Changes:

• Tidied up the menus to a single 4 menu screen
• Removed Demo/p2p listing in side list, replaced with net.server syntax
• Mac client now uses pre packaged libs for ease of use
• Server now properly handles dumb fire missiles
• Client can now handle Remote events from server for the dumb fire missiles
• Server side collision model for dumb fire missiles implemented
• Split binaries/data into separate files parsecdata.zip, parsec-mac-bin.zip, parsec-linux-bin.zip for easier download updates
• Fixed bug with Missile collision system and now dumb fire and homing missiles can do damage
• Fixed issue with laser upgrades where the server wasn’t recognizing the upgrade resulting in damage to other players always remaining level 0, now upgrade 1 and 2 work correctly
• Fixed issue with repair and energy boost not giving amount defined in server configuration

Known Criticals:

These issues have cropped up during play testing the client/server

• Remote clients dropping mines may abort, This is due to the client trying to execute a ship killed event when the server does not recognize mines so the death is invalid
• Firewalled users filtering UDP that interferes with Parsec may cause a rapid reconnect/disconnect event and the server aborts
• Invulnerability power up becomes permanent, the invulnerability power up has been disabled until corrected

It was a pretty successful week so far, it is starting to become a lot of fun, there was a 5 player battle mid week to test out the dumbfire rocket collisions. Currently the servers player limit is set to 16 I would like to try and max that out at some point.

Jason W who made some of the original changes in 2004 has started working on the windows build. From my understanding he became horribly frustrated and may be working on creating an SDL user layer which would benefit and improve all 3 platforms. I will continue implementing the server one piece at a time and if you want to check in and have a fight feel free to download the files just keep in mind the mac client is exceptionally limited at the moment, linux however seems able to do fullscreen, mouse input and is generally more stable.

If you decide to try it out the server is 212.13.194.182 This address will be changing hopefully very soon, the server just grabs the first IP (fixme) on startup currently, this one will be going away. I’ll update this post if it happens before next weeks update.

Stay tuned

Ever hear of Parsec? probably not, it was a hopeful Internet space shooter back in 1999-2001. The team developing it released a running demo version and 2 LAN builds and that’s all the public ever really saw.

In 2003 they released the source code!

Then nothing happened.

A couple times 1 or 2 people (myself included) tried to fiddle with the source but this usually ended in frustration and giving up.

About a week ago I was searching for any sign of activity ANYWHERE regarding this and I found a mailing list from 2008. It turned out someone named Jason W had modified the source to some degree and had set up a linux build that worked better with the GNU tools than the original distribution and got a linux client to build. Turns out the SVN still worked for his branch and i tried it out myself. Sure enough it did work! I was back in.

Then I took his code and made a mac x11 client out of it
Then I took the original server code and got it to build

The server was fairly broken, it would crash out the second anyone fired anything other than a laser. I did some tweaking, properly defined some objects and I was able to get it to run pretty stable.

Yesterday I had a 3 client match over the internet over the server and clients I had built, something that probably hasnt happened with this code in a long time.

Also Jason W’s interest has been captured again and he is working on getting the Windows build working again.

Sure this is a very old project that technically died long ago, but in that time no one has created anything similar so it is worth a second look.

Linux build: parsec-linux-net-alpha.tar.gz

This was made on Ubuntu, I have tested it on debian as well, other linux distro’s success may vary depending on library naming.

Mac x11 build: parsec-macx11-net-alpha.zip

This requires X11 installed , the resolution currently can’t be changed

Known Issues with clients:

-The menu data is from the LAN build and some options do not work

-Mac client does not do fullscreen or resolution changes

-No joystick support on mac

-Joystick support built in linux client but untested

Current server limitations:

-Missiles do not work (you can fire them but the server doesn’t process them yet)

-No helix cannon

-No lightning gun

 

However, this is just the beginning and less than a weeks work…And it’s still fun even in this state

 

I am going to resolve this feature request now. If anyone has an issue with this information being disclosed then I completely understand and suggest that you contact support to have the referral removed.

Just over thirteen years ago I finished an undergraduate degree in Physics and started working as a systems administrator. One of the tenets of science that I left behind was that claims require evidence. Robust evidence originates from repeatable, robustly designed experiments.

Thinking back over the hundreds of occasions when someone has suggested using a new technology, technique or process I can think of fewer than five occasions when that suggestion was backed up by robust evidence. This is a pretty awful state of affairs; I call myself an engineer and yet I make the majority of decisions based on little more than anecdote, intuition and poorly controlled experimentation.

Towards the end of last year, a colleague sent around a link to a talk [video slides] given by Greg Wilson at CUSEC. It’s called Bits of Evidence: What we actually know about software development and why we believe it’s true. It’s about an hour long and outlines some areas where evidence exists and what it seems to mean.

I’m currently reading Making Software, the book mentioned in the talk. Almost every chapter has caused me to discard some folklore or has explained some of my previous experiences and intuitions. Most importantly, it’s given me some hope that as an industry we can move on from anecdote-based engineering to evidence-based engineering.

I made a list of the publications that are mentioned in the talk; some are time consuming to track down, especially if you don’t have much experience in using academic search engines.

• Lind (1753) A treatise of the scurvy

• Doll & Hill (1954) The Mortality of Doctors in Relation to Their Smoking Habits, Br Med J. 1954 June 26; 1(4877): 1451–1455.

• Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group (1992) (paywall). A New Approach to Teaching the Practice of Medicine, JAMA 268 (17): 2420–5

• Cochrane Collection

• Fowler (2009) (paywall) A Pedagogical Framework for Domain-Specific Languages, Software, IEEE, Volume: 26 Issue:4

• Arunda & Easterbrook (2005) (paywall) Anchoring and adjustment in software estimation, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Volume 30 Issue 5, September 2005. Read the thesis instead.

