JonRob's blog

Funny Air Traffic Control Conversations

2007-03-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

This story was on Digg today and it has some really great lines:

http://www.businessballs.com/airtrafficcontrollersfunnyquotes.htm

Includes things like:

Tower: "Delta 351, you have traffic at 10 o'clock, 6 miles!"
Delta 351: "Give us another hint! We have digital watches!"

and

A military pilot called for a priority landing because his single-engine jet fighter was running "a bit peaked." Air Traffic Control told the fighter pilot that he was number two, behind a B-52 that had one engine shut down. "Ah," the fighter pilot remarked, "The dreaded seven-engine approach."

Enjoy :D

This guy rocks my socks!

2007-03-13T07:25:00.000-07:00

Avant-window-navigator is one of the coolest new pieces of software I've seen in a while. If he goes ahead and puts together another project he's talking about, Affinity, then Gnome is going to blow people away!

You can find his blog here, which he updates regularly. The best thing is I've found the SVN version to be STABLE!

http://njpatel.blogspot.com/index.html

Go take a look around and send him encouragement or bug reports :D!!

Reading

2007-03-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

I stopped reading Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig quite a while ago; I have been doing a lot of reading since then though, and I thought I'd share with you.

The Independent is running a series at the minute entitled "Banned Books" and each week they're selling a copy of a book that was banned or burned or restricted in some other way for a reduced cost (usually about £3). I'm trying to keep up with the series and haven't done too badly, need to get my hands on a copy of Lolita for this week; passed books have included Farewell To Arms by Hemingway and Clockwork Orange (though I can't remember the author's name!).

Both were really good, especially Farewell To Arms but I warn you, if you're to read it make sure you have something happy to do after - actually that's good advice for any Hemingway book! As for Clockwork Orange, although I've never seen the movie I think the book is probably a lot easier going. There's a lot of Russian and made up words which makes the impact of the disturbing scenes a little less striking - the overall message is still very clear and it's a great read all the same.

I've got an interesting post to put up soon - I just needed to pass a bit of time with this one :D

VCRs and Guns

2007-02-18T11:33:00.000-08:00

I'm reading the book "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig at the moment and just read a brilliant example about the problem with copyright laws; I thought I'd share!
In case you can't see it clearly, the caption reads "On which item have the courts ruled that manufacturers and retailers be held responsible for having supplied the equipment?".

The story is that Universal Studios (I think) went to the courts protesting that Sony was responsible for damages caused by the record feature on their new VCRs because, amongst all the legal uses, it enabled people to illegally copy content owned by Universal. Guns, on the other hand, kill people and yet their manufacturers' and retailers' aren't, or have never been, held responsible for murders involving guns.

That ruling was overturned but it's a pretty funny example of the complete lack of common sense surrounding "creative property" law. I'm not sure what the British situation is on all of this as most of the material I've been reading is by American authors but I plan to find out soon...

Playable/Bootable

2007-02-09T02:21:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to make a DVD that would both play in an ordinary DVD player and also boot in to a GNU/Linux live CD when in a computer. Apparently nobody else has wanted to do this because I haven't been able to find any documentation on the net but I have eventually figured out the rather obvious solution! I guess anyone else who wanted to do this probably knew more about mkisofs than I did but just in case there's ever any one else who needs to know how to do this, and doesn't know more about mkisofs than I do I'm going to document it very quickly here. (Also for my own future reference!)

mkisofs -dvd-video -pad -l -r -J -v -V "KNOPPIX" -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
-boot-info-table -b boot/isolinux/isolinux.bin -c boot/isolinux/boot.cat \
-hide-rr-moved -o /mnt/hda1/knx/knoppix.iso /mnt/hda1/knx/master

This example obviously takes Knoppix as the Live CD you're attempting to make but it should work for any live distribution that uses isolinux. The only relevant option to change is the -o, which should point to where you want the iso image to be created and the option following that, which specifies the input folder - i.e. where all your files are which you want to be put in to the iso image.

