This post is not here. Nothing to see. Move along.

BusyBox v1.00 (2006.11.07-01:40+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

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 WHITE RUSSIAN (RC6) -------------------------------
  * 2 oz Vodka   Mix the Vodka and Kahlua together
  * 1 oz Kahlua  over ice, then float the cream or
  * 1/2oz cream  milk on the top.
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root@OpenWrt:~#

Hurray! Embedded Linux rocks. It's just something of a shame that I didn't actually mean to buy this particular model of LinkSys wireless thingy. Never mind, I'm sure I'll find a use for it :)

It's always kinda annoyed me when applications waste space with lots of menu bars and toolbars and stuff, when they could be using the space to show me useful stuff, or just be smaller. I appreciate that lots of people don't want information as densely packed as I do, but that's clearly not going to stop me trying. Up until now it's not been enough of an issue to do anything about, because I've had at least one big monitor for quite some time now. However, since I recently got a very portable laptop which only does 1024x768, my mind has been mulling over ways to save as much screen space as possible. With that in mind, I've collapsed down as much stuff as I can and present two screenshots, firstly of my firefox workspace and secondly of my thunderbird one. All the gnome stuff I care about is packed into one little toolbar at the top and since I always run these apps with the windows maximised, I use devilspie to strip the window borders. My main workspace just has four terminals at the maximum sizes they can be (which works out at about 82x29 with small fonts). Finally, as a challenge, can anyone suggest ways to save even more screen space?

I'd just like to say that, a year since I moved to London, things are seriously rocking. I have a great job as a sysadmin for Canonical (the Ubuntu people) and a fantastic girlfriend.

Dear The Universe, Thanks! Chris

Over the weekend I was at Eastnor Castle with a bunch of friends for The Big Chill, a fantastic little music festival that happens every August. It's nice and small (I reckon about 30,000 people) and very friendly, with lots of very cool bands playing (mostly ones I haven't heard of, which is nice). I expect some pictures will appear sooner or later, but in the mean time, sucks to be all of you that didn't go! ;)

Note: This post is a work-in-progress, I will probably come back to this and change/update/rewrite it at will I picked up a ThinkPad x40 recently to use with Dapper and I thought I'd chuck up a few notes from my experience thus far. I deliberately chose the ThinkPad because of the reputation of IBM's laptops and especially that they use very good hardware and it has to be said that on a modern distro, especially one that aims to work well with laptops, almost every bit of hardware works straight away after install. I would seriously recommend ThinkWiki to anyone attempting ThinkPad/Linux shenanigans - they have a huge amount of information about the various bits of hardware, installation guides, tips and a bunch more, all nicely tagged so you can tell which bits are relevant to the machine you own. First off I'll run through some of the key steps of installation. 1. Before doing anything else, I used the IBM tools in the pre-installed Windows XP to produce restore images and burn them to disc (one CD, one DVD). This is mostly a precaution in case I either have some insurmountable problem with Linux on the machine, or if I ever come to sell it and the buyer wants their licenced copy of Windows. 2. After that I did a pretty much default install of Ubuntu. If you want to, you can set the BIOS to disable protection for the "hidden" IBM recovery partition, then use the whole disk in the Ubuntu installer. I chose to leave it there, but I may reclaim it at some point in the future. I read on a few pages/forums that suspending seems to be more reliable if you add acpi_sleep=s3_bios to the kernel command line, which is easy to do in Ubuntu. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst (you can use gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst if you don't know otherwise) and place the above acpi_sleep option on the end of the kopt= line and running sudo update-grub. 3. With the install done I set about installing a few bits and pieces to make the laptop more useful - things like Network Manager (so it's trivially easy to join wired/wireless networks from the desktop), various Bluetooth tools (install gnome-bluetooth and you get most of the bits you need), Java (sun-java5-plugin), mplayer, a few other multimedia libraries including Real Player (available, along with Opera, in the Add/Remove tool (see the Applications menu) if you enable the commercial repository). 4. Start testing things - graphics work fine, wireless works fine with the madwifi driver (although there is some possibility that there is a kernel crashing bug in the version Dapper offers, see LaunchPad bug 37773), wired ethernet is great, keyboard keys mostly seem to work (volume controls work by default, which is a nice touch). 5. Configure it. The first thing I did was disable the Sound Server Daemon in Gnome (called Esound, or esd) because I really dislike it. I then stripped out all the interfaces from /etc/network/interfaces other than lo so that Network Manager will take responsibility. 6. Tweak things. Mplayer always works better if you add an entry to /etc/sysctl.conf that says dev/rtc/max-user-freq=1024 and the ThinkPad's wireless activity LED can be enabled with dev/ath0/softled=1. I fiddled with the settings in the Power Management options in Preferences, but these are personal choices, so I won't bother listing them. One thing I would recommend is setting it to only show an icon when it is charging or discharging - if you're on AC and the battery is full you don't really need an icon, so you get a few extra pixels of panel space (and because the screen is small I'd recommend ditching the lower panel and moving its applets to the top). On the subject of applets and screen estate, you can replace the "Applications Places System" menus with a single "Main Menu" applet, which shows an ubuntu logo on the panel - click on it and you get the Applications menu, with Places and System tacked onto it. Gnome's sensors applet can read the information provided by the ibm-acpi driver, so you can monitor the temperature of various bits of hardware and fan speeds. Also of some interest is the CPU Frequency Scaling applet (which shows you how much Linux is throttling your CPU when its idle). One final Gnome panel tip is that if you make it 25 pixels tall instead of the default 24, larger windows will get their window manager icons shown in the Workspace switcher applet. A trivial little detail, but it's kinda handy if (like me) you tend to run things fullscreen on their own workspace.

