We’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning while I’m on holiday.  Grete’s been selling some stuff off on eBay (listed here) and today we dragged some boxes out of the loft and I threw away a lot of old paperwork (bills from 10 years ago) that we need to shred.

Also found a bag with a lot of stuff from my university days, mostly letters from friends during university or in the year or so afterwards.  Really brought back some memories (can’t believe it’s 20 years ago).  Would love to find out how some of the folk I knew back then are getting on (I know a few of them through FaceBook and while we don’t chat every day, or even once a year, it’s sort of nice seeing how they and their families are doing).  On the off-chance that Linda Shaw, Jane Shephard or Joy Elsender search the net for their own names (assuming they’re not married), then drop me a note!  Let me know how you are!

In fact, anyone I was at Sheffield Polytechnic / Sheffield Halam University between 1989 and 1993, drop me a note, let me know how you are (how egotistical is that – ah well, have to start finding people somehow!)

So the other thing I found was a bunch of invoices for various bits of computer (these are different to the ones I found here), can you believe these prices from June 2000?

• 17GB Seagate drive – £66
• 20GB Quantum Fireball drive – £96
• 8-port 10BaseT hub (yes, 10BaseT) – £37
• 15″ CRT – £119 (why do monitors always cost ‘around £120′?)
• 4×4x20 CD Writer – £139
• 40 speed CD drive – £30

Crazy!

I hate printers.  In fact, I know a lot of PC owners hate printers.  For a long time they were really the bane of many home computer users.  Initially every application needed it’s own drivers for every printer type, then we got unified drivers but they were crap, and so on and so forth.  It’s gotten better over the years, but windows printer drivers are still bulky and annoying.

I suspected the one big area of Ubuntu I’d have to bleed to get working was printing.  I’ve played with CUPS previously and an HP LaserJet 4L (a long time ago), and it worked but it wasn’t always ideal.  So I settled down today to spend three hours making Ubuntu drive my HP PhotoSmart C4585.

Holy crap was I wrong.

5 minutes.  Literally.  Googled for ‘HP PhotoSmart Linux’, found that HP have developed their own open source printer drivers.  That looked like a good sign, filled in a few fields on the website and it told me the drivers are already in Ubuntu.  That sounded good.  Did an apt-cache search hplip and apt-get install hplip only to discover the drivers were already installed.  So, opened System, Administration, Printing, told it to search for a printer, it found the PhotoSmart, installed the config, printed a test page.

I am literally gobsmacked.

It even happily drives the scanner as well (using XSane, also already installed).  The printer driver is less annoying than the Windows one (just hides away), and the only thing I’m missing is a display of how full the ink cartridges are, but the Windows one estimates that badly anyway.

So, well done HP, well done Ubuntu, and well done open source printing.  Now I have to find something else to do for 2 hours 55 minutes.

Anyone unlucky enough to have read anything in my blog before knows I’ve been a long-time Linux user.  I’ve had various Linux servers and now have a couple of Linux virtual machines on the ‘net hosting these pages.  I’ve flirted in the past with Linux based desktops, but for various reasons never made a solid effort to give up Windows.  Mostly that’s because there were a handful of things I wanted that I could still only really get from Windows.  Games primarily, and that’s still the case today.  Lord of the Rings Online might run on Linux under WINE, but since I have a valid XP license and my machine runs it quite happily already, why go to the bother?

However, the list of apps that I do need and only come with Windows has shrunk considerably.  I made the switch to OpenOffice a while back (both at home and work), and although the paragraph numbering pisses me off a great deal, I’m happy enough with the applications.  I don’t play any other PC games any more (other than Flash based stuff) because we got the PS3 and so that has removed a huge chunk of Windows reliance.  Just about anything else I do is either a web app (mail) or there are plenty of Linux apps that cover it (Usenet, browsing, etc.)

So I thought I’d make a solid effort to use Ubuntu and see how I really get on with it.  But I don’t really want a dual boot system until I know for sure I’m going to migrate my data to Linux and only boot into Windows to play LOTRO.  So I’m running Ubuntu in a VirtualBox VM, running Full Screen with Bridged Networking and ignoring Windows in the background.  The VM has ~1GB of memory and plenty of CPU (especially for Linux) so performance isn’t an issue.  The only question is really can I find the apps and a way of working that I’m comfortable with.

I’ve been setting this up for two days and already there’s been some pain.

