Planet BitFolk

Taras Young (taras): How about this for the ultimate chill-out playlist? All these...

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:13:00 +0000

How about this for the ultimate chill-out playlist? All these works are available to purchase on Amazon and iTunes.

John Cage - 4’33”
Boards of Canada - Magic Window (from ‘Geogaddi’)
Sly & the Family Stone - There’s A Riot Goin’ On (from “There’s A Riot Goin’ On”)

If anyone knows of any others, let me know! Meanwhile, on Facebook, there’s a campaign to make 4’33” this year’s Christmas number 1. I like it.

Matthew Walster (dotwaffle): dotwaffle

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:30:35 +0000

Posting on this topic before has led to various heated insults and name-calling of myself, but I’ve decided to revisit this subject none-the-less: Conservation.

After receiving water bills that have increased year-on-year by >20% on average, I looked into why we should conserve water. I don’t buy the fact that by “saving water” we are “saving the environment” – no-one seems to be able to come up with a rational argument for me to process. That is, until a recent article on Radio4.

It appears that the consistent water shortages happen because we “waste a lot of water”. This, I don’t doubt – in arid climates like Southern Arizona, water is in such short supply that water conservation is a real issue and must be addressed. However, I live in England – as far as I’m aware, we don’t ship vast quantities of fresh water outside of our island, so it’s pretty much a closed system. The article on Radio4 dealt with the problem of ever lowering reservoirs. Some of the reservoirs were reported as being “very low” or “much lower than average” despite being at levels between 60-90%. I realise you can’t empty a reservoir without consequences, so we’ll just surmise that a safe “low water mark” would be in the 20% range. That still seems like a lot of spare capacity, but maybe I’ve missed something.

I was pondering this point while stuck in traffic when the interviewee stated the following (paraphrased): “Reservoirs are getting very low, and building new reservoirs is very expensive.” Very expensive – so what he’s saying is that the water companies are quite happy with their massive increases in water charges whilst investing little in capital expenditure such as building new reservoirs and improving the ones we currently have – or indeed, replacing many of the leaky pipes that are around. I’m informed that the massive water-pipe replacement works in London are in fact being sponsored by the London Authorities, replacing the old Victorian infrastructure installed over 100 years ago.

The cynic in me looks at the efforts by the water companies to reduce our water consumption – if I use less water, I’m not on a water meter, I essentially pay more per litre of water. Severn Trent have to supply me less water, thereby increasing the amount of profit they’ll make from me. Severn Trent have had a reputation for being one of the worst for “leaky pipes”, supposedly 150 litres per day for every property it serves [2006 figures]. BBC News reports that:

Severn Trent Water has reported a 19% increase in profits to £541m for 2009/10 and has announced £2.5bn of investment over five years.

Clearly, their strategy is paying off. Get consumers to use less water, make more money. Every time I hear “a drought order is being brought into effect” I will no longer accept people saying “think of the environment” I’ll correct them by saying “think of the lack of capital investment in reservoirs, and historic lack of pipe repairs that are only now being addressed” instead. Not as catchy.

Moving to the world of “energy” I’m told by nPower that I should lower the amount of electricity I use. This is clearly insane – they will make less money from me. They must have an ulterior motive, surely – perhaps once the energy usage goes down, the unit price of said energy will increase so I’ll end up paying the same (or more) for less energy. It is in a company’s best interests to make you use *more* of their product, not less – and I can’t think of many large companies that ask you to use less “for the good of everyone”, there has to be a bottom line advantage in there somewhere!

Which brings me to my final point – why do I need to turn off lights when I leave the room, why do I have to turn things off at the plug rather than leave them in standby, why do I have to be “conscious of my carbon footprint”? The only reason I should have to do those things is because it saves *me* money. The carbon problem can easily be solved, but not in a way environmental campaigners will like – replace every power source that uses fossil fuel with a renewable fuel, such as hydrogen and the like, and produce the hydrogen through electrolysis – essentially using electricity.

How do we produce the electricity, though? At present, we produce most of our electricity from fossil fuels. France produces in excess of 80% of it’s electricity from nuclear, but it’s largely “bad nuclear” that ends up on ships bound for Sellafield for reprocessing and hazardous waste dumps for encasement in carbonite glass for thousands of years.

In comes LFTR, a nuclear technology that was developed in the 1950s and rapidly abandoned when nuclear weapons became the most important aspect of the nuclear cycle – LFTR doesn’t produce much nuclear waste, and what it does produce is completely unsuitable for nuclear weapons.

Fuel costs are 0.1% of that found in Uranium reactors.
The sheer amount of fuel is about 0.25% of Uranium equivalents.
The waste is at the same radioactivity as the input ore after 300 years, and 85% of it can be extracted at the same radiation levels after only 10 years.
The entire cycle is self-cooled and at atmospheric pressures, not incredibly high pressure as with current reactors.
In the event of any catastrophic failure the reactor will drain it’s fuel mixture into a containment vessel without any intervention from humans or robots, preventing any nightmare Chernobyl or “China Syndrome” scenario typically bandied about when it comes to nuclear power.
Zero change of proliferation.
No “buffer zone” required.

You may notice I mentioned Chernobyl in that section – and it’s not the faux pas you might expect. Uranium reactors utilise metals in solid form. These can be rods or pellets or what have you, but the important thing is that they surface area is small and immobile. A process called “Xenon poisoning” naturally occurs and can be incredibly deadly. In the event of suspected Xenon poisoning, a reactor powers down to minimum levels for a few hours and slowly ramps back up once the Xenon has been burned off. Chernobyl happened because the engineers weren’t aware of this Xenon issue, and when the power output dropped, they increased the desired power level. After a certain level, the Xenon burned off quickly, the reactor went into overdrive and essentially exploded because the power just went “mental”.

How do you stop Xenon poisoning? Don’t use the metal rods/pellets. You *have* to use them in Uranium usage, it’s just not practical otherwise. With LFTR, the Thorium is made into a salt which just does not get affected by Xenon poisoning. In the incredibly unlikely scenario of the reactor overpowering and risking meltdown, the cooling would be overpowered, and an ice plug would be melted by the excess heat. The fuel then drains (in it’s salt form) into a containment tank where it can be stored safely – and disaster averted. A little while later, the salt is pumped back into the reactor and things go on as normal.

During testing in the 1950s and 1960s, the Thorium reactors were shut down overnight basically by just removing the fuel from the reactor. Uranium based reactors take weeks if not months of proper planning and safety checks to make sure they are properly initialised and increased to the desired load. Thorium can react in minutes to anticipated demand. For the overwhelming majority of cases, Thorium is safer and more useful than not just Uranium, but Oil, Gas and even Coal.

Three problems:

We’ve literally got enough fuel *waiting* to go into these reactors for decades of operation, it was a by-product of previous operations, and is an abundant element that can easily be mined and will last for hundreds of years. However, there are no reactors in production, nor are there any planned. “Generation IV” reactors are either Uranium or Uranium-Thorium mixes and are planned to go live within 20 years. Thorium is not the answer unless serious research and development is entered into with a view to having the first power plant online by 2035. The UK could be a world leader in this technology, but science and technology budgets are being slashed to their core.
The fuel cycle is self-sustaining, and breeds new fuel as part of the power generation process. Waste can easily be filtered out during the process – but while it does contain certain fissile elements that may be of use to countries with heavily developed nuclear weapons industries, the cost and effort of extracting those materials is far in excess of anything done today, and is impractical, so much so that the US Military abandoned it, the most gung-ho weaponry researchers you can think of!
You still have the nuclear waste issue. Sure, it’s 300 years not 10,000 years, but you still need to store that waste somewhere safe. No-one wants to store it, and while countries like Sweden and Finland are building waste storage facilities, the storage required would have to be magnitudes larger if the whole world went nuclear overnight.

That was a very long diversion of this topic onto LFTR, but my point is – we can generate energy without producing carbon. Wind, Solar, Hydro and Tidal are all supplementary measures that will never take the full brunt of the energy requirements of 21st Century Earth, at least, not without gigantic investment in global power infrastructure (including electricity grids) and co-operation through free energy trade (free as in unrestricted) rather than “energy independence”.

I’m distinctly aware that literally no-one is reading this far, so I’ll end on a final point that I’m sure will irritate everyone for different reasons. I believe:

Global Warming is happening. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again.
The cycle of Global Warming is almost certainly being affected by man.
While the amount of carbon generated by man is small compared to the amount generated by nature, nature compensates with natural carbon sinks such as forests and oceans. The nett deficit means that our added carbon plays a far, far more affecting role than any volcano.
Increased atmospheric H2O, CH4 and CO2 levels are almost certainly to blame for previous warm periods, and the resulting ice ages.
I honestly don’t believe we can do enough to stop Global Warming from continuing, with the resulting effects of rising sea levels, droughts and an increasing effect on the third world.

I honestly believe that whatever we do, my generation and the next couple of generations that come after me will see climate change not just be a pressing concern, but an inevitability that unfortunately will be poorly dealt with – resulting in massive loss of life in places like Bangladesh through flooding, in Africa due to crop failure, and more violent storms that will ravage our environment. I just don’t think that we can stop it happening, even if we over-achieve all our CO2 targets.

Brain dump complete. Time for sleep.

Alan Pope (popey): Change for Change’s Sake?

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:41:03 +0000

Tony Whitmore (@tonywhitmore) blogged about The Quest for Originality which got me thinking about the podcast that we make with @ciemon, @daviey and @lauracowen.

Over the weekend at OrgCon there was some discussion of originality. The subject was brought up when talking about the creative business, with original works being “worth” something, perhaps more than a digital facsimile of some work. So for example a concert is a one off live event is worth paying for, whereas an MP3 is “worth” less because in part it’s easily duplicated and thus lacks originality. (I’ve paraphrased and perhaps twisted the meaning of the discussion to suit this post, but I’m sure you know what I mean).

I guess there’s a couple of things that I think of in relation to being original. There’s originality with reference to the ‘competition’ and originality in terms of us not being stale over time. Both require some effort to achieve, and in my mind we should be doing both.

Competition in podcasting is hard to define. People have a finite amount of time in their lives to listen to podcasts, so we’re competing with other things people would rather be doing, like spending time with family, programming .. or whatever else our listeners do in their ‘spare’ time. People also listen during a commute, jog or some otherwise ‘dead’ air-time. So we have to be compelling or people will do ‘other things’ than listen.

People thus have a limited amount of time to listen to podcasts, and will thus only consume a limited number of shows. I doubt anyone listens to every FLOSS/Linux podcast, but I’m sure most people have tried them all to see which they prefer. So we need to appeal to people if we want people to listen to the show.

I do want people to listen to the show by the way. Whilst we do this for fun (and no financial profit), if nobody downloaded the show I think we’d probably stop doing it. The idea of being on stage to the sound of one hand clapping doesn’t appeal (to me at least). Others are happy to continue making a show no matter how many people listen.

There are of course other podcasts which do pretty much the same as us, Tuxradar and Full Circle Magazine are two good examples with a similar format, but with their own style. Then there’s the likes of Linux Action Show, Linux Outlaws and The Linux Link Tech Show who all have their own style and niche. Every podcast is clearly different, with presenters having their own expression, shows of varying duration, different personalities, quality and frequency. None (including ours) are perfect, all are serving a segment of the market successfully.

Within our own podcast we’ve evolved slightly over the 2.5 seasons we’ve been running, but for the most part the format has stuck. We have introduced new segment ideas, and refined various elements of the show, but in general we’ve stuck with a formula that works for us, and gets us some listeners.

Right now each episode gets downloaded about 5K times in the week after release with a long tail of 13 weeks to hit 10K downloads. After a year each episode hits around 18K and after two years each episode hits around 32K downloads. Clearly as with every podcast, we have no idea how many of those downloads translate into listens. We’re not so naive to think they all do, but we don’t know what the proportion of downloads to listens is, and I don’t think we ever will do. On that subject, for the record, I don’t think we need to do any kind of survey or tracking to try to figure that number out. I’m personally happy to know that some thousands of people download it and some of them listen to it.