• Sackman, Erikson, Grant (1968) (paywall) Communications of the ACM, Volume 11 Issue 1, Jan. 1968

• Lutz Prechelt’s homepage

• Boehm et al (1975) (paywall) Some experience with automated aids to the design of large-scale reliable software, ACM SIGPLAN Notices - International Conference on Reliable Software, Volume 10 Issue 6, June 1975

• Why Aren’t More Women in Science? Ceci & Williams ISBN: 978-1-59147-485-2 Amazon

• Woodfield (1979) (paywall) An Experiment on Unit Increase in Problem Complexity, Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions Volume: SE-5 Issue:2

  …the 25 percent increase in problem complexity results in a 100 percent increase in programming complexity.

• van Genutchen (1991) Why is software late? An empirical study of reasons for delay in software development, Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions Volume: 17 Issue:6

  The two biggest causes of project failure are poor estimation and unstable requirements.

• [Thomas et. al (1997)] - Can’t find this one

  If more than 20-25% of a component has to be revised, it’s better to rewrite it from scratch.

• Fagan, 1997 “Design and Code inspections to reduce errors in program development”. IBM Systems Journal 15 (3): pp. 182–211.

  Rigorous inspections can remove 60-90% of errors before the first test is run.

• Cohen 2006 Cohen, Jason. 2006. Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review. Beverly, MA: SmartBear Software

  The first review and hour matter most.

• Herbsleb and Grinter 1999 James D.Herbsleb, Rebecca E.Grinter. 1999. Splitting the Organization and Integrating the Code: Conway’s Law Revisited. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering.

• Nagappan et al. 2008 Nagappan, N., B. Murphy, and V.R. Basili. 2008. The Influence of Organizational Structure on Software Quality: An Empirical Case Study. Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering: 521–530.

• Bird et al. 2009 Bird, C., et al. 2009. Putting It All Together: Using Socio-technical Networks to Predict Failures. Proceedings of the 20th IEEE international conference on software reliability engineering: 109–119.

• El Emam et al. 2001 El Emam, K., S. Benlarbi, N. Goel, and S.N. Rai. 2001. The Confounding Effect of Class Size on the Validity of Object-Oriented Metrics. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 27(7): 630–650.

  Most metrics’ values increase with code size. If you do a double-barrelled correlation the latter accounts for all the signal.

• The “beautiful” series:

  • Beautiful Code Greg Wilson, Andy Oram, 2007.
  • Beautiful Data Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher, 2009.
  • Beautiful Visualization Julie Steele, Noah Iliinsky, 2010.
  • Beautiful Testing Adam Goucher, Tim Riley, 2009.
  • Beautiful Architecture Diomidis Spinellis , Georgios Gousios, 2009.
  • Beautiful Teams Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene, 2009.
  • Beautiful Security Andy Oram, John Viega, 2009.

Last Saturday I went to a Doctor Who convention. Called “Big Blue Box”, it was held in support of Compaid. It was the first one I’d been to in fourteen years, so I was slightly apprehensive about whether it would be very different from those I’d attended in my youth. Happily it was a relatively small event, with only 100 or so people in attendance. That meant there was good access to the guests, with plenty of time to chat. Along with the usual discussion panels (with guests from AudioGo, Big Finish and Doctor Who Magazine) there was also a chance to see Cleaning Up, the brilliant short film from the Guerrier Brothers starring Mark Gatiss and Louise Jameson. John Leeson, the voice of K9, and Colin Baker were also at the event. Colin was there with a camera crew from Channel 4, recording a show that involved him trying to sell merchandise to us all day, albeit in a good cause. I also got to meet James and Ian from The Doctor Who Podcast, who turned out to be very pleasant fellows. The day was rounded off with a performance of Louise’s show, Pulling Faces, which is on tour now and well worth seeing.

I know that organising events like this takes a lot of work, so thank you to all those involved. The venue was great, if a little cold, and really got into the spirit of the event with a special menu for the day. The best part of the day for me? I got to have a new photograph taken with Louise Jameson.

In 2669 the TCS Concordia is ambushed by the Kilrathi and disabled. The hulk of the ship crashes on Vespus.

Costa Concordia, run aground in 2012

I hope that Matt Smith carries on playing the Doctor for a long time, I really enjoy his portrayal. But when he moves on, as he eventually will, I’d like to make my suggestion as to who should replace him in the role. I think Vicky McClure would make a great Doctor. You may well have seen her brilliant performances in “This is England” where she demonstrated a huge emotional depth. She’d do a great job of delivering the range required by the character of the Doctor and looked powerful striding around in a big coat and boots in “This is England 86″.

I’ve even created a Facebook group to that effect which you can join if you think that I’m not totally talking out of my hat. http://www.facebook.com/groups/188805587884093/

Photo by National Media Museum on Flickr under Creative Commons by-nc-nd 2.0.

This new/suggested policy has come about because of this feature request. Although this request was created by me, it was still based on actual feature requests made by customers, and it has received some positive votes.

As things currently stand, the person you nominated as your referrer will have seen that they gained a new referral, and will have been able (if they wished) to work out how much your service costs based on how much credit they were getting. From the dates when the credit was added they could work out what your payment schedule is. The only new information proposed is your account name.

Admittedly, all the previous information would require a great deal of effort to obtain at the moment since they would have to keep logging in to the panel to see their credit.

Thanks for mentioning this on the mailing list, because I do have feelings about it.

Actually, feelings is the precise right word. While I see no specific harm in sharing the listed information, it still feels a bit icky to share financial information with a potential stranger.

Myself I found my way to Bitfolk by way of a blog post, and ended up putting the author as my referrer. With this new (suggested?) policy I would most likely not have nominated that person as a referrer, and I expect that I will want to take it back.

Updated description to clarify existing situation.

There hasn't been much feedback over the privacy concerns so I'm going to assume that nobody has any strong feelings.