• Looks like NAT networking in VirtualBox 3.1.4 is hosed.  I started browsing and downloading various things yesterday and every now and then a web page wouldn’t load, and I’d need to click refresh a few times.  Then I installed a Usenet client (XPN, very nice) and it would randomly hang getting headers.  Took me a while to realise there was a problem, but since this is a Debian based distribution the investigation was trivial – sudo apt-get install wireshark; sudo wireshark.  Tracing the network traffic it was obvious the client was losing packets and there was a lot of bright red ACK’ing and re-ACK’ing going on.  I checked online and there were reports of VirtualBox NAT being broken a few sub-releases ago but being fixed now.  Well, it’s clearly not fixed, however Bridged networking seems (so far) to work fine.  Sadly, this caused me serious frustration yesterday and earlier today while I was trying to download and install various apps.
• Finding a replacement for Twhirl (Twitter Client).  I could of course, still use Twhirl which is an Adobe AIR app and so runs under Linux.  However, support for Twhirl has been dropped and I hate the replacement (too big!).  So I scouted about and found Gwibber.  Sadly, it suffers from the major problem with a lot of open source apps, crap documentation.  Yes I know, it’s open source and so I can fix this myself, but it doesn’t help when you’re first trying to get it installed and working.  So, the current package is buggy, but I worked around that and got it running, then I couldn’t get any themes to work until I found they’d changed the theme system and none of the ones found by Google worked.  Then I found there was a theme package you could apt-get install and it was all okay.  But now in order to run it, I have to launch it twice from the menu, I’m sure I’ll get that worked out.
• USB support – not critical, but I did manage to blue screen my entire machine today trying to get USB devices to show up inside the VM.  I might try again later, would be nice if I ever need to move data around (although I do have a shared folder, so I can leave stuff on the Windows partition).

Some things worked really well,

• Pidgin, it’s just excellent.  The plugins are great, and GFire especially useful since I can hang out in the XFire channel with friends.
• I loved apt-get the first time I used it, and I still love it now (even if it’s called something else )

Some things are okay, but could be better,

• Picasa works under Linux, but only because it runs with the WINE libraries.  When I first ran it, I had some issues but that might be due to the network problems I was having at the same time.  Annoyingly, because it’s running in WINE it looks like a Windows XP app, which bugs me because if I’ve switched to Ubuntu I want it to look like a Gnome app.  But hell, at least it runs; Picasa was the one major app I would miss other than LOTRO.
• After being a Windows desktop user for a very, very long time, a lot of the shortcut keys I’m used to (such as shift-num-pad-1 to select everything on a line) don’t work, and those are going to be the things that take me longest to get used to.

I’ve promised myself that if I’m just sitting at the computer, I’ll use the Ubuntu VM.  If I’m playing LOTRO I’ll close it down to free up resources, but return to it once I’m done.  I have a couple of other options.  Wubi looks very interesting, it installs Ubuntu into a single file under Windows, and adds a boot option for it on the Windows boot menu.  It installs like a Windows app, and you can uninstall it again afterwards.  When you boot into Ubuntu the Windows partition is mounted so you can share files.  The other option is a straight install and dual-boot into it’s own partition (but I’d need to do some partition shrinking to get there).  Until I know for certain I want to move, I’ll stick with the VM, since it gives me the quickest way to get into LOTRO and back out again.

I suppose the only question I haven’t answered is why I want to move?  Unlike some, I don’t hate Windows (although I still use XP so maybe that’ll come), and I think that Microsoft is no worse that many major software vendors.  I think I just like the idea of software being free and available for anyone to use, improve and share.  Certainly in the next 10 years the face of computing is going to change radically and I’d rather the stuff I use be driven by the people who use it, than the people who want to make money selling it to us.

So everyone’s blogging about Apple’s new iPad.  You know what?  I like it, I think it has a place.  I sit in the lounge trying to read web pages on my iPhone to find out who the person in the TV program is, or check my mail on it or whatever it might be.  I can see myself dragging the ‘pad off the table, checking a web page and then sliding it back on there.  I can see them being used in small business meetings.  I can see them being used to read magazines or similar material in that style.  Tried ordering from an online grocery store on an iPhone?  Imagine doing it in the lounge with your iPad, nice and convenient, big enough that you can read it.   Easier and more convenient than a laptop, who needs keys if you’re going to be mostly reading.  Not mobile as such, but certainly something you can drop into a backpack and drag out when you’re sitting somewhere.

Would I read a book on one?  Maybe.  But really when they’re cheap enough, I see them being the first permanent computer we have in the lounge.  Bored with the news?  Quick game of Peggle on the iPad while waiting for the movie to start.

The key thing of course is that it’ll finally drive tablets into the house – and give them a foothold – and that will increase the competition and drive new technology (hopefully).

I’m currently going through about 15 IDE/ATA  hard disks and wiping them.  I’m using an old machine to do it.  A friend asked if they could have some of them after they’re wiped, for a friend of theirs.  I guess this post is my way of responding and saying no, sorry.

I have no doubt that the data on them is gone.  But, I intend to wipe them, take them outside and hit them a few times with a 4lb lump hammer, and then take them to the local recycling centre.  So the platters will be clean and the devices themselves will be broken.

This isn’t just my data we’re talking about, it’s the personal data of anyone who communicated with me since I started using computers for electronic communications in around 1992.  I don’t think there’s anything, anywhere on any of those disks that could incriminate me or anyone else, or cause any embarrassment, but hell, why take the risk?  When people talked to me on FidoNet, bulletin boards, by e-mail, usenet, IRC, or any other mechanism that may have kept a record on my machine, I bet they weren’t thinking ‘in 17 years, I wonder who’ll be using the disk this is being stored on’.

