Posts from October 2009

This conversation didnt actually take place but it could have.

Last week, friends and I were discussing µblogging in the pub. Well not µblogging exactly but two ladies had recently discovered Facebook and were talking about the pros and cons of this wonderful social network.

One lady said: ‘Oh and another thing - I really don't like the ‘Jenny is…' status update. I just don't get it.'

The other lady replied ‘Yeah - that bit is stupid. I am hardly going to write down ‘Marilyn is…just off to Asda for the weekend shop'.

I then interjected: ‘But you don't have to put down minutiae after the ‘is…' part'. You can put anything. For example, I might choose to write

‘Norman is….seriously considering jacking his job in, pursuing his dream and opening a record shop'.

They looked at me as though as I was mad. My mate sighed and said ‘Right - who's up for another ?'

Jenny stared at me as though I had two heads and said ‘What ? You're going to open a record shop ? In these tense and difficult times. Are you serious ?'

A few years ago, on a Wednesday night, I returned from work and Norma told me in passing that she had got a man coming to clean our carpets for free.

Ten minutes later, I found myself welcoming not one but two Kirby salesmen into my house. What followed was possibly the worst 96 minutes of my life (with the possible exception of yesterday's fixture at Anfield).

I am normally polite and well mannered so I dutifully sat with my cup of tea and listened to the sales guy's pitch about the miscellaneous wonders of the Kirby vacuum cleaner.

After a while of professional, polished and non-stop patter, I interjected and tried to ask 'OK - this sounds great but how much is it ?' in an effort to curtail proceedings but was ignored.

I waited patiently as he assembled various attachments for dog hair, vacuuming the inside of the car and accessing the hard to reach areas behind radiators.

I got slightly more irritated as Norma excused herself to make tea for the kids and the senior salesman passed over to the junior apprentice for phase 2.

I cursed silently as Norma returned and asked 'Listen - you've been here 25 minutes now. When are you going to hoover my carpets for me ?'. Without pausing for breath, senior sales guy triumphantly plugged in the vacuum cleaner, and proceeded to clean and re-clean a 4 inch square of my lounge carpet. He then instructed his stooge to dump the contents onto a white cloth and invited us both to examine the contents in minute detail.

It was dust. Not that fascinating.

Again, I interjected with 'Listen - I'm really not interest-' but was interrupted with 'OK - now we will hoover your bed for you. Please bring your current hoover upstairs'. To my horror, Norma led them upstairs where they apparently lifted up a duvet and vacuumed the mattress of my 6 year old daughter. Twice.

Two more pristine white cloths was brought out and we poured over the skin debris that a human leaves behind on the sheets when asleep. We compared and contrasted the superlative results of the Kirby which has lifted much more dirt than our Panasonic hoover.

Norma, feeling incredibly guilty and no doubt a little embarrassed, now started to assert herself and politely asked the salesmen to leave as it was now the kids' bedtime.

Still, the two sales guys persisted as, after what seemed like hours, we entered the home straight and the the closing of the deal. Finally, we got to a price. It was a lot - I think it was over £2,000 which almost made me spill my now cold cup of tea. I countered with 'Come on, I can get a Panasonic for £200 from Comet' and the sales guy immediately replied with his 'Objection-Retort' from the school of pressure selling about the benefits of the Kirby and its lifetime guarantee.

My wife left the room. I could tell she was now quite upset at the imposition of having these chaps in our house, interrupting our routine. People who upset my wife (with one honourable exception - me) tend to upset me so I now got slightly more forceful.

'Listen, chaps. I realise my wife invited you here this evening but she thought she was getting her carpets cleaned for free not a gentle, prolonged, high pressure sales pitch. We've got a hoover. We're not looking to buy a hoover and we certainly would never contemplate a Kirby hoover that cost over £2,000.'

Senior salesman piped up with 'Ah but that's the good news Mr. Brightside - if you commit tonight, I can offer you a 40% discount.'

I sighed inwardly and stared at the mantelpiece. I was transfixed. I stared again at the clock on the mantelpiece. The time was 7:41pm on a Wednesday night.

I stood up, folded up the white cloth, put the assorted attachments back into the box and handed it to the junior apprentice.

