This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Coral is a seamless transparent system for distributing HTTP traffic over a set of web cache proxies to reduce bandwidth demand on a central resource.
What? What the hell does that mean?
Stops your server going down under the weight of a Slashdotting, dude.
Really? That’s cool. How does that work, then?
Easy. Take the URL that you want to not get Slashdotted: let’s say it’s http://www.example.com/something/cool. Then add nyud.net:8090 at the end of the hostname, like so: http://www.example.com.nyud.net:8090/something/cool. That’s the URL you give to people. Now, when someone requests it, the content at that URL will get transparently given to them from one of Coral’s many caches, instead of from your server.
Neatness! How many caches are there?
This is unclear. The website makes reference to people running Coral caches, but doesn’t seem to say whether anyone is actually doing so.
Nonetheless, that’s smart. Hey, I’ve got an idea! Why not use this for LugRadio?
I was just thinking about that. Of course, we already have the mirror network. Moreover, Coral won’t let you serve files more than 50MB: LR shows aren’t that big, but they might reduce it still further. It’s a pretty cool idea, though. It would be most handy if Slashdot themselves Coralized the URLs they post, which would stop anyone getting Slashdotted (or would help, at least).
Ooh, good idea? Do you think they’ll do that?
Hell, no. But it would be good. Would have saved my website when I got slashdotted, for example.

The government’s Office of Government Commerce has released its report on open source software, saying that “open-source software is ‘a viable desktop alternative for the majority of government users’ and ‘can generate significant savings‘.” Steve Ballmer from MS riposted with the rapier-like observation that “the findings do not align fully with feedback we regularly receive from our customers in the market place“. Really? You asked a load of MS customers what they liked and they all said MS software? I am shocked. Shocked, I say. I asked loads of car-owners whether they thought that owning a car was a good idea and, wouldjabelieveit, they all said “hell yes!” and followed up with “you won’t catch me on a damned peasant wagon bus“. When I asked Tom about his opinion, he said tghat cars were the terror of the modern age and we should all use pushbikes. Something like that, anyway. Again, the government leap another notch or two. Whether such a report actually changes anything remains to be seen, but we could be on the cusp of a free software surge here. Fantastic.
Full report available in RTF, HTML, PDF, and Word formats.

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APLAWS is an Open Source Content Management System developed to assist UK local authorities deliver services online .
The APLAWS content management system. Its development was funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. It’s in use by loads of local councils. It runs on Linux. It’s based on Red Hat’s CMS. It’s entirely GPLed. It implements web standards for accessiblilty, navigation, and metadata.
Yay! Someone somewhere is getting it right. I was losing hope in our government, but they’ve just gone up the ladder quite a few notches. Well bloody done!

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I’ve got two machines; my desktop machine, and my laptop. The desktop machine is always on. It runs Gaim for instant messaging, and has all my files on it. I use Thunderbird to read my mail, which is on an IMAP server on that desktop machine. My laptop has a wireless card in it, which means I can use it elsewhere in the house. The problem is this: when I’m on the laptop, I’ve not got access to everything. I mean, I could set up Thunderbird or Evolution on the laptop and have it read mail by IMAP from the desktop machine. What do I do about instant messaging, though? If I put Gaim on the laptop then (a) I have to set up all my accounts on the laptop as well, and (b) how do these systems react to you being logged in from two different locations? If it logs me out on the desktop then that’s a pain, because it won’t log me back in again when I close down the laptop.
So, maybe I should just use the laptop as a terminal, and have everything actually happen on the desktop. How, though? I can’t have the laptop just do XDMCP to the desktop: if I do that, it starts a second X server, and then Gaim starts up again on the second X server, which is the same thing as running it in two different locations. I don’t want to use VNC from the laptop to acess my existing running X session on the desktop, because the desktop runs at a higher screen res than the laptop is capable of, and because VNC isn’t great if you’re using it all the time (it’s fine for using another machine for a while, but not as your primary means of using it).
How do other people solve this problem? Jono tells me that he just has duplicate environments on the desktop and laptop. I could do that, but it seems a pain to set up, and the twice-logged-in IM problem seems like a bad one.