I intend to reveal the following information to referrers:

• Account name
• Referral amount (thus cost of service can be calculated)
• Payment schedule (monthly / quarterly / yearly)
• Date of account setup and whether they are still a customer or not

Privacy policies and documentation about the referral scheme will be updated to reflect this.

For those who are not comfortable with this information disclosure, the recommendation will be to not nominate a referrer.

At least a month will be allowed for existing customers to take back any referrers they've already nominated.

Done.

Maybe consider using Finnix as your rescue image. It should be usable as-is, but is also easily remastered.

I believe it's used by Linode.

See http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_for_VPS_providers

“I’m putting together a landing page for my website and would like a photograph of me to sit behind it. I was wondering if you’d be up for taking/making it? I have a vague notion of walking down a track through a mist-filled woods, wrapped up in a big coat. But that might just be because of the weather. I think something informal (or at least, informal feeling) and in a natural surrounding. Does that make any sense?”

That was what I sent in an e-mail to Graham Binns before Christmas. The obvious subtext was “please make me seem likeable, co-ordinated and, if possible, a bit cooler than I am.” So what’s the first image I get to see from the shoot?

Yeah, thanks for that.

We got together for the shoot just before Christmas. Graham is always fun to be with and it was an enjoyable shoot. He was ably assisted by his awesome wife Sarah. I felt pretty relaxed posing and enjoyed a nice meal in a nearby pub afterwards to defrost! I can’t wait to see the photos where I am actually managing to stay upright and get it on the landing page…

So I was playing with the boys and I don’t know what the heck these weird block things they have are but before I knew it I had built a broadsword from Wing Commander!

The BIND/Unbound resolvers have been replaced with a cluster of Unbound resolvers, so validation can be turned on whenever. We will announce a turn-on date in February 2012.

There's already installer support for Ubuntu 11.10, but it needs to be added to the selector in the panel and to the main web site.

Earlier this evening I received a marketing email from a company I had never heard of, for an event I wasn’t interested in, to an email address I had only ever given to a differently, seemingly-unrelated company that we shall call Company U.

When this sort of thing happens it may be an indication that Company U has leaked their customer address database or else decided to sell the contact details on, so I’d sometimes follow it up instead of just opting out and consigning the address to the bitbucket forever.

In this case as many times before, I decided to have a whinge on twitter about it first.

Anyway to cut a long story short they got in touch, and it turns out that this marketing email has been sent by Company S. Someone from Company S emailed me to apologise and to remove my address from their list.

I asked this person how they obtained my email address that had only been sent to Company U, and they admitted that they used to work for Company U and that their “rampant CRM system” had somehow “indexed all of my PERSONAL emails”.

Now, from my point of view, this would actually suggest that this person has likely taken a database of customers of Company U with him to his new employer.

So, Internauts, do I have a duty to shop this guy to his former employer Company U? Or am I just frothing in my nerdrage here at the terrible inconvenience of being sent a piece of email I don’t want? Is the man a menace, or should I just get over it?

A little while ago I bought a Zoostorm PC from Ebuyer. It’s a farily basic (but powerful) i7 based system with 8GB RAM and a 1TB hard disk. This is to replace my older (but still fully working) Mesh PC. The newer one is more power efficient, quieter, a lot faster, and all Intel inside – the previous desktop was nVidia based.

I wanted to migrate from the install on my old Mesh PC to a new clean install on the Zoostorm. I could have just yanked the disk out of the Mesh and put it in the Zoostorm, but I did it slightly differently. I’m typing it up here for my own notes but also to find out how other people do it, and to get any tips.

So the goal was to have a clean install of Ubuntu Precise (which will become 12.04 LTS in April) and keep all my existing files and folders intact. I wanted to keep all my home files but didn’t want to keep the applications I had built up over several install/upgrades on that machine. Time for a fresh start.

The old Mesh has a single 120GB SSD and the Zoostorm has a 1TB Hard disk and I added a 120GB SSD to that too. My idea was to do a clean install on the Zoostorm SSD, and use the 1TB hard disk for my /home directory. That way I get the super zippy performance of an SSD for loading apps, but the slow(er) hard disk for loading my files. I’m happy with this tradeoff in speed/capacity.

Here’s the steps I went through.

• Clean install of Ubuntu Precise on the Zoostorm with / and swap on SSD, /home on HDD. Use a hostname of ‘zoo’ so as not to conflict on the network with the hostname ‘wopr’ used by the Mesh PC
• Boot into new installation and make sure everything works
• Boot Mesh PC but don’t login, so none of my personal files are open/changing
• Use rsync on the new install to copy files from Mesh to Zoostorm over the network

$ cd /home
$ rsync -avz -e ssh wopr:/home/alan .

• Shutdown the old Mesh PC
• Edit /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname to change host from ‘zoo’ to ‘wopr’
• Reboot the Zoostorm PC to ‘Bring the WOPR on-line’ as they say

I think that’s about it. I now have all my personal stuff, work, config on the new computer, and can consider things to do with the old one. I think I might install GameOS on it until Valve get around to porting Steam (and all the games) to Linux.

Things to consider:-

• I could probably have sped this up a bit by taking the disk out of the Mesh PC and putting it in the Zoostorm, then partition up the 1TB disk and move my /home directory over to it, edit fstab, remount /home and logout/in. That seemed like more effort in my mind, so I went for the approach above
• I now have a whole load of packages I need to install because my Zoostorm is a clean installation. So the first thing I did was to get the basic things I need. I will apt-get any missing bits as and when I need them. I have a decent connection so it doesn’t bother me that I’m missing critical stuff at the moment.
• Copying only /home means I may have missed out some stuff in other places like /usr/local, /root and /etc. I have full backups of my old machine, so I am not to worried about missing stuff here or there, I can get them if I really need to

Hope that’s useful to someone, and if you have any comments, do let me know.

If Arch Linux has a netboot installer then it should be added to the self-install section of the Xen Shell.

