Tom Fotherby's Blog

Animal Ass Coat Hooks

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:44:26 +0000

	Did I chop Cypher in half and mount her better end on the wall while Kix was out?
No, I put up some unusual coat hooks:

Gnome Cat Brush

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:31:14 +0000

To further prove our cat is a geek, her brush has the Gnome Logo on it!

I have also realised that Cypher is a good Halloween cat seeing as she’s black and witch-like:

New Job at PeoplePerHour.com (11/Nov/08)

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:42:53 +0000

I have a new job. I’m going to be working at a small startup developing a recruitment website called www.peopleperhour.com. I’m very excited! It certainly ticks the boxes in terms of things I wanted from my next job:

Must have:
- At the bare minimum, at least 50% of my time should be spent coding. Yes, they use agile development with minimal documentation.
- Comparable salary to Amadeus. Yes.
- Some involvement with Linux. Yes, the servers are running RedHat.
- No long periods of time away from home. OK - No travelling.
- Reasonable commute time (would be good if it involved some exercise, e.g. cycling). Borderline - I estimate 80 minutes but the train journey from Reading to Paddington is only 30 minutes so the rest should be exercise.
- Not too much legacy software. I.e. No TPF or the like. Yes.
Good to have:
- Five weeks holiday per year + Not too ridiculous hours + hardly any weekends. No - This project is going to be hardcore.
- Some involvement with open-source software - perhaps the opportunity to work on a open-source project? I think so - They certainly use a predominantly open-source tool chain.
- Some kind of cover to hide behind between the end-users and me. I think so.
- Able to wear casual clothing. Yes.

New release of Ubuntu - “Intrepid Ibex”

admin — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:48:01 +0000

I upgraded to the new Ubuntu 8.10 release and found it included a few improvements. These are some of my favourite:

Nautilus now has tabs so you can middle-click folders to open them in a new tab.
The included version of F-Spot has had a bug fixed so it now correctly imports comment metadata from photos.
The eject software for my laptop DVD drive has been corrected and Nautilus now has new convenient eject icons.
The volume buttons on my laptop keyboard now work

Things that I’m still disappointed with:

Cheese doesn’t find my laptop camera. In fact, /dev/video0 was completely missing (see bug 255678). This is a big step backwards from 8.04 where video Skype calls worked out of the box.
Playing DVDs didn’t work out of the box - If your going to have an application called “Movie Player” I think it should player DVDs without putting you through too much trouble. Even after I installed the plugins (gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly) the sound in the DVDs didn’t work and the frames were jerky. Installing xine is the easiest way to watch a DVD.
The memory card reader in my laptop still doesn’t work.
On shutdown I get a error about CIFS that causes a lockup of about a minute. It’s caused because Ubuntu tries to unmount Samba shares after shutting down network services (see here for a fix).
In F-Spot, it would be nice if the Facebook export plugin automatically set the Facebook photo caption using the F-Spot photo comment. Who wants to write a caption for each photo twice?
Tracking down why my Samba share wasn’t showing in 8.10 where it worked fine in 8.04 was quite a headache. It turns out the Samba user credentials file format has suddenly started to disallow spaces. “username = tom” now needs to be “username=tom“.

Introducing Cypher, Our New Cat (Family++)

admin — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:36:25 +0000

The bad news is that we’ve got a cat. The good news is that it’s a geek like us.

She’s called Cypher and cost £50 from a RSPCA rescue home. She’s already spayed and chipped but we need to get her some injections before she can go outside.

Asus Eee-PC 900 - 3/Sep/08

admin — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:00:38 +0000

This laptop can be summed up in one word: “Cute”. It’s just perfect for traveling:

9 inch screen
Weights only 1KG
Solid-state disk drive (very bump/knock resistant)
Wi-Fi
Built in camera for Skyping
Card Reader so you can store holiday snaps.

I bought this laptop for two reasons, firstly to help plan our road trip as we went and secondly so I could write a journal without doing it on paper then spending ages typing it up like I did when we went to Europe. It worked very well for both these requirements and it also kept us entertained. One evening we watched a episode of TrueBlood in our tent whilst in quite a scary campsite in Canyon Du Chelly (with lots of stray dogs)! However, it definitely lacked performance. It was slow to boot into XP and felt sluggish to use, for example menus would have a delay before popping up and it couldn’t handle viewing photos from our camera at all quickly. Putting Linux on it might have improved it a lot but not enough for me to be impressed. I did want the 901 model (which has a 1.6GHz CPU instead of this 900MHz) but it wasn’t in any of the US shops (and we looked all round Los Angeles).

What did this laptop cost? We bought it in “BestBuy” for $500 (£270) including tax and we sold it on Ebay 7 weeks later for £180 but we had Ebay fees of £16.33 (listing: £1.79, postage: £8.22, PayPal: £6.32) so the end result is that we rented this for the US trip for £106. It was worth every penny considering how convenient it was for planning our trip and for how much time and money we would have spent in Internet cafes if we didn’t have it.

Fothofax v0.41 (Oct/08)

admin — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 22:55:56 +0000

Seeing as I have needed to organise my time more than usual lately (because I have more of it!) I made an update to my calendaring software called FothoFax and released version 0.41. It now supports events that span multiple days and has the ability to colour the background of a day. Anniversaries are handled in a standard way (and you can have as many as you like) and editing the data is easier because it is done full-screen instead of the old postage stamp sized textarea. There is a change log in the README file.

Fothofax 0.41 screenshot

It’s not a lot of extra effort to release the sourcecode, just in case someone else may want it. See the Fothofax project page for more info. I guess I should get round to making it a wordpress plugin one day…

Stitching Photos Together (16/Oct/08)

admin — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:00:56 +0000

Hugin works like magic to stitch photos into a panoramic even without using a tripod. After doing the tutorial on the Hugin website, Kix used 3 photos to create this larger one:

A panoramic of the 65000 year old Winslow Meteor Crater

The funny thing is that, if you look closely, there is a man in the photo that appears twice! This is because he moved during the time it took to take the pictures and so exists in a different place in two of them and was stitched into the final picture twice.

The Food in the US

admin — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:52:40 +0000

You wouldn’t believe what they have as a optional extra at the Universal Studios theme park in Los Angeles…

An unlimited food pass for THE WHOLE DAY. All the pie people (like me) walk around with bright pink arm bands that allow you, at any time in the day as often as you like, to walk into a food joint and place a free order. It’s ridiculous but amazing. Kix ate for free because I gave her my side salads on each round. What’s more, the fat pass was only $20 which probably works out at only 1 cent per 10 calories

There were so many different types of fast food. In England we only have a few options (Maccy D’s, KFC, Murder King and The Hut) but in the US there’s many different burger joints to choose from. The variety of burgers is huge and the price is cheap (a US Maccy D’s double cheeseburger is only 60p whereas a single cheeseburger in England is 99p. I didn’t try them all, in fact I generally stuck with one’s that had “Tom” in the title:

Tom at Tommys

What was my favorite fast food joint? In-and-out burger easily.

Wildlife in the U.S.

admin — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:04:50 +0000

We saw a lot of wildlife while in the US, it was one of the best things about our trip. Often the animals we saw were in their natural environment and protected from humans by the rules of the National Parks. These were our top five wildlife encounters:

A Bob Cat in Yosemite
Sea Lions in San Francisco
Chipmunks everywhere
Mountain Sheep at the Grand Canyon
Lions in Las Vegas MGM casino

The animals that we saw most frequently were Squirrels:

This one seemed to be sitting at the Canyon edge contemplating life: