Bagel Belly Blog

Mark the calendars

.... World of Goo should be available on wiiware in Europe some time in December. Nintendo, Goosters, I forgive you all! (But I'm still angry.)

Previously: Saturday morning disgruntlement.

Technorati Tags: europe, games, nintendo, wii

eee pc volume

My eee pc was more like a mouse than a lion in the volume department. I had to turn the volume up to max, and still couldn't hear much.

It turns out the line out and pcm controls are inverted -- turning up line out results in much more of a roar.

So, if others are using ubuntu 8.10 on the eee pc 901 (with the array kernel), that might help...

See also ubuntu very quiet volume, minor volume glitch on eee pc 901.

Disruption

As I sit doing LiMo work on my netbook, with a new Linksys N router sat beside me ready to replace the ageing Fon this weekend, I read this interesting article on four disruptive technologies for 2009. Damnit, where can I get me some USB3?

Future of Mobile

So, the start of this week was Future of Mobile, which brings together the pioneers of the mobile industry to talk about browsers, devices, standards, user-interface design and more. I was fortunate enough to go as one of my colleagues was speaking on a panel at the event. I was quite excited - I've been watching what the Carsonified crew have been doing since back when they were Carson Systems, and it seemed to me that FOWA, FOM, FOWD etc. may just be the gold standard of conferences, injecting a little bit of rock star and excitement into a world where conferences had become dull and boring.

I guess with expectations like that, it was going to be a tough challenge for FOM to live up to. And, for me, it was a somewhat hit and miss affair.

The good news is that FOM managed to attract some awesome speakers.

Rudy de Waele from mTrends talking about threats and opportunities of increasing openness in the mobile ecosystem had some great content though I think the slides (particularly the transitions) made the talk a bit difficult to follow. It also seemed a bit like two talks - one on the importance of openness for fostering ecosystems and innovation, and the other on what the future holds for mobile. But there were some good nuggets of information in there.

The panel session, led by Simon Rockman of SonyEricsson, was a lot of fun. Alongside my LiMo colleague were a bunch of other mobile movers and shakers. Tom Hume has an excellent write-up, but if I were to pick out some key quotes, it would be these:

David Wood, Symbian: "co-operation and collaboration rather than competition [...] too much competition [...] too many operating systems, too many variants [...] too long to realise phones and services", with which I totally agree. Also "open source only succeeds from strong stable mature basis", which I disagree with. The ASF has consistently proven that careful governance and meritocracy can be more important than code - indeed, a little bit of buggy code and a lot of great people most often leads to fantastic communities and powerful open source collaboration.

Rich Miner, Google: "it's important to build an open platform not controlled by one entity". I agree - but I am still waiting to see how the Android community governance model will shape up, above and beyond the invitation-only closed doors of the Open Handset Alliance (which, with Google as benevolent dictator, looks a lot like one entity to me from the outside). Also, "delight and deliver value to the user" - definitely! "Then deliver ads." Oh well...

James McCarthy, Microsoft: "intend to be one of the key players [...] no one dominant operating system". I guess Microsoft's brief in the mobile space is to depose Nokia - only then can they focus on being the dominant OS? Also, "18,000 apps but not brought to market in as simple a way as iPhone". This is quite significant - apps will become a key differentiator between the platforms, moving forward. If a neutral third party could offer an app store experience on a par with iPhone, but fully open, we'd see a runaway success. I think (hope) everyone in the industry now recognises that what you deliver to the phone on an ongoing basis is as important as what you deliver on the phone at the start.

After the panel, Doug Richard from Trutap did a great presentation on understanding development for emerging markets. Again, Tom has the scoop. Perhaps the key takeaway from this talk was that for many people the mobile will be the first and primary computing platform they use, rather than a mobile version of their desktop computer. It's something even I've been realising as I leave the laptops behind in favour of surviving the weekend on the iPhone. Indeed, TruTap looks like an interesting product - though when I tried to download it I was told my iPhone was not a mobile phone. A colleague had to fight with Vodafone's content rating system (which I grumbled about 3 years ago) before being allowed to view the TruTap site. These two data points quite nicely sum up the whole mobile experience...

I was somewhat disappointed by the 6x6 UK bloggers perspectives. It was great that they were there, but I'd have liked more of "wouldn't it be great if ..." rather than "mobiles are shit". Still - most of the bloggers spoke well and were at least entertaining. And yes, I promise to write a "wouldn't it be great if ..." post real soon now.

I think the Carsonified crew were let down by the venue. It was a nice enough place, but they were delayed in starting due to being let in late to set up, and this led to some annoying sound problems during many of the talks. There was no WiFi except BT Openzone, and no lunch provided. I don't mind them not providing lunch, but it would be smarter to provide people with pointers to local restaurants (not a problem for me, it's round the corner from where I live, but not nice for many other delegates). Also, sticky labels for name badges - no thanks. It's all about attention to detail.

