michaelcarden.net

Odd Linux software archive

The ISP I use at home is Velocitynet and I don’t often visit their web site. Today I did take a look and I noticed that they’re promoting their ‘massive file archive’ that I can access without adding to my monthly data limit. They even mention that it has a Linux section. “Yay!” I thought, “I can download Linux distribution ISO images and also do all of my system updates without adding to my monthly quota.”

Well, not quite. It turns out that the ‘Linux’ link just points to their mirror of a Tucows download site. That’s disappointing, but the results (click the image above for a close look) are even more disappointing. See how the URL in the browser includes ‘Linux’ and the page is showing the ‘Linux’ tab and the category at the left is ‘Linux’?

Now take a look at the featured piece of Linux software. Uh-huh. SpeedupmyPC3.0 for 2K / XP / Vista. That’s just several sorts of disappointing.

Do you think he’ll win?

“Hey Mike, do you think he’ll win?”

These last couple of weeks have delivered a really interesting Tour de France featuring a number of great Australian cyclists competing hard against the best in the world. A lot of people know that I’m a cyclist, so for most of July I have been fielding questions about Cadel Evans’ chances of winning the tour. It seems that non-cyclists assume that I have some additional insight into just how the great race will pan out and turn to me for the inside word. I’ll bet that if you’re a cyclist (and perhaps not even a road cyclist) you will have had friends, colleagues and family ask you the same question.

And I did think he could win. I kept thinking it until about the second time check in last night’s final time trial. I never considered it to be the lay down misere that many said it would be, but I thought that he might do it. It is evident that his Silence Lotto team is nowhere near the powerhouse that team CSC-Saxo Bank is, but Cadel has done great things by himself in the past and a good time trial might have handed him the race.

The one thing that kept being repeated in the media was the difference between Cadel and his rival Carlos Sastre as time triallists. Cadel is known to be the better rider against the clock, but with Sastre’s yellow jersey comes the magical super-power of massive crowd and team support that turns a great rider into a legendary rider. That’s what Carlos found during his time trial, the ability to rise above himself enough to out-ride Cadel and retain the leader’s jersey.

So they will race tonight into Paris, a stage during which tradition dictates the overall lead will not change. The surviving riders will celebrate their successful completion of the world’s biggest bike race, the sprinters will vie for their moment in the limelight, and Cadel will again take second place on the podium.

Yes, I did think he would win, but second in the circumstances is a result that does him great credit and shows his incredible strength and tenacity. Bring on Le Tour 2009.

Incredible relief

In spite of the errant stupidity I alluded to in a previous blog posting, I didn’t manage to fail my first semester exams. Today was results day and I joined the impatient masses of students hammering away at the ANU’s student web site at midday to retrieve results.

Predictably enough, the university’s computer infrastructure tried to melt under the load so response times were sluggish at best. I persisted in trying to log on and after half an hour I managed to gain access to my results.

It turns out that I did considerably better than I had expected, with a High Distinction in each of my two subjects. I’m not sure I can say that all of the stress and the hard work were worth it, but the sense of relief I feel right now is too big to wrap up in words.

Thanks to everyone who helped me get this far - you’re all awesome.

What not to do in an exam

Should you happen to be undertaking a written University examination in a computing subject, and should you have to write a few lines of code to answer a question, make sure that you don’t name a variable with a reserved word.

So, if the language under discussion were to be java, and you needed your code to make a bunch of attempts at something, you might avoid calling that something try.

Any marks that your wildly unusable code snippet may have garnered from a sympathetic examiner have certainly been consigned to oblivion.

That is all.

Data storage getting cheaper

I have just been testing a disc drive for work purposes. It’s nominally a One Terabyte drive and it cost all of AUD$275 including GST. That is not a lot of money for quite a lot of storage. We have it set up in one of these NexStar3 external cases which has both USB and eSATA connectors on the back.

The case cost another $63.80 but it looks quite nice and (so far) seems to work quite well.

The drive needs to be used with Windows computers and with Linux computers so I have had to set it up with NTFS as the filesystem. Things like USB memory sticks tend to have a Windows FAT32 file system on them from new, but this big disc had nothing. There’s no use trying to set it up with FAT32 because it’s just too big. Luckily we don’t need to use it with Windows 98. I used my Linux desktop machine to put a massive single partition on it, then formatted it as NTFS with:

mkntfs -f -L Handbag -v /dev/sdc1

The ‘Handbag’ bit is the volume label. I called it that because one of our team will be carrying it to and from Sydney as a fashion accessory while transferring data down the Hume highway.

