice and strong. I also hemmed a triangle at the corners to make them more rounded when turned the right way around. Speaking of which…

STEP 12
Turn it the right way out, tie a knot in the narrow straps at the top - et voila! Get a cat to check it for comfort value then hold said cat in a grapple hold in order to take a cat-free photo of the finished artefact. Put the cat down again and enjoying the purring.

The pillow case seemed to be a bit longer than normal so the “straps” are really pleasantly long - imho much better as a shoulder bag than Martha’s version. It’s pretty big too and easily holds my brand spanking new laptop (in the padded slip carry-case thing it came with), and the related bulky paraphernalia (power supply, mouse, headphones…). It’ll be great for swimming and/or shopping too because unlike most tote bags, the strap is pretty broad so won’t go like cheese wire when carry more than helium balloons.

Next time the cats are available to help, I might add an outside pocket or two for things like my keys (the pillowcase was one of a pair, but I might use some orange felt I’ve got instead) or some fun over-sized buttons or something for decoration.

TOTAL PROJECT TIME: about three and a half hours including cat stroking, a cake-break and an episode of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ (wasn’t a good one; Riker made it with a hot alien chick).

MATERIALS & EQUIPMENT:

1 x pillowcase
cotton/thread for sewing
Additional decorations as desired
Scissors/pinking shears
Pins
Sewing machine (or a trusty needle and a whole lot of time)

TOTAL CATS REQUIRED: four.

GKH is a skinny Steve Ballmer…

2008-06-15T22:08:11+00:00

No Monkey Dance … yet … but this is the closest you’ll get.

Greg Kroah Hartman gives an excellent talk on the development processes, contributors etc. to the Linux kernel. There’s some really stirring stuff in there, particularly the page referring to changes that have gone into 2.6.26 - you can’t really make out the individual items but its kind of awesome all the same.

The kernel has always held a special fascination for me and I harbour a slightly childish ambition to contribute a single patch to the Linux kernel. Given that a Google employee has contributed seven spelling fixes, maybe I might just be able to fulfill it. :)

Summer Fun

2008-06-15T13:58:41+00:00

I have been working really hard of late and have decided to block book a load of long weekends this summer and get outdoors a bit. I have been thinking about doing a long distance path for ages and have decided to do one in early August, probably the West Highland Way. It is 95 miles and I reckon I can walk 20 a day so should be able to fit it in if I take a Friday and a Monday off work. I have just gone shopping for some kit so I can do it as lightweight (and brutal) as possible, and so got my gadget fix at the same time. This is ambitious as I have done nearly nothing for almost 3 years, but fuck it. I am in Snowdonia next week and will see just how bad my fitness is and the next six weeks I will do as much prep as I can.

From Alpkit.com, a great store selling direct from the factory at low cost.

Hunka Bivy, £30

Gourdon 30L Watertight Rucksac, £20

I wish they had the Wee Airic mat in stock, but i got a thermarest one instead (cost 3 times as much!)
Wee Airic, £17.50

From golite.com:

Ultralite Poncho/Tarp, £26

JetBoil, £46. Been thinking about one of these for a while, very efficient use of the gas, boils real quick and stows in the 1L pot.

I am well excited about it.

Corrupted filesystem recovery dry-run with LVM snapshots

2008-06-05T12:59:02+00:00

I have a corrupt Reiser filesystem that needs a tree rebuild on it, which can be a scary thing to do (and is only advised when you *really* do need to do it which, unfortunately, I do).

Now, this filesystem largely works, there is just a small part of it that causes problems when accessed. A rebuild could make things a lot worse, or it might just solve my problem (note: my problem appears NOT to be due to hardware failure. rebuilding the tree of a Reiser filesystem on hardware that has badsectors or whatever is VERY likely to make things worse. don’t do it).

So, I’m currently using the filesystem and avoiding the broken bit. I need to know if one: how long a rebuild is going to take, so I can plan the downtime and two: will it complete sucessfully or will the world fall on my head.

LVM snapshots can help here and my filesystem in on a LVM logical volume. The idea is to take a snapshot of the filesystem and run the rebuild on the snapshot. Then you can decide whether you want to take the live filesystem down to rebuild that, or maybe you decide to update your backups best you can and start a new filesystem from scratch.

create the snapshot: lvcreate -s -L 5G -n home-080605 /dev/myvg/home
run the rebuild: time reiserfsck –rebuild-tree -y /dev/myvg/home-080605
note the time it took
mount the snapshot somewhere: mount /dev/myvg/home-080605 /mnt/home-rebuilt
poke around a bit, make sure things are worse off (in my case, I took a file listing of live and snapshot filesystems and ran it through diff - nothing guaranteed, but provides some clues :)

The 5G is how much data can change from the time of the snapshot before LVM drops it. This depends on how many changes the rebuild is going to make and how many changes to the original filesystem are made whilst you’re working (assuming it’s still in use like in this case)

In my case, the output of the rebuild command showed that just the known corrupted files had been affected, which was nice. So now you can arrange the downtime and do the real rebuild. Feel free to take another snapshot before running the real rebuild, then if something does happen to go terribly wrong, you can recover to at least where you started.

