jcm's blog

Photo: LUG Radio Live 2005 – a live LUGRadio show recording, with the usual gang, is in progress.

I went to LUGRadio’s Live 2005 event in Wolverhampton on Saturday afternoon. The event kicked off late morning and I arrived just after it had started, due to fun with trains as usual. I met up with a lot of people and partook of a few pints of coke between listening to some excellent talks. The organisers had asked me to give a talk on Embedded Linux and I was on in the afternoon with a number of props to help in making my varied points. Jonathan Riddell kindly made some notes on my talk on the LUGRadio Wiki. He was one of the many others who also gave talks – in his case on Kubuntu, the KDE based Ubuntu derivative for those who like KDE (keep taking the pills folks…I’ll just be sticking with GNOME for now )

Photo: Jonathan Riddell promotes Kubuntu when not scribbling down some notes on the talks.

Wolves LUG met up the evening before this year’s Live show event (which was also the first one there’s been, but there will now be another show again next year) for food and we all got together on the evening of the show itself at the regular curryhouse – The Standard – which was sponsored in part by profits from the 3GBP (approx 5USD, nearly 7CAD) on-the-door nominal charge that covered a bit more than costs of the day itself. RedHat chipped in a bit to help out too.

Photo: Kat and Dave manning a stall prompting Free and Open Source software. They actually do this at various computer shows too – I should try to help them out sometime with this laudable goal.

The cool thing about the friends I’ve got is that they’re all such nice people. Kat and Dave live next door to Hannah and Joe and kindly put me up again since their neighbours were off on their honeymoon around bits of the Cornish/Devonshire countryside. The next morning, I managed to just about be ready at 08:00 so that we could leave for the Paintballing at the Delta Force near Birmingham. I wasn’t going to be able to make it, but at the insistance of Jono and the LUGRadio gang (who apparently have been advertising that they plan to “shoot the roundhead”) and thanks to the kind offer of a lift to Nottingham from Matthew Walster, I was able to go paintballing in the morning and be miles away in time for Dave’s annual DDE/EP BBQ.

Photo: Paul Sladen asks a question of the team during a live recording of LUGRadio.

Matthew tells me that he flies a PA-28 Piper Cherokee and has kindly offered to take me flying in August if we can work out a mutually agreeable sunny day to fly over to see the museum at Duxford. Taking a few weeks out in Florida to learn to fly is something that had actually interested me. Certainly, I’ve gotten a few outstanding offers of being flown around various places that I really should take people up on – I wonder if Martin will reaffirm his offer to take me gliding if I see him when I’m up in Edinburgh at the weekend. In any case, I’m a little happier with the idea now. I have actually been in an army helicopter (I was one of those chosen at school to go flying with one of the teachers’ brother – or something like that – who is/was in the RAF and turned up one day with a SeaKing and another helicopter too) but have never been in a really small prop-driven areoplane (“airplane” to the USians amongst you).

Photo: Mark Shuttleworth talks about being an astronault, his motivation for getting involved with Free and Open Source software and where he sees the future heading.

Someone who didn’t have trouble with trains was Mark Shuttleworth. His jet being at London Stanstead, he elected to fly to the show in a private helicopter and was picked up from around the corner by one of the friends of the show. Mark amused us with tales of his trip to space and showed slides (as if it were a gigantic “holiday” – well, I guess it was really) while he talked. Mark is the angel investor behind Canonical and therefore by extension the primary financial backer of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution. This was the second time I’ve met Mark and again I ended up really trying to stress a few points about things that suck with Linux distros right now that need fixing – mostly device detection and integrating stuff like Dell’s DKMS into mainline Linux distributions. I pointed out that the OS X shared text editor app he wanted to have an Ubuntu counterpart for relies upon proprietary Rendezvous technology and therefore that it may cause patent fun if a direct clone were produced.

Photo: Malcolm Parsons demonstrates his DSLinux port to the Nintendo DS.

Various other people turned up that I hadn’t seen in a while, including Kimble, Sledge, mjg59 and other Debian people, Brian, Josette, and probably many others. I enjoyed this year’s show and gave it what I considered a reasonable writeup for the mag. I’ll aim to be at the event next year and in the meantime suggest that readers head over to LUGRadio.org.

Jon.