Anyway, it turns out that a Terabyte drive formatted with NTFS has a reported capacity of about 932 Gigabytes. Almost a seven percent reduction from a possible 1000 Gig (no, no arguments about powers of 2 versus powers of 10 please) but still a respectable amount of storage for something you can hold in your hand.

Now to go and find out how long it takes to fill it up.

Microsoft Windows - Oh, the Pain

I have managed to get myself into a position where I almost never have to interact with MS Windows at all, and that’s a very pleasant place to be. Sadly, my employer still runs an exchange server and a TRIM Context record keeping system, so I have to use Windows for some things. Luckily, Chris has set me up a nice VirtualBox instance with Windows XP and the apps I have to use, all nestled nicely inside a Gnome desktop on Ubuntu Hardy. This gives me my Exchange email and TRIM, so that’s all good. Oh, and it’s on a Dual Core monster with 4 gig of RAM, a gazillion rpm hard drive and a pair of 22inch widescreen LCDs powered by an NVidia super-mega-everything video card. It surfs the web quite nicely.

Jump across to the laptop that I use for presentations, conferences and the like. It has run Ubuntu for years and currently runs Hardy. I had been using VMware’s free edition on it to boot XP, but it was flaky and never survived apt-get upgrades to the host OS. So I have changed to VirtualBox Open Source Edition and I have installed a Windows XP instance inside that.

It’s kind of cute having a pet Windows XP that you can fire up and poke at. Sort of like a ponderous tamagotchi.

I kept it there for a while, not really using it, but I have just realised that I have a need for it so I fired it up. First step was to jump through the Product Activation hoop. I was girding my loins for a confrontation with MS over activating the laptop’s genuine, legal copy of XP inside a VM, but it just worked online automagically (at home, not via the clunky office network) and activated.

Next I took a look at what I need to use it for. Turns out XP comes with next to no software - such a crippling thing when you’re used to Linux installs where most things are there and others are just an apt-get install away. No Java. Fair enough, my Linux machines usually need that installed. Off to the Sun web site to pull down the Java 6 JDK. No office suite. Off to OOo for the OpenOffice 2.4 download. No CVS client. Off to Google to find a Windows one. Download tortoise CVS, faff around with it for ages and give up. Take a deep breath and download Cygwin.

I like Cygwin a great deal. It’s pretty much a full Unix/Linux environment that runs on Windows. I must say that having become accustomed to it, I find a Windows machine without Cygwin next to useless. The trouble is, it’s a behemoth of a software installation if, like me, you choose to install ‘the lot.’ So on my home DSL connection I expect the Cygwin download to progress far into the night.

This may take a while. Once that’s done I’ll need PostgreSQL and then perhaps I can download our very own software (DPR and Xena) and get on with using the Windows VM.

“Why Windows?” I hear you ask. Good question.

One of the aspects of the Digital Preservation process is Quality Assurance. Let’s say we’re working with some MS Office files and converting them to ODF. Our QA process requires that we sample some files in an originating application (e.g. MS Office) and then in a post-conversion application (e.g. OpenOffice) for comparison. It so happens that MS offer free viewer software for Word, Excel and PowerPoint that suits this purpose, but that’s Windows-only software. Soon we’ll get ourselves set up with Crossover Office on Wine, but for now it’s Windows for QA.

I have also found that XP has no included image viewer, so for Old Times’ sake I have grabbed IrfanView. I guess I’ll need an editor of some sort - probably Eclipse. I stuck Firefox 3 on as a browser first thing so I don’t need to put up with the pain of using IE. I wonder what I’ve forgotten?

I have read a great deal in the last few days about doing software development on Windows vs MacOS or Linux, mostly due to a series of articles on Ars Technica. The Slashdot comments on the original article were a revelation to me. I had naively assumed that the general inertia and blinkered view of the vast majority of Windows users would not necessarily transfer to the domain of people who actually understand and work with this stuff. How wrong I was.

One Laptop Per Child from the Horse’s Mouth

Catching up on some podcasts during a drive from Canberra to Sydney and back this week, I was fortunate enough to hear the ABC Radio Science Show from March 22 of this year. The show was given over to a presentation by Nicholas Negroponte at the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the subject of the OLPC laptop.

Much has been written about the OLPC project since its inception a couple of years ago, but until now I hadn’t heard the tale from the man who put it all together. I did attend a very interesting talk by Jim Gettys (pdf download) at Linux Conference Australia this year, in which he spoke of his experiences in providing OLPCs to kids in remote Peruvian villages, but that’s as close as I have been to the inside story.