If Gentoo has a netboot installer then it should be added to the self-install section of the Xen Shell.

Never reproduced.

Though the cat is an undeserving bastard, I cranked this out today while watching the Packers and Lions play at the pub.
Pattern is from knitty. ( http://knitty.com/ISSUEspring03/PATTdimsum.html ) I’ve also taken a bit of leftover white stockinette from where I changed up the Naughty Reindeer hat and used the sewing machine to whip up several more. They aren’t pretty, but the cat was stealing them from me as I made them, so they must be a hit.

I’ve been playing with the python-elements but it seems like the project is dead.

The upstream website has gone and the packages has had no updates for some time. I’d like to create a simple demo/game along the lines of some of the mini games you find in WarioWare on the Nintendo Wii. The Python Elements (and box2d) libraries seem to fit the bill but I don’t want to code using something that is going to disappear.

Suggestions for other libraries welcome.

Update: seems the python elements is maintained in debian, my mistake. Still keen to hear of libraries in this area.

I said last year that 2011 was going to be a “game changer.” Yup, I actually used “game changer” in public. In my defence, either I used it ironically or I said it before it was a cliché. Ahem. Has 2011 lived up to its hackneyed description? Let’s have a look at some of the most significant events (in no particular order):

• Setting up my photography business and actually starting to work photographing weddings!
• Attending “The Workshop” run by the awsomely-awesome Jasmine Star
• Having a great week in Cumbria, despite the rain
• Attending my first ever Grand Prix at Silverstone
• A full season of doing the Ubuntu Podcast live: the most fun season yet
• Flying to New York for Zoe and Stuart’s wedding and had a great time
• Meeting Colin Baker, John Leeson and David Gooderson
• The loss of both Nicholas Courtney and Elisabeth Sladen
• OggCamp 11: the biggest and best yet
• Attending Home Camp 4. Mmm, vietnamese food!
• Helen and Jeff’s 1920s themed wedding
• Seeing Chris in his first stage appearance in a long time
• Recording a LugRadio reunion
• The Box
• Doing very well at Puretech Racing
• Seeing Richard Herring live twice
• Visiting the Doctor Who Experience
• Completing a weekend of fun and adventure with Graham Binns to make some great images
• Getting Ubuntu membership
• Losing a couple of stone (and so far have kept it off!)
• Doing fun things with Neil and Amy: A canal boat trip, a murder mystery, a tour of Christmas lights
• Visiting and playing host to more family and friends than last year!

I’m pretty pleased with that. Getting my business up and running has taken a lot of time and meant not seeing as much of some friends as I’d have liked. I’ll work to redress that. I think 2012 will be even more eventful though. Especially as I start a new job in January…

Today I purchased the second of 3 planned locomotives to run on my layout. The first being last April when I bought my DCC system was a Chessie GP40. As you may have noticed if you have for some bizarre reason been reading my blog I like the Chessie System. Chessie however is not my only favorite railroad I also enjoy Canadian Pacific. This latest edition to the fleet is a brand new DCC equipped CPR GP35. The striking red combined with the multi mark stripes on the hood and rear bring back fond childhood train watching in downtown Niagara Falls.

Details of IPv6 prefixes are now listed on https://panel.bitfolk.com/dns/

Eventually should be able to specify reverse delegation for these as per #45

Here’s the photos of the finished hat and the one armwarmer. I am semi-pleased with the hat. It’s awesome, and the concept is great, but I think it might be too small for Todd’s head with the reversible side in, and there’s some pulling on the patterning that I don’t care for, but it’s intarsia in the round, so it is what it is.

I love the armwarmer and can’t wait to wear them one day, but I still need to finish spinning the yarn for the second one…

Merry Christmas to those of you celebrating it.
Happy whatever it is you celebrate to those of you who aren’t.

I’d show you photos of the one finished arm warmer and the finished Naughty Reindeer hat, but both need to be washed and the hat blocked for sure. And I am worried it’s going to be to small, because Todd has a big head. Or maybe it’s my imagination he’s got a big head. Maybe it’s normal sized and it will be fine. But now I am worried, none-the-less. And shmoo won’t even try it on. He says he’s not going to contribute to my crazy. And that if I am going to be crazy about the hat, I can do it on my own.

It’s like he knows me or something!

I’m a big fan of Christmas. Not just because I take two weeks off work! I love preparing for the Christmas episode of the podcast (the version of A Christmas Carol in this year’s is getting rave reviews!), spending time at home as well as travelling through the dark to visit friends and family. This year we have added rather snazzy TARDIS and Dalek decorations to the tree. And the food! Those treats which never seem appropriate at any other time of the year are suddenly justifiable!

It’s also a time to catch up on little projects. This year I’m experimenting with a medium format camera. Even though I’ve only used a few exposures, it’s already had the effect of slowing down the process of making a photograph happen. I’m so used to the instant feedback of a digital SLR and working iteratively to get a shot right that using a camera with no review screen, no internal light meter and only a paltry twelve exposures on a roll of film has made me really make sure I get everything set up correctly before firing the shutter. Hopefully I’ll have some results to share in a few weeks.

Every year I make a Christmas donation to an open source software project or two which I’ve used in the preceding twelve months. This year I chose the OpenShot video editor. I’ve been using it to edit some video projects for the lovely Emma Lappin Flowers and I hope to be able to share them with you very soon. It’s a long way from being finished but hopefully the developers will deliver a stable, fast and feature-rich video editor for Linux.

Merry Christmas!

I finally got all the switches on my layout wired. It took about 10min per switch and there are 9 on the layout over the course of a couple weeks when I could find a few min to spare but in the end it was worth it. Now it is possible with ease to do some shunting in the inner junction to build a train for the mainline.  A few more items and it will rarely require the magic giant hand from the sky to come down and manually intervene.

