This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Yesterday was one of those good flipover days. At the beginning of the day I had a huge wall of projects depressing the hell out of me; too much work to do and no way that I’d get it done. By the end of the day I’d passed on one project to someone else and made some really serious progress on one of the others; it went from being a disconnected pile of code and spec lines to being a rigorous spec and a working project (with, admittedly, a load of bits still unimplemented). In absolute terms, there’s not much difference between the two states, but psychologically it’s now a glass-half-full rather than a glass-half-empty. I am most pleased.

I’ve been using Gnomemeeting to talk to Jono, and it rocks a bollock. Took a little while to set up, though. Things you should check:

• Does your sound work? I’m using kernel 2.6, so it had ALSA in it and the mic worked fine without me having to do any work.
• Have you got the mic volume turned up? Use alsamixer to check.
• Port forward all the ports mentioned in the Gnomemeeting FAQ to your machine (you have to do them all individually; SW1.0 doesn’t support port ranges).
• Make sure those ports are also available in the “services/external service access” section in your smoothwall configuration.
• Turn on “Enable IP translation” in the H.323 advanced section of the Gnomemeeting preferences.

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Jono, Schwuk, and Aquarion have all posted some pictures from the Linux User and Developer 2004 Expo. Clearly this is a message that I should also post mine, which I will do when I get a sufficiently round tuit. Besides, I’m in more of other people’s photos than I am in my own :)

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Matt outlines some thoughts on the poor state of Linux advocacy documentation, including why it shouldn’t be called “advocacy” :

Tapping “Linux advocacy” into Google produces very little that isn’t outdated or irrelevant. This is both slightly depressing and yet confirms that we’re doing the right thing.

I look forward to seeing the fruits of the research: some pointers on the best way to leave people keen on the idea of moving to Linux would be invaluable.
He also notes my tendency to act as “Socratic investigator“, which is, um, true enough I suppose. I did, and still do, have some reservations about their approach to the (brilliant, nonetheless) Infopoint Linux “advocacy” stands at computer fairs, and it was those reservations I was outlining. I will be the first in line applauding when they succeed, and they did lay most of my reservations to rest during the discussion (which got quite heated at times!).

Phil Ringnalda :

“Despite our different opinions about the relative importance of the message board and the star parts, Roger and I are both looking for the same thing, the same sort of connection, from our blogs. It’s not about having an echo chamber posting twenty “you’re so right!” comments, just those comments and links that even when they make it clear that you were wrong, also make it clear that someone read what you had to say, understood it, and thought enough of it to reply. “Star” is a little strong for me, but I’ve long thought of my blog as just a forum where only I get to start message threads.”

We had a new senior IT guy start at work a few months ago, in a different office, and I still haven’t got around to meeting him—the time I went to that office, he was away. When he mentioned (to someone else) that he still hadn’t got around to meeting me, they suggested to him that he should read this site, because it’s almost as good as meeting me in person.
I was really, really pleased with that. I must be doing something right.

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Lugradio is mentioned in NTK!. Let the fame begin!

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The LugRadio World Domination Plan continues—episode 5 is out, with things about GMail, advocacy, and KDE going away.

I’ve been recommending to people for ages that they use a bootable live-CD to install Debian. After the slight lack of success alluded to in the last entry, I’ve just tried using the 10MB netinst installer (discovered from Rick Moen’s Debian installer list, and installed Debian with it. While this was a woody installer, and therefore hasn’t seen some of the latest updates, it asked only one hard question: what type my PCMCIA controller was. I guessed at the first (of the two offered) and it’s worked, so I must have got it right. I walked through the installer, and then grabbed grub, the latest 2.6 kernel, and udev with apt. I’d forgotten just how good Debian is; I’ve discovered with live CDs that I’m sometimes afraid to grab arbitrary things because I might break their live-ness or the setup, which is built in arcane ways I don’t understand. Coming back to real Debian is like returning to an old friend; the comforting embrace of feeling confident of what I’m doing is worth a hundred flashy hardware diagnostic things.
Naturally, I haven’t installed X yet. That’s next.

My laptop is an ancient Toshiba Tecra 520 CDT. I’m trying to get a decent Linux installation on it. Now, I’ve tried Damn Small Linux and Feather Linux, but, unfortunately, I want (eventually) to be running a 2.6 kernel and be using Debian, so that I can use my wireless card. Both DSL and Feather are mostly Debian, but are not in certain critical ways (to keep them small, mainly). So they boot and install fine, but upgrading the kernel makes them fail to boot at all. Big no-no. I’ve downloaded about five other Knoppix-based distributions, but my laptop just ignored the CDs; wouldn’t boot from them. This is clearly very annoying. So, after agonising over this for some time, I discovered Smart Boot Manager—just download it, and it writes a bootable floppy image to a floppy. You then boot from that floppy, and tell it to boot the CDROM, and, pow, everything boots fine. Yay!

