Planet ALUG
- A Big ALUG Blog Spew

Like Tim, I recently got a new lens for my camera - though mine was on the recommendation of the Canon EOS Beginner's FAQ, and since I have a Canon 350D, I got a Canon EF50mm f/1.8 ll Lens - 52mm. It's taking quite a while to get to grips with a prime lens (I still keep reaching for the lens to zoom it), but I love how this forces a "back to basics" approach to framing shots (i.e. you have to walk about a lot).

I also got a circular polarizer. I need to figure out how to use it to best effect, but to get an idea of the difference it makes, I took two almost identical (typical tourist, terribly clichéd) shots of Norwich Castle:

I think I need to practice some more ;-) I also got a new tripod, a Manfrotto 055D, which should do to get me started. I tried out a Canon EF24-70mm 2.8L, but at over £900 I couldn't quite convince myself I needed it ... yet. I'll live with the lower quality 18-55mm for now.

I've compiled my own kernels for as long as I can remember. I do so for almost any box I use, rather than running distro supplied kernels. I think this dates back to to the days when that was just what you did, but it also ties in with the fact I often want to run the latest and greatest (eg for laptop device hardware support).

One of the things I've always avoided is the initrd. I've never really seen the point; I compile my root device driver into the kernel and thus it all works. I've seen some suggestions that the in kernel RAID array detection code isn't really being maintained and that in the future it'll require userland tools to configure a RAID array, so I've been a bit worried that I'll eventually have to learn about initrds.

In fact, that day came this weekend. My large IDE disk is dying and I decided I needed something to replace it so I could have a proper poke. So I bought a pair of SATA disks and found a cheap Highpoint RocketRaid 1520 (don't buy one of these; I mistakenly thought they were better than the good old SI 3112, but they're not. And if anyone knows of a cheap (sub £30) SATA-II PCI card then let me know. I don't think they exist.)

The RocketRaid is basically just a HPT372A (hpt366 driver in Linux) with software RAID on top. Previously I've ignored such things and just used the normal Linux RAID support, but I thought I'd give this a try with the aid of dmraid. This can read several different ATARAID formats and uses device-mapper to map the drives appropriately to keep Linux happy.

So, I install dmraid and it happily finds the RAID array and configures it all up (though I end up with the wonderfully named /dev/mapper/hpt37x_dabhghbgeg which is a bit unwiedly). All good. Except, of course, that I have to run some userland to get the RAID array up, which means I need an initrd to sort it all out if I want / on it. And I do.

These days I want initramfs rather than initrd (and I needed to remember to set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y in my kernel config as it's needed for initramfs or an initrd). I found the initramfs-tools package and installed it, then had a poke around for info on getting dmraid working with it. Debian bug #367661 discusses such things and I've attached the patch I used from Ubuntu to the bug report.

Then I did, as root, update-initramfs -k 2.6.17.6 -c -v and it magically created a /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17.6. Passed that as the initrd in grub and it all magically works; dmraid fires up from the initramfs, the kernel gets to mount the RAID partition as / (and the other partitions as swap and lvm) and it's all good.

Except the fact one of the disks seems to have been damaged in transit and eBuyer are being slow about issuing an RMA number. Oh, and the fact the RocketRaid sucks and only seems to get 15MB/s or so. Meh. The initramfs stuff is all happy though, and a lot easier than I expected.

I have resigned from my role at Canonical where I was a member of the team developing the soyuz portion of the Launchpad project and where I also did some work on Ubuntu also.

I have been given the opportunity to go and do what I have been wanting to do now for almost six years — go to work on the lower levels of the software stack we all take for granted. I will be starting work at Simtec Electronics mid-August and while I will be working on things at as high level as I am used to at Canonical I will also be plunging down through the levels of experience I have gained at MIPS and Zeus, to the as-yet uncharted (for me) waters of programmable logic itself.

To those who I have worked with over the past (nearly-)two years on Launchpad and Ubuntu I wish the very best of luck. I think Launchpad is an excellent project and it has the opportunity to really make a difference to the open source world. I will continue to use Ubuntu on my servers although I imagine that with my new job I’ll be moving a little further back toward Debian (although perhaps not).

To all my friends in the Ubuntu community — I will miss you. Some of you have been invited to come and visit and those invitations still stand, just contact me by mail to discuss them. Those of you who I was helping with packaging or similar are welcome to continue receiving what little help I can offer. And those of you who simply enjoyed a game of cards from time to time — keep on Maoing.

I don’t know if I’ll make it to any of the conferences as a community member, perhaps if there’s one in the UK I may. If not, then Auf Wiedersehen Pet and I’ll see you on the flip-side.

Everyone in or near Norwich should ensure they're at The Murderers this Wednesday (19th July) from 8pm for Dave's Reynard City launch party. Yes.

• Canon EOS Beginners' FAQ
  (tags: camera digital FAQ guide howto photography reference Canon eos tips tutorial)
• Innovation Happens Elsewhere
  (tags: opensource book business)

My trip to and from Rome was obviously my turn for the travel gremlins to be out in force. The outward journey was messed up by nature (a stag was struck by an incoming train, delaying all services on the line to Cambridge and my onward connection to Stansted Airport). Thankfully I'd allowed the obligatory extra two hours for train travel in this country, so after an hour of being told "the train will be here in 20 minutes", I managed to get a car from the wonderful folk at Norwich Car Hire. One mad race later, I made it to the airport just in time to hop on the plane. It was a good job I'd used internet check-in, since I'd have been walking to Rome otherwise.

