Posts from 2010

I was recently in a pub when a lady looked expectantly at me and said ‘Fancy a whip for this ? I looked a little taken aback and hesitated until she helpfully clarified ‘A kitty. For the drinks. Shall we have a whip round and Ill then buy some drinks. In a very polite British way, I proffered a ten pound note and said ‘Oh that will be great. Thanks for sorting that out. A pint of London Pride for me, please'.

Whereas what I really wanted to say was. ‘We are two couples having a quick Saturday night drink after watching some amateur dramatics featuring some friends. It's five past ten so we'll probably have two drinks. Why on earth should we contribute to a kitty ? You buy us a drink and I promise that we will reciprocate.'

There are many different problems with these whiprounds and kitties:

• Someone has to manage the money.
• Someone, normally the fastest drinker, always ends up thirsty as, like a training course, the pace is governed by the speed of the slowest person present. If girls are involved, you can actually die of thirst and lose your kitty contribution.
• People always think things are cheaper than they actually are so are sceptical when the demand comes round to top up the kitty.
• As the night progresses, people become less inhibited and contribute massive amounts ‘Here's £50. That should sort it for a while.'
• At the end, the kitty has to be sub-divided and the proceeds returned to all contributors. This is a variant on the ‘splitting the bill' syndrome at a restaurant - only more complicated and time consuming. Forget the last train home. You've missed it. You're getting an expensive taxi. Still, at least the drinks were equitably divided.
• I once had the misfortune to be appointed ‘Kitty Treasurer'. This was a complete nightmare because people expect you to continually go to the bar. Time after time because ‘you've got the whip'. I never spoke to anyone but the bar staff all night.

So please don't invite me into your ‘kitty' or contribute to your stupid ‘whip'. This is the correct and proper way to ensure a night of trouble free, enjoyable drinking:

• Get in a round with mates who drink at vaguely your rate. With blokes this doesn't matter as slowcoaches simply accrue 5 full, untouched pints while the rounds continue to be brought over to the table regardless.
• Ensure the rounds are ‘equalised' by the end of the night. This means that everyone in the round buys the same number of pints. I can't emphasis the importance of this enough.
• Choose the size of the round appropriately. If you're in a group of 4, you need to prepare to sup 4,8, 12 or even 16 pints.
• Large groups can lead to livers the size and colour of George Best's. Consider splitting large groups into 3's or 4's.
• Don't skew the financial calculations by having a crafty ‘Southern Comfort' on the penultimate round because ‘I'm a little full of beer'. Just drink pints. You're a man. That's why you're in a pub not a wine bar.

United players line up for the identity parade. Paul Scholes has been excused to quickly go to the toilet.

~~Bullshit. More Government lies designed to…~~

This server has now been commandeered by MI6.

This entry will self-destruct in 30 seconds.

Last week saw the first anniversary of my adoption of Linux on my desktop PC so I thought Id write a quick summary of how things went in the last 12 months as I always enjoy reading real-life user adoption stories.

Initially, I installed Linux Mint 7 (Gloria) on my aged Dell Dimension and in the following weeks, I subsequently upgraded to Linux Mint 8 (Helena) in November and again in May 2011 when Linux Mint 9 (Isadora) was released.

In April, I finally heeded some not so subtle hints from my wife and bought her an relatively inexpensive Acer Aspire laptop for her birthday. The machine came pre-installed with Windows 7 but, as she had been gradually getting used to the Linux Mint interface and had never previously used Vista or Windows 7, I took the rather bold step of unpacking the laptop and surreptitiously installing Linux Mint. This was mainly because I felt constantly switching between Linux and Windows may prove to be rather confusing and hinder the drive for Linux adoption.

The laptop proved to be a great success and my wife initially used AbiWord to write essays for a part-time course she was studying. We had the inevitable hiccup when she emailed AbiWord format documents to colleagues at work who were unable to read them. Although I managed to get AbiWord to use the Microsoft Word .doc format by default, I still saw the odd compatibility issue which led me to install Open Office Writer.

In June, my wife had to give a short 5 minute presentation for an interview and created the slides in Open Office Impress and then presented her work, from a USB stick, on a Windows computer using Microsoft PowerPoint. Although I had tested this route (48 times) myself, this successful use of Linux software went down very well and seemed to boost her confidence that using this ‘Linux thing' wasn't so bad after all.

