Going back to Linux

When I first started this blog at wordpress.com it was called “Learning Linux And Loving It”. At the time I had an old Intel based PC that I had been given. Not wanting spend any money on an operating system, I installed a version of Linux called Ubuntu. The version was Warty Warthog. It was horrible. I had awful problems trying to get the machine to run in widescreen, get a soundcard working, and most important of all get a wireless network connection running.

Needless to say, I gave up. This blog has, since then gone through a couple of re-designs, becoming my personal blog when my main hosting was down, and latterly my geek rants blog.

It would seem that things have come full circle. Yesterday I grabbed a machine that was left in my garage, brought it indoors, dusted it off and installed the latest version of Ubuntu - version 8.04 LTS (long term support) Hardy Heron Edition.

So? Initial thoughts? What a bloody revelation. It was a positive experience without the trauma scarring my memory from my earlier experiences. The “new” machine is an AMD Athlon XP2800 running with 512mb RAM and onboard sound and video. A generic wireless card and hardwired ethernet too.

The installation itself was a few guided questions with simple options for the novice (or windows convert) to understand. All the hardware was detected and installed, both network cards, video and sound. The system even detected the most suitable screen resolution as 1280×1024.

Using the OS is a breeze too. OK, there’s a bit of searching on the net for me to figure out what I want to do, remembering that I have to use “sudo apt get” in a terminal for example, but it’s still fun and the knowledge on the ‘net is awesome.

I am going to live with it for a few weeks on my second machine and see how it goes. I can’t permanently convert from Windows because of iTunes for my wife’s iPod, but I might end up using this one as my main machine and just leave Windows on the old machine for the boss to use.

I have found a couple of problems though. I don’t know whether it was just a glitch, WP staff mucking about or if it is FUBAR, but the screenshot below is what greeted my when I visited the wordpress.com support forums a few minutes ago:

Once I have settled in to using it a little more and found resources that I believe are really useful (Donncha already provided a couple, thanks Donncha!) I will put up a new post with those links for others to share. In the meantime if you have any tips or tricks to share I would be most pleased to hear them!

Vista According to the Bastard Operator From Hell

One of the best reviews of Vista I’ve seen yet:

“You should go to Vista.”

“So you like Vista?”

“Not really, no. I run a Vista simulator.”

“Virtual Server?” the Boss asks.

“Nah, I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm.”

“So you don’t like it?”

“No. But it has does have one advantage.”

“What’s that?”

“It causes a clean reinstall of XP which is generally good from a defrag point of view.”

Blatantly copied, unedited, direct from the Bastard Operator From Hell

If You’re Happy And You Know It…

Here’s a really quick one for Windows Users to try:

Either hit the Start button and click Run or on the keyboard hit the Windows key + R.

You’ll get to the command prompt. Type in the following:

If you’re happy and you know it…

Hit return. The result shouldn’t be any surprise. You’re using a Windows system after all…

I Am Your Customer Not Your Bitch.

The title is one of the comments posted at Giga Om’s post Jobs’ Mea Culpa Is Apple’s Victory.

In the original post Kevin Kelleher muses that the iPhone $100 rebate that Steve J announced was not due to a pricing cock-up or an attempt to revive flagging sales. Rather, it was planned from the start and is a very clever ploy.

As ever, it’s the stupidity of the comments that amuses me. Here’s a couple of my favourites:

From “Bender Robot“

You Wall Street analysts just don’t get it, do you? You don’t know Jack about Apple; just how many of you have predicted Apple’s demise in the last ten years and been absolutely WRONG?

Not a single word on the actual content of the post, just (it rambles bullshit for another three paragraphs) a lame attack on the blogger. Dude. Really. Comment on the content of the post or don’t bother commenting. Oh, and give us a URL where we can see how high and mighty you really aren’t. Oh, what’s that? You don’t want to take your head out of your arse ‘cos you might smell the way the internet really works? Twat.

Or this one from Morfeus:

As an iPhone buyer I feel stupid & ripped off. I feel Apple took me for granted.

here is what folks at Apple need to know - I am your customer not your bitch. I pay you and not the other way round. I need to be shown some respect. Take your 100 and shove it up where the sun dont shine. I aint buying anything Apple in the next 100 years…

So, you bought the iPhone and were probably (there’s nothing in your blog about it) quite happy with it until Stevie J announced the rebate. THEN you feel stupid? Tell you what. If you really don’t want that $100 rebate, send it to me. If everyone that has this attitude sends me their $100 rebate to spend in an apple store then I reckon I would be able to get at least two 24″ iMacs (mmm shiny!) for my desk with the wireless keyboard and mouse and the USB guitar adapter for Garage Band.

