I noticed that the videos from the most recent Ubuntu Developer Summit are now online, and thought I’d have a play with the new embedded HTML5 video stuff in Firefox 3.5.

Rather than view all the videos by downloading them individually I thought I’d make a page where I can view them all sequentially.

Here is the html I threw together. Guess it will look rubbish in anything but Firefox 3.5. Of course that’s no guarantee it will look any good in Firefox 3.5. Just, y’know, you’ll see the videos

This is just a real random test post for Rob.
I might even include a photo. Hmm... Yes. I think I shall!






Rwarrr...

I've uploaded a set of photos from my recent trip to Brazil for FISL 10.

I spent a fair bit of last week recuperating from the Shortest Night 2009 all-night shoot. I messed up my sleep pattern and seem to be stuck in an up-late, sleep-late pattern. So I started exercising late as well - 20-30 minutes on the Duppas fitness trail followed by a long wander around the park with Riz and finishing up with a of quiet contemplation in front a warm summer sunset.

Doing the fitness trail feels a bit like exercise without ever maxing my heart rate but also without the pain of pounding the pavement jogging gives me, so I’ve started to like it now. Going in the evening rather than the morning shocked me a bit. In the mornings a few housewives make the rounds of the simple equipment.

In the evening spillover from the busy adjacent playground takes over. Small children attempt exercising properly until boredom inspires them to climb up and all over the equipment while their parents smile and wave. It suggests we cease to become a wrapped-in-cotton-wool nanny state. I wait patiently for chipped teeth and free access while goofing with Riz.

Actually no one has gotten hurt and the wait is rarely very long.

After a workout and brisk wander with multiple games of fetch or football, Riz and stop for a bit on the top of the hill and take in the sunset and (hopefully) cool breeze, while I contemplate my navel.

Last week I moped around a bit but the exercise and summer breeze blow out the cobwebs. Lately I started thinking, with some sadness, about “the butterfly effect” and resenting how I ended up unemployed during the depths of a recession. But, looking over at Riz, I started to look at it another way.

I know Riz is still ill. I worry the latest course of meds are failing, given his incontinence and decreased appetite. And even if beats the e-coli infection he’s old. He’s (circa) 13 years old, give or take a year (Battersea Dogs’ Home could only guess at his age when I adopted him) — I have to start to accept the inevitable.

If it weren’t for my getting ill and losing my job I wouldn’t have this time to spend with him. And I’m very grateful for it.

• Ladies and Gentlemen, [jwz has] ported Dali Clock to the Palm Pre.
• Phil Hands explains how to do passphrase-less ssh properly.

More annoying that companies who don’t believe ‘+’ in an email address is valid, are ones that did until their site got redesigned, leaving you unable to log in and having to explain the problem to people that can only read scripts. I’m looking at you, MBNA.

Update:

  CustomerService@MBNA.co.uk
    SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:
    <CustomerService@MBNA.co.uk>:
    host mbna.co.uk.s7a1.psmtp.com [64.18.6.14]: 554 No
    relaying allowed - psmtp

Update:

From: autoreply@customerservice.mbna.co.uk
Subject: Customer Service Reply

Thank you for replying to this email.

Any emails sent to this inbox are not
responded to. If you have a query about
your account please check your account
details online.

I’ve enjoyed freedom for a long time.

Not only is Linux software generally open source, it’s also given away. So not only do we not have to pay for it, but we can also see and develop on top of other people’s previous work. Lucky old us, free software and money we can keep because these Linux developer types work for free, outstanding.

That is until….

Over this last month or so I’ve been working on a package called byobu. Now, when I say working on I mean that I’ve been essentially working on the man pages and coming up with a few ideas. The trouble is that life and work really do get in the way of helping out. After a long day at work, I’m often lacking motivation to sit at the computer and work, even though I have a head full of things that I need/want to do. But it takes commitment, and time; time that could be spent doing many many other things.

So, next time you’re using a piece of software that you love, consider finding that project’s donation button and congratulate them on their fine product.

I’m not suggesting that everyone should be paid to develop software or maintain it, and I’m certainly not suggesting I should be getting fists full of dollars for the teeny tiny amount of work I’ve done (I’d only forward it to Debian). But using that donation button might allow project leads to thank their team members for their work over the last release cycle in some way other than words.

Go on.. it’s a great way to say thanks.

In the past when my then husband and I went to tapings of Radio 4 programs he would ring up the ticket unit and see what was available.

A while back I noticed on of my far-too-many RSS feeds told me tickets for The Now Show were available. I signed up for the first and last show of the series, received an email telling me my request had been received then pretty much forgot about it.

Yesterday I noticed a text on my phone from “message” with no other info, telling me I had tickets for the taping. No information as to where it was, though I suspect it was at Broadcasting House. They sent no other info at all, no email.

I thought of calling the Beeb to see if this was standard operating procedure, but in the end I just gave up.

Yesterday was a weird day. Too much negativity and death. I made jokes. I deal with things by making jokes.

Things are a bit weird right now. I’m trying very hard to finally get some closure regarding last year but that’s backfiring quite spectacularly. But I’ve handled it with a lot of aplomb and maturity and am pretty proud of myself. It really is all about self confidence, the real freedom is being comfortable doing what you feel right.

Still, I think I’d prefer closure right now, I don’t really care so much about being right.

In the end I decided not to go to the taping, as much as I love The Now Show. I just didn’t feel like it. I worry about Riz, my ears are due a syringing and in the meantime I’ve got a head full of gloppy olive oil and can’t hear properly and I feel anxious. Once I get an idea in my head of what will fix something, it’s hard to shift it. And once I get stuck on an idea I feel tremendous anxiety until I act on it.

A on-again-off-again friend organised a leaving do for tonight, and lots of people I know will be there. Still feeling a bit yesterday, a bit last year. I might just opt for a quiet night in with Riz instead.

I recently purchased an Acer Aspire REVO for the purposes of a Development server that I can keep running 24/7 without the fear of racking up electricity bills. The trouble is, it has no cd-rom, so I set about looking to install from a USB disk.

After a bit of googling, it wasn’t quite obvoius how to achieve this, so here is what I ended up with.

You’ll need a USB disk, formatted as FAT32 - for the purposes of this article, we’ll assume the usb disk is mounted on G:

First of all you’ll need dd for windows.