My wife mainly uses the two computers for Internet access, email, simple word processing and printing. It was quite interesting to see that she fully expected everything (email, files, Firefox favourites) to be identical and immediately available on both machines. Obviously, this isn't the case out of the box but luckily, my ISP, Virgin Media, had recently converted to the Gmail platform with IMAP available so I configured Thunderbird on both PC's and, lo and behold, all her email is simultaneously available on both machines as well as being backed up on a server elsewhere.

For file synchronisation, I toyed with configuring simple network file sharing between the two Linux boxes but as the desktop PC isn't always turned on, this wasn't too attractive. I also installed DropBox which I thought would be ideal but, by then, the wife had already become accustomed to sending documents to herself via email which did the job just as well.

For browser synchronisation, there was a useful Firefox addon called Xmarks that worked seamlessly. Unfortunately, the Xmarks service will be closing down at the end of the year so I have converted to Firefox Sync that seems to offer similar functionality if not quite as polished.

As the year progressed, my wife increasingly used the laptop almost exclusively and really only used the desktop PC for printing documents. This was a blessing really as it allowed me to embark on a period of concerted distro hopping to see what other Linux distributions were available. After experimenting with Debian, Linux Mint Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, PepperMint and Arch, I eventually settled on Fedora 13 (Gnome) which is very stable and comes with all the main software packages I use. Being based on RedHat, Fedora offers a nice contrast with Linux Mint which is based on Ubuntu which, in turn, is based on Debian.

As for the future, well, my wife keeps asking for a quick Nautilus tutorial on how to effectively manage and organise her growing number of files as currently, her documents and downloaded papers from the Internet are liberally scattered across ‘Downloads', ‘Home Folder' and ‘Documents' and the temporary folder used by Firefox.

My wife seems quite content with Linux; in fact she recently recounted colleagues telling war stories over lunch about their computers being out of action after being struck down by viruses and having to purchase a Microsoft Office license just to be ‘able to work on documents at home.' My wife told them that her husband had installed this Linux thing onto her computer so she didn't have to worry about viruses and she used a ‘free' version of Word.

From my point of view, the laptop is fast and still boots as quickly as the day I installed it. No Windows or vendor crapware, no spyware and no crippled, limited period anti-virus program suites to be uninstalled which would have undoubtedly been the case had I left Windows 7 on the laptop.

There are a couple of minor irritations; printing on Linux is OK but it is still difficult to accurately monitor the ink levels on the Canon Pixma ip4000 without hooking up a Windows laptop and my wife is able to occasionally crash Open Office Writer simply by copying and pasting content from Web pages into a document which is rather embarrassing.

The laptop runs Linux Mint 9 (LTS = Long Term Support) which means this version will continue to be supported for a full 3 years until May 2013. However, there is also the tantalising prospect of migrating to Linux Mint Debian which looks and feels like Mint but decouples the dependency from Ubuntu and is based directly on a rolling Debian release which is quite attractive as, theoretically, this would never need upgrading (as in a re-install).

Also, today, hot on the heels of last week's Ubuntu 10.10 release, the Mint development team has just announced the first Release Candidate for Linux Mint 10 (Julia) today which is another possibility.

As for the desktop PC currently running Fedora 13, I quite like Fedora as it's stable, fast, looks great and offers a comprehensive list of up-to-date software available in the repositories. Fedora also appears to be gaining in popularity so I may well upgrade the desktop PC to the imminent release of Fedora 14.

I admire Wayne Rooneys skills as a footballer and I honestly dont give a flying fig about his sordid, personal life. Unfortunately, I dont think Wayne Rooney is blessed with that much intelligence. This isnt a criticism, merely a statement of fact.

If Alex Ferguson says the sky is green, then the sky is green. If Alex Ferguson says you have an ankle injury, then you have an ankle injury.

Sadly, for Rooney and Manchester United, I sense the writing might now be indelibly marked on the wall for his career at Manchester United.

Rooney should just ask Beckham, Keane, Stam and van Nistelrooy.

One of my favourite and regular UK bloggers, Jonathan Beckett had gone rather quiet recently so I assumed he must have moved blogging platform the the Nth time, gone on holiday or possibly his feed was screwed without his knowledge so I sent him a polite email asking ‘Dead or just resting ?' and he informed me he'd intentionally changed blog address without telling anyone.

I think this sudden, unannounced, abrupt loss of service is an excellent idea for all bloggers - it's a bit like writing ‘I love small, fresh, juicy satsumas' buried deep in the middle of a technical report to be delivered to a client or pausing for 5 minutes, with your face in your hands, during a presentation at Oracle Open World. It helps to focus the mind and check whether anyone is actually reading or listening.