Hell, if I get enough of these rebates to buy two 24″ imacs, I’ll create a competition on this very blog and give one away as a prize. Yes, I would. Really.

EOS 40D - Want One?

Hong Kong based Roland has written an awesome review of the new Canon EOS 40d. If you’re a wp.com blogger you’ve probably already seen (or ignored) it but I wanted to pick up on it anyway.

I currently shoot (semi-professionally) with an old (think 6 years) Canon EOS 10d - 6 megapixels, slow write times - and a variety of lenses. When I heard the rumours about the 40d I got all wishful. Wishful that I could afford one. Now I am glad that I can’t afford one. I don’t want it. That’s not quite true. If I could afford it (like I had ten thousand pounds spare) then I would have one tomorrow. As it i, much like the rest of the world I would struggle to raise the money. Yes, it’s gorgeous. Look at the 3″ screen (below) and apparently it has live preview - something that compact cameras have had for years.

Then I read Roland’s excellent review (probably the first in the world and one of the most in-depth) and I saw one word that put me off. CMOS. Yes, it’s actually four words, you get my point.

I am absolutely scratching my head though. The CMOS sensor is all well and good, 10 megapixels or whatever, but it’s not full frame. You still have to take into account the 1.6x crop factor. For most people that won’t make any difference at all. What you see in the viewfinder is (essentially) what you get on the image.

But that means that my 50mm f1.8 Canon lens is actually an 85mm when connected to my 10d (or the 40d). My 19-35mm lens is actually 30-56mm and my 70-300 comes out to 112-480mm. I have nothing that will work as a wide angle.

I could go and by the Canon EOS 5d (12.7 mp full frame) but that’s retailing at £1599 in the UK right now and I can afford that even less than the 40d.

I know that Canon used the CMOS to keep costs down but surely economies of scale apply? If they started using the full-frame sensor from the 5d in the lower range then surely the cost of the sensor would come down and the price of the camera would too?

Grr! As much as I want to upgrade I will not be buying a new camera until Canon put the full-frame sensor in a reasonably priced body. And don’t tell me to buy a Nikon! I would have to change all my lenses. And anyway Nikon suck…

PHP 5 Required?

The Hypertext Pre-Processor (PHP - Yes, I know it’s all screw, blame the developers!) programming language is what runs most of the web these days. WordPress, forum software such as phpBB, even Blogger, all use PHP as their language of choice for communication both with the end-user’s browser and the MySQL database that holds all of the post and comment information.

30 August 2007 saw the release of PHP Version 5.2.4 for download. Most people will not care. I do. Why?

Well, following a comment on one of my Facebook posts, I started looking at how to develop applications for Facebook. Purely for no other reason than I was being nosy. The link to Dapper that Sanjida gave bore no resemblance to Facebook at all. A quick Google search turned up the Facebook Developers Step-By-Step tutorial. Guess what. PHP5 is required to run through the Tutorial.

There’s a new blogging application called Habari that I would really like to try out. Ok, it’s only at version 0.2 right now but I like the sound of it. Guess what. Yep, PHP5 required.

So, if PHP is currently at 5.2.4 then why the hell are all my hosts still running 4.4.2 or 4.4.3? Am I using shit hosts or are all hosting companies this slow to respond??

It looks like the only way to get something that’s running PHP5 is to upgrade my XAMPP install on my local server. XAMPP is running 5.2.3 which is good enough for me.

Yet Another Reason To Avoid Blogger

We all know that Blogger is the root of all blogging evil. It’s been well documented in the past that Blogger has been hacked and malicious scripts, viruses and malware installed on users’ blogs.

BBC News is reporting today that Alex Eckelberry from Sunbelt Software noticed booby-trapped links on 27 August.

From the report:

Now many hundreds of blogs on the site have been updated with a short entry containing the link.

Mr Eckelberry said it was not yet clear how the links were posted to blogs. The bogus entries could have exploited a Blogger feature that lets users e-mail entries to their journal.

You would have thought that after the first three widely publicised takedowns that Google (who own Blogger) would have tightened security on the application. Apparently not.

Among the other recipients of spam e-mails generated by the virus are users’ mail2blogger accounts, which allow them to update their blogs via e-mail,” said the spokesperson.

