Upgrading Fedora 12 to 13

I'm pleased to report that after problems upgrading from Fedora 10 to 11 and minor issues upgrading Fedora 11 to 12 that I've finally had a no problem upgrade from Fedora 12 to 13 on my home machine.

I have only a very slightly unusual setup in that I've got Fedora running on top of a hardware RAID environment which has caused some issues with preupgrade in the past. Upgrades I have tried on other equipment such as my work laptop have always been flawless and now it seems the issues with RAID installs have gone away too.

So this brings to an end my blog trilogy about upgrading Fedora, short and sweet, it just works! Now onwards to enjoy using a great new distribution that's pushing the boundaries in pretty much every area of Linux usage. Thanks to the Fedora team, Goddard looks fab.

Pre-built Joggler Images

It seems everyone buying a Joggler is doing so for their own good reasons with thoughts about how to hack the device to their needs. I include myself in this too, why else write these blog posts? The majority of people aren't so interested in the hacking side of things as simply getting the device to do what they want and that's where using a pre-built, already hacked, operating system image can come in very handy indeed.

The Images
Easily the two most popular images are Ubuntu based although there are Joggler communities for Android, Mer and Meego, all of which are Linux based platforms. I've only tried the first of these but can lend my recommendation to either of

• http://www.stephenford.org/joggler/
• http://www.fuzzylogic.co.uk/

As I said, both are Ubuntu based with the key difference being the first image uses the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (a.k.a UNR, Ubuntu Netbook Edition and UNE) while the second one uses "normal" Ubuntu.  You'd perhaps expect them to be in fierce competition with each other but in good open source spirit quite the opposite is true. Both are produced by nice guys who help each other (and the rest of the community out) by sharing what they do.

There's no sense in me reproducing how to download and use either of these images.  Both come with pretty bullet-proof instructions on what to do.  I would, however, heartily recommend you produce the images from a Linux system having recently helped a friend struggling with downloading the images successfully and finding the right tools to do the job under Windows.

Fair's Fair
From my own investigations and messing around with putting Fedora on the Joggler I can certainly vouch for the amount of time and effort these guys have put into producing such good quality, usable hacks.  So, if you do more than just evaluate these for your own use i.e. you really are using your Joggler with either of these images then do give serious consideration to spending a few quid giving something back to the guys as they ask through a small donation.  I have no idea how much they might stand to make through donation and other revenue such as the Google ads, but it's probably not a huge amount and is definitely well earned.

Modification
If you try the images out and there's something you don't like, fine, you don't have to stick with that particular quirk.  There's never going to be a one-size fits all approach so if you don't like, for example, the on screen keyboard, the user interface or something else then feel free to change it.  It's your system once you've downloaded and booted it after all.  There are a lot of, dare I say, complaints on the forums about things not being quite right.  If it's something major then let the guy know who produced the image, it will probably get fixed in their next version.  Also, there's a huge wealth of help and support out there in various places so try looking for someone who's already "been there, done that".

Subject to some of the Joggler Hardware Gotchas it is possible to use these images on devices much bigger and faster than a 4GB USB stick.  I've tried with an 8GB stick and USB hard disks from 80GB through 320GB and even one disk of 1TB.  Simply follow the instructions for either image to write to your larger device as if it were a 4GB stick.  Then use a tool such as gparted (again I recommend Linux simply because it's easy and the tools are readily available) to resize the second partition to be as big as you like.  If you move to a hard disk (rather than USB stick) then you can undo some of the modifications made in the images for efficiency and to try and protect your stick:

• Change the file system back to ext3 from ext2
• Add a swap file or swap partition

You can change the file system type from ext2 to ext3 either before or after changing the size of the partition.  Simply boot the image on your Joggler and run the command "tune2fs -j /dev/sda2" then edit the file /etc/fstab to change bit that says ext2 to say ext3, save that file and you're all done.  The reason for making this change is your files will be a little safer in the event of unplanned events such as sudden loss of power.  This was quite rightly turned off for the USB stick images because more data is written to the device and since USB sticks are only capable of being written to a relatively small number of times the trade-off between stick reliability and file system reliability has to be made.