In fact, this method of social network suicide followed by starting again from zero and organic gardening is a strategy I have used more than once during my blogging lifetime. The only difference is my stats genuinely reverted to zero but I wasn't inundated with curious Tweets, scribbling on my Facebook wall, IM's and concerned email messages enquiring about my state of mind and asking for details of the new blog feed.

I was greeted a wall of silence, pierced only by a solitary email: ‘I simply adore Clementines'.

StatusNet names all releases after R.E.M. songs so heres my idea for future Habari release codenames. Its a well kept secret that all Habari developers and users adore that popular beat combo - The National.

The Habari development roadmap in full

• 0.7 - October 2010 -Developer Release 1 (‘10/10/10')
• 0.8 - January 2011 (‘Pay For Me')
• 0.8.1 - February 2011 (‘Murder me Rachel')
• 0.9 - June 2011 (‘Lit Up')
• 0.9.1 - August 2015 (‘Slipping Husband' aka ‘Slipping Release')
• 0.9.2 - November 2015 (‘Mr. November')
• 0.9.3 - January 2016 (‘The Geese of Beverley Road')
• 0.9.3.1 - January 2016 (‘Mistaken for Joomla')
• 0.9.3.2.1.3(Alpha 3, RC1) - January 2016 (‘Start a War')
• 0.9.4 - March 2017 (‘Afraid of Everyone')
• 0.9.5 April 2017 (‘Your Patches Were a Kindness')
• 0.9.9 - June 2017 (‘Conversation 1,000,016' aka ‘Taxonomy revisited')
• 1.0 (Final) - Thursday December 25 2019 (‘Bloodbuzz Ohio')

Apart from a short-lived crisis of confidence - after losing a Draft post, I spontaneously migrated this blog to Wordpress as an interim hop before completing 99% of a full blown migration to Django-Mingus which I then immediately discarded - I have used Habari as my preferred blogging platform for two and a half years.

It's been a while since the last major Habari release (0.6) but, because I run the latest 0.7 development code (using SubVersion), the lengthy gap and absence of a formal 0.7 release didn't particularly bother me.

However, the 0.6.4 release is pretty dated now and lots of new features have been added and bugs fixed in the intervening 18 months. Also, I think there are potential developers who are keen to get the latest and greatest version of Habari so I was pleased to see that the Habari project released a '0.7 Developer Release' yesterday.

Occasionally, I have posted stuff on Posterous and Tumblr because I didnt really feel it ‘belonged on this blog, it wasnt worthy or it was a throwaway one-liner and not a proper blog post. As I subsequently deleted my Posterous account (as I didnt like their negative campaigning against Tumblr), some of this content has now been lost forever.

I think, from now on, I will post everything on this blog where it's under my control.

This morning, a gentleman was reading a copy of The Times on my South West Trains service bound for London Waterloo. Nothing too surprising about that.

However, this man continued to intently consume the day's important news stories as he left the train and made his way down to the Underground network.

This chap wasn't reading a newspaper though. He was an early adopter so he was reading the electronic version of The Times on an Apple iPad. Clearly, the content is so captivating, the display is so sharp and the font is so crystal clear that he simply has to continue reading the news as he descends the staircase at platform 4, tightly packed in a mass of humanity, down to the Waterloo and City line.

I'm not a rabid Apple hater. I think Apple are an innovative design company who have helped spark some much needed competition; particularly into the mobile ‘device' market.

What irritates me though is the fact that this chap wasn't using the iPad like people use a newspaper. People don't generally read a newspaper as they descend a set of stairs. People generally don't hold a device costing over £400 (although I suspect this chap splashed out on the 3G/WiFi/64GB version which costs a staggering £750) out in front of them and nonchalantly pretend to to fascinated at the content while navigating a set of steps and simultaneously being jostled by rushing commuters from all directions.

This gentleman was doing this for one reason and one reason only - fervently hoping and praying that someone, just anyone, would look at him and his fancy tablet, maybe even ask him about it, exclaim ‘Wow ! Alan - look, that guy's got an iPad !' or just surreptitiously try to look over his shoulder to catch a glance of last night's football results.

Part of me was urging him to lose his footing, tumble forward down six steps, falling flat on on his face, dropping his fancy, overpriced, electronic gadget, shattering the screen in three places.

But unfortunately he didn't. Despite me barging into him. Twice.

What a complete iPoser.