A couple of years older, a couple of years wiser, I saw Ugly Duckling again at the Jazz Cafe in cheery old Camden Town recently. Last time they were Meat Shakin', but this time they had Bang for The Buck which is a really sweet album and makes for some very cool live performance. The venue is kinda small so it's *very* cosy, but the only people at UD gigs seem to be all other UD fans, so everyone is having a shitload of fun and is ignoring the inevitable game of "guess the body part" ;) From a weird, observational point of view, the typical demographic this time was older and more suburban than last time, which is...as I said, weird. If you're not familiar with UD, head to their site (link above) and it will play a track. Reload for another. Realise you want the rest ;)

I am now resident in The Big Smoke, although not that near the middle yet. All you Londoners, bring it!

After almost 28 years (bar some short spells here and there) I am leaving Brighton, because despite being a fantastic city, the jobs market for IT (especially Linux) really sucks here. The city depends on tourism, there's no space or reason for very much technology. I am therefore abandoning the insurance industry for the advertising industry, and Brighton for London; The job is similar, but with more headroom. My current mission is finding a sweet house with a bunch of cool, interesting people to dampen the shock of moving, since I don't think I can commit my life and finances to an hour and a half commute a day if I stay here ;)

Since Firefox doesn't seem to make it very easy to import/export the data it creates (beyond bookmarks at least), I probed my profile and found a signons.txt file which seemed to contain the information, albeit encrypted. No problem I thought, that will be the password I set for the master thingy in firefox. Wrong was I. A little googling turns up that you should copy the key3.db file too, which is fair enough, but I really think this kind of thing should be easier. That does have a nasty habit of tending to introduce a lot of complexity as more aspects of the program get more flexible, especially from the user's point of view. Interface designers are getting pretty good at making simple interfaces that do the right thing most of the time, with more advanced options hidden away for when they are needed and this is something I like a lot, but it's a shame that all that functionality is isolated with the user. It makes me pine for the old days of ARexx on the Amiga. It was (fortunately) considered de rigeur for self-respecting applications to support it and it exposed the full user functionality of a program to automatic scripting. If that kind of thing were updated for the modern world and combined with bindings for the various scripting languages, a whole range of possibilities open up. Back in the Amiga days, Arexx was all about automating the hell out of graphical tasks for power users, but I have been thinking about another possible use. The idea would be an alternative to traditional help systems which are tedious to compile, large to download, not always very helpful, etc. Instead, exploiting an Arexx-like ability to control applications, the "help" system guides users through the application without making them watch a stupid tutorial - it actually helps them. That is to say, I click "help me export my data", it asks me some simple and sensible questions to figure out what to do, and actually opens the right windows and shows me what to do while it does it. In one feature you are training the user to do it for themselves (maybe they want to do it or they want to use more advanced options), and you are providing a simple, automated solution for the casual/new user who maybe uses this feature once a year at most and doesn't need to learn it. This has to beat writing reams of documentation and capturing thousands of screenshots. You just need a few text prompts to explain what is happening and what the results are, and the rest is scripting that is quite stable. The developers can do whatever they like inside their application, the "help" is controlling it at the level of UI widgets, effectively. It might even be possible to write the scripts and place the text prompts with some kind of tool, rather than write them by hand. Perhaps it could be done by the UI designers in Glade-like applications - the same functionality could be useful to them for automated testing and they could write the tests, documentation and interface with the same tool into one XML interface file. Does that make any kind of sense? Randomly, I also think the next release of Ubuntu should have a little animated Jeff Waugh who pops up and talks to new users, cheers them up and helps them learn how to use Ubuntu Linux, preferably with the above help system ;)