Politicians...can't live with 'em can't sell newspapers without 'em

I had an interesting conversation with someone, the only person I've found, that actually condones the behavior saying "I don't see what the problem is they did it within the rules. Thats the point, you can still do WRONG whilst remaining within the rules. Take tax dodgers for example, billions are lost each year through large corporations moving money about, all within the law but its still not right. In my mind these large countries are more or less taking money from hospitals and people that need it. Which leads me straight back to the expense claims of politicians, how does a politician getting a surround sound system benefit his/her constituency. Or a moat or a chandelier, just how out of touch with the common man are these people. A staggering percentage of people in the uk struggle to pay the mortgage and are more likely to know the characters of Eastenders than the front row in the house of lords. Sometimes I think the best thing to happen would be a revolution, then I am reminded of the absolute stupidity of the common man/woman and realise that it would spell disaster. Most people don't know what is good for them and would destroy themselves and those around them if they were to get into power!!!!!

concurrency

Just read an interesting post about processors, which ones are better. The scary thing is someone had written "if you have a task to run on a single core, when you run it on a dual core it will complete twice as fast, FACT" well despite the fact this person has written FACT at the end it is totally untrue. Not only can the task not finish twice as fast, it may not complete any faster than a single core machine. This got me thinking, if this is a common misconception even in well regarded tech circles then maybe this explains why very little progress ( at least from what I've seen ) has been made into purposely writing programs to run on multiple cores. Presumably threads of operation are assigned to a particular processor already, this would help to load balance a system and yes vastly improve multithreading i.e. when we use several applications at the same time, however the programs themselves are not written for multiple cores, as far as I am aware. I might write an article about this at some point in the future, just as soon as I have more than a simple netbook to write with. Having said that, this netbook is fantastic, it still manages over 6 hours ( did 7.5 when it was new and running windows not linux ) of continuous use, building apps in netbeans whilst listening to music online e.t.c. very impressive. It's the Samsung NC10 if anyone is interested. Having said that I am seriously looking forward to what netbook offerings come off the back of nVidias ION, now that is a serious pico-ITX board. Whilst researching this I read an article stating that pico-ITX is currently the smallest ITX form factor after the nanao and micro, but I could have sworn the clever guys at VIA had announced a mobile-ITX form factor which was as small as a motorola V3 phone, could be wrong though so I'll have another look. Whilst on the subject of concurrency, does anyone have any metrics for using activeMQ topics as the broadcast bus in a distributed node concurrent system, the system I am looking into doesn't require so much speed to use a shared access memory model type design so I was curious about anyone elses finidings doing things this way.

interesting thought

just watching the tv and an advert popped up. "dettol kills 99.9% of bacteria" seems good, but I was thinking if dettol kills 99.9% of bacteria doesn't that mean dettol prevents your body from getting the opportunity to create 99.9% of antibodies for said bacteria. the old saying holds true, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". Obviously within reason.

got bored

I got bored so messed up my blog, don't really like it but hey I am in a bad place right now...only kidding :)

insurance are skum

I was burgled on the 4th of January, and to this day I am still having to ask my useless insurance company Marks and Spencer ( M&S ) for items. What on Earth do I pay them for when they take this long. I found out today that vouchers that have been given in order to pay for certain electrical items can only be used in a single store and can't be used online. No self respecting IT worker buys computer hardware from PC World or Currys, they are over priced and usually outdated. The only machines that come close to suiting my needs are web only offers, oh and by the way they only come close to serving me when I add an extra £50 of my hard earned savings into the mix. iVal the people responsible for aquiring items and sorting out compensation have so far not once called me about the electrical items, not a single time in their process have they been pro active. Credit where credit is due though the staff are nice when you speak to them on the phone, however I am beginning to feel they just tell you what you want to hear to get rid of you as several times messages weren't carried across. This whole fiasco makes me angry, now is not the time to be getting stressed out with all this stuff. To make matters just that little bit worse than they already are, I read an article in the paper that said even the police know who is behind our robbery and others in the area but are unable to prosecute as they haven't located where the goods are stashed. I've never wanted to crush someones larynx with my boot more than I do right now.

Amazing

I was playing with Ubuntu a bit more today, the bits that I don't really play with often are the very windowsy-nicey-nice bits, like the applications it gives you...and, well I really should they are of a much higher standard that the Microshaft windows offerings. For example I started Rhythmbox, its a sort of music library application that lets you listen to stuff in your library in much the same was as wmplayer does. In the past this has sprung into life when I plug my mp3 player in and I just shut it as I know I just want to transfer some files. The reason I am so excited by it is I wanted some background noise whilst I work on my code as music tends to keep me focused ( go figure ). So I clicked the radio button and after listening to Virgin Rock for a while it got a bit dull so I clicked the Last.fm icon not expecting much, I was wrong ( again!! ). If you ever used Pandora and were a little upset when it was suddenly no longer free then Last.fm is for you. Looking at the website they have gone through a lot of trouble making a clean simple intuative interface that actually took me by the hand and led me to exactly where I wanted to go. So the site is amazing and the selection of music it gave me was spot on too