Whatever else the OLPC may achieve or not achieve, there’s no doubt that it has lit a fuse under other manufacturers that has resulted in a rethinking of the laptop market. I believe that products like Asus’ wildly successful Eee PC owe much of the inspiration behind their existence to the OLPC. It is also my observation that the Eee PC has in turn played its part in reducing the prices of conventional entry level laptops to a level under AUD$500, so that for those who would like a ‘proper’ screen, plenty of storage, plenty of ports and perhaps an optical drive, very inexpensive hardware is now available.

It looks to me as though the ABC no longer make available the mp3 audio of the Negroponte speech, but they have an excellent transcript available on their web site.

For anyone with an interest in the OLPC, it’s a fascinating read.

Fiddling with LibraryThing

Today I took some time to add my three month backlog of books to my LibraryThing list. I’m not really using the service quite the way it’s intended, as a repository of information about books I own. I’m using it to record the books I have read starting from January 2007. While I do own some of them, many are borrowed from friends or from the local public library.

I’m also playing with the Librarything widget on my blog. Unless you’re reading this via an aggregator, you’ll see some books listed down the right side of the screen. This still needs work, but it’s promising.

The book cover thing brings to light something that amazed me when I was adding titles. While trying to find the right cover art for the books I’ve read, I got to learn the cover art selection pages rather well. I was amazed to see that John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury had 43 cover images available, and NOT ONE was the one in my hand! Is it just me or is that overkill for different cover art? Anyway, I dragged my copy into some reasonable light, took a photo, GIMPed it into shape and uploaded it for the world (and me) to use.

I can’t see myself ever trying to upload data on all the books on my shelves into LibraryThing unless I acquire a barcode scanner and a big heap of free time, but I just may keep lobbing the odd title its way as I finish reading them.

Special mention for recent books is Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. I had no idea what this book was about when it was handed to me, other than the fact that I’d heard there’s a movie of the same name. I found it incredibly well written, disturbing, interesting and riveting. I think I finished it in three days. Three work days during which I mostly worked on a uni assignment in any spare moment. It was worth a read.

Ur Thowa

There’s the TV advertising, there’s the print media, there are quite a few blogs, and there was even an email to all staff at work about it. Earth Hour 2008 is happening today.

I’m sure there is a rich and nuanced debate to be had around the usefulness or otherwise of switching stuff off for an hour, but that’s not what’s on my mind.

Y’see, I have more experience than I care to remember in the area of fixing electronic stuff that’s gone ‘boom.’ Years and years sitting at a workbench with a ’scope, various meters and a hot soldering iron, chasing down elusive failures in all things electronic. In among the many wondrous ways in which stuff can stop working, one particular sort of failure comes to mind.

Most modern pieces of electronics make use of a switchmode power supply. Everything from TVs and DVD players, to computers and kitchen appliances are likely to have one, and in general they are a wonderful thing. Small, light, cheap and able to run from the mains power in most parts of the world without caring whether they’re plugged into 110, 115, 150, 230 or 240 volts. They (mostly) just work.

In some circumstances though, they can be problematic. If you have something like a VCR, a DVD player or a TV that is plugged into a power outlet and only ever switched on or off via a remote control, then there is always a small part of the switchmode power supply ticking over, even when the device is switched ‘off.’ It needs to do this so that there’s a trickle of power available for the remote receiver to keep going, waiting for you to press the ‘on’ button on the remote control.

If you have this device plugged into power all the time, a small part of its switchmode power supply - the part responsible for kickstarting it from completely off - never gets used. And this part almost always contains a handful of tiny electrolytic capacitors that play no part in the running of the device until it’s disconnected from the power outlet, and then connected again. Then it’s their job to get the power supply started. These little beasties don’t like heat very much, but they usually live in a hot place (the switchmode power supply) and so as the months and years go by, the heat slowly kills them. They can die completely and you’ll never know. Unless you unplug the device or switch off the power outlet.

So I’m wondering what will happen if thousands or millions of people switch off everything at the power outlet all at once. I think that there’s an excellent chance that quite a lot of stuff won’t come back to life when the power goes back on. Sure, it won’t happen to everyone and in fact it will probably only happen to a very few. Still, I reckon that on Monday of next week, the electronics repairers of at least this nation will have cause to be grateful to the Earth Hour organisers. Or is it the retailers who’ll be delighted? Do people get stuff fixed any more?

My other thought on the subject is this. The electricity suppliers have their systems set up to expect a certain minimum load that never goes away. While I’m sure that their systems are designed to cope safely with the sudden loss of load when everyone switches off, I can’t help but wonder just when they tested this.

