Matt’s Blog

Suspending Global Warming

October 9th, 2006

Lots of geek types, myself included, tend to have machines running all the time, or at least for extended periods of time. But is it always necessary, or rather would it be that bad to turn some of them off when they are not being used?

Obviously if there is a server doing something useful I’m not saying shut it down, but there are other machines where I’m sure it’s not so necessary. I used to leave my desktop machine on 24 hours a day for example, just so that all the documents I was working on would stay open.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot more since moving to using my laptop instead of a desktop machine for most day to day tasks. Now that I’m using Ubuntu Dapper on my laptop the suspend-to-RAM functionality is much improved. Previously my laptop would fail to resume more than one in ten times that I suspended it and that made it too flakey for general usage, but now, with Dapper, it seems to work flawlessley. It is so fast too… only approx 15 seconds to suspend and another 15 seconds to resume, all my documents open just as I left them. It makes me think that we should all be using this functionality much more, for desktop machines as well as for laptops.

So my call today is for everyone to just think about the machines that they leave switched on for extended periods of time and just consider whether any of them could be put into a lower power state when not being actively used… Even consider having your machines go into auto-suspend if they are idle for an hour or two…

Computers don’t use too much power, so in the grand scale of things compared to, say, transportation and heavy industry, it’s not going to make a great deal of difference, but we should all probably be looking to do our bit…

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Ban Them All

September 27th, 2006

Some things that ought to be banned:

Parking meters (and other payment machines) that don’t give any change so you end up paying more than the actual fee
Quiz TV channels that run quizzes 24 hours a day and require you to call a premium rate phone number in order to answer some inane question
Spam email, junk paper mail and cold calling
Cash machines where you have to pay to get your money out - I noticed recently that one chain of motorway service stations here in the UK seem to only have this sort of machine nowadays…

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Connect Me Already

September 26th, 2006

I was happy to see that the version of Wireless Assistant (a KDE GUI for connecting to WiFi networks) inluded in Ubuntu Dapper seems to work a lot better than the version included in Ubuntu Breezy. At last it finds my wireless network and allows me to connect to it after specifying the appropriate keys.

I’m rather saddened to find, however, that it doesn’t apply the settings to the default config (eg. /etc/network/interfaces) so that my laptop would connect to the wireless network on boot… Instead it seems to rely on me logging into KDE and using the Wireless Assistant to connect each time. How lame. I will of course have to now just edit the files manually as before and only use the Wireless Assistant when I want to connect to some network whilst out and about.

I think that GUI application designers sometimes miss the point with this sort of thing. They seem to assume that because I’m making changes to settings from within KDE, that I’d only want them to be applicable for KDE and not generally system wide. It’s the same with adding printers for example. If I add a printer from within some nice GUI inside KDE I still want to be able to print to it using lpr when I’m at the command line. I think GUIs are great for making configuration changes, especially to things that aren’t changed frequently, but they really should be GUIs to the system wide config IMHO.

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Make It Live

September 20th, 2006

A couple of times recently I’ve wanted to try out some new software, only to be thwarted by a list of prerequisites as long as my arm. I’m talking about cutting edge software for Linux in particular… it often relies on cutting edge libraries that aren’t available in most Linux distributions. Getting all the right versions of those dependencies can become a major nightmare, having to build from source and often having to patch them in some way.

Two projects where I’ve recently had problems like this are Jokosher and Diva. Both these look like excellent bits of software, but the list of requirements make them a nightmare to try out. Some of the prerequisites are not available as packages for many distros and there are some requirements that need CVS versions of libraries and special patches. It just makes it too difficult to try the software out for anyone except the most determined user.

It seems to me that in order for cutting edge projects like these to get more people trying them out, it would be a good idea for them to produce a live CD which I could just boot from and have everything set up ready for them to work. All the right libraries and dependencies already there. Surely, with the number of live distros out there, it wouldn’t be too hard for them to take one of those, such as Knoppix, and modify it to include whatever dependencies they have? This would save such a lot of effort of those wanting to try out these bits of cutting edge software and would surely reduce the number of people that just give up…

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

Start, Stop, Start, Stop, Start

August 29th, 2006

After a continued absence, of more than a year, with no blog posts, I’m back again to have another go. I’m a yo-yo blogger, but I think that there are pleny of other people also with blogs containing mostly messages about how they are going to start blogging more again, just like mine

This will, hopefully, be my permanent blog location from now on. The posts prior to this one have been imported from my old blog on blogspot.com which I shall no longer post to. So, if you want to follow my (possibly lack-of) posts then use the new RSS/ATOM feeds listed on the sidebar, or subscribe to receive them by email if you prefer.

Normal service of Matt’s Blog will now be resumed. Sorry for the delay.

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Matt’s Blog

Suspending Global Warming

Ban Them All

Connect Me Already

Make It Live

Start, Stop, Start, Stop, Start

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