'Listen lads. I realise you're only doing your job but my wife has politely asked you to leave. I have also politely asked you to get out of my house but United are playing in Lyon and the game kicks off in 4 minutes so now I telling you to get your fucking stuff together and leave. Now.'

Senior sales guy could now (finally) see the writing on the wall and started moaning about how we'd wasted their time - a little ironic as I viewed it as them wasting our time - and started to protest and call me rude names.

I ignored him, turned the TV on, picked up his box of tricks and his catalogues and ushered them both to the door.

Driving along the M25, my son noticed some large graffiti on a bridge

Give peas a chance

Norman Junior III: 'Hmm - that's interesting 'Give peas a chance' - what does that mean ?'

Me: 'Well these days broccoli and green beans are getting really popular so these people just want us all to give peas a chance.'

17 seconds silence then both of us burst out in uncontrollable laughter.

Update: A picture is worth a thousand words (or peas).

After the Yak was shaved, we suddenly realised we had missed Football Focus and proceeded directly to the casting couch.

I fully appreciate that evaluating a Linux distribution is just 18 minutes and 32 seconds isn't probably sufficient to probably gain a full picture of the capabilities (or otherwise) of any software let alone a full blown operating system.

However, this superficial, high level, cursory review of all the distros below is useful as it solely focuses on the installation process, ease of use - both of which are key for prospective Linux users; particularly those people who might be looking to migrate, as in my case, from Windows.

Ubuntu (Hardy Heron)¶

As I have installed Ubuntu before, this was fairly straightforward. As I now had the full 80GB disk to play with, I allocated four 20GB partitions (root, home, apps and data).

The installation prompted for my timezone, keyboard type and was pretty quick. Once I rebooted, I was able to configure my Linksys wireless adapter and access the network. As I was using a Ubuntu version that was 12 months old, the system update utility soon notified me that I had over 800MB of available updates which I downloaded.

I was mortified to see the file transfer speeds was variable. Very variable - it ranged between 35-50 KB/sec and I also noticed the strength of the wireless signal was incredibly sporadic. On Windows, I would consistently get a signal strength between 75 and 95%. This computer was in the same room as the router with clear line of sight. I tried browsing the Web - the experience was painful, It was like the bad old days of 56KB dialup modems. I killed the system update which only improved the state of affairs slightly.

I then discovered that there was a Ubuntu mirror hosted by my ISP (Virgin Media) so reconfigured system update appropriately but still - no improvement. A ping to ubuntu.virginmedia.com took 4-5 seconds - yes seconds - not milliseconds. A ping from another Windows PC in the house took 20 ms. This was a major concern and might kill this experiment dead in its tracks with yet another Windows install beckoning.

Another of my concerns about adopting Linux full-time was printer support so I was delighted to see that drivers for my Canon IP4000 inkjet printer were included in a comprehensive list and printed a test page to prove it.

I imported photos, music and documents from my external USB Windows (NTFS) drive (which just needed to be mounted as 'root'). OpenOffice was able to read all my Word 2003 (and 2007) documents, Excel spreadsheets (and PDF's were also accessible using Document Viewer. I could view photos fine and I intended to use F-Spot to manage my photo library.

I was puzzled to see Evolution installed as the default email client so I installed Thunderbird and configured it to access Virgin Media email servers to send and receive email which worked fine.

Mint 5¶

Next, I installed another year old distribution - Mint 5 with the XFCE desktop interface (as opposed to the more common Gnome desktop which comes with Ubuntu).

Again, I simply reformatted the root partition and left the user data well alone. Mint looked impressive and has a slightly better utility to manage the wireless network. I was offered the chance to install 'Restricted' packages for proprietary software (e.g. the nVidia drivers, Flash). Open source purists may object but I accepted the invitation. I was rewarded by being able to play YouTube videos straight away with no fuss. I recall hunting around on Ubuntu for ages until I discovered the 'Restricted-Extras' package.

My main concern, the performance of the networking seemed unchanged (not wholly surprising as I believe Mint 5 is also based on Hardy Heron).

