Poll

Do you still buy printed computer magazines?

Total Votes: 14

1. • The Replacement Solution

   • bySpode on9th May, 2008 inGeneral

   • I've finally got fed up with trying to fix the sound on this Shuttle with ALC882 sound. I've tried increasing buffers in ALSA and fiddled with pretty much every option under the sun. Surprisingly, despite the rest of the complaints on the Ubuntu Forums, it wasn't a PulseAudio issue as the same issues occurred in ALSA and OSS.

     I took the replacement solution, which can barely be called a solution, by popping in a spare Sound Blaster Live! Value I had lying around. I booted up, and PulseAudio worked flawlessly with it out of the box. I'll have a fiddle with it in a months time, to see if Ubuntu has solved the issue.

     After a little fiddling with my EeePC, I realised it would happily charge and would happily be powered by the mains (i.e remove the battery). However, it couldn't cope with the current draw of charging and running by mains at the same time. This turned out to be caused by a modification I had made to the power supply. I had replaced the power cord with a retractable USB cable, to make the PSU a little more portable. However, it would seem there weren't enough strands to deliver the current required. I made the assumption that if the cable couldn't cope, it would heat up (which it didn't), so crossed it off my list of possibilities a little too early. I soldered back the original cable and it's working like a charm. The annoying this, is I removed my Bluetooth and 32GB modifications as part of my problem solving. In the process, I've managed to kill the 32GB drive, giving me nothing by input/output errors

     I am tempted to sell this unit and upgrade to the 900 series, but I've also been offered a very good deal on an HD DV Camera - so I'm a little torn!

     From a media perspective, I went to see Iron Man at the cinema last night. I think I can put that down as the best film I've seen recently (considerably better than the new Stargate film). Probably helped along by my childhood fascination with wanting to be a robot. Some nice plot twists, good overall storyline, a cool main character, excellent CGI and funky sound track What more do you need for some evening entertainment?

     Musically, I'm still listening to As Tall As Lions a lot. I never did get around to reviewing their albums, but of the two, the self titled album is probably the most accessible, but strangely their five track EP "Into The Flood" is one I often find myself sticking on before bed. The Carousel and Acrobat, from LAFCADIO, are strong enough songs to consider buying that album too. Definitely worth checking out.

   • Comments: 1
     

2. • The IT Journalist- a Dying Breed?

   • bySpode on8th May, 2008 inMusic, Film & Media

   • I always found classifying myself as a journalist difficult, made worse by my finger in every pie, ad-hoc work situation. As a description, it just doesn't define me – in fact “the modern geek” is probably the closest approximation I've found to date (and it's a phrase I coined first ). IT journalism is so separate from “real” journalism, that it fully justifies the need for its own title.

     In the world of IT journalists, there are two types of people. There are those that have trained as Journalists – so can write really well, but don't really understand the topic fully, and those who really understand the technology but really struggle to, well, you know, explain things. Both types of people are just as frustrating to deal with, in their own ways.

     I started Spode's Abode when I was 15, and English was my weakest subject – B/C at GCSE. Even now, although my writing has improved over the years, I would still consider myself average at best. At 16 I started writing for Computer Shopper Labs. It was only at this point I learned to understand the market, and the context for which to apply my technical knowledge. I also fed of the years of writing experience that the rest of the team had. I like to think I've been lucky enough to eventually land in the middle – technically proficient enough to out smart most Journos, yet a good enough writer to be able to explain myself. Even trained writers aren't perfect – that's what sub-editors are for

     The unfortunate truth is that in most cases, an editor is most likely to give work to freelancers that take the least editing, over someone who is technically more accurate. The up shot of this, is that a large majority of IT reviews and by extension, IT Journalists, have weak technological understanding.

     I've naturally met a lot of Journalists, and had enough conversations with them to be very cautious about trusting what I read in reviews. Hiding behind the authoritative mask of a publication, often lies a barely functional human, counting the hours until the open bar at the next press launch.
     
     Realistically, the technical advice you get will probably be better from a friend in the know. They might not be able to explain it as well, but that's what clarification questions are for. What Journalists tend to be good at, is knowing the market well, so they can tell you how a product fits into the current line up. However, if you ask anyone who is looking into a product of X type, chances are they are well researched and are going to know the market pretty well too.