When we started I think we had some original concepts compared to others within our space. We’re family friendly, (usually) well prepared, not North-American (not that being American is a problem, but many FLOSS/Linux podcasts come from there, so it’s nice to have one with a non-American ‘accent’ in my opinion), (mostly) above average audio quality, (generally) on time with a regular schedule and made by contributors to the Ubuntu project rather than bystanders. Whilst other podcasts had some of those elements, not many had all.

Since then we’ve perhaps stagnated, and whilst we have introduced new concepts and made changes at the ‘backend’ to streamline the way we produce the show, we haven’t had much in the way of revolutionary changes that the listeners would notice. The big question is I guess is ‘should we?’.

We could do as Linux Outlaws and TLLTS do and have a live part of the show. We tried this in the past but technical barriers (like Tony having a crap internet connection) stymed that. It’s also tricky in that we take tea breaks and eat cake between segments, rather than record it in one go. We could open the show up to have callers phone-in now we have a nice telephony setup. Maybe we should drop the ‘season’ system and just produce a show constantly with no breaks. We could change the duration, presenters, format, style or any other part of the content, but again, ‘should we?’.

There is the danger that we could break something that didn’t need fixing. Perhaps it is broken and we just don’t know that. Perhaps we’re in danger of burning out on a treadmill to churn out episodes that we don’t enjoy, if we don’t change. I don’t know. Do you?

Tony Whitmore (tonytiger): The quest for originality

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:34:01 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the things that I do in my free time and why I do them. Over the last year, the course I have been studying has taken up a lot of evenings and weekends, as well as nibbling away at a few days of annual leave. Despite this I’ve kept up my work on the Ubuntu Podcast and contributed to the organisation of two OggCamp events. However, other activities have been less lucky: I’ve hardly seen some good friends and my two godchildren recently and there were a few months when I hadn’t picked up my camera at all.

One of the problems I’ve been mulling over is that of originality. Our Ubuntu Podcast is a successful show by most metrics, but we’re not the only Ubuntu/Linux/FLOSS podcast, not by a long stretch. Some are very different, stylistically, from our own. Others are more similar and I have found myself wondering if there’s any point in having several shows that share similarities. If podcasting really is radio that anyone can do, then what is the point of you doing it? If you’re not doing anything original, anything different, if other people can do it, why continue? Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

The same thing applies to photography. I’m not a professional photographer, but I’ve enjoyed developing my skills over the last few years. I went on my first photo walk at the weekend, and couldn’t help feeling that twenty photographers walking them same route would come out with pretty much the same photos. Similarly, taking photos of well-known views or places seems pointless when you can find high quality images of the same thing on Flickr. There seems little point or challenge in taking photos which others can easily take too. If there are people making better photos of the same subject than you, why carry on making them?

Is this just trying to avoid being judged and found a failure? To compare your photographic efforts with those of someone who had access to the same scene and come out second best can’t be a nice feeling. If someone starts an Ubuntu or Linux-related podcast, rather than seeing them as a kindred spirit, I can’t help but feel it is a threat or increased competition; that they might do what we do better than us, that our listeners prefer the newcomer.

All this leads me towards the question of motivation. Why do I continue to work on the podcast and spend my time trying to take better photographs? If one can’t make something original, why make anything at all? A lot of my interest in learning how to do something new. The idea of doing a live podcast appeals because it’s a new experience. I’d like to photograph more and varied subjects; to feel I have acquired some new skills. If one finds the process rewarding or fun, or it serves a bigger, grander purpose then that on its own should be enough. Like anything worth doing, it’s difficult to be good at it. If you happen to strike on an original idea on the way, you’re very lucky.

What do you think? Please leave your comments below.

Laura Denson (laura): New Weaving

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:45:55 +0000

While I haven’t finished finishing my first weaving…. I have done a second piece of cloth, and this time instead of over several weeks I did it in one day. Even shmoo was impressed about how fast it went this time.

I used the handspun I had done up from a merino silk blend I got at MSW last year from the Cloverleaf Farms booth. The warp was a simple two ply and the weft a chain/navajo ply. I had done up two bats and was just experimenting with plying when I did them and thought the minor difference would be neat for weaving when I went to rake the stash for weaving yarns.

I love it. I can decide if I want to make a small project bag/purse out of it or something else, but in the mean time, I’ll just keep petting and admiring it.

Kevin Whelan (Eckrall): Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-25

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:05:00 +0000

Hiring the pub for beers with the boys, might actually make some plans for the wedding as well, but doubtful #

Alan Pope (popey): Ubuntu at Non-Technical Events

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:53:54 +0000

We seem to be quite good at turning up to technical events such as LUG meetings, technical conferences and other self-organised events and telling everyone how great Ubuntu is. However we seem to spend a lot of time preaching to the converted, speaking to people who already run Ubuntu or some other distro, rather than ‘converting’ people who have little or no exposure to Ubuntu.

Amber Graner recently wrote about her experience evangelising and advocating at a local Goat Festival. She was also interviewed about this on the Full Circle Magazine podcast recently.

When I heard about this it made me think that it’s something we should think about. Not specifically Goat festivals, but non-technical events. I wanted to canvass the group to see what events people might want to have a presence at. I’m not (at this point) asking for volunteers, but just ideas of events where people go and we might be able to have a stand where we could talk to people about Ubuntu and how they might want to use it.

These could be non-technical business events, they might relate to a specific sector such as education, or they could be cultural events like festivals. Anything goes really. I’ll start the ball rolling with a fairly generic example that pretty much anyone here can do:-

Village Fêtes

These attract families from all walks of life, and would be a great opportunity to have a public stand at little or no cost to run. Other attractions could include simple games (always popular at Fêtes) with prizes perhaps donated by community members, sponsors or (if willing/possible) Canonical. With summer coming it would be a great opportunity to get geeks outside in the sunshine and show off what we have to offer.

What events local to you would you like to see a stand at?

Also posted on the UK LoCo mailing list, so some responses may appear there too.

Kevin Whelan (Eckrall): Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-18

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:05:00 +0000

woot, just found out Civ V is coming out soon! #
Fucking HP P400i Scsi controllers are shit, won't let me change boot volume. Rebuild both arrays and restore data for second time… #

Tony Whitmore (tonytiger): Geoff Sayers: Gone but definitely not forgotten

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:00:10 +0000

Geoff Sayers was the Head of Drama at St. Bede’s, the school I attended in the 1990s. Last week I found out that he had passed away, which was both a great shock and a great sadness. Geoff was one of those teachers whose individuality and commitment to their subject meant that every lesson was a memory. He helped me learn about lighting and sound, which became my job for a while and the skills from which I still use on the podcast and in my photography. Not without eccentricities, he achieved superb results on GCSE and A-Level courses. The chief examiner of the exam board often attended assessment performances personally to ensure they were fairly marked. Geoff directed many plays over the years, a few of which I had the privilege to be involved in, which were noted for some excellent individual performances and were often spectacular budget-busting ensemble pieces. Working in his drama classes also helped create friendships which are still strong today.

I posted a short message on my Facebook status when I found out he had died and soon a collection of comments amassed from ex-classmates, each of whom had their own memory of Geoff to share. Although there is a memorial service is being held at the school in September, getting together for an evening of memorial drinks felt like a fitting tribute for the man who treated his students like his cast, who was always a teacher but felt like a friend. So on Saturday 7th August we’ll be getting together in Reigate for some drinks and, I’m sure, a fair bit of reminiscing. There is a Facebook event page, but it would be great to see anyone who remembers Geoff with affection come along. Please pass the details on to those others who knew Geoff too.

Isabell Long (issyl0): isabell121

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 07:47:03 +0000

Well well well, these last few weeks (well, days) have been crazy.

I AM GOING TO COLLEGE IN SEPTEMBER.

That’s the shell of it.

This year has been pretty pointless, if I’m honest. It has been unchallenging, uninspiring and being 16 in a class of 14/15 year olds has been horrible. You may not think one year makes a lot of difference but it really does – the majority of kids in my classes are so immature!

Just after my German speaking exam earlier on in the week, I went for an interview at a local college and they were impressed and offered me a place. Now no, I don’t have GCSEs apart from French, Core Science and R.S, but they didn’t seem to mind as they looked at me as an individual to see what I could bring to their college. I left there beaming – I don’t think I’ve smiled that much in a while! So, subjects:

AS French
AS Computing (not ICT)
AS Govt and Politics or Sociology (haven’t decided yet)
GCSE English
GCSE Maths

It should be great and way more challenging in the right environment this time, plus I’ll be in the right class for my age. I am exceptionally happy to be doing French again as I have had none this year apart from a 15 minute chat every Thursday with one of the French teachers on breaktime supervisor duty. As you can probably notice, I’m very happy and looking forward to 2nd September 2010.

Laura Denson (laura): Recipe: Asian Pineapple Mango Salad

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:32:14 +0000

(I’ve posted this before, but it’s at the bottom of a long fibery post and I am trying to go back and make sure all my recipes are single posts so that they are easily found and read. So, if you missed it the first time, this is one of my favorite salads!)

You need iceberg lettuce, mango, green seedless grapes, pineapple, and asian sesame/soy/ginger salad dressing, red wine vinegar, and rice vinegar, and chow mien noodles. Optionally, you can add an onion. You’ll need your seasoning of choice as well. Salt/Pepper are probably fine, but I generally use Morton’s Nature’s Seasonings.

Chop up the mango and pineapple. Wash the grapes. If your grapes are huge, you may want to cut them in half. Cut the lettuce (I do it in shreds). Dice up your onion if you are using one. Put it all in a big bowl and toss well. Take the Asian dressing, and put it in a small mixing bowl. Add equal parts rice vinegar and red wine vinegar. Generally the total amount of vinegar should be almost equal to the amount of dressing you started with, but it’s to taste, so play with it. Season to taste. Pour the dressing over the salad, toss until very well mixed. Add the chow mien noodles to the top, and enjoy.

Notes: Every once in a while I’ll make this with some cilantro chopped up in the lettuce. Not a bunch, but enough to give a bit of flavor.

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): Lies! All Lies!

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:40:21 +0000

Kevin Whelan (Eckrall): Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-11

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:05:00 +0000

Just worked out I have spent £430 on World of Warcraft in just over 3 years (Did have a second account for a while to be fair). #WoW #
Just aboot to jump on a boat for an afternoon of Thames leasure, just don't forget the factor 50 #

Kevin Whelan (Eckrall): Just aboot to jump on a boat f…

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 11:08:08 +0000

Just aboot to jump on a boat for an afternoon of Thames leasure, just don’t forget the factor 50

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): Mission log: Counter strike Development

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:09:08 +0000

Currently I have 7 missions in production and about 14 or so in development so this year I should be pushing out a lot of content for Vendetta Online. You might think “14 ,wtf , that’s a lot on the go” well yes and no. Those aren’t necessarily 14 separate story lines most of them are part of a campaign I have been developing for some time. If you are Itani you may have played “The other side of the universe” series which is actually a sampler for this campaign. 9 of those 14 missions I have the go are part of that campaign. Any ways on to the point…

Counter strike, the mission to end all missions.

What drives me to make missions? I want to play combat missions that stress the fuck out of you as you scramble to try and complete them barely scraping by successfully or being beaten down to hell by what seems impossible odds. Nothing in VO really offered that nor really does to this date (except a mission or 2 I have in game of course). I designed a story 2 years ago for the Itani to accomplish this. The basic jist of the story is the Serco are trying to sneak in the back door through Jallik bypassing Deneb to attack Itani and you must fight them off. After fighting them off you get promoted to a training position in the capital but tragedy strikes as your trainees are killed by a Queen and you vow to seek revenge. Impressed by your revenge ass kicking you get assigned to the Counter strike fleet in the Ukari and Helios system with the goal of keeping the Serco bottled up to their own affairs however the Serco do not care for this plan and fight back….

Sounds simple? it could have been, my previous missions break each story line into 4 separate missions with the 4th usually being the climax to the story but I decided the envelope needs to be pushed and VO’s mission engine stretched as far as it can fucking go.

The Super mission concept

Other MMO’s have these massive missions that take you extended amounts of time they usually call them Quests or dungeons or whatever but VO did not have anything like this. Missions are generally short and to the point with a little bit of substance here and there so I decided the entire Counter strike story would be contained within 1 mission.