Quick visit to The Hague

Update: Some images now available in The Gallery.

While I was bouncing around the technical wonderland of LCA back in January, I received a call to say that the Dutch government had invited me to speak at a one day conference in The Hague. To my surprise it wasn’t a case of my colleagues winding me up, and barely four weeks later, on Tuesday February 26, I boarded a plane in Canberra to begin my journey.

I flew to Sydney in a turboprop aircraft that ran almost an hour late, then after a mad dash across to the international terminal, didn’t quite miss my British Airways 747 because it had also been delayed. Once on board I settled into my BA skylounge and amused myself for the long haul to Bangkok. At some time that my body thought was perhaps 2:45 in the morning, but locals assure me was 10:00 in the evening, I disembarked into the shiny Bangkok airport for a long walk to the escalator that would take me up one level so I could do a security scan and walk back to where I’d started. We were told we’d be boarding again in 30 minutes and I just made it back in that time. They lied though. We didn’t board for almost 2 hours.

On through the endless night and I landed at London’s Heathrow just on daybreak to change aircraft again for the short hop across the channel. It’s funny to think that Heathrow to Schipol is roughly equivalent to Canberra - Sydney, yet in that distance you have changed countries. The approach to Schipol showed me a Dutch countryside I’d previously only seen on TV or in storybooks and I was captivated. I managed to stumble around like the wide-eyed tourist that I was and eventually found the right part of the adjacent railway station where I bought a ticket to The Hague. Luckily I’d figured out from the web that most trains between the airport and The Hague require a change at Leiden, otherwise I might have ended up anywhere.

My hosts had considerately booked me in to a hotel just out the door of the central railway station in The Hague, so at 1:00pm local time I walked into my room… and the phone rang.

I was astonished. Who knows I’m here?

It was my host, Fabrice Mous from ‘The Netherlands in Open Connection’ and he would be at the hotel in minutes to collect me. I managed to shower and change before meeting Fabrice in the lobby for a very short walk to the Dutch Nationaal Archief where a meeting room was set up with people basically waiting for me to get there to talk digital preservation. Bonus! All this arranged without my lifting a finger!

So I spent the afternoon talking with the wonderful people from the Archives, from the KB (National Library), from the ministry of Education, of Economics, of Agriculture and the list goes on. Part way through I was shown a beautiful public display room put together as a joint Archives and Library project in which significant documents are in display cases with integrated touch screen multimedia presentations attached. Also, one long wall was dominated by a visual show created by five or six synchronised video projectors - quite stunning.

After they’d shown me theirs and I’d talked about mine, we enjoyed drinks and nibbles in the building’s foyer where I met more interesting people. In particular I had a great chat with the two principal developers of the Dioscuri universal emulator project. While I’m not a huge fan of emulation for digital preservation, I greatly enjoyed meeting the guys and I hope that the money tap is turned back on so that they can continue their great work.

The day wasn’t over yet though. The conference organisers swept me away to dinner to meet with two of my fellow international speakers, Dr Gavin Beckett from the UK and Jens Jakob Andersen from Denmark. Dinner was pleasant with some interesting conversation around open data formats but my eyes kept closing so I retired early to bed - mindful of the work to be done in the morning.

Next morning I met Gavin and Jens for breakfast before we strolled a short way up the street to the building of the Social and Economic Council (SER). The venue was most impressive and with microphones at many desks and one wall dedicated to glass and a view into The Hague Forest just metres away, it looked like something out of an elaborate movie set. Dr Beckett was heard to mutter something that sounded like, “Donald Duck, I’ve never presented in a room like this before.” My sentiments exactly.

Proceedings got under way and unfortunately for me, much of it was in Dutch. After Fabrice spoke briefly to set the scene, I was first cab off the rank and took the stage to do my thing. Apart from some laptop video woes that upset some of my images, the presentation seemed to go well. I hit my 40 minute target pretty well bang-on and fielded a few questions. The best part for me was the feedback I received during the rest of the day in which many people came to thank me and compliment me on my talk. Several even asked if I would speak at other European conferences, so that was very gratifying.

I caught a few more presentations, but the lack of an English translation left me struggling, so I was ‘rescued’ by the Archives people who whisked me back to their offices for a thorough grilling. The Digital Depot crew had prepared a truckload of questions and recorded audio of me for a few hours of interview. Intense but fun.

