Today, iplayer tells me "You have download 2.22 of content" with a checkbox saying "Do not show this message". Robbed of a unit the former looks messy, robbed of "again" the latter looks a bit "Do not press this button again".

Download times have come down a bit. Still — 4 hours now for a 60 min programme. I even managed to get something to play today; the frame rate appeared to be about 5/second.

What a flurry of posts? I went mad today and joined twitter and friendfeed both at the same time. Gosh, what a time waster this stuff all is.

Right, just got to twitter about posting on my blog.

Managed to download a file; it doesn't block so badly at 5pm. Can't get the file to play in any way, shape or form. There is, however, a solution. What you do is click on the "download to windows media player" link. This gives you a straight forward URL from which you can http download. This is actually better, in many ways. You can use what ever download manager you like, including a vaguely capable one. You don't have to guess which file is which as you did before. And as soon as some one has worked out how to pull the URLs out of the BBC's UI, we should be able to circumvent the entire process of going to their website.

So, perhaps it's not all doom and gloom after all.

Just been forced to "upgrade" to this, despite having no desire to. It's very impressive. It will only do a single download at a time and is current reporting 10 hours left for a 1 hour programme; the old BBC IPlayer would download in about real-time, certainly after 10pm in the evening. I did manage to download one programme in 5 mins, but sadly the file was only 32k at the end and it wouldn't play; really, really broken. And, of course, it's ditched my existing programmes despite promising to keep them.

Apparently, they have ditched P2P for IPlayer Desktop; good idea, if you ask me. Lower CPU load, no upload traffic generally good. But you have to upgrade your servers, guys. And, of course, the entire internet, to avoid the slowest link effect. Very poor indeed. The message boards would be floods of moans; lucky that the BBC had the foresight to close them down.

Ironically, they've gone high definition; it was announced on the website. Great idea; a week to download 5 mins, but looks great when you do.

Very poor; has to go down in history as one of the worst damn squib launches I've known. I wish I knew how to upgrade back to the old iplayer.

Did the update. RC1 is out which is a reasonable time. If I updated on the release day it would have taken for ever; last time, it took something like 2 hours. This time the whole process was over and done with in an hour. It's all been relatively painless. So far only two problems. Obviously my marble mouse configuration stopped working again, and I had to change all my HAL scripts; luckily, this is now better documented than before. A great relief because following through the myriad pieces of advice on how to do this every update was getting taxing. And, secondly, they've introduced something called "screen-profiles" which is colour schemes for screen; very nice, I'm sure, but when it seems to be kicked off when I start screen with an aliases, asking me lots of questions. Uninstalled it; problem gone.

And Jaunty? Well, it looks nice enough. Boot time is definately faster, although my windows box still beats Ubuntu (there is less on it, to be fair). Login screen looks very cool. Other than that, well, all ahead as normal.

People seem to be talking about my post on upper ontologies. Half of them are moaning about my blog software.

Look, the point is that the user interface is nice and simple for me. I just type stuff into a text editor, I can do it offline and it all works. No one else needs to use it if they don't want to!

Of course, it would be good to use something better, but not if I have to fiddle with any of the 100s of rubbish online editors that I've seen. And it's too hard to change now.

Bah, humbug.

I've been getting recurrent problems with the ssh service on cygwin. It was crashing with a wierd fork, malloc style error that I just had no chance of debugging. It's been causing me real grief. sshfs has stopped working, unison has had problems. But it's only been intermittent, so I never got around to fixing it.

Today, I did the google thing. And the cause? Think hard, have a guess, I promise you will be surprised.

My web cam drivers. Of course, I hid the critical information from you — I have attached a device from Logitech to my machine; I've ranted about logitech before, but this one takes the biscuit. They really do make some of the worse software known to man. I mean, how are you supposed to figure this one out? Hmmm, a key component of my secure networking is causing problems; what can it be? Perhaps, it's my webcam software.

Uninstalled their QuickCam disaster. The webcam still works. So far, no ssh problems at all.

I just spent 40 minutes trying to get the Bioinformatics class files working under linux. Pain in the ass. The problem is that Ubuntu has moved from teTeX to TeXLive, so things are all different. Canonical have also screwed around with TeXLive and teTeX a little also, so that they can install either; hence you have /usr/share/texmf-texlive rather than /usr/share/texmf. Under no circumstances could I get it to work; it just would not recognise the class file.

I tried:

• adding it to ~/documents/tex which is my TEXINPUTS. This is my usual technique. Didn't work.
• Adding it to ~/texmf which is, apparently, the recommended technique. Didn't work.
• Adding it to /usr/share/texmf-texlive and running texhash and makelsr. Didn't work.
• Adding it to /var/tex. Didn't work.
• Adding it to the same directory as the .tex file. Didn't work.
• Swearing a lot. Didn't work. Didn't even make me feel better.

LaTeX really irritates me at time; the problem, is been around so long, and much of the documentation that you find on the web is woefully out-of-date. The lack of debugging statements don't help. It's really hard. Sometimes, you feel it must have been written by a bunch of idiots.

After 40 minutes, I fixed it. The file is bioinfo.cls, not bioinf.cls.

"Dr Watson Postmortem Debugger has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience"

The pulseaudio problem described earlier wasn't. I managed to uninstall pulseaudio and Ubuntu is still crashing. Eech, this is not good.

Why the hell do people insist on sending "please remove me" mail messages to mailing lists? I mean, if they are on a mailing list that they don't want to be on, have they considered the possibility that other people are in the same boat.

This has happened to me twice today, once on a local UCU mailing list and, once, on a conference mailing list.

Roll on universal identifiers for scientists. We can use them for blacklisting. Anyone sending a "please remove me" mail message will be right up my list, I can tell you.

Ah, that feels better.

The maddness of Linux sound continues to plaque me. Pulseaudio is crashing Gnome on an hourly basis. It get an obscure message like this in my /var/log/messages.

pulseaudio[14900]: pid.c: Stale PID file, overwriting.
pulseaudio[14900]: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_NICE, (31, 31)) failed: Operation not permitted
pulseaudio[14900]: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_RTPRIO, (9, 9)) failed: Operation not permitted

I've tried adding myself to the pulse-rt group on the basis of a 2 year old message about Hardy, and setting ALSA manually in the sound options. Eeech, this is not good. Haven't had this level of instability since, erm, RedHat 5.