So anyway, no sorry, you can’t have my old, crusty, IDE disks, I’m destroying them.

The most amusing thing about the process is that the machine I’m using to wipe the disks (with the case off so I can swap drives in and out easily) is clearly dying, sometimes it boots first time (from Darik’s Boot and Nuke media), but most of the time it gives a random combination of beeps and needs another power cycle.  I think it’s the graphic card slowly dying but it’s hard to tell.  So, if the box lives long enough, I’ll finish wiping these disks and then I get to play with my lump hammer.

I recently completed this game on the PS3 and wanted to write a short post about it.  It’s such an unusual game, and yet I enjoyed it a huge amount.  The game is a mixture of anime, first-person shooter, turn-based strategy and roleplaying game, without really being any of those things fully.  The game story unfolds through the use of animated stories about a bunch of central characters who have become involved in a war.  Various chapters open up as the story develops, and each of those chapters has a number of battles.   The stories aren’t interactive, you watch and listen.  But the characters are interesting and the plot engaging.

When you get to a battle, you take control of a squad of troops who you can equip (and you can research new equipment), and train (to improve levels and gain new abilities) and then run through the fight.  The battle itself is a mix of first-person and turn based.  You pick a character to control from a turn-like map, you then control that character directly in first-person mode, running them through the battle dodging bullets.  When you want to engage the enemy you switch to a control system that stops time and lets you aim at a single target, at which point you fire your weapon and then return to real time.  You cycle through your squad, moving them and engaging the enemy over a number of rounds to achieve your objective.  When you do, you’re rewarded with more story and more chapters.

That’s an ugly description of a beautiful game.  The artwork is superb, the characters quirky and amusing and the game play truly engaging.  If you have a PS3 this is a must buy – and it’s been out long enough now that you should be able to pick it up quite cheaply.

People who own the rights to music, film, tv, etc. should, in my humble opinion, learn to love the Internet, and not to be frightened of it.  That’s a nice glib statement from someone who never created anything useful in his life, but as someone who consumes a lot of created content surely I have some experience

I was really struck by this thought when reading Felicia Day’s blog (again), after the release of the Guild song, Do you want to date my avatar.  Within a short time of it being released, there were fan-made movies on YouTube, using that music and animation from games such as Lord of the Rings online, World of Warcraft, Second Life, and others, to perform to the song.

Many content owners would immediately go to war with DMCA’s to have the music stripped from those videos, since it’s clearly not owned by the people who made them but by The Guild, or Felicia Day, or whatever organisation she has in place to own the rights.  Did she start processing take downs?

Nope, she found them on YouTube and listed them as favourites, which let’s them show up on her FriendFeed account.  I can only assume that this eventually increases the sales of the song (because god only knows once you’ve heard it you can’t stop humming the bloody thing) and doesn’t negatively impact it at all.  In the same way that seeing a cool fan video on YouTube with a song by Big Mega Band from the 80’s as the backing track is more likely to make you go and re-buy it on iTunes than it is to make you strip the audio from the vid and import the illegal, low quality version onto your mp3 player.

You either embrace the ‘take it and use it and make something with it’ nature of the ‘net, or you end up fighting it at every step of the way and losing none-the-less.

Felicia Day and creative content owners of her generation are going to make it work, because they accept, use and take part in the medium.

So, it’s out, Avatar’s trailer, the best place to see it is on the Apple site in HD, here.  Does it look impressive? Yes.  Do the CGI characters move well and have emotion in their eyes? Yes.

Do they still look like CGI? Yes.

Does it look a bit like WoW the movie? Yes.

For some reason, the non-terrestrial channels on our Sky+ box are showing very dark on the TV.  If you switch to BBC1/BBC2/ITV/C4 it looks fine (they’re still being delivered via Sky+ over the same SCART connection).  But anything else you can actually see it ‘flip’ to a darker picture.  On top of that, any dark scenes are causing the black on the TV to get totally saturated and you can hardly see any detail.

I’m positive it only started doing this in the last couple of weeks, maybe even after I switched in the new Sky+ viewing card.

It’s really frustrating me.  I hate when ’simple’ technology like this doesn’t work and hate it even more that I can’t fix it.

I use Cygwin both at work and home to give me a quick to access unix-like environment, where I can use tools that I use everyday in my sysadmin role.  I find it a lot easier to wc -l something than load it into OpenOffice and do a word count.  I’m happier with awk and grep and find than Windows GUI tools.

My only real pain was that the terminals under Cygwin were awkward.  The default terminal is terrible (essentially the windows command prompt).  I eventually configured rxvt and got it working pretty much to my liking, but the X-Windows style never really fit well with my other windows and some of the features annoyed me.

However, today I found the MinTTY package within Cygwin and I’m finally very pleased with my Cygwin terminal.  It looks and feels just like a PuTTY window (which it should, being based on the same code) which is handy since I use or used to use PuTTY all the time for remote access to the stuff I support.  It’s configurable (easy) and fast.  Very pleased, give MinTTY a shot if you’re a Cygwin user and didn’t know it was there.