     Many people turn to friends for technical support – this very reason is the only way AMD ever sold CPUs, as it certainly wasn't their marketing budget that did it. The power of blogs and the watering down and merging of blogging and journalism is testament to the points I'm trying to bring across.

     Browsing eBuyer the other week, I bought several products, purely off the back of their price, the rating other users gave it, and the promotional videos eBuyer supplied. Who needs a professional review? If you talk to the journalist writing the review, he can probably summarise it in two sentences for you. Instead, they have to add in loads of filler with the product specifications (which are available on the manufacturers website), and filling in the gaps for people who have never touched a computer in their life.

     This is the information age, people are used to reading multiple sources to get what they need, the one stop shop scenario just doesn't happen with publications anymore, as people turn to search engines and portal sites for answers. Reading the “Conclusion” of a review, googling for the specifications and checking a price comparison site for prices, is pretty much all the information you need on whether a product is worth buying. Consumers aren't stupid – if a product is duff, people soon know about it.

     So there are two things on my mind, one is classifying myself. As someone who has gone from bedroom site, to paid Journalist, to blogger and now to paid blogger, the line really blurs. But possibly more controversially, with the mass of Journalist-beating bloggers out there and PCs becoming closer to toasters when it comes to choice - when will the IT Journalism bubble burst?

     The mass sales decline in magazines that review IT products (eg. Computer Shopper) and the increase in sales of magazines that show how to use IT products (eg. Computer Active) suggest that what the world needs is a few more doers, and a few less reviewers.

   • Comments: 6
     

3. • Hardy Heron - Ubuntu 8.04

   • bySpode on2nd May, 2008 inSoftware

   • Coming home to a new Linux distribution was almost as pleasing as coming home to a tidy office and bedroom (Spode tip: always tidy the house before you go on holiday!). Hardy Heron is the next Long Term Support release of Ubuntu, since 6.06. Frankly, I have found Gutsy to be such a damned good release, Ubuntu has a lot to live up to.

     My main machine has 64-Bit Ubuntu on it, and the HP laptop I've been using had 32-Bit, both 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon. I felt these should be my first test beds.

     Karlson, my over the road internet proxy, was smart enough to set up an apt-cache. This is essentially an apt proxy, so if a package is already downloaded, it hands it straight to you across the network. If it isn't, it downloads it, and it stays there for the next person. Updating multiple machines, this made my life a lot easier. Using a focussed wireless antennae I managed to boost my signal strength somewhat and that also improved update speeds - getting in the region of 2MB/s downloading locally over the wireless.

     Starting with the HP laptop, I don't know what I did when I was in Italy, but I managed to upset it somewhat, no longer connecting to the network either wired or wirelessly, or even mounting any flash drives. I did run out of power at a couple of points, so there could have been hard drive corruption, but more than likely, I just changed something I shouldn't have. However, booting into rescue mode and setting an IP manually, I managed to get the machine onto the local network. From there, I did a manual "apt-get dist-upgrade" after adjusted the aptitude sources list first.

     This churned away, pulling the packages down, before failing with the error:

     apt-get

     failed trying to overwrite '/usr/share/applications/screensavers/ubuntu_theme.desktop', which is also in package gnome-screensaver

     I felt overwriting this file (essentially a shortcut) wouldn't be too detrimental, so manually installed the package:

     dpkg -i --force-depends --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/human-theme_0.18_all.deb

     Then I simply re-ran apt-get dist-upgrade, but with an "-f" switch. After a while, it was finished and rebooted. All my previous woes were fixed and my upgrade successful.

     I then went through the same process with my 64-Bit machine, which took a little longer as the packages weren't already cached. Curiously, I came across the same ubuntu_theme.desktop error, which I couldn't find documented anywhere on the web, so I don't know what I'm doing that's so special. However, after this, it booted up fine without fail.

     One of the big reasons I moved to Ubuntu was the ability to do a distribution upgrade, so I was glad that it went (fairly) flawlessly.