Stations as your base are boring…

Secondly I decided your base would be a trident frigate instead of a station. You would be required to dock to get missions, repair, and so forth. There was a cheat event “dock any station” and if you require the player to stay in that sector you can effectively use the capital ship as a docking event yay!

Keeping it simple

Ever read Taggarts tactics in the Claw Marks magazine from the TCS Tigers Claw? Have any idea what I just said at all? Well basically Missions can be classified into a few basic types of Patrol, escort, defend and strike. These are the formats for the internal sub missions of the game. In total there are about 10 sub missions contained within this one missions and I would say average play time is probably around 1.5 hours depending how fast you are at the sub missions.

Careful design

I had to make sure when I built this mission that I was mindful to clean up NPC’s after each sub mission otherwise this mission would crush the servers resources. Usually with a jump out or mission change or when the player was out of site a simple go away (warp out) would suffice. I learned from Other side of the universe 4 that this was important because that mission 2 years ago used to crash the test server so being mindful of your resources is very important! To give you an idea of the scale of Counter strike it is currently 60 stages using 10 sector destinations, 9 timers, 27 individual npcs and 36 npc groups. Lots of stuff. More than anything currently in existence made by a player.

NPC choreography

To make sure everything happens how you want it in a twitch based game can be pretty difficult because you cannot predict the skill of the player and forcing things to blow up on their own is lame. For events where you are supposed to lose I usually make use of a timer that keeps re spawning the enemy or friendlies in a x minute interval until the desired scripted event is achieved. Also, despite your beliefs from the border war, Capital ships can destroy each other!!! Maybe the devs should play my missions and take tips?

Testing

This is the hard part, getting people to test in the first place is a huge challenge but in a mission of this scope if any massive bugs were to be found they could unravel any stage jumping set up and require hours of work. Currently the only other player besides me to play this is mr_spuck and he seemed to quite enjoy the mission. I sat back and watched him play the mission and took some screens which I have linked below. Keep in mind when I am developing I turn all the fanciness off and run in an 800×600 window.

Stay tuned, this one is Coming Soon!

Current Album: Vendetta Online: Counter strike
Images:

Kevin Whelan (Eckrall)

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:10:13 +0000

Just worked out I have spent £430 on World of Warcraft in just over 3 years (Did have a second account for a while to be fair). #WoW

Leica (leica): Emo-tainment

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:40:11 +0000

Art imitates life

I want to mention three bits of media I serendipitously stumbled on in the last couple of weeks.

First is a Canadian programme, Being Erica. Maybe a bit too chick-lit for guys, but it has really grown on me. It’s about a Jewish woman with a few issues and a therapist capable of time travel and quick costume changes. Basically she goes back into time and relives her worst moments in hopes of changing the outcome.

Episode two of the current series reminded me so much of some of my past conflicts that it was spooky! And the message was one I agree with whole heartedly: you can solve conflict, if you really want to solve it, by talking *and* listening to each other.

A great episode and worth a watch.

Watch Series 2 Episode “Battle Royale” on 4oD.

Lennon Naked is an interesting re-enactment of John Lennon’s issues dealing with relationships. The film attempts to explain Lennon’s propensity to behave badly to the important people in his life with his childhood abandonment by his father. I found the the scene where Lennon describes the anguish of waiting for a father that never comes particular poignant and frighteningly familiar.

Christopher Eccleston and Chris Fairbanks both give surprisingly low key performances.

There’s no iPlayer version but the final airing is this Friday on BBC4 at 23:40.

Full description and clips here.

Finally, I found the last piece on this Radio 4’s All In The Mind this week particularly interesting. It explains the effects of social deprivation on solitary confinement prisoners. Solitary confinement presents the extreme case of social deprivation but I think it’s easy to extrapolate that isolating from other people for extended periods can do very bad things to your mental state.

Listen here - at 23:00 minutes in exactly if you prefer to just hear the piece on social deprivation.

Laura Denson (laura): Recipe: Broccoli Cheese Soup

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:27:08 +0000

Again, mostly for a co-worker of shmoo’s, but feel free to take/use/etc.

3 cups Fresh Broccoli, chopped
1 1/2 cups water
4tbs flour (mix and dissolved in 1/4 water)
2 cups milk
1-2 tbs butter
1-2 cups Grated Cheddar Cheese
1 tsp Paprika
1 tsp Garlic Powder
Salt and Pepper to taste.

In a big pot…
Combine water and broccoli. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low/medium and cover. Cook for about 15 minutes.

While that’s going, in a small bowl, add flour/water mixture milk and stir.

After the 15 minutes is up, pour the flour/water/milk into the pot along with adding the butter and the grated cheese.
Add the Paprika, Garlic Powder, Salt and Pepper now also. I generally go heavy on the Pepper and very light on the salt.

Cook on low/medlow about 10 minutes til the cheese is all melted and soup thickens.

Continue to simmer until ready to eat, but do not allow to boil.
And that’s pretty much it.

Notes:
The first time I made it, I accidentally did double the amount of cheese that I should have, and it was VERY VERY cheesy, but still quite good. I’ve toned it back a bit since then. I’ve also sauteed onions and added those in, and imagine leeks, small bits of potato, and cauliflower would go just as well. Depends on how fancy you want to get. Speaking of fancy, I’ve subbed half my milk with Half n Half also, and that’s quite good as well. It adds a good bit of richness to the soup overall.

Our favorite cheese to use for this is a smoked cheddar from Sweetvalley Farms in Tennessee, but any good cheddar you love will do. You could always use regular cheddar and add a bit of liquid smoke if you wanted a smokey cheese taste. Generally when I make this I do it in double batches, as it’s a nice comfort food type of meal, and when I had to go to Canada for a week last month, it kept shmoo in meals quite easily. I haven’t tested yet to see how well it freezes, but probably will next time I make it.

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): Mission Log

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 03:35:06 +0000

As I have mentioned in a previous post some months back I am a member of the Player contribution corps for Vendetta Online. The purpose of this group is to develop content for the game in the form of either Missions, Documentation or Lua interface improvements.

Over a month ago Guild software made some announcements that got the attention of Slashdot and a few other high profile sites which attracted an influx of new players. I happened to notice they all seemed to run into the same issue between lvl 2-3 which was an immediate halt of anything interesting and a terrible grind with the basic and advanced combat missions in order to make level 3. Level 3 being key here as that opens up access to trading guild, escort missions, hive skirmish and the border wars all of which can be very amusing. This lead me to the drawing board to try and correct this long standing issue.

The Gauntlet

The idea behind this mission is you go to a specified sector and fight waves and waves of enemy ships of progressing difficulty and getting larger rewards as you reach certain gates or round completions. This is similar to how adv combat works EXCEPT I use a variety of ships in progressing difficulty until an ending conclusion of a boss battle that ends with a bonus and cash reward whereas ADV Combat just tells you to go find and kill bots until you don’t feel like it anymore and it’s always the same over and over and over and over again! Plus ADV combats rewards are shit. If you have ever played the game Wing Commander: Academy you will immediately recognize the format of Rounds and waves because that is pretty much the direct inspiration for this mission. For anyone who might read this and want to check them out this mission is available for lvl2-4 combat in barracks stations it has a replay limit of 3 times per day. You may ask why it is limited and that reason is because I don’t want people to just play this one over and over and over without checking out other missions available either otherwise the whole point was lost in creating it.

Help! Rogue Queen detected

This mission was inspired during the newb influx by the amount of new players requesting help with Queens and also by seeing veteran players taking newb players out Queen hunting. The basic idea is that there has been a rogue Queen detected and the station is hiring the player to help destroy its escorts so a ready wing of Bombers can swoop in and destroy it. The point is to show the new player that coordinated efforts result in easier victory and also to introduce the player to the Hive Queens in the event no one else does. This mission is available at barracks stations immediately and goes away once the player exceeds combat 5. There is also a 3 play per day limit attached to this mission to avoid overplaying it.

This is all very newb oriented content and for that I do apologize to the more seasoned players for leaving you out this time but I have something coming down the pipes either this week or next week that is for higher levels players so stay tuned.

Tony Whitmore (tonytiger): Ubuntu Lucid on the Viglen MPC-L

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:48:29 +0000

In order to be able to update a bug I’d filed against the graphics driver on the Viglen MPC-L, beloved hardware of the Ubuntu Podcast listeners, I set about installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, nicknamed Lucid. This wasn’t as straight forward as it could have been, so here’s how I did it:

Downloaded the Ubuntu i386 desktop ISO.
Turned it into a bootable USB stick using the “Startup Disk Creator” program in System Tools.
Booted the MPC-L off the USB stick. (N.B. It will only boot from USB sticks inserted into the rear USB sockets.)
At the splash screen, selected the advanced boot options, and appended pnpbios=no noapic acpi=off to the boot options.
The system then booted to the text-based installer. I didn’t tell it to use this installer rather than the graphical one, it just did.
Followed the installer process through, noting an error about not being able to install a suitable kernel. I think this is because the Lucid kernels are compiled for i686, whereas the MPC-L is essentially an i586 CPU (AMD Geode).
At the end of the installation procedure, at the “reboot” prompt, I selected “Go back” and chose to start a terminal session.
In the terminal session I set up a chroot to install a suitable kernel:
# mount -o bind /proc /target/proc
# mount -o bind /dev /target/dev
# mount -o bind /dev/pts /target/dev/pts
# mount -o bind /sys /target/sys
# chroot /target
Then I installed a kernel: apt-get install linux-386
Once the kernel had installed, I exited the chroot and terminal (type exit twice). This returns one to the installer menu.
Then I selected the reboot option from the installer menu.
After a reboot, the system came up just fine.

As ever it’s worth noting that running GNOME on the 400MHz CPU of the MPC-L is quite hard work, but can be done. Check out Xubuntu or Openbox for more suitable desktop environments though.

Oh, and the bug wasn’t present in Lucid.

Laura Denson (laura): Summer Garden

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:29:23 +0000

I’ve not done much in the way of knitting. Just a row here and there, but nothing really to show. I have finally finished my first bit of weaving but have yet to actually get it off the loom, so nothing to show there either.

I did take some pictures of our container garden on our porch though!

bigpot

cilantroblooms

crappytomatopot

spearmint

squash

thebasils

tjstomatos

tomatos

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): Collectors gold

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:15:22 +0000

Over the last couple months I have been on a pretty big Wing Commander kick. For those of you unaware of Wing Commander it was the greatest space combat simulation of the 90′s if not of all time. I say that because really after the series went quiet the entire genre sort of…well…fell apart which is a bummer considering it is my favourite gaming genre and also my favourite game series.

Not to worry though, the community has lived on strong over the last 10 years and many fan games have come and gone to continue the story, my favourite being Wing Commander: Standoff. The reason it is my favourite because it has truly captured the absolute intensity and madness of the first 2 games of the series.

Recently I have been giving back to the legacy of the game with the creation of my Wing Commander music plugin for Vendetta online which overlays Wing Commander 1/2 music into the game. Along with that I have remixed a copy of the Kilrathi theme in Garage band giving it a different sound and I located a PDF version of the SegaCD version of the manual. It has been a good Wing Commander year for me

But wait there’s more…

I have been trying to expand my collection of the series which until this year consisted of Wing Commander III, IV and Privateer. About a month ago I found on ebay an auction for Wing Commander II: Deluxe edition and I jumped on it. Upon Arrival I noticed it came with the ORIGINAL manual which had all the fighter/ship specs PLUS a 10 page sample from the book Freedom Flight. This was absolute gold for me and set me off on my next task: Finding Wing Commander 1.

A few weeks past and I found a set of Wing Commander 1 with the original fighter specs however after some heavy bidding I lost it to someone else and felt rather defeated. I took one more pass at ebay and found a “Buy it now” of Wing Commander deluxe edition IN THE ORIGINAL BOX with FIGHTER SPECS, CLAWMARKS, WC1, Secret missions 1 and 2 plus the install manuals, a 1990 catalog and some other paperwork from Origin! I jumped on that quickly and awaited shipping.

Today it has arrived and it is Christmas in June for me! The box has a dent in it but all the contents are in excellent condition. For being almost 20 years old I would say it has held up pretty damn well and I look forward to liberating the Vega Sector, chasing down the Sivar and liberating Firekka from Kilrathi Occupation!