Next step:

• Standardize couplers
• Uncoupling magnet
• Ballast the tracks

 

Doomsday is continuing on with its longest run of player activity EVER with a brand new round and update!

Bug fixes:

• Fixed error with non formation attacking that could cause a division by 0 error
• Adjusted Asteroid will impact i X days message by 1 day to account for 0 days issue
• Fixed a newplayer error where the id value was blank

Gameplay changes:

• Airstrikes and spy/recon spies being caught will now add to the anti bully retaliation table if the player is significantly smaller
• Added colonist game variable to allow setting a minimum amount of farmers to become colonists to launch with the shuttle
• Added research item to give shuttle a 25% chance to miss a missile that is going to hit
• E-mail notification on endgame() to players who have notification set up

Any good photographer will tell you that colour management is important in ensuring that your photographs look their best regardless of where they appear, be it on screen or in print. Making sure that the screen you are using is calibrated to display colours correctly is the first step.

The Windows and Mac software that came bundled with my Gretag Macbeth i1 (now available in its second model) is really rather nice. A simple GUI with large, friendly buttons guides you through the process of characterising your display, then creating and installing a profile. The offerings available on Ubuntu at the time were complex and pretty unintuitive in comparison. There was Lprof, which is competent but very complex to use and doesn’t integrate the resultant profile easily with other applications. Then there’s Dispcalgui, a front-end to ArgyllCMS which is closer in functionality to the bundled Windows & Mac software, but still a bit of a maze to get through.

Fortunately things got a lot better in Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty). Gnome Color Manager is a much more simple application for characterising output devices, including monitors, and supports a range of measuring devices, including mine! I connected my device and selected the “high quality” measurement. After about 20 minutes of flashing squares on the screen, the profile was generated. A tickbox let me toggle it on and off, just like the Windows version.

You can make your new display profile the default for both the current and other users of the system, but at the moment it doesn’t apply to the login screen. This interview with Richard Hughes shows that further developments are planned which will make colour management available more easily for all devices and users on a system.

This ones a little far fetched, but for 10 years now I always felt the Windows XP default background looked familiar and it appears the answer has been found.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mind. Blown.

The rescue VM as accessed via the "rescue" command from Xen Shell currently boots into a Debian etch environment. etch has been end of life for a long time and as a result it is not possible to easily install packages except by going to archive.debian.org for them. Also this means there will be unfixed security bugs in kernel and packages.

The rescue system has very little writeable disk space of its own (half the customer's RAM, by default), so installing new software isn't that feasible anyway. The security issues need to be addressed however.

It’s been some time since my last model railroad update but the quest is not over yet, far from it. I had spent the summer at my summer home and some house issues since returning had prevented me from resuming my hobby.

I decided to final try out wiring one of my several switches to work out any kinks I may run into along the way so that I can plan and quickly implement the other switches to some sort of standard implementation.

Initially I was going to have the wires come up under the switch but that proved impossible to maintain a connection or to screw down the wires. What I ended up doing was coming up slightly behind the switch motor and covering it with black electrical tape to cover up the existence of the wiring.

Once all the switches are done I will look into some type of gravel or bush modelling to cover up the motor all together. I had considered under the table motors but this is m first return to modelling in 15 years so I decided it would be ok if I wasn’t entirely discreet this time around.

The switch motor worked perfectly but I have now run out of wire so the rest of the motors will have to wait. I then decided to final nail down the inner main and the branch line as they were still not securely fastened to the table. This took some time as I had to make sure the tracks remained properly aligned to avoid an annoying mismatch once I got to the last piece. After had finished a large section of track I would run a loco with a car on each end of it backwards and forwards over the action to test power and look for derailments.

Over the sumer my grey cat had decided the train was a sleeping area and turned several sections of green to a hairy sort of grey so I cleared all buildings and train equipment off the track and vacuumed the layout. I used a brush attachment for the extremely hairy areas. I also took the time to clean up the area behind the layout which was a mess of switch motors,wires, spare tracks and tools into a much more organized area.

I got a lot of good work done today and there will be more to follow in the coming months!

• I just unlocked the “Mall Rat” badge on @foursquare! Time for a fancy pretzel. http://t.co/rjdcKwrW #
• Out for 'beer tastes best thursdays' in Kingston, Hella yeah #

This weekend I wrote some code to extract my posts from Personal Weblog and put them into a Jekyll-friendly format.

I suspect that few people were using Personal Weblog in the first place and of those, even fewer will migrate to Jekyll, so it’s unlikely that this will be of much use to many people, but I tidied it up a bit and put it up on github anyway.

The import isn’t very reliable, especially if there’s less than ideal HTML inside the blog posts and you might find yourself manually editing HTML to edit the post.

For the past year or so my personal website has been in some disrepair; the RSS feed was returning HTML and there was no way to get to most of the blog entries at all. It was all on a domain called darkskills.org.uk, hosted by a third party. Both of these are things that I grew out of a long time ago and the source of some embarrassment. Sorting these things out has been too much like the day job for me to muster any enthusiasm.

I made a few attempts to migrate everything to an open source CMS, but these petered out after getting irritated with Wordpress or trying to glue the various bits of Django together to do what I want. Drupal, Wordpress, Django and all the other full-featured content management systems and frameworks I tried can be made to do what I want, but at the cost of spending hours learning their features, choosing styles and enabling plugins. Once that’s all done there’s the ongoing patching for security updates.

This weekend I really should have been doing something useful with my time, but instead I ended up migrating my blog entries to a static site, running on my BitFolk VPS, with pages generated by Jekyll. I combined this with a change of domain name and using Bootstrap as my stylesheet. The spartan design isn’t a great demonstration of what you can do with Bootstrap; there are some clear examples on their site that are well worth looking at if you like to avoid writing CSS at all costs.

One surprising outcome is that I seem to have regained some enthusiasm for writing on the web and making web pages. I’ve put this down to how easy it is to write in Markdown using a text editor and not having to worry about HTML. It feels like the Jekyll workflow is pretty close to my ideal way of making a simple site.

