-
A project to document everything in known history, founded by Bamber Gascgoine (you know, the bloke who used to present University Challenge before Paxo took over).
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
links for 2008-12-02
Sunday, November 30, 2008
links for 2008-11-30
-
OK - I've decided. My new Web 2.0 service, which will be a social font discovery tool, will be called TyreBottle. I'm convinced the system they use is adapted from Asus's method of naming computers (letters and numbers on a dartboard) with randomly-selected words instead, such as 'Master', 'Oxymoron', 'Chocolate', 'Gluck', 'Elephant', 'Chief', 'Siam' and 'Kaiser'.
-
A parody of a MyFace bulletin.
-
A cluster made of BASIC stamps: you know, the type of microcontroller found in some robots. Not really a supercomputer, but cool all the same.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Tweets for 2008-11-29
- Ooh, it’s quiet. #
- @tom_watson Your PC probably has one built into it… called the system clock. ;) in reply to tom_watson #
- A bug? In WordPress? HERESY! #
- I need something to write about to see if WordPress has been fixed. Anyone? #
- @bigdaddymerk I would, but can’t be arsed. Ended up posting some Fedora screenshot pr0n in the end, but at least it works :-) in reply to bigdaddymerk #
Fedora screenshots
Having now configured Fedora as I like it, I can now show you some screenshots of the current desktop.
The desktop with the two gnome-panels on autohide
I appreciate that this particular image is quite unremarkable. However, what the screenshot can’t tell you is how fast it is. It boots very quickly (boot to login prompt in under a minute, which considering the fact it’s Unix, and without optimisation, isn’t bad at all) and Compiz works without a hitch.
Wireless, bluetooth over USB, sleep, display, video chip, trackpad, et al ALL worked straight out of the box. Don’t ask me how they did that.
OpenOffice.org 3.0, which, you will note, IS in the repositories, unlike in Ubuntu.
OpenOffice 3.0 works very well, even if the installation process is somewhat fiddly (you have to yum each individual component.) I might have been able to save a bit of time with package groups… probably not, though.
Fedora has an About this Computer option in the System menu, which links to this panel in System Monitor
Overall, Fedora is very impressive, very fast, and very polished - more polished that Ubuntu Intrepid, in fact (yes, even the GNOME variant). There are still some issues (WLAN won’t work when waking from sleep, for example) but that’s SELinux’s fault, it seems. After generating a policy around it, it worked just fine.
It’s very quiet.
I haven’t updated this site properly this week, which is odd considering the amount of stuff that’s happened: I switched to Fedora (which I did write about, rather badly), bought a new iPod, and have started using Delicious again (the plugin broke some time ago, and it’s only been now I’ve got round to reactivating it).
This has partly been because I’ve been preparing to move home this weekend. Then again, it’s partly due to laziness.
I’ve set Twitter Tools to post daily Twitter digests to this blog at 5pm every day, so the site doesn’t feel too neglected in my absence. It may or may not work, so if you want me pestering you with slightly idiotic slurs 24/7, regardless of whether or not internet access is available, feel free to follow me on Twitter.
Normal service will resume as soon as possible.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
I think I’m in love
I installed Fedora this evening, and I am absolutely in love with it. I downloaded it over BitTorrent over two days (yes, it is that slow) and popped it on an SD card, and then booted the Eee PC from it.
The first thing I noticed was that it is incredibly fast. Boot-up happens without Plymouth (modesetting support for Intel chips is still in development, and will probably appear when it gets merged into the mainline kernel) but still uses a nice little ASCII boot screen. It’s fast - I haven’t timed it yet, but it’s speedier than Ubuntu.
It boots into GNOME 2.24 (through a brilliant implementation of GDM) starting X in less than three seconds. And - perhaps most surprisingly - everything on the Eee PC worked out of the box. WLAN, Ethernet, display, compositing, touchpad, webcam, everything. When Ubuntu’s traditionally been better in this respect, I’m thoroughly impressed that everything works out of the box in this release.
The only immediate problem I’m having at the moment is the fact that because my Internet connection’s been quite slow lately, downloading OpenOffice.org and LaTeX is taking a lot of time. It’s been going for hours now… and will keep on going for a lot longer.
Another issue I have with Fedora is the fact that a superuser password is required. I’m aware this is the norm on Unix systems, but I would like a simple (GUI) system whereby it could switch to an Ubuntu-style system (i.e. root login disabled, first user added to /etc/sudoers). Aside from these gripes, however, Fedora is incredibly solid. I’ll be using it on the Eee PC for the forseeable future from now on: I still think Ubuntu is a great OS, but for now, it’ll be Fedora on my main Linux box.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
What difference will -2.5% make?