Tolien: Weather, part 3

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 15:42:19 +0000

In part two I said I hadn’t done humidity yet. Now I have – it was fairly easy to do and I was short of something better to do in the wee hours of the morning.

Twelve hours:

One day:

I was asked in #bitfolk whether the station did anything other than temperature and I remembered that WSDL gave the dew point so thought I might as well add that too.

The maths required to calculate dew point and the background information is given in the Wikipedia article but for want of an excuse to use the LaTeX plugin for WordPress, the dew point is given by:

Where is given by

The bottom pair of lines in the temperature graphs in the last post show the dew point.

Tolien: Weather, Part Deux

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 23:48:50 +0000

So nearly a week ago I got a weather station. Since then, I’ve hacked up some Python to deal with the temperature data and spew it into graphs. I haven’t got to doing the same with the humidity data, that can be Part Trois…

Anyway, graphs (update every 15 minutes). The last 24 hours:

The last week:

If anyone’s particularly interested I could post the Python that does this. It’s not the most exciting (or, I don’t doubt, the most well-written) code in the entire world but there’s probably someone weird enough to want to see how dire a job I can do of chopping a string up.
I added some optimisation to only parse lines which haven’t been seen before using a temp file so after the initial run the longest part is now uploading the images.

Apparently weather stations are a “conversation killer, if there ever was one!!!”. Who would have thought it?

Alex Hudson (so_solid_moo): Bongo & Roundcube

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 11:38:52 +0000

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything about Bongo; for much of this year there hasn’t been an awful lot to write about – we’ve all been pretty busy. However, yesterday we had a teleconference which is worth talking about.

One of the problems we’ve had is that working on a number of pieces of the system, including the backend and web front ends, has been difficult – both parts are in development, and having everything subject to change like that it pretty difficult. On top of that, the web parts we were bequeathed from Hula just don’t work well and ideally want to be restarted with a modern JS library underneath.

So, we’ve agreed to take a slightly different short-term path: initially, we’re going to ship a version of Roundcube as our mail client. Yesterday, I demonstrated some of the work that Lance and I had done to this end, which comprises a skin for Roundcube (based on the Dragonfly design and assets), and a Bongo plugin based on the PHP bindings we developed as part of the Dragonfly-NG project. As well as the standard IMAP and SMTP support, then, the plugin connects straight to Bongo and pulls through your address book – as well as your own, you can also access shared address books on the server. This all works right now and is pretty useful.

The direction we’d like to take this is to continue the development of these additional parts to make Roundcube as good a Bongo client as we can make it; including:

calendar access;
server-side rules, signatures and vacation settings;
anti-spam training;
removing dependencies we’re not interested in (SQL being the obvious one).

It will be interesting to see what extent we can do this within the existing Roundcube framework; the plugin API doesn’t seem sophisticated enough quite at this point. However, the intention is definitely not to fork the project: where we can’t do things within the plugin, we’ll need to see if we can put forward proposals which are more generally acceptable to everyone – making Bongo-specific core changes would be pretty easy, but really not the road we want to go down.

The initial version of this plugin and various other bits of code are available in the Bongo-Web project on Gna!. The intention here is that we will release this concurrently with Bongo, so the two pieces fit together well: we will also be developing an separate administration tool to sit along side this.

What this means for the future web development is unclear at this point. It’s still possible we would take forward our own client development in the future, but that isn’t something we need to think about at this point: and even if we did, it would still be advantageous to maintain good support for Roundcube users in the future.

Tolien: Weather Nerdery

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:19:47 +0000

I’ve wanted to set up/build a weather station for a while; lazyness and apathy were mostly what stopped me. Last week, I bit the bullet and bought an Oregon Scientific RMS300 (change from 35 quid from OS themselves).
It comes in two parts: a base station with a screen and built in temperature/humidity sensor and an included wireless sensor (by default labelled “outside” as a serving suggestion).

The supplied (via download) software, “OS Weather”, is…pretty shit. It doesn’t work on Windows 7 (“trial version” available “end of June”, apparently) and I couldn’t be bothered setting up a virtual machine to screw about with it.

Next up was Weather Station Data Logger. It’s good, but I have more than enough machines running 24/7 without adding a Windows one (and again don’t particularly want a Windows VM). I have machines which do run near-enough-24/7 but run Debian GNU/Linux so the ideal solution would run under that and ideally headless.

Enter the WMR100 module which will do all the work of getting the data out of the base station and its wireless sensors and present them in a fairly easy to manipulate format:

DATA[20100622001211]:type=TEMP,sensor=0,smile=0,trend=,temp=24.7,humidity=42,
dewpoint=0.0

Next magic trick will be to get the data I collected with WSDL and the data that’s being collected with WMR100, stick it all together in some way, and start getting it into graphs of some description. rrdtool‘s the obvious candidate.

Alex Smith (alexjs): VMWare ESX and a full SQL Server Database

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 09:58:00 +0000

Hypothetical situation. You installed VMWare ESX, possibly upgraded from 3.5 to 4, went with the embedded SQL Server, and Many Years Later the VirtualCenter server no longer starts. You look through the event logs and the best you can find is:

Faulting application vpxd.exe, version 4.0.10021.0, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 5.2.3790.4480, fault address 0x0000bef7.

So you decide to look at general application eventlog events rather than just for VMware:

Could not allocate space for object ‘dbo.VPX_EVENT’.’PK_VPX_EVENT’ in database ‘VIM_VCDB’ because the ‘PRIMARY’ filegroup is full. Create disk space by deleting unneeded files, dropping objects in the filegroup, adding additional files to the filegroup, or setting autogrowth on for existing files in the filegroup.

“Great”, you think. I can just pass this over to a DBA to get them to increase the filegroup size. Then you dig a bit deeper and look at the event log for SQLServer:

CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE failed because the resulting cumulative database size would exceed your licensed limit of 4096 MB per database.

“Oh no!” you sob. You really don’t want to try migrating to an enterprise database right now. Worry not, there’s a VMWare solution. This easy process is:

Install Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express
Download and extract VCDB_PURGE_MSSQL.zip
Make sure all VMWare VirtualCenter processes are stopped
Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express
File -> Open -> Choose the extracted sql script
Change the database from ‘master’ to ‘VIM_VCDB’ in the dropdown on the top bar
Press ‘Execute’
Evaluate the deleted rows, make sure it’s not more than you’d expect (ok, I didn’t do this)
Change

SET @DELETE_DATA = 0

to

SET @DELETE_DATA = 1

Press ‘Execute’ again.
Wait. Get a coffee. Get eight. It will eventually finish:

****************** SUMMARY *******************
Deleted 8400 rows from VPX_TASK table.
Deleted 2585209 rows from VPX_EVENT_ARG table.
Deleted 1662120 rows from VPX_EVENT table.
Deleted 0 rows from VPX_HIST_STAT1 table.
Deleted 0 rows from VPX_SAMPLE_TIME1 table.
Deleted 0 rows from VPX_HIST_STAT2 table.
Deleted 0 rows from VPX_SAMPLE_TIME2 table.
Deleted 0 rows from VPX_HIST_STAT3 table.
Deleted 0 rows from VPX_SAMPLE_TIME3 table.
Deleted 105331 rows from VPX_HIST_STAT4 table.
Deleted 373 rows from VPX_SAMPLE_TIME4 table.

Start VCenter Server. Wait. Try and connect. Hope. Pray.
Connect to VCenter Server
From the client, press Ctrl-Shift-I
Go to ‘Database Retention Policy’, and enable it.

Hopefully this will save someone a bit of googling.

Andy Smith (grifferz): Dear Lazyweb, can you recommend an issue tracker?

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:37:53 +0000

I’m looking for a free, open source web-based issue tracker that I can install and run. I would like it to be able to authenticate off LDAP and allow users to rate the importance of the fixing of each issue, as well as the usual commenting.

I already run Request Tracker and don’t really want to adapt that to do it, I’d prefer something simpler.

Any recommendations? Can trac do it?

Thanks!

Update:

davee pointed out that more info is probably needed.

It’s for feature requests for various bitfolk.com services. There’s lots of them outstanding, and they’re all good, but I have no idea which ones are in most demand from the customers. So I’d like:

for users to be able to submit ideas by web and possibly email
rate how much they want them implemented
for further discussion to be possible inside the issue tracker (web/email)

I know RT can be made to do it, but I currently have it set up for mostly individual customers to raise issues about their individual service, not for everyone to comment on stuff.

Adam Sweet: Passion Star Interview on The Milk Bar

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:54:25 +0000

While of work this week, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Jason Forrest and Zoe Turner on The Milk Bar about my band Passion Star. The show came out yesterday and you can have a listen here. The interview is right at the end around 55 minutes but there are Passion Star songs played throughout the show. If you’ve not listened to The Milk Bar, show should give it a listen.

It’s funny how stuff to do with Passion Star crops up every now and again, I’ll get an email from a fan, or one will add me on Facebook or somebody I don’t know will approach me in the street or in a bar and ask me about it. It seems so long ago now, it’s easy to forget I’m still the same person.

While on a shameless, self-promotion spree, you can:

Read more about Passion Star here.
Download MP3s of many Passion Star tracks here.
Join the Bring Back Passion Star group on Facebook.
There even seems to be a Passion Star page on Facebook. Not sure where that came from.

Otherwise, I bought the passionstar.co.uk domain in January with the hope of doing something with it in the future, but for now it lies dormant, merely pointing at my website holding page. Should there ever be anything there:

http://www.passionstar.co.uk/

In the meantime, go listen to the Milk Bar interview and maybe download some Passion Star MP3s while you read the Passion Star story.

Thanks to Zoe and Jason for having me on the show

Alex Hudson (so_solid_moo): Getting rid of Google’s annoying “background image”

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 08:05:45 +0000

For some reason, Google have decided to put large images as the backdrop to their search engine. Not only are they large and grating, but they change over time and it’s horrible.

I’ve turned this off by putting the following in Firefox’s userContent.css:

@-moz-document domain(www.google.co.uk) {
 #fpdi { display: none !important; }
 body { background-color: #ccc !important; }
}

This gets rid of most of the nasty. However, sadly, the file you need to edit may or may not exist, and could be in a variety of different places, and of course there doesn’t seem to be any good way of doing this easily. First, you need to find your profile folder – and once you’ve located that, the userContent.css file goes in the chrome directory.

Make sure it’s the userContent.css file you edit and not the similar userChrome.css file – they’re not the same thing.

Update: just to be clear; you will need to restart your browser after you make this change – it’s not instant. Also, you may need to change the domain given – I use .co.uk, so that’s what I put in there. For google.com users, it seems like you can change your background without needing an account for now – but who knows for how long?

Also, my theory is that Google have done this to be annoying. If you have an iGoogle account, you can set the background to be white again – which a lot of people will want to do. Implicit message: your experience is better with an iGoogle account. Sorry Google, but I don’t actually want one of those.

Alex Smith (alexjs): Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not...

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:47:28 +0000

Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Andy Smith (grifferz): Adventures in entropy, part 2

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:06:32 +0000

Recap

Back in part 1 I discussed what entropy is as far as Linux is concerned, why I’ve started to look in to entropy as it relates to a Linux/Xen-based virtual hosting platform, how much entropy I have available, and how this might be improved.

If you didn’t read that part yet then you might want to do so, before carrying on with this part.

As before, click on any graph to see the full-size version.

Hosting server with an Entropy Key

Recently I colocated a new hosting server so it seemed like a good opportunity to try out the Entropy Key at the same time. Here’s what the available entropy looks like whilst ekeyd is running.

First impressions are, this is pretty impressive. It hovers very close to 4096 bytes at all times. There is very little jitter.

Trying to deplete the entropy pool, while using an Entropy Key

As per Hugo’s comment in part 1, I tried watch -n 0.25 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail to see if I could deplete the entropy pool, but it had virtually no effect. I tried with watch -n 0.1 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail (so every tenth of a second) and the available entropy fluctuated mostly around 4000 bytes with a brief dip to ~3600 bytes:

In the above graph, the first watch invocation was at ~1100 UTC. The second one was at ~1135 UTC.

