Ben Shephard

Yesterday I headed down to Wolverhampton for Lug Radio Live 2009. I used to listen to Lug Radio quiet often but they stopped doing it just over a year ago but they decided to do another live event so I decided I should go since it’s not far away and we don’t get a great deal of Linux events in the UK anyway. I intended on setting off for Wolverhampton pretty early but I’ve had a pretty long week at work and was starting to get really tired and the darker mornings aren’t helping much either. I over slept and didn’t leave home until about 9am (doors were at 9:30) so I had hurry up and get there. I set up my Co Pilot sat nav on my G1 which worked pretty well for the drive down there. When I got there I parked the car and put the postcode into Co Pilot for the venue but for some reason I was having little joy using it for walking directions. I tried google maps too but that was just as crap. I think it was because I was bang in the middle of town amongst reasonably tall buildings so the GPS was a bit flaky. Eventually I managed to get Google maps to kick in and I was on my way. I found the building which was an arts college building and they were using the theatre box office entrance for signing in. I paid my fiver and as proof of payment my hand was stamped with the high tech stamp made from half a potato with the letters LRL carved into it.

I’d already missed most of the morning but I just managed to catch the tail end of Gervase Markham’s talk abut the first program he ever wrote which was in BBC Basic. It brought back a few memories of my first experiences of programing on my ZX Spectrum. I remember we had a big book full of games and stuff which you could just type in for yourself. The code for Harrier Attack was in there somewhere so me and my sister stayed up really late one night typing it all in but we must have missed something because it never did work. My most recent programming experience was with Visual Basic 2005. I wrote a lottery number generator but that never quiet worked properly either but at least it ran without crashing. It had a tendency to generate the same number twice because I was lazy when I wrote the code but it wasn’t as if I was ever going to use it anyway since I don’t play the lottery. It was just something I did to keep me entertained on a train to London one day. I keep saying I’m going to learn Python but I can’t think of anything useful to write so I haven’t got around to it yet. Anyway for what little I saw if his talk it did seem interesting. Shame I missed most of it.

I hung around to watch Matthew Somerville’s talk about government websites but for some reason he had some crappy flash presentation running on a windows laptop which didn’t want to play with the projector which was rather embarrassing. He was a bit late starting because of it but I really wanted to see  Fabian Scherschel’s talk about Linux in schools so not long after he started I hopped over to another stage to see that. It wasn’t the most exciting talk I’ve ever heard but it was reasonably interesting. From my own experience kids seem to find Linux exciting because it’s different and because they can do stuff like have brightly coloured themes etc if they want to rather than having a choice of blue green or silver in XP. Also if kids use Linux in school it makes computers more accessible to the less well off kids to use at home because they don’t have to fork out the Microsoft tax for a usable computer for home .

Then I went off to see Des Burley talk about the law regarding the licencing of software. It was much less interesting than anticipated and didn’t really tell me anything I dind’t know already but there were a few interesting questions at the end. He was very dry and to talk about a subject such as law you need to be able to entertain your audience because it’s not an exciting subject to begin with. I have to admit I was struggling to stay awake at one point.

Next up was Andy “blackadder” Robinson’s talk on Open Street Map which was a little more interesting. I’ve been thinking about contributing to open street map for a while but it’s one of those things I’ve never really gotten around to doing but his talk was pretty interesting so I’ll try and make the effort to grab my etrex and map my street and a few more close by when I get time.

The rest of the talks I saw weren’t very exciting until it came to the live recording of Lug Radio which was as comical as it always used to be back in the day. That over and done with I decided it was time to head home and picked up some chips on the way back to the car. I set off forgetting I’d set Co Pilot to walking routes so ti decided to take me up all the little back streets of Wolverhampton thinking I was walking very quickly back home. The option to set this is hidden deep in the settings menu so it’s easy to miss when setting up your journey.

I got home eventually. I managed to pick up a few freebies one of which was a mug from Bytemark hosting so I made myself a cuppa and sat down to read my free copy of Linux Magazine. I had also received my new hard drive I bought for my net book while I was out so I opened it up only to find I’d bought the wrong one. I needed one with a ZIF ribbon cable connector and this had 50 pin connector on the back so I’m now talking to the company in Hong Kong I bought it from Via eBay to see if I can swap it out. They didn’t state which interface it was and thinking there would only be one kind of 1.8″ IDE connector I ordered that one but it seems I was mistaken but the listing could have been a little more descriptive.