Back to the conference, I arrived in time to catch Gavin Beckett and I commend his talk to anyone who wants to see how presenting should be done. Gavin spoke about the Bristol City Council deployment of StarOffice and the change to OpenDocument format. Check it out, along with mine and others at the conference programme page: http://odfworkshop.nl/programma

I also saw Machtelt Garrels speak and recognised another excellent presenter. She spoke Dutch and I understood almost none of it but the talk was clearly a good one. I was lucky enough to catch up with Machtelt after the official proceedings had finished and found that I was in the presence of an Open Source ‘rock star.’ Among others, Machtelt has written the Bash Guide, Introduction to Linux, LDAP operations and from what I can gather she’s into BSD development as well. To top it off she’s quite a character and a fine public speaker. I hope one day we can convince her to speak at a technical conference in Australia.

Things wound down, people left, and soon Fabrice had just two international guests and a colleague remaining. So he took us all off to dinner in a lovely little restaurant fronting the square opposite the parliament building. A very pleasant evening during which Werner from Germany attempted to convince me of the virtues of valve (vacuum tube) audio amplifiers. We left the others behind with esoteric debate of Total Harmonic Distortion, negative feedback stability control and the theory of harmonic reinforcement. I’m still a solid state guy, but he’s since sent me links that contain beautiful pictures of glowing valves, so I’d better read the text more closely.

Next morning I checked out of the hotel and had most of a day before my flights back home. I started with some serious foot-slogging around The Hague with camera in hand and captured a bunch of images. To my surprise, no shops opened until 10:00am so I found myself sharing the pedestrian malls with delivery trucks and not a lot else. There’s a limit to how much unguided walking I can do in a foreign city, so I retrieved my luggage from the hotel and caught a train to Amsterdam.

An hour later I disembarked into the remarkable tourist wonderland of downtown Amsterdam. People everywhere, postcard views of canals and river boats, all nestled among medieval looking buildings with 21st century shops squeezed inside. I wandered along to the square where Madam Tussaud’s dominates one side, a museum another and who knows what the rest were. A block away I found an outdoor antiquarian book fair and had to restrain myself from buying stuff I couldn’t carry. A nearby English language bookshop did provide me with a Stephen Fry paperback for the flight home though.

Hours raced away in Amsterdam and I soon made my way back to the railway station for the train to the airport, some heavy storms and the first of four planes for home.

Early Sunday morning I stepped off the 737 in Canberra, confused as to what time of day it was and still buzzing from a couple of remarkable days on the other side of the world.

Disjointed Diary - LCA08

I’d anticipated “Linux dot conf dot ay yoo two thousand and ate” (LCA2008) for a long time.

Steve Hanley convinced me way back in ‘04 to attend LCA05 in Canberra at the Australian National University and I managed to get my employer to send me. Yee hah! I was there to see Tridge reveal the ’secrets’ of hacking Bitkeeper and to see Eben Moglen take on proprietary licensing. Powerful stuff. I was hooked.

Steve again worked behind the scenes to get me to Dunedin, NZ, in 2006 (my first time out of Australia) and another amazing linux conf.

By 2007 I was convinced enough to do it myself in Sydney and I was actually a speaker twice at LCA07.

By 2008 I had myself and two colleagues funded by our employer to attend as delegates in Melbourne. The LCA train is a’rollin’.

So here’s the part where I describe LCA. I attended conference sessions all week. Several were incredibly inspiring. I partied at night. I met people. We talked. I saw new techniques and new technologies. I learned a great deal. None of which is in this post.

But… if you go to LCA and meet a guy from Iceland wearing sandals, socks, and Crocodile Dundee’s hat… DO NOT get into a drinking contest with Johan.

Fedora Core 8 - against my judgement

Jo had a Win XP computer for a few years and the hardware became very unstable. I replaced a few bits but eventually I realised that the motherboard was failing so another machine was needed. Chris came up with a spare motherboard, so I resolved to begin from scratch. Minor trouble arose when I found that the new mobo and the old case didn’t like each other, so I raided the garage for an old case and shoehorned the motherboard and a nice new DVD drive into it.

To give Jo access to her old Windows stuff, I put her Windows machine’s 200gig Win drive into the new box and I installed Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) onto an old 6.1gig drive with the Win drive mounted as a Read Only device.

This was okay for a while, but Jo really wanted R/W access to her music and photos and in addition, the 6.1gig drive was proving flaky. I was reluctant to mount the big Win drive R/W in case Jo’s data was hosed, so I resolved to buy a new big drive and copy it all there.

So off to the Computer Market I went to buy a 320gig Western Digital PATA drive for $110. On opening the case to fit it, I realised that I lacked the cables to make it a third drive, so I pulled the 6.1gig drive and put the 320 in its place. So an OS re-install would be needed. I’d already copied Jo’s home directory to a USB stick, so I could put it back later.