Hope this helps someone,

Jon

New episode coming!

2007-02-08T05:17:00.000-08:00

I'm interviewing Mark Shuttleworth on the 26th of this month (February) so feel free to send in any questions you have for him! The format will be slightly different as I've only got one guest for this episode but the rest is the same, i.e. Mark answering your questions! I'm expecting to mostly take questions on his work with Ubuntu Linux (as he is the founder of the project!) but if people do send in questions about his space trip and such like maybe I'll ask those too.

Oops, almost forgot to put down the contact details. Either send the questions to yourquestions@questionsplease.org or leave a voice mail at 0121 286 9845 (+44). Feel free to visit the site, questionsplease.org, to find more information, another way to get in touch or to find past episodes for download :-)

I know I haven't been posting so much to this blog lately but my blogging over at Free Software Magazine has been taking my writing attention and also I've started on a new project - more details of that one to follow soon!

Jon

From London to China...by train!

2007-01-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

I wish I was using Wordpress now really, unless anyone can tell me a way to get asides on Blogger?!

Well anyway, that's not what this is about. There's an interesting article on BBC which is a correspondent describing their journey to their new posting in China, by train, from London! It's a good read and a really cool thing to do in my opinion...

See why I want asides now? How short was that!

Free as in Freedom!

2007-01-21T02:31:00.001-08:00

This is a double post:

firstly, you have to check out wikisource and wikibooks! We all know and love wikipedia but how many of us know about these sister projects? Wikibooks aims to create textbooks and books in the same way wikipedia was created and wikisource is similar, at least I think it is, to project Gutenburg.

Secondly, I found Richard Stallman's biography at wikisource recently and am reading it there at the minute. It's called Free as in Freedom and is really interesting - not normally in to biographies either.

A movie about trusted computing...

2007-01-16T07:04:00.001-08:00

Ok this is really cool...well I thought it was. For a start it's just a cool movie with cool animation and soundtrack. Secondly it's a good introduction to "Trusted" computing and makes it quite clear how trust has nothing to do with it. I wish I could upload it to here, infact...

Never embedded a video on my blog before but it's cool so hey! Here's a link back to the original as well so you can see if there's more there that interests you (you can find the video's original copyright info here too). Also, for anyone who refuses to play proprietary formats I've converted it to an ogg theora file and hosted it at my website but please only use this if you have no other way of watching it - I host my podcast here and don't want to lose all my bandwidth to this video!

Science and Relgion episode released!!

2007-01-16T04:50:00.000-08:00

I've just posted the latest episode of the Questions please... podcast. This time around the subject is Science and Relgion and the guests are Russell Stannard, David Bartholomew and David Wilkinson. Russell was the head of physics at the OU and has written and edited many books on the subject; David B is ex vice-principal of LSE and a professor of statistics (as well as author and editor); David W is the principal of St.John's college Durham, author and editor, theologian and astrophysicist.

It's a really interesting listen and covers a wide range of questions including ones on Dawkins, mind & brain, evolution and also some of the failings of science. The address is http://questionsplease.org

Enjoy :-)

Bluehost - argh!!

2007-01-15T12:32:00.000-08:00

I'm becoming increasingly disallusioned by my hosting provider! Not only have I found that downloads are painfully slowbut I have discovered that my site is actually down tonight...I'm damn pleased I didn't release the new episode tonight. Haha, and as much as I'd like to believe slow downloads and the website going down is becuase my site is so popular I think this is very unlikely.

So what to do?! I have paid for two years of hosting so I can't see myself moving to a new host so I guess I'll just have to complain lots - maybe they'll give me some sort of upgrade :-) Or even better - money back!

Photos!

2007-01-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

I was just looking through my flickr account at some old photos and I found these two. The first one was taken in Paris from the Eiffel Tower and is the best photo I've ever taken, at least in my opinion!