Yesterday was my final day at O.I.. It’s been a fun three years since I first turned up on the doorstep of Resonance all bright eyed, bushy tailed and curious as to what NMR was all about. I’ve learned a lot since then and benefitted from working with some great people. Unfortunately, things were never really the same for me following the buyout last summer and I decided I couldn’t stay any longer. The surprising thing was the realisation how much I’ll miss a few of the people I’ve worked with – but I hope they’ll feel likewise and we’ll end up meeting up from time to time to yack about Linuxy stuff, the weather, etc. It was with a little emotion that I left the place last night, not sad to see the back of the office (it is, after all, completely impractical to get to on public transport) but sad to realise I won’t see some of these people again. I hope they have nice lives.

Jon.

LUG Radio Live 2005: I’ll be talking about Embedded Linux and demoing some cool tech gadgets, including talking about recent Xilinx FPGA kit running Linux.

BT tried to blame the weather for continued ADSL outages last night, in much the same way that rail operators – not bothering to be prepared for the inevitable British weather temprementality – choose to blame the “wrong kind of snow” or “wrong kind of rain” or whatever for their general incompetence. No! They should just learn to deal with the odd thunderstorm without going all shit on us.

I nearly ended up using dialup at home for the first time in years, but my ADSL modem is now getting line sync once again and I have broadband access once again this morning. It’s just annoying that, even after “local loop unbundling”, we’re still stuck with the shitty service that is BT. Where did my high-speed fibre to the home option go to?

No thanks to BT, I have managed to put together preparations for today’s LUG Radio Live 2005 talk on Embedded Linux. I even had to use a USB pen drive to store my presentation because BT were being shit. They suck – they wouldn’t suck nearly half as much if I could actually speak to the ADSL people without being forced to go via my provider. I can use some reasonably ok automated crap to report a fault and eventually run the risk of potentially talking to a human being – but they aren’t really qualified to test the DSLAM connection on your line (now to me, it’s part of the telephony service and should be part of a standard line test by this point in time – they’ve had several years to get that sorted). hint: human beings are useful things to talk to, shitty automated systems are not. Hopefully today will be more fun than last night preparing without ADSL was.

Jon.

I was just sitting and watching Top Of The Pops (TOTP) on BBC television and had just concluded that the country had gone to pot with the trash that was in the “music” chart when a telemarketeer decided it would be a good moment to call.

Why Space Kitchens felt the need to call…

Using my standard procedure, I first wasted as much of the person’s time as I could get away with and then said that I would like to speak to (whatever silly management title) someone about the offer of a chance to get a free kitchen in return for appearing in a magazine apparently called something like “Focus” (published four times a year! wow!). True to his word, I got a call back from a manager about the offer and promptly entered into a conversation about whether he felt it was appropriate to disturb my evening with a marketing call. Then, when I was done with him, I called freephone on:

I spoke to a guy there to confirm that it was likely his company that had just had a call center call me and then entered into a discussion with him about this unpleasant business practice. He was increadibly professional and even told me about the caller preference service and preventing future calls but advised me that, aside from registering on such a list, anything else I tried was likely to be useless – I admire his reasonable level of honesty. Still, I explained how much such things leave me very much uninclined to ever purchase a product or service from such a company that feels the need to cold call. One of the people I spoke to told me that they also advertise online and perhaps on TV, to which I responded that one can always ignore a website or a TV advert but that it’s harder to just ignore every telephone call. I pointed out that finding “Space Kitchens” was increadibly easy once I knew of them.

So, if you want a kitchen, you might want to avoid Space Kitchens. But you can write to their head office to tell them how bad it is to cold call people (the Companies House information is just not very useful here so I used their website):

Next time one of these people call you, try:

• Waste as much time of their time as you are willing to waste of your own for a moment of amusement.
• Engage them in a discussion of whether they work for an ethical company. You’ll find they often don’t seem to be allowed to hang up on you.
• Pretend to be really interested, but say that you have to go and check with your husband/wife/spouse/girlfriend/other and that you’ll be right back. Leave them hanging on the line for as long as possible.

I wish people in general weren’t stupid enough to buy from companies using these tactics, but they are and that’s the reason that this kind of shit will forevermore continue to happen.