Static pages mean that I can’t host comments without using a javascript solution like Disqus, but that also means that I won’t have to deal with comment spam, which seems like another maintenance win.

I still have a few things to migrate over and then we’ll see how long my enthusiasm lasts.

A new round and new version of Doomsday has started! Congrats to FiReMaGe who after dying mid game came back in another 110HK to win the game!

Gameplay Changes:

• Formation command: Players can now set the order of which units attack in battle, this should increase the value of manufactured units late in the game
• Air strike changes: If you have multiple bombers they will each (upto a max of 5) launch a bombing run against the enemy. This should make bombing more valuable than just for bombing the shuttle factory.
• Increased Coffee, 40 hour work week, urban planning research time as they are end game items and were being achieved too early

BugFixes:

• Fixed session issue where the in game source data would be terminated after 10min of inactivity instead of the proper 60
• Fixed issues with Sessions and death
• Fixed issue with e-mail communication causing game shut down
• Fixed issue with duplicating statistics tables from players using non web clients to return to the game
• Website improvements to better handle when the game server is not available

As requested, this is copied from my Facebook status:

If you’re under 40 and think you’re going to get the same pension deal that people get today, you’re delusional. Why should you stop working and have everyone pay for you to have the rest of your life as a jolly, just because you’ve reached a certain age?

Pensions should be for those who can’t work any more due to an inability to do the job because of age-related problems. Yes, that means some people will end up working until they’re 80, but it also means some people will retire in their 40s. If you retire because of your age, you don’t get to play the age discrimination card anymore, and I’ll have no problem openly mocking you because you’re making me pay for your false sense of entitlement.

Past generations did everything they could for the future generations that followed; your generation got us into this economic mess, you can bloody well fix it before you decide it’s time to “cash out” on a 20 year holiday.

As a follow up to one of the comments, I also wrote:

Indeed, the public sector get paid roughly the same as the private sector, with the same pension entitlements (plus >85% take up the additional pension offered, compared to ~15% in the private sector), they retire earlier (some as early as 50!) and they generally get more favourable holiday arrangements, flexible working and better access to employment tribunals/unions!

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update 2011-11-26:

The first attempt worked fairly well. It was not possible to remove the bottle from the ice without filling it with some warm water for a few seconds. I think this was probably because the bottle had a very slight bulge at the bottom.

It would be hard to find a perfectly cylindrical or even tapering plastic bottle, so I will next try the original plastic cup suggestion.

• RT @LunaticFish: Just blitzed the laptop and installed Xubuntu 11.10 .. so much simpler than all that Unity crap. #
• RT: COMP TIME!! WIN the hardcover of THE JOKER: A Visual History of the Clown Prince of Crime – follow @ForbiddenPLanet and RT to enter! #

I've only skimmed your response so I might be missing something, but this sounds like its mainly a cron/scheduling issue.

I'd also be hesitant to make a backup of a backup - doesn't this introduce another point of failure for both backups? For instance if the bitfolk backup became corrupt or was misconfigured in some way then this would be mirrored off-site and both backups would have the same fault.

Hi,

I recently registered for an account at startssl.com and was interested to see that they are using client SSL certificates rather than username and passwords for login and wondered if this would be something that bitfolk might be able to offer?

I don't really have much knowledge of SSL, so this may be completely impractical or not feasible for some reason, but I thought I'd suggest it as it seemed advantageous from both a security and single-signon/ease of use viewpoint.

Today one of my rsync backups began failing with:

inflate (token) returned -5
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at token.c(604) [receiver=3.0.3]
rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 373 bytes [generator]: Broken pipe (32)
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(1544) [generator=3.0.3]

It was repeatable when trying to transfer the same file (a large gzipped SQL dump file).

It turned out to be a bug in that version of rsync.

rsync 3.0.3 comes with Debian lenny. In order to get a newer version I have had to use lenny-backports for this. That gets me rsync v3.0.7, which does not exhibit this bug.

(Yes, I am aware that squeeze has been released and this host should be upgraded to that. There is security support for lenny until at least February 2012.)

So, I may have forgotten to post for September and October. I may not have realized this until it was November 2nd or so….

The new job has been been very busy brain-wise. There has just been so much new to learn that my brain is just pooped out by the time I get home at night. Not that this is a bad thing, it’s just not how it has been for several years. It’s been an adjustment, but I am starting to feel like I’ve found my feet. It doesn’t hurt that I LIKE my job. I feel challenged every day and I respect the company I work for so much. I am not used to being proud of the company for which I work. It’s a novel experience.

I only recently started creeping along at some knitting again. I’m half way done with a pair of handspun rainbow armwarmers now. But the 2nd bump of roving is still needing to be spun up the rest of the way, and I didn’t use a pattern, just kinda winged it as I went along, so we’ll see if I end up with anything close to a “pair.”

I also knocked out a dog sweater in September, but it only took a day or so and I didn’t actually finish it very well. The dog took it and started wearing it before I got the ends tied in, much less finished up the arm holes and tweaked the neckline to be more what I wanted. I don’t think it matters, she loves it, it keeps her warm, and if it ends up getting trashed, I’ll probably be ok with it. It’s made from Lamb’s Pride worsted so it’s hairing and fuzzing all over the place, but since I am not the one wearing it, I can live with that.

Speaking of Daisy, she had surgery at the end of last month to have some tumors removed and get her teeth done. She came out of it just fine, despite all my nervousness and worry, but the tumor was a Mast Cell Tumor, Grade 2. Which means, yes, it was malignant, but that the vet thinks she got all of it, since she was pretty aggressive when removing it, and now we are just observing to see what happens and she has a check up again in March.

Shmoo found out that my vet is a knitter and spinner. And then he promptly forbid her to talk about the fiber arts to me. I don’t think it will last, as I’ll just talk to her about it instead.

