As is my wont, I took the last half of December as holiday (having carefully saved it up during the year) and got back in to work today, hence the slight drop in post frequency.
Of Blogging
If my first month of blogging taught me anything, it’s that it’s remarkably time consuming to write technical articles for a technical audience. Turning ‘that thing that I did at work today’ into an informative, accurate, and non-trivial (not to mention non-criminal) article takes more time than expected. For that reason I think I’m going to be dropping to two posts a week (if that) instead of three.
That’s the downside. The upside is that my digital log-book has actually served most / all of its intended purposes. I’ve used it for my own personal reference on more than one occasion and others have used it to help them get things done. Not only that, but I am now more intimately familiar with the seedy underbelly of the blogosphere – the SEO and the carefully selected topics titles and stubs. Analytics tells me I’ve had 540 unique visitors (which is more than I was expecting), the vast majority of whom are referred by Google search results (75%).
All in all, a successful little experiment and one I plan to continue for a while yet.
Of Holiday
I use the word ‘Holiday’ in the loosest possible sense. I mostly stayed in Cambridge pretending that Internet Radio didn’t exist, which was indescribably refreshing. I also, naturally, played a little with my computer. I have discovered that:
- Compiz now works in Sid (on Intel cards)
- If you do use Compiz, you can really only play videos with the GL renderers, and they play really badly with … err…. everything else on screen (which is obviously also GL). Also, don’t get too attached to being able to switch to console without crashing X.
- Debian has handy tools for building pendrive linux images (on which topic an article shortly)
- Xen won’t easily boot XP as an HVM guest from your pre-installed XP partition (on the same disk as your root partition). Steve said it would be fine, until I disclosed where the XP install was. Then he laughed. Then he said it was unsupported. Then, when pushed, said it was possible but ‘a really dumb idea’. He repeated that a couple of times. Then I did it anyway. Then he spent the best part of an afternoon helping me make it work. Then we gave up. I should listen to Steve.
- VMWare won’t boot XP from your pre-installed XP partition (or at least not without a Windows MBR, which I’ve not yet had a chance to copy from somewhere).
- `xset -dpms; xset s off` will turn off your screensaver, no matter how obtuse KDE is being.
- Epigenetics is fascinating. So is genetics, but I’d already heard of that. Props, as ever, to Radio 4 (and its fans)
- You really need a Raven login to access the University’s teaching materials
- Steve has a Raven login (mine’s apparently still ‘in the post’)
- If you want to play chess over the internet, you probably want to sign up at FreeChess and install pychess
- You can write your own BBC iPlayer (not sure if I’ll write an article about this), but you still can’t save the files
- I’ve forgotten how to play chess
- Sake is good
All in all a successful, relaxing and informative holiday.
Of the future
This year, apart from my New Year’s resolution to ‘Give people a break. They’re really not as bad as you make out’, I will be doing my best to sabotage the following organisations:
- Big Media – They seem to be doing a pretty good job on their own, to be fair. I was at home briefly this Christmas and for the first time in ages I saw an anti-piracy advert when I put a DVD in my parents’ player. Now don’t get me wrong, I have quite a lot of DVDs, I just don’t see the ad’s because playback software in Linux isn’t hideously crippled. If I had to watch those things, I’d certainly steal more films and buy fewer.
I also had, as a result, to try to convince my father than in spite of what’s written in 36-point block caps on the screen, piracy is not theft. Piracy is copyright infringement; theft is theft. (Apparently the law disagrees). - Apple – A lot of the cleverest people I know buy Apple. They don’t see that Apple is doing anything worse than your run-of-the-mill tech company and like the innovative products the company creates. If Apple are so nice, show me the offical documentation for DAAP. In fact, show me the docs for the Apple Accessory Protocol so that I can plug my iPod (I don’t own an iPod) into something that Apple didn’t make (I know such devices are available, but they all had to use the reverse engineered protocol). Apple are creating an ecosystem of devices with which you have no guarantees of interoperation, and just because the devices work and are shiny doesn’t make it good.
- The ISPs – ISPs are a necessary evil. That’s pretty much all I have to say on that.
- Adobe – When I tried to write my own BBC iPlayer, I discovered that there’s not a single place in the free world that you can find an implementation of RTMP (the Flash video streaming protocol). I found it hard to believe that there were still protocols that were secure by their obscurity, but there it is. It’s everywhere, streaming almost everything, and the only way you can view the streams is using an officially-sanctioned Flash player. Something must be done.
That’s part of the future. I’ll obviously be doing the turncoat thing of going to work everyday for what is effectively a media company, implementing existing DRM schemes, creating new ones of my own, buying DVDs, watching Flash videos and using the internet. But deep in my soul, I’ll be hating every minute of it 