Some guy called Wheels has been talking about how statements like KDE is about choice and choice is good are bad things. Instead, he’s advocating, for the KDE desktop, that the whole deal of allowing configurability all over the place is harming their usability. I couldn’t agree more. Gnome took this path some time ago, at least partly prompted by Havoc Pennington’s rant on free software UI, and I’d love to see KDE go down the same path. People over in the KDE camp are aware that this sort of thing is a problem; it remains to be seen whether those people can pull the project back from the precipice it’s on, but I’d love to see KDE as a real competitor to Gnome in ease-of-use and innovation. At the moment, for me at least, it isn’t even close. Again, there are people over there who are aware of this, and are thinking of ways to change it. I wish them every, every success.

After our summer break (which it must be confessed lasted longer than we expected), the Magic That Is LugRadio returns, bigger and better than ever! Get thee to lugradio.org and fear our mighty words!

Chris Metcalf has built a digital picture frame out of an old laptop. Very cool. I’ve heard about people doing this before, and thought it was cool (in a, well, heavily spod sort of way), but it’s triggered off a thought or two. Somewhere on my list is a telly in the bedroom; I wonder whether I should do this instead? I’ve got a Toshiba Tecra 520 here: it’s only a P166, and I don’t use it much. However, pretty much anything should be able to watch telly with a hardware TV card, no? PLus, it can be a picture all the time that it isn’t being a TV. This would be startlingly cool. I’m not sure that the laptop’s up to the challenge: what I really need is to get hold of a PCMCIA hardware TV tuner card (without, y‘know, paying £200 for it) and check it out. This would be a pretty neat Christmas present. I shall ask Jon at work: he knows about this kind of thing. I’ll bang a noddy Debian install on it and then freevo, perhaps. It’s only got a 12.1” LCD screen, but then it’s a bedroom TV so that’s not too unacceptable. Interesting idea.
I really need a “projects” category here so I can put all these cool ideas in it.

Has anyone written anything which takes the output from Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser and writes it back out to, say, Atom, or RSS? I can’t find anything, and I don’t want to have to spend all the time that he spent understanding RSS/Atom in order to know that what I write out is valid.

I need some t-shirts. I was looking at some of the ones at NTK, T-Shirt Hell, and ThinkGeek, but I’ve decided that, well, everyone’s got one of those. Besides, I’m sure I’ve got some of that magic transfer paper lying around here somewhere. So, I’m looking for t-shirt slogans. In the spirit of those sites mentioned above; you can imagine the sort of thing. Not something copied from somewhere else, though. Not the Mozilla logo, mind, given their policy on using their logo, which is a shame—I like Ade’s Mozilla t-shirt. Suggestions gratefully accepted: actual PNGs or whatever even more so, so I don’t have to go digging through my list of fonts. Prize is you get to see a picture of me wearing your suggested design, if that counts as a prize. Plus, I might not actually get around to doing it; you know how it is with me and doing projects rather than talking about them. Anyway, go for suggestions. Ideally designs should be for a white t-shirt, ‘cos I’ve got some of those. YOu can go wild with the colours, too, since I get to print it out on an inkjet; they don’t have to be monochrome (although they probably will be if it’s just a text slogan). Anyone got any idea whether you can laser print to transfer paper?

We did record the first episode of the second season of LugRadio, and it should be out at some time on Monday or within the few days afterwards (Mixer Boy Jono is busy enjoying himself rather than doing work, I am afraid to report, which might account for a slight delay; a fatal beating has already been administered on behalf of our loyal and long- (long, long) suffering fans.
Meanstwhile, if you ache for the spirit of the LR team and you’ve already listened to everything in the archives, I cannot do better than to recommend QI, a television programme I discovered last night. It, a comedy quiz, embodies the true glory of LugRadio, just on telly. Stephen Fry and four panellists ramble and tell jokes in a manner at best peripherally related to the questions at hand and one which astounded me in its likeness to our own glorious LR. I would claim that we got there first but (a) not even I think that we are as funny as professional comedians, (b) if we didn’t then I might be sued for libel, and© although it seems like a lifetime we have only been doing it for eight months and we took three of those off, a working schedule of almost Bushian laziness. Oops.