Adding a swap file (if you don't know what this is then have a go at understanding paging)is probably easier in many ways than adding a swap partition and with a recent version of Linux such as the ones used in these images doesn't lead to any loss of performance as might have been expected in older versions of Linux.  Feel free to add a swap partition in gparted though, don't forget to add a line to /etc/fstab to tell Ubuntu to use this partition as swap.  To add a 1GB swap file simple run the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=1024; swapon /swap" then add a line to /etc/fstab so next time you reboot Ubuntu will use this file for swap space.

You can find a lot more of my information about the Joggler at my Joggler Index post. I also have a list of Joggler Bookmarks.

Joggler Hardware Gotchas

I haven't (so far at least) attempted to modify my Joggler hardware in any way. It is possible to do so in order to, for example, add an internal USB port. If you're interested in this sort of thing then have a look at the Hacking the Hardware section over at the Joggler Wiki. I have spent a reasonable amount of time playing with the hardware now though so here's my list of things to be careful about.

GMA 500
Contrary to Intel's usual position with regards Linux support, the GMA 500 chipset is an absolute abomination.  The basic reason for this is they license some of the technology from elsewhere so are unable to provide the full source code to the community.  This means parts of the drivers for the GMA 500 chipset are binary only, cannot be shipped by any of the Linux distributions, so must be downloaded individually by each user.  This driver is known as IEGD (Intel Embedded Graphics Driver).

There is an open source alternative known as PSB (or the Poulsbo driver).  Support for this in the Linux distributions is patchy at best.  Earlier versions of Ubuntu and Fedora have better support for this driver as it best supports earlier versions of Xorg, namely version 1.6.4 and below.  The PSB driver has very recently been patched to support Xorg 1.7 and later so should soon start to work with Fedora 12 and above and Ubuntu 10.04.  The patch was written by someone in the Mandriva community and has been made available for Fedora 12/13 by a Red Hat employee netbook enthusiast.

I have tried both drivers on Fedora 12.  I was unable to get Adam's PSB driver to work (the akmod failed to compile) but I do have a fully working Fedora 12 graphical system using the IEGD driver.  There will be more about how to get all that going in another blog post soon.

It's a shame the Joggler (and most netbooks) use this chipset.  Before investigating you would think Linux would have superb support for Atom based netbooks given many of them have previously been sold with a Linux pre-install version.  My guess is the lack of support for current distributions is why we don't see new Linux pre-install netbooks any more.  This can only be due to demand though, Intel would support later versions if a vendor was willing to pay for support but the market has to be there in order to make this worthwhile (rant over).

USB power
The power provided by the Joggler's USB port is dodgy (technical term) at best.  In order to support that claim I have tried several different USB hard disks (1 Lenovo, and 2 Freecom disks) and only non-bus-powered ones have worked reliably.  The Joggler simply isn't able to provide enough power to operate these drives, two that I tried span up but didn't get enough power to move the disk heads, the third (a brand new Freecom mobile drive classic 2) does work but occasionally drops out causing the OS to crash.  My recommendation is to provide an external power source if you're connecting much more than a USB stick to your Joggler.

Options then, well you can either mains power your device(s) or power from a USB hub.  Either of these work reliably in my experience (I've tried a mains powered 3½" disk and powered hubs with my 2½" disks) but still there's one more problem.  If your device passes power back into the Joggler itself, it wont boot and you'll end up in the O2 interface.  You'll know if your device is doing this as the Joggler backlight will be lit even if the Joggler is not plugged into the mains! So now you have 2 options again, (1) stop your device passing power back to the Joggler, and (2) butcher a USB cable.

You can stop your device from passing power back to the Joggler (if it is doing so) by buying a decent powered USB hub. I'm using a Plexus hub I bought from eBuyer along with my Freecom disk.  I have tried some cheaper powered hubs but they also passed power back to the host so while allowing me to connect multiple devices didn't solve the problem I was having.