My new background picture is this beautiful Fiat Coupe, taken from a selection of equally beautiful Coupe images. So nice. So nice.

Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:
“woman had also been useful in recruiting various foreign” (Tom Clancy, “The Bear and the Dragon“)
Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?
A computer I’m trying to gift with USB ports.
What is the last thing you watched on TV?
The West Wing on DVD. Actual TV programme: Angel, last Tuesday.
WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is.
6.45pm
Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?
6.33pm.
With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
Other computers :-) The fan noise drowns out pretty much everything else.
When did you last step outside? What were you doing?
About 4pm; some kids said they’d kicked their ball over the fence,and I went to get it.
Before you came to this website, what did you look at?
Someone’s diary.
What are you wearing?
A dressing gown. :)
Did you dream last night?
No. I don’t dream much.
When did you last laugh?
On the phone to Natalie.
What is on the walls of the room you are in?
Green paint. Three whiteboards. Two shelves. A clock. Two cartoons. A picture in Ancient Greek style.
Seen anything weird lately?
Disappointingly, no.
Last movie you saw?
Blimey. Er. Matrix Revolutions about two weeks ago.
If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
A computer that does USB so I don’t have to fix the piece of shit next to me. Ha!
Reveal something that no-one knows about you.
There isn’t anything that no-one knows.
If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
I’d make it a meritocracy.
Do you like to dance?
No. Not even if no-one’s watching.
George Bush:
Stupid warmongering arsehole. First against the wall when the revolution comes.
Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?
Niamh Katherine :-)
Same question for a boy.
Patrick. Don’t know about middle names.
Stretch your right hand all the way out, what is the first thing you touch?
The cupboard with all the network gear in it.

Fascinating discussion over on Crooked Timber about the nature of fictional political leaders such as Francis Urquhart, Harry Perkins, Jed Bartlett, Jack Ryan, and Jim Hacker. The thesis is that the American fictional presidents are ideals, perfect men in every way, and while this isn’t really true I understand what the writer means. El presidente in a TV programme is someone you’d vote for, someone who engenders the thought that this is the way the real guy should be doing it, and why doesn’t he get that? British PMs on screen are not in any way like that: Urquhart is rampagingly cool but not in any way whatsoever someone you’d vote for; Hacker is hilarious, but, again, not a vote target. The only fictional British PM who does have that “he’s my guy! why don’t the real people get it?” vibe is Harry Perkins from A Very British Coup and the story isn’t about his greatness, it’s about how he got his arse kicked by the Civil Service. I think that some of this is about the power embedded in the office; the PM is supposed to be literally just the prime minister: the first among equals. (Without wishing to delve too far into political ranting, I get the impression that this annoys the shit out of Tony.) The US President has real personal power all his own; he gets to say “Make it so“, Picard-like, much more than our PM does. So your ideal fictional one should say “Make it so” for all the right reasons and on all the right issues, and, lo, we have utopia. Political utopias are a much rarer commodity in fiction regarding Britain; look at 1984, the canonical book about British politics. Look at V For Vendetta. As mentioned, the only potential utopic story was A Very British Coup, and that’s about how a guy tried to make a utopia and got screwed!
I can’t imagine the programme 10 Downing Street, the UK equivalent of The West Wing. I think that Americans see politics as a knife-in-the-back grubby business and chastise their politicians for not being the Platonic form of a perfect politician. Here, on the other hand, no-one really expects politicians to be virtuous—the complaints come about when a politician shows explicit un-virtuousness, but if they exhibit the status quo of not being explicitly nasty but not being nice either, no-one thinks twice about it. Politics is a grubby business and politicians don’t care about us. There are, notably, exceptions, but they’re not exceptions who are doing what everyone expects of politicians (and therefore everyone else is falling down on the job), they’re exceptions who rise above the norm and the expectation.

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RML outlines use cases for Project Utopia. Firstly, I want it, I want it, I want it. Waaah! Second: I am surprised to see that there’s no “plug in a digital camera and start up F-Spot” use case, although I suspect that the ones he listed are a (small) subset of their big list of use cases for PU.

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Now, Knoppix and derivatives (Morphix, etc, etc) are really good. They diagnose nearly all your hardware. But, say that Knoppix version x.y diagnosed 90% of your hardware. You boot from it, and do a hard-disc install. Then, a month or so later, Knoppix x.y+1 comes out, and it supports your woreless card (where x.y didn’t). What do you do then? You don’t want to blow away your existing system containing a month’s work and tweaks and just reinstall with x.y+1. There’s no way of saying “detect all your stuff, and then update my existing HD install with the new data“, is there? How difficult would it be to write this? Would it be possible to just download the new detection routines from x.y+1 and run them on a x.y HD installation to update your config files to handle the new hardware?