     So what changes have I noticed? Well, oddly, the first thing I noticed was that "Restricted Drivers Manager" has been renamed to "Hardware Drivers". But even odder is the fact that the change has only been made in the 32-Bit version.

     Firefox has been changed from version 2.0 to 3.0 Beta 5. At first, I thought it was a strange choice for an LTS release to have a beta product, but as someone pointed out in this piece describing a little more about the new release, FireFox 2.0 may have been a final product but it was still pretty flakey and unstable, so even thought FF3 is in beta, it's still a more stable version.

     It's my first use of FireFox 3, and I have to admit, it has a lot of features that I really like!

     OpenOffice has been updated to version 2.4, but I imagine we won't notice much difference until version 3.0. Pidgin has been updated to a newer version too, that I'm finding very frustrating as you can no longer resize the input portion of the window.

     Doing multiple file copies, instead of having multiple copy windows open, someone finally had the sensible idea of just having all the windows amalgamate into one - much like a download manager would. That's a nice touch.

     One major change I've noticed while administering, is the "unlock" button. This basically elevates you to root, so you can adjust settings that need elevation. This has the benefit that some applications you can launch without root access, merely to read data (which is often desired), without having the login.

     On the HP notebook, Desktop Effects (wobbly windows etc.) worked out of the box, which was nice to see. But it still didn't support the Broadcom wireless card. Doing this still involves using ndiswrapper. A graphical tool for working with ndiswrapper, that literally involves pointing to the Windows drivers, would be a really positive step for Ubuntu.

     One of the bigger changes has been moving the sound over to the PulseAudio system. This is something that happened in Fedora 8 too, and caused me problems then. In Ubuntu, it's receiving nothing but complaints, especially with people suggesting it is a beta solution, and shouldn't be in an LTS release. Hardy won't become LTS until June, so there is still a small amount of time to iron out these bugs, but I have to admit I wonder if it's a wise choice. ALSA does seem to do a pretty good job by itself.

     I have turned off Pulse Audio, but even without it, my onboard sound is now incredibly unhappy with pops and clicks all over the place. I have a suspicion I need to increase the audio buffering on my card, but I don't have time right now to go fiddling with ALSA configuration. I'm going to put up with it for a couple of days and see if someone in the Ubuntu forums comes up with a solution. I might also try the 32-Bit Live CD to see if the problem is still there.

     Overall, there are a few tweaks here and there, but it doesn't feel hugely different to Gutsy, which was already a pretty fine distribution. Some of the changes that have been made, are at the installation phase, such as the ability to install straight away without loading the entire Live CD (which can take a while). So at some point I'll be giving a fresh install a go.

     This article suggests that power consumption has Vista beat, and this article whets my appetite for a new type of SSD.

   • Comments: 5
     

4. • I'm Back! (again)

   • bySpode on2nd May, 2008 inGeneral

   • No sooner had I returned, I left again. After my few taxing weeks, I decided I needed a holiday and went out to Italy for a week, with school friend and ex band member, Richard Williams. Our flights were super cheap, costing £125 return, for three seats. One each, plus another for the Guitar. It was cheaper to get a seat for the guitar than it was to put it in the hold. Of course those seats were apparently "free" - I really wish they quoted actual costs.

     I went out to see my parents, who run a Bed and Breakfast, and several holiday homes in the village of Trisobbio, some 45 minutes from Genova (Genoa) in Northern Italy. Check out the website if you want to know more about getting a room with them, or just want to see some pictures of the area.

     

     We stayed in one of the houses that was pretty much in the dead centre of the village. It was absolutely idyllic, with the one downside of no internet access. Frankly, I'm glad of this, as a little disconnection did me some good. Rich and I went out there with the intention of writing a new album, for our new joint project. We wrote 6 complete songs, and we have a few more to work on, plus some instrumental tracks. So we should have enough soon for the album, which we will be making free of charge to stream from the website, or a minimal cost for a higher quality, DRM free download, with bonus tracks. We won't be gigging the songs at all, the intention being purely internet sales. We have written them in mind as also being able to be performed as acoustic tracks, so I'm not entirely against the idea.