Disabling the Entropy Key

Unfortunately I forgot to get graphs of urquell before the ekeyd was started, so I have no baseline for this machine.

I assumed it would be the same as all the other host machines, but decided to shut down ekeyd to verify that. Here’s what happened.

The huge chasm of very little entropy in the middle of this graph is urquell running without an ekeyd. At first I was at a loss to explain why it should only have ~400 bytes of entropy by itself, when the other hosting servers manage somewhere between 3250 and 4096 bytes.

I now believe that it’s because urquell is newly installed and has no real load. Looking into how modern Linux kernels obtain entropy, it’s basically:

keyboard interrupts;
mouse interrupts;
other device driver interrupts with the flag IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM.

Bear in mind that headless servers usuallly don’t have a mouse or keyboard attached!

You can see which other drivers are candidates for filling up the entropy pool by looking where the IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM identifier occurs in the source of the kernel:

http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~baker/devices/lxr/http/ident?i=IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM

(as an aside, in 2.4.x kernels, most of the network interface card drivers had IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM and then they all got removed through the 2.6.x cycle since it was decided that IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM is really only for interrupts that can’t be observed or tampered with by an outside party. That’s why a lot of people reported problems with lack of entropy after upgrading their kernels.)

My hosting servers are typically Supermicro motherboards with Intel gigabit NICs and 3ware RAID controller. The most obvious device in the list that could be supplying entropy is probably block/xen-blkfront since there’s one of those for each block device exported to a Xen virtual machine on the system.

To test the hypothesis that the other servers are getting entropy from busy Xen block devices, I shut down ekeyd and then hammered on a VM filesystem:

The increase you see towards the end of the graph was while I was hammering the virtual machine’s filesystem. I was able to raise the available entropy to a stable ~2000 bytes doing this, so I’m satisfied that if urquell were as busy as the other servers then it would have similar available entropy to them, even without the Entropy Key.

Feeding entropy to other hosts

ekeyd by default feeds entropy from the key directly into the Linux kernel of the host it’s on, but it can be configured to listen on a Unix or TCP socket and mimic the egd protocol. I set it up this way and then put an instance of HAProxy into a VM with my ekeyd as a back end. So at this point I had a service IP which would talk egd protocol, and client machines could use to request entropy.

On the client side, ekeyd-egd-linux can be found in Debian lenny-backports and in Debian squeeze, as well as Ubuntu universe since Jaunty. This daemon can read from a Unix or TCP socket using the egd protocol and will feed the received entropy into the Linux kernel.

I took a look at which of my VMs had the lowest available entropy and installed ekeyd-egd-linux on them, pointing it at my entropy service IP:

Success!

Where next?

Get some customers using it, explore the limits of how much entropy can be served.
Buy another Entropy Key so that it doesn’t all grind to a halt if one of them should die.
Investigate a way to get egd to read from another egd so I can serve the entropy directly from a VM and not have so many connections to my real hardware. Anyone interested in coding that?
Monitor the served entropy both for availability and for quality.

Matthew Walster (dotwaffle): dotwaffle

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 16:46:32 +0000

For several years now, I’ve been using iTunes to manage my music and podcasts. With the launch of Spotify’s import from iTunes, I’m finding that I’m using iTunes less and less with the net result that all my iTunes music is now imported into Spotify and I can load it up on any device and just use what I want. It’s very cool, very useful, and works across all the platforms I use, including Ubuntu!

However, there’s one feature of iTunes that as far as I can tell is not replicated elsewhere – podcasts. Sure, there are “podcatchers” out there, and some support “resuming” so that you can go back a few days later and finish off that 2 hour bumper edition of LUGRadio you started when driving – but very few support “syncing” between a desktop and a handheld. I use an iPod Touch at present, but as soon as I can I’ll be upgrading my phone to an Android based platform which allows me to use “Google Listen”

Listen (for the most part) works beautifully – it seems to use Google Reader to keep track of RSS feeds which, while not perfect, does an admirable job. However, it only works with audio podcasts, and it only works for your mobile – it doesn’t seem to have a desktop client.

Roughly 1/3 of the podcasts I subscribe to are video – FoodMob, This Week in Space, DiggNation, BestOfYoutube etc, and I tend to only watch these in one location, as I’m not normally in a position to watch these on the move, so I watch these on the laptop, typically fullscreen rather than windowed.

The answer seems obvious – use a podcast app on the laptop/desktop to download videos, and use Google Listen for audio; the problem is that I quite often listen to audio podcasts while doing other things, and I’d rather have them play out of my laptop. If Google Listen really will sync between devices (i.e. if you listen to someone on one device, it doesn’t show on the other, and podcast management via Google Reader so I don’t have to type URLs into the device) then surely it should be trivial to make a desktop version of the Google Listen client? Does anyone know if that exists?

Adam Sweet: Portable Ogg Player Required

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 01:54:25 +0000

As I sit here at the beginning of a long overdue week off work, stranded in Rugby after working late to finish a project and getting my car locked in the car park, my thoughts turn to my recently deceased 16 GB Cowon iAudio 7. I loved that thing. It was a fantastic player, near enough 60 hours continuous playback (honestly), tiny and like the rest of the iAudio range, it plays Oggs and the sound quality was excellent. None of that iPod bullshit for me We were planning to marry and raise a family.

My romance with Cowon started in 2006 or 2007 when I was looking for a portable media player that supported the Ogg format, which offers better quality and smaller file size compared to MP3 and is unencumbered by legal bullshit. On a recommendation I bought a Cowon iAudio X5 and was delighted with it, even though I never actually watched any movies on that ‘larger than anybody else but still quite pokey by today’s standards’ colour screen I paid unnecessarily for. It finally died last year when I dropped my bag on the connector which was propped upright, meaning it could no longer be attached to the charger or a PC and I’d just bought a replacement battery for it, having worn out the factory fitted one.

I drifted for a little while, with various vain attempts at glueing it back together making it worse until I came across this post by my evil twin Felim Whiteley about the iAudio 7. After asking a few suspicious questions I decided to buy one and was really, really happy with it, even more so than the X5. It works on Linux, it shows up as a USB storage device, it’s tiny, lightweight, the battery really does last the advertised 60 hours of playback, it plays Oggs and the sound quality is way better than an iPod. Then I dropped it last week and it wouldn’t turn on any more

Having destroyed the screws with an over sized screwdriver, I had to get my dad to drill them down so I could prize it open, but having done so and re-connected the on-off button to the internal mechanism, either the fall did more damage than I thought or the drilling/reconnecting process damaged other stuff. It turns on but the screen is corrupted, it doesn’t play anything and well, the casing looks pretty shitty after being drilled in each corner. And I can’t find anyone who stocks a replacement. The last one was £116, but they’re out of stock now and so it seems are everybody else. What appears to be the replacement in the product line is the iAudio 9 (sometimes referred to as the i9 to differentiate it from the Cowon S9) and it seems to start around the same price as it’s predecessor, but is larger, less attractive to my eye and has half the battery life (though 30 hours isn’t bad, if they’re as honest with this one a they were with the iAudio 7).

So, the purpose of this winsome ramble is to solicit opinion. I need a new Ogg/MP3 player. Smaller would be better, Ogg playback is essential, looks not so important, 12-16 GB preferable, sound quality should be very good, battery life should be more than 24 hours, must show up as a mass storage device on Linux and understand when you copy new tracks to it without using some bullshit media player to update an internal database before it will notice you added new songs.

Specifically though, I’d like to hear your recommendations, particularly from owners of other Cowon models, other manufacturers who support Ogg and maybe, with hope in my heart, from anyone who has a 16 GB Cowon iAudio 7 they would like to sell

Guess I’m going to end up buying an iAudio 9.

David Leadbeater (dg): A database of URL shortening services

Mon, 31 May 2010 18:46:22 +0000

I found myself with a need for a list of URL shortening services but I couldn't find a good one. Where I define "good" as "available in a sensible format and kept up-to-date".

So I've started my own.

You can query it via DNS (but it's not a DNSBL/RHSBL, as the return value needs parsing).

It is used like this:

$ dig +short txt bit.ly.type.spam.ms
"r\;p"

Where r means "redirect service" and p means "public" with a semicolon as the separator.

See the FAQ for more information. Let me know if it misses any URL shorteners (eventually I'll add a submission form, but I just wanted something that worked to start with).

Martin Meredith (Mez): Why shouldn’t I login as root?

Thu, 27 May 2010 20:20:29 +0000

I’ve recently gotten a lot of flack from a couple of people for an innocent comment I made about logging into a machine as root.
I’d like to think of myself as pretty savvy when it comes to security, and as far as I’m concerned, the reasons for not logging in as root are:-

Password could theoretically be sniffed
Unsecure connection could theoretically be hijacked
You don’t get an audit trail like you would with su or sudo
Password could be brute forced
You could easily run a command unintentionally which causes damage to your system

Ok, so we have the reasons not to – and they’re good reasons. This is why, generally, I don’t login to my boxes as root. However, the box in concern mitigates the above in the following ways

We only ever connect via SSH
Access to root is only allowable through SSH keys
Due to the nature of the server (local file storage) we don’t need an audit trail
Password login is only ever allowed from a secure TTY (aka the box itself)
The only reason we ever need to login to this machine is to perform maintenance which requires root access

Is there any good reason that I shouldn’t be logging in as root in the above circumstances?

William Anderson (neuro): “How are You With Turtle Wax?”

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:40:59 +0000

Oops … famous-for-being-famous (and for having fucking huge fake implanted tits) Heidi Montag decided to tweet her (frankly mediocre) firearm skills in an attempt to curry favour with Transformers 3 director Michael Bay. Pity Bay doesn’t have a Twitter account; the account she pinged is a fake. Oh, the irony.

.bbpBox14719471223 {background:url(http://a1.twimg.com/profile_background_images/66130196/twitterbg_lp.jpg) #0F1724;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

@michael_bay Check out this 1/2 minute video clip of me in combat training session today at ADE: http://bit.ly/d5DtI7less than a minute ago via webHeidi Montag
heidimontag

.bbpBox14720191848 {background:url(http://a3.twimg.com/profile_background_images/15326029/bikini_atol.jpg) #9AE4E8;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

@heidimontag That’s great sweetheart, but how are you with Turtle Wax on Ferrari paint?less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhonefake michael_bay
michael_bay

Ciemon Dunville (CieD): A killer combination, byobu and terminator

Sat, 22 May 2010 16:25:52 +0000

I was amused by someone today, specifically by their condescending tone when they suggested that byobu had nothing to offer the power user. Is there some other system that can show:

architecture, battery, cpu count, cpu freq, cpu temp, custom (user definable field), date, disk size and use, ec2 cost, fan speed, host name, ip address, load average, memory available and used, network traffic, processes, reboot required, services running, time (system and utc), update info, uptime, users and a few other things too, all in two lines of constantly updating text an example of which is below?

The other smart thing that byobu provides is multiple shell sessions from one login, which are effectively tabbed, making it easy to maintain multiple logins, sessions etc all over one ssh connection. Of course, they’re all maintained when you drop the ssh connection and you log back in to the existing byobu session.

Now, if you happen to have access to multiple servers, then terminator is also an excellent piece of software because it provides multiple terminals in one window:

Each of those terminals can be maximised (Ctrl+Shift X) whilst the others remain connected and working in the background. Zoom out, Alt-Tab to the next server and you have fast access, with an overview of everything.

One part of terminator that I don’t use is standard tabbed windows, mainly because I don’t have that many servers to work with, but it’s possible to take that image above, make a new tab, and have a similar layout with a bunch of other servers, at which point your head explodes trying to keep track of where you are.

So… can someone tell me of an alternative to this awesome combination?

Laura Denson (laura): Recipe: Brussels Sprouts

Fri, 21 May 2010 15:33:43 +0000

This is for shmoo’s coworkers, but the rest of you can feel free to try it too.

Fry a piece or two of bacon in your pan. Get it nice and crispy.
Towards the end of the frying, put around half a onion, diced into the pan as well, and let it start to brown.
Remove the bacon when it’s done and set aside to cool and dry.