I’ve spent today trying to catch up with jobs around the house but I should have also gone to my sisters to finish fitting her burglar alarm but I just didn’t get time. Perhaps I’ll go up one day in the week and sort it out but I need to turn the power off to put a new socket in for the control unit so I’ll probably end up working by torch light since the clocks went back this morning. It’s going to be dark when I leave work from here on in. Roll on 2010 I say

Ben

= 5.6

I like to keep a close eye on the news but it’s rare I ever talk about what’s happening. Yesterday I heard the BBC were to allow the BNP leader Nick Griffin on Question Time. I shouldn’t have thought there would be any question over weather or not he be allowed on air. I may not agree with the man but I respect his right to free speech. I didn’t expect it to get quiet as much attention as it has. As I was getting ready to shut the laptop down for the night I checked face book and to my amazement everyone was talking about it. I just had to see what was going on so I flipped open BBC news live player and had a look see. Mr Griffin was being taken down a peg or two by everyone in the room. One of the audience even called him a dick at one point which had me rolling around in laughter. He seemed to deny every accusation that he had ever said anything racist and it was said that there are videos on you tube of him making racist remarks etc so I decided to have a look for a few.

This one contains ol’ wonky face hisself addressing an audience of white nationalists in Texas along side a former KKK leader.

There are more on there if you have a look around and it’s definitely interesting to see the way he addresses small audiences compared to the way he behaved when he was on TV last night.

This morning on my way in to work I stopped to pick up a news paper and he seemed to be front page news on every national paper. I didn’t see a single one that seemed to be backing him in fact most were calling him a disgrace. The Times opted for a slightly less anti BNP headline of “Hostile reception for Griffin” with a large picture of the protest outside TV Centre. I’m really glad he went on question time as without it the protests wouldn’t have happened. The fact that it was a protest and not a riot between BNP supporters and those who would want them silenced was a good thing to me because it shows that there are more people who hate the BNP than support them. I think the BBC did a great deal of good last night as they showed Mr Griffin for what he really is, a racist thug.

I’m pretty happy to be British today. I live in a democratic country with a free press. The BBC really earned their licence fee last night. Were all free to express which ever view we like how ever we can and that’s just how I like it

If you missed it you can watch it on BBC I-player.

Hopefully there will be more like this to help me decide who gets my vote at the next election. It won’t be British Nazi Party that’s for certain.

On a different note the weekend is here and it’s time for Lug Radio Live. I’ve never been to a Linux event before and this was one of my new years resolutions so time to get my sat nav set up and get my bits together.