     

     As well as writing music, we drank far too much of the local wines, went on a few bike rides, basked in the glorious sun, took rabbits for walks and played scrabble. Maybe not everyone's idea of a good time, but suited me.

     

     As my EeePC appears to have died on me, no longer charging, I was forced to take out an HP Notebook that my brother recently purchased in bulk at £250 a piece from eBuyer. Naturally, I wiped Vista and put a copy of Ubuntu on straight away. It was a surprisingly nice notebook to use, and at £250, you really can't complain!

     Now I'm back home, I have to get quite a lot of stuff ready for Think Bikes, as the demo season is coming in thick and fast, as is the good weather.

   • Comments: 8
     

5. • Slitaz - USB How To

   • bySpode on23rd April, 2008 inSoftware

   • I'm on holiday in Italy this week, but Alex @ Custom PC has just informed me that my article on installing Slitaz to a bootlable USB drive has been published online.

     If you haven't tried Slitaz yet, perhaps give this a read. I don't have much in the way of an internet connection at the moment, so don't expect much out of me this week

   • Comments: 1
     

6. • I'm Back, Baby!

   • bySpode on18th April, 2008 inGeneral

   • Wow, what a tough few weeks this has been. I've been involved in organising an event for over 300 doctors from 31 different countries, coming to the UK for a conference on drug abuse. If any of you have ever been involved in events organisation, it's relentless. The transport alone is tough enough, but really is the tip of the iceberg. I've been working non-stop running up to the event, and even more-so when on-site. Staying in the hotel isn't a luxury, it just means they can work you harder. lol. I feel my £240 a night hotel was somewhat wasted on me, as I spent only a few hours in it each day
     
     The room I was staying was on the top floor overlooking London, but more importantly had a lovely LCD TV, which happened to have a D-SUB connection. I plugged in my EeePC, and it certainly improved my ability to check e-mails and watch Red Dwarf

     However, for some reason my EeePC has started misbehaving. It is no longer charging, and even using just mains with the battery unplugged, it would turn off when powering the external screen. I guess I did have a 32GB flash drive, bluetooth, external keyboard, external hard drive and an LCD display plugged in. Maybe I was just taxing it too much? I'll have a look at it over the next couple of days to see what's what. I'm semi-hoping it's broken so I can purchase the new version

     One of the things I was shocked at, while running the event, was the cost of internet. £17 per 24 hours in the hotel room. That's shocking considering I could get 3G via my phone for less than that. But this is an expected cost. What I didn't expect, was that in our on-site office, which was on an identical connection with the same "room number" prompt, we were expected to pay a £250 setup fee and £50 per day, per computer. It seems that adding "business" to costing schemes allows you to charge insane amounts.

     As we'd already contractually agreed to do this, we took one computer and one connection. I then used a cable-ready Netgear router to share this both wired and wirelessly to all the machines we needed. Thank you, NAT. Then using Ethernet over power, I shared this connection three rooms across. Downstairs, we had 4 computers setup as booths for delegates to give feedback and other such things. I managed to persuade the network guy to adjust the patch panel so that we could patch straight through downstairs for "local network traffic only". Of course, a switch and wireless hub later, and I had the entire downstairs floor connected to the internet too.

     Even with all these extra computers connected that should have cost us £50 a piece, the bill was still way too much. What's more, if I had known in advance, I could have just setup a WAP in client mode connecting to the wireless connection registered under my room number at £17 a day, and shared this instead. Still, I'm not paying the bill so it's not my problem, but it does make my blood boil a little, seeing the ridiculous costs that hotel were pushing our way, carried out by incompetent staff whom barely have a grasp on the English language.

     All in all, the event was tiresome and has completely absorbed my life for the past few weeks. However, my bank manager has explained to me that it was probably for the best

   • Comments: 2
     

7. • 9000 School PCs Go Linux

   • bySpode on8th April, 2008 inSoftware

   • Over in Switzerland, 9000 PCs have made the switch from Windows to Linux, after a period of dual booting. When I hear about the decisions other European countries make correctly, it makes me want to emigrate, just so my eventual children get a decent deal.