The second one was taken in Swaziland, summer 2005 and I just love it - it might not look as arty as the Eiffel Tower one but this photo is so frickin cool! Brings back all the best memories of that trip...now to find something else to do before I start to feel nostalgic!

FC6 on Acer Aspire 1300

2007-01-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

Just thought I'd write a quick note to remind myself, and to help out anyone else who has a similar problem, that when I installed Fedora 6 on this laptop I needed to change the default run-level in /etc/inittab to 5 to get it to boot graphically. Also to get it to run at the correct resolution use the "Hardware" tab in the Display GUI (found in System>Administration)...

I expect I'll be editing this soon to include how I got my wireless card going; saying that there are plenty of good walk throughs for this already.

Do something!

2007-01-05T15:04:00.000-08:00

Ok, this is simple: you can visit Oxfam's website and find lots of easy actions that don't require any money or much time and make some kind of a difference. While you're there, sign-up for e-mail campaign updates and do what you can each time something comes up. They are campaigning on really important issues as well: for example anyone familiar with Free Software and their stance on patents and intelectual property will be interested to discover that IP doesn't just cause problems for software, it also causes problems for people in third world countries who can't afford medication due to patents!

Don't just stop at Oxfam either: there are many organisations that need your help such as Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth; both of these have similar "easy" actions which don't require much time or any money. Saying that, if you can afford to give a little money why not!? I'm sure it will be greatly appreciated and will certainly make some kind of a difference.

The point of this post? Do something! Anything! It doesn't matter what as long as you, from time to time, make an effort to do something.

Jon

Questions needed: Science and religion!

2007-01-03T07:45:00.000-08:00

I've almost made it to recording the second episode of my podcast. This time the episode is on the topic of Science and Religion and is featuring Russell Stannard, David Wilkinson and David Bartholomew as guests, hopefully answering and discussing questions submitted by people like you and I. Obviously for this to work properly we need your questions so please head on over to the site and http://questionsplease.org and submit your questions, or send them to yourquestions@questionsplease.org . In fact, you can even call in and leave a voice mail at 0121 286 9845 (this is a UK number so use +44 if you're outside the UK).

Hopefully the discussions will be just as interesting as last time and maybe the show will even have a bit more polish about it this time: I think I've learnt quite a lot. I'm also hoping to have smaller download sizes and a theme tune!! Exciting stuff hey!? Check it out!!

Jon

Eggy flips revisited...

2006-12-12T06:56:00.000-08:00

Well, I finally got around to making my self some eggy flips/bread using my Grandad's recipe and they were really good! Here's what I did, all be it made very short and very quick:

Follow a recipe to make Yorkshire Pudding batter (I believe you use about 150g plain flour, 1 egg, and 200ml of milk: make a well in the flour and put the egg in and half the milk and mix until smooth with lots of little bubbles on top; then add the rest of the milk and mix until smooth).

Cut pieces of bread into quarters and cover them in the batter. Let all the excess drip off back in to the rest of the batter.

Put a frying pan on a high temperature with a little bit of oil. Once it's hot place the bread covered in batter in the frying pan, turning them over regularly, until they turn golden/dark brown. Take them out and put a little bit of salt on them and you're set!

Enjoy...

openSUSE 10.2

2006-12-08T11:03:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of talk lately about Novel and Micorsoft's new deal. Most of it has been bad, and I can only really think with good reason too if the Samba team - amongst many others - have seemingly been against this deal. Yet, I've done some research, as far as I can tell they haven't breached the GPL or in anyway admitted that Microsoft has legitimate intellectual property claims over any part of GNU/Linux so I myself don't see the problem (still who am I to make this judgement, see edits 1 & 2); add to this the fact that I believe a lot of what Novel has done, like usability testing, beagle etc has added a lot good things to the Free Software world and the result of all this has been that once I saw openSUSE 10.2 available for download I went and got a hold of the iso and installed it on my system!