my ordinary day

few things that people should know 1. Writing procedural code in an object oriented langauge does not make it an object oriented program magically. 2. coding progress is not measured by the number of lines written, nor is it inversely related to the number of lines written. With more lines code is bloated and specific purpose of routines/methods is blurred or multitudineous. With less lines but still no division of responsibilities the code is difficult to read and maintain. 3. fixing a bug with no investigation into the cause is the same as applying a plaster to something, yes it stops the bleeding for now but whatever was causing it may lead to death in the mean time. 4. when using an api I should not need to know the inner workings of its implementation, it should be as a simple box that answers my questions. 5. there is good laziness and bad laziness. Good laziness leads to automation and tools being created to make work easier. Bad laziness leads to no units tests, sloppy code and having to repeatedly perform the same operation time after time when it could be automated. 6. situations don't just improve, without someone willing to fix problems they will exist forever. 7. knowing a language syntax does not mean you are a good developer. You can be a good developer, able to see what conditions should exist, what things should be checked for and how something should work without even knowing a programming language UML is often enough. 8. experience teaches a developer, regardless of academic qualifications, experience is what truly matters.

my god I am really a geek

I never thought I was a trekie, I hate Voyager and the Bill Shatner originals, I have never watched Enterprise and yet today I had a room of IT people calling me a trek nerd!! It all started when discussing a personal HUD as a pair of glassed that made you look like data, I corrected this statement by saying Jordy was the one with the glasses, it was played by Levar Burton. Strike 1, knowing the difference between data and jordy I then went on to say yes data was the android played by Brent Spiner Strike 2, knowing what Data was and who played him I followed this up with, you know the doctor from Independance day Strike 3, the nail in the coffin, knowing another sci-fi film that a guy from Star Trek was in. D'oh! Note to self: must remember when to stop talking :)

The typical UK drivers guide to driving in the snow

1. when driving in heavy snow make sure you leave no more than 2 inches between you and the car in front, because remember it'll only get you there quicker. 2. When moving away from stationary always rev the crap out of your engine before popping the clutch up, if you don't get grip straight away simply rev more the wheel is spinning so at some point you should start moving. 3. When turning corners ALWAYS whack the steering wheel to hard lock as fast as you possibly can, if you notice the car isn't turning in the desired direction be sure to once again rev the fuck out of the engine. 4. When you need to stop make sure you slam on those breaks as hard as possible, after all whats the point in having abs then not using it! 5. Before setting off remember that it doesn't matter that the MET office has said don't travel unless its a necessity you want to drive and your damned if your gonna let 'The Man' tell YOU what to do. You must have a f**king big exhause a f**king loud stereo and virtually black tinted windows. 6. To defrost the car its simpl, boil the kettle and pour all over the windscreen, ignore that creaking cracking sound it just means the snow is being scared away! 7. Never drive slowly in the snow it'll only make your tires cool down and they may become frozen to the floor. If some other guy is driving slowly, especially if they are doing 28mph in a 30mph zone, overtake them as no one tells YOU how fast to drive. 8. When its snowing always chose the most out of the way routes with plenty of hills. 9. If you are fortunate enough to enter a spin the only way to stop is to turn out of the skid, if it doesn't work first of all turn faster and harder its the only way. 10. The most important thing is, if you see anyone in trouble, especially if its a woman with small children in a ditch, wind down the window laugh, shout, turn the radio up and maybe even flip them off for being lame and not having a car with twice the amount of bhp as your IQ points!

half arsed and happy

I have recently decided to have a crack at making some sort of editor, there are several formats of documents that I would like represented in a specific way and have been as yet unable to find any editors that meet my needs. Plus it would be a great opportunity to learn some of the finer points of Swing or whatever I eventually decide to use. As a side note: it may suit my purposes to make the editor using GTK since it is looking more and more like this is the best solution to the interface for my media centre. For the Swing MVC ( well in the style of mvc but more like message-delegate, I think ) you get a series of interfaces I'll add to this blog as time goes on but for now it looks like this A JEditorPane is an uneditable representation of some styled document, it editable subclass is the JTextPane - to be honest I would have named these the other way round to avoid confusion but thats me. a JEditorPane displays a StyledDocument, this is an extended version of the Document class which consists of lots of Elements that are held in a tree like structure, all of which makes sense. Each Element can have Attributes ( for example bold, italic, size... ), these attributes are what are translated to the visible difference in text and other objects. The Document itself does not carry state, so we don't know where any caret may be or anything that is selected, it is just the data that forms the Document. In order to have state and hence to be able to 'View' the data the Document is added to the JEditorPane inside an EditorKit, this kit is then responsible for displaying the styling defined in the Document as represented by the Style interface. After looking at all this it does kinda make your head ache but it does make sense after a while...as you may have noticed I haven't looked into the Styleing of the Document much yet I have only got as far as the Pane and Document stuff. Therefore I shall add to this blog as the murky waters begin to clear

Wiki - what a great tool

I have been on projects that have used a wiki and even more that have not. The difference tends to be that projects that have taken to using a wiki for the most part have far more valuable documentation. It won't be the best presented documentation but it will exist, and it will convey exactly what the author wanted it to. By using a wiki it makes creating and maintaining system documentation so simple and easy that it no longer becomes a chore, in fact by using a wiki developers keen to get one over their colleagues tend to try and make their pages look better than the next guys thus improving the documentation effort. The alternative is to have lots of versioned documents that have standard styling and corrected SPG (spelling, punctuation and grammar) and this makes the task long, tedious and sometimes daunting which normally means its the task that gets put off till the last minute, and as every developer knows the last minute tends to be where frantic dev work goes on to squeeze that extra feature in. So heres to the wiki, I salute you :)

Code Practice

Are public variables bad? Simple answer YES, of course their bad! How on Earth can a class maintain control of its inner working if there are parts that can be set without it knowing, this is like puling the carpet out from under an object. In java there is a very simple specification for how simple data should be accessed within a class, the bean specification says provide a series of getters for items that are externally readable, a series of setters for items that are writable. The simple caveat to this is that items of type boolean have an 'is' method instead of get.