Then boot.img.gz from here

Extract boot.img.gz to the same place you put dd (I stuck it in c:/) and simply run:

dd.exe if=boot.img of=\\.\g: bs=1M

Once this is completed, remove the disk and re-insert it to fresh the filesystem, upon opening it up you’ll find all the necessary files needed to boot.

The final step is to add a disk image to install from, I used the NetInst ISO - simply drop it into the root of the usb disk.

That’s it, boot the USB disk

"This is not a battle that we will win for you. But rather, these are battles we will win with each other. We will do this not with fear on our minds but with courage in our hearts."

Just listening to some music, when I thought it started to sound a bit slow and warbly. “Batteries must be running out,” I thought. Two problems: I’m listening to MP3s On my laptop Not, as my age-addled mind briefly decided, on a portable tape player.

I love git, but I also loved ChangeLog files and git is not so good at merging them. For a while I played around with gnulib’s git-merge-changelog which made merges really easy. It worked fairly well, but now I’m bored of documenting my changes twice, both in the ChangeLog file and in the git commit log.

The coreutils project has been creating its ChangeLog file from the git commit logs for a little while now, and I decided to take a look at how that’s done. Now, at last, system-config-printer can do that too. Here is how it works.

Step 1 happened a while ago, and that was to modify the style of my git commit log entries. I now write a single line at the top giving a summary of the overall change (as before), so that I get nice output from tools that want to abbreviate the commit log to one line. Then I leave a blank line, and below that my ChangeLog-style entry with no indentation.

Firstly, the gitlog-to-changelog script from gnulib has been added to the repository. This is the build tool Jim Meyering wrote which does all the work.

Next, I renamed the ChangeLog file “ChangeLog-OLD”, because I’d like to keep that history around without any alterations.

I use automake in system-config-printer, but it gets upset if there is no ChangeLog file. To pacify it I modified the “bootstrap” script to create an empty ChangeLog file. I added “/ChangeLog” to the .gitignore file so that I don’t get continually told about this dummy file not being under revision control.

Finally, to generate the ChangeLog file from git commit logs whenever a new release is built I added a “dist-hook” rule to the automake file, getting it to run the gitlog-to-changelog script.

These changes were made on the 1.1.x branch. The older 1.0.x branch still has a normal ChangeLog file in the source repository, and when changes are made on that branch and merged into 1.1.x the ChangeLog entries get merged into ChangeLog-OLD automatically (git is fantastic for merging changes across renamed files).

The actual changes are here.

Riz seems a bit poorly. He refuses his food until he’s very hungry - sometimes waiting as much as 10 hours to finish (or even start) eating.

He eats snacks still, so I’m hoping it’s just the taste of the antibiotics mixed in his food. The only way I can get him to take the meds is to try to hide the taste, but that takes very stinky food (dogs’ appetites are stimulated by smell).

He needs to go outside very often now and if he’s been running around he feels the need to go every few minutes. On the plus side giving him lots and lots of fresh water and letting him outside frequently seems to be helping - the last few days he’s woken me up at dawn needing to go outside, but today he waited until I woke, which was circa 7 am.

I’ll ring the vet today and see what she says, though I’m a bit afraid to ring in case it’s bad news.

For all those who can, I’d urge you to pick up a copy of Linux Format tomorrow.

A couple of months ago, I pitched an article to the editor of Linux Format and it was accepted. Tomorrow, the magazine will be on the shelf. While I’ve already seen the PDF for the article, I’m going to be up early to make sure I can get my hands on the physical copy. For some reason, it won’t seem real until I can run the paper through my fingers and smell the ink.

Here’s a sneak preview:-

Way back in the early days of dial-up, the internet mostly contained library catalogues, military secrets, and students’ Dungeons and Dragons spec sheets.  Now there are websites for people, their pets, their friends and family, and their businesses.  However, while most people are happy to use a free hosting provider, or to pay a company to host their websites for them, the more dedicated web master tends to plump up for a dedicated server, or a Virtual Private Server (VPS).

Running your own server means that you have to be aware of the multitude of potential security issues you’re exposed to on the internet, though.  These days, most home computers have a firewall in place, or connect through a router that can protect them from the dangers lurking on the web.  If you own a server, you’ll still need a firewall, but there’s much more you can do to be safe online and we’ll show you how.

I hope that anyone who reads the article in full will find it useful, and please, do send me feedback if you’ve read it!

The big question now is, what do I pitch for my next article?

Here are some snapshots from Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Mike McGrath asks a pertinent question: why didn’t you vote? Although I did actually take the time to vote, I can totally understand why someone wouldn’t.

For one thing, as others have said, a lot of the candidates were quite similar: they said many similar things, and I don’t doubt any of them could do the job competently.

Personally, I tried to vote on issues where possible. I voted for people who had a clear view of what “Fedora” means to them, and sided with those who had a specific vision (that is to say, not those who take a pluralistic all-things-to-all-men approach). I tried to vote for bettter communication (though most candidates were pro- that), and for those who had a track record of commitment: these various “posts” don’t really have much in terms of power, so I mostly am interested in a. what the person would bring in terms of time and resources, and b. the attitude of the person.

I have to add that many of my votes were coloured by mailing list conduct - that’s mainly where my view of the candidates was formed, because I couldn’t really get through all the town hall stuff, and didn’t think it as accurate a picture of behaviour in any event. Where I thought possible, I voted pro- “be excellent to each other” candidates, and less favouably to those I didn’t think had been so excellent to people.

It’s a really complex picture, and many people eligible to vote I suspect just don’t come into contact with many of the candidates. I know I have only really had dealings with one, who was indeed excellent to me, and so he definitely got my vote. But beyond that, it was actually quite difficult to choose between.

Recently I updated CUPS in Fedora 9 and 10 to version 1.3.10. One big change in CUPS 1.3.10 is in the filter for converting PDF documents to PostScript: it has been completely reimplemented. This sounds like a lot of work but in fact it is now a very simple wrapper program.

Prior to 1.3.10 it was based on Xpdf but with some changes to make it work as a CUPS filter. This meant that every PDF security vulnerability had to be fixed separately in both Xpdf and in CUPS’s pdftops program, not to mention all the other PDF implementations (ghostscript, poppler, etc).