OpenSUSE¶

Next up was OpenSUSE which offered a slightly different administration interface and a green theme. This was another old CD and I was gratified and hugely relieved to see that OpenSUSE started loading system updates at a decent speed (500-705KB/sec). If all else failed, I could also revert to this distro although I wasn't entirely comfortable with the Nautilus File Manager after becoming accustomed to Gnome.

CrunchBang¶

CrunchBang was an interesting distro with a very different interface - Black background, very minimalist with a handy system dashboard (CPU, memory, disk utilisation) with all applications were available from a right-click menu.

I really liked CrunchBang as it appeared to have a small set of carefully selected and useful packages without being overly cluttered with megabytes of additional software. I prefer distros with a compact base where I can then install additional software as required.

If I was the sole user of the computer, I probably would have gone for CrunchBang as the monochrome, minimalist beauty of the desktop was appealing. However I doubted that Norma would be as comfortable with the cut-down interface and funereal colour scheme.

Fedora¶

I embarked on the now familiar installation process but once Fedora booted, I got a couple of disconcerting kernel diagnostic error messages when using Firefox and the automatic system update failed. There was also a worrying amount of blue - both during the installation process and on the default theme.

Debian¶

I dearly wanted to love Debian as I get the impression it is the distribution of choice for Linux aficionados and the technically minded crowd. Also, it had lots of red during the installation process which was very promising.

By now, I was getting bored of these time consuming full blown installations onto hard disk so thought I would evaluate the remaining distros simply using the Live CD approach and make allowances for any sluggish performance.

Unfortunately, Debian assume that Debian is the one and only and the best Linux distribution for you so you will obviously be installing the software on to the hard disk. For some reason, (as far as I could see) Debian don't see fit to provide a Live CD so people can choose to evaluate their software so, once again, I found myself performing a full blown installation.

Thus far, every single Linux distro had correctly auto-detected, configured my Linksys wireless adapter and managed to connect to my Linksys Router (running Tomato firmware) which was a pleasant surprise.

But not Debian. Oh no - although the WiFi card was recognised and I could enable wireless networking, see the available networks, enter my WPA credentials, Debian stubbornly refused to connect. There seemed to be a worrying assumption that all wireless networks used WEP and I felt I would have to do some serious digging to fix this and that somehow because I wasn't prepared to do so, I was unworthy to have the privilege of running Debian. Maybe it's some sort of Debian initiation ceremony. In any case, life's too short.

Arch¶

Arch is an interesting distro - it uses a character based installer. It reminded me of installing SUSE Linux way back in November 1999 when I had to recompile the kernel in order to get the mouse to work. Having been spoiled by all the GUI installers, I was tempted to give up on Arch there and then but proceeded until the partitioning utility decided that I had overlapping partitions (which was odd as every other distribution disagreed) and refused to go any further.

PCLinuxOS¶

Another short lived experiment - some obtuse failure meant I wasn't able to evaluate this distro.

Mandriva¶

Finally, I looked at Mandriva which was a great looking distro and very user friendly. I particularly liked the WiFi management utility. It also performed well (even booting off the Live CD).

Ubuntu 9.04¶

After all this effort, I still had a nagging doubt, that I was using dated versions of Ubuntu and Mint that were more than 12 months old. As there will have been a lot of updates and two full releases during this period, I decided to burned two more CD's for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and Mint 7 (Gloria). My main reason was to see if the problems with my wireless Linksys card was resolved in the current stable version of Ubuntu and I also wanted to try the Gnome version of Mint.

Sure enough, support for the wireless USB adapter in Jaunty seemed much, much better and I was able to use the network normally and large downloads were now as quick as with Windows and Open SUSE.

Mint 7 (Gloria)¶

The Linux Mint distribution is based on Ubuntu which means you can also access the Ubuntu repositories which have a wealth of software packages.

I liked the look and feel of Mint 5 (using the smaller, lightweight XFCE desktop) and was similarly impressed by Mint 7 (using Gnome).

The software update process is slightly more refined on Mint than Ubuntu - updates are classified based on priority.

The clinching factor in Mint's favour was the new Mint Menu introduced in Mint 7 which offered a (I hesitate to say it), a start menu that would be reassuringly familiar to Windows users.