I tried removing pulseaudio entirely. Sadly, Ubuntu-desktop depends on it. So, removing it would fix the crashes but in a way which, I feel, rather defeats the point.

So, I've been using Lua for a couple of months now; I thought that I would learn it because it's been ages since I learned a new language, and it's got a reputation for being small, clean and fast.

On the whole I think it's lives up to it's reputation. It's a nice langauge, leaning more toward the functional than OO, at least in the way that I write it.

Syntactically, it's very simple and regular which is a good thing; there are a very places where I would have simplified it still further. For example, both of these are legal:

print( "hello" )
print "hello"

which is a nice syntactic short-cut, but then it only works with a single argument,

print( "hello", "goodbye" )
print "hello", "goodbye" -- ILLEGAL

Probably I would not have allowed the shortcut.

Lua has a pattern syntax for regexp-like searching, but in a desire to keep Lua small, it's a pretty weak; more over, it's not a standard syntax at all, and lacks familiarity. Of course, Lua makes it easy to link in a regexp library, but I think that they should have standard extensions — i.e. if you are going to link in a regexp library choose this one first. To some extent, this already happens — the Math.power function is not guarenteed to work as it forces the linking of the ansi C math library.

Almost all of Lua is based around tables — hash maps effectively — which also serve as arrays. This is okay and, of course, you can build anything you want from this; but, combined with the lack of types, I find myself asking questions like, is this a table of tables, an array of tables or a table of arrays? Too much knowledge is implicit. Table handling is also a bit limited; there's no support for taking slices of tables (when used as an array), nor functions like "contains" or "first index".

On the whole I think it fulfils it's purpose; it's great for small and simple code. The worry is that people will get carried away and start writing enormous applications in it, for which it is just not suited. Small languages have a habit of becoming big. As it is, though, it serves as a nice, relatively low-level language.

It's been said alluded to before that I am, occasionally, an obsessive, with a tendency to think about totally unimportant rubbish and that I should get out more. Clearly, a post on video connectors is necessary here, for me to clear the air.

See, I just got myself a big new monitor at work; no doubt some people will impune that this is a method for making up in my lack of prowess in other areas; probably they are right. But it's left me wondering.

For years, monitors all had that strange 15 pin thing, always blue. Everything plugged into everything. Then, a short while back came out the DVI connectors; these are slight offwhite, with a novel combination of flat and round pins. My new monitor has an HMDI connector. But the other end of the cable is a DVI; my old monitor used DVI plugs, has no been downgraded to a second screen. Fortunately, it also had a VGA, which is lucky because the video card has one DVI and one VGA.

What's going on here? It's totally confusing. If I want to swap computers and monitors around, I have to sit and add up, do they have the same interface, do I have the right converter cables if they don't (or if I only have convertor cables, do they have different sockets).

It feels like the bad old days before some bright genius of usability invented USB; a flawed genius because they were stupid enough to make them rectangular, but a genius non the less.

It all goes back to what I was droning on about in the pub, on friday; it ended up like a comparison between different operating systems, cause I was a bit too drunk to make myself clear; I move between linux and windows freely, and given the choice, I decide on relatively trivial grounds; it makes no difference to me, really, because I can make them largely look the same anyway. And this is the point: what do people want from a computer these days? My answer is this: forget the features give me familiarity; stability not excitement. Just don't change a damn thing. And that includes the background wall paper.

Likewise, video plugs. We have three different sorts now. Stop it guys, just stop it.

You think this is bad, don't even begin to get me started on low voltage power supplies...

Well, the new version of the software for this website is nearly done. I'm onto muse generation now, having got the scary make file and perl file generator done.

Of course, you could ask the question why not switch to wordpress or blogger or the like? Well, at the end of the day, I have to have an offline tool. Also, I like to have all my source files locally. All my electronic work is based around a single directory, and everything is in there. I guess that I am far from being a convert to the cloud.

It's probably going to take a few weeks yet, though. There should be only a few visible changes; first I am moving toward tags rather than categoies. I will be adding more than the current four. This means the individual RSS feeds — there will be only one. I doubt that anyone will mind this, but should if not.

My experiences with bazaar continue. I've used it to version my new blog software and, also, all my course notes from this years teaching. I've had one inexplicable crash (it core dumped everytime I tried to init one directory). In general, though it's really nice. It feels like going back to RCS in some ways. You don't have the SVN and CVS nightmare of importing a new project which tends to involve moving existing files out of place, then checking them out back into place.

I haven't actually tried any of the distributed facilities yet; it's all just me for which SVN was always overkill anyway. It's nice to know that I will have the option when I get to it.

My adversary even responded to my email which ended with "I think it's time to stop this". I replied with an email saying "But I am going to get the last word". He replied to this as well.

He's turning out to be quite a nice guy; he's accused me of "displaying an incredible ignorance of the FLOSS community" — my reply was that I just didn't know what the acronym was and that this was probably a good thing.

Although, I'm really quite warming to the guy, there is a problem here. I like to witness the development of a community, but in many cases this seems to result in introversion and worse still exclusion. Regularly developing a pile of acronyms, like the tendency to generate new jargon in science, just services to exclude people. Having switched between quite a few different disciplines, I've been on the wrong end of this tendency to find a clear reason why someone else doesn't belong. "Ah, but our community isn't like that", "We're not the same as them though, so how can their solutions be of value?", "But you don't understand how we do things". It's a shame and it saddens me that people who are essentially good should still fall prey to it.

I managed to find a solution to the problems with Bazaar; the problem is that vc-bzr.el launches "bzr" which is a python script; the cygwin version uses a magic shebang line which doesn't work on windows outside of cygwin. So, firstly, I fixed the problem in vc-bzr.el by making it launch the python executable directly and then pass "bzr" as an argument; I sent this into the Emacs Bug List. I got a reasonable reply from Stefan Monnier suggesting a wrapper script; I kind of agree that it's a nicer solution (it works with DVC too!), although it still leaves users in the situation of vc-bzr.el not working out of the box.

