There’s a fantastic new UK government website called yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk which gives us the chance to tell the government which laws and regulations we think they should get rid of. Please take a minute to vote 5 stars on repealing the digital economy act.
Why? What’s so bad about the Digital Economy Act? My objection to this law is that it gives corporations the power to ban a entire household from the internet and I feel very strongly that everyone should have the right to be online. I would go so far as to say, for me, life without the internet wouldn’t be worth living. Just because someone in the household has broken some licensing agreements shouldn’t mean they are stopped from all the useful online stuff such as paying for road tax, campaigning for freedom, conducting research, enjoying art, planning travel, etc etc.
Other reason this Act seems unfair to me:
The Act’s uses a guilty-until-proven-innocent system.
The Act’s will add extra costs on wi-fi providers – meaning less public wi-fi. I had hoped the whole country would be blanketed in wi-fi by now.
The Act is a threat to sites that permit user-generated content. This is because it has web blocking provisions that let copyright holders get a site taken down for inadvertently hosting a small amount of copyrighted content.
A great computer game history book about how the two Johns started a company and developed some of the epics games of my childhood, in particular: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake.
Loved John Carmacks programming dedication and legacy – what a hero!
PeoplePerHour (my primary employers) have a new trailer. It’s fun watching webpages I have helped build woosh past a’la star wars. It’s bold and upbeat, I love not doing things by halves:
Three whole days without even a single scrap of food entering our bodies, only having water to keep us going.
I’m joining in – it started at 11am:
I ate the following a few minutes before 11am:
Massive plate of home-made lentil curry.
Massive bowl of nut based cereal.
Massive energy drink.
Some vitamins that were lying around from years ago.
I’m totally stuffed now – let’s see how I am in 72 hours, cold turkey! I’ll probably miss coffee a fair bit too.
Friday, 26th March Update.
Proof! Wii Fit can't lie!
I managed it. The first 30 hours were the hardest then it plateaued and I coped fine. I wasn’t even all that hungry by the end. I was very busy with work so I had a lot to take my mind off being hungry. After the firth 24 hours, I had lost 4lbs, then 6lbs, then 4lbs – so I lost 1 stone in total – not that it means anything because I’m sure it’ll just go back on (but I’ll try not to let it).
I expected to feel drained and have trouble sleeping or getting up early, perhaps even stomach cramps but none of that happened, my energy levels were ok, physically.
Apart from feeling hungry, there were some other negative side effects:
Mild headache started on day 2 and lasted into day 3.
My brain stopped firing on all cylinders part way through day 2
Upset stomach started on day 3.
Aching carve muscles started on day 3.
Felt a bit “away with the fairys” from day 3 – not dizzy but not quite right.
This story is set in a Shakespearean-like era with kings and princes and swords and battles – minus the romance. Actually, it’s more like medieval Merlin and the knights of the round table because the civilization is shrouded with myths and has the equivalence of dragons because it is semi-integrated with alien cultures and alien artefacts. I didn’t find the story all that engaging but I did find the planet the story is based on well worth reading about. Banks calls it a “Shellworld”, a ancient alien construction built up from several separate layers, each effectively a world in itself, with its own planetary conditions, civilizations and even artificial suns. The tech level of the story builds and builds and the ending is true action Sci-fi.
My favourite bit of all the culture novels is reading about the ship minds and AI. Banks really captures my imagination and hits the Sci-fi sweet spot.
Ubuntu will be switching their default search engine from Google to Yahoo in the next release (v10.04) because they have struck a deal where they will get a cut of the money made whenever a user clicks on a advert after doing a search. The only reason that this is interesting is that Yahoo search is powered by Microsofts Bing search engine which brings up some interesting questions: On the positive side, Microsoft will be paying for free software development, but on the negative side, Ubuntu users will be making money for Microsoft.
Tuxradar did a open ballot to gather peoples thoughts on the subject. They discussed it on episode 1 of season 2 of their podcast and they even mentioned me at 35:23. I was making the point that the default search engine of Firefox is moot because many people are switching to Google’s Chrome browser.
I didn’t play much single player but we found this game really fun in multiplayer mode, especially 4 player – you have to work together otherwise it’s chaos.
I liked the “bubble mode”, it’s like a get out of jail free but without making it feel like cheating.
If you can spot what I find annoying about the following screenshot of an advert I keep seeing whilst browsing around, then you are fabulously geeky (like me):
Google is trying to teach me to suck eggs. They obviously know what Operating system I’m using so I thought they would be clever enough to detect what browser I’m using and serve me something more targeted? What scares me more is that I suspect they are actually paying someone for me to see that advert.
Yes – I went outside bare foot in the snow. I saw the cat catch a Robin in the garden and rushed to the rescue. The nice thing about working from home is that you don’t need to wear any shoes.
For £30, in my opinion this is MUCH better than a iPod because it can play ogg vorbis files. I use it to listen to podcasts at the gym and it’s ideal – it remembers where you got to so you can easily listen to hour long files and the fast-forward is perfect. The clip on the back is the best feature – really handy for cliping to the exercise bike or the ergo handle.
