Search Results: "daveb"

26 January 2009

MJ Ray: Hardware Questions: Asus M5200N, Ubuntu, GPRS and an iPod Touch?

Moving on from the horrible tax situation, I m struggling to get three pieces of hardware working. I m terrible with hardware. Can anyone help me get these working better, please?
  1. I ve been lent an Asus M5200N after I busted my shoulder with a 7kg laptop at #davebcs. I ve managed to enable processor scaling as ondemand, but like the page says, the fan is noisy. Other sites report that the Centrino s thermal limit is 100C, so is it OK to set the fan not to kick in until 78C on the sensor? The default is 40C which means it s permanently on - the coolest the fan makes it is about 74C.
  2. The Asus has Ubuntu on it (intrepid I think). Is there an easier way to get my three GPRS connection working than copying the config files from the old laptop and using the terminal? Network Manager doesn t seem to work and I can t see what it s trying to do or why it s failing (where s its debug log?). Alternatively, is there a distribution better suited to occasional laptop use than Ubuntu?
  3. I ve been lent an iPod Touch. However, when plugging it into the USB on the Asus, the screen says simply iTunes and the quick start guide says to connect it to iTunes. Can gtkpod do this, is there another way to start it up from Ubuntu, Debian or GoboLinux, or shall I beg access to a computer running iTunes?
Thanks for any answers. I may send out small gifts in return because questions 2 and 3 seem very awkward to me.

13 October 2008

Decklin Foster: What's sup?

After some weeks of final testing, I've just uploaded packages for sup-mail to NEW. I'm pretty excited about this. Sup is a console-based MUA, like mutt (which I have used for many years). A few things distinguish it from most mail readers targeted at geeks like us:
  • Sup has no folders, a la Gmail. After watching many friends and even fellow hackers switch to Gmail, I have to admit: this literal hierarchical organization thing doesn't scale. I was planning to totally redo my mail folder system Any Day Now for about six months prior to starting on this. It was never going to happen.
  • Sup uses a Ferret full-text index to make this approach plausible. Search is super fast and beats (for me) both any kind of "organization" I could have disciplined myself into and the fine-grained control of something like mutt's search. It's sort of like git: until you do it, you don't realize how much more productive you can be when previously-expensive operations become instantaneous.
  • Sup works with threads, not messages; this is another thing Gmail got right. I used to waste brain cells thinking about which messages in a thread were worthwhile enough to save or not. Given the absurdly cheap price of disk relative to what we can type out in plain text since, like, a decade ago, this is crazy. In the index, I only have to look at whether a thread has new chatter or not, not its size, shape, or where the new messages are relative to it. All that's in the thread-view buffer where I actually read content.
  • Sup is written in Ruby. Back in the dawn of time, I used Gnus, and while I wasn't very good at elisp, the hackability afforded by being written in a high-level language was very nice compared to programs mostly implemented in C (even if they had a tacked-on scripting language). Plus, I love Ruby right now.
Despite all of those wins, sup currently has many drawbacks, and I don't recommend it for everyone. (And I mean everyone who thinks that the above are good ideas and are interested in using it; plenty of people, I'm sure, already think everything about this is idiotic, not new, or inferior to their preferred MUA. That's fine! You can ignore it all.) Here's what's still problematic:
  • At version 0.6, sup is very much not-yet-1.0. While it handles insanely large amounts of email without breaking a sweat, I still keep an additional backup of everything. (If Ferret crashes, the original copies of mail will be untouched, but it never hurts to be paranoid.)
  • The flow of data from your physical mail store to the sup index is currently one-way only. Actually removing deleted/spam messages is a big hack (if it works at all), and labels/flags/etc live entirely in Ferret-land. If you want to manipulate an actual mailbox, mutt is still the tool for the job (and then, you need to re-sync sup). This is probably the deal-breaker for most of us. I jumped in anyway because I feel like it can be solved (or more likely, made irrelevant) later.
  • William (upstream) is currently re-designing the whole thing from scratch, replacing the index library with Sphinx, and decoupling the index from the console frontend. As a result, the previous item is pretty much a non-priority (and bugs in general are not going to get the same amount of love as usual). I am hoping that we end up dumping mail into the index directly, then writing more frontends to write to Maildir backup, serve as webmail/whatever, but this is a long way off. On the plus side, thanks to Thrift, they will not be limited to Ruby.
  • Ruby's ncurses library still doesn't handle Unicode correctly. It can be patched (still doesn't work totally right), but I'm trying to find a more permanent solution for Debian.
So, if you're interested enough that you want to deal with these warts for now, apt-get install sup-mail (as soon as it hits the archive) and join us! Hopefully being in Debian will increase the userbase and get things fixed faster. If you're unsure, stay tuned for the next-generation version later. (There are screenshots and a few introductory docs over at Rubyforge that illustrate and explain all this in more depth, which I recommend checking out if you're still saying, "...huh." Me, I'm a sucker for any piece of software with a manifesto.)