So I sent a report into the cygwin mailing and got replied with a blank no from the wonderful Christopher Faylor; just use cygwin or it's "do whatever you like". Meanwhile, off-list, I've been soundly castigated by another cygwin mailing list subscriber who has advised me "PCYMTNQREAIYR" and really doesn't like my quotation style. I never understood speaking with acronyms since I first met it in Perl land; but, hey, TMTOWTDI.

Some wonderful sections of the email conversation include:

  him> you can't be bothered to take 15 seconds to look something up, why
  him> should I be bothered to talk to you?

I don't know. And yet you are.

Astonishingly, he replied to this. It's been an entertaining conversation, but I think it's time for it to finish; I am hoping that this will work.

  him> I also care when you blatantly disregard the accepted practice of a
  him> community, and refuse to listen to members thereof when they try to
  him> tell you you're behaving in a way that is, by their standards,
  him> inconsiderate.

So bug reporting is inconsiderate? For the record, by the standards imposed by
my community, preaching at people is considered rude. I saddened that you
blatantly disregard these standards. But, hey, I'll get over it.

  him> A simple "I agree to abide by the list etiquette when posting to the
  him> list" would have ended this conversation long ago.

Yes, but then this conversation has been an entertaining diversion from my
otherwise dull and pointless existence which I would have been sad to miss.

I don't think I've ever received such a response for an attempt to publish a bug report. I guess some people need to just get out more; in this case, I mean me, but it's just about the start of term and that's not likely to happen.

I've started to give bazaar a go in anger; my hope was that I could get the offline advantages of RCS, with a newer system (renaming and such like) as well as something that works for collaboration.

The emacs support is a bit primitive yet. There is a vc-bzr.el, though, so I tried this but it didn't work. This turned out to be because it doesn't work with cygwin out of the box. I've tried the windows version and it all seems to behave nicely. But it doesn't understand symlinks which is a major pain — I need those symlinks!

Life can be hard at times.

Just got my first piece of skype spam...pretty novel.

[17:09:39] marianne - fille sexy a baiser sexe says: ca va ?
[17:10:38] Phil Lord says: ca va bien, et tu?
[17:10:39] marianne - fille sexy a baiser sexe says: sur http://www.*******.com y'a des joiles femmes !

I decided that the time had finally come for me to encrypt the home space on my hard drive of my laptop in case it gets nicked; I've been encrypting high-value information for years, but I thought the time to just do the whole home space had come.

So last night, I set it going. It started off suggesting it would take 12 hours. Okay, no worries, I'd rather not leave the laptop overnight but needs must. By the time I left work it had dropped to 6 hours, all going swimmingly.

Get in this morning, look at the progress bar; 92 days remaining. Oh dear; I mean I know I have a lot of files, but there's only 10G of stuff there. Next stop, true crypt I guess.

Moved my desktop to Hardy today. Had a few errors but it all went smoothy, right up to the point that I tried to use it, when I was getting lots of wierd stuff with the mouse. Basically, left click was giving double click events.

Took about an hour to work out; I'd configured xorg.conf a while back to enable mouse wheel emulation on my trackball. As a result, the upgrade didn't add the vital new line (Option: Core Pointer) without which it doesn't work.

X still sucks; the configuration is bizarre, unfriendly, inconsistent and impossible to debug. One day this will all get fixed. I hope it's soon.

Actually, thinking about it, the install balked have way through and asked me something, which was irritating as I was at lunch; unintended installs are good!

Installed Hardy Heron today on some laptops I have at home — I had decided to try and rip my entire CD collection again with consistent naming and organisation, and the best tool for the job — ripit — is linux based. The wonderous wubi makes a quick installation for a single purpose possible. There is not risk to your machine, and no painful partitioning to be done.

Hardy worked pretty well. X worked fine, as did the new resolution switchers. They have moved the location of the "no, no, no, don't autoplay the CD, not under any circumstances, just don't do it" dialog from removable devices and media to the file browser. They need to rename something—a CD is "removable media" in my book.

I couldn't get the wireless to work which was pretty disappointing, but this turned out to be because I had clicked the wrong button — if you single-click the network on the panel and pick the relevant network it all just works. If you right-click and fiddle with the settings yourself, it doesn't. Hardy actually got all three of my cards (spread between two computers) with no problems.

Neither computer is upto much, and each CD is taking ~20 mins, which is much longer than I expected. Still can't really blame hardy for this.

Just tried the BBC's iplayer for the first time. Pretty good, actually. It basically works, the image quality is good, download speed is fine. The download manager is pretty clunk and limited — you can't control how many things it downloads at once for instance. The DRM is a pain because you have to use windows media player to watch stuff back; normally I am a VLC man, and I miss having the keyboard shortcuts.

Shortly after downloading a few things, my download speed plummted. I think Virgin have chocked me for blowing my download limit, which is the first time this has happened. I managed to get a "0" reading on a download speed diagnostic; strangely, it also showed I have a 2MB upload which makes no sense at all. Is cable not asymmetric?

Update

Take it all back. IPlayer installs kservice.exe as an automatic systems service. This spams the outgoing connection even after terminating iplayer. Moreover, it's a CPU hog, that turned my machine to treacle. This rather disingenuous blog post mentions the problem, says "it's outside the scope of this article" and suggests you firewall it out. I have a better idea; the BBC should switch the damn thing off. Very, very poor.

I've been an avid user of fusesmb for a while. I found it to be very good, but a little hard to set up. For no readily apparent reason, it has stopped working for me.

So, now I am trying out sshfs instead. This worked better than fusesmb anyway — in particular directory listing was much quicker which was a real problem with fusesmb. However, I had a major problem which was that rsync did not work to a sshfs mounted directory. I got a wierd error about file renaming. This was a hassle — I use rsync quite a lot. In particular the —delete option is great for websites which I develop in one place, and publish to another.