The new CUPS PDF filter just runs the pdftops program that comes with poppler, or alternatively ghostscript depending on the CUPS build configuration (in Fedora we use poppler for this).

In future if any new PDF security vulnerabilities are discovered, CUPS in Fedora will not need to be patched for them. Yay!

I read with interest the various Twitterings about price of disk space - in particular, about Bitfolk, but it applies to any other service really. Andy’s take on this is really worth interesting, although I personally think he’s defending Bitfolk’s pricing unnecessarily.

My basic philosophy on this is that price isn’t an issue; things cost what they cost. What is really at stake is the value of the service: is what I’m paying for worth it? Of course there are plenty of businesses which are effectively discount-merchants - the Ryanairs and Tescos of this world - but they don’t offer an awful lot of value. Trying to compete on price caters for a certain type of customer, but it’s a limited market.

It’s too easy to fixate on the cost of materials. You can look at a sandwich and say, “Oh, that probably cost 20p in bread and filling. £2 is a rip-off”. Things simply are not that simple though, unless you’re really truly price-fixated. If you have time to spend scouring the market for a cheap sandwich that’s similar in quality, fine - personally, my time is much more valuable than that.

Similarly, with VPS services, it’s easy to put together some raw numbers on hardware, divide it by a few people, and assume that it’s very cheap. Occupancy, failure and incidental costs don’t really factor into it, or the time to manage it. With that kind of service, the economies of scale really matter, and it’s difficult to see how you could do it more cheaply for the same price. But at the end of the day, even that doesn’t really matter.

What matters is the value of the service. For me, the value of Bitfolk is excellent: it’s a huge amount of management taken off my shoulders. I don’t want to manage Xen; I don’t want to have to worry about hardware-this and the vast kernel-patch hideousness. I don’t want to have to worry about I/O rates. Bitfolk is a service of good quality, and while it’s never going to offer bullet-proof VPS uptime I suspect you can’t get much better without moving to some canny clustering setup.

This is what I don’t understand: bitching about the pennies. Is £24pa too much for 20 Gb disk space? That’s £2 a month. That’s our sandwich from up there. It’s just not worth worrying about, in budget terms it’s noise. What matters is the quality of the service.

Recently BitFolk has been accused of overcharging for disk space.

In general I don’t try to defend BitFolk’s price-point - the unmanaged VPS hosting market is flooded and it is very easy to find stuff hosted out of the US or continental Europe for just a couple of pounds per month. Clearly I am not going to try to compete on price alone, yet BitFolk does sit firmly towards the cheap end which I feel is fair given that there isn’t a 24-hour team of support persons in nice business premises.

This particular complaint however seems to stem from the perception that “disk is cheap.” Well, yes, it is fairly cheap. That’s why we sell it at the “fairly cheap” price of £6/5GiB/year (10p/GiB/month), with no VAT added on top. Just because you can buy a 1.5T consumer hard drive for about 9p a gigabyte doesn’t mean that you should expect to find 1GiB of usable disk space on a server in a decent datacentre for anywhere close to that figure!

I try to keep costs down by using a configuration based around 4×7.2kRPM 3.5″ SATA disks with hardware RAID. I would dearly love to have a nice shared storage solution with 10 or 15kRPM 2.5″ SAS disks, or even to use them as local storage. Lack of disk I/O is the limiting factor for how many customers I can put on one machine. The problem is that the storage costs would be around 10 times as much and the target market (mostly people looking for cheap personal hosting) will not pay for it. They don’t understand why it would be desirable; for many of them it may not even be necessary since if they do only a little I/O they get the same performance either way.

So okay, if we resign ourselves to 4×7.2kRPM SATA disks and a RAID card as local storage, the next way to keep the price down would be to buy the disks with the sweet spot for price per gigabyte. At the moment that would be 1T. The problem now is that I’d end up with roughly twice as much disk space as I could ever sell on each server. I don’t get to keep adding customers until the disk space runs out — the I/O operations per second run out first. At the moment I can sell around 700GiB per server.

I thought I would not need to explain that 2×500G in a stripe with no redundancy would be insane, but apparently not, because I am told that some people “don’t need RAID.” I have to disagree, and I feel the ~49 or so other people on the server would also disagree when the first disk failure sees their service down and all their data lost (apart from the ones who have a backup strategy, right? No, really, why are you laughing?). Let’s not go there.

If you recall, I/O is what runs out first. So any sort of RAID-5 configuration is a bad idea because of the read-modify-write problem. The minimum number of disks and the most sensible RAID level then is a 4-disk RAID-10. Four 500G Western Digital Green Power drives will set me back around £165+VAT. You’re looking at around a further £225+VAT for a 3ware 9650 RAID controller. After the manufacturer lies are accounted for and an operating system is installed, there’s going to be about 930GiB of usable space left. We’re now at £390 for the lot, or 41p/GiB of usable space. Excluding VAT.

By the way, I am repeatedly told that Linux software RAID is good enough and I needn’t bother with hardware RAID (even a cheapy one like 3ware). I started off using Linux software RAID and still have one server using it, but that’s due for decommissioning next month. In general it does perform well enough. Unfortunately, hard drives accumulate errors and the only way to find them is to read the disks looking for them. The code for doing so on software RAID needs to be in the main operating system and the Linux mdadm package in Debian (and presumably elsewhere) handles it by means of a cron job that runs once a month to verify all the disks. Because it’s running on the host all the data has to go through the OS and while the machines are under moderate write load I have found that this verify process will take several days to complete and will impact I/O performance. In short it’s actually more cost effective to spend more on a RAID controller and put more customers on one machine.

Now consider the power usage. More than 60% of BitFolk’s recurring hosting costs are directly related to power. Disks aren’t huge power draws when compared to the CPU or chipset, but it’s not an inconsiderable extra cost and it’s often overlooked.

We’re already up to 41p/GiB cost price, but you may be thinking that this is no problem since at 10p/GiB/month, 700GiB sold brings in £70 a month, paying for all the disks and RAID controller after about 6 months. The reality is nothing like this. The full price has to be paid up front to get the hardware into service, but it’s going to be months before the server is full of paying customers. And if those customers don’t happen to want any extra disk space, then still around 50% of this capacity will remain unsold. The remaining capacity is not usable when the IOP/s have run out, but it has to be there from the start just in case there is demand. Does 10p/GiB/month start to look more reasonable yet?

