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:  |
|
Gnome Cat Brush
New Job at PeoplePerHour.com (11/Nov/08)
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.
Ubuntu 8.10 on Sony VGN-AR51E
After installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my Sony laptop (VGN-AR51E) this is a list of some of the configurations I’ve made:
Fixes
- The web-cam (MotionEye – Ricoh USB r5u870) doesn’t work, I think the driver isn’t in the kernel for Ubuntu 8.10. In fact, /dev/video0 is completely missing (see bug 255678). This is how to fix:
- lsusb gives:
05ca:1839 Ricoh Co., Ltd - Download the latest driver:
svn co http://svn.mediati.org/svn/r5u870/trunk r5u870( see http://wiki.mediati.org/b/2008/01/r5u870/ for more info) - Do the following:
cd r5u870 sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion make make install Reboot the machine sudo chmod 777 /dev/video0
- Test with
gstreamer-propertiesorxawtvorskype - Cheese still doesn’t work but nevermind.
Configurations
- To get DVD playback working: Install the Xine movie player:
sudo apt-get install xine-ui - To get youtube working: Go to www.youtube.com, click to play a video and then click on the link to install Flash. Adobe provide a deb file that works fine – just make sure you don’t miss the Firefox “Allow this software to install” notification. Also, sometimes I have restart to see flash work (but other times it worked without a restart?)
- Install essential Firefox Add-ons:
- Install the British English Dictionary extension and restart Firefox. Once restarted, right- click inside a text field and choose English / British under the Language settings.
- Install LastTab (I can’t understand why pressing Ctrl+Tab doesn’t default to your last tab in the base installation of Firefox?)
- Edit
/etc/hostsand add the names of the other machines on our network - Set up the printer:
- Turn the printer on.
- Click System->Administration->Printing. There should be 4 Devices, one being “HP Photosmart 3200 series 192.168.0.5”.
- Select “HP” in the “Select printer from database”, Then “Photosmart 3200”.
- The printer should now work.
- Remove the Windows recovery partition from the Grub Boot screen (because confusingly, it has the same name as the real Windows partition and I kept booting into the recover partition instead of the rubbish but game-playing-enabled OS I expected.
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst. Then comment out the first occurrence of Windows which is at the end of the file.- I like to press “super+d” to see my desktop (i.e. minimise all). To map this keyboard shortcut: System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts. Under “Windows Management” section, click the “Hide all windows and focus desktop” and the press “Super+d”.
Still not working:
- Three of the Sony Custom keyboard buttons: DVD eject button and 2 user programmable buttons. None of the methods described in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/HotkeyResearch work.
- The Headphones socket.
- The card reader works for SD cards but not “Memory Stick Pro” cards (which is unsurprising since it is a Sony proprietary technology).
New release of Ubuntu – “Intrepid Ibex”
I upgraded to the new Ubuntu 8.10 release and found it included a few improvements. These are some of my favourite:
|
|
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++)
|
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 (“Cypher Tarball Fotherby” in full) 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
|
This laptop can be summed up in one word: “Cute”. It’s just perfect for traveling:
|
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)
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)
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
| 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.
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: |
|
Scorpion Trail (Geoffrey Archer)
Fiction, 3/10 – October 2008
|
I read this because I had got though all the other books on my holiday. It seemed to be war based so I was hoping for something action packed. Unfortunately, it wasn’t packed with action and wasn’t gripping. The characters didn’t come alive for me and I didn’t find the tense parts very tense. I found the love story was nonsense because I didn’t understand two people drifting into each other so rarely but so intensely. I did enjoy the MI5/spy sections and enjoyed getting an insight into the problems with Bosnia and ethic cleansing that occurred 10 years ago. |
Gridlinked (Neal Asher)
Sci-Fi, 7/10 – September 2008
|
What if you could have Google hardwired into your brain? Then you would be “gridlinked” like Special Agent Ian Cormac has been for thirty years – ten over the max. The book explores what it may be like to be unplugged after being fused with machines for so long. I found the slow re-gaining of humanity after being unplugged pretty interesting. This was my first Neal Asher book and I enjoyed it a lot. In no bad way, I found the atmosphere quite similar to Ian M Bank’s culture society, for example in both worlds, AI’s run the universe “and honestly, why would you trust any one else to?” |
I liked the Terminators (a.k.a robot golems) but didn’t like the incomprehensible alien that called itself Dragon. It represented too random a subject in a world that seemed so organised. So did Ian Cormacs boss who was an immortal formed from the Hiroshima nuclear blast of the 2nd world war. I wasn’t satisfied with the ending of the book – I wanted more answers. Maybe a sequel will shine more light on the situation?
Car Scratch (20/Sep/08)
I had a small scrape against a stealthed rock which I assumed the car hire company wouldn’t be too impressed with:
The scrape on our car
They actually were very understanding and just told me “don’t worry about it” – I therefore rate Alamo very highly and will hire from them again if I get the chance. The funny thing about the rock I reversed into was that I tripped over it while going to see what I had hit. It therefore put a hole in the car and my leg, Doh!
A hole in my leg (and the car)
Our “holy” car was a nice drive – It was a hybrid, which I’d read about but thought was quite futuristic and didn’t expect to get. It did 50MPG which probably saved us quite a bit of dosh seeing we did an average of 100 miles a day.
Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
Fiction, 6/10 – September 2008
|
The characters are bold and striking and interesting, especially Sebastian Flyte. I didn’t find the book to have a proper story in terms of a beginning, middle and end but perhaps it’s more accurate to say it has too much story. It covers faith, alcoholism, painting, the decline of English aristocracy, WWII and love. The English nobility and how they conducted life, especially at university is an interesting subject to me because it’s so odd. |
I didn’t find it gripping and I did find it depressing but it had something about it which makes me recommend reading it anyway – It’s 60 years old now and a interesting window to that age.
In the Beginning… was the command line (Neal Stephenson)
Programming History, 7/10 – September 2008
|
This is basically a short diary of the thoughts of Neal Stephenson about Microsoft, Apple, Linux and user interfaces. Tech is a hard subject to write about in an interesting way but Neal can do it well and obviously has a rich history and deep understanding of technology – he is one of my favorite computer-related fiction writers. It feels a little dated and a lot of the material will already be familiar to most programmers but it’s only 150 pages and worth the few hours it’ll take to read it. |
A quote from the book will demonstrate the kind of thing it’s about:
“Gnu is an acronym for Gnu’s Not Unix, but this is a joke in more ways than one, because GNU most certainly IS Unix,. Because of trademark concerns they simply could not claim that it was Unix, and so, just to be extra safe, they claimed that it wasn’t. Notwithstanding the incomparable talent and drive possessed by Mr. Stallman and other GNU adherents, their project to build a free Unix to compete against Microsoft and Apple’s OSes was a little bit like trying to dig a subway system with a teaspoon. Until, that is, the advent of Linux, which I will get to later.”