Anyway, I found the solution today. Delightfully, it is this. Instead of mounting with sshfs, you add a new option to get sshfs -o workaround=rename. It's rare that you see such a honest command line...

I've been looking through the stats created by workrave. I'm slightly surprised to find that I make between 16 and 45,000 keystrokes per day (on my desktop at work — more if I include home). And around half a kilometre of mouse movement.

That's a lot.

I was most entertained my Lord Falconers technically illiterate idea: that online news resources should remove prejudicial information about individuals during trials.

Pretty stupid idea. Apart from the technically difficult task of working out when a web page is about a particular individual, it seems to ignore the reality of the internet — that's is a global resource and British law does not affect it all. Asides from aggregator and archiving sites like http://www.archive.org, which would have to remove, and then reinstate potentially thousands of websites per day.

Suggesting that we pass new rules, attempting to put the genie back in the bottle, lacks any sense at all. Perhaps not a surprise from a judge.

Well, I understand that they want to make some cash, but the sourceforge marketplace dialogue that keeps on popping up is quickly becoming more annoying that the Clippy.

Get rid of it. I only want to say go away once at most.

I've started trying out Eclipse; I've decided to document my experiences as I thought that they might be interesting. Well, possibly. Possibly not. I'm just going to add to this as times goes on. So far, my conclusion? Pain in the backside.

Trying to help my dad out with his computer. I've come to the conclusion that Vista is a pig. It's slow as treacle, unless you turn off all the 3D nonsense which frankly doesn't do much anyway. It's not very stable. Norton anti-virus refused to identify itself to uninstall; when I finally worked it out, the uninstall took for ever. Eventually I had to reboot; it turned out to be because it was waiting for input from me from a dialog underneath the "uninstalling" progress bar. And I could not get it sharing files despite my best attempts. The only nice thing — it knew the name of my router and opened up a browser to http://192.168.1.0 automatically.

Picasa is also a pig. The UI is slow, the scrolling uncontrollable. I want to add captions and place into an export folder but, unaccountablly, this takes about 20 clicks. Urrgh.

Just got a new Plantronics Discovery 510 — this is a bluetooth earpiece that I thought would be good for travelling; no wires to get broken and tangled up in my bag. This is the third device I recieved from Plantronics. The first two, Discovery 340 I think, were both broken. I think it was a systemic fault in the manufacture as they both failed in exactly the same way, during pairing. The 510 is a nicer device (sold at three times the price so that's not surprising). The main advantage, however, is that it actually works which is a relief. The sound quality is not that great though. I guess most people are using this over a mobile where you wouldn't notice, while the drop from normal skype quality is clear. Still, it will be useful, so long as it doesn't break.

Meanwhile, my new Virgin Broadband sufffered it's first outage. Around 18 hours, no connection, no DHCP, no DNS. Pathetic. Their authomated phone support service said "Some people may be having issues, and our engineers are working on it. Turn your modem off and on may fix it". Gods, talk about lack of specifics.

I've just given my laptop a good clean out, in particular removing services I don't use. Killing Zone Alarm and VMWare has together had a massive impact. Previously, the boot took about one and a half minutes, and then after login there was another two minutes before I could actually use the system. The boot is about the same time, but I can use the system in 5 seconds now. Makes a big difference at a conference, where you hibernate and wake a lot.

I'm all in favour of being nice to foreigners, but I think that it's all gone too far myself. We are now being so nice to people from other countries that we are making life harder for decent, hard-working British people.

For the last few days, every time I go to http://www.google.com or http://www.myspace.com, the stupid interface talks to me in French. Just because I am in France. Well, I think that this is just wrong. These websites should be in English everywhere. If the French want to be spoken to in their own language, then they should click a button or set a preference or something.

Anyone know how to stop these and other sites stop being clever and doing the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing?

Well, RSSFwd works pretty well, but it's often has a really slow interface which can be a pain if you want to change, for example, from HTML to normal email. So I'm giving RSS2Email a go. No support for OPML unfortunately, but it seems to work otherwise.

Oops. Just realised that Windows installed onto D, rather than C. So, yet another reinstall on monday.

This is harder work than you might hope. I've installed windows maybe 40 times. It shouldn't be hard.

On my fifth attempt to reinstall windows now. Keep on managing to get something wrong — getting the hard drive partitions backwards or whatever. Also the on the disk format option it has "do you want me to do it quick, or to take ages". I keep on getting the wrong one and there's no way to stop it.

It even tells you "Windows will now format you life; Press Enter to continue" before it starts. And YOU CAN'T GO BACK! IT'S FOREVER!

Hmmmm.

Just got cable fitted. This is the second attempt; first time the engineer didn't show up, or said he did, but didn't try phoning or anything. Wasn't too bad, although took quite a while and I couldn't use my existing extension line as I hoped. Think he should have vacuumed the floor afterwards, though, and was not best pleased to find that he left wall staples on my bedroom floor; would have been more than not best pleased if I had got them in my foot. All seems to be working, though.

Just unplugged my fan, and plugged in my office heater. Winter is here.

I've been trying http://rssfwd.com. Before this I used http://r-mail.org which was okay, but seemed to fail for a lot of feeds. I like Google Reader, but having to go to a different application for just RSS is a pain. I was going for weeks without looking at it. So I am trying email again. It seems to be working for the moment; it has an non HTML layout and (seems) to be able to cope with all the feeds I use.

Guys, this is a PDF tool. Why on earth would I need an RSS reader? I mean, what is the point of that? I already have an RSS reader. I just want to read PDF files, nothing more, nothing less.

Just put a DVD upside down into my windows machine (there were no labels on it, so this was not hard). Windows hung, then told me explorer was not responding, then killed itself, then rebooted. Impressive.

Had to kill this on Ubuntu also. It's eating my entire disk IO all the time making it not very usuable. For the moment, I've just tried turning off the "watching" and left "indexing" on.

I don't know what "watching" or "indexing" actually does. I'm not impressed; this is not windows; having a nice GUI does not mean that you don't have to write technical documentation.