It has 2GB internal memory and a card slot to increase the space if you need it. I have found a big flaw though – if you put too many large files in the memory it freezes when you unplug it from the computer with a message on the screen: “Refreshing your media.” – I have waited for hours for the message to go away but the only way to fix it is hold the power button down for several seconds until it turns off, then plug it back into the computer and remove some of the big files and see if it’s ok again when unplugged.
I need to remind myself that there’s no point whining about a shortfalling in a piece of software unless I can be sure the author is aware of it. To that effect, I filed a bug with the Chrome team: #31833. I also submitted a tiny patch for the Jodometer JQuery plugin.
I recommend the new Ubuntu 9.10 release (Karmic Koala), it works well on a Sony VGN-AR51E.
Karmic Goods:
It includes a new piece of software called “Ubuntu One”:
Ubuntu One currently gives you 2GB of free cloud storage via a folder called “Ubuntu One” in your home directory or via a URL (https://one.ubuntu.com/).
The Desktop icons have been improved and now use a vector format (i.e. svg instead of png). I was able to use my own icons, created in inkscape, very easily.
Updated software. Firefox was updated from version 3.0.11 to 3.5 which is faster, supports the video and audio tags and has a private browsing mode. Geany was updated from version 0.17 to 0.18 which handles long filenames better in the Documents pane. Meld has been updated from version 1.2 to 1.3.0 which has better search functionality and no longer seems to lose it’s scroll synchronisation when the window loses focus. The kernel was updated from 2.6.28 to 2.6.31.
The headphone and microphone sockets now work. So does the DVD eject button on the laptop chassis. Only the 2 user programmable buttons and AV-mode keys still do nothing.
Karmic Bads:
Startup and shutdown seems slower! This is odd seeing as it uses newer startup software called Upstart that is supposed to be faster! I even installed Grub 2 via https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2 but it didn’t help.
At shutdown I sometimes get an error: “CIFS VFS: server not responding” which hangs the system sometimes for a while. This is because I have mounted Samba shares in /etc/fstab and when using Wireless, Ubuntu tries to unmount Samba shares after shutting down network services. The bug tracking number is #211631.
The webcam (MotionEye – Ricoh USB r5u870) didn’t work after the upgrade: /dev/video0 no longer existed!
Fixing the webcam:
The Sony VGN-AR51E laptop comes with a integrated Ricoh webcam. The webcam model number is 05ca:1839 as seen via:
> lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 05ca:1839 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC6 [R5U870]
Current kernel info:
> uname -a
Linux psyduck 2.6.31-16-generic #53-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 8 04:02:15 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Useful commands and logs that give info about the problem:
> dmesg | less (or less /var/log/kern.log)
[ 19.367070] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (05ca:1839)
[ 19.367573] uvcvideo: UVC non compliance - GET_DEF(PROBE) not supported. Enabling workaround.
[ 19.367786] uvcvideo: Failed to query (129) UVC probe control : -32 (exp. 26).
[ 19.367789] uvcvideo: Failed to initialize the device (-5).
[ 19.367824] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
[ 19.367828] USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)
The problem seems to be that the webcam drivers were not packaged for Ubuntu 9.10. In the previous version (Ubuntu 9.04) the webcam used the r5u870 V4L2 driver but it was deprecated and replaced in Karmic by a kernel module called R5U87x. R5U87x should be better because it is a set of userland tools that loads the firmware for all UVC compliant devices and makes them work with a more standard uvcvideo driver. Unfortunately, the R5U87x tools were not packaged in time for Karmic because the firmware images contained in the package didn’t have a suitable license to allow redistribution. i.e. the original working r5u870 driver was not packaged but nor was the newer R5U87x driver! This is all documented in Bug 120434.
Current (Dec/09) fix:
David Jarenkas has created r5u87x-loader (which doesn’t contain any non-free pieces) to load the webcam drivers. Add the following Personal Package Archives (PPA) to your sources list:
sudo emacs -nw /etc/apt/sources.list
add:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/r5u87x-loader/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/r5u87x-loader/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
Add necessary encryption keys needed for software download:
Test with a application such as Cheese (or gstreamer-properties or xawtv or skype).
In Skype, audio works but video still doesn’t until you add yourself to the “video” group (the file permissions of /dev/video* is group read and writtable for the “video” group):
sudo usermod -a -G video tom
Other tweaks:
The Ubuntu splash screen is nice but I prefer to see what the computer is doing. To turn off the splash screen do:
sudo emacs -nw /etc/default/grub
and change
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
When you buy this game you know what you’re going to get. And you get it. And yes, they went overkill on everything, especially the gore and the clichés and the bad language. The story is entertaining if you like Shaun of the Dead.
I like the gun shop – it makes the game have a bit of variety when you can choose a different gun for the level.
My main bone to pick is that it is extremely difficult to calibrate the light gun. I was trying to calibrate the official AMS Hand Cannon through the in-game calibration settings. Why is it so hard? It was way off on the first million attempts. However after 30 mins of trying, I managed to get it spot-on. It was just a random success. So I suggest you patiently re-try and re-try until it just works (for reference, the TV was a Samsung UE40B7020W).
There’s a fantastic new UK government website called yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk which gives us the chance to tell the government which laws and regulations we think they should get rid of. Please take a minute to vote 5 stars on repealing the digital economy act. 