Iam fed up with making do!

One thing that really irritates me is the whole idea of making do when it comes to code. I quite often hear "oh that error, yeah, it sometimes happens we just restart and hope it goes away". Normally these errors are an indication that something is amis somewhere hence they are "errors". Find out what is causing the error and fix it, this does of course take time up front but in the long run its a much better option that building an app only to find out that the foundation it was built on was not very stable after all and the whole thing will either come crashing down or need a whole new rewrite which will cost a lot more than devoting a few days to tracking the original bug/bad design. Deployment is a big bug bear of mine too, something should be as easy to build and deploy as running an ant task, not several ant tasks, a few scripts and changing some properties on the system, it should be one task. Maven has this idea right out of the box and once configured correctly Maven has proved to be an immense time saver when it comes to the code/review/deploy/test cycle. Increased productivity is where the money is saved, not cutting corners this just hides the development costs. Patching over redesigning is a right pain too, imagine a method is required to do more and more over time, and rather than redesign the area of concern so that small objects that can be easily tested are created, instead the method is just allowed to grow to epic proportions. This is the cause of very long bug fixing as the method does far more than it should do, its responsibilities are not well defined and usually with these things because the code has not been reviewed it is mostly superfluous.

best things come in small packages

So its been a month and the insurance company still haven't got back to us with a decision GRRrrr but as I didn't want to put my life on hold I decided to buy myself a new toy. A long time ago I wanted to get an EeePC but couldn't find stock anywhere, this was the time I lost patience with dabs.com they are without shadow of a doubt, rubbish. Anyway I have saved up some money to get a netbook, but unlike earlier when there was only really one netbook to get now there are shed loads. After doing a bit of research I decided to get the samsung nc10, as I had used eeepc and aspire 1 in the past and didn't like the keyboard. I read a nice review that said how nice it was to have a large shift key on the right of the keyboard, which I prefer too. Anyway I got one and guess what, the idiots at samsung have given the European market a small right shift key grrrr have to say its the ONLY thing wrong with this tasty bit of kit though. Iam going to install linux on its massive hdd as a dual boot with the windows that comes with it. anyway loving the netbook back soon

I was so very wrong

In my last blog I was very cavalier about the whole economic crisis, thats because in economic turmoil I personally decide to cut back on luxuries and prevent spending more money. However I have been hit by the other side of the social spectrum, thats right I have been burgled by some ignorant scavangers after whatever they can get. About 30 minutes is probably all it took, in 30 minutes my entire life has been brought to a halt. They only stole "stuff" I am sure they justify this theft with "what do they care its insured" well no you fucking prick it isn't all insured, the fact that I haven't been able to sleep properly for over 80 hours, the fact that every loud noise I hear makes my heart race, the fact that I view everyone in my estate with suspicion and contempt is not all covered by fucking insurance is it you skagged up wanker. My home used to be my safe haven the place I could run to in times of pressure and now no longer, I feel weak and unable to protect that which I hold most dear, my wife!!! Stealing stuff is just stuff, its what is stolen without even realising it that hurts the most. I try to be a nice person and generous, if these people had asked for assistance I probably would have helped them without any expectations but now I am a changed person, my ideals are not what they were, my generosity almost non existent now. I spent many hours out of my house today at work and after meetinf friends, and where I used to be the one to call it a night I found myself trying to convince everyone to stay for just one more round, one more round so that I would not have to go home and open the front door again, one more round so that I could at least pretend that it hadn't happened. People who will have been burgled before are probably wondering why I have taken it so hard and can't get over it, I don't know is the simple answer, many things I can get over but this has hit me hard and I don't know why. All I can say is that I hope not to see a rise in this sort of behaviour as the economy tries its hardest to tear itself apart at the seams!! Having insurance does not mean that hard workers don't have to pay for the things that they lose, it is totally wrong to think otherwise I used to love my home and the area that I lived in now I can't wait to move out! Life is like a box of chocolates...eventually it all rots down to shit!

