Matt's Blog

Suspending Global Warming

matt — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 14:35:11 +0000

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…

Ban Them All

matt — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:53:24 +0000

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…

Connect Me Already

matt — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:35:12 +0000

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.

Make It Live

matt — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 09:15:20 +0000

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…

Start, Stop, Start, Stop, Start

matt — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 20:30:03 +0000

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.

Spaceman Bounties

matt — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 14:03:00 +0000

Mark Shuttleworth really is one of the good guys with both great vision and ability to make things happen. Of course, he can afford to be a good guy - anyone who can afford to be one of the world’s first space tourists is certainly not short of cash!

The Shuttleworth Foundation that Mark has founded has some great aims, a lot of which is focused to South Africa (that being his country of birth). The belief that Africa in general can be aided by improving the education system so that they have many bright, talented people showing their full potential seems like a reasonable idea to me.

Of course, one of the main reasons that I’ve found out about Mark is because of the good things that he is doing in the Free Open Source Software community. Mark is funding a number of projects such as Ubuntu Linux and the SchoolTool project. Naturally a lot of the projects that Mark funds are related to the aims of the Shuttleworth Foundation and it’s just good to see someone helping to fund projects in the FOSS community.

Another thing I noticed when browsing the Ubuntu website were that anyone can get “bounties” for implementing certain features. There are a few open source type projects that are now offering bounties for this sort of thing. If only I could make enough money from those things to make a living out of it! I’d really love to work full time on free/open source software…

School Sense

matt — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:50:00 +0000

Every day on my way to work I pass by a school and if I’m unlucky/disorganised enough then I get there just as the thousands of parents drop off their child in their 4×4. The school is situated right on a junction and the parents’ cars just get parked everywhere. I take extreme care driving past, so worried that some small child could dart out from between two cars, it all seems so unresponsible to me.

So I started thinking of some “creative” solutions to this problem… Perhaps they could stagger the start times for each class so that there wouldn’t be so many parents turning up at one time? Or perhaps there could be an incentive for parents that car share, like their children get to be in a class with less pupils?

But then I realised, there is a much better solution here. Why not have forced boarding school for all children Monday to Friday? This surely makes a lot of sense? Traffic would be reduced enormously, parents could go out to work, schools could give kids a healthier lifestyle by controling what the children eat/do after school, you know it all makes sense!

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Radio Boyd

matt — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 22:51:00 +0000

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Tommy Boyd has been back on the radio since January. He seems to have a regular weekly spot now on BBC Southern Counties Radio.

I used to listen to Tommy’s fabulous cult radio show “The Human Zoo” on Talk Sport radio station where he allowed callers straight to air with “no screening”… It certainly made for an eclectic set of characters that would call up with their rants, bits of prepared audio or general abuse of Tommy. If you’ve never heard the show, then you should listen to some of the clips from his shows. Unfortunately his format/attitude lead to his downfall when he failed to cut off a caller who, on the day of the Queen Mother’s death, commented on the royal family that we should “shoot the f*cking lot of them”. The Human Zoo was a bit of an acquired taste, but there has always been a bit of a hole in my Sunday evenings since its demise.

I’ll be tuning in to Tommy’s latest show, though no doubt it will be nothing like The Human Zoo, especially as it’s on the BBC. At least being on a Saturday evening from 9pm to 1am it may have some interesting content, we shall see.

Who Am I Voting For?

matt — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 09:45:00 +0000

If I vote Labour in this year’s General Election, am I voting for Tony Blair, or Gordon Brown? I’m strongly of the opinion that should Labour win the election then it will only be a matter of months before we start hearing more and more about the Blair/Brown rift again and there will become more and more pressure for Blair to stand down… And if not then I’m sure a leadership challenge will take place forcing Blair out of office. I’d be amazed if Tony Blair is still in No. 10 at the end of 2006. So really, a Labour vote is a vote for Gordon Brown isn’t it? I’m not sure if that makes me more or less likely to vote for them.

I still have no idea who I will vote for, I’m a classic floating voter at this moment in time… Every day I change my mind. I hate all the lies that they all put through my letter box, they are all as bad as each other. I think the Lib Dems have the best policies relating to technology, best views on software patents etc. But I’m not sure that I could vote based on that one issue alone and I’m just not really convinced that they would make a good job of running the economy. I doubt I’ll vote for the Conservatives, they just don’t seem trustworthy at all to me… So am I going to be left with only Labour to vote for? Maybe I just don’t like change.

One thing is for sure, I wont vote for the Greens… Doubt they would approve of all the computers running 24 hours a day at home - would get taxed to oblivion!

Speak My Protocol

matt — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 13:04:00 +0000

I have five different Instant Message accounts; MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ and Jabber. That’s four proprietary systems and one open one (Jabber). Of course, no one wants to have five separate IM clients on their desktop so you end up using some third-party software which can communicate with the different systems such as Kopete, GAIM or Trillian… And upgrade any time that one of the proprietary systems change their protocol slightly (after a couple of days have passed to reverse engineer the protocol change of course).

This is all clearly insane and a good example of where companies insisting on having their own proprietary protocols just results in a big mess for the end user. I don’t even see what MSN, Yahoo etc are gaining by having proprietary protocols in the first place? It’s not like they are charging for the service or anything. Is it all about them standing up against each other with how many users they have on their network? These are the reasons that we need the open software movement to prevail. Even if companies are going to write commercial software, let’s at least have open standards and protocols to connect it all together in a friendly fashion.