UK Linux User Groups

Someone who seemingly would like to remain anonymous (88.209.73.252 252.73.209.88.dsl.monaco.mc) has been reading my blog and getting into a froth about something or other.

I have read your Blog and for the life of me I can't see why anyone would be interested in consulting you or having you on the same planet.

You are an offensive cunt, with not a single redeamable feature which shines through in your blog. You are a sad and embitered little man.

Fuck off and die.

All I can offer is a thorough and heartfelt meh?. Feel free to continue consulting my blog. Or not.

PS: some red pen corrections: redeamable should be redeemable, embitered should be embittered.

Contact me

The Copyrighting the Future: Keeping ahead of the game consultation finishes in a month’s time (6 February). They actually called it that - “copyrighting the future” - can you believe it?

In case you haven’t seen it yet, this is the consultation that ignores the Gowers review findings and tries to start it all over again. Please respond and try to avoid term extension, DRM/TPM and other similar landmines. Any comments you can leave me to help us all would be very much appreciated!

Well kind of…in a way…possibly…OK, not at all.

The other day I was digging through some old articles that I wrote. To my amusement, I saw a reference to a little program I hacked up once when I was involved as a KDE developer. I had totally forgotten about it, and I figured it would be fun to share the story.

Back in the year 2000 when I was starting University, I spent every evening between midnight and 6am hacking on code. Fuelled by six cans of coke every night, I barely slept for those few years: I was running on three or four hours of sleep for most nights. Every evening I was excited to fire up my concrete brick of a laptop, check out the latest KDE CVS and taste the latest crack of the day. This inspired me to want to contribute to the project in some way.

It was a bit of a trial by fire. I was not only learning C++ but also Qt and the KDE bindings. To be frank, I was not very good. But I tried hard, I learned a lot, and mostly importantly, I had a lot of fun.

Throughout this time I wrote a bunch of little programs. One of these programs was called KWebStat, and this what I re-read about the other day. Using the wonder of the Wayback Machine I managed to find the old homepage for it which included a screenshot:

See a bigger screenshot

When I read the article, I realised the program was a simple, primitive equivalent to what we now know as Twitter: it put a current status update online. KWebStat was a little different: instead of writing a message, you could click some buttons to indicate what you were doing at that moment, and you could set custom activities to show. KWebStat was a lot more primitive than Twitter though: it updated a static HTML page and you needed some magic to get that page online, but the basic premise was there. There were a few niceties though: KWebStat could grab which song you were listening to in your CD or music player as well as grab a screenshot and put that online. It was a pretty primitive first implementation of status-blogging, and I used it on my old homepage.

So, if the Twitter folks would kindly send over a portion of that mountain of gold that they have, it would be appreciated.

Hugs, Jono.

Thanks to Graham for sharing http://www.brendangregg.com/specials.html

What made the work a lot harder was that the changes had to be made through a web front end that abstracted about 20 seconds of vim in to four minutes of clicking buttons that were never in the same place twice. It's been a while since I've had to bulk make production changes using this kind of interface so I was freshly amazed at how awful it was.

First of all was the time it took. The average change was about 8 mouse clicks, most of them on different pages, across a slow application that was working with a very large (for it) dataset. Second was the lack of a safety net. I had to do full copy and pastes to somewhere safe for each thing I wanted to change before changing it. It may not sound like much but if you come from the land of version control and diffing changes then it just feels so risky. And if you don't then I suggest you start learning one. Instead I had to rely on some hastily written post check scripts that confirmed the changes were correct when publicly viewed. We'd normally write these as a double check but without version control they become the single safeguard. Which were only effective after the change was made, which is better than nothing I suppose...

I know I'm about five years later than everyone else in discovering the joys of a GPS receiver, but I'm really enjoying having one in my G1.

Here's our Boxing Day afternoon stroll around Tooting Common. More details on the InstaMapper web site.

We saw parakeets. I've known there are wild parakeets on the common for years, but this is the first time I've seen them for myself.

Update: PJ points out that  the maximum speed is quite possibly inaccurate.

This morning, I took delivery of an Edge10 DAS 501t storage box. It's an external eSATA box with room for 5 drives, running with a port multiplier. Thus, it only needs a single eSATA connector to join all 5 drives to the host machine.

read more

America OnLine (AOL) killed their blogging service - actually, all their Hometown sites - last September and I only just noticed.

AOL didn’t kill it cleanly. They could have offered 301 Moved Permanently redirects to users’ new hosting (good - maybe no interruption to users), returning a 404 Not Found with an explanation (OK - software like RSS readers would detect the serious problem) or even simply taking the hostname offline (bad, but better than what they did). Instead, AOL 301-redirected everyone to a page on their own journal (which hasn’t closed down) to “sincerely apologize for any inconvenience”. It wouldn’t have been so much inconvenience if it had been closed down cleanly.