That’s about it for news here. Hopefully I’ll have some finished arm warmers to show off before the end of the year.

One common bug that people are running into with Fedora 16 is that CUPS is no longer enabled after upgrade from an earlier version of Fedora (fresh installs are unaffected).

This has already been reported in Bugzilla, and a test update is available.

There is also an Ask Fedora answer about it.

I have recently spent time back on eBay after a few years’ break due to an unfortunate incident which damaged my confidence in the eBay payment protection policy. It was a few years ago now and I’m very much impressed by the improvements made by eBay and Paypal. Though I’ve only been on it a few weeks, they have already successfully blocked someone attempting to defraud me, and though I had my suspicions, it was for low value goods, therefore a good opportunity to help test my confidence in the new systems.

One of my recent purchases has been the Amstrad Emailer Plus. It’s an interesting little device originally sold in 2002 by Amstrad for circa £200, dropping to £15 only two years later in Tesco, and finally discontinued on July 14th 2011.  As you can see, it is quite a chunky but pretty device – as well as providing convenient access to email – so why did it fail?

Though the market for email on a household phone is probaby quite a small one – the Emailer Plus definitely has the ‘geek’ factor as well as being a little bit ‘retro.’  I bought one, not because it can give me access to emails, (I can do this well enough from my Samsung Galaxy S2 already,) but because it has got personalty.  The big blue display not only displays a nice clock in standby mode, but it also has the ability to play ZX Spectrum games, and other little tidbits that when integrated properly could make the big display quite useful.  The standard issue BT phone I have on my desk at work costs more than this, but offers much less in terms of functionality.

The failure in the Amstrad Emailer Plus is down to a naivety in understanding the direction that the internet and email was taking.  In the early days of modems and dial-up internet, it could cost 5p per minute to get online – webmail wasn’t taking off because staying online to write emails was costly – so it was better to have an offline client to do the writing.  The Amstrad Emailer required a ‘phone home’ call at least once a day – with a cost of 14p per call.  It’s a bit of a premium price to pay for receiving a bulk email delivery – plus, unless you were sensible enough to group your outgoing emails up into a single batch – the outgoing cost was also 14p per connection.

It’s a real shame, as I think had Amstrad had the foresight to see that the screen was valuable real-estate, the Emailer could have been a market-changing device.  It has the ability to host ‘widgets’ or ‘apps’ as they are now commonly known.  Amstrad have learnt it all now, with their ‘Amscreen’ – a backwards piece of technology consisting of essentially a flatscreen with a red LED ticket attached to the top in a bulky, ugly black case – being used to broadcast advertising.  The technology itself isn’t expensive or interesting – the real value is in where the screens are.  I recall a seminar at Warwick Business School a few years ago, with the General Manager of McDonalds in the UK.  When asked ‘What is McDonalds’ core business?’ most people responded with ‘selling burgers’ – when he replied that it wasn’t, the majority looked fairly confused.  His answer was ‘acquiring prime real-estate, to prevent our competitors selling burgers.’

In the same way, strategy needs to look at pushing alternatives to the core market of a project.  Sure, there may be a specific target market to aim the product at – but individual markets are a finite resource.  Look at alternative uses for your product – can it be abstracted and re-marketed at a different sector?  Do you have to sell it for it to benefit you?  The end result for the Amstrad Emailer was for Amstrad to use it as a loss-leader for selling their Emailer service.  It’s a shame that the device couldn’t be rescued from obscurity by diversifying.  Hopefully I’ll be able to make some use of it and deny this technological marvel it’s resting place on some gadgetry wasteland for a few more years to come.

 

 

On November 2nd I received this spam:

(some headers removed; xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net is my censored email address)

Received: from mail15.soatube.com ([184.105.143.66])
        by mail.bitfolk.com with esmtp (Exim 4.72)
        (envelope-from <bounce@soatube.com%gt;)
        id 1RLikr-00070I-6U
        for xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net; Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:53:57 +0000
Received: from [64.62.145.53] (mail3.soatube.com [64.62.145.53])
        by mail15.soatube.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6B324181CFF
        for <xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net>;
        Wed,  2 Nov 2011 14:46:01 -0700 (PDT)
To: xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net
From: events@idevnews.com
Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:00:40 -0700
Subject: BPM Panel Discussion: IBM, Oracle and Progress Software

-------------
BPM-CON: BPM Panel Discussion - IBM, Oracle and Progress Software
-------------
Online Conference

Expert Speakers:
IBM, Oracle, Progress Software
etc..

The email address it arrived at was an email address I created in November 2004 in order to take a web-based test on Red Hat’s web site prior to going on an RHCE course. It has only ever been provided to Red Hat, and has not received any email since 2007 (and all of that was from Red Hat). Until November 2nd.

The spam email contains no reference to Red Hat and is not related to any Red Hat product.

From my point of view, I can only think that one of the following things has happened:

1. Spammers guessed this email address out of the blue, first time, without trying any of the other possible variations of it all of which would still reach me.
2. One of my computers has been cracked into and the only apparent repercussion is that someone spammed an email address that appears only in an email archive from 2004/2005.
3. Red Hat knowingly gave/sold my email address to some spammers.
4. Red Hat or one of its agents have accidentally lost a database containing email addresses.

Possibility #4 seems far and away the most likely.

I contacted Red Hat to ask them if they knew what had happened, but they ignored all of my questions and simply sent me the following statement:

“Hello.

Thank you for contacting Red Hat.

we apologies for the inconvenience caused however we would like to inform you that we have not provided your email address to anyone.

Thank You.

Red Hat Training coordinator.”

That wasn’t really what I was asking. Let’s try again.

“Hi Red Hat Training coordinator,

Thanks for your reply, but I’m afraid I am not very reassured by your response. Do you have any suggestions as to how an email address created in 2004 and used only by yourselves for my RHCE exam managed to be used for unrelated marketing by a third party in 2011, unless Red Hat either provided my email address or leaked my email address?