GMail hegemony

When talking about the eee pc I mentioned putting more data into the cloud - a fancy way of saying I'm using and trusting more online services. Here's one example.

Back in September I took the final step in my migration to GMail, a process I began back in August 2007 with the adoption of Google apps.

For a while all new mail had been going to GMail, but I still had a significant archive of mail on various other servers and my laptop. I really needed to get these into GMail as well - it was frustrating having archives split across several places, having to search several places, having to make sure all those servers were working. Not only that, but GMail's initially ropey IMAP implementation meant I had at least two copies of every email in Apple Mail - one in the appropriate folder based on my filtering/labelling, the other in the "All Mail" folder that GMail insisted on using. This was a killer for using Spotlight, for example.

I figured my mail use case might be a good make-or-break test for GMail, since I had some 3GB of archives, with (apparently, according to GMail) over 120,000 messages. I set it going one evening, keeping half an eye on my old mail server for signs of smoke or fire, but everything went smoothly enough, GMail took a fair time over it so there was no need to worry. It was interesting to watch my mail archives slowly appearing in the GMail interface.

It wasn't long before GMail reported that everything was complete - having all the progress charts and statistics in there certainly made me feel more confident in the whole process.

And the final result, after all GMail's hard work? Well, I've hardly dented my MB allowance:

I really like having my email available from anywhere, any time, without needing to lug around my own laptop. Being able to search through a decade of email is also extremely useful. And not having to maintain my own mail server any more, and compete with spammers - that's a real time saver and weight off my mind.

Technorati Tags: computing, email, gmail, google, mail, cloud, servers, sustainability, web services

eeeeeeee! PC!

So, curious to see what all the fuss is about with netbooks, and fed up with carrying around a hefty collection of overweight laptops, I decided it was time to downsize to an Asus Eee PC. I picked one up over the weekend from the geek heaven that is Tottenham Court Road.

Since I'm getting back into linux and putting more and more data into the cloud, it really makes a lot of sense - and I can't argue with the 7 or so hours of battery life I got today with light use. The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to - especially when swapping between the netbook and full-size laptops - but I can cope with a few typos if the end result is no more back pain.

Of course I had to ditch the custom Xandros distribution that Asus ships in favour of a full Ubuntu 8.10 installation. I followed the Tombuntu installing Ubuntu 8.10 on the Eee PC 901 instructions, although I opted for ext2 filesystems (ext3 is journaling and so a little slower) and I've disabled bluetooth in the BIOS since I'm not planning to use it. I also worked through the four tweeks for using linux with solid state drives, though I skipped the step for Firefox as I'm planning to use a Webkit browser shortly. I also updated my grub settings to set the boot delay to zero - it's nice to see the machine start up so quickly.

Some other tweaks I did can be found on the Ubuntu using Eee PC page - not all of which are needed as a lot is configured automatically with 8.10.

So far the machine does exactly what I want - we'll see if a few days on the road with it has me wishing I had the MacBook Pro back...

Technorati Tags: apple, asus, computing, hardware, linux, mobile, eee pc, purchasing, ubuntu

Disclaimer

It shouldn't need to be said, but sometimes it has to be, so just in case:

Anything I write here are my opinions only, and do not necessarily represent those of anyone else, especially any employer, my colleagues, or my family.

Also, what he said. And him. And him. Some day this will be on a separate page.

Good. Now, we return to our usual programme of insulting everything and everything.

Expo and Olswang, a time for conferences

It's been (and looks set to be for the forseeable future) a time of conferences and workshops.

A few weeks ago, I attended the LinuxExpo at Olympia (just 2 short minutes on foot from the office - gotta love London life). It was good - I got a chance to chat to a few people, including Alastair who was doing a great job manning the Gnome stand, and a few Debianistas including noodles, which took me right back to the good old days of ALUG.

The event itself was a bit of an odd one though, with the Linux part tucked away in a corner of the larger CreativePro Expo and MacLive Expo. If Gartner are saying 85% of businesses have adopted Open Source, you'd expect a stronger showing. I can only assume other Linux events are attracting all the attention.

And, indeed, that certainly seems to be the case: last week I had the oppportunity to attend the Olswang Open Source Summit, which was oversubscribed with more than 120 folks coming along to hear all about Open Source. Most of the crowd had some involvement in law, as you'd expect given the hosts.

A few things caught my attention. Firstly, Adam Burrows (Associate General Counsel, Symbian) asserted that when the Symbian OS is fully open sourced, it could be the largest open source project in the world, with in the region of 40m lines of code. Obviously it depends on what you class as the project (and LOC is a notoriously dodgy measurement), but to put it in perspective: the linux kernel is around 5.2m lines of code; OpenOffice is around 10m; Red Hat 7.1 is around 30m; Windows XP is around 40m; and Debian 4.0 is around 283m lines of code. So whilst not the largest, Symbian is certainly big - and getting to grips with all that code is going to be a real challenge for their developers. Not to mention - why is a phone operating system bigger than some desktop operating systems?!