The economy is coming to an end!! And I say bring it on

This is a bit of a socialist rant, verging on the marxist ideal so some people may want to ignore it :) I am in an industry that seems to be inappropriately paid for what it does. This may sound like a ridiculous statement but I am a highly experienced and educated enterprise software developer, this is a highly skilled industry, but the point I'd like to make is.... Do I work any harder than a construction worker or a sales person I would have to say probably not. Some people try very hard to be the best that they can possibly be at their jobs, I am one of them, I am pleased by the elegance of a solution, the fact that it can quickly and easily be enhanced this proves to me that my intellect, imagination for change and ability is sufficient for the task but does it mean that its worth more than the work of moving 10,000 bricks up a ladder on a building project. It may be more mentally demanding but not everyone was created equally, there are some people for which understanding a triple integration equation is as simple as turning on a light. What I would like to see happen is that everyone is paid for the amount of effort they exert. Sadly this, I can see is an impossibility, who would determine how much effort someone was making. I have been told that bankers are clever people, some of them maybe, some of them may simply have the job as that is what daddy got for them. The thing is as banking jobs fall by the way side, intelligent people will find other things to do. Intelligent people are generally very lazy, lazy intelligent people come up with ideas that make their work easier. This sort of laziness should be applauded it does actually advance us as a human race. When an intelligent person is doing something that comes easy to them and they are getting vastly overpaid for it they will keep doing it, and this could stagnate innovation, making people suddenly readdress their current situation is probably the best shake-up for the good of mankind at the moment. It is not going to be easy, but then again, when has anything "easy" really been worth it. So come on you are your own person, take stock, chin up and explore yourself as a person.

AWESOME

just thought I'd add this little note to say I recently went to a Slayer gig and they were awsome, Kerry can still bang out a good tune, plus I love that guitar he has I want one, if only I could play the guitar :) I missed the finally though, quite annoyed at that. I crowd surfed and as I did so I suddenly felt really old, everyone in the pit looked about 18-19, I am only 27 but that did make me feel old. The only downside is I had my phone nicked, I don't think I just simply lost it because I was in a group and we were standing near the back listening, not moshin' and we both went to get our phones out of our pockets and they'd gone. The staff at the Apollo were ... well ... rubbish I was told 3 times to see the wrong person to report the loss to so after queueing for a really long time I spoke to someone who basically didn't want to know and didn't even make a note of it suppose thats what you get for minimum wage.

lets hope 404 doesn't lead to 501!!!

so I am coming to the end of my service at my current company, not through choice, but due to being made redundant. The annoying thing is that this has nothing to do with the economic downturn its due to a merger announced about a year or so ago. The problem that I now have is that I am being put out on the street at the worst possible time to look for work. I have asked a few agents how this is effecting them, and it would seem that agents themselves are being made to do some actual work in order to earn a buck. No longer are companies accepting candidates that can barely spell JMS and have no concept of OO principles at a practical level, they are actually having to probe the people they find have stunning CV's only to discover that a large percentage simply lie on their CV!! I recently spoke to one guy that seemed a bit surprised that he could carry out a conversation with me on a technical level and it was him that had to admit first that I'd already surpassed his level of knowledge. This got me to thinking, shouldn't this have been the way it worked all along. I mean, I always intended to get into system development I started programming at 7 on the old BBC Micro then C64 I used a trs-80 and VIC20 then PC's e.t.c. and at each stage I learnt more and tried to better myself always. So I continued this attitude through university then on into the commercial sector always working out new ways to do things and just trying to be the best. However time in different companies has taught me one thing, almost no other developers have the same idea as me they simply are there to make money by lying about what they do on their CV and bungling their way through a solution one hack at a time. This is also true of contractors, although I have to admit there is a much greater proportion of those that know what they are doing to those that don't but I have still met some terrible stinkers when it comes to development. I recently moved some projects from using maven and continuum (backwards in my view) to using ant and cruisecontrol....don't ask I realise its devolution rather than evolution. The code that I was looking at looked like a series of hacks made by an unskilled school child, using member variables in servlets, having public member variables that are altered by lots of other classes in other packages, it was a mess. The author of this code was someone who was quite senior and most people generally agreed that he was good --- how on Earth do people get to these positions. The Answer; The simple answer is that the people who are for the most part responsible for hiring and firing of developers don't understand the systems these people make so just blindly trust what these people tell them, this means someone who is (for want of a better word) crap at the job they are hired to do, they are actually incredibly good at the bullshit game can go far. If these people were actually told the fact that a poorly written system costs so much more to support, so much more to maintain and is almost impossible to adapt to change then they would have trusted code reviewers that would more than likely fire idiots quickly. I have seen one contractor, whom I fully respect for being very very good at their job, stand up and say this about someone on a team to a project manager and it worked.

epiphany

As I was on the bus today I realised something.  It is something that I imagine not many people really think about.  I was talking to an elderly gentleman who was saying that when he was young e.t.c. and I got to thinking for each generation each family is taught primarily from the head of the house be it father or child.  Now imagine that each child is taught as best that they can be by those parents.  How can a parent who has not actually seen good parenting be expected to raise their child in the manor of a typical good child.  Both parents from each walk of society will do what is best for their child unfortuately we don't live in a society that will recognise this fact and hence we are lumbered with youngsters who typically expect to be given all that they need as well as youngsters that believe no matter what they do their achievements will be met with ridicule.  Posh kids seriously piss me off, measure the iq of most posh kids and it falls below most typical inner city school kids.  By most I do mean over 50% just to make things more statistically correct.  It shouldn't be like this but no matter what I do no change happens the government do need to step in on this one.  There was another point I needed to make, possibly the collapse of XL possibly not, anyway I'll update this lot later!!!