27 January 2006

MJ Ray: Blogs: Tips to improve your blog

Want to better your blog? It seems that new year 2006 is the time to do it. I've seen a few lists recently that I'd I recommend:
  1. First, from a few months ago, but very good: Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 17, 2005: Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes - I sometimes deliberately use mistake 4 (mystery links) for effect, I've only recently addressed mistake 5 (classic hits) and I'm still working on mistakes 7 (irregular frequency) and 8 (mixed topics)
  2. Find those too hard to start with? Try Performancing's Quick and Easy Blog Improvements (via Dave Briggs) - I feel I've only one of that list left to do.
  3. Lastly, a very new one: How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog) by Steve Pavlina - if you just got your confidence back with the "quick and easy" changes, this one is a noble but ambitious list to stretch you again!
Remember my remarks about comment images and moving blogs too, please. Happy hacking!

25 January 2006

MJ Ray: Google Problems: China; and World Economic Forum TV

25 Jan 2006: google is taking a lot of heat online for agreeing to Chinese government content requests. I won't criticise the actual decision too much, because it's typical corporation behaviour: follow the money, like the rest of the World Economic Forum. If you're buying Chinese products just because they're cheaper, you're part of the reason they have the money and part of the reason that google is following them - corporations are seldom held accountable. If you don't like that, maybe you should Boycott Made In China as well as google? Conclusion If you believe that privacy matters, that bugs should be fixed (or at least answered) or that WEF is wrong, say no to google. Boycotting it will help to make the point.

World Economic Forum coverage

In 2006 as in past years, satellite TV channel SFinfo at 13e will be broadcasting some sessions of the World Economic Forum, with both German and Original (often English) soundtracks (I think Left/Right split). If you have a satellite set, you can see what the barons of big business are saying: sometimes depressingly hilariously irresponsible.

Other notes Amusingly, a Yahoo! search for google problems returned this google answer about a urination problem high up in the list (fifth result or so). Now that really is taking the proverbial...

21 October 2005

MJ Ray: Will the last ex-UEA-er to leave Norfolk please switch out the light?

A surprisingly high proportion of ex-UEA people stay in the area after finishing at UEA. Over 40% want to, according to the local chamber of commerce. Eventually, that number falls: with John and Brett leaving, I think I can now count on one hand those from my Norwich years (1994-1998) who I know are still here. Most left some time ago. Why? Small place syndrome? Underpaid work? Both? Possibly. It feels like only in Norfolk could the train station start to expand its car park to cope with demand and the same week most train services to it are cancelled because a Cambridgeshire farmer drove onto the single line stretch, was killed and it takes at least a day for access and safety checks in this sparsely-populated area. From the BBC's picture, the unit involved was one of the commemorative King's Lynn "picture trains". You seldom hear what happens to the damaged trains and injured drivers. I guess the railways and the media doesn't like to worry passengers. Even the Potter's Bar investigation ending only got brief mentions that I saw. Also at the train station, local police put out a picture of people they would "like to interview" about the spate of recent bike thefts. Possibly as a result, they've charged one man. Someone I know had a bike nicked, which meant a long walk to/from work until it was replaced. Very annoying. The sort of petty bike vandalism/theft which annoyed savs is also on the increase here again. I'd've expected nicked bikes to sell better in summer, but maybe the local crims are thick or there are more easy-to-nick bikes in September. At least it's not Fakenham, (which is one of the most boring places on earth, you may remember - original source ) where the headline story is that the kerbs are too high. I'm sorry someone was hurt, but kerbs here seem tiny compared to the ones in Northamptonshire. Probably they've all been lowered for safety there too now. As a result of adding Dave's blog to Planet ALUG, I noticed BritBlog for the first time. I spent a while browsing the other Norfolk-based blogs on it one evening. Unsurprisingly, I knew about most of the ones I found interesting already, apart from Ztroller who links to me... erm, why? Does he read this? Most listings are from blogspot and I still won't add Atom support to my blogging software - I want to read, not edit, so Atom is mostly extra cache filler. I only added Really Simple Syndication as well as RDF Site Summary because it was fairly cheap to do and I didn't know about the obvious way to get RSS 1 from Wordpress. Finally, in local(ish) concerns, Northern Ireland, from Noodles' emptiness:
"while I'm ranting, why is the adjective for someone from the UK "British"? Britain doesn't cover all of the UK. I wasn't born in Britain yet I'm British. Can't I be UKish or something?"
I'd hate to be called UKish. I don't have any particular affection for this Kingdom's political boundaries. If the UK ended tomorrow, would anyone besides its rulers mourn? I'll not thank you if you call me British. I'm English, a midlander and Towcestrian. British nationality is a side-effect. (And why is it so hard to get .gb domains anyway?) It's odd that there's such argument over England's anthem. So there is imagery or irony involved in Jerusalem, depending how you want to view it: who cares? It's rousing (unlike the UK dirge) and mentions England past. Yikes, I've just discovered I'm agreeing with Billy Bragg of all people. As for the UK, why don't we work together with others when we agree and work independently when we don't agree? Unfortunately, few politicians advocate English self-rule, apart from racist bigots and English imperialists. The really depressing thing is that those sort of people would probably easily get a majority in any English legislature, if backed by the mess media. Maybe Britain is diverse enough that it balances the extreme English... diverse we are or de verse it gets... (ouch)