Turn down to medium heat.
Place halved Brussels Sprouts in the pan cut half down. Scooch the onions out of the way if you need to, and if there isn’t enough bacon fat in the pan, add some butter. When all the halves are face down in the pan, add a bit of stock to the pan, about halfway up the sprouts, and let it cook down until the stock is basically gone and the sprouts have started to brown on the bottom and get a little crispy, but not all moisture is gone from the pan.

Remove from heat.
Crumble the bacon you set aside earlier and add to pan.
Add a bit of coarse pepper, and possibly a bit of salt, to your tastes.
Throw in a handful of dried cranberries and stir.
Now sprinkle on about half a handful of grated Parmesan and serve.

Notes:
If you don’t have stock, don’t use bouillon to make it, it makes it WAY too salty, just use water and throw in a bit of extra butter for flavor.
A coworker highly recommends trying this with shallots and walnuts and more butter instead of with onions and cranberries. I think I’ll be giving it a try next time we do them.

Alan Pope (popey): Ubuntu Developer Summit Audio Recordings

Tue, 18 May 2010 14:44:30 +0000

The crew at UDS have put the audio recordings from the sessions on-line.

http://uds.ubuntu.com/audio/uds-m has the audio files in Ogg Vorbis format for download. There are separate sub-directories for each day from Monday through Friday, and the files are timestamped and named based on the rooms that sessions happened in.

To see the list of rooms and find out what time a session ran, go to http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-m/.

This compliments the video which is available at http://videos.ubuntu.com/uds/maverick/.

Isabell Long (issyl0): isabell121

Mon, 17 May 2010 18:00:48 +0000

The weekends at the end of March have been crazy. Before, I couldn’t even begin to express what has happened over the past few weeks, but now I think I can at least start!

Rewired State: Dot Gov Labs

Rewired State Dot Gov Labs was a two day hack event run by Rewired State in March. I went along and had great fun working with a few people (Philip, Tim, Chris, Ivo and Josh) making “The Bump Game”. You can find more information here.

”Rewired State: Culture”

Rewired State: Culture was a day long hack event also run by Rewired State in partnership with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, also in March. Naturally, I went along and again had a great time working with Josh (yes, the same Josh that was mentioned before) on a project called Landing Zone that mapped all the crop circles in the UK on a Google map according to (approximate) latitude and longitude that we were given in the data. Possible improvements to this include pictures of crop circles and more! Again, you can find more information and a link to the hopefully still live website here.

There is more, lots more, but that is as far as I am going for now!

Tim Waugh (cyberelk): Ricoh supplies Device IDs

Mon, 17 May 2010 12:21:19 +0000

I’ve mentioned before about how the automatic printer driver installation feature in Fedora 13 requires IEEE 1284 Device IDs to be provided by both printer devices and printer drivers so they can be matched together. I gave a presentation about this at the OpenPrinting Summit in April.

Since then I’ve been helping Ricoh fix the pieces that needed fixing so that their printers will work with automatic printer driver installation. Impressively, Ricoh has sent me the Device IDs for 785 different devices. This brings the number of drivers without IDs down to 2,605, or just over 25% of the drivers we ship. Previously this was nearly 40%.

Not only that, but now the Fedora 13 cups package retrieves Device IDs from Ricoh network printers that do not have support for the Printer MIB standard. It does this by sending an SNMP query for the “private” Ricoh OID that holds the Device ID string.

Matthew Walster (dotwaffle): dotwaffle

Mon, 17 May 2010 09:35:35 +0000

This Sunday, I stopped in at the LSUCS LAN24, and had a look around. Plastered on the walls were advertisements for everything from mouse-mat companies to a special gaming mouse that somehow makes you better at “World of Warcraft”. All this shameless promotion of other companies has to come with it’s benefits though, right? Surely LSUCS are deriving some kind of benefit that makes it worth giving free-reign to put up advertisements over their website and across their event?

As Prizes, [Aria] have provided us with 2 x XFX Black Edition 850 Watt Modular Power Supplies, and 2 x DX 11 Graphics Cards for the winners of the L4D2 Scavenger Tournament.
For LAN 24 we have been provided with a 32 slot BFBC2 server hosted by Rackage in their London data centre.
We proud [sic] to announce crucial will be sponsoring LAN 24, supplying us with a 4GB kit of Crucial Ballistix RAM for the winner of the GunGame Tournament.
The prizes for the winning counter-strike source team in the 5v5 tournament are 5x QcK+ gaming surfaces [from Steelseries]!

Four different companies have “donated” prizes in return for putting banners up etc. AFAICT, there was no monetary benefit. I’m having to go on second hand information for this, but I hear that those that “usually win gaming events” won, so essentially the committee did all the work so that their mates could get some free stuff.

Now, to be fair and balanced, I confronted a few people on LSUCS committee to ask them what they thought on this issue. One told me to mind my own business, another told me that it was important to have sponsors so that when they had a bigger event, they could call on the sponsors to fund it. I asked why the winners of some games received prizes worth several times the entrance fee when speakers (who put a lot of time and effort into generating the talks) do it for free, and the club would have only been in deficit for a large event because of rash, ill-informed purchases such as projectors and the like. I received no response.

There were two incidents while I was there that worried me slightly – firstly, they publicised on the front page of LSUCS.org.uk they were going to stream the live F1 coverage to the event from the BBC iPlayer. I highly doubt they even considered that they needed a TV licence and therefore should have either not done it or not publicised it openly. As far as I’m aware, the projector they used was the one they spent a great deal of money on a year or two ago – which AFAICT didn’t get used apart from the F1. The other incident was involving a game they wanted to play, Tribes 2.

According to the gaming officer, Tribes 2 had been made available for free in the run-up to a new release in the Tribes series. Rather than linking to a download location, he uploaded the binaries to the LSUCS.org.uk site and asked people to download it from there – thereby breaking the JANET AUP, probably the distribution agreement in force in the files and needlessly opening LSUCS up to potential trouble.

Then we come to the issue of the way the event was run. As far as I could tell, the networking was laid out well, the power was run in a sensible way, and the table layouts promoted quite a bit of healthy competitive spirit. Miles had set out the network well, and had chosen to use large amounts of multimode fibre to link the switches, in a sort of star/tree hybrid configuration – but I don’t think there was any link monitoring going on. There weren’t any reports of congestion, so I imagine it just wasn’t needed – plus he was there to enjoy himself too, rather than rig up a Cacti instance etc.

The committee had their own table at the top, and were essentially cut off from the rest of the party by their gigantic screens – though Dan Felton in particular did a lot of walking around and seemed to make sure everyone was having a good time. Ian Jakings had a megaphone, and seemed to be acting as though what he said was akin to commanding the 101st Airborne Division (although in a drone-like uninspired stupor) – but I think everyone knows I think he’s a pillock so I won’t rub it in further. The event seemed to work well, and after 24 iterations, things really seem to flow naturally; the key being not to over-plan, and to provide facilities and loose structure but ultimately letting people have a good time.

Overall, LSUCS made a good event, one they can be proud of. However, the prizes seem offensive to those who actually put effort into the society and derive little benefit. I’d like to see LSUCS attempt a “big” event for their 25th LAN, but I don’t think they’re in a position to plan or run one quite yet. Certainly they’d need outside advice on power and event structure, but it wouldn’t be out the realms of possibility.

Laura Denson (laura): Argyle Vest

Mon, 17 May 2010 04:57:43 +0000

First, I got a loom! Kromski Harp Rigid Heddle. I’ve named it Cameron. Since my wheel is Ferris, I figured my loom should be Cameron. I suppose the next thing I buy I have to name Simone.

myloom

And here’s my first weaving project.

firstweaving

It’s stalled out however, because I’ve been spending all my crafting efforts on this…..
An Emergency Sweater for young man I did not know was coming into the world. So I’ve had to knit quickly, because as every knitter knows, it’s harder to beat them once they start growing. I knit the 6 months size, but it seems HUGE. Not having a kid, I cannot judge the accuracy of the sweater, or my thoughts on hugeness. I do rather feel that perhaps the yarns aren’t far enough apart in color saturation, though, the colors themselves did a nice contrast, so the colorwork is not crisp and clear, but I still like the finished product just fine.

front

The directions for the sweater call for it to be knit flat, but there was no way I was doing colorwork flat. So I did it in the round and steeked it. This is my first sweater with steeks. It didn’t suck, and cutting the knitting wasn’t that traumatizing or anything. Snip snip snip!

The other modification I made was to make the right shoulder of the sweater be a button closure instead of sewn together. That way it’s easier to get the thing on him. I hear babies can be squirmy, so I figured it would help.

back

I still need to sew the steek bits down and trim them. I’ll take a photo of the innards after I do so for all you freaks who like to look at knitting guts. But in the meantime, here’s one steek done and the other two still needing to be done.

1down2togo

Until then, carry on!

Ciemon Dunville (CieD): The security dilemma, carrying keys on your phone.

Sat, 15 May 2010 19:47:08 +0000

For at least 6 months I’ve been waiting to get a new phone; with Android being the obvious option and the HTC Desire fitting the bill perfectly, it arrived yesterday.

One thing that my HTC TyTn-II and Windows Mobile didn’t do too well was ssh; tiny screen, tiny keys, tiny text made it hard, and the fact that it mashed byobu when I did manage to log in meant that I really didn’t use it.

By there are none of those problems with the new phone.

I’ll be carrying my private ssh key on my phone, with my pgp key too, or should I say that I’m considering it. I guess that I’m not comfortable with having those keys in a un-encrypted state on a device that can be easily lost; effectively compromising everything that I use the keys with. Right, before panic sets in, what’s the risk?

I think there are two, unknown loss of the keys and known loss of the keys.

Unknown loss of the keys, done whilst the phone isn’t in my pocket, is certainly the worst case, because I’d be unaware of the compromise. If I know I’ve lost the keys then I can revoke and replace them in accordance with my plan (once I’ve written it). Of course I don’t just use my keys on personal work, and so this is a real risk, not just geek panic.

So how do I solve this problem, is there an application to encrypt my SD disk or files on it?

Tony Whitmore (tonytiger): OggCamp10 – veni, vidi, vici

Wed, 12 May 2010 22:11:46 +0000

OggCamp10 came and went so quickly that it seems vaguely surreal already. The months of work poured into the event all exploded across 48 hectic hours in Liverpool. Now it’s all over, bar the administrivia. It’s just crazy that people travel from all over the country, and even abroad, to come to something we’ve set up. Crazy in a great way, crazy in a way that puts pressure on us to make sure the event goes well, crazy in a way that we really appreciate, but crazy nonetheless. So, how to sum it up? To be honest, I’m not in much of a position to do so. Such was the pace of the weekend that I spent most of it running around the main stage. I didn’t see any talks in either of the two smaller stages. Not one. There were also lots of people I only got to say hello to in passing, something which comes with the workload of running an event, but is still a bit sad. There are some great photos emerging on flickr too. So I’ll share my memories, but they are but a small, small part of the picture.

Laura and I set off for Liverpool early on Friday morning, via Basingstoke and Hammersmith. We were collecting bits of equipment for the event on the way, adding to the assortment of raffle prizes and other boxes which were already packed into the car. I had arranged to collect the kit as, at the time of booking it, we weren’t sure how much sponsorship money we’d have. Collecting kit in person saves on a day’s hire and a delivery charge. It added a few hours to the journey time though. The Hammersmith location was a small recording studio in a town house, of which I was immediately jealous. It looked like the perfect place to record podcasts. Goods all safely gathered in, we set off for the north.

Thanks to the wonder of Google Latitude we could see that we were going to reach the M6 at almost exactly the same time as Alan and Laura Czajkowski. We arranged to meet at the next services, where we enjoyed a quick break and a catch-up. Driving into Liverpool around 5pm, we were overtaken by Ciemon on his motorbike at some traffic lights. Laura and I went straight to the Black-E to drop off the kit from the car. We met up with Dan and Dan’s mum, Agnes, and helped them unload their car too. This was my first chance to look around the venue – Dan had seen it many times and Laura had visited a couple of weekends previously. I’d seen photos of course, but there’s no substitute for being there in person. It was immediately clear that this was a very cool venue, with just the right vibe. It was a real shame that the refurbishment work hadn’t been completed as this took quite a lot of the shine off. The main stage was just massive. With two hundred seats set out, there was still plenty of space round the outside for people to stand. There were two balconies right around the space, giving the whole thing the feeling of a roman gladiatorial arena. At least, to my slightly nervous and overwhelmed mind.