The return journey wasn't so fortunate. Due to "operational reasons", our plane was delayed by nearly three hours. Not as bad as Ugo's 4 hours and 20 minutes, Matt's cancellations or Gianugo's epic journey, but it was compounded by the fact that Rome Ciampino has very few facilities, no wireless internet, and nowhere near enough seats (c'mon people, it's not rocket science: how many people boarding planes at any one time? Right, that's roughly how many seats you need). There was also an entertaining 10 minute wait once we'd all boarded where the captain had to negotiate with the airport to persuade them to re-open. Adding insult to injury, if I'd known the flight was going to leave at midnight, I could have taken the time to catch up with friends in Rome instead of sitting in an airport.

The delayed flight and the long drive home (even though it was completed in record time, given the lack of traffic and a heavy foot on the accelerator) meant I didn't reach my bed until nearly four this morning. Yawn!

Oh well. I know if you play the airplane lottery often enough you are more likely to get flight delays and cancellations, and I still count myself lucky to get to see so many places when traveling on business. I just get a little grumpy without enough sleep ;-)

<p> I need a new TV. I've have my current one for 6 years now and it was secondhand when I bought it. Plus it gets this little green patch now and then (which it's been doing for a couple of years). Not hugely annoying, but everything helps in justifying a new one. </p> <p> My current TV is a normal 25" 4:3 set. I've worked out that if I go widescreen I need a 31" set to get the same height, which seems perfectly doable. The tricky bit comes in that I'd like HD, as hopefully the new TV will last me at least as long as the old one has. HD's only recently been launched in the UK - <a href="http://www.sky.com/">Sky</a> brought out their <a href="http://www.sky.com/hd/">HD service</a> just in time for the World Cup (though I understand lots of people who'd pre-ordered didn't receive their upgrades in time). <a href="http://www.telewest.co.uk/">Telewest</a> also have a recent HD service. Of course <a href="http://www.ntl.com/">NTL</a>, who I have, don't yet (despite them having merged with Telewest) and the Freeview DVB-T trials are only in Central London. Anyway, I won't have HD signal for a while, but I want to be ready when for when I do (and I'll be hooking a media PC up to the screen anyway, so will be able to take advantage of it via that method). </p> <p> Sky appear to have decided on using 2 HD formats; 720i (1280x720, progressive) and 1080i (1920x1080, interlaced). So having support for those would be nice. In addition I'd like 1080p (1920x1080, progressive), for things like the media box and in case content becomes available in that format (HD-DVD/BluRay?). This doesn't seem like a huge request. Lots of TVs in the UK are marketed as <a href="http://www.eicta.org/goto.asp?docid=398">HD Ready</a>. What does that mean? </p> <p> Essentially it specifies that the minimum native resolution of the screen is 720 lines and that there is a digital (DVI or HDMI) input that can support 720p and 1080i input and copy protection (HDCP). There is no minimum width; the set is allowed to scale the image to fit whatever it has. I've seen HD Ready sets that have a 1024x1080i native resolution - not wide enough for a native 720p image let alone 1080i. However most HD Ready sets seem to do 1366x768 as the native res, so fine for 720p but not 1080i/p. <b>sigh</b> </p> <p> I managed to find a TV from <a href="http://www.philips.co.uk/">Philips</a>, the <a href="http://www.consumer.philips.com/consumer/catalog/catalog.jsp?fhquery=fh_secondid%3D37pf9830_10_gb_consumer%26fh_location%3D%2F%2Fconsumer%2Fen_GB%2Fcategories%3Ccatalog_gb_consumer%2Fcategories%3Ctv_gr_gb_consumer%2Fcategories%3Cflat_tv_ca_gb_consumer%2Ffh_att_prof_features%3E%7Bfh_att_hd%7D%2Fcategories%3Clcd_large_30_40_su_gb_consumer%26&productId=37PF9830_10_GB_CONSUMER&activeCategory=TV_GR_GB_CONSUMER&fredhopperpage=detail.jsp&language=en&country=GB&catalogType=CONSUMER">37PF9830/10</a>, which does native 1920x1080p. <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/">Amazon</a> even sell it, though for an eye watering &pound;2,248.28. What does this get you? Integrated Freeview decoder? No. MPEG2/4 playing of movies from flash media? No, just image viewing. A nice big monitor for your computer? No, Philips' website only lists 1024x768 as the max computer res and I've seen reports in forums that 1366x768 is possible, but no higher. There's a 42PF9830/10 (42") that adds movie playing and ethernet, which sounds good but adds who knows how much to the price (I couldn't easily find a UK price). Plus it's probably too large for me even if it was affordable. </p> <p> My naive hope is that with the Sky push lots of people will have got sorted for the World Cup, or will go HD for Christmas. Meaning that come the new year I might have a better available choice of proper HDTVs and the pricing might be sane. I can dream, right? </p>

I tried Coke Zero for the first (and probably last) time this evening. While the first mouthful actually tasted not bad, the familiar and unpleasant taste of artificial sweetener soon hit. Oh well. Much better than Diet Coke, but not something I'd buy again.