Well, with it seeming almost certain that VAT will drop by 2.5% to 15%, what difference will it make? The difference, some simple maths tells us, will be 2.127659574468085106% (which we’ll round up to a 2.13% decrease in price for simplicity’s sake).
However, with this measure meant to kickstart consumer spending, what difference will it make? Very little, Mr. Mushnik. Let’s do some simple analysis.
As major purchases are most likely out of the question, let’s try something simple, like this Christmas’s must-have gadget, the iPhone 3G. That, with the 17.5% VAT rate, costs £349. Multiplying that by 0.9787 (subtracting 2.13%) gives us a grand total saving of… £8.43. Yes. With this measure, designed to kickstart the economy, the iPhone will now cost £341.57. Of course, figures may not be totally accurate or add up to 100% due to rounding.
In this respect, let’s try something more substantial, like a Samsung 40″ HD ready LCD TV from Currys. At present, it costs £549.99. With the cuts, it is… £538.38. Great. So you can save enough money to buy a DVD with your TV. T’riffic.
Going even more substantial, let’s try a car. Like, for example, a Chevrolet Lacetti, used as Top Gear’s benchmark reasonably priced car. The base model is £11,995. After cuts, that’ll be £11,739.51. Again, not a major difference considering the actual cost of the thing.
In this case, let’s try the other end of the spectrum as cars go. Aston Martin have recently announced the new One-77, which will cost somewhere between £1,050,000 and £1,200,000. We’ll take the 1.05+E6 figure as a conservative estimate. After cuts, that’s £1,027,635. That’s quite surprising: that’s a major difference.
So the VAT cut MAY make a difference after all: unemployed bankers undergoing early mid-life crises will all buy overpriced supercars, bouyed on by the fact they’ll have twenty-two grand left over at the end, which will cause all Aston Martins to fall way down Top Gear’s cool wall, which will ruin Aston Martin’s business, which will cause the automotive industry to collapse which will cause another crash on Wall Street which will eff up the economy for the next thousand years. Darling, YOU IMBECILE!
Gordon Brown Likes Packages
Gordon Brown IS the PackageMaster
It apppears our Great Leader and his band of minions apostles have a very strange fetish - for packages.
It’s quite obvious to anyone who’s had at least one eye on political happennings for the last year or so. No act of the government is announced on its own any more - they are all part of packages. The alleged cut in VAT that may be announced in the pre-budget report? That’ll be part of a broad package of measures. When something bad happens, the typecast ‘annoying spokeswoman with strange accent and oddly-timed words’ will always be trundled out to tell journalists that they are ‘working with the community to put together an appropriate package so that we can invest in community services’ (i.e. they’re getting some old, fat, obscenely rich people together in a council chamber and making a quick, drunk decision before they go back out on the pull).
Of course, the Dear Leader may be the one orchestrating this package-fest, with his ministers obsequiously doing up the strapping and slapping on the FRAGILE label. Maybe Gordon subscribes to Packaging Digest, and reads it after a bad session of Prime Minister’s Questions.
Or maybe, just maybe… he’s scared of unilateral approaches, because even though they may work in practice, they look bad politically.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Thoughts on the BNP List
...your name will ALSO go on the list.
The leak of an old members’ list for the extreme right-wing BNP in the UK has raised some serious questions about the rights of extreme political parties.
Something that strikes me is that if I were a member of a political party, then I wouldn’t be ashamed about it. I’d be paid-up, and would probably have zero shame in declaring my membership of X party. I’d probably also be involved in party activism, so I’d probably make my e-mail, phone and postal address public (to some degree).
However, BNP members, apparently, don’t wish to be identified when phoning in to radio and TV shows, or leaving comments on the BBC’s web site. Is this because they’re ashamed, or afraid of threatening phone calls? Perhaps they fear for their job, or their friends and family.
Well… perhaps if the BNP didn’t have such despicable views, people would be less inclined to make threatening phone calls. If they weren’t racist, homophobic, fascist, hypocritical and two-faced, people’s perceptions might be a bit different. However, if their views are unacceptable - serves them right. I’m not saying that leaking the list was the right thing to do, but neither is what the BNP advocates.
In my opinion, they’re entirely deserving of something like this. If it helps to weed these vermin out of British society, then it serves them bloody well right.
A word of warning: I’m not posting the list here, or any links to it. It can be located by a quick Google search and on several torrent sites, but that’s your responsibility. Anyone posting any segments of the list in the comments section will be killfiled permanently and with immediate effect.