Ben

= 6.8

Tomorrow Windows 7 is due to be released and for the first time ever I won’t be upgrading. I’ve been a windows / dos user for most of my life but I’ve always been interested in checking out the alternatives. I remember reading about BeOS way back when and I first heard of Linux I knew I had to try it. The problem back then was I was using the family computer and I couldn’t really trash it and install something else. When I eventually left school and got my first job I decided the first on my list to try was BeOS I went to their website only to find that they had just been bought out by Palm and that BeOS had died it’s death. Then I moved on to Linux trying a few versions of SUSE but I couldn’t really get into it. I tried a few other flavours including Mandrake and RedHat but with little joy. I managed to get things installed and booted but it was how to manage the system once it was up and running that I didn’t understand. I managed to use it for basic tasks like web browsing and IM but some things were just too confusing to me back then. I carried on using windows but there came a point where I eventually got bored with XP perhaps it was purely because Microsoft took so long getting Vista to market but as a home user I’d just got bored looking at the same colour schemes and stuff. It just wasn’t new and exciting any more and as someone that loves playing with technology there was nothing new to explore. As soon as Vista was announced I was all over it. I wanted a copy as soon as I could get my hands on and I some how managed to get myself on the list for the early testing releases that weren’t available to the public. I even went to a Microsoft conference in Nottimgham to get as much information about the inner workings of it as possible. This was early days and what I saw looked promising but sadly the last few glitches still existed when I got my copy on release day. I’d bought a new machine with more memory and a dual core processor as Vista was a hungry beast. It was one of those that came with XP MCE with a free upgrade to Vista home on release day. I reinstalled my machine only to find that most of my hardware still wouldn’t work because of driver incompatibility and most of my software much of it other Microsoft products wouldn’t install. Vista was all good if all you wanted to do was admire the Aero theme and the 3D flip window switcher. Things got going and after a few service packs it became usable but I didn’t bother with it because my machine was so much faster with XP on it. I used to rip all of my DVD’s to make backups and under XP I could trans code at 128 frames a second but under Vista that pretty much halved. Even with all the fancy graphics turned off etc it was still painfully slow. While I was busy being disappointed by Vista I bought a few computer magazines to see what the rest of the world thought but on the cover of one of them was Ubuntu so I decided to give it a go. I had found the way forward. It worked like a charm and was very user friendly and there was lots of documentation on the Internet and a really good community behind it. The only thing I couldn’t make work was my Broadcom WiFI card. I did some research but it was pretty much a no go. I was getting ready for a new laptop so I decided to make this one a machine I could be sure I could run Linux on it with no compatibility issues. I found a Lenovo laptop  at Linux Emporium and decided it was time to get my wallet out. I dual booted this with Vista and Ubuntu but I found Ubuntu so usable that I never used Vista and I eventually ditched my Vista partition and moved to Ubuntu as my main OS. I Like Ubuntu but I still like to play with alternatives from time to time. Debian comes a close second place with Fedora and CentOS just behind that. I know most businesses have not moved from XP to Vista because it was awful and the coming months will be interesting as XP is due to reach it’s t end of life. The thing is XP does the job and does it pretty well so why should we all go out and buy Windows 7 apart from the fact that there won’t be updates for it for much longer. For me not just Linux but open source as a whole is the way forward because it’s far less frustrating to use once you have gotten over the differences and got out of the MS mind set. I’m now so into the Linux way of life that Windows manages to really annoy me  in ways I would have just accepted a few years ago. I did try a beta for Windows 7 and I was shocked that my network card needed a driver to get it to work. I’ve installed every flavour of Linux I can think of on the same machine and never once had to think about getting the network card working past setting it to DHCP or assigning an IP address to it manually. It seems strange that as a new user who may have never seen a computer before that I’d be expected to install drivers for basic and common hardware and expected to know how to get them and how to do it. Linux is not free of hardware issues like this but in most cases you can boot into almost any modern desktop Linux distro and surf the Internet, write email or perform office tasks. This is just not so with Windows and to stay competitive they need to really think about how satisfied their customers are with their products. I jumped ship because vista was utter crap and I can’t help wondering if the next few months will see an influx of new Linux users. To date I’ve managed to convince at least five other people to make the switch and they all seem pretty happy thus far. Hopefully that will be five former Microsoft customers as a little competition never hurt anyone and perhaps they will need to start making software that works rather than depending on ways of locking people in to their proprietary crap such as making new file formats that just give everyone one big headache. Granted they have done a few things right such as Active Directory but it’s only a matter of time before everyone is doing something similar. I hope Microsoft have learned their lesson but I think it will take them a good few years before they win me back. The next few moths will prove interesting and the world of open source has nothing to lose and everything to gain by it’s very nature. Hopefully more people will take free software seriously if Microsoft’s products continue to disappoint. From time to time I run in to people with the attitude that free must be crap because you only get what you pay for and that just isn’t the case. It’s not perfect but just because you paid a lot of money for something doesn’t mean it’s worth it.

Shop around people. If you find Linux too scary perhaps keep an eye on Haiku which is an open source OS inspired by BeOS and designed to be compatible with old BeOS apps. Since I never did manage to try Be back in the day I’ll probably be taking the alpha release of Haiku for a spin some time soon so I’ll write a little review of it when I do. Don’t go out and camp out in front of PC World tonight waiting to get your hands on Windows 7. I got really excited by Vista and I was rather disappointed to learn I’d spent £550 on a new machine to run something that was barely even usable. There is a whole world of choice you just have to step out of the Microsoft box and go look for it.

For me buying proprietary software is a bit like paying for sex. You pay a lot and get something ugly that doesn’t work and you’ll probably end up with a virus sooner or later. Also I’d never dream of doing such a thing.

Ben

= 6.1

Life is a journey but what if we didnt get speeding tickets and we could all drive around at 1500mph?

Today I’ve been doing some more to the house in the way of painting one of my new doors I put up over the last few weeks. I decided this would be a good time to try out a new app for my G1 which makes time lapse videos. The free version only has one resolution option and it’s the lowest but it worked pretty well so I decided to purchase the paid version as it was only $1. The app lets you post the video directly to YouTube which is nice and convenient. I did however have a slight mishap while painting and spilled the paint all over the floor which I quickly scooped up with my hands and put back in the tin before getting a bucket of warm water and a towel to clean up the mess. I was in such a hurry I didnt realise my jeans were falling down so beware that around the 25 second mark because I do moon at the camera as I clean up the mess.