TODO list

This is a list of things I have to do if anyone can offer any advice then please feel free, I am open to suggestions as always. 1. I need to find out why my wifi connection seems to go to sleep from time to time and then take a while to wake back up 2. I need to be able to connect automatically when the machine switches on, I was told this works if you switch off roaming and put the details in there but so far no joy. At the moment I get prompted for my keyring password, which is and always will be different from the login password so no use getting pam_keyring installed. 3. I need to create a wiki on the system, as I didn't want to get an off the shelf one I already started this I may blog this somewhere. 4. I need to reduce the noise made by the unit, I think I will strip out the current psu and replace it with a 12v supply fed by an inline transformer, I have one spare from a laptop that has breathed its last, it is an ex-laptop (norweign blue it was called!) I have investigated the way to do this and its very simple, the current psu will be replaced by a jetway 12v dc-dc board and an ac-dc transformer is then plugged into this. The dc-dc converter costs £23 (roughly) and to ensure I use a compatible transformer that also costs around £20, I am not sure that it is worth spending £43 at the moment especially as I think its the cpu fan that causes the most noise. To stop the cpu fan from making noise (ie. spinning) I think I could get away with down clocking it to 1.2GHz and either switching the fan off in bios or unplugging it. As an interim measure I think I will change the heat dependant settings of the fan so that it only spins at higher temperatures. Currently I think its on about 6k rpm at 45 degrees which is probably a little too over cautious. 5. I need to respoke a bicycle wheel but for some reason keep getting a simple 3-way crossover pattern all messed up d'oh!

Fuel Prices

everyone moans about fuel prices and in turn then they moan about the government for taxing it. I would be a liar if I said fuel isn't taxed a hell of a lot here in the uk but I did read a survey that said that taxation hasn't kept up with inflation rates. If tax is removed from the fuel it will then have to be added somewhere else because the government can't cope with losing revenue. I hear the ridiculous scare tactic of panorama talk about "negative equity" in a car, well durrr the value of a car never increases so how could you ever have anything other than negative equity!! Put quite simply we are much richer now than we were say 20 years ago. Don't believe me, well think of this one 20 years ago how many 17 year olds had cars?? Let alone brand new cars!! How many families has more than one car or would even consider a large capacity vehicle (ie. a 4x4) unless it was an absolute must. Also on panorama they said high quality hydrogen cars were still many years away?? I've not checked yet but I was sure Honda made one. What is starting to really get on my nerves is that a lot of people moan and winge about the price of fuel but still refuse to change their habits. From making sure the car being driven is not carrying extra weight and has well inflated tyres to not using the car for journies under a mile or so plus more fuel is used when accelerating quickly and hard braking yet you see this all too often. Once again I am reminded that oh so many people refuse to think.

Prince2 and Bullshit Bingo

Have you ever been in a meeting with non-technie-but-trying-to-be type managers and listened to some of the drivel that spews forth from them in vast quantities with little regard for usefulness or even factual content?? I have, ad was surprised to learn that not only was I not alone but that some people play bullshit bingo whereby you listen out for certain middle manager buzz words that sound ~nice~ but mean absolutely nothing, you then tot up the number of buzz words and see if someone can beat it in another pointless meeting arranged to make the MM's (middle managers) feel needed/wanted and useful. Well earlier I saw the course text for Prince2, what a pile of poo that is!! Seriously if bullshit bingo could be personified its name would be prince2. This just seems like an aimless collection of terms designed to hide the fact that the manager knows nothing of a technical nature whilst at the same time convince someone not fluent in prince2-eze that they know more than they do. No wonder the government has such a bad project delivery history if they are always trying to use this stuff, the people that know what they are doing are being prevented from communicating it by this all consuming language barrier created and perpetuated by Prince2. The only thing that I can see with regards this tripe, is that it will ensure that particular groups of friends can muscle their way in ensuring that they have a job that is then perceived as being important enough to not fire them whilst at the same time ensuring that they never have to actually do any work.

why...just why

well, my previous post was some rantings about outsourcing which may have upset some of the people I work with needlessly, especially as I was rather drunk so it contained a number of spelling mistakes!

Heres a new post.  The media centre that I have built has a lot of films now stored on it that I have recorded from videos.  In order to make them viewable via my laptop in other rooms in the house and indeed other peoples houses I have setup a server using dyndns.  The impossible to understand thing is, sometimes I cannot access the centre directly using the internal LAN but I can access it over the www name. Even stranger still is the fact that when I can ping the www address I cannot ping the local address but this only happens for a finite length of time before I suddely get a ping response on the local address almost like its timing out something before it then lets me in locally, I thought this might be the port trigger mechanism but it is not configured to trigger on any ports yet.

I assume there is something illconfigured on my router but can't for the life of me figure it out.