     Karl and I were talking about GIMP and Kino last night, and came to the conclusion that although both are technically capable, they both lack in the interface department. If the Government spent £200,000 a year, they could employ a few coders to work full time on improving the interfaces on these softwares and in under a year, we'd have two excellent photo editing and video editing packages. I wonder what job I need to apply for, in order to make such a decision

     The Inquirer has a nice piece on impending fuel cells in our mobile devices, and science daily suggests that dogs have no concept of time passing - which would explain why you never hear them complaining about public transport.

   • Comments: 10
     

8. • Kino, OS Video Editor

   • bySpode on6th April, 2008 inSoftware

   • One of my biggest worries about Linux has been a lack of video editor. However, at the last Linux User Group meeting I went to, someone corrected me suggesting that Kino is now quite stable.

     I decided to give it a go. The first and only issue I came across was a permissions issue when trying to capture the film. Simply running with sudo fixed this problem and I had no setting up to do for it work with my Sony Camcorder.
     
     At first, I really couldn't get along with Kino. It doesn't use the traditional timeline like I would expect to see in other sequencers, instead it runs vertically, and as far as I can see it is entirely linear.

     Then there was the issue of applying effects. Each effect you apply, it generates a new file with the effect and updates your timeline accordingly. This removes the dynamic aspect of having effects and makes things much more permanent - not to mention confusing.

     In the end, once I had worked out its quirks, It took me around 6 hours to fully capture an hours worth of footage, edit it, encode it and upload it to YouTube. Kino has built in support for mencoder, so I could kick it straight out as XVid

     The fruits of my labour can be seen here, with me riding around in the snow this morning.

     Kino certainly isn't a premiere competitor, but it's a competent simple video editor. It's biggest issue, much like The GIMP, is that of interface. From a technical point of view - it's great, it's purely an integration issue. If someone came in, and made it easier to use, it would really turn heads.

   • Comments: 4
     

9. • New Server A-Hoy

   • bySpode on3rd April, 2008 inSoftware

   • Yesterday was supposed to be a very quick and easy server upgrade. It took longer than expected, but we had around 3 hours down time, which isn't bad considering I had to set things up from scratch. UK2 support was excellent, and installed Ubuntu Server to my exact specification (I tested it out beforehand in VirtualBox, so I knew what I was dealing with). The server previously had LVM partitions, which are a pain - so I made sure this wasn't the case the second time around. I went for a 128MB "/boot", 4GB swap partition and then the rest of the drive split 50/50. 50% for Ubuntu, and 50% unused, in case I want to dual boot. I also had an extra 512MB of RAM installed for good measure.

     Installing Ubuntu on VirtualBox, I was most impressed at how minimalistic the distribution is, and how quickly it boots. However, VirtualBox doesn't support the PAE kernel, so I had to boot in rescue mode, mount the drives and use apt-get to install the "linux-generic" package, before modifying grub to cope.

     Once I was up and running, I pulled down my backup and put the websites into their normal folders, copying over my apache configuration files and installing a few apache modules. MySQL was a bit of a pain, purely because I made the silly mistake of accidentally chowning the entire /var folder as apache:apache. It's a pity there is no way of restoring the correct ownership, short of a reinstall.

     As I am now using Google Apps for all my e-mail, and MyDNS takes care of the DNS, things were up and running very quickly indeed. I just have a few minor tweaks to do, which can wait until this evening, and I imagine there might be some file permission issues on a few of the websites that I'll have to check.

     If you see anything strange happening - please contact me!

   • Comments: 13
     

10. • Transparent Displays

    • bySpode on1st April, 2008 inGeneral

    • I'm still waiting for that revolution in display technology to happen, and this article certainly makes me salivate at the thought of transparent screens and their many applications.

      OpenOffice 2.4 has been released, but hasn't made its way to my Ubuntu source list yet. It looks like mainly bug fixes, so I'm not that worried - I'm looking forward to version 3.0 instead.

      And the BBC News website has had an update, and now is a lot more digestible. They have a nice article on stories that you'd think were April Fools articles, but aren't. Google on the other hand, managed a pretty good one. Did you find any good April fools articles?

      You might have noticed the server went down for a short while yesterday. Unfortunately, this was not the server change...

    • Comments: 3