The desktop interface was simple, stylish and uncluttered and I liked the Mint management tools. Also, support for an Ubuntu based distro would be easily available.

So that was it - after a day of evaluating various Linux distributions, I decided to go for Mint 7. Now the boring bit was over with, it was time to sit back and enjoy my new computer.

How I ditched Windows and embraced Linux - the prequel.

On Saturday morning, I thought it might be fun to install Linux on my home computer. A year ago, I had experimented with a few Live CDs and actually installed Ubuntu (not officially supported) followed by Oracle Enterprise Linux (officially supported) on my work laptop (Thinkpad T61). For various reasons, I subsequently had to reverse that change so I thought it might be worthwhile and interesting to install Ubuntu on my own computer (an ageing but reliable Dell 4500).

There was no problem with the computer, there was no problem with Windows XP. I am not a rabid, freedom loving, Microsoft hating individual. I just wanted to play around with Linux before 'Football Focus'.

As Norma also uses this computer (email, Web, Word documents), I decided to install Ubuntu as a dual-boot option alongside the existing stable Windows environment. This was firstly to evaluate whether Linux supported all my various peripherals and software requirements and secondly, let people continue to use Windows.

I dug out an old Ubuntu (8.04 - Hardy Heron) Live CD and started the installation process. When I came to partition the hard disk, I chose the 'Advanced' option so I could preserve all my existing data with 60GB allocated to Windows with another 20GB for Linux.

The re-partitioning failed; the 'ntfsresize' program helpfully told me with a typically cryptic Unix style error that '1028 is greater than 1024'. No matter - just get a Windows recovery disk and use the 'fdisk' utility to re-partition.

I booted from the Windows recovery CD. After a while I saw 'Files being copied for installation...' and wondered if I had missed the prompt to enter a DOS prompt enabling me to run fdisk. So, I hit 'Control-C' and rebooted. As I expected, my computer was now completely screwed as I had aborted during a full installation.

I sighed inwardly at my impetuousness and stupidity. I also blamed David Marsden who had helped sow this original tiny, little seed in my brain which was now turning into a long running saga and a complete waste of time and effort. Just to get back to where we had started. Almost.

This whole exercise was a classic example of Yak shaving as its finest. I was justifiably proud of myself.

I decided to postpone the Linux experiment to another day and simply re-installed Windows. One hour later, the machine was usable again. All my data was preserved so I took a full backup to an external USB drive. However, although none of my programs were installed and the Windows registry was pure and virginal, the 'Program Files' directory was horrendously cluttered with lots of unused folders.

Now I had a choice; dig out all those drivers and install disks for my Linksys Wireless Adapter, Canon printer, scanner, reinstall and reconfigure all the important software (Picasa, Firefox, Office, Outlook Express) so the machine would actually be usable again. Preferably before Norma got home and asked 'Can I just quickly check my email ?'

Alternatively, now I had a full backup, I could do the right thing, rebuild the computer completely and install Linux. So that's what I did. Only I didn't because I wasn't entirely sure Ubuntu was the best Linux distribution for me. Using the excellent, open source program InfraRecorder. I embarked on burning ISO images for all those distributions I was aware of, have seen recommended or reviewed recently.

I also perused DistroWatch to look for the most popular and used Dan Lynch's excellent, comprehensive, honest, balanced reviews of various Linux distributions.

The cast list, in no particular order:

• Ubuntu (8.04)
• OpenSUSE 11 - lurking in my drawers for the last 12 months
• Mint 5 (xfce) - also last year's vintage
• Fedora 11
• Mandriva
• CrunchBang 9.04
• Arch
• PCLinuxOS
• Debian 5.0

[Obligatory hat tip to How to stop defragmenting and start living. As an aside, if youre an Oracle DBA and havent read this whitepaper, please do so. Now.]

I have used various devices and software over my 76 years on this planet to listen to music:

• Record player
• Cassette player
• Transistor radio
• Ears
• WinAmp
• SonicStage
• Windows Media Player

18 months ago, I finally caved in and bought an iTouch which I use a lot; mainly for listening to music and podcasts at airports.