If not, maybe you would be better off going to a really big cloud computing vendor who can take advantage of massive economies of scale to really drive the price down for you. Like say, Amazon S3 who will charge you $0.18/GiB/month for storing stuff in Europe. Plus $0.10/GiB/month more to write it and $0.14/GiB/month to read it.

Finally, the entire point of paying for a virtual server is that you don’t need to worry about the hardware. If it breaks, it’s BitFolk that replaces it, hopefully without you even noticing. If you are sitting there thinking “I could buy a 1.5T hard disk for 9p a GB, screw this!” then you just don’t get it. If from the outset you are prepared to manage your own hardware, and your needs justify purchasing an entire machine, then guess what? Don’t buy a virtual server on someone else’s hardware! Buy your own hardware that is set up exactly how you want (and please feel free to have no RAID and host it under your bed). With this mindset, pretty much every “* as a Service” product is going to look expensive to you because you have missed the point.

I realised I’ve been doing most of my blogging via Twitter now. I will make amends.

I spent last night on an all-night photo walk. It mostly involved circling from The South Bank up Tower Bridge and back a couple of times, with a detour through China Town for some Chinese food at an open-all-night Chinese Restaurant.

I’ll try to edit an upload later today.

<shameless self promotion> In the meantime feel free to have a look at what’s currently in my Flickr stream. </shameless self promotion>

First off.. Happy Solstice, I hope the day finds you well and brings you the things you need.

This morning I went to Stonehenge to see the sunrise with a couple of running friends, yeah, we ran there and it was a great run. But the sights at Stonehenge were utterly utterly horrible. Seriously. These free festival types need to find somewhere else to go at this time of year, they’re not there to celebrate the solstice and see the sunrise, they turn up for a party, get pissed/wasted, throw their rubbish all over the floor, urinate pretty much everywhere. Why are English Heritage allowing this to happen? There is no justification for a free festival of this scale at any historical site, especially Stonehenge.

I’m not at all impressed, and letters will flow.

If you want to celebrate the solstice then stay at home, find a local place that you find beautiful and see the sunrise there. Don’t come to Stonehenge, please, stay away. That doesn’t just apply to the free festival types, that applies to everyone, the Druids, the Witches, the Heathens, if you live more than 10 miles away from Amesbury then don’t come, go somewhere else, find your own local spot and leave this monument alone.

Yeah I’m grumpy, you would be too.

Fedora 11 is finally out. The bad news is that there are several known issues (well, known now) with printing. Unfortunately I was tied up with PDF-related security fixes for several months and did not have the time I wanted to spend on polishing Fedora 11.

For me the most annoying problem is that the printing troubleshooter does not work in Fedora 11 as shipped. This is fixed in the test update for system-config-printer. Using the troubleshooter can be very valuable when tracking down problems, but most especially when reporting printing bugs. Please install the update and try the troubleshooter (Help->Administration from the system-config-printer window) before reporting bugs. This updates system-config-printer to 1.1.8, released on Thursday, which has lots of fixes.

The other test update I’ve pushed in the last week is for cups. Fedora 11 was released with beta 3 of CUPS 1.4. The current upstream version is 1.4rc1, and there is a test update for that out now. Please try it out if you are having problems with printing. I will update it to 1.4.0 when it is released.

I am slowly working my way through the backlog of bugs that have been reported, both in Bugzilla and on mailing lists. Please be patient!

Life got a bit interesting.

Long story short, my GP signed me off ill for a couple of weeks and when I returned my services were no longer required at RIM.

Few people hiring, many people applying.

So…challenges lay ahead!

It’s slightly old news now, but for those that haven’t seen it, Wordpress 2.8 has been released. We’re getting closer!

Read More here

By Mike Hughes.

Someone has come up with a way of enabling tethering on the iPhone without paying your network silly amounts for the privilege, and allowing those with providers that do not “support” tethering to make use of this wonderful new feature in iPhone OS 3.0.

Simply head over to help.BenM.at -

Choose the first option, “MobileConfigs”, then go through your country and carrier where you’ll eventually be provided with a download for a new “Profile”, choose install, you’ll be presented with a message telling you that the phone cannot verify the profile, hit install and you’re ready to go.

You can find tethering under settings -> general -> network. It needs to be switched on manually, and can be used over USB or Bluetooth.

I just tried it over USB and it appears to work very well, it provides windows with an “ethernet” device, over which the iPhone appears to act as a NAT gateway (residing on a non routable 192.x.x.x IP.

I haven’t had a chance to try this on 3G yet (No coverage where I live), but it worked ok under GPRS (Despite people saying it only works on the 3G connection!), albeit very slowly.

Enjoy

By Mike Hughes;
Well iPhone OS 3.0 is here, the search is awesome, now, just the wait for quickpwn/jailbreak.

Oh, Was pointed at this today, made me giggle, and deserves to be shared

YouTube - IOW (A song for the Isle Of Wight - a parody of Lily Allen’s LDN)

It was a beautiful day in Kowloon.

So, recently (the last couple of months), I’ve been involved with the Birmingham Hackspace (aka FizzPop), and I’ve found it a great community to be part of. For those who aren’t in the know, a HackSpace is a place where a group of people interested in Hacking (and that’s not the bad sense of the word, nor just the coding sense of the word – there’s a lot of Hardware hacking going on ) can get together, share a space, share knowledge, and come up with some mad and cool inventions!

Anyway, one of the group’s main leaders, Antonio Roberts is very very arty, but is also pretty much your classic computer geek too. It’s been interesting talking to him of late regarding his journey into the FLOSS world, and how he’s coping with that, and integrating it into his artwork.

For all those interested, he’s doing a talk at the Birmingham LUG tomorrow about FLOSS and the art community tomorrow (Thursday 18th June), and you’ll be able to watch his talk Live on the internet. The talk is starting at approximately 7:30 UK time. You’ll also be able to interact with us on IRC, we’re on the Freenode Network, in the channel #sblug, and for those of you who miss it, a video of the talk will be available online at some point after the talk on my Video site. (where you can also find videos of past talks, including Dave Walker’s talk about Mythbuntu, and Scott James Remnant’s talk about Upstart)

I’ve hit across this problem a couple of times and always end up having to look up the magic incantations, so I’m going to store it here for posterity and in the hopes it may also aid other people.