For clarity we are talking about the email address “xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net” which has never ever received any email except from Red Hat, until yesterday, when it got some unwanted
marketing email from a third party.”

“Hi Andy,

Please be assured that Red Hat does not circulate student’s e-mail address to any third party.

Thanks,
Red Hat Training Coordinator”

I’m not getting anywhere am I? I was only after some reassurance that they would actually look into it. Maybe they are looking into it, and for some reason decided that the best way to assure me of this was to show complete disinterest.

Oh well, I can send that email address to the bitbucket, but I can’t help thinking it’s not just my email address that has been leaked.

Anyone else received similar email? If so, was it to an address you gave to Red Hat?

Update 2011-11-10: Someone suggested I politely ask the marketer where they obtained my email address. It’s worth a try.

“Hi Integration Developer News,

May I ask where you obtained my email address
“xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net”? I’m concerned that it may have been
given to you without my authority.

Thanks,
Andy”

Also I have now been contacted by someone from Red Hat’s Information Security team, who is looking into it. Thanks!

This is a brief addendum to my previous post on the same topic.

I was driving down the M6 the other night, past junction 8 where the M5 splits off – and the Active Traffic Management was turned on.

At one point, we were all going along nicely at 40mph, as indicated by the overhead signs. All lanes were open, and there were no workmen about on the roads.

At the penultimate gantry before the M5 lane forked off the main carriageway, the overhead signs had been set to 20mph. With the majority of traffic moving along nicely, 11pm and no obstructions in the road, the driver of the lorry must have not seen the drop by 20mph. Unfortunately, the car driver in front of him had – and with the threat of the speed camera sign, had slowed his vehicle fairly abruptly.

This sent the HGV swerving into the middle lane, causing me to pull out into the fast lane – luckily fully aware that there was nothing coming up on the outside.

It’s exactly stupid and irresponsible uses of technology like this that make me wonder why Active Traffic Management was put there in the first place.

With the sad events that have occurred on the roads over the past few days, I can only hope that someone has the good sense to review this technology before it too contributes to the rising death tolls on our motorways.

I was listening to AM640 last night for their pre game interviews and Andy Frost kept saying crap like what would it take for Leafs nation to warm up to Phil Kessel and I couldn’t help but wonder….

Why the fuck aren’t they warmed up already?!

• is 30+ goals a season shitty all of a sudden?
• is the 20 points he has gained this season already not good enough?

I don’t want to hear crap about draft picks or “streaky”. Brian Burke’s bad decision 2 years ago has nothing to do with the player himself and it is still turning out to have been a good choice anyways.

Streaky is bullshit cause who the fuck cares, 30+ goals a season for 3 years is still 30+ goals a fucking season for 3 years.

So back to my question, is Leafs nation nuts or is the media just being an idiot and spreading crap. If Kessel keeps playing the way he has all October he is about to obliterate the crap out of any naysayers opinions so I want to hear your thoughts now before you jump on the bandwagon later on. Personally for me, Kessel has been my #1 Leaf since his Leaf debut 2 seasons ago.

Last night, Chris mentioned that he's been wanting to set up an RSS feed for radio programmes available from iPlayer. All the bits were there - the excellent get_iplayer, MP3 converters, RSS and Google Listen for Android.

I also listen to the BBC's Friday Night Comedy podcast on the train, but miss out on the evening shows from Monday to Thursday while I'm travelling. Here's how I set up a private podcast feed.

Pre-requisites:

1. get_iplayer
2. flvstreamer to download radio programmes with get_iplayer quickly (don't rely on mplayer).
3. ffmpeg to convert from AAC, ensure your copy has MP3 support if you need it.
4. id3v2 for get_iplayer to tag the resulting audio files.
5. MP3::Podcast to easily generate the RSS feed, plus a small patch. I suggest using cpanm to build your own Perl libs dir like so: cpanm -l ~/pvr/lib MP3::Podcast

get_iplayer has a great PVR mode which stores any set of command line arguments for search keywords, format and output options allowing you to run it in a one-shot mode to fetch all the current programmes. Here's my configuration, explained below:

get_iplayer --pvr-add r4comedy \
    --type=radio --category=comedy --channel="4$" \
    -o ~/downloads/pvr/r4comedy/ --nopurge \
    --aactomp3 --mp3vbr=8 --modes=flashaacstd,flashaaclow --tag-fulltitle

Line 1: add a new PVR entry titled "r4comedy". View and manage PVR entries with --pvr-list, --pvr-del etc.
Line 2: search for radio comedy programmes on Radio 4 (the regex prevents Radio 4 Extra programmes from being returned).
Line 3: output directory, don't delete old ones.
Line 4: convert to MP3, variable bit rate, download in AAC and tag with the name of the show.

A small script on a cronjob runs get_iplayer --pvr and regenerates the RSS feed using genpodcast.pl from the MP3::Podcast examples:

#!/bin/bash
LIBDIR=/path/to/pvr
OUTDIR=/path/to/pvr/downloads
IPLAYER=/path/to/get_iplayer

$IPLAYER --pvr >/dev/null 2>&1

# Delete after 2 weeks
find $OUTDIR -name "*.mp3" -mtime +14 -delete

# Update RSS feeds
perl -I${LIBDIR}/lib/lib/perl5/ $LIBDIR/genpodcast.pl \
    $OUTDIR "http://example.com/pvr" \
    r4comedy "Radio 4 Comedy" > $OUTDIR/r4comedy/index.rss

And lastly the output directory is added to the Apache config so it's accessible:

Alias /pvr /path/to/pvr/downloads
<Directory "/path/to/pvr/downloads">
    DirectoryIndex index.rss
</Directory>

The URL http://example.com/pvr/r4comedy/ can simply be added to your podcast/RSS client.