A Vmware upgrade didn't work for me. So I decided to update to Gutsy, the new version of Ubuntu. It mostly worked. Texlive was problematic, but I tracked this down to a copy of language.dat in my TEXINPUTS. Installing from a root console would have solved it, but in the end I just deleted language.dat which shouldn't have been there. Everything else worked straight away, no worries.

Well, except for Xorg of course. It didn't get the widescreen working, nor the track ball scroll wheel emulation. I had to hack the config file by hand. One day, this will all work, but not yet.

I reinstituted incremental backups a few days ago. I have a nice, new, big hard-drive now, so I thought why not. My data is actually copied to quite a few machines, so having a backup on the same hard drive as the data is less of a problem that it seems.

Anyway, a few days later, for the first time in ages, I found today that I had deleted a file I really, really needed but was able to recover it. Let this be a lesson. Backups are good.

I did get this working in the end. Basically, my /etc/samba/smb.conf was wrong and needed fiddling with; gnome even provides a GUI for doing this ("Shared Folders"). Setting the domain and the WINS server and everything works.

Fusesmb is great; I have now symlinked in the machines that I want. It only seems to understand paths like //CAMPUS/machine_name/share which is a bit of a pain; paths like //internal/web which work within CS don't work here. I had to find the machine names by ls-lR'ing through the entirety of SMB space. It's also very slow, so listing directories with a symlink to an SMB location can be a pain.

But, given all of this, it's still great. Having a mount at the file system level rather than in the GUI works well for me. I have command line access, it works in Emacs, I can just forget about it and go about my work.

I've also tried encfs, which is encrypted fuse mounted filesystem backed by a "real" file system. Also, straightforward and works like a dream. One satisfied customer.

Trying this out today. Not working either. I think at heart it's my SMB configuration that is hosed rather than anything else.

Now trying out autofs — the cifs filesystems don't umount cleanly and autofs seemed like a nicer solution. Anyway, it looks like it's working — autofs and mount all show the right thing — but I can't cd into the directory.

One of the things that I liked most about windows, which I can't get to work under linux is start or from cygwin cygstart — which does all the right things with paths. Basically, it means "do the right thing with this file"; so start hello.txt will open hello.txt in Notepad or Emacs. On linux nautilus . works for directories but fails for files.

Today was no end of hassle as I tried to get SMB shares mounted — the problem here seems to be that it needs IP numbers; then I tried to get latex installed — tetex is broken, as you need to put the main directory in TEXINPUTS, TeXLive just doesn't install; and finally a recurring problem with vmware server which I think I have solved (removing vmware player services), but won't know till the reboot. Hmmm.

I took the advantage of having not being in the middle of anything as a result of coming back from holiday to move to linux, and am not typing this on Ubuntu. A few things to do yet — not least getting my website generation working, so this blog may appear several days after I type it.

It's all gone reasonably smoothly so far. Took lots of running of unison. Got my email running today; some 350 mails in main box, with around 1000 in total (plus another 2000 spam). Hmmm, lots to read.

And permalinks added. I wonder if I can get myself named as a DOI or LSID authority, then I can immortalise my thoughts forever into the future.

In a fit of paranoia, I have decided to add a disclaimer to the bottom of all my web pages, including this one. This is probably unnecessary and legally pointless, but no one can blame me for not trying. For my next trick, I was thinking of fiddling with my stylesheets; quite a few dim-witted friends of mine have asked me whether I was colour blind, not aware that this the clash of colours is, in fact, a deeply satirical comment on society, the role of education and the monarchy in the 21st century. Suggestions for other possibilities in the colour palette are accepted.

The CARMEN project came to a grinding halt this afternoon. We decided to try facebook as a social networking site for the project. It turns out that everyone has to register everyone else as a friend; nice though it is to think that you have lots of friends, Facebook actually requires n squared number of clicks. Poor old Frank, being a young whippersnapper with lots of friends on Facebook, saw his laptop turn into the machine that goes ping as all his mates added him and sent him zombie requests; how does anyone get any work done in these days of social networking.

I've put comments onto the blog now. I've done this using HaloScan which is a javascript based system; I can insert comments without modifying the source of the blog. I'm a little nervous about this; I'd rather have comments under my control, but this seems the easiest way for the moment. It basically seems to work, although I had hoped that the comments would be injected back into the main page; something to work on.

Permalinks come tomorrow. With the comments, I have all the machinary in place that I need for this.

Tried to install Feisty recently. Turned out to work fine (the proxy business at install now works). But there were still problems. The mouse configuration (I use a logitech marble mouse) was a pain. Logitech make nice equipment but their devices never work properly with anything else and are hell to configure. Combine this with Xorgs bizarre configuration scripts (while they have sadly not thrown away since the fork).

I find it incredible that no one has written a nice mouse configurator, and more incredible that you have to restart X to see what the effects are. This really needs to be sorted.

As described previously, Google Calendars was broken for me. But, magically and randomly, it appears to have fixed itself today. Thanks heavens for that.

Decided to register for facebook today to see what it's all about. Did not get off to a good start as it would not accept my name as "legitimate". Ended up registering as "John Smith".

Entertaining. Wake up people. Lots of people have lots of different names. Blacklisting on words does not make sense.

I've just been engaged in an enormous rant about the Access Grid. This is video conferencing software that I've been using for over 5 years now. It's dreadful. I live for the day that we can dump it, especially now that skype and teamspeak have outdated it. We shall see...

Google calendar — or rather google mail — seems to have broken for me. Instead of giving me an "add to calendar" button when an event comes in, it blithely tells me "sign up for calendar". Well, I already am! And events gets shown randomly translated into a US timezone.

This is really, really bad! I've come to rely on an electronic calendar, and without it I am in real trouble.

Noticed today that azureus, also called zudeo has now become Vuze. I noticed this because a new version has appeared. After an hour or so, I worked out how to switch of the silly interface.

One of the ironies of the situation is that the BBC content is currently not available in the UK, just in the US. Strange. I could have sworn that I paid for this stuff first time around.

I was a little bit saddened to find the kerfuffle over an encryption key for HD-DVD being reported as a 21st Century Rebellion.