Problem: Windows Vista / XP machine on a wireless network behaving extremely oddly. You can often browse to Google, for example, but basically nowhere else - it’s like other websites just time out.

Issue: For some reason, the MTU discovery doesn’t seem to work - the OS ends up sending packets which are too big and things stop working. This is probably an issue with one of the wireless routers involved I would imagine, rather than windows itself.

Solution:

You’ll need an Administrator shell. Find the ‘Command Prompt’ in the Start Menu, and right-click to select ‘Run as Administrator’. Then, use this command to find the name of the interfaces on the machine:

netsh interface ipv4 show subinterfaces

Using the name we found above, do:

netsh interface ipv4 set subinterface "Name We Just Found In Quotes" mtu=1400 store=persistent

It’s a complete hack, but it works, and since I use Windows about once a year I really don’t care

I did promise Lance that I would blog more on Bongo, and I’m going to try to stick to a post a week at least - however, this first one will only tangentially be about Bongo.

Since the project was initially released, the autotools build system was what you needed to create Bongo. There are a variety of benefits to using autotools, and it’s an extremely well-tested and mature system. However, it’s also relatively difficult to understand and not particularly quick. Over time we accreted more and more things into our build which no-one understood fully and that would occasionally blow up in our face.

Now, a little while ago I started a new branch of Bongo, called “memmgr-glib”. This was mainly to replace the memory allocator - maybe Pat can blog a bit more about this, but the short story is that this change has highlighted a variety of bugs in Bongo. The branch version of Bongo therefore seems extremely unstable - actually, it’s just a lot less bug-tolerant, which is overall a good thing - but we used that as a cue to make some other changes.

One of which was a switch from autotools to CMake as our build system. Just to give one really obvious stat:

	autotools	cmake
Configure	52 seconds	3 seconds
Initial compile	47 seconds	21 seconds
Install	1m 15 seconds(!)	2 seconds

Clearly, there is a big difference in each category: it must be said that the build systems aren’t doing quite the same things at this point, and I haven’t done these tests properly as benchmarks, but fundamentally the times are extremely different. I expect eventually that the compile time will even out - the difference will become minimal, and is already of the same order. Configure and install are clearly quicker though, and there aren’t any amazing short-cuts being taken on the cmake side.

The huge difference this makes for developers is the compile-test cycle. A re-compile with either system is basically pretty quick - something like a few seconds each. However, “make install” with both systems is quite different. To do a proper update, it’s much quicker with cmake, which means the testing cycle is really quick.

One other thing that is also big, for me at least: with CMake, we can finally do out-of-source builds. It’s possible with autotools, but our system never quite got it right. With CMake, you can check out Bongo from svn and then do something like ‘mkdir build/; cd build/; cmake ../; make’. The source we checked out isn’t touched, and nothing gets built in the source tree - it all happens in another directory. Not only does it feel cleaner, but it means that you’re not likely to commit any files which shouldn’t be there and if something goes wrong you can just nuke the build directory and start again easily.

I’ve yet to teach the bongo-build bot on IRC about this new system, but I expect that it will make building there a lot quicker too - mainly because it goes through the cycle above more than once (it configures twice, for example). It will be interesting to see what a difference it makes!

So, because of my work for an online Mobile Phone Accessories Site – I recently installed a Pagerank Plugin for Firefox.

I was pleasantly surprised when I loaded up my blog and found that I had a PageRank of 5. I’ve never done any “SEO” work on my site, and until recently, it was a bog-standard wordpress installation. (now I have a theme, and I point at feedburner, as I was curious about statistics)

It’s kind of nice to know that a simple blog can achieve a decent PageRank, without actually doing anything special

I think what mystifies me more, however, is the fact that googling for my name brings up my site within the first page of results, even though my name isn’t mentioned anywhere on the site (I guess I can blame the planets for that though!)

I’ve got to admit, I’m quite happy that even though a famous author shares my name, I’m still on the first page of results in Google.

My mother and her partner Alan came down to London on Friday afternoon to see a show (Oliver!) I’d bought them tickets for. We let them do their own thing on the Friday, though I was pleased to hear that their tickets were front row seats which they very much enjoyed. Despite me going through the details of how travel works in London in painful detail, they somehow still managed to end up buying two travel cards at £12.something each on Friday afternoon and then not needing them anyway, as their hotel was off Bloomsbury Square and the theatre was only at the end of Drury Lane. Tsk, tourists eh?

Jenny and I met up with them at their hotel on Saturday morning and after some tea we set off for Greenwich. Journeyplanner suggested the 188 bus from just around the corner on Southampton Row so that’s what we went for, but I should really have known better — the traffic was pretty bad and it took over an hour to get there. Still, it was a lovely sunny day for a picnic in Greenwich Park, some Frisbee and then a quick look around the National Maritime Museum.

On the way back Jenny suggested we use the Thames Clipper from Greenwich Pier to get back to Central London. It was another £5 each but I really didn’t fancy getting onto crowded public transport in that heat so was happy to give it a try. I’m really glad we did because it was great; surprisingly quick, comfortable and good for seeing the sights. We got off at Embankment Pier, walked up to Lancaster Gate, a short bus journey back to their hotel followed by a rather rushed change of clothes then off for a meal at the Oxo Tower Restaurant.

I’d hoped we’d get a table out on the patio but we had to settle for one next to the window. Still the view was superb looking across at St. Paul’s Cathedral. I could really get used to the excellent service but perhaps not the steep prices! Worth it for special occasions though.

The night was finished up with a slow walk back along the South Bank to Waterloo where we went our separate ways.

On Sunday we met up again for a lazy afternoon lunch and rest in Russell Square Gardens people- (and squirrel-) watching.

Tonight we’re off to Windsor for a meal to celebrate Jenny’s brother’s birthday so I suppose I better get on with some work.

I’ve been playing around with XSLT recently, with the hope of using it to move to a more “MVC” approach to web development.

If like me, you don’t use Apache, and want a little more control over your XSLT processing, PHP has a fantastic XSLT class that can do just that!