[UPDATE] I’ve just registered our home numbers with the Telephone Preference Service. We’ll see if it actually makes any difference whatsoever. My guess is it won’t, since it won’t stop people outside the EU (especially those in the US making automated calls) from leaving unwanted messages.

Jon.

P.S. Thanks Disney for the automated call about a holiday to one of your theme parks earlier today. It’ll help me avoid ever actually going.

Random stuff…

I’ve booked another driving test (can’t practically – pun intended – get one until August) but I will attempt to move it into a cancellation slot before then. The DSA (Driving Standards Agency) have an insanely ludicrous telephone automation system which requires no less than five menu choices just to book a driving test – a very likely reason for calling. When I complained about it, I was informed that I could just press “22221″ to get through to a human – I had figured that out, but only after having to call back 3 times. It takes 3 minutes to get through the system if you listen to the recorded prompts and simply electing not to let it think you have a touchtone phone in the hope that it skips the crap doesn’t work in this case. They hired a team of monkeys to implement an ape to text “speech recognition” system which fails more often than it works, or so it seems. They suck. But I’m stuck with this evil government agency for the moment. I haven’t wanted to physically smash a phone like that in a while – congrats on the utter shite phone system.

I’ll probably look into extending my stay in NYC by a day or so since I have a growing todo list. I’ve arranged to have lunch with my publisher (yes, I always wanted to say that) and stuff. Cool! Reminds me that I should probably be writing stuff and not up blogging but meh. I’ve been idling on #nylug (we say “hash nylug” and I’ll never get used to “pound nylug” or even “pound define” or “press the pound key” – it’s “hash” and eternally should be ) and have also been checking out Wikitravel for some visiting advice. I will investigate visiting Liberty Island (renamed after the statue) but due to witch hysteria it’s not possible to actually enter the statue (apparently) so that might not be so much fun – though sailing across the water might make for some good sightseeing. I’ve been on to the Ticket information pages on NBC to investigate tickets for the Conan O’Brien show that I seem to be watching more of on CNBC Europe. It’s actually a funny late night TV show – one of the better USian late night TV shows I have flicked over to – and I enjoy the fact that they seem to understand irony and humour in a British-compatible way.

I just got back from seeing Mr. and Mrs. Smith – it had potential, but that’s all. And I paid over 19 pounds (25+ dollars) for three tickets. In a regular cinema. By the time I’d also snuck in a bag of Starbucks merchandise, the total run to around twice the weekly earnings of a citizen in parts of Moscow (according to a Discovery documentary I saw tonight on the girl with X-ray eyes).

Jon.

Photo: Testing out the new Nikon 4600: G&D’s in Oxford. Two small local coffee houses which make yummy home made ice cream.

We had fun on Saturday after me, Dan, and Hussein met up fairly randomly. I say fairly because we did at least plan this the day before. I met Dan in the late afternoon and we ended up going shopping in Selfridges food court for father’s day gifts (yes, it’s a horrible markeering gimmick but it’s also an excuse to buy yummy sweet turkish delight for your dad and then help him to eat it). I got a few brochures on Jura coffee machines since one of the guys I work with splashed out on one a while back and subsequently raved about it. At 1595GBP (over 2200USD) it had better be a good machine – and the newer model doesn’t even have the connectivity pack the previous model could be configured to come with (but it’s only for diagnostics and recipies – they missed a trick there by not having it remote controllable too).

I resisted the temptation to buy lots of Hershey’s bars while I was in with all the sweet stuff – they’re not widely available in this country (because Cadbury’s does taste better and is obviously extremely well established as a household brand) and taste disgusting initially, but you soon seem to want to eat more after you’ve had a few bites. I didn’t resist having a Frapaccino and am now quite fond of the Caramel Coffee “light” variety that a certain coffeehouse chain have finally realised people would like (there’s just no reason for them to be so bad for you unless you subscribe to the “it’s coffee, let’s make it extra bad for you” philosophy they often have).

Hmm. What else? Oh, I failed a driving test. For a couple of reasons. Pop quiz – what would you do about the below:

• You’re completing a turn in the road manoeuvre and have completely blocked the road as you proceed with the final stages of the turn. Two cars are approaching from both sides and are unable to pass you, but are a safe distance from your vehicle. Do you finish up or stop?
• You’re at a “priority to oncoming traffic” sign and there’s another in the distance ahead. Parked cars are littering your side of the road inbetween. Cars are approaching from the distance – do you wait for them or slip in behind the parked cars?