Given Jo’s lack of engagement with Kubuntu, I figured I’d give another distro a try and pulled out a Fedora Core 8 CD that I’d scored at LCA08. My hope was that the Gnome desktop and Fedora world-view might better suit Jo.

So I set about installing FC8 on an empty 320gig drive.

Jo needs at least:

* Web email access
* Access to files from the old Win drive (ntfs mount)
* Audio player for flac, mp3 and wma
* iPod connectivity
* Flash in a web browser
* PDF reader
* OpenOffice
* Access to our networked printer
* Camera download and photo management

The install process was scary from the outset. It didn’t detect the XP partition in the way that the Ubuntu installer did, and I had to tread carefully to make sure that only the new drive was touched during installation. So, unlike Ubuntu, the GRUB bootloader menu knows nothing of the bootable Windows install on the second drive.

The hardware probing failed to handle the 19 inch CRT monitor on the NVidia graphics card and offered 800 x 600 as a desktop resolution. When I later used the desktop screen resolution selector to get 1024 x 768, it chose 1400 x 960 and required some cajoling[0] to give me 1024 x 768.

All of this pales into insignificance though, in the light of the yum / rpm based software packaging system.

Yum insanity

Has anyone, anywhere, anytime, ever tried both yum and apt-get? And decided to use yum? Has anyone ever noticed that apt-get is approximately 20 times faster than yum and that apt-get actually works? How on earth do Red Hat / Fedora people manage to persist with yum? It’s a complete mystery to me.

On installing FC8, the initial “you have packages ready to upgrade” took two and a half hours on a 1.5mbps vdsl download link. That’s before I started trying to get anything working. That, if you’ll forgive my saying so, is fucking ridiculous. Like, it’s so bad that I’m amazed that the yum developers haven’t just quietly made yum a wrapper for apt-get. How don’t they die from embarrassment? The yum header download takes about as long as a whole apt-get upgrade.

That’s to say nothing of what happens when I tried to install crazy stuff like the ability to play mp3 audio files. Gee, it’s fun using yum to chase dependencies. Blah blah blah failed because it depends on foo. Okay, install foo. Foo already installed. Try again. Blah, blah, blah failed. Oh joy.

Having wasted an afternoon running that gauntlet, it was time to copy over all of the windows files. No drama adding a line to /etc/fstab to mount /dev/sdb1 as an NTFS volume, but then I tried to look at it in a file browser… and ended up with about 42 dozen open windows on my desktop. Holy shit, where did they come from? What ever happened to asking permission to spawn extra windows? And trying to turn it off. How about a preferences entry for “disable idiotic window spawning”?

Grrrr.

There is some good though. Our printers are shared via another Linux PC acting as a cups server. This ‘just worked[tm]’ and offered both printers in the printer setup dialogue. Very nice and a whole lot easier than the same thing in KDE 3.5.

Apparently OpenOffice is not a part of FC8 and required a manual install, as did the Adobe Flash player - the browser auto install failed. Grabbing the rpm from Adobe and manually installing it was painless though and probably an hour faster than doing the same thing via yum (if it were even possible).

Google’s Picasa / Wine download and install seemed to work, though the camera is intercepted by something else on connection. At least it is recognised and images can be downloaded, unlike the combination of Gutsy/gphoto2/KDE on the same machine that utterly failed to see anything on the Panasonic LC40 camera.

So I have yet to experiment with Jo’s iPod, but the ABC radio podcasts that I pointed Rhythmbox at have downloaded and are playable, so at least I have audio to try it with.

While this is just a random series of initial impressions and not a review, I have to say that the yum system would completely stop me from using Fedora for myself. It is astonishingly bad. It feels like something 20 years behind the rest of the world in speed and doesn’t even do the basic job of packaging systems - resolving dependencies - at all that I can see. Nasty, nasty, nasty.

The acid test now is in handing it over to Jo. How many emails, text messages and phone calls will I get at work to ask me to fix something? Time will tell.

[0] Where ‘cajoling’ means several X server restarts and wrong resolutions.

IRC support - don’t blog angry

Amarok. I love the Amarok audio player. I use it to play my music collection, most of which is stored as FLAC audio. I use it to play my podcast collection, most of which is MP3. Amarok is the very sophisticated audio player offered as a part of the KDE desktop under Linux.

But Amarok has stopped working for me.

Perhaps I should explain what I’m trying to do. My ‘use case’ in software development parlance.