It’s as easy as that.

Mike Hughes.

So, this morning (or yesterday morning, as it is now!), my attention got drawn to Wolfgang’s post regarding VB.Net. While I understand his point, I’m not too sure whether I agree with it in it’s entirity.

When I first started programming, I learnt how to write Basic. I don’t mean Basic as it stands nowadays, but Basic as it was back then (or should that be BASIC?). I learnt to code while I was wheelchair bound, as my father thought it’d be something interesting for me to do. It taught me the basics of programming, and I stemmed from there, moving on to learn Perl, then PHP, then C, etc etc etc.

The first time I ever wrote an application for a Modern computer, I wrote it in Visual Basic. I loved it. It was so simple to use, and I could use everything I’d learnt (apart from stuff like Music Envelopes etc etc) with ease in it.

Since then however, the world of programming has moved on. People have discovered Object Oriented programming, and found new and better ways of describing the data structures and logic behind an application. I have also moved on, I no longer write my own code in Visual Basic. I’ll generally use a tool more suited to the task.

I do, however, have to maintain some VB.Net code. In fact, it’s the code that Wolfgang mentions in his article. I can fully understand why the original subject’s response was “Urgh!” – the code is horrid.

I don’t neccesarily, however, think that this is because of the coders themselves. While this may have contributed (I’ve had many a “WTF” moment) – I think that the main problem behind it is the fact that it’s an Object Oriented design written in a language that’s tried to shoehorn Object Orientation into it’s core functionality, where the core functionality should probably never have had something like that done to it. It sits in my mind like some bad genetic experience resulting in some sort of mutated behemoth.

VB.Net, to me, just seems like a poorly made implementation of something it was never originally designed for. Wolfgang mentions that the ease of use of the Basic Language allows a user to start working without having to dive straight into OO programming, as would be forced onto you using something like C#, and in a way, I agree. The thing is, that Basic, as Wolfgang rightly said, is meant for beginners, after all, it was originally an acronym. “Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”. This, in my opinion, is where it should stay. Basic is great for beginners, and VB6 was amazing. But, the advent of VB.Net means that programmers are going to start writing OO code in Basic, something it was never designed for, and to that end, fall into pitfalls and misconceptions where they have been led to believe that the VB.Net way of doing something is the de-facto standard. When they come to start working in another language, they have to re-learn things from scratch. If their experience is in a corporate environment, then their skills are only transferrable to something also written in VB.Net, and rarely anything else.

Basic is for beginners, it was never designed for the more complex stuff, which should probably be left to languages that were designed to handle it.

Disclaimer: I am in no way qualified to provide financial advice and this article is purely my personal opinion formed as a result of basic investigation – you should consult an expert before investing your money.

Recently I’ve been looking at high interest saving account for when I turn sixteen on Sunday. I closed my children’s saving account with Abbey last summer in favor of a current account with a decent rate of interest, at the time I had no money to spend on saving so I wasn’t really concerned about it. In the past few months I have started earning large amounts of money on a more regular basis, and given that I am nearing sixteen it makes sense to wait until then to open a new saving account. Ideally I will save enough money to afford to go to university without a large loan.

Originally I looked for young persons accounts and easy access saving accounts. Although I do plan on investing a significant amount of money, I don’t feel comfortable with it being inaccessible in case it is really needed – so a fixed term or notice account is unsuitable; nor do I want to make a commitment to regularly putting money in to a savings account (I freelance so there is no guarantee I will make a certain amount of money each money) – making regular saving accounts also not very suitable. Branch access is also essential, most online-only accounts are only available to post-eighteen savers anyway, and finally I can only commit to putting in £100 to start with.

My first port of call was to look on the various comparison websites. The accounts specifically targeted at young people, while having a very nice level of interest, tended to be aimed at under sixteens. More general saving account fitting my criteria had an interest rate of anything up to to 2.0%AER. Given this is still rather low (granted we are in a period of low economic stability) I started to think about alternate arrangements.

ISAs were the next type of savings I looked in to. They have the benefit of being tax-free, which, while not helpful to me at the moment, could well be useful in the long run. Generally ISAs also tend to have a higher interest rate than comparable savings account, mainly due to the fact that you are encouraged to keep money in them given the maximum yearly input of £3,600. Beginning to place money in an ISA early is also useful, even if you don’t put in the maximum amount possible for the first few years you still benefit by having more overall once you do. The most attractive ISA I found was the Barclays Golden ISA with 2.55%AER, compared with other saving offers this amount is frankly amazing.

Nobody I spoke to about it could recommend anything better, and the higher interest ones available aren’t really suitable for me. You can also invest in a stocks and shares ISA (while keeping any existing one) when you are post-eighteen, which is similar to a regular ISA in terms of tax benefits and maximum input – but is invested in the the stock market instead.

I’m still open to suggestions for better deals, but otherwise I plan on heading in to town on monday morning and opening a Barclays young persons account (only to use for moving money in to and out of the ISA, the interest rate on it is abysmall compared to my NatWest account) and a Golden ISA. I will write back in a few months about how it worked out.

Next Friday is my last exam, and indeed the last time that I will ever be compelled to participate in education by our society. For me (indeed, many people my age) leaving school is a monumental event. It will be the first day of the rest of my life. After this point I have numerous aspirations and to improve the chance of achieving these I am setting myself a number of “resolutions” – similar to how one would traditionally at new years, but without a arbitrary start date and with a very fundamental reason for doing so.

Aspirations:

• Achieve high grades in all four of my A-level options: mathematics, physics, chemistry, and economics (preferably A*).
• Get one or two open source projects that I’ve been meaning to set up for some time off the ground and spend more time maintaining my additions to existing open source projects.
• Put more attention in to an active social life outside of the internet.

These are all things that I want to succeed in very much, and now that what I do is my choice they are things that I feel it is feasible for me to stop neglecting without the constant compulsion to take my dissatisfaction out on societies rules.