Not that I'm that fussed. I don't drink a lot of soft drinks - we buy pure juice for the house and although I occasionally drink Coke (or preferably Pepsi) when I'm out, it's only if I'm not drinking. I prefer ice cold water but it's usually ridiculously expensive and doesn't come in pints (tap water will sometimes do, but often isn't cold enough). Nice try Coke, but count me out.

<b>Debugging &amp; Logging</b> I just fell out of the zone, which means that I'm going to update my journal. Firstly, I'ld like to point people at <a href="http://logging.apache.org/" >the Apache Logging group</a>. They have some logging tools which are actually really well put together - I'm now using their Log4Net in my code and its really saved a lot of effort on my part to provide a suitable logging service. <p> The only strange thing is the lack of error logging on its constructor - I had a massive problem in getting it to find my XML file (partially because I forgot that I wasn't compiling into and running from the same directory that I was programming in). However providing it with a dodgy path to a non-existent file didn't throw any errors - this would mean that the logging would never be able to interrupt the execution of the program. I will have to look into how to detect if the logging has managed to succeed or not (at least on start-up). <p> Its ability to have a watch on the configuration file is also quite nice, and it doesn't seem to have that much impact on performance when you start using (and ignoring) its debug() functionality. Its main power however is the ability to use the logger in one environment with one configuration, but then (for instance when using the code in a program as opposed to the test harness) having the logging go to different places. The ability to control the end-location of the logs to different streams, emails or files is just awesome. I mean I am really, really impressed with this software. <p> And its not too annoying in the code either, which means I'm even happier - at the top of each of my classes I just put <p> <pre>private ILog myLog = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(currentclass));</pre> <p> then I just put <pre>mylog.debug("Some Debug Stuff");</pre> or whatever I want inline, replacing all my Console.WriteLines(). Its great. Go use it! <p> <b>Human Interfaces</b> <p> <a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/prozac/diary.html?start=50" >Prozac</a>: I use a tiny mouse - I mean a really really tiny mouse. <a href="http://geeks.blog.activelabs.co.uk/fullimage.aspx/33.jpg " >This</a> gives some idea as to how small my mouse is to my hand (also shown). I hold it in my fingers, and I actually have no problem with the straight down menu styles, because my fingers just move when my hand doesn't. <p> Plus I generally click as little as possible. I'm annoyed that I haven't found a suitable way in windows to have the sloppy focus of fluxbox that I love and enjoy - just to cast my mouse to a location. <p> But then again I also have a good memory - or rather not necessarily memory but my hands know the shortcuts. I mean they know the keys off by heart, (I have a das keyboard - did I mention that in here yet? I aught to have - its very <a href="http://geeks.blog.activelabs.co.uk/Default.aspx?type=view&id=40 " >cool</a>).

I'm off to Rome in a few minutes, and I thought I'd better check the weather forecast so I can dress appropriately. And blimey, what a forecast:

To put that into context, on Wednesday night it will be only 2 degrees cooler in Rome than the top temperature in Norwich during the day:

I'm going to melt!

Back on the 9th May, Anthony shared ten words beginning with the letter ‘I’ with us. When prompted he gave me the letter ‘E’ and I gathered some words up and never got around to formulating my post with them in, so here for your delight and delectation are ten words starting with ‘E’ and what they mean to me…

eccentricity

Where a lot of people see 'odd' or 'strange' I see 'eccentric'. Eccentricity is simply a deviation from that which people consider normal. One could say "centered differently" or "not in the usual way" but to me, eccentric simply means interesting. If noone was eccentric, how would we find new normals and new ways to express ourselves?

emotion

A lot of people see emotion as a weakness, but to me it's a strength I could not live without. Emotion is what drives us to smile unbidden, to hug someone, to live life to the full; to love.

encryption

In my life I have been many thing and I will be many things more, but first and foremost I am a geek. In my life as a geek I have been fascinated by many thing, but none quite as much as data security in the form of encryption. Encryption is a way to protect our secrets and a way to communicate without being understood by someone intercepting the message. Encryption is a fundamental part of the way I do my job and the ways in which I contribute to open source projects. I doubt that, without encryption, I would be working on as much free software today as I am.

engineering

The word 'engineering' means different things to different people. It might mean the design of new buildings, or machine parts. It might be the construction of new software or the act of looking after a steam engine. To me it is, quite simply, the act of directed creation itself. I apply engineering principles in almost every part of my life, from the software engineering I do for myself and for my job to the engineering of situations or the organising of others. Engineering is fundamental to my way of life.

entertainment

Quite simply, without entertainment our lives would be less rich. Both being entertained and indeed entertaining others gives us, as a people, a rich and powerful way to derive joy. And joy is paramount.

equality

Equality is a concept which in my opinion needs to be considered carefully. For example, total equality is one of the ways in which communism intended to save the world. But ultimately there cannot be equality of treatment without physical sameness and equivalence. There are degrees and axes of equality and the concept of equality in law of ethnicities or other demographic slices of society is perhaps the most important to me (being of a potentially disadvantaged demographic).