I was only reading one journal there (Pripensulo) which I can’t find anywhere else, but I’m surprised by the incompetent webmastering. AOL’s webmasters run managing massive (if bland) websites, after all, and if they’re smart enough to do a 301 redirect to their apology, then they’re smart enough to do a useful redirect or a 404 Not Found. Why didn’t they? Don’t they care about their users? Are they trying to take SEO points from all their users and give them to People Connection?

Seems we got about 1cm of snow overnight. Let 3 days of London-wide transport chaos commence.

• AR-media
  With ARplug-in, Google Sketch-Up users are allowed to visualize their 3D models directly in the real physical space which sorrounds them.

I would say it’s been a great two weeks off, but I’d be lying. As two weeks holiday go, I think this one has been the worst I can recall. There have been a few highlights (visiting family and a few friends) but not as many as I’d have liked (visiting _more_ friends!) and I havn’t really achieved anything with my time off either. To be fair that’s mostly since I’ve been feeling pretty bad with flu for a week - and now something else (I think) - bad cough and dreadful backache if I move after sitting still for long. I’m going to see the doctor to see what they have to say - it might just be due to flu, but two weeks seems plenty long enough.

Fortunately I have some time off work coming up shortly which I aim to have more fun with, looking at visiting Iceland (it’s about the only place where the government has shafted the currency worse than Britain’s has).

Ever used a website that allowed you to tag content? Ever ended up accidently using slightly different tags? Something like graphs and graphing or blog and blogs? (I hope so, otherwise it's just me...) To spot some of the more obvious overlaps you can stem each of the words and look for a common base. Where one's found there is the possibility of mistaken duplication. For example if you passed hunts, hunted and hunting through a stemmer each would return 'hunt'. If you want to try for yourself there are online stemmers available.

As a more concrete example let's look at the wonderful service del.icio.us. You upload your own bookmarks, tag them with a number of keywords and can then group, sort and search them by your own defined terms. Except I have a habit of tagging articles about similar topics with nearly, but not quite the same tag.

The perl code below shows how easy it is (using Lingua::Stem from CPAN) to run your own data through a stemmer and look for overlaps. There are implementations in most languages (PyStemmer is also very nice) and the wikipedia article is actually a very easy to follow introduction.

Or should that be vague plans?

• Attend FOSDEM. I’ve been incredibly lazy the last few years and haven’t attended.
• Try to prevent the PET Centre from eating my life. This is probably more of a vain hope than a resolution.
• Buy a flat or learn to drive. Because unless I make it an either/or I will do neither.
• Attend the spring UKUUG meeting. Understanding kerberos is probably a worthwhile endeavour even if I never use it.
• Skate more. Assuming we actually get a summer this year it shouldn’t be to hard to top the dismal amount of skating I did last year.
• Attend at least one observing night of the Cardiff Astronomical Society to remember what the night sky is supposed to look like.
• Migrate Peapod to a sensible modern XML library to fix some of its more annoying bugs
• Make an effort to visit friends. Which is just code for be less of a social hermit.

So it turns out Eames was a fan of the Venn diagram approach to design thinking too. Here’s his interpretation, as presented in The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher.

Diagnosing a corruption issue just before Christmas, I used “memtest86+” as usual. However instead of booting, the PC just said: “Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into memory”.

Fortunately this is covered by this Debian bug. It’s still not been fixed, in the meantime you can grab this precompiled memtest86+ ELF binary (not the usual x86 boot sector). You need to boot it slightly differently, my grub entry is:

title Memtest (ELF - 4GB fix)
root (hd0,0)
kernel –type=netbsd /memtest
boot

Yesterday we went to Oxford with friends to view the Earth From Above exhibition at Oxford Castle. It's a fantastic exhibition and well worth visiting if it comes near by - it's usually held outside so in winter best wrap up well!

After a hour or so in the freezing Oxford winter sun we walked across town to Science Oxford where they had the 2007 BBC Wildlife Photographer of the year photographs on display.

An excellent day was had by all.

The Eleventh doctor will be Matt Smith.

I've never seen him in anything (although he's appeared with Billie Piper in Secret Diary of a Call Girl and The Ruby in the Smoke).

Apparently he's a great actor and more importantly, he looks like the Doctor.

Since I managed to get my blogspam plugin listed on wordpress.org I've seen a surge of interest.

In the past few hours capture stats are:

Almost exactly 1% of submitted comments are OK, and a SPAM rate of 99%. Either forum and blog spam are even more rife than I'd expected or I am over-zealous!

Anyway that's enough on this topic for a while, if you want to follow the work you know where to look and if you don't my writing about it again will just drive you mad..

ObFilm: The Breakfast Club

The main focus of the book is that measurement is good, blind guessing is bad and that capacity planning, like security, is an ongoing process. While a lot of the material is common sense - which is never that common in IT - it's a perfect introduction to capacity planning (and the principles of data collection and graphing) for novice to intermediate system administrators and a handy refresher for the experts in the crowd. I found it oddly reassuring that someone else has a lot of the same thoughts as I do when it comes to these topics.

The Art of Capacity Planning is an easy, engaging read that gets you thinking along the right lines without becoming dull or long winded. Well worth the couple of hours it'll take to read - 8/10