The other thing that puzzles me is how do I install the totem plugin on opera, it should be able to accept mozilla plugins but can't see any automated thing to do it, guess I'll have to learn how to configure plugins on opera.

why is it so difficult

I can't understand why getting the zyxel g-260 wireless usb adapter to work under ubuntu is so damn difficult. The ndiswrapper will work but upon restarting the system you have to uninstall then reinstall the driver to stand a chance of the connection working, if you do manage to get a connection it will not last longer than 30 minutes before it drops and will require a full system restart. I have tried the zydel zd1211driver and yep get no where with that. the other little bit of kit that is playing me like a cheap harmonica is a ricco digital mp4 player. Seemed like a good idea at the time 1Gb player plays music, movies and works as an ebook reader. Turns out the ebook reader only reads txt format files - fat lot of good for all the pdf's I have accumulated. Anyway I thought I'd get some films put on it but due to windows being shite the video and sound are about 12 seconds out of phase rendering any movies unwatchable. The windows software they provide is a port of mencoder to windows however I cannot get any films compressed on linux to work on the player as the compression setting must be very specific. I have asked the support team for some assistance but won't hold my breath as until a few days ago the url in the instructions hadn't actually been registered.

never eat here

This is a bit of a late blog but it needed to be said. I went to a pizza express near london bridge and it was terrible. Firstly it was not a busy time, there were quite a few empty seats yet it still took a long time to get our order taken. When we eventually got our food the 'prosciutto' (or however you spell it) was replaced by fatty bacon bits and tasted all a bit cheap. The worst bit was my wifes meal, the 'pollo pesto' had no chicken, I am not saying it had small amounts, they had simply put no chicken in it - at all!!! No waitress came to the table to ask how the meal was or anything, then when they came to collect the plates we told the waitress who just said "oh" and walked off. Then a further wait of half an hour before we were asked if we would like deserts, are you kidding me I thought so we just got the bill and left NEVER to return again. This is a massive disappointment as I have eaten at a few pizza express and especially like the one in Crawley of all places, where thankfully when a pizza says prosciutto thats exactly what you get and the service is brilliant, I always tip there simply because they deserve it.

When did it become 'cool' to just be stupid!

A few more of the usual stupidities of the world have got to me recently. Number one and this one is always a pain in the backside, people and their cars. So many people seem to forget how to be decent human beings just as soon as they get behind the wheel of a motor car. On the motorway I am fed up of seeing twats get in the fast lane 200 yards before the exit they want comes up, they then hurtle across the chevrons causing a whole load of cars behind them to brake so they carry on oblivious to the traffic jam they have caused all in aid of getting 30 seconds ahead. Point number two that annoyed me, idiotic thugs starting on an innocent toilet attendant because they had too much to drink. Cheap booze!! Strange one for me this as I do enjoy the odd tipple :) trouble is I was in a very cheap pub but it was devoid of atmosphere and its entire existence was to provide young kids a means to get as much alcohol down their throats as possible, which of course leads to queues at the bar, which leads to arguments and when combined with people that can't handle so much alcohol leads to fights which gets in the way of my enjoyment. I am not a fuddy duddy, I like people to have fun doing whatever they want as long as it doesn't interfere with anyone elses enjoyment including my own. some idiot turned up at the pub this afternoon wearing torn jeans and a t-shirt but he was driving what looked like a fireblade motorcycle, ok fine he is just endangering his own life, but as he set off he floored the bike sending a spray of gravel and dust into the pub garden and into everyones shiny new cars. He then throttled the thing reaching ridiculous speeds in a 30mph speed restricted area.

stupidity

Is it me or has the whole country taken a vow of stupidity. I have noticed more and more that little things just go unnoticed, for example using the word to instead of too. "the drink is to hot" the drink is WHAT going to a place called hot!!! ( one of my pet hates ). 90 odd percent of the population read the sun and mirror to get their news, erm I am sorry but I struggled to find any "news" in the Sun the last time I read it, it was all about celebrities saying or doing things they probably never said or did, followed by sport whilst the whole time real news goes un reported ~crazyness!! People get into cars and forget how to drive, they get on the subway and forget basic manners I am beginning to think that the majority of the population have infact given up on free thought and prefer to have someone else ( the Sun ) do it for them. This idea does truly scare the sh!t out of me!!

aha, Eel proof boat :)

ok resolution d'oh my own silly fault should have looked at xconf all sorted now. Couldn't play dvds properly, again user error I forgot to put libdvdcss2 on the machine, silly mistake. Started to look into wifi issue, strange thing is it sometimes connects. I ran NetworkManager in the terminal so I could see the output of what it was trying to do and voila there it is the reason it fails is that it timesout whilst trying to authenticate with the router. Didn't have time to look in more detail so I am not sure if its a problem with the router or the wifi device ( I think its the wfi device ) there may be an issue with regards WPA support of the zd1211 driver I am using.

d'oh! The Eels in this hovercraft have eaten the engine!

Still struggling with the media centre damn it! I am really impressed by the video capture its fantastic, ok its the one thing that has taken ages to get working but it does seem bullet proof now. I drilled a few holes in the back of my TV cabinet and posted all the wires through and set the centre up plugged into the TV it worked brilliantly, the text was so much more readable than when I was using windows on the system. However... I had been using the wired network connection whilst making sure it was setup, but with it being downstairs I had to resort to using the usb wireless thing I had. I had previously confirmed that this works with Ubuntu and got it all configured and expected it to just work after setting everything up in my sitting room, but it didn't. For some reason, that I am yet to investigate, the driver stops working and needs to be installed almost every time I restart the machine. I thought that maybe the drivers weren't in the init.d and so wouldn't be loaded on startup, but every so often the drivers are loaded and everything is fine. When the drivers are up and the connection made it lasts for anywhere from 30 seconds to a few hours before the connection just drops, again I am yet to investigate this!! Plus I want to play around with the resolution so that it fills my widescreen TV but I think the net connection is a more pressing matter. Other than that all that is left to do is learn GTK+ and make a nice little interface for it. Oh yes before I forget, I can't play DVDs directly from the disc to the TV, I think this maybe a strange copyright thing that occurred when using windows, to get around it I installed DVD43 and imagine I have to do something similar here. On a side note I made some bread at the weekend, no its not a weird tecno word for anything I do in fact mean flour water yeast e.t.c. anyway as first attempts go it wasn't great, not a complete failure but I didn't know stuff had to be 'proved' anyone that knows about bread will realise that I ended up with a crusty loaf the size and shape of pitta bread :)