These two issues are not safety related. Nothing I did was in any way dangerous (in fact, I assisted an emergency ambulance by stopping promptly and properly on a roadabout and was given praise for handling that situation correctly). No. I technically failed. This is also known as a). bitterness on my part. b). anality on the part of the test criteria. What annoys me even more than failing on petty technicalities is that I can’t book a regular test until October. October! The DSA are almost as bad as the rail chiefs (read on) but not quite there – they should get themselves in gear (pun intended) and sort out the backlog and mess of tests caused by people being forced to retake their test after too many endorsements. So, it’s back to waiting and hoping I can get a cancellation slot soonish.

Meanwhile…two other things annoyed me on Tuesday:

• The UK government is pushing through legislation against religious hatred which also happens to violate my fundamental right to freedom of expression (article 10 of the EHCR is intentionally badly worded to give these crooks the ability to pass such unpleasant legislation). Not that we ever really had any. While it’s a good idea to stop people from being persecuted, our government – like certain other evil regimes around the world – just didn’t need to introduce yet more legislation in that regard (they already lock people up for being potential terrorists, why bother with this).
• Evil bastards (rail operators) have proposed Congestion Charging on British Rail networks during peak hours – designed to punish those of us who willfully submit to the vile and disgustingly badly run services on a daily basis. Wow. Thanks a whole lot for being so out of touch with reality. I had the good fortune of happening upon a gathering of train managers at Birmingham station a year or so back (some “meet the management who run this circus” event) so had the opportunity to (after giving them hell for some time, repeatedly firing off valid points they could not counter) conduct a survey to find out how many of them actually used trains. The results were hardly surprising. Get a [removed incitement to hatred of badly run rail networks] clue.

For your general amusement, I recalled this evening how I haven’t yet mentioned the US tourists I was speaking to last week. They were after directions and I helped them out – they were in search of their hire car place and I tried to help get them the relevent information to interpret the Google Maps they had brought. But the guy (with what was presumably his wife/partner – middle aged folks at any rate so you might hold out some hope over the college jocks who asked me “say, do you have canoeing in the UK?” last summer at the Vatican. No, I’m not making that up – I explained I live on a giant island surrounded by millions of gallons of water) did manage to step in it by saying how they have this wonderful in-car map system you can get in the States, and it uses satellites. No shit! Wow! Strangely enough, there’s an ongoing revolt against the government wanting to mandate GPS tracking of every car for road tax reasons (horribly evil). I found the naivety most amusing, but only very briefly. Then saddening.

I seem to be being a bit negative in this blog lately. It’s not exactly intentional, and I’ve not got a fantastical reason to be so. In other news, my new Nikon Coolpix 4600 arrived randomly in the mail. It takes nice photos and is smaller than the older model that it replaces. Also unfortunately takes MMC, but meh. I’ll try to upload some of the sample shots I’ve taken and update this entry with some photos above.

Jon.

“God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil”

– Father Daniel, priest at a convent in north-west Romania

Have a look at this story about a young woman, diagnosed with schizophrenia, who was tortured and killed by religious nuts at a convent after they felt whe was possessed by the devil. This is yet another reason why I don’t generally subscribe to organised religion.

I’m essentially now an atheist. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have strong beliefs – I just choose not to waste hours every weekend praying to god to intervene in my life and make it all better. No, rather than be the child who cries to mother about a grazed knee, I believe that I make my own destiny. There may be some greater force out there – but ask youself, if you were that greater force, do you think you’d be bothered with the fate of one person who has the free will to change their own life? I believe it would be a better use of time to spend an hour a week picking litter (you can have tea and crumpets in the village hall afterwards if you feel that you must) and getting involved with our local communities in more constructive efforts.

Some people think I just don’t get it. I used to go to church, every week, for years and years. I was head chorister in the choir and was confirmed into the Anglican church. Yet, as I have grown up I have come to realise that I cannot support many of the actions of these religious groups. I object to the oft-abused notions of some certain organisations that AIDS is some kind of curse or that contraception is wrong, and I believe that men and women are equals (so get with the programme, get women priests already). Can’t we just all be nice to oneanother?

Jon.