The email addresses on mail2blogger accounts are stored in Blogger so that the system can associate the account with the email address. A simple (relatively of course) or an insider would be able to get said email addresses and pass/sell to the “gang”. This would mean two things:

1, The “gang” would be able to post the malicious scripts to blogs via cloaked email.
2. The “gang” would be able to email the script to the owner of the email address infecting their computer and causing it to pass on the script in the usual virus like manner.

I don’t know about others but I try my hardest to avoid blogs hosted by or running Blogger type software. Yes, I may be missing out on decent content but I just really can’t stand the interface, the spam advertising, the porn and the black templates of death.

My suggestions:

1. Avoid any blogs on blogger.
2. If you want to blog, use a decent service. Yes, it’s very restricted but so far there have been no reports of hacking into the system.
3. Get a Mac.

Facebook At Work? No!

In a news report from the BBC today the Trades Union Congress reckons that social networking sites such as FaceBook, MySpace and Bebo should be allowed at work:

Employees should have access to social networking websites such as Facebook during office hours, the TUC has said.

This is utter utter crap. These sites have the “social network” tag for a reason. They are SOCIAL sites, not WORK sites. I don’t know about you, but the only friends I have on Facebook are friends, no work colleagues.

When you are at work, you are there to WORK. If you are surfing Facebook you aren’t working. You are not doing your work, you are reducing productivity and effectively costing the company money.

Some firms have blocked workers’ access to the sites, or disciplined staff for misuse of the internet.

However, the union organisation says it is unreasonable to try to stop staff from having a life outside work and suggests setting guidelines instead.

My employer blocks all the social sites, including Face Book and MySpace, they even block eBay. It’s no bad thing. Since blocking these sites we saw a reduction in internet usage. We also installed monitoring software which has had a similar result. Allowing users to to access non-work related sites simply adversely affects performance.

Stopping staff having a life outside work? What utter crap. The organisation is trying to get the time back that the employee is paid for. Thankfully there is some sense in all this:

Employment Law Advisory Services, which provides advice for employers, said access should be for business use only.

Personally I believe that many more sites should be banned too. The shopping sites like Amazon and play.com would be a good start!

Does your employer block any sites? If they do, what do you think of the ban?

Your Facebook Status in your WordPress.com Blog

Do you use Facebook? I have done for about a month now and am rather enjoying it. It’s like MySpace without the Emos! My profile is here. If you’re using FB then feel free to add me. Let me know who you are by commenting here so I can tell who’s who though!

One of the facilities is the “Status Update” where you can tell your friends what you are doing/feeling/pondering/whatever you like. Think of it as a Twitter for Facebook. It’s not much use unless you want to let your friends know what you’re doing.

Well, thanks to Adam at Pomomusings there is a way to share your Facebook Status Updates on your blog. He has actually created a small plugin called Facepress Statuspress which, when used with the hosted version of WordPress will allow the blogger to display their Status Updates in the sidebar.

Knowing what WordPress.com bloggers are like for Gucci widgets, I thought I would explore the possibility of displaying Status Updates on wp.com blogs. And it’s easy! It uses the RSS feed for your Status Updates. You can find the RSS feed like this:

1. Go to your Facebook Profile.
2. Click on the Mini-Feed bar so you can see all of your recent activity.
3. Click “See All” on the top right of that box.
4. Under “View” on the right, you’ll see a long list of “Stories” - click on “Status Stories.”
5. Underneath the list, you will now see “Subscribe to these Stories - My Status.”
6. Right click on “My Status” and Choose “Copy Link Location.”

Come back to your wordpress.com blog and follow these steps:

7. Go to Presentation -> Widgets.
8. Scroll down the page and find RSS 1 or RSS 2. If you have already used both of those then scroll down a little further and increase the number of “RSS Feed Widgets” appropriately, save and re-load the page.
9. Drag the selected RSS widget to an appropriate location on the sidebar.
10. Click the configure button on the widget and paste in the URL that you copied in step 6.
11. Click away from the widget and then press “Save Changes”.

When you view your site you should now see your Facebook Status updates in all its glory on your sidebar. You can see mine on the right. I changed the number of items to display to “1″, otherwise it was taking up half the sidebar.

Sandbox Went to 1.0

I just noticed that Scott (in a comment on Ryan’s post about 2.3) has released version 1.0 of Sandbox specifically for WordPress 2.3.

Sheesh! Something else to play with! :)