Don't get me wrong, here, I find the idea that industry should have the right to control how we watch films distasteful; I think it will limit what we can do with the digital content that we choose to buy; I think that it will result in horrible user interfaces, with limited choices; I think it will result in far more control being placed in the hands of a few people than is healthy.

But in the past, rebellion meant slaves struggling for the freedom, workers struggling for the profit of their own work, minorities struggling for civil liberties. It's a bit sad when this it becomes posting a number on a website like digg.com. Lets face it, if anyone gets sued, it will be the admins of digg, not the people posting. This is hardly standing up to be counted, now is it?

At least some of my chums had the guts to put it up on their own websites. Still not exactly Tom Paine but at least it's a start.

Spent today fiddling around with Je-S. This is the web portal that a number of the research councils use to submit grants.

It's a delightfully baroque and obscure piece of software. They appear to have worked very hard at the usability aspects — it would have been hard to make a system this unusable by random chance.

The system stores a grant in a two deep hierarchy with a small amount of information at the bottom of each. The end result of this is that you have to click down, then up, then down, then up to find out anything at all about exactly what is in the grant.

They also have this fabulous system for logins. Basically, if you login, and then don't do anything for 20 minutes, Je-S will automatically log you out. This would be minorly irritated. The designers clear thought that this wasn't good enough, so as well as loging out, it locks the entire system for another 20 minutes preventing you from loging back in. When it does this it tells you:

"This account is already in use. Please ensure other browser sessions are properly logged out before attempting to log in."

It clearly knows that you are not logged in because it logged you out, but obviously telling what you have actually done would be too much like hard work.

The whole idea of the portal is really good; we used to have to submit kilos of paperwork by post in quadruplicate. It's amazing that some software engineers could take such a perfectly good idea and completely strangle it. They appear to have managed to make a user interface which is SO bad, that you hunger for the days of word docs and print-outs.

Just got home. Tomorrow, I am going to Edinburgh, but I've left my laptop power supply at work. I'm not going to pick it up and get the train at 7:30.

Pretty pathetic really. Why do laptops all have different power requirements? I can see varying voltage requirements, but all the different shapes and sizes? At the end, this variety is not for any good reason, but for an economic imperative. Vendor lock-in, to the direct deteriment of the user.

Going to be interesting doing a workshop laptop-free for the first time in ages. I'm falling back to old technology — pen and paper.

Was particularly pleased to get the following error today:

I would have been somewhat less pleased if it had happened the next time I rebooted but, fortunately, it all sorted itself out.

A first for me today. I have had an ongoing Silly Ideas wiki running for sometime, but someone finally tried one of them today, namely by Portable Music idea.

Perhaps this will spur me on, as I haven't written up a silly idea for ages.

Took rather a lot of messing around, but I should have an "Everything" page now. The problem was that people kept saying I never posted anything. In reality, it's because the posts were split among four feeds. So, now, there are five!

As it happens, this is was a good thing. I use muse to generate these pages, but I've had to hack it a bit to split the files up — I want to maintain a single source file but then generate out a one per month chunk of HTML.

Muse is quite clever; it works out whether output files are out of date, but assumes that there is only a single file. I'd hacked the code so that it checked all the output files. This never worked well, so I've removed it. Things seem to work better now and there are less changes between the publish function supplied by muse, and the one I overload it with.

Perhaps, I should just take Dan's advice and use a content management system. But, this way I don't need databases and all that malarky.

Part of the infrastructure at Newcastle moved over to the Shibboleth provided by SDSS, at least as far I can tell from the login screen.

It's fabulous. The idea is to provide a federated login so that, at least as far as I can tell, login information is managed at a single point, and allows authorisation at multiple institutions. All of this sounds like a good thing, but they've actually managed to achieve the notable success of making logins harder than it was before.

In the past, I would go to a URL like http://ness.cs.ncl.ac.uk, which is our coursework system, be presented with a login screen, which would login me into the system. Nowadays, I get take to a screen like this:

The purpose of this form is to let me tell the browser to go back to the system that I asked it to go in the first place. There I get another login screen which, to make our life easier, has been nobbled so that the browsers won't remember the logins. It also seems to be crashing a lot now, so that you have to refresh your browser to get it to work.

The help link, incidentally, at the bottom takes you to a page which tells you:

SDSS Development Federation

The SDSS Federation no longer accepts new applications to join the federation. Applications should instead be made to the UK Federation.

Help is not forthcoming.

When it first came out, session management was put forward as a feature, but I am starting to think that the inability to turn the damn thing off is actually a bug.

If you turn the OS off, with firefox still running, then it thinks there has been a crash, and offers to open all your pages again which I never want — if I have turned the machine off I am unlikely to remember which pages I had open. If there has been a crash, then having Firefox open all the pages again, one of which made it crash last time, seems like insanity.

Acrobat is a highly irritating application. It always tryies to be smart-ass and does far too much. Today, just trying to download it failed. The adobe site insists on using a download manager, which was just crashing.

Eventually, I managed to get the metadata file that the download manger uses — embedded in this was a URL. 10 seconds later, download complete.

Adobe, sort your life out. I just want to read a document. How hard can that be?

When I moved up to Newcastle and had Outlook inflicted on me for a while, I moved to using a trackball. I've found that they are much, much easier on the wrist for mouse-heavy applications. The experience has generally been good. However, logitech insist of supplying mouse drivers which attempt to be clever, and do the right thing all the time. One of these things, was to screw up cutting and pasting into a cygwin window. Finally, I have found the solution:

bind '"\C-y":paste-from-clipboard'

Emacs keybindings in cygwin: what more could you want?

Been trying out Zudeo. Basically, it's Azuerus with a nice front end. It doesn't take too much to get behind the front though: strange messages about NATs, UPnP devices and port numbers pop up with regularity. They need to think more if they really want to sell this to the mass market. The basic idea of a high quality version of YouTube is fine, but it takes too long at the moment for the download.

For the life of me, I can't get google calendar to use the correct reply-to address when sending calendar events. This is a pain. Once you let an alternative email out there, people will start using it whether you want them to or not.

Nothing ever works exactly as planned.