Remember to remove the snapshots when you’re done: lvremove /dev/myvg/home-080605

Landing Gear Failure - Live from Manchester Airport!

2008-05-29T14:56:59+00:00

Well, I’m back off holiday - almost!

I’m currently writing this from the runway at Manchester Airport. Yes, on the plane. The problem is that we landed over an hour ago after a bumpy landing due to landing gear failure. The wheels went down, but the steering was b0rked and we needed to be towed.

That was only the first problem though, because we only got 200 yards before the tow truck broke down. A replacement was sent, but, incredibly, that broke down too!

We’re currently sat waiting for a replacement truck to tow us across the main runway - two hours after we landed.

Here’s the current view:

Twitter relay rbot irc plugin

2008-05-25T01:30:05+00:00

I wrote a little plugin for rbot that follows a user on Twitter and announces any twits of its friends on irc.

I registered a dedicated twitter account for our irc channel and had it follow everyone in the channel who has a Twitter account. When they twit, we get an announcement within 90 seconds:

<chanbot> via twitter, johnleach is testing his rbot plugin a bit more (23 seconds ago via web)

The plugin is available here and is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2, just like rbot.

Just drop it in your .rbot/plugins dir, rescan, then configure twitter_relay.username and twitter_relay.channels and off you go. It will check the rss feed every 5 minutes by default, but that can go as low as around 60 seconds if you set twitter_relay.sleep.

Only tested with the latest development snapshot of rbot, but it will probably work with older versions.

Dear Red Hat marketing dudes…

2008-05-24T10:14:56+00:00

When videoing people for use in marketing videos, zooming in and out, moving the camera about randomly and putting people in front who talk in monotone only serves to make the viewer seasick and sleepy. Please stop it.

Exhibit number one. Bad.
Exhibit number two. A bit better.
Exhibit number three. - (OGG) Awesome.

Flashers on Fedora

2008-05-24T09:48:29+00:00

So of course I wanted to watch carpet tube for the 20th time after installing Fedora 9. But couldn’t. Firefox 3 beta 5 ships with Fedora 9 but the built in flash installer doesn’t work for $REASON. After futzing around with swfdec (interesting results but not _quite_ ready, qv. ath5k) I headed back to the proprietary realm. Post rpm install, video worked, just not sound. Fiddled, poked, temporarily blamed pulseaudio. Sorry Mr Poettering. Googled, hit this then installed libflashsupport. Then discovered Flash 10 is on the horizon with support for the aforementioned pulseaudio etc.

I don’t even need to browse Fedora-devel to read the latest round of:

“Why do we ship borkened Fedora, I want puppies plz k thnx”.

For a good reply of why not I direct you to Yaakov Nemoy’s take.

Click heels 3 times for networking…

2008-05-23T21:07:06+00:00

So …. NetworkManager in Fedora 9. Its been fascinating to watch the progression of this through subsequent releases. It was unusable in Fedora 7, intermittent in Fedora 8 so I was keen to see what had changed. Static IP addressing but most importantly, support for 3G/HSDPA modems such as the huwaei e220, of which I have one through work.

This works, out of the box. So well, in fact, that I use it in preference to my house WLAN when ath5k eventually grinds to a halt. As in:

Fedora experience: Plug in modem, wait 5 seconds, use internet.
Windows experience: Plug in modem. Wait for drive to mount. Wait for hardware detection to complete. Get confused when Windows says it is installed a CD-ROM drive. Run through software installation (must be Administrator to do this). Load up software. Watch as software declares SIM to be invalid. Restart software. Use internet.

That’s not the end of the tale though dear readers. I have an itouch dual mobile phone. On Fedora 8 when connected via USB the system speaker emits a squawk, prints a kernel bug to systems logs and charges. On Fedora 9 it identifies it as a networking device and makes it available for connection.

You mean I don’t have to type:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid “My Home Lan” anymore?

BodyWorlds In Manchester

2008-05-10T22:36:42+00:00

I went a few weeks ago to see BodyWorlds at the Museum of Science and Industry (mosi) in Manchester.

I have only just had chance to get the pics off my phone and am amazed at how well they came out.

All one body, look at the shared foot.

This was the highlight for me, what incredible musculature.

This is amazing, enough features remain with just the blood vessels that you could probably recognise him if you knew him in life.

Either a real life visible human or a macabre newtons cradle.

It was a great day out.

