jcm's blog

[ from the yes-that-was-fun dept. ]

I enjoyed going to dfb’s summer BBQ 2003. Random fun and now I am about to be on route to get a train back to Reading in time for work tomorrow. Playing with programmable logic this week.

Jon.

[ from the and-the-order-of-a-large-fries-and-a-burger dept. ]

The new Harry Potter book came out last week. No I have not read it and have no urgent plans to do so. For those who are avidly reading away, and while I have a lot of respect for self made women, J K Rowling and Time Warner are continuing in their bastardisation of international copyrights.

One day when the world has destroyed itself and the bees have taken over, perhaps we might have some sane patents, copyright, laws and corporations.

Jon.

[ from the jcm-anual-bbq-ahead dept. ]

The anual jcm BBQ is next weekend so all friends and family are invited to email me for more information soon.

Jon.

[ from the mr-stabby-mr-stabby dept. ]

Yesterday I went to Linux User & Developer Expo with Tom and jok. The Expo itself was part of a Networking Show and was quite small at that – but nonetheless it was still quite interesting fun.

Extreme Networks had some funky kit but did not want to give me a free shirt…I got a few bits and freebies but on the whole slim pickings. Alan Cox gave a good talk on the Linux Kernel version 2.6 and some Debian guys spoke for a bit too. SGI had an Altix 3000 which was interesting and I might review a unit. Unfortunately the Sun Microsystems stand was a little bare and the other guys
were notably quite absent on the whole – I hope Linux World 2003 Expo will be a more interesting and fulfilling affair.

After the Expo a group of us headed in to Birmingham city centre and ended up in a Weatherspoon’s pub for drinks and food. I met up with some people that I already knew and a few fresh faces – and some interesting fun fotopic.net. Paul had a remote controlled minicar which was driven around the tables and floor before being turned in to Mr. Stabby the Auto-kebab machine.

Jon.

[ from the well-that-is-nice dept. ]

A friendly Vue Webmaster contacted me to say that a non-flash version of the site is under construction and that they appreciate the accessibility needs to the site for all users. They encourage further feedback. That was quite surprising.

Jon.

[ from the hey-dude-how-is-it-going? dept. ]

Today I am working outside of Oxford, and will later be in Reading. I have been reading The Quintessential PIC Microcontroller on my travels and I am very impressed with it so far.

Today is the first day of Linux User & Developer Expo 2003 and I shall be in Nottingham from tomorrow night in preparation for our trip to the Expo in Birmingham on Thursday.

GLLUG borrowed my copy of Revolution OS over the weekend as theirs was still on order. OxLUG are having a screening at some point.

Jon.

[ from the I-am-blogging-this dept. ]

I decided to modify my view on SCO from being a mere annoyance to being another collective which should be put out of their misery. Their utter shite specifically designed to cause FUD around Linux annoys greatly.

Still a comforting thought is that Unisys can no longer extort money from webmasters for using GIF format images – thankfully their patent has now expired and they will have to divert those people agressively persuing collections of royalties in to actually doing some kind of useful work…perhaps. Maybe not. Then again there are patents on pizza delivery.

Today I will be in Reading, London, and Cambridge. I am looking out for a portable mp3 player and perhaps a PDA within a reasonable time frame. Solaris is now heavily on my agenda and in particular I want to get back in to what source documentation I do have. In other development news I got the serial driver I was writing working aside from a couple of issues.

I bumped in to a Microsoft drone the other day and managed to piss them off very quickly indeed. Primarily this was because I was dressed in one of my walking Linux advert outfits but I might have been mumbling a few words under my breath.

Everyone who saw the news on Thursday night will have heard about the Burnham chemical fire incident. I ended up travelling for 5 hours on a journey which normally takes not much more than 30 minutes once on a train. Even given the circumstances it took 10 times as long!

Jon.