Heather Meeker of Greenberg Traurig LLP did a nice roundup of the various foundations out there, including Free Software Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Python Software Foundation, GNOME Foundation, Software in the Public Interest, The Open Group, Eclipse, Linux Foundation and LiMo Foundation. As an Apache member, I was particularly pleased to hear her refer to the ASF as "the bellweather or hallmark of how to manage Open Source projects".

I was however somewhat disappointed by the presentations from IBM and Microsoft.

The IBM presentation was somewhat like a FLOSS talk from five years ago: no real insights, rehashing the same tired old arguments and focusing more on scoring points against Microsoft than providing useful content. C-, must try harder.

The Microsoft presentation held no surprises: it was a typically disingenuous but cleveer tale of half-truths, twisting facts and figures to confuse the audience. Just a couple of examples include the claim that Microsoft have "always been widely interoperable" (no explanation was given for how their proprietary undocumented binary file formats were ever interoperable), and the howler "we have 80,000 Open Source projects running on Windows". The implication was that Microsoft themselves are developing these projects - it may be true that there are 80k projects that happen to work on Windows, but I suspect it's completely untrue that they come from the Microsoft stable. Indeed, a quick look at Microsoft's Open Source Project Community, CodePlex, shows just 6618 projects at the moment. The most disappointing aspect of all this is that Microsoft have some genuinely good news to shout about - for example clearing their developers to contribute directly to Apache projects - and yet some speakers still rehash this duplicitous nonsense, forcing us to rebut instead of support.

So: it was a good afternoon with some interesting conversations, but next year I'd hope to see the big companies really raising the bar.

Forking blogs ....

Last weekend I was given a sharp reminder of the dangers of forking, modifying and otherwise patching a project.

For some time now I've been disgruntled with the amount of comment spam getting through requiring moderation or deletion. It turns out there's a nice captcha plugin based on recaptcha, but some tweaks are required to make it work. Unfortunately the tweaks didn't work out of the box, and as I was also getting annoyed with the look and feel of the blog, I rashly decided to apply one of the shiny themes that come with Movable Type. Big mistake: the indexes looked lovely, but the individual entry pages looked quite awful, with broken styling and half my meta content missing.

At this point I recalled that in the last 5 years or so I've tweaked, patched and otherwise mutilated my Movable Type templates and CGIs. It's great - I can make the blog look however I like. But because I'm no longer using the baseline code, the MT themes do not apply cleanly and there's no guarantee of compatibility with the rest of the MT community.

I managed to back out the style changes by crawling through backups, but if I want to get the whizzy new templates and captcha stuff, I need to do more work. So I now face the tedious task of either reverse-engineering my changes and applying them to the current MT, or ditching my customisations in favour of progress and finding a way to make the most recent MT display the content I want - neither of which I have time to do right now.

So, anyway: having the source code is good, being able to change the code is good. Forking is bad.

Now things are sort-of fixed, I can get on and write all the other stuff I've been meaning to post for, like, forever (at least a couple of days).

Evolution junk mail bogofilter-fu

I've been using Evolution as a mail user agent, primarily so I have a workable calendaring solution on Linux. Having tried out Mozilla Thunderbird, Sunbird, Lightning, with and without Google Calendar integration, I'm happy to use something that just works.

Unfortunately (you saw this coming, didn't you?) all is not well with Evolution in Intrepid Ibex, Ubuntu 8.10. When I enabled junk mail filtering, I started getting the exciting message:

Pipe to Bogofilter failed, error code: 3

Ah, error code 3. It's almost like being on a Mac in the olden days. Anyway, there's a simple solution: mark a message as junk, then mark it again as not junk. For the full rationale, see bogofilter error messages in evolution.

A whole bunch of Ibex stuff

Let's just say that getting Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex completely happy on this Dell Latitude D630 has been less than straightforward.

Out-of-the-box installation is pretty straightforward, with the wrinkle that I had to use manual partitioning in order to overwrite my previous test Ubuntu install - there's seemingly no "Overwrite old installation" option.

I had to do some work to get dual monitor support working properly. The laptop has an NVIDIA graphics chipset, and so I installed the proprietary binary drivers (bad me). Unfortunately there's a bug in the NVIDIA X Server Settings application that can cause it to crash instead of writing out your current settings to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. The workaround I took was pretty simple: I moved my existing /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.orig before clicking the "Save to X Configuration File" button. This allowed me to save my dual monitor configuration and it now works, and is retained across reboots. It's still a bit flakey - Ubuntu doesn't seem to recognise when the external display is removed, so I end up disabling it in the server settings app before disconnecting from the docking station. That makes undocking a tedious chore.