euphemisms

"munching on a chocolate starfish", "spanking the monkey", "Miss Palm and her five daughters dance the shuffle". Come on, how many of you didn't even crack a smile. Euphemisms are a glorious way to inject a little humour into what some consider to be an offensive thing to express.

exceptions

Without exceptions one has only the expected. And that can become rather dull. Exceptions are what inject a litle excitement and confusion into our lives and through that we can grow to understand more of the world around us. The phrase "The exception which proves the rule" is a beautiful example of how the concept of exceptions being fundamental to our lives is deep-seated within our collective consciousness.

exotic

Simply meaning 'foreign' or perhaps "Not from round here" -- to me, exotic invokes the idea of an opportunity to learn something new or to extend my range of understanding of something I already know a bit about. Exotic foods are an opportunity to see how others eat and to learn new ways in which to prepare food for myself. Exotic ideas give rise to the potential for even better engineering within my life.

exploitation

The word 'exploitation' has such negative connotations in so many of its uses in modern society, but I prefer to think of it as the more benign "act of making something more productive". For example, in software engineering one would 'exploit' a property of the data to engineer a more efficient solution. For example compression 'exploits' redundancy in data streams to produce a representation of the same information in less space. Perhaps we should all learn to think less about 'victimisation' or the other negative forms of exploitation and instead learn to exploit the richness of our languages to better express ourselves.

I hope that in some way this has enchanted, entertained, engaged or enlightened you and perhaps encouraged you to express an enthusiasm for some words which mean a little to yourself.

Summer Placement with Senokian

After a stretch of working in the fields picking vegetables (great money by the way) and desperate job searching I've managed to secure myself a summer placement! It's perfect in every way except that it's in Coventry. Luckily lauperr happens to be renting a house in Coventry and isn't having much luck finding a job at home so we're both going to live there for a couple of months and work. I'll be working for Senokian Solutions writing open source software and I assume contributing to the Enterprise Groupware System. I'll be part of the Shell Step program, though not eligible for any awards because it's only really meant for 2nd and 3rd years (shh!). I should be starting on Wednesday.

LugRadio Live 2006

For anyone who's still in the Bourne area I'll hopefully be back every weekend except next week when I'll be at LUGRadio Live 2006 in Wolverhampton. Be there or be... not square I suppose.

Ubuntu Dapper

I've spent about a week using the latest (long term support) release of Ubuntu Linux, Dapper Drake. I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a bold statement.

I believe GNU/Linux is now ready for the desktop.

Dapper Drake isn't perfect, but it's damned good and it's definitely easier to install than Microsoft Windows. That's understandable when you think how many years it is since Microsoft last released an operating system, but I believe that the perpetually delayed release of Windows Vista is going to alienate a lot of people, especially the minority who actually care about things like the Windows Genuine Disadvantage. I for one can't afford a PC which could run Vista and I'll probably only install it if I get a free copy from University. Dapper probably isn't as good in terms of usability or style as Mac OS X but it has its own advantages. I'm not saying that GNU/Linux is going to suddenly dominate the desktop, I'm just saying it's ready for use by the general public in ways it perhaps wasn't before the latest release of Ubuntu.

I'm doing some fixes to a site today which requires me to revisit an old friend ...

Doesn't time fly?

<a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/doppelganger/diary.html?start=0" >Doppleganger</a>: I can't work out if you are a bot or a real person. Where are your links to your `posting'. Are you actually some kind of megahal bot that's been fed a data structures and algorithm textbook and just preparing an account that can be later used for link spamming? <p> <b>Edit</b> Thanks <a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/bi/diary.html?start=42" >bi</a>. That looks very much like an implementation of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie" >Trie</a>. As such, it would be very efficient, (in searching speed) but I fear the amount of memory used up would be *fearsome* and creating it in the first place may also be very slow.

• Seven Habits Book Summaries
  (tags: book business gtd howto management 7habits productivity)
• Overcoming Procrastination Through the Pull Method
  (tags: procrastination productivity gtd lifehacks motivation business inspiration tips)

• Getting Through Customs - Articles
  (tags: business culture guide howto reference sales travel)
• Jeb-Soft: Ejector
  (tags: macosx mac osx software utilities recommended)

• ianhenderson.org - megazoomer
  (tags: software osx mac macosx tools utilities recommended)

Black Cat got another query today about offering dynamic DNS to customers. We've had people ask us about it in the past, but the DNS changes we made a while back means it's something that is possibly easier for us to offer now. So I had a think about authentication and tying it in to our current DNS interface and bits like that and decided it might not actually be too hard to get a basic service running.

Then I went and had a look at current implementations. In particular I wanted to see about client support. So I grabbed ez-ipudate, which is used on at least the Netgear DG834G and Linksys WAG54G routers. It supports a load of different services. And the only one that protects the password is GnuDIP. Various services offer HTTPS updates, but ez-ipupdate doesn't support it that I could tell.

I stopped looking at that point. If one of the most common clients doesn't care about protecting users then I don't want to depress myself by finding out how many others don't either. It's a real shame though, as it means if we want to implement dynamic DNS that'll work with standard clients we have to add another authentication system that is unique to that service.