After checking in at our fairly minimal hotel, we had a quick brush-up before heading back to the Black-E for a photo-shoot. That’s right, someone actually wanted to take some photos of us. Graham Binns was taking photos during the OggCamp event but wanted to take some photos of the UUPC mob as a separate project. Although there was some confusion about where we were shooting, we had access to the venue for half an hour, where he shot some portraits. After that, we were whisked off to the beaches with Antony Gormley’s Another Place installation for some brief and cold photos. Graham has blogged about the process and whilst I agree with some of the areas for improvement, the results are very pleasing. We wrapped up just as the light faded.

UUPC on the beach - Graham Binns

After getting back from the photo-shoot, we went to find something to eat. Always the gastronomic adventurers, we ended up in Pizza Hut with Andy Stanford-Clark, Simon Phipps, Roger Light and Laura Czajkowski. One of the lessons I learnt this OggCamp is that not having a designated hotel is a pain! People end up staying all over the town and something as simple as getting together for a meal can become a much more protracted and involved operation than I’m comfortable with. After eating, most of us finally made it to the Rathole Radio gig, an arrival which was delayed by my poor map-reading in the darkened alleyways of Liverpool. We arrived just in time to get a beer in before Dan and his band took to the stage and played a great set. The venue was great, reminiscent of the Cavern Club with its low vaulted roofs. Seeing people gathering helped build the sense of anticipation for the following day. Weary from our travels and aware of the early start the following day, we left around midnight.

We arrived at the venue at 8am, beaten to it by a few ever-eager crew members. Those who had stayed up later at the Rathole gig rocked up some time after the designated start time. A whirlwind of activity ensured that exhibitors were loaded in, signs stuck up, projectors configured and PAs set up. The fantastic banners heralded the event outside the Black-E and there was a crowd outside well in advance of the doors opening. In what seemed like no time at all, we were on stage welcoming everyone along and introducing the first speaker, Simon Phipps. Fortunately lots of people had come along ready to give talks, so I missed Simon’s talk to help Laura set up the schedule for the rest of the day. Unfortunately we were rather surprised by the number of people putting forward half hour talks rather than hour long ones. Worried about not having enough talks to keep everyone occupied, we chickened out and only scheduled a single round of talks before lunch. In hindsight I’d have preferred to pack that time slot out more as it felt like a bit of an anti-climax. Being stuck up on the balcony looking after the sound desk, oblivious to the fascinating talks going on on the other two stages, it all felt like a bit of an anticlimax and I crashed hard.

After a lunch break the afternoon schedule kicked off with another round or two of talks. Dan did a great job of chairing a panel session, keeping our very chatty panelists in line with ease. All the panelists were great, but it was especially good to see Brad Pearce being part of it. Brad came along to OggCamp and offered a talk on neuroscience. During the talk it was clear that he was an articulate and intelligent speaker, so we just asked him to join the panel! It was also great to see my friends Ade Bradshaw and Chris Procter, former LugRadio presenters, taking part. Both had come along to support the event, but it was nice seeing them spout forth a bit. Saturday concluded with the wonderful raffle, with a range of prizes donated by various generous companies. Dave showed his salesman instincts, flogging loads more tickets just before we got underway. I really enjoyed the raffle, it was exciting, a little bit tense and very funny. Oh, and it helps us cover the costs of the event too.

After a pit stop at the hotel, (oh, alright, we watched Doctor Who) we headed off to Studio2 for the evening session. Studio2 is a fantastically cool venue, perfect for an event centred around two podcasts. It’s a recording studio, complete with sound booths and large studio monitors in the walls. Thanks to yet more poor navigation on my behalf, Laura, Andy Stanford-Clark and I took far longer to get there than we should, so we missed last orders for food. We had to make do with a nearby restaurant in Chinatown instead. We were finally able to let our hair down a bit at Studio2, knowing that tomorrow would not be an early start. But before too long it became clear that the day had taken its toll and we headed back to the hotel, leaving others knocking back baby guinesses.

The Live Show - By Lorna Jane Mitchell

Sunday was quieter than the Saturday, which was the case at LugRadio Live too. I’d love to know why people only attend on the one day – do they have family commitments on the other day, or just called in on the Saturday on the off chance? Nothing wrong with just coming on one day of course, but I’m curious. Again, I was in the main stage for most of Sunday, catching Alan Bell’s interesting talk on VoteGeek and Andy Stanford-Clark’s twittering house talk (for the third time!) This year we had provided a clip radio microphone for speakers and they all seemed more comfortable with it than the handheld radio microphone. Definitely a win over last year. But before we knew it, the live show was bearing down upon us. Popey had squeezed some ideas out of us and ensured that we all knew roughly what was going on, but the combination of nerves and having seven people on the stage meant that we were tripping over each other a bit during the recording. Although Fab and Dan are used to working together, and the UUPC presenters are too, we’re not used to working with all of us at once so we didn’t do as good a job of second-guessing what we were going to do as we could. That said, the show picked up pace in the second half and the last few minutes were really funny. We had to edit it a bit for the Ubuntu Podcast version of the show to stay family-friendly, but the Linux Outlaws released the unexpurgated version for those who aren’t of a sensitive disposition. (I’m very pleased that something I said became their episode title!) It’s always difficult to know how it went immediately after recording, but we had lots of great feedback. Then within an hour we packed up all our stuff and got out of the venue. A quick stop at the hotel to drop all the boxes off preceded another meal in China town, this time with Laura Czajkowski: a chance to mull over how we could make the event better in future. Yup, despite all the stress, pressure and work, it looks like we’re doing it again next year. We rounded off the weekend with a few more beers at Studio2, though once again tiredness hit before too long.

We drove home at a leisurely pace the following day, reflecting on the event and how all these amazing people come together from around the country, work hard, play hard and then disband, scattering across the globe. Events like this are essentially ephemeral, but not being able to speak to everyone and viewing the whole thing through a fug of tiredness is slightly disappointing. I don’t blame those who steer clear of volunteering for things. That said, I’m already looking forward to getting stuck into organising next year’s event. Once we’ve all unwound and properly put OggCamp10 to bed, we’ll think about “next year”, but please give us some time to get over this one first!

Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror): Sunset in Stockholm

Wed, 12 May 2010 17:31:12 +0000

Sunset in Stockholm
Originally uploaded by ioerror

Watching the sun set over Stockholm with Sofia.

Martin Meredith (Mez): An hour in the life of my mouse

Tue, 11 May 2010 16:13:39 +0000

A mini-meme that has been spreading round the IT team at my workplace is “IOGraph” – a small Java program that tracks and draws the status of your mouse over a period of time. Lines are movement, circles are places where the mouse has stopped… The bigger the circle, the longer it was there. I have 2 monitors, which explains the weird dimensions!

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): Call Rogers wireless to get the latest Apple intel!

Tue, 11 May 2010 14:36:42 +0000

So the wife has been itching to get an iPhone but she is still within that 2 year block of her contract before she can get the promo deals. As with most cell phone companies you can get around that and get what you want just by saying the right things, calling in enough and so forth.

Yesterday she calls in for the second time to try and bug them into giving her an iPhone and the agent on the other end goes”Why don’t you just wait a couple months for the new iPhone, it has tons of new features”

Well fuck, Gizmodo and that poor engineer are under all that stress from the full might of Apples secrecy engine and all we really needed to do was pump Rogers for information.

Alan Pope (popey): Ubuntu Developer Summit Keynote – Unity

Mon, 10 May 2010 08:26:04 +0000

Mark Shuttleworth just gave his keynote speech at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. In it he talks about Ubuntu Light – the version of Ubuntu provided to OEMs which boots to the web in 7 seconds. With a new launcher and no file management, a fast-starting panel, ‘Unity’ is available in a ppa now.

Here’s the video that I recorded on my Kodak Zi8. It’s not fantastic quality, but good enough I hope

Mark also gave a Q&A session:-

Unity was designed for small screens and the goal for 10.10 is to bring that interface to the Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Unity can be downloaded from the Canonical DX Team.

There will be no ‘Systray’ support in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10, and will likely use ConnMan for network connectivity. With a full screen interface which takes inspiration from touch devices and consoles. Unity was at least in part developed by David Siegel – the guy behind Gnome-Do. Unity will include the Panel, Indicators, Launcher and Dash.

Mark indicated that “Gnome Shell is for Desktop, Unity for Netbooks” and that all this should be stable for the next LTS release 12.04, but will be available for testing in the universe section of the repository in the releases between now and then.

Mark then went on to talk quite a bit about the Sound indicator and some of his plans. He hopes that by 12.04 you’ll be able to manage the sound settings of an automatically discoverable DNLA audio device easily and in the same way as you manage local sound devices. Further improvements in 12.04 including providing a single date/time management window/menu, and using Connection Manager for network management.

“The Perfect 10.10″ as Mark describes it will consist of UNE, new icons, the new font and many other desktop improvements. Mark has now blogged about the session.

Taras Young (taras): The Fairy Coffins at the National Museum of Scotland. Genuine...

Sat, 08 May 2010 15:42:04 +0000

The Fairy Coffins at the National Museum of Scotland.

Genuine fairies. In coffins.

Leica (leica): Crazy

Thu, 06 May 2010 17:46:05 +0000

This morning, after hearing Frank Bruno publicize http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/ and his campaign to end the stigma of mental health problems, I used the site to pledge to be more vocal about my issues in order to help and encourage others. I’ll recount experiences that I believed contributed greatly to my behaving differently to what you might expect of people, especially here in England.

When I was a junior in high school (third of four years for those who don’t know the American system) I took a history class entitled “Advanced Placement European History.” The coursework for the class consisted entirely of a 10-page (circa 2500-3000 words) paper due every 4th week, on the topic in history we discussed. At the end of the year students took a test graded 1-5, 5 being the highest. A score of 4 or 5 got you out of taking a semester of History in University. I scored a 3.

I enjoyed the class but in those days I had no real parenting so no structure. My father worked days and mostly went out drinking at night - there was a bar in our apartment complex so no hassle getting home for him, just a short walk indoors to get home. My father prevented contact with my mother after she was hospitalized around 10 years before.

I lacked any pro-activity whatsoever. I also digested material very fast and wrote well (I wanted to be a journalist back then, so as a point of pride slavishly followed rules of grammar and punctuation and attempted writing in active voice).

So I wrote and researched almost in one go, thanks to the invention of erasable bond typing paper. This is in 1982 folks and already my father said no to my having a computer, on account of being a girl or something similar. I wanted an Atari back then, but would have settled for a TRS-80. I used to dream of word processing! The closest thing I had to a computer was weekly trips down to Wilbur Wright Community College to use their PLATO.

I always waited until the last minute. I went to the high school library and checked out as many books about European history as I could. I brought them home and arranged them in a semi-circle on the living-room floor and lay in the middle, skimming and making notes, bookmarking the pages I wanted to quote. Remember folks, it’s nothing without attribution.

When I was satisfied that I knew the “story” of that particular epoch of European history, I put my little typing table, and my little Smith-Corona electric typewriter (so small they told you to use an “l” as a 1 and had no “1″ key). I typed a flurry of fact in narrative form, stopping periodically to kneel down by the books on the floor to find the quote I needed to back up my version.

Around about 10 p.m., give or take an hour, I’d hear keys jingling in time with a slow gate. Then the sound that shot panic through my core - the sound of keys in the front door.

When not doing homework those sounds sent me into a flash of activity - turn off the lights and television and hide behind my bedroom door before the door opened. But even if I disappeared there was no way my books did, which meant an angry pound on the door. I waited for it instead.

“It” was my dad issuing a long diatribe about my making a mess of the living room, complete with shouting, swearing and an inability to stop once he’d made his point. I’d eventually start shouting back, trying to explain he should be proud of me, I was staying up late doing homework, wasn’t what good kids did? Remember my father was Indian - grades mean everything. Mostly As weren’t good enough.