I have my music stored on a disc drive on the same machine as Amarok. It’s an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Intel P3 in a pretty aluminium case. I have my podcasts stored on another machine, with its podcast directory mounted to the Amarok machine as a mount point at /mnt/podcasts.

I can start Amarok and ask it to scan my collection. It does so and I can watch the HDD lights on first the local music machine and then the networked podcast machine flash away as Amarok indexes them. Excellent.

Then Amarok’s collection browser fails to see anything on the podcast machine. Its File browser tab sees the files, but the collection browser doesn’t. Equally, Konqueror or a Konsole command line can see the files. Even Amarok will play them via the File tab, but they do not appear in the collection tab.

So I deleted everything under .kde/share/apps/amarok/ and tried again. No joy.

Google search. Try fix. Google search, Try fix. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

So I see that support is via IRC. To me, IRC is a protocol, not a solution, but I fire up KSirc and join #amarok

Bots, trolls, and no idea. Bravo for the IRC method. Does sense ever come from the cacophony?

“You didn’t give it enough time!”
“The real developers are on the web forum”
“No, no, no. You need to email ….”

Thanks Amarok, but I just bought iTunes.[0]

–
MC
[0] - I joke. I joke.

Linux Conference Australia 08 - I’m excited

‘Twas the night before LinuxConf, and all through the house…

Okay, it’s the night before I drive to Bright in Victoria to ride the annual Alpine Classic, then I head down to Melbourne for my fourth LCA, but allow me some poetic licence.

I’m in Geek Overload trying to figure out the best set of choices in a great looking programme. No doubt I will again see some gems and again see some that leave me baffled. Usually the bafflement is down to me.

I love the conference sessions, but much more I love meeting and getting to know some of the incredible people who make this stuff happen. It takes less than a day at LCA to see why Free and Open Source Software is inevitably becoming the norm. The passion, enthusiasm, humour and hard core technical skill are unmatched.

So okay. I’m excited.

Microsoft’s OOXML and me

The ongoing debate about the proposed ISO standardisation of Microsoft’s Office Open eXtensible Markup Language, aka ECMA-376, aka ISO DIS29500 is a hot topic for all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

Back in December 2007 I attended a forum on the topic at the University of New South Wales Cyberlaw Centre. I was initially invited as a speaker, but my employer was unwilling to have me speak, so I was permitted to attend as an observer only. Strict instructions to shut up and listen.

Pia Waugh has blogged nicely on the day.

One of those who didn’t know that I was there to look and not talk was Jeff Waugh. So Jeff innocently asked a probing question and passed me the microphone. The results of that are in Andrew Hendry’s Computerworld article.

I don’t think I said anything too incendiary, and Andrew is to be commended for his journalism, but if I’ve upset anyone, I blame Jeff. Why not? Everyone else does.

On Bug Fixes

I read Andrew Cowie’s interesting post about bug fixing in closed source vs open source software.

This reminds me of a bug we submitted to Sun almost a year ago now. It’s a bug against java 1.6. In essence, applications can’t save preferences if you run java 1.6 on Linux. Works on Windows, doesn’t work on Linux. Works on both via java 1.5, so it’s something that broke between 1.5 and 1.6. So we can’t run any of our stuff under 1.6 on Linux. So we’re effectively held back to 1.5.

The bug moved to ‘In progress’ late last year and we’re coming up on its 12 month anniversary this month.

Which has led us to speculate about the current state of Sun’s java dev team. We reckon it must be down to two blokes in a garage:

“What you doin Jonathan?”

“Java seven. What you doin Scott?”

“Bug fixes on all the others.”

The Books of 2007

I think it was back in August that I wrote of my plan to log all of the books that I read during 2007. Here I am in late December having performed one of my overdue updates to the list and I figure that with the year almost gone I should make it public again.

Here is the Google Docs spreadsheet of the Books I have read in 2007 with only a couple of days remaining in the year.

I should point out that those books came from a number of sources. Throughout the year my local library has been very useful in keeping me topped up with books and they probably supplied well over half of the list. Other books have come either from school fetes, from friendly loans or from gifts. Since even the library books are not always selected by me, the list does not necessarily always reflect my tastes in literature.

In compiling the list I have left out quite a lot. For instance I have not mentioned things like magazines or journals and I have mostly not mentioned technical books. In the course of my work I read a lot of documentation and a lot of ‘papers’ about one thing or another, to say nothing of the various web sites that I devour each day.

Some technical books are never far away. Though I have read Michael Still’s ImageMagick book from cover to cover, I still keep it handy as an all round imaging reference. I read most of Akkana Peck’s GIMP book this year too, but not all of it in one go. And while I have never written a Perl program in my life, I have read much of The Camel Book in 2007, though more for its entertainment value than to actually learn Perl. Along with Michael and Akkana’s books, a copy lives at my bedside.