• Essentials, 2006 edition [dive into mark]
  (tags: Linux ubuntu Software essentials)

I'm sat in the airport at Dublin waiting for my flight to Norwich, without internet access because eircom's wireless internet service accepts payments but dishes out incorrect username / password details (as Gianugo also experienced during his nightmare trip home). Whilst this means I can't do essential things like compulsively checking my email, chatting to people over IM, or reading news, it does give me a chance to write up some thoughts on ApacheCon.

This was my first ApacheCon, as I've somehow managed to miss the previous European events - London 2000 (too busy starting up Luminas) and Stuttgart 2004 (too busy running Luminas). In many ways I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was.

It's definitely a conference by geeks for geeks, but the business track had an awful lot of good content in it too. I particularly enjoyed Danese Cooper's "Challenges of Corp. Inv. in Open Source", and found much to agree with in Brian W. Fitzpatrick's "Apache: Code Isn't Enough". I think the highlight was definitely the Lightning Lottery Talks, which provided some much-needed relief after the mental exertions of the previous days.

There were a few niggles: the pre-conference organisation was pretty chaotic (talks and workshops confirmed or cancelled far too near the actual event); spotty wireless at the beginning of the hackathon (though this improved dramatically); most annoying of all was the totally inadequate number of power supplies. The last was especially frustrating since I usually carry a 4 socket power strip with me, but decided against it this time since the Cocoon GetTogether had lulled me into a false sense of security about provisions at Apache-related events.

None of these niggles were enough to seriously lessen the enjoyment of the event though, and the sense of Apache community really made it a great experience. I can't wait for the next one.

I've uploaded my photos to ApacheCon Europe 2006, and more photos can be found under the tags apachecon and apacheconeu2006.

I returned last night from my first UKUUG conference, which I'd been at since Friday (missing the Thursday tutorials, but arriving in time for beer on Thursday night of course ;). Good to see the usual faces, as well as meet some new ones. Ta to JD for providing me with crash space (and recommending the wonderful Thai).

I don't think my talk, Hardware Hacking on a Budget; the Amstrad E3 was as good as it should have been. The audience were much more hardware savvy than I expected and I went through it too quickly. Still managed to talk up until lunchtime due to the previous talk having started late so I guess that worked out ok. And hopefully some more people will get involved in the E3 work.

It was amusing to see that TFM isn't the only person who decided to replace a broken heating system with something hooked up to a linux box. And Ben's talk on DVD creation was good as I'd been fighting with that myself last week. Meeting SteveC was good as well - I've been pleased by the number of people I'd been touting OSM who have now either gone off and starting marking things up or at least started thinking about how they can make tracks.

All in all a great (if hot) weekend and too much to mention all here. Definitely something I'd go to again.

I am proud to announce the second release of my secret-sharing library (libgfshare).

This release covers a few important things:

• Memory leak fix
• Manual pages for the tools and the concept.
• tar.gz release to enable easier packaging

I expect most people will care little for the tar.gz, more for the memory leak and most for the manual pages. They’re still a little rough around the edges, but as Søren Hansen discovered — if you want to help, branch, fix, and share the fixes with me.

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Go Joey.

Good things about the weekend:

• Discovering KLM's internet check-in.
• The fact I can walk from home to the airport in about half an hour.
• Getting upgraded to a Penthouse Suite for no extra charge due to the hotel overbooking.
• Finally getting to go to the Heineken Experience (I'm a beer bottle!)
• Checking in for the flight home at the automated terminal with just my passport (I'd forgotten to print out my ticket details and was worried I was going to have to go and find some net access to get them).
• And of course, having a nice weekend with some good friends.

On the flip side I only actually saw Andy (the reason I was in Amsterdam at all) for a few hours thanks to a combination of BA delaying his flight for over 2 hours and my body deciding at 2am that it was really time to wander back to the hotel and sleep.

89 Lester Drivereet
Haddenhamme
Elychester
CB6 3UW

No use trying to fight it, you're an eight-sided die, a d8. A fine example of simple elegance, the d8 is one of the least appreciated types of dice, and is often neglected. You are known to be quiet and shy, outward traits that conceal viscous sarcasm and mean wit. You are very smart, yet wise enough to hide your intelligence the quicker they found out how smart you are, the sooner they'll put you to work, which is something you can do without. People call you dark and pessimistic, or moody and cynical. You find little point in arguing.

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

Well, wasn't that fun? :)

I got some bounces today from Nationwide (no doubt spam backscatter), but the interesting thing about them was that they were PGP signed. Some digging reveals that Nationwide seem to sign their outgoing mail, which is nice to see. Further digging fails to find any nationwide.co.uk keys on pgp.net, keyserver.net or pgp.com. Well that's useful, isn't it? They're not the only people who do this - I regularly see posts to mailing lists that are signed but the key isn't available. Why bother signing mails if your public key isn't out there? It doesn't really give the impression you understand why you're signing things.