After a while of this I’d end up in tears, begging for support. I cried for two reasons, an incomprehensible but strong sense of arbitrary injustice, and a desperate need for love and support, a need that was never, ever met. Not once. Seriously. Not once in my teenage years do I remember my dad saying a single encouraging or supportive word. Unless you count the day I told him I decided to get my degree in Journalism. He said, “That’s a good field for a girl.” My brother studied electrical engineering and became even more of a hero to my father.

When I broke down I cried hard, begging, “Why are you doing this to me?” “Why can’t you be proud of me?” I wanted support. Here was the person I depended on to be my entire family, my provider of food and shelter and he was generally just a stranger shouting at me. I became increasingly desperate for support and increasingly depressed not to get any. I started self injuring, struggling with suicidal ideation and para-suicide.

I still find myself, more than two decades later, still wanting love and support and never finding it. I cling to people desperately and offer them everything and then some, just for giving me a modicum of support. The irony here is that I most need support when I suffer a rejection of some sort. Rejection triggers in me such intense feelings of insecurity I regress way further than those teen years, those first few years of depression. I go back to being needy as a small child, maybe 4 or 5 years old — the last time my dad showed me any love and support — before my parents separated.

The scene usually ended the same way. I couldn’t stop crying and my dad would start shouting, “Stop crying!” Eventually he’d put his hand on the phone and tell me I was crazy, and he was going to call the hospital and have me put away like he did my mother. I just kept crying or begging him to leave me alone, and he’d take a bottle, a glass and a box of Marlboro reds into his bedroom. Or sometimes I’d go into my room, slam the door and he’d drink and smoke and watch TV for a while. I’d wait in my room and when he’d gone to sleep I’d get up and finish my paper. I usually finished in the small hours of the night, which was fine; it gave a certain amount of bragging rights amongst the brighter kids.

How do I still, so often, end up in situations where I’m being rejected, where I find myself crying and begging for love and support (usually right after the person I’m begging has rejected me)? Oh all sorts of ways. I just do. It’s called repetition compulsion and is common with people suffering with post-traumatic stress.

We subconsciously recreate the situation hoping for a different outcome. According to current thinking, repetition with a different outcome does actually normalize a more positive experience:

The patient, in order to be helped, must undergo a corrective emotional experience suitable to repair the traumatic influence of previous experiences. It is of secondary importance whether this corrective experience takes place during treatment in the transference relationship, or parallel with the treatment in the daily life of the patient. — The corrective emotional experience (1946)

Franz Alexander

I’ve never managed to recreate the pattern in therapeutic situations, because I’ve never managed to get to a point of “transference.” I’ve only gotten that sort of emotional dependency from personal relationships, and sadly I’ve never changed the outcome.

Instead I often recreate the old scene in personal relationships. I cry and beg and berate myself. I become suicidal and self injure. Well not actually self injure, more just hammer myself with drink and drugs until I can cope better. I become more and more desperate for the love and support I still crave. I fail with people 99% of the time. I faired better with dogs - they do give you unconditional support. But there’s no conflict with dogs, and no praise or even reassurance. Just doggie affection. It’s lovely but not enough to change my deepest, darkest fear - that someone I depend on emotionally will stick around and support me when I hurt, and praise me when I do something worthy.

True to form, I recreate the same pattern. None of the praise I seek; rejection followed by me melting down, begging for support (and begging to undo being spurned); when I get desperate I generally get labels - “crazy” “psycho” (or the ever popular “psycho bitch.”) or any of a number of references to my mental state and nearly as many reminders “I need professional help.”

I equate that, on many levels, with that old scene with my father.

I keep hoping to someday find a partner who will give me enough love and support and patience to help me learn not to panic, but so far I’ve only found the same old scene. And as I grow older, I lose hope and grow weary of hoping.

How Soon is Now? - The Smiths (HD)

Runtime: 6:43
Views: 16,338

Taras Young (taras): After impulse-buying about 100 unused Victorian/Edwardian...

Wed, 05 May 2010 20:57:39 +0000

After impulse-buying about 100 unused Victorian/Edwardian chemists’ labels on eBay, I have been struggling to find a use for them. Until tonight.

Turns out they make great tamper-evident seals on parcels and envelopes.

Phil Spencer (CrazySpence): What the hell happened to Garfield

Wed, 05 May 2010 15:33:31 +0000

I have a Garfield calender on my desk cause I like Garfield however I have an issue with newer Garfield.

It is 90% about Jon not being able to date

What happened? Garfield used to be about hating Monday, Sending Nermal away, Punting Odie, Watching TV, Smoking, Drinking Coffee, Pranks, Lazyness, Eating, Fighting neighborhood dogs, Getting stuck in trees, Ferns, Scratching furniture…

Over 30 years of Garfield maybe that is all they can come up with now. If that is all that is left maybe Garfield should retire.

William Anderson (neuro): "If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you. I warn you that you…"

Wed, 05 May 2010 13:03:00 +0000

“

If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you. I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend upon payment. I warn you that you will have ignorance – when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right. I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay. I warn you that you will be cold – when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.

I warn you that you must not expect work – when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies. I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light. I warn you that you will be quiet – when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient. I warn you that you will have defence of a sort – with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding. I warn you that you will be home-bound – when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up. I warn you that you will borrow less – when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.

If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.

”

- Neil Kinnock, 7th June 1983

Dominic Cleal (Dominic): Cron, local time and DST with Puppet

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:23:12 +0000

Following on from my sleep(1) based hack to get certain cronjobs running at local times on a system configured for UTC, I've implemented a function to do this elegently from Puppet.

As Puppet's running regularly on the systems, it's possible to use a function that's given the local time and then on each run it performs the timezone conversion back to UTC. When DST arrives, the function output will automatically shift, the crontab gets updated and back again when DST is over.

The function needs RubyGems set up and the tzinfo gem installed (remember, on the puppetmaster, not the clients). This snippet then goes into your module, somewhere like modules/cron/plugins/puppet/parser/functions/tzhour.rb:

require 'rubygems'
require 'tzinfo'

module Puppet::Parser::Functions
    newfunction(:tzhour, :type => :rvalue) do |args|
        tz = TZInfo::Timezone.get(args[0])
        u = Time.now.utc
        localtm = Time.utc(u.year, u.month, u.day, args[1], u.min, u.sec)
        tz.local_to_utc(localtm).hour
    end
end

Next, the function can be used in the cron type:

cron { my-cron:
    command => "/my/cron.sh",
    user    => "root",
    hour    => tzhour("Europe/Amsterdam", 19),
    minute  => 45,
    weekday => [ Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri ],
}

If you're using multiple environments, watch out for bug #1775. If you get errors on the clients saying that the tzhour function can't be found, check the troubleshooting section on the Puppet wiki.

Tony Whitmore (tonytiger): OggCamp10 – so close you can taste it

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 20:16:24 +0000

OggCamp10 is just a few days away. In fact, it’s next weekend. Before I know it, it’ll be Friday and I’ll be on my way up the M6 to sunny Liverpool. With a packed week ahead at work, an evening class and an entire episode of the Ubuntu Podcast for the team to record, edit, mix and release before we go, it’s going to be mad and manic and marvellous.

In the last week or so, things have really started to come together. Equipment is booked, ready to be collected or delivered, kit lists are being checked and double-checked, travel plans calculated and all the last minute details being sorted. Unfortunately, the venue staff have told us that lift to the first floor, where main stage is, won’t be finished in time for OggCamp. The lift to basement is OK, and the exhibition is on the ground floor. The crew will help any wheel-chair users to get up to the first floor, but we’re really sorry for the inconvenience.

On a happier note, the mugs have arrived, looking all shiny and lovely:

If you donate £5 to support the event, you can get your hands on one of these bad boys. Be the envy of geeks everywhere! Our exclusive t-shirts are also being printed as I type. From what I’ve seen so far they look fantastically cool and they are a “thank you” for everyone who donates £10 to support OggCamp.

The banners which will be hanging outside the venue have also been printed, and look like this:

I’m sure they are going to look great hanging outside the Black-E and, like all the design elements of OggCamp, are the result of Fab’s skills.

We’ve also had a flood of cool donations to our raffle. This was a highlight of last year’s event for many people. This year’s prizes include:

3x Viglen MPC-Ls
An assortment of books from Wiley
Two Aluetia PCs
Books and ebook vouchers from Apress
Some swish Ubuntu backpacks from Canonical
An O2 joggler
A 1.5TB USB disk from ebuyer

That’s a seriously nice collection of goodies, any of which I’d be happy to get my hands on! Every day new talks and activities are added to the OggCamp ideas wiki. I just hope I get time to enjoy some of them! With our Saturday night shin-dig now confirmed (Studio 2, from 7pm, a suitable venue for a podcast party if ever there was. ), and the volcanic ash being kept at bay, it looks set to one hell of a weekend. If you’re as excited as we are about OggCamp, join us in #oggcamp on the Freenode IRC network or our facebook page.

I can’t wait to see you there!

Alex Hudson (so_solid_moo): Thunderbird: Fedora & the future

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 17:01:26 +0000

It’s only been a couple of months since I last wrote about the future of Thunderbird, but I’ve been thinking about it again recently. The immediate issue which prompted me to write this was the disturbing news that a potentially bad crasher bug in Thunderbird has gone unfixed in Fedora even though a patch was submitted about a month ago because of sensitivity over trade marks. Although some users on the devel list appear to be dealing out their usual standard of hyperbole on this, it is an extremely difficult position to defend: who knows if the maintainer would have actually released an update by now, but the immediate problem is the mark.

The company I work for moved offices recently, and this also set me thinking about Thunderbird again as we update our e-mail systems. As well as an update breaking one of the add-ons we rely on, there are still basic features missing from this mailer which we need as a business, and doing things like adding good-looking signatures to e-mails is bizarrely difficult and user-unfriendly.

We’re also in the position of still running on Thunderbird 2. We’re there because it’s a reasonable little client, but Thunderbird 3 is not: it comes with bad defaults which need to be switched off, and the search is irritatingly difficult to manage. Every now and then I search and rather than the useful folder filter I get the craptastic separate search tab, which doesn’t work because I’ve turned off Gloda.

Thunderbird 3.1 is supposed to be an easier upgrade for Thunderbird 2 users. Two problems: first, I don’t really believe it, and second, there are now no new Thunderbird 2 releases planned. So we’re now on an unsupported product with only an upgrade to a product we’re unhappy with available.

What would moving to Thunderbird 3 involve for our organisation? Well, primarily, it’s a support issue. We’re distributed (as well as having an office), so we would need to be giving users some kind of training so they could support themselves on the new software (avoiding all the inevitable “Where has button X gone?” type support calls), and ideally we’d want some distribution mechanism so we could control the setup of Thunderbird for our users. Of course, no such stuff is readily available – you can’t even buy it from Mozilla Messaging, the business set up to develop Thunderbird. This seems unbelievable to me; we can’t be the only business who’d be willing to pay for a business-ready Thunderbird distribution.

It’s now getting to the point where we will be making decisions. I can guarantee that we will be testing Evolution on Windows, to evaluate its suitability as a cross-platform client. My misgivings about this before have again centred on commercial support and reliability: however, Evolution has a much, much better business story, a clear development roadmap and solid history of releases.

Evolution would also be an easy sell to our users with the enhanced address book and calendaring support. It doesn’t look amazingly Windows-native to me, but that’s potentially a quite small problem – the main thing is testing it’s reliable.

I would have never thought Evolution would even have been a contender on Windows, but to be honest if we’re not in a position to receive commercial support for either suite, the choice becomes a lot more interesting – and obviously for our Linux users, it’s stable and has a great integration story.

Tim Waugh (cyberelk): system-config-printer now has a mailing list

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:00:39 +0000

For those of you interested in participating in system-config-printer development, I invite you to join the new mailing list.

Josh Holland (dutchie): Irssi scripts git repo created

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:01:42 +0000

I’ve previously released a couple of irssi scripts. I decided to consolidate them all into one place under some version control, so I can actually keep track of older versions.

My VCS of choice is git, and the hosting I use is github, and you can view the repo in action at http://github.com/jshholland/irssi-scripts.

Patches/bug reports welcome, not my fault if it messes up your computer etc etc