[Edit: For now I will read Groklaw and see what they have to say on the matter and say this: openSUSE 10.2 really is a very good distribution; as for the deal regarding Microsoft and Novell, I'm no legal expert so I would point people to Groklaw to hear one side of the argument and to the openSUSE wiki where you can find Novell's response, and ask that you make up your own mind. Edit of the edit: You may also want to do a google search for information from Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman to get their points of view on the deal; someone in the comments has suggested their responses are also very useful.]

[Edit 2: After reading Groklaw, although I am still unsure, I don't want to make the mistake of endorsing a Novell product (or any product related to Novell) because of my ignorance! The review stands, it is a good distro, but in terms of what Novell have agreed with Microsoft including the agreement to include OpenXML support in Novell OpenOffice, I can't recommend it. In fact, I will be changing. I'm not sure what to but I think I'm going to have to think long and hard about it. ]

I must say I'm impressed. So much so I'm going to attempt to write my first ever distribution review! I'm not going to go over every step of installation and use, rather just try and pick some of, what are in my opinion, highlights (and real negatives!) of the distribution.

Pros:

The installer was as good as any other graphical installer I've ever used. What was really great about it was the package selection: here the user had complete control over the installation packages with detailed descriptions of each to help you make your choices. The other thing I liked about the installer was the good default partitioning layout, using ext3 and a separate home partition. Add to these two things it worked, detected and configured my hardware properly, had a nice slideshow while installing telling me about all the great features I was going to find in the OS, and had me online quickly and easily.

The default themes throughout, including the boot splash, the GDM and Gnome's desktop backgrounds are all really attractive with nice blues and curvy lines and a, in my opinion, very cool openSUSE logo. Once logged in it took me a while to get used to Gnome with just a single panel across the bottom, with a single menu "Computer". This menu is so different to any other Gnome menu and I really love it!

Rather than try to explain it all, which will undoubtedly end in failure I'm going to link to some screenshots:
If you click the image you should hopefully be taken to where you can find a complete screenshot walk through of installation and the main features of the distro. Saves me a lot of time :-)

You might be wondering how to see the rest of your applications? Well, you just click the "More Applications" button and you're taken to a window with all your applications nicely catagorized and looking quite attractive, and a filter search to help you find them quickly.

The best thing about this, in my opinion, is that it's clean and there's nicely integrated beagle search which is just such a fantastic idea! Also in this menu is a link to openSUSE's help documentation which covers a wide range of topics, although I fear it won't be much good for any problems requiring more in depth knowledge - IRC, mailing lists and forums will still be important!

The other thing that's really different about this distro is that they actually make use of Gnome control center. This is a really good point I think as it looks much cleaner than the system menu used in other Gnome distros and makes it feel more complete.

Although none of these things are crucial functionality they make the whole experience a lot more pleasant. Things that are different to other distros are the default installer, which has a simple interface and makes installing applications easy to do, with repositories setup by default during installation; linked to this as well is the Yast2 set of graphical applications for configuring your system, hardware, software etc. I haven't had much chance to try it out yet, but it's accessible from the Gnome control center and appears to have a wide range of tools. I have used it for adding new repositories and that was straight forward, so I can't really fault it yet.

I should also add Firefox 2.0 is present here and is really great to use. The new spell checker feature is proving it's worth while I write this post :-p While talking about applications, F-spot and Banshee are both installed and clearly promoted in the default install which I think is fantastic because they look great and they work great too. I even think Banshee is using Helix as the backend by default, and if I'm correct this provides out of the box support for WMA and mp3 from an open source application. Please feel free to correct me on this. Although it's a shame not to try and support ogg etc a bit stronger this will certainly appeal to people coming from Windows.

Cons:

There's only two thing so far I'm not impressed with: it seems slugish at times, certainly when compared to Debian or Fedore (with out SELinux enabled), and I wonder if this is because of Novell's apparmour? I haven't tried disabling it yet because it's only a matter of 10s or so on boot and login but it does seem strange when the rest of the distro is so good.