Resolutions:

• When using the computer, aim to carry out a particular activity. If there is nothing to do at that moment go and enjoy something culturally enriching, such as reading a book. Often I find myself justing cycling through social networking sites and the various sites on my bookmarks bar, this is very much a waste of time.
• No more eating and drinking (other than water) at the computer. This is a very nasty habit of mine and something I intend to help me get a better figure as well as improving my attitude towards the computer.
• Get in to a regular schedule. At the moment I find myself going to be when I feel like it, and getting up when I feel like it. Over the summer I will be off for two months so it will be easy to continue my current attitude, however a strict pattern will undoubtedly increase the amount of time I spend doing productive activities and will be helpful when returning to school.
• Use Linux more. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but it is also something that will be good both in terms of learning and increasing productivity.
• Do stuff straight away, rather than leaving it until later. It may be easier said than done, but it is definitely something to bear in mind.

Hopefully I will be able to achieve some of these goals and make some impact in others that I don’t keep to. For anyone interested there are several things I intend to do this summer, as well as paid work that I have scheduled (and am still looking to take on):

• Develop CLog, a chat log manager and viewer supporting a range of log file types.
• Rewrite Formatilicious, with support for a wider range of file formats.
• Rewrite the LinyardWiki database code, and digitalise more of the data – much of the code is from when I first learnt PHP three years ago, and there are much better techniques to use.
• Improve the code of my various MediaWiki extensions.

Maybe once school is over forever in a few days time I may for once be able to work towards being happy and doig what I really want to do.

Through two rings!

It’s been great to see Fedora 11 released, even with a couple of small delays it didn’t seem to me like a terribly problematic release.

As Rawhide, I’ve been using it on and off for a while now, and to be honest aside from the few things I ended up filing, there hasn’t been an awful lot wrong with it. One thing I’d particularly like to call out are the small improvements arriving in virt-manager, which is slowly improving release by release into a really tasty piece of software.

I was slightly surprised by the various Mozilla-based apps being included in pre-release version, because they’re important to me and Thunderbird in particular doesn’t feel ready. However, to be fair to the maintainers, I haven’t encountered any particularly bad problems - they’re fine packages, and Firefox 3.5 in particular feels quite awesome. My main complaint is really that I’m missing my various plugins (which I’m sure can be hacked to work, but you know).

The artwork also deserves special mention I feel, because it looks really rather good. I use my laptop professionally a lot, and having it look respectable is very important to me. Right now, I think it looks more than respectable - big thanks to the art team.

It’s going to be a shorter path to Fedora 12, and I hope to involve myself mostly in QA - what small amounts of hardware testing and bug filing I could do seemed to help progress, and Fedora is so good now I think one of the crucial things in the future will be to ensure regressions are as small as possible and picked up as early as possible.

I decided to take a change in direction as far as my SEO experimentation goes.

Since making it to second result for Mike Hughes, I started looking at the first result, and I didn’t really find much of a reason for why it was first, other than the almost exact keyword match in the domain name.

So in the name of research, I’ve intelligently 301′d mikehugh.es and mikeh.me.uk here to mike-hughes.net - which means the existing position should be maintained, but it will be interesting if the 100% keyword->domain match will be enough to make it in to first place.

I finally sorted out the new domain for myself (Mike Hughes), there wasn’t really any reason behind it, just a little experimentation with SEO.

Mike Hughes

I’m looking for a “Soundboard” application for Linux (preferably that works with Jack)

Does anyone know of one?

My latest blog post about PPA Keys has had a few comments already. Having just returned from visiting my parents, I’ve noticed an email asking me to approve a Pingback.

The pingback was to a Portuguese site which had taken my post and written it into a tutorial.

I’ve got to say, my portuguese may not be up to scratch, but it’s obvious that this is a well written tutorial. I’m very impressed by this site, and the way that they’ve written, and illustrated this tutorial.

All I can say is, great site Claudio! Keep up the good work! Something like this site in English would be an asset to the ubuntu community. It’s well thought out, and well written

After reading Alan Pope’s recent post on installing GPG keys for PPAs easily, I thought I’d have a bit of a hack around.

Personally, I regularly add PPAs to my system, whether it be for Chromium Daily Builds, Bazaar, Gwibber, or anything else. I’ve found the most annoying thing is the installation of the GPG keys.

Now, I wouldn’t reccomend this for everyone, but, for some, it might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

Here’s what I did:-

Firstly, I saved the Script that Alan linked to as /usr/local/bin/ppakeys and chmod’d it to 755. I then created a new file, “/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/05ppa” containing the following line

APT::Update::Pre-Invoke { "if [ -x /usr/local/bin/ppakeys ]; then /usr/local/bin/ppakeys; fi"; };

Now, every time I do a “sudo apt-get update” – it’ll check for new keys that I need, and install them as neccessary.

Magic!

<edit> Please make sure the quotes are correct if you copy and paste this!</edit>

My just-over-three year old desktop machine was due a replacement.

    type     |                       name
-------------+---------------------------------------------------
 Motherboard | Asus P6T Deluxe
 CPU         | Intel i7 920 D0 Stepping Retail
 RAM         | OCZ 6GB PC3-12800C8 DDR3 (3x2GB) (OCZ3G1600LV6GK)
 Case        | Lian-Li PC-A71B
 Graphics    | XFX Radeon HD 4890 1GB
 HDD         | Western Digital Caviar Black WD640AALS
 PSU         | Antec TruePower New 650W
 DVD-RW      | LG GH22NS40
 Backup HDD  | Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS
 CPU Cooler  | Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme
 Fan         | Noctua NF-P12 120mm
(11 rows)

Initially, it’ll be running some version of Windows 7 (though I also have a spare Vista license) but given it’s not released there’s no point considering how much that’ll cost for now.

The plan is to put the two WD6401AALSs in a RAID array then backup in some manner to the WD10EADS. Given the price of RAM (£70.99 for 3×2GB), I’m half-tempted to go nuts and have 12GB of RAM.

Some sort of computer-assemblage pr0n to follow – the motherboard and CPU cooler should be with me tomorrow…

Today I made my way up to Sheffield to attend the UK Network Operators’ Forum’s 13th meeting. UKNOF is something I’ve wanted to attend many times in the past as there has always seemed to be a very interesting set of presentations, but I could never convince my employer to let me do so as my job was never particularly networking-related.

Well, these days I am my employer, so very little convincing was necessary! Despite the presentations having a lack of immediate relevance to my day to day work I still found them on the whole to be of very high quality and of benefit in understanding the wider networking world in which I operate. Not only that but it gave me the opportunity to meet a number of BitFolk’s customers in person.