Stuck with the unending task of applying resources to fit deadlines of a project, what can you do other then beg for more resources (which will invariably be left with a negative response) or drop features from the project? Whilst some more resources have been given (two guys are starting within the next couple of weeks) one of the deadlines has been hastily moved forwards by the combined efforts of demands from customers, the result, a hastily re-drawn map of features and requriements diagrams alowing us to cancel features whilst still leaving us with enough product to move to the beta demoing stage. <p> The only thing to do now is move from the features based diagrams to the implementation diagrams. These cause me headaches - even though I know that no one diagram can succesfully describe the methods of displaying the code that will be written - <a href="http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/classDiagram.htm" >class diagrams</a> get horrendiously complicated when you start using more and more generic systems, and <a href="http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/sequenceDiagram.htm" >sequence diagrams</a> begin to get horrendious when you have one per 'use' of the use diagrams. With seventy user features on the project, that leading to seventy diagrams is overkill, and it would be easier just to write the thing and write how it was written afterwards - but that would be bad now.

• Lauri Taimila's website
  (tags: apple howto linux macosx osx ubuntu themes)

I've just had a pigeon (I think) fly into my study window, making a rather large bang, and then fly off again. It's the first time I've notice this large a bird do it, but there have been several instances of something sparrow like doing the same. At first I thought it was some kids throwing something at it, until I managed to actually see the bird flying off again afterwards.

Are their magnetic direction sensors adversely affected by all the technology in this room perhaps? :)

Google's not very helpful about this one. If your Linux kernel is spewing this message then you no doubt have IPv6 configured and have a route via a global address rather than a link-local address. I think this should only affect machines that are being used to forward IPv6 packets for other hosts. Anyway, replacing the route to a global IP with a link-local one should make the log message magically go away.

I've been quiet for a couple of weeks now; I went home to my parents for just over a week at the start of May (more on that later), then last week was spent catching up with various bits after being away, and then the past few days I've had a cold (just in time for the weekend, yay!). Meh.

Anyway, as such I haven't been fiddling a lot with the E3; still stuck at the point where I could get it to load my second stage loader from NAND, which would then load u-boot, which would then load the kernel, but not getting anything from the kernel after decompression. Whereas if I loaded the second stage loader over the serial port it all worked fine.

Figuring that Amstrad's PBL must be doing something different depending on which method you use (NAND/serial) I had a look at the config registers to see if anything was different. Nothing obvious. I enable the low level kernel debug output and find it is booting ok, but that it freezes as soon as it tries mutex_lock in clk_register. Odd. So I disable CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES and all of a sudden it works. My E3 boots into Linux unattended. Woooo. I think.

Rock. I've now got the LCD on my E3 working; blurry picture at http://www.earth.li/~noodles/images/e3-lcd.jpg (I couldn't convince the camera to both focus well and shoot the flash in a way that made the text visible). I've updated my Amstrad E3 page with a few of the recent 2.6 developments as well. I'm quite chuffed with myself; while Mark did the original work of getting it booting with serial and USB I've managed to write the NAND driver, the LCD driver and sort out the keypad keymap.

There's still quite a lot left though:

• Get u-boot onto the actual device rather than having to load it over the serial port on each reboot.
• Add NAND support to u-boot.
• Get the modem setup.
• Sound
• Handset - both mic/speaker and off-hook detection.
• Mailboard (the pull out keyboard)
• Camera

And then I can worry about the application layer. :)

On the Vale

Laura and I on the Vale

The Vale

Bullring

Selfridges Building

Festivale

Entrance to Festivale

Festivale Stage

The Vale Lake

Busy Festival

Festival Stage at Night

Small World Stage

Juggling Fire

Outdoor Cinema

Summer Ball

Gladrags for the Ball

Ball Meal

And she had a rose in her hair

Bodger and Badger

Laura and Pat Sharp

Back Home for Mr M's Leaving Do

Bodger and Badger

Captured Blue-footed Booby

Tamed Blue-footed Booby

Bourne Festival

Sunset over Bourne Festival

Ride of Doooom

Bourne Festival Stage

Exhibition

iPod Painting

Back in Brum for more partying

Snobs Nightclub

I am unsure what to think about Unified Modeling Language. The sort of size projects <a href="http://www.activefone.com/" >we</a> are about to embark on would be difficult to maintain due to the nature of the program. Our new product, which the sales and upper management are in danger of followign the <a href="http://www.tv.com/dilbert/the-name/episode/12006/summary.html" >Dilber t 'Name' syndrome</a>. My main questions about UML are will we (the technical team) be given enough freedom to be able to have good software development process whilst still being able to be flexible enough to meet demands of prototypes and last minute deal-clinching feature requests - this is more a case of will the tools that are available to us be easy to use and actually aid, or will they hinder application development? I don't want to have to go down any route which will create barriers to developers enthusiasm for developing cool new products. <p> <p> <p> Then, there is of course the inevitable battle between the technical and design sides when it comes to good template based design. Perhaps I am being too harsh in expecting the CSS based HTML templates to look the same in both <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx" >IE</a> and <a href="" 'http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/'>other</a> <a href="http://www.opera.com/" >alternative</a> <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/" >browsers</a>. I also know that in this area, this is paramount to preaching to the converted, and that I know that you shouldn't back down by saying at the bottom of the website best viewed in - I know of many users who do not have the ability to use IE - not just linux computer geeks, but <a href="http://www.apple.com" >Apple Mac</a> users (for whom, the IE has not been available for a few years now (see <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx" >the Microsoft for Apple downloads</a> (although using virtual PC for Mac might enable that use) which include several non-geek friends of mine, of varying ages (including a retired lady who is very good with her Mac) who have no desire to perform complicated manipulations of their operating systems to view a single web page - they would just go elsewhere to a site which does view correctly, as well as certain companies which use Firefox as their main web browsing application by default (whether or not the employees want or like to, or even know.) <p> <b>Edit:</b> Issues with RSS feed of this post. The rss feed of this post (<a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/Chicago/rss.xml" >here</a>) has some issues with it. Primarily, only the Dilbert link shows correctly - the other links all seem to link to the rss feed. The only difference I can tell is that the Dilbert link uses double quote marks, where the others use single. I will change them to double to see if there is any resolution in this. Looking at the RSS feed, it seems to produce: <p> <blockquote>&lt;a href="" 'http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/'&gt;</blockquote> from <p> <blockquote>&lt;a href='http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/'&gt;</blockquote> <p> Is there any reason for that?