The other thing is the range of software available in the default repositories. It seems quite limited, but then it could just be that they've chosen different packages to what I've seen in other distros. Everything one needs for most tasks is included but there are some obvious gaps such as Istanbul desktop recorder (maybe not so obvious until you come to record a screencast for a review you're writing!).

I do wish they'd used a better default icon set too: I think they're using "Industrial" and it's just ugly in my opinion! Only a minor point.

The final point I'd like to make is about their approach to non-free software. If you're downloading the CD images you have to grab an extra bonus CD to get non-free bits and bobs, which I think is a fair approach and similar to Debian's non-free and contrib repos; when downloading the DVD, however, they're on the ISO and some are even installed by default. During installation if you choose to customize your software selection you see they are clearly labeled proprietary which I suppose is fair, but if you didn't choose to do this? The first clue you have is when you're presented with some license agreements. I guess I just wish they made the point a bit clearer, throughout the distro (with things like out of the box mp3 support).

[Edit: After reading Groklaw, although I am still unsure, I don't want to make the mistake of endorsing a Novell product (or any product related to Novell) because of my ignorance! The review stands, it is a good distro, but in terms of what Novell have agreed with Microsoft including the agreement to include OpenXML support in Novell OpenOffice, I can't recommend it. In fact, I will be changing. I'm not sure what to but I think I'm going to have to think long and hard about it. ]

In conclusion? I'm going to stick with it. It really is impressive with a great set of software installed by default (taking away perhaps a lot of my need for massive repos), nice touches like the new menu and use of Gnome control center etc.

Sorry it's not the most detailed review ever, I'm impatient! If there's anything I've not talked about and maybe you'd like to know about before trying it yourself post a comment and I'll try and answer your question. Or you could just look at the openSUSE website :-p

Eggy bread (or egg flips in some parts)

2006-12-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

I had a craving this last week for what my Grandad always used to call "egg flips" which I think more people know as "eggy bread". Well whatever you call it I'm sure if you've ever tasted it you have fond memories of how delicious it is and would agree it was definately worth some research. Here's what I found:

On the internet the only recipes I could find simply told you to dip bread in beaten eggs and fry it. I wasn't so impressed with the resutls; I found them a bit bland really. So I rang my Gran to ask her and she said it was better to do it with flour and milk as well, to make a proper batter. As I understand it now one takes an egg, some flour and some milk, beats it all together and adds a pinch of salt,dips the bread in and frys it.

I've yet to try this but I can only imagine it being better and more like my childhood memories so once I've tried it I'll post again and let you all know. Maybe I'll be able to add some more exact ingrediants too!

Jon

gNewSense

2006-11-26T10:21:00.000-08:00

Two posts in one day: starting to feel a little dizzy!

Well just a quick note to remind people to visit and download my podcast :-p and to give gNewSense a try. It's a completely free GNU/Linux distribution (free as in freedom) that is based on Ubuntu Dapper Drake. I'm just about to try it myself so I can't comment how smoothly it will go, but I think it will be at the very least a good thing to try.

Good luck,

The speed of light IS fast!

2006-11-26T01:16:00.000-08:00

I'm writing this after an article that made it to the digg front page explaining why the speed of light really isn't that fast at all: he took the distance to various objects in our solar system and told us just how long it would take light to reach them. Admitidly the times weren't that quick, but wait until you consider the distances. This time around I'm going to put down how long it takes light, and how long it would take you to reach the destination driving at 60mph in your Volvo!

Earth to the moon: at 60mph it will take you approximately 167 days, driving 24 hours a day with no stops for dinner! It takes light 1.3 seconds; Seems pretty quick to me! And incase you were wondering 167 days is 14.5 million seconds.

I'm just going to skip on to the Voyager space probe example now...