The purse strings at BitFolk are necessarily tight at the moment though, so that meant just a day trip for me. I would dearly have loved to travel up on Wednesday night, stay 2 nights and come back tomorrow, but unfortunately finances dictated an eye-watering 4am wake up today for me in order to get the 6.37am train up to Sheffield from London St. Pancras and arrive in good time for the 9.30am start. Again I’d have loved to stay tonight and sink more than the two rushed beers I managed but here I am on the 19.27 back to London.

A London venue would have been easier for me, but that’s just being selfish. Sheffield appears to be a very modern, good looking city, and the people a friendly lot. More time here would have been good, and another visit very welcome.

Electric Works, the actual venue of the conference too was superb — such amazing acoustics in the conference room that I don’t think the microphones would even have been needed were it not for the recordings being made. Speaking of the recordings, it was refreshing to find a (free!) conference that takes logistics seriously. A decent quality wireless network, downloadable slides in advance of the talks, streamed and recorded video and jabber and IRC chat rooms were provided.

A fantastic effort by the UKNOF organisers, and Bogons and Portfast for the video streaming. Thanks to Yorkshire Forward for hosting and to Pingsta for the beers afterwards!

Anyone who knows me will know that I don’t get enough exercise. Over the last year or so I have lost a bit of weight due to having a better diet and being a little bit more active. Now that I’m working from home almost all the time I thought it would be a shame to reverse the trend and start putting it back on through leading an even more sedentary lifestyle. Something had to be done.

I don’t get on with exercise for the sake of it at all, so the idea of going to the gym just does not appeal. I decided that two things I could probably bear to do are cycling and swimming.

Since Jenny moved in it’s become pointless for her to keep up her gym membership in Holtspur, so last week we took a walk down to Feltham Airparcs Leisure Centre to see what it was like. From the outside it looks a bit drab, run down and 1960s so I wasn’t expecting much, but in fairness their pool looked quite good. Jenny wasn’t overly impressed with the look of the gym but she decided to give it a go anyway, and when she did get around to it this week she found it was better than it looked.

I also bought a basic bicycle from Halfords and this morning I cycled the 1.5 miles to Airparcs and went for the early bird swimming session, then cycled back. It’s the first time I’ve been swimming in something like 20 years, but once I’d got into the rhythm it was fine. Normally the early bird session is from 7am until 9am but in school holidays it finishes at 8.15am, so I only got just over an hour in. I liked how quiet it was this morning — no annoying kids at all even though it’s holidays — so I hope it’s like that every week. I think there were 9 people there including me at the busiest time.

It’s a small step but I’m really pleased that I seem to be able to get along with it, and if the pool stays quiet like it was today then I could see me going up there for an hour or two several times a week.

Inevitably I look a complete tit in my cycle helmet as well, but I can just about ignore the odd looks I get from all around me!

There's a lot of chat about the EU fishing rules which set stringent quotas on the number of fish that can be farmed. Now the EU is backtracking and has this week concluded that a new decentralised Common Fisheries Policy is called for.

Apparently, environmentalists and fishermen alike are concerned that lots of poor fish are being dumped back into the sea — dead — after the capture quota has already been filled.

I would personally suggest that, instead of spending millions on coming up with new legislation, fishermen simply stop fishing when they have exhausted their quota… but that would actually make sense, and we all know that the EU isn't fond of that.

In the meantime, wouldn't it make sense to at least sell/eat those dead fish? Other liberals complain constantly about supposed "global food shortages" (though look up "American food wastage"), so even if you can't help but find yourself with tonnes of dead fish that you've managed to accidentally catch, you can do better than to dump them at the bottom of the ocean.

What a silly world we live in.

• BBC News - China bridge jumper ‘gets a push’

Last Sunday I trundled up towards East Croydon to catch the weekly lunch-time jazz gig at The Green Dragon. This week featured a brassy jazz-fusion veteran Derek Nash and Sax Appeal.

I knew the local music scene shifted from The Ship to The Green Dragon a while back, after the Hogshead sold up and the facade was painted green, but never managed to check it out until yesterday.

Though a recent convert, I like jazz. Live jazz works better than listening to it solitarily on an mp3 player — I don’t know why really, maybe because the intensity and dynamics of the music doesn’t translate well in recorded form generally.

Though a budding fan, I went with an ulterior motive: I wanted to try my hand at gig photography. I thought a small local venue might be an easy start, so armed with nothing more than a Sony 50mm/F2.8, a borrowed Tamron 90mm/F2.8 and my little Sony A200, I gave it a go.

A few things challenged me, as would anyone photographing gigs. The lighting leaves something to be desired - like light mainly. So I cranked the ISO to 1600, the aperture opened slightly wider than a medium-sized volcano but still had slow shutter speeds!

I managed to get a table right in front, so a good vantage point. The front of the stage was a line of tables in front of a line of tables, with a few supporting beams in between tables to ensure complete lack of movement.

Stage design included roll blinds, black curtains, ducts, vents and mains sockets. The lights were quite good all in all, and the lighting guy did a good job. But the stage lights failed to reach the back of the stage for the most part so the drummer and shy keyboard player stayed mostly in darkness. I lost a few shots to the limitations of a cheaper camera - the sensor just can’t do strong red and green lights properly and the noise required quite a bit of post-processing fu in order to make them acceptable.

For all that I had a fantastic time, I loved the music and felt completely at ease. I tried out some ideas which worked well. I think all things considered I feel pretty happy about the experience.

Pictures here.

Update: Solved! Someone pointed me to the “beep” track of the volume control, which was hidden and muted.

Last month I upgraded my ThinkPad R61 to Ubuntu Jaunty. Recently I noticed that I no longer have the beep when taking it on or off of AC power. I don’t know if it has always been missing since it was installed, or if it went away some time after. The beep still happens at all times prior to the kernel loading, so I don’t think this is BIOS or hardware related. The power applet does know when I am on AC power (or not), and seems able to estimate battery life reasonably well.

Anyone had that before?

I may have been slightly bored… (i think grifferz is the best <taras> for VPS) Edit: using an embedded font (makes the text smoother) and it’s now clickable!

There are worse ways to have a nargeela.