I duly downloaded iTunes in order to get my music library onto the iTouch. I seem to remember that iTunes couldn't play Windows Media Player files which was slightly irritating. In any case, with a sense of a new beginning and a fresh, clean start, I re-ripped all my music CD's into Apple's AAC format, added the missing album artwork and synchronised my music, photos and applications to the iTouch.

Over the last 18 months, Apple proceeded to add more and more 'features' to iTunes which I don't want or need:

• Tighter integration with the iTunes store
• Genius - some sort of recommendation engine closely linked to the above
• Jukebox
• A default assumption that I also wanted to install additional software packages: QuickTime, Safari and Mobile Me.

When Apple recently released iTunes 9, I suddenly realised I was downloading 98.4MB - just to play music.

It slowly dawned on me that, whenever I started iTunes, my (admittedly ageing PC) was unusable for 40 seconds while iTunes initialised and CPU usage hit the roof.

I also realised that iTunes consumed a staggering 82MB of physical memory while playing a tune and this excessive memory consumption could increase to 134MB after connecting to the iTunes store.

I realised this was madness. Complete madness. Finally, I came to my senses and sought out alternative programs to replace the oversized, obese, bloated, multi-function and very slow iTunes.

I soon discovered Foobar 2000 which is a small, compact, lighweight audio player for Windows. I downloaded the program and was immediately struck by the size of the Foobar2000 distribution - 2,985KB, 2.81MB or 3,056,036 bytes to be precise.

This was already promising so I installed the program. I was pleasantly surprised that Foobar quickly imported my existing iTunes music library in its entirety and I was immediately able to play AAC encoded music. No need for additional plugins or codecs.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see Foobar 2000 start up instantaneously (no delay or hourglass here) and consume a slightly more reeasonable 25,888KB of memory.

However, all of this was redundant unless I could actually synchronise music to the iTouch as using two completely separate programs to mange my music was self-defeating. So I downloaded a Foobar extension promisingly named 'Ipod Manager' and configured it.

For a complete fresh start, I took the rather brave (or stupid) move of completely resetting the iTouch to the factory settings which deleted all data and promptly hit 'Sync' in Foobar.

Although it took a while, synchronisation was 100% successful and I even got a 'Preview' of what songs were going to added/removed from the iTouch. This feature was incredibly useful as it gives you a chance to abort if your entire music library is going to be (unexpectedly) deleted.

There were some minor issues - not all album covers were displayed on the iTouch. I discovered that iTunes embeds album artwork in the AAC file. I preferred Foobar's method of adding the album art to the folder as 'Cover.jpg' so you have complete control over the images used. Later on, I actually removed the embedded artwork completely.

What else was missing ? I previously used iTunes to manage podcasts although this was never really satisfactory as iTunes had a weird concept of when the status of a podcast should be modified to 'Listened'. I rather thought listening from start to finish would qualify but Apple obviously disagreed and repeatedly kept sync'ing old content onto the iTouch.

Foobar had another useful extension called 'PodCatcher' which worked brilliantly. It would automatically download new podcasts (in the background) and I was able to easily sync to the iTouch simply by including the new 'Podcasts' category to the synchronisation list.

I wasn't completely happy with the default UI of Foobar so I used the Columns UI extension to make it look slightly more usable with the album artwork displayed.

Foobar 2000 really is the complete music player - once you add the appropriate encoders, it can play virtually music in any format (FLAC, WMA, AAC, WavPack, Ogg Vorbis et al).

One great feature is that Foobar can perform conversion between the various formats. If I can summon up the energy to re-rip all my CD's yet again, I plan to rip all my music to a lossless format (FLAC) and Foobar would dynamically convert to the required lossy, compressed format during the sync to the iTouch.

Another couple of useful extensions for Foobar:

• Audioscrobbler
• to upload my played songs (including those on iTouch) to last.fm
• Playback statistics
• generates 'Recently Played' playlist.

Although I am now blissfully almost iTunes free, I still need to use iTunes to update the software on the iTouch but I am delighted to say that is the sole extent of my iTunes usage. If I need to install any applications on the iTouch, I can do that directly from the iTouch.

It was particularly satisfying to copy my Foobar configuration and music library to my work laptop and completely remove iTunes from that computer.