Well, the calendar move seems to have gone okay. I have a slightly baroque mechanism set up. Pulling down the ical files from google every night should give me offline access, in a read-only way using sunbird. I've then got an export caledar in sunbird which, by hook or crook, will eventually work it's way back to my website, from where google can pick it up. Then I can copy it to my main calendar and, finally, delete it when it works it way back to sunbird. I was going to give Calgoo a go, but I didn't like the look of their license.

I've been using Planner mode for the last few months, to keep track of appointments. I like it because it integrates well with Emacs, which is my main environment. But I've decided it just doesn't cut the mustard. It lacks two main things. Firstly, it can't do ICAL based mail negotiation of meetings. Secondly, it lacks a nice overviewer. I developed something which addresses the latter, but it's not enough. So I keep on missing early meetings, because I didn't see them coming up the day before.

In the end, I've decided to go for Google calendar. It generally integrates nicely with mail, although I'll have to check my gmail account periodically, which is a pain as I don't use it for anything else. The AJAX interface of the calendar is quite nice; I don't need to use it as rapidly as email, so that it's a bit clunky is not a huge problem. Pity that right clicks don't work.

Moving current events is going to be a pain, though. I think I shall keep planner, though, as a task manager. It's pretty good at that.

Read a very bad article on the BBC website about free security software. Very bad because it suggests that people using free security software, may be using software which doesn't do the job, failing to stop many attacks or even importing trojans.

All, of course, entirely true, but providing the entirely false impression that software you paid for is going to do any better. Security software is like insurance — you don't know if it's any good, until you get in trouble. Actually, it's even worse with than insurance; when you crash your car, they might actually pay up. With security software, by the time you find that it's rubbish your machine has been trashed. However are you to purchase wisely, when you have no ability to judge, and where all the "experts" have a stake — they guy slagging off free products works for McAfee.

Been having an interesting discussion on the relative merits of mailing lists as opposed to web forums. Personally, I hate having to read things in web forums, because I am always find the interface terrible, particularly for writing notes as you are largely limited to a rubbish text box. Part of the reason why I hate web forums so much, though, is because I am a Gnus user; it was originally a usenet, news group reader and it's user interface it designed for reading high traffic, where most of what you want you get, you don't want to read. When I was had to use Outlook earlier this academic year, I was in real troubles, because it's user interface could just not cope with large amounts of traffic — click, click, point, read, click, click, right click, mark, read — read by date or by thread, but not both.

However, during the discussion I realised that there was a display that Gnus doesn't do; it would be really nice if the summary display — a threaded, indented set of subject lines — could also display the first four of five lines of text underneath. Currently, subjects and contents are heavily mixed.

Just taken delivery of my new machine: a Sony TX2XP. It's quite cute. The keyboard takes a little bit of getting used to, as it's fairly small, but it's probably worth the hassle for the overall size and weight of the machine.

In general, it seems a significant enhancement of the previous machine I had. The mouse buttons are nicer than the old one. The power management drivers are cleverer (the DVD still powers off when in low power mode, but switches on again if you want it...although it won't switch off again if you don't). The only real fly in the ointment are the graphic drivers which still don't work properly: they just cannot cope with multiple set ups. The previous version tried to guess what you wanted, but often got it wrong (setting up a project as an extended desktop for instance). This system has some right click context menus, and includes an option to set up schemes, so you can pick what you want. Sadly, it's totally broken. It seems to randomly forget schemes (although they come back later) and, even when it remembers them, it doesn't get them right, leaving the resolution unchanged. Pity, because it's a good idea.

Hopefully, this one will last a little longer than my last one.

Just tried using a new system for postgraduate admissions at Newcastle. It's built on top of the Universities SAP system, which means that it probably cost lots of cash and barely works. It's taken me about a week to login. Amasingly the system seems to consist of scanning in documents and displaying them as a tiff image, surrounded by enough Javascript to ensure that it will only display with a single viewer.

I went to a talk once by Ted Nelson, during which he slagged of Acrobat. His comments were over the top, but he has a point. Transferring a printed document to screen decreases it's usability. It's the 21st Century people! We shouldn't still be doing this.

I've been having wrist problems recently, so I decided to try a track ball. I've bought a Logitech Marble trackball. It has a track ball and four buttons — two main ones, and two smaller ones which can be bound to different things. The secondary buttons did strange things by default (operating back and forward history in Firefox, and Mouse 4 and 5 in Emacs). So I ended up installing the Logitech drivers to rebind these. Very annoying. As well as mouse drivers it insisted on installing Music jukebox and a desktop E-Bay shortcut! This has to be the most irrelevat co-install ever. The drivers are also annoying; the GUI removes the "pointer trails" options which I generally use and always binds a click on both the main buttons to something, rather than just letting in through to the underlying system, thereby blocking cygwin's middle mouse emulation, for example. I managed to recover this situation with a bit of judicious registray hacking. Pointer trails can be turned on here, and the allowable gap for recoginition of a keychord can be turned down. But, really, should we have to go to these lengths?

Still. my intial experiences with the track ball are good. My wrist already feels more comfortable; it's largely static during mouse use. My accuracy still leaves something to be desired, but it not far behind mouse use already. Hopefully this will improve in time which will mean I can turn up the speed somewhat as well. For those with stiff wrists (oh, er, Missus) a trackball is recommended.

I've borrowed an old IBM laptop to be going on with. It's fine. Nice big screen, good hard drive. Slightly broken keyboard and a wireless card that only seems to work at 11M. I'm going to get one of the small Sony 11in laptops in the long term though. This machine is something like 3kg which is way to heavy.

Yep, shortly after getting broadband at home, and a funky new NAS box, by laptop died. It had been getting increasingly slow. I had decided that this was probably because it was having a Microsoft Moment, although there was possibility that physical trauma was the cause. So, I tried a full reinstall. This went okay, but didn't solve the problem.

On Saturday, while drunk, I discovered that it was only registering half a gig of memory, rather than the 1G it should have. So I took the memory off, blew the contacts clean with compressed air and reinserted. And now it won't boot. Worse, I have now discovered it should only have half a gig of memory.