So, Matt’s got married. That means that all the LugRadio team but Jono are now hitched, although Jono is basically married without benefit of ring. Sorry, ladies: the world’s best-looking free software radio team are all now unavailable. I expect a rash of suicides of hot 15-year-old girls with LiveJournals, or possibly an upsurge in sales on Gary Barlow’s last album.
Am I old for even knowing who Gary Barlow is, now?
It’s weird, watching someone you know get married. There was a present and card on a table addressed to “Mr and Mrs Revell“, and it makes you think, “cor, Mr and Mrs Revell.” Matt’s got married. I mean, that’s a pretty big deal, that. It takes a while to get used to it. I’ll let you know when I finally manage it :)
Pretty good reception, too; Jono and I drank a heinous amount of wine, the disco guy had a comprehensive enough collection that he could impress both Matt (by having some Marilion) and Sam (by having Chesney bloody Hawkes). (That’s his full name, by the way. Little known fact.) Slightly odd choice on the food front: there was Chicken a la King, which is fine, but with rice and noodles and potatoes and pasta? Hope no-one there was on the Atkins diet.
Didn’t stop me eating some of each, though.
And I am still disappointed that, contrary to the foul barking dogs of rumour, the wedding photographer did not make Matt stand on a box for photos. I was planning on pimping this with Matt for the next ten years. Still, humour is provided by how Annable the Cannibal drove around Ironbridge without finding the wedding, although he cannot be blamed for this because the directions were lies. I had to stop and ask an old guy, thereby forswearing my manhood for ever. Damn you, Revell(s).
Speaking of LugRadio, which we were, tonight is the recording for LugRadio Season Two Episode One. (We’re recording in seasons in a pathetic attempt to disguise the fact that the summer break lasted a month or so longer than expected.) It should be cool: Matt will not be present since he is unaccountably on honeymoon! Can hardly blame him there; his new wife’s dress was lovely. Caught lots of confetti, too.

So, I went to LinuxWorld 2004. It was quality.
No, not the expo itself. Linux expos in the UK have been getting steadily more shit as time has gone on. There was virtually nothing, no stand, that was even remotely interesting. A great big Novell stand full of SuSE presentations, a great big HP stand full of big servers and a load of Oracle shit, a big Sun stand full of the Sun Java Desktop, a big Veritas stand full of people trying to bring the horror that is BackupExec to Linux, and some people flogging hardware. Woo. Oh, and OpenAdvantage, who rock the world.
The point of the expo for me, though, is not to get sold products. As Jeremy Allison said in the Great Linux Debate in response to me asking whether the corporate dominance of the expo was a bad thing, it’s not about technical stuff. (My question didn’t relate to technical stuff, really; it was more about small companies, and I was seriously disappointed that there weren’t more small firms there. Speaking to a couple of people, stand pricing might have something to do with that.) The point of it all for me is to meet cool people. And to get drunk on the first night. I managed both with stellar success.
Firstly, a big shout out to Matt Bloch and Patrick at Bytemark Hosting. It is deeply reassuring to disaocver that the people from whom you purchase hosting are not only providing a superb technical service but are also really cool guys as well. We also met up with Schwuk, and he and I had a barney about Mono. That was really rather fun. The usual suspects were all there: Paul Sladen for Debian, Brian Tiemann, Jon Masters, and it was cool to see them all again. It was also marvellous to catch up with Kam, who made it down for a couple of hours; I bent his ear about Ubuntu, and he was most helpful. It’s pretty cool knowing a massively influential guy :) We also had lunch with Phil Hands and Matthias Ettrich—how cool is that, eh? Matthias was a really interesting chap: serious and committed, but a real technical star, and he’s got some strong ideas. All in all, it was a great, great couple of days. I love going down to the Expo. Jono will have photos, I suspect.
Oh, and Jono’s talk was pretty darn good, too, but don’t tell him I said that.

Looks like we won’t be using Firefox at work, despite how it now does seamless authentication and everything. You see, one of our business critical applications has a web client, which all the staff will be using. And (go on! go on! guess!)...that client only works in Internet Explorer. It totally, totally does not work in Firefox. It uses IE-specific HTML. IE-specific JavaScript. There’s not a chance it’ll work in Firefox. Great.
What’s the fucking point in writing a web client if it only works in one browser?
This is what vendor lock-in means. All hail the mighty Microsoft.
The stupid thermal coffee mug the company has sent me does not make up for this.

The XFree86 Synaptics touchpad driver is the coolest thing I’ve seen in ages. It changes the action of the touchpad on a laptop so that dragging a finger down the right-hand edge works like a mousewheel, a two-finger tap works as the middle button, tapping in the corners works as a middle or a right-click, and loads of other cool stuff. Even better, you can adjust the sensitivity of the pad to clicks; no more does lghtly brushing the pad by accident act as a mouse click! Have Windows people had this for ages and I just didn’t know about it? It’s a shame that Ubuntu doesn’t install it by default; it’s in Debian (and Ubuntu) but it requires hand-hacking the XF86Config file.