Next up is the strange decision by TPTB to make the wifi LED blink on activity. It's a horrendous usability snafu, incredibly annoying, and unless you know better you tend to wonder if there's a problem with the wifi connection. Theoretically you can disable the wifi LED blinking; after creating the script I ran it (sudo /etc/network/if-up.d/iwl-no-blink) and the blinking stopped. Briefly. It's back to blinking again... I'm still looking for a resolution.

Another problem that's plaguing me is occasional complete hangs, with caps lock and shift lock lights flashing and the machine frozen. Nothing even gets into the logs - so I can't easily diagnose it. More on that as and when I've figured out what's going on.

I still find it frustrating that Firefox looks abysmal out of the box on Ubuntu. In order to make it remotely pleasant to work with, I had to:

• Go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Fonts and select Subpixel smoothing


• In Firefox, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Content -> in Fonts & Colours Advanced -> and select Serif/Bitstream Vera Serif / Bitstream Vera Sans / Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and set default sizes to 14 and 12.

Next up: syncing, the woeful state of calendaring, and hibernation.

Brother DCP 9045cdn with Ubuntu Intrepid

Getting the Brother dcp9045cdn working was a bit of a chore with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.

I fired up the printer add tool: System -> Administration -> Printing.

Rather amazingly, it automagically spotted the printer on the network when you click "New -> Printer".

Unfortunately there's no drivers installed by default, and none were discovered automatically. I needed to install the additional packages, and it looks like these are brother-cups-wrapper-ac, brother-lpr-drivers-ac and associated dependencies. I could then select the Brother DCP-9045CDN CUPS v1.1 [en] driver.

According to edubuntu wiki brother driver packaging these are the packages needed, also a list found on Brother printers and Ubuntu 8.04.

Unfortunately it's not all plain sailing from there on in. My first attempt to print was met with the error printer foo: cups-missing-filter; following the cups-missing-filter thread led me to try the command: sudo aa-complain cupsd

This didn't completely solve it as the printer still appeared to be disabled. Connecting to the cupsd web-based admin page at http://127.0.0.1:631/, clicking manage printers, then my printer, then start printer seemed to do the trick.

I can now print again. Hurrah!

Point. Counter-point. Counter-counter point: Plug the printer in, open a document, and print (from 2003 ... gosh).

Linux blogging tools

Dear LazyWeb,

Are there any decent blogging tools out there for Linux users? I've seen a list of five blog editors, and tried two of them, but neither are quite up to scratch. Things I want to do include:

• select which blog to post to
• see a list of previous entries (and optionally edit them)
• do approximately WYSIWYG editing
• drag-n-drop image placement with auto-scaling and thumbnail generation
• select (multiple) categories for an entry
• select (multiple) tags for an entry, ideally from a saved list
• send pings on posting
• support for MovableType

... basically, I want ecto for Linux. Anyone?

Vista guest on Ubuntu host with Virtualbox

So I've got Ubuntu's latest and greatest installed, Intrepid Ibex, 8.10, and I want to get Vista up and running using Virtualbox. There's a few hurdles, caveats, and other stuff to watch out for, which I'll document here as I did with my Vista host and Ubuntu guest comments.

Firstly, the fully open source version of Virtualbox that can be installed straight away from Ubuntu (sudo aptitude install virtualbox-ose vboxgtk) is ok, but the GUI lacks significant functionality found in the Sun distribution - for example, being able to mount ISO images. The solution is to install the packaged distribution, but the Virtualbox Linux Downloads page does not list Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex". Fortunately you can find packages in the virtualbox download directory with a bit of URL mangling, including virtualbox ubuntu intrepid i386.

Once VirtualBox 2.0.4 is installed, you can go ahead and create a virtual machine and start the Vista install. One thing I noticed is that the initial black DOS screen with "Loading Windows" takes a long time - but stick with it, and eventually you'll be in the graphical installer.

When you've completed the Vista install, you'll find you have no networking. Apparently Vista does not support the VirtualBox virtual network device out of the box (see Windows Vista on Virtualbox, Vista guest on VirtualBox, Vista on Ubuntu using Virtualbox, Set up Vista networking). There's lots of talk about downloading drivers from the AMD website, creating an ISO, and mounting that. In fact, the solution is far simpler: just change the network adapter from PCnet-Fast III Am79C973 to Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop, and the network will work again.

Once you've installed the guest tools, you can use shared folders. These don't appear to be mapped automatically, however, so you need to click on Computer, then Map network drive, then enter \\vboxsvr\YOURSHARENAME and click Finish.

You can now relax as Windows Update gets busy - which for my machine involved an initial 30 updates, 116.2 MB total. Welcome to the wonderful world of Vista!