Once upon a time I maintained a magazine addiction that kept my local newsagent solvent, but these days the combination of the internet and the high cost of publishing has kept my purchasing to a minimum. I still read Silicon Chip whenever I can but I source most magazine style content from the net now. Even to the point of arranging for my employer to subscribe to Linuxjournal magazine so that I could obtain their complete back issue archive on a CD.

Anyway, to get to the point of this ramble, I have been looking for a better way to handle the whole book-logging thing. The Google Docs spreadsheet web interface is so laggy and unreliable that I can only use it by exporting the list to a local machine as an OpenDoc spreadsheet, editing it and uploading it again. This results in a new URL every time I republish it and frankly the whole process is a pain. I have heard that I should use the services of LibraryThing but when I try to import my list of ISBNs, their import script always seems to find only one ISBN, so I have shied away from entering my whole list manually. Has anyone else tried this? If their service worked as advertised I’d be tempted to cough up the cash for a proper membership.

Back to school

The results from my STAT tests are in. The scoring system is a little odd, but the percentile results appear to make some sense. These figures show the percentage of candidates who scored less than I did on each test and the numbers confirm that I can’t write particularly well:

Multiple Choice Test:

Verbal: 99.4
Quantitative: 94.3
Overall: 98.7

Written English:

75.5

So 1/4 of those tested write a better short essay than I do, but not many did a lot better on the multi choice exam. So that’s nice.

What does it all mean? Well, probably not very much at all now. It looks as though I have accidentally short circuited this whole process and perhaps made the STAT testing unnecessary.

While awaiting my results, I contacted the Australian National University to introduce myself and try to find out if there was anything I might do to help secure a place for myself for next year. The student services officer asked me for a copy of my resume so I duly sent a brief PDF by email.

To my astonishment, this was met with the suggestion that I might like to enrol in a postgraduate course of study next year, and that I might wish to commence a Master’s degree in IT studies. The suggestion soon materialised as a written offer and I have gratefully accepted it.

So the STAT testing to seek a place in an undergraduate degree has been rendered pretty much redundant by the opportunity to leapfrog several years of study and enter at the Master’s level.

Colour me astonished.

Filtering Stupidity

Much as I am reluctant to write a blog post purely for the purpose of pimping a web site, something has come to my attention that I just can’t keep to myself.

http://stupidfilter.org/main/index.php?n=Main.HomePage

I really wish these people every success. I tried to look at some of the random stupidity that they make available but my eyes leapt from their sockets, commandeered my keyboard and closed the web page.

Their FAQ page is well worth taking a few moments to read.

Special Tertiary Admissions Test

Well I’m glad that’s all over and done with. I sat my multiple choice and written English STAT tests today and my fate is sealed one way or another.

The tests are run by the NSW and ACT University Admissions Centre to assess those of us not graduating from year 12 this year to see if we’re made of the right stuff to be offered a university place in 2008. It’s the first hurdle for oldies like me aiming for a degree.

I made my way to the St Edmund’s College hall in suburban Canberra for my tests and after proving my identity, took a seat at desk number nine of eighty. Not every desk was filled though. Perhaps a quarter were vacant and I consider that a bit odd since all candidates had coughed up cash to be there.

The seventy question multiple choice test is designed to test verbal and quantitative skills from several different directions. It’s broken up into sections in which a passage of text or a diagram or other setup is offered, then a selection of multiple choice questions are aimed at that particular situation. I found it always challenging, though at times answers seemed a little too simple (recheck those ones!) and at others completely bamboozling. I answered every question with about twenty minutes of the allotted two hours remaining, then spent five minutes reviewing what I’d done.

If it were an old fashioned pass-fail kind of a test, I’d say I passed. It’s not though, so I have no clear idea of how I went or how it will influence my chance of uni admission.

Just over an hour later I was back for the written English test. Only forty two desks this time, and again only three quarters were occupied. This time we were to select two topics. One each from two groups of four similar topics, and write a brief essay on each selected topic. One hour was available to complete both essays, so not spending too much time on each was important. I did some sketchy idea dumping in the ‘workings’ area of the paper, then set about writing as clearly, quickly and neatly as I could. I managed about a page and a half on each of my two topics before both essays had found their natural ends. I had barely ten minutes left and spent those re-reading in search of egregious errors.

So it’s all done. Some time in the next three months I should hear of my results and when uni offers time comes around next year, perhaps I’ll see if I’m to be a student.