As previously mentioned I run evilwm as my window manager. The only way to spawn a new process in it is to hit Ctrl-Alt-Enter, which opens an xterm. So I have a single xterm that I use to launch whatever apps I need (I choose this. I'm aware of many options if I felt the need to point 'n drool to open apps.).

I don't think application authors can do this much, judging by the amount of crap that gets output in this xterm. For example, today I installed evince (I normally use xpdf) to have a look. I launch it by typing evince, up pops the window, I go to the File menu and choose Close. What do I get output in my terminal? The following:

(evince:4105): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_tree_model_foreach: assertion `GTK_IS_TREE_MODEL (model)' failed

(evince:4105): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_list_store_clear: assertion `GTK_IS_LIST_STORE (list_store)' failed

WTF? A 'critical' error for simply starting and exiting the app? It's not the only offender. liferea spews Unhandled property: 12 border-collapse messages, gajim defaults to calling aplay rather than aplay -q so you get a message every time it plays a sound. Does no one else care about this crud? Is it unreasonable if I file wishlist bugs every time I hit an app that does this? Should I just learn to live with it?

I had a rant about Firefox today on #debian-uk. Mainly the fact it seems to like to guzzle memory and bring my system to a crawl when it feels unloved. Which is every time it loads an animated image as far as I can tell. Matthew suggested Epiphany so I thought I'd give it a try.

Seems ok, but looked a bit blocky, like GTK apps do for me. Not shiny and curvy like people who run a GNOME desktop (I run the excellent evilwm). So I had a poke around. And the magic is to run aptitude install gtk-theme-switch gtk2-engines and then switch2 and pick a theme and marvel as your GTK apps become sexier.

Of course you probably all knew this. I'm impressed with how it's affected GNUCash, liferea and workrave as well (yes, yes, that's the whole point of theming, but I'm a simple creature who mostly runs xterms).

Time will tell if Epiphany actually sucks less than Firefox. And there's still the leaking bucket that is liferea (253MB? Eh? And that's with the optimise for memory option enabled).

<strong>Interviews</strong> <p> At work start tommorrow. My techincal test has been written, and this time dosn't include the difficult database question that caused the thirty minute stumping of so many previous people. I am considering writing a simpler database question, but what would be the point? They have to be challanging questions... <p> My current questions now consists of: <p> <li><strong>Set Theory</strong> This consists of a set of simple maths sets, and then performs different combinations on them, such as AND, NOT, OR and XOR's expressed in different ways. The idea is to see if they can handle sets of data, which transposes to their ability to understand things like sets of customers or indeed more abstract things like problems (where symptoms may be in various sets)&lt;/em&gt; <li><strong>Web Programming </strong>This aims to see if they understand the principles behind reasonable web programming, security issues, interface issues and the technology behind simple request - response - request - response style programming. <li><strong>OO Programming</strong> Possibly my favorite question, which aims to see if they understand references properly. <p> <strong>Elvaston</strong> <p> Was great fun - official webpage <a href="" 'http://www.elvastonrally.co.uk/'>here</a>. But it was not as good as previous years. I last visited three years ago, and there where at least two more large tents. Everything seemed scaled down - even the Icom tent, which last time bristled with cool equipment was now a shared tent with Kenwood - each having perhaps only two tables of their gear. <p> The most interesting thing there has to be the <a href="" 'http://www.winradio.com'>WiNRADiO</a> which is a receiver that does its signal processing on the computer. The basic premisis being that it provides a much better control of the listening range then any of the hardware solutions currently out. <p> This product, and several others on display all seemed to point at a trend of moving back to having dual sets - one to listen and one to transmit, which of course leads to dangers of having them set on different frequencies, it does mean that you can have specialist gear for each one. <p> The WiNRADiO was seductive though - its got a really nice USB interface to a nice plastic shielded case. It's specs look great, and its has 'alternative' interfaces for selecting listening frequencies. One of these (as well as the tradional dial) was a graph of the entire frequency range, with a selection of the frequencies that are being amplified. The user can spot what frequencies are in use by seeing where the spikes are, and then just drags their selection over the top. <p> Seductive yes. Expensive yes - remember, this is only the receiver. With prices at 400 (450 GBP for the better demodulator) you need to have a (Windows) PC allready (which lets face it, I do). But then if you want to transceive you also need to have another peice of gear to transmit from... <p> However if you wanted to do something like.. ooh I dont know, Amature Radio Astronomy, it might provide an exellent base to start from.