Never, ever fiddle with hardware when drunk. It's only going to end in tears.

Finally got my broadband connection. An interesting experience; spent 20 minutes fiddling with it, and failing to get a connection before I gave up and phoned the support. They were alright — the modem drivers needed re-installing and the windows config needed doing manually. Two days later, I got a Linksys ADSL Modem/Wireless router. Ironically, I managed to get up and working in five minutes.

My file splitting scripts didn't work initially. The problem is that Unison uses temporary file names while copying and this includes directories. So if you transfer a single directory containing 2G, for example, Unison will use a temporary directory till it has the whole lot. So I tried rsync instead; this worked well up to a point — about 2.4G as it happens, where a bug causes it to block.

Finally, I worked out how to get Unison to work — firstly, I run it with

ignore = Name {*.*}

This matches all the files (and not directories by and large). So the directory structure gets transferred. Then, I run Unison again; now it transfers the files so you get a restart with the granularity of a file. For really large files, I can still use my split file scripts.

Having said this, I am getting very variable download rates from the ADSL — 1.5Mbs and more at night, but during the day rarely more than 500K. To be expected, I supposed.

I want to use Unison, the file synchroniser to move files between home and work, when my broadband comes; this means I can put files into a transfer space, and remove them either side: I won't have to clean up twice. There's a problem though: Unison can't restart an interrupted transfer. This is a pity because it uses the rsync algorithm and copies to a temporary file; it should be easy enough to restart the transfer. It effectively blocks using Unison over the (slow) broadband that I am buying, at least unaided. So I've written some scripts to copy and split files into small bits. I'll release them to the website in a few days time. Can't believe no one has done this before, but I couldn't find anything.

Decided to get broadband for the house; bit of a nightmare; there are so many variables that the different packages are hard to compare. Bulldog appears the cheapest at a tenner for 8Mb, but isn't available here. Irritatingly, they over a slower package for more. CarphoneWarehouse announced a new package today, but this involves the phone and has an 18 month tie in, and a 30 quid connection fee. Currently, tiscali appears the best, though. It's slow (1Mb), but cheap and uncapped, and seem to have good house moving policies. The only problem is that they don't do static IP's. I think I can get around this, with various NAT fiddlings, but it's not-trivial.

This is all a pain; there is too much choice here, too many options. This seems to be true in general for telecoms. The problem is that it's just too expensive at the moment, so people are actually forced to care about these differences. Give it another year or two and I think the prices in general (for non-mobile anyway) will come down enough, to where it doesn't matter. At least, I hope so.

Got a reply from the Business Directorate in my attempt to get a signed copyright waiver. I tried the technique of writing to the head of the department which seems to have resulted in a reply. Actually, it produced several replies, from the head, and the next down, and then the next down again. Fingers crossed we will be there soon.

I've been trying to get the University to fill in a copyright disclaimer for the Free Software Foundation. This was painful at the Manchester and looks like it's going to be similarly so here. So far no one has any clue about who I should even email; I'm working on the business directorate who are supposed to be in charge of IP. So far, they are ignoring my email; soon, I am going to go and sit on their door in person, till I get a reply.

This doesn't bode well though. When I tried to get a login for submit.ac.uk, it took about a week and a paper chase of 6 people before I finally got to the one who knew.

I'm a huge fan of Unison, the file synchroniser. I use it religiously; half of my system is based around it. It has a few quirks, however, and today I fell into one of them. I'm sure I've been here before, but I couldn't remember the cause.

Essentially, it gives a cryptic message about the transferred file disappearing. The basic reason is this; Unison can't cope with a path been included for synchronisiation twice; it twices to synch the file twice, and each time messes with the other.

It was hard, tedious work, but, today, I finally dumped Outlook. Nearly six months of using it and it was driving me mad. No decent threading, slow interface, battery sapping processor requirement and a wrist-aching dependency on the mouse. Awful, truely awful.

So, it's back to Gnus.

The irony is, this is all unnecessary. Our local systems people, ISS, have a daft policy of actively trying to stop people using other clients. This is to reduce the amount of work they have to do, and to encourage the use of Outlooks shared calendars. So, they've switched the IMAP interface to Exchange off. Result, if you want the calenar, you have to use the Exchange email, and therefore, outlook; in my case, the cost of UI is such that it's not worth advantage of the shared calendar.

It's good to be back in the rapid environment of Gnus, though; I can move around quickly, I don't need the mouse and I can control what the email looks like. As a side effect, I'll be back in a programmable environment which will be great for returning coursework and the like.

Windows seems very confused; if you have two network interfaces, one with an internet connection and one without, windows seems unable to work it out; sometimes, it tries to access the world through the wrong one. Confusing. Answers on a post-card, please.

I've been using iTunes, recently, to play my music. It's quite a nice interface; it's sad, however, that it's crippleware. It doesn't include other peoples' shared music in its "recently played" or "most played" lists.

It also lacks a "watch directory" option; if you add music to a directory, you have to add all the files individually: add the directory, again, and everything becomes duplicated. Picasa has this, why not iTunes?

Started to have a look at Darcs today. It's one of the first distributed version control systems that I've looked at in detail; I couldn't see how they worked myself, but it's not that difficult. Everything is a branch and you pass patches around; obvious — at least, once you think of it.

Spent about an hour trying to work out why the aforementioned NAS box was totally failing. The ftp server seemed to be working, the machine seemed to be identifying itself.

Turned out to be the firewall. Windows can cope without a call-back it seems. It looks rather like this was also the cause of poor performance on small files. I've managed to get my network card up to 30% utilisation; saturday it was rarely more than 2%.

Finally got around to buying myself a network attached storage box. I needed this for home backups and mass storage. I bought a Buffalo Linkstation — I've had some reasonable experiences with their Terastation while I was at Manchester.

This is much the same; simple, well put together. It would have been nice if it had sftp or rsync servers on them (particularly the rsync!). The only problem I have with this box is that it seems very optimized for large files; if you are transferring lots of small files, then the speed at which you can get stuff across the network is very, very slow. Perhaps this is windows though, who knows?