Earth to voyager space probe (assuming a distance of 87 AU - approx 8*10^9miles): at 60mph, again with no breaks for dinner will take you 15600 years! Light? 30 days. Again, seems pretty quick to me!

Space is big, really big; light is quick.

Jon

Episode released!

2006-11-23T10:04:00.000-08:00

Wooo!! The first episode has been released and I think it's a good one! Go check it out at questionsplease.org and enjoy either the ogg or mp3 file - the choice is yours...

Thanks,

Jon

New Podcast

2006-11-21T04:16:00.000-08:00

I'm starting a new podcast. I don't know how many times I've written a description of it now because I'm trying so hard to get the word out!

The idea is that ordinary chaps like you and me ask questions to people who have made significant contributions to their communities. The first episode is featuring guests from the Free Software world (Richard Stallman, Jeremy Allison and Jeff Waugh) answering questions. Obviously we need questions to make this a real success so please visit the site and submit your questions to yourquestions@questionsplease.org.

It's being recorded on Thursday so if you could send them in soon that would be great!

Thanks all,

Jon

SIP conference calling...

2006-11-08T07:08:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to hold a conference call on a linux system using the sip protocol but there really are a lot of options out there and no decent tutorials on how to do it so after I get it all set up and figured it out, unless someone can point me in the direction of an existing tutorial, I'm going to write one! It will be clear as day light and anyone will be able to follow it, or so goes my plan...

Jon

Not the norm.

2006-11-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

I don't usually post stuff like this but it did make me laugh and hopefully it will make a few other people chuckle too...infact this isn't even really a proper post, just a link.

Enjoy.

Actually, incase you want to know what it is before visiting, it's a page that has various quotations from famous people about their opinions on sex and love. It's funny.

Commit to stop climate change...

2006-11-05T01:44:00.000-08:00

2006-11-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

This is pretty quickly becoming a photographic blog really isn't it!! Well, I've been spending quite a bit of time with photos lately and this is another one that I've taken which I think is fantabulous (any one else like Van Morrison?)...

I hope anyone who sees this likes it!

Just so this isn't a total photographic blog my next post will be something a bit more geeky and Linux related - will have to try and get my Mum's school to at least try some Free Software on their systems I think :-)

Ooops...

2006-11-03T08:52:00.000-08:00

Ooops, spot the silly spelling mistake in my last post!

Hear should read here! Hides in shame...

2006-11-03T08:50:00.000-08:00

I took this picture today and although the quality isn't brilliant and the exposures aren't quite right on the different images that make it up it's still pretty cool - how lucky am I to live hear! I'll be heading back down to get it perfect next time the weather's good, which according to the forecast is tommorrow so I'm looking forward to it already!

Not just a blog for wingeing now! Enjoy, and visit Cornwall if you ever get a chance, there's no where quite like it in the world!

Jon

Broadband in the C20th...?

2006-11-01T07:12:00.000-08:00

We're currently in the process of moving our broadband service from one company to another and we received a letter informing us of our connection date to the new service provider. The letter read:

We are pleased to inform you that you will be connected to our broadband service on the 01/01/1900.

According to this I should have been connected long ago rather than the 3 weeks + that I've had to wait for my service to be switched over! Still...apparently I'm going with a company who are well ahead of the rest of the field ;-)

The First Post...

2006-10-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

This is becoming a bit of a tradition: I start a blog; I write my first post entitled "The First Post"; I stop writing the blog a few weeks later.

Well, I think it's time for this to stop. I don't care if nobody is reading my blog as occassionally I just need some where to vent some anger (like after I read the star letter in the latest computer active - really wished I had a blog then!) and this will hopefully be that place. The plan looks something like this:

I'll keep this blog; it is about nothing in particular, just what I want to write about when I want to write about it (apparently not a good way to build a regular audience, but like I said this is not my aim).

Humble aims but I expect it will be surprisingly difficult to achieve! Hopefully I can avoid contributing yet another un-maintained blog to the blogosphere...