mini-itx system

I made a few rubbish purchases; 1) I bought a SATA hard drive for someone who required an IDE one...durrr 2) I bought DRAM when I needed DDR2-RAM...fool! Anyway rather than try to sell these two items I decided to try and build something, so I also purchased a mini-itx motherboard ( a jetway j2f7...I think ) this was around £85-90 from mini-itx.com, a very good website for seeing other peoples projects and get ideas and kit. I spent a further £45 on a case and psu, then using a slimline dvd-rom/cd-rw from a broken laptop I was ready. To start with I just wanted to check that everything worked so I installed windows on the system. This worked so I then decided that I could turn the unit into a nice little PVR, this was before they started to drop in price. In order to play dvd's I used a copy of power-dvd and in order to watch dvds on my tv using the unit I had to install dvd43, as for some strange reason a copyrighted dvd won't play...go figure. So that I could use the unit to play all of my dvds from the hdd I used a piece of software called autoGK and another called DVDShrink this did take around 12hrs+ to rip and compress a single DVD which means to convert my whole collection would take a million years. Around the same sort of time I was experimenting with Linux so I wondered if there were any similar programs on there, well shocker there is and its called AcidRip and that took just 2 hours to turn a 1hr30minute dvd to a 700Mb avi file FANTASTIC. Since then I bought a cheap £20 usb video capture device from KWorld, who I since found out are a cheap Korean hardware manufacturer that tend to sell stuff in India-- or so I've been lead to believe. Anyway it took a while to get the video capture to work on ubuntu 7.10 but now it does finally work in mplayer, turns out the GStreamer drivers aren't mature enough to use it but the xine stuff did work whoopee. I might write a little project build guide up and submit it to mini-itx.com as possibly the cheapest PVR project ever. I have also discovered DynDNS and have decided that the media device can be made into a simple energy efficient server, and now I have just discovered that it is ideally suited for being a vlc server :) so I am still experimenting

here's to getting old

I don't know when it happened, but I have to admit I am officially old! At the ripe old age of 26 I have recently found myself a) wanting to find a quiet pub on a Friday night. b) no longer find fun in 'getting bladdered' c) can't easily distinguish 2 pop songs from one another. d) if I have a heavy night out the following night has to be an early one. e) upon seeing 'kids' in a pub you think, are they old enough to be in here? I guess all this should make me feel sad at the thought of my youth disappearing in what seems like the blink of an eye, but I don't. I feel quietly satisfied that when I look at a chavved up boy racer sh!t mobile, (some £400 corsa with a grands worth of body kit making it look like a caricature of its former self ) all I see is a childs toy and feel pity.

there goes another paradise

so with the announcement that Fidel Castro is going to retire lots of people are getting excited about the whole thing. The US say that they want to bring democracy to Cuba, when they can't even provide true democracy to their own country I find this hard to believe. If they take their own ideas of democracy to Cuba this will probably mean that some of those beautiful jungles I crossed will become development sites for holiday homes, starbuck and macdonalds as long as they are able to line the pockets of the people making the legislation. While I am on the matter the BBC reporting is getting more and more inaccurate, sensationalizing everything presumably to maintain the interest of 90% of the population that are more interested in which slapper of a celebrity has fallen out of what club wearing what dress!!! for a start the BBC said that the inhabitants of Cuba lived in poverty with barely enough money to live and they all hate Castro. I didn't see much evidence of this really, I mean yes I did see that the general population didn't have a great deal of money due to trade embargo thanks to the US, but in a communist state you shouldn't even need money. Everyone I spoke to liked Fidel except for the richer people of Havana who had property seized by the government, but again the majority of them were on the payroll of the mafia as far as I could make out. There was also another report that said suicides in Wales may be due to kids using chat rooms like beebo and facebook, I am sorry but neither of these are chat rooms and I have completely lost my faith in the reporting from the BBC. In other news they have said that Porsche (girls car makers) are going to contest the fact that drivers of more polluting cars will have to pay a £25 congestion charge in the courts. Heres a thought Porsche why don't you try and make your cars more efficient!! Also if you can afford to run a car like the chayenne monstrosity then a £25 fee wouldn't even be noticed. Maybe they are being clever in launching this action so that they get back more than enough in free publicity to boost their falling sales to warrant them squandering money on an ill conceived legal action.