Felicini Voucher

2008-05-09T18:07:59+00:00

Went here with a friend, pretty yum. 50% off makes it great value too.

http://www.felicini.co.uk/voucher/felicini_voucher.pdf

Expect an update soon on why my brute-forceing below was plain dumb rather than simply naive.

Summer in Armley

2008-05-07T17:20:08+00:00

The street is silent
Except for one girl screaming:
“I hate you, you fat fuck”

Like birdsong, with swearing
The girl grounded, the door locked
The fat fuck will slap her, she will.

Graphical Git on GNU/Linux with Giggle

2008-04-27T21:46:39+00:00

Check out (pun!) Giggle, a graphical frontend for the git distributed revision control system. Cute name and much lovelier than gitk. It’s pretty new but already does a lot, and more is planned. See the screeny.

Making a staging database with sed

2008-04-26T10:53:40+00:00

Quick one - thought was was cute and useful. I take a copy of live databases once in a while for use in the staging environments, but some apps have references to the live url in the there (Wordpress does this and makes all its redirects using it, making it particularly difficult to test in staging).

This is a simple little way to change all the urls in the db as you clone it:

mysqldump -h live_db_host -u user -pmypass live_db | sed -e '{s/www.example.com/staging.example.com/g}' | mysql -h staging_db_host -u user -pmypass staging_db

Though depending on your MySQL table type you might want to dump to disk first, then pipe it through sed as your live tables might be locked (I’m not actually sure if mysqldump will block waiting for the other processes to catch up)

Broken Bus Window

2008-04-20T11:44:57+00:00

Broken Bus Window form back in 2005.

My shell history, by C. Brown

2008-04-13T19:06:36+00:00

[chris@stig ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
170 ls
119 cd
72 rpmbuild
72 emacs
58 less
52 diff
42 sudo
32 ssh
29 exit
28 rm

Tired of humanity…

2008-04-13T18:29:30+00:00

Sometimes people conspire to make you feel like you live in a nation of Very Bad People.

Incident One - A few days ago the house was broken into. I was away visiting older brother and so the house must have looked deserted. Said intruder got a surprise when younger brother greeted him when he walked into his room at around 11pm. He left taking with him one of my old mobile phones and leaving us with a hefty bill to replace the windows frame he had used as his entrance.

Incident Two - I was involved in a minor collision (my fault entirely) a week or so ago. I have received a letter claiming personal injury and GBP £1k plus in damages. Err, no.

Incident Three - Two snotty emails at work, one sent late Friday, just in time for the weekend. Thanks!

Not great. Still, here’s the bright side.

Wordpress 2.5 (on which this blog is written) is awesome. Upgrade was a cinch too.
Metal Michael continues his awesome adventures and I continue my persual of travel sites.
Tomorrow is another day.

Project Euler 39

2008-04-12T18:49:57+00:00

If p is the perimeter of a right angle triangle with integral length sides, {a,b,c}, there are exactly three solutions for p = 120.
{20,48,52}, {24,45,51}, {30,40,50}
For which value of p < 1000, is the number of solutions maximised?

WARNING: CONTAINS MATHEMATICS
(more…)

Speaking at the Manchester Free Software Meeting

2008-04-08T22:05:35+00:00

I’m speaking next Tuesday (15th April 2008) at the Manchester Free Software about my geeky web comic, Everybody Loves Eric Raymond. Apparently people are still interested in it even though it hasn’t been updated since December! Hooray!

It’ll be a bit of a mix of the two talks I’ve done before on ELER, so some stuff about the history of the comic and how I make it, plus some ranting about free software, free markets and leaders.

I was asked by the then organiser (and my friend) Matt Lee who was then extraordinarily renditioned to North America with his new wife, leaving the new organisers to pick up the pieces. Luckily most of the pieces were found and it’s all go, though I do now appear to be talking about my new Rails hosting company too and my name is spelt differently. If there is time, I’ll talk about some of the stuff we’re doing at Brightbox with Free Software.

Talk starts at 7pm at the Manchester DDA. More details on the Manchester Free Software website.

6 year old Gnome bug picks up pace

2008-04-05T11:12:45+00:00

This bug regarding the Nautilus image thumbnailer performance was reported almost 6 years ago. It had input on it at the rate of around one message every two months, up until the end of 2003 - then nothing until 2006, where duplicate bug reports start coming in pretty regularly until the end of 2006. All pretty quiet until then, kind of suddenly, Michael Chudobiak writes a patch that speeds up Nautilus almost 3400%

I used a test folder that had four 15000x400 tif images and four
15000x400 png images (solid colors). Without the patch, it took
Nautilus 4 minutes and 30 seconds to thumbnail the folder. With
the patch, it took 8 seconds.

I'm not clever enough to touch the actual pixop codebase. But
these numbers suggest there is enormous room for improvement!
This bug has been open for 6 years - nudge, nudge.

Because free software is forever we can just afford to get there in the end :)