This is silly. We get our few days of summer and suddenly we all can't cope with the heat. Or at least I can't. Especially when my neighbours decide it means they can play loud music that I really don't like (I don't do doof doof, sorry doop), or when it is music I like it's too distorted to actually be enjoyable. And if I shut the windows it just gets hotter and hotter inside. sigh. Sometimes I wish I worked in an air conditioned office again.

Spent all weekend being too hot and avoiding writing my UKUUG talk for the end of the month. It's done and submitted now; thanks to #alug, Simon and Paddy for constructive criticism. Now I just have to produce some slides.

Not much else happening. I have a u-boot patch for the E3 against their current git tree, but I haven't heard anything back about my JFFS2 compile patch so I'm not sure whether they'll take it or not. I've sent it off to Mark for comments first.

Kathy's disappeared to New York with her sister again, leaving me at a bit of loose end. Off to the Fat Cat on Wednesday with the other Simon which can't fail to be nice.

And, er, that's it really. I suppose I should go to bed.

Last night my monitor went "pop" and then it went FZZZZIIIT!!! FZZZZZZZZZZZZZT FZZZZ FZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ then the magic smoke came out. Apparently there were blue sparks too, I didn't see these (much to my annoyance, if something's going to break in a spectacular way I want to see it!). <br /><br /><p>This of course facilitates purchasing a replacement screen, the model chosen and ordered is a 20" Viewsonic VX2025wm TFT, it should arrive on Tuesday. I didn't want to have to buy a new monitor right now, especially not one that costs ~320 quid when I'm quite skint. Also of note it seems that you really can't buy good CRT screens any more, at least not many people even seem to bother to stock them. The only CRT's that I'd consider to be "good" cost nearly as much as the TFT will.

<strong>Trust Metric issues in Advogato:</strong> <p> <a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/salmoni/" >salmoni</a>, <a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/lkcl/" >lkcl</a>: Erm, no not quite - I think there actually has been a bug in Advogato - I created my account a few years ago, before moving to Livejournal as I changed what my journalling was about. I know I aught to seperate out my comptuer geek stuff from my personal stuff, so have come back to Advogato. Unfortunatly, in the meantime, something must have happened and I lost my ranking. <p> Now the way I understand the trust metric, that just can't happen - unless someone does something in the database, because you can't fully delete a user, and you cant seem to delete your ranking of someone (change yes, delete no) so any links I had originally should still be there. <p> I wasn't too worried by any of this - I was presuming the moment someone ranked or reranked me the system would reset my rankings to being whatever it should be. Mind you, things change over that period of time. I know I've matured a lot and even if I lost all my previous rankings, that may not be such a bad thing, as I don't believe my posts then reflect who I am now, neither in my personal or professional [geek] world. <p> <strong>Progress on Photo Blogging</strong> <p> Sending a MMS with the word <i>blog</i> in the message to 447921505050 will now appear on <a href="" 'http://geeks.blog.activelabs.co.uk'>this photo blog</a> which is cool (MMS's cost normal rate for your MMS provider, this is not a premium rate service, and it might even work internationally (but I dont know what that might cost someone)), and if you do test it, please remember to put the word blog in there... otherwise it goes elsewhere (and might cause charges).

I've been working hard on our new photo blogging solution. The specification is for branded community photo blogging, whilst still being maintable, and blah, blah... and blah. (Standard Software Engineering for Mission Critical Stuff applies). The solution we have (currently the only working demo is sitting <a href="http://geeks.blog.activelabs.co.uk/" >here</a>, and has some cool ideas behind it. <p> The first is the basics of each page in the blog is powered by xml snippets controlling it - the template to be used, and then customizing elements inside it, mainly the width and heights of the thumbnails and the number of columns and rows in the body of the template. Adding and removing pages becomes simple, and these configurations could be optionally overridden with arguments in the url. <p> This system is currently using <a href="http://www.ericdaugherty.com/dev/cses/" >CSES</a> as a basis for getting images into the system, but currently I'm having problems with the recieving of every message - whilst certain messages work, it seems some emails are getting lost. After dwelling on patterns of success and failures, I have an idea that it might be my implementation of the message spool, which I will have to look at in the morning. <p> Apart from that, I'm quite happy with the progress that this templating system is making - this is the first outing for my WAG project - the Web Active Generator, which aims to produce a <a href="http://smarty.php.net" >Smarty</a> style interface for use in .Net applications. It's had to come through a couple of major rethinks to get this far, but generally seems ok now. Its slightly recursive, but does allow me to deal with any kind of sectioning tags that anyone may want to throw onto it at a later point...

Behind Ubuntu interviewed me a little while back (just before I moved to Manchester really) and have since been coordinating translations of my undoubtedly trite and tired words into such languages as French German