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Matt has decided to use his skills as a writer and content manager to help the Gnome project. This is excellent. Documentation on Linux software, as any fule kno, is not great in the vast majority of cases. I’ve said countless times in the past that there must be writers as well as hackers out there with an interest in Free software who would help with this, and then, when there was one right under my nose, I never even thought to pimp the idea to him. Good thing my friends are smarter than me and don’t need my suggestions. Good work, Matt. I expect Gnome to get even better than it already is as a result of his contribution.

Andrew Gregory has built ExplorerTree, an expandable-collapsible explorer-style tree (loosely) based on my aqlists code. Cool!

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So, my dad says to me, this computer you set up for me? I can’t read the text in any of it; it’s too small. After a certain amount of righteous wragging because he’s clearly getting old, I thought, OK, I’ll jack up the screen resolution. It’s running Morphix Gnome, and was at 1280×1024. After some fiddling around, and setting the modes in the “Screen” section to have “800×600” first, I got to the stage where the screen seemed to be 640×480 and the desktop was 800×600. So the screen scrolled around on top of the desktop when you moused to the edge. Who wants this behaviour? Lots of people seem to run into this with X, and I have never, not once come across anyone who finds this behaviour useful. If you set the size of something to be 800×600, the bloody screen should be that big. The X log (/var/log/XFree86.0.log) complained that it was using the default hsync and vsync settings, despite me having HorizSync and VertRefresh directives in XF86Config-4. Googling around for the problem, I finally came across the recommendation to use “CloneHSync” and friends (his card’s a Radeon). So, I read the Radeon module man page, and set ‘Option “CloneHSync” “x-y“’ and similarly for ‘Option “CloneVRefresh” “a-b“’ for the hsync and vsync ranges of his monitor, and ‘Option “CloneMode” “800×600“‘, and it worked. The man page says that there are setting stuff for the “secondary head“, which to my mind means that it should make no difference to his one single monitor. Yet it did. I don’t get it. And X configuration is still a black art, despite all our advances. Having your distro, or Knoppix, or XFree86 -configure do it for you is easy, but if it fails or you want to change it then it’s still a black art. I note that Morphix now has a thing called xconf, and it’s “in their apt repository“http://www.morphix.org/debian/, so maybe this will get fixed too.

I spent most of the last decade honing my ability to absorb complexity and detail and translate that complexity into working programs.

I’m spending this decade trying to make that premise seem ridiculous, at least on the platform I can influence.—Don Box on usability

One of the things I really love about Python is the interactive shell; when I think “how do I do X in Python?” then I can just drop to a shell, type “python“, and then try stuff out. I can’t do that in VBScript, and it annoys me. So: an interactive VBScript shell.

do while true
  wscript.stdout.write(">>> ")
  ln = wscript.stdin.readline
  if lcase(trim(ln)) = "exit" then exit do
  on error resume next
  err.clear
  execute ln
  if err.number <> 0 then wscript.echo(err.description)
  on error goto 0
loop

Note that this is totally daft and it doesn’t do anythng complex at all. No line continuations. No cleverness. But it helps me to answer the sorts of questions I come up with a lot, like “does a string with length > 0 evaluate to True?” without having to create a .vbs file and run it. You need to run this from the command line with cscript.

In addition to my current big secret project, I want to rebuild my working system. I’ve thought before about my mail setup and whatnot, but I’ve got a few other ideas:
It’ll be Debian, with the ROX Filer as the file manager.
I’ll use /usr/apps/Debian extensively, because it’s autopopulated with AppDir wrappers for installed Debian applications (those that try to put themselves on a WM menu, anyway)
I want the Filer patched to handle Mozilla drag-and-drop
I want a Trashcan which does apt-get uninstall when I drag an AppDir from /usr/apps/Debian to the trash
Window manager: probably metacity
I want to investigate gDesklets as a means of writing little apps that do stuff for me
I don’t know how to best integrate “AppDirs” that are wrappers for Debian packages with real AppDirs made by me for applications that aren’t in Debian
I want Project Utopia, mostly—specifically, I want udev (in Debian), hal (in Debian), and rox-volume-manager, a non-existent thing for the ROX Desktop that does what gnome-volume-manager does for Gnome. This involves understanding exactly what gnome-volume-manager does do
Still need to work out exactly how to handle mail, mailing lists, and newsgroups
Hopefully Firefox will run without crashing on a newly built and installed system that doesn’t contain four years worth of crud and bad configuration decisions on my part
I want the Python bindings for FTE, but I can’t get them to compile
I want FTE’s “copy a line” bug fixed (must mail fte-devel about that)
I need to know how best to do the installation. Since I want stock Debian when I’m finished, but I don’t want to go through the Debian installer, I’d like to use a Knoppix derivative. Morphix LightGUI? DSL and Feather Linux are neat, but contain some non-Debian stuff (including the X server, eek) which isn’t good. Is there a lightweight Knoppix derivative which only uses real Debian? Is this what Bonzai is? It’s light on docs (as in, there are none afaict).