Whats with 4x4's

I can understand someone having a 4x4 if they need to get across uneven terrain, or if they need to carry bulky equipment e.t.c. but I hardly think the M25 counts as rough terrain and even the round bulbous balding frame of a man driving doesn't really count as heavy machinery. So why is it that everytime I drive into town Iam faced with a carpark stocked with half the number of cars it was built for because people driving these things "need" 1.5 parking spaces!!! Lets face it do you need a 4x4 - No, did you buy it for the added safety - No (don't kid yourself, you didn't). Did you buy it for its fuel economy (ha ha sorry had to add that one) or quite simply did you like so many sheep decide that its fashionable and wanted one, thus proving that independant thought is dead and that you are now simply a consumer automaton. The 4x4 has now taken over from the (ridiculous) sports car as the penis extension only now rather than being a laugh to see on the road these monstrosities are getting in my way and hastening the demise of this planet yet these reverse-porcupine tins just seem to multiply (called reverse-porcupine tins as the pricks are on the inside) The other reason I dislike 4x4 is the arrogant fools that tend to drive them. On my way to work I pass a few schools and if I am running late I always get stuck behind some woman driving a 4x4 whilst trying to keep 2 screaming kids under control during the 700yard drive to the school gate. One time a woman was driving along infront of me a slammed on the anchors, no danger as I was keeping a safe distance as these people tend to weave across the road when their mobile phone starts to play the latest god awful pseudo-rap song that happens to be the chav audio taste de jour. Anyway I couldn't believe this woman as she put on the universal parking lights, or as we norms call them hazard lights, she then proceeded to get out retrieve her hideous balls of blubber from the back of the car, kiss them goodbye then sent their arses off for another 8 hours of picking their nose and farting, whilst in the mean time a queue of traffic was building up and she was oblivious to the whole thing - twat!

Philosophical Outlook on things

It is true to say that every journey starts with a single step, and that great oak trees can spring from the smallest of acorns.

Quite simply put this means that a person is capable of great things but they must first choose to set out on the path to becomming great. I can't help but think that this lesson is lost on a great number of people, the children who play truant and commit crimes through boredom or the stoner that ignores an opportunity in favour of getting high. If these people realised their potential and then realised that is a very easy path as long as you put in the effort we would have a world filled with far happier people.

Virgin Media, what are they thinking about?

I saw an advert that seemed too good to be true (turns out it was but please read on) The advert was for broadband through cable and telephone for about £15 a month, as I am currently with BT and the fastest connection I have is 460kbps as I live so far from the exchange I thought a change to cable would be just what the doctor ordered. So I called up and spoke to a very polite lady who also convinced me that for an extra £5 a month I could get freeview stations too, I decided to take this deal as well because in bad weather I do lose freeview signal sometimes. The advert says order by 12th Dec and we GUARANTEE to beat santa -- cool I'd be able to watch xmas tv on a nice shiny cable system. True to their GUARANTEE a 2 man installation crew comes round and installs all the hardware inside and drills holes in the wall of my house and puts wires in. Then they say sorry the carrier signal is too weak someone else will have to come and install a new drop line (whatever that is), I am assured that someone will call to arrange a suitable date by the end of the day. Hours later I decided to take the initiative and call customer services myself, I explain the situation and am told someone will call me with a date. The next day I call again as noone has called me to arrange a date and I am told someone will install it on 3rd January!!! Hang on the GUARANTEE was to be in for xmas, does Virgin Media celebrate on a different day from everyone else? I raise this fact and they do agree that I shouldn't pay the installation fee as the install hasn't actually taken place yet. Reasoning that if they couldn't get this right that they might be stupid enough to send the same installation crew round that would once again tell me I need a new drop line, I called customer services and explained that "I want to make sure that on the 3rd of January the engineers know they are fitting a new drop cable not just doing an installation". The customer services guy assures me that this has all been added to my profile so there will be no confusion. So the 3rd January comes round and I get a call from an engineer "hello, I believe I am due to do an installation at your property this afternoon". I reply "Well, your due to put a new drop cable in, the wiring inside the house is already done". I then get the response that I dreaded I would get "Oh, well I am a one man crew I don't do that sorry". May I just point out at this point I have already had to take 2 days off work which (a) is difficult at a busy time of year and (b) cuts the number of days I could go to a sunny beach. What is even more infuriating is that my neighbour has a friend who used to work for Virgin Media and he has fitted her out with new cables, has done a much neater job she didn't have to pay this guy and shes probably getting cable for free as well. So if I wasn't a law abiding citizen I could probably have had everything installed myself before xmas yet here I am with nothing installed. If it doesn't get installed today then forget it, I am not going to bother with them, I might use sky if they offer cable broadband!!! It is nice to be able to get through to nice customer support that speak good english and are very polite, but if your issues are NEVER resolved whats the point!!

I've never written a blog before, I've never written a diary before either but thought that maybe it would be a good idea to keep hold of all of those little bits of information that could come in handy at a later date. At the moment I am trying to add some details to a web site regarding flight codes, which ordinarily would be a simple matter, however the way the system was designed means that the airport code in question is not only a nice little display item but is also used in the underlying booking system too. So much for separation of concerns! Anyway this is proving to be quite a pain and I am having to do some hideous shuffling of data in order to change the code, it seems like a lot of development work for very little gain. People that request these changes have no idea what the change involves because all they see is a three letter code changing, that annoys me.