The USB cable butchery option isn't as bad as it sounds.  USB cables have 4 wires in them, white and green for data, black for earth and red for live.  Simply grab the cable you want to connect your device with (whether it's the device itself or a cheaper powered hub which is passing power back to the Joggler), cut part of the outer sheath away (about an inch will do) somewhere along the cable length, find the 4 cables inside (getting through any braiding or foil that might be in your cable depending on how expensive it was), then simply cut the live wire.  Make sure the live ends are not touching each other with some insulation and you can wrap the cable back up again.  That's it, you've now got a Joggler compatible USB cable which wont pass power back to the Joggler but, obviously, wont power your device either.  The Joggler is able to detect you've got a drive as part of the circuit is still there via the ground cable and data will flow as normal along the untouched data cables.

Partitioning
This observation is a real oddity for which I have no explanation (suggestions welcome).  The Joggler will not boot from your USB device if it has 4 primary partitions, don't ask me why, yes it should work, but it just doesn't boot.  Using 3 primary partitions works, up to 2 primary partitions, an extended partition and as many logical partitions as you like also works.  But, give it a device with 4 partitions on and it's game over as far as booting from that device is concerned.

Usability
Some people have mentioned to me about not finding the touch screen very user friendly while running Linux. When compared with the O2 interface that's a pretty fair comment as things tend to be a lot smaller on Linux vs O2. There are various tweaks you can make to your desktop depending on your personal preference such as:

• finding an on-screen keyboard you're happy with (onBoard vs Cellwriter for example)
• increasing the font size such that all the things you want to touch (click on) are bigger (do this under System->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts in Gnome)
• installing touch screen addons for your programs (such as chromeTouch for Chrome)
• Make your scrollbars wider
  

If you've decided the touch screen really isn't for you then look into getting a keyboard/mouse solution or a stylus. For keyboards/mice you'll need a USB hub so you're able to attach more than one device to your joggler. I have and can recommend a wireless BTC keyboard with built in joystick (for mouse control) which uses a radio signal via a USB receiver. You can use any USB keyboard/mouse you like though but I'd recommend something compact and wireless, there's always Bluetooth too for which you can get some pretty tiny receivers these days. If you go for the stylus option there's plenty of commercial solutions out there for capacitive touch screens. I quite like this DIY Stylus as an option, however.

You can find a lot more of my information about the Joggler at my Joggler Index post. I also have a list of Joggler Bookmarks.

Getting a Joggler, the how and the why?

Buying a Joggler is pretty simple, you can just go to the O2 shop and get one for one hundred of our UK pounds, or fifty if it's on sale.  The reason for putting "the how" in this isn't to teach you how to buy stuff on the net.  No no, more to say you can get it for less than fifty quid if you're careful!  Those of us who work for IBM have been buying them through a money saving web site we have access to as IBMers such that you buy the Joggler and a PAYG Mobile Internet USB dongle (which you're not obliged to use) for a total of £60 and get £25 cashback for doing so.  That's £35 for a Joggler and mobile Internet, bargain!  I would think this sort of offer must be out there in the wider world too if you look carefully enough.

So why do I, or you for that matter, want one?  There's lots of different uses for it.  Even if you look at it as a dumb wireless digital photo frame then it's far cheaper than other wifi frames out there.  The neat thing about it is it runs a version of Linux internally, has a USB port and is also capable of booting from USB.  This means you can run pretty much anything you like on there instead of the default O2 interface.  So, it's the ideal hacking toy and can become a fully fledged computer system disguised as a photo frame if you choose to do so.  The sky is the limit.

For me, I use it as a low power home server running:

• remote login to home (ssh)
• music streaming (squeezebox server)
• internet connected photo frame (gphotoframe)
• trivial internet browsing (chrome + touchscreen addon)
• file server (nfs, http, ftp, smb, etc as required)
• backup server (rsync) 

I've also found it very useful to have a computer connected to my printer for wifi print serving from my laptop in the past.  Currently the Joggler isn't located next to my printer so I'm not doing this but it's definitely an option for the future.  Similarly I may eventually reconnect my current cost meter for home power monitoring, sending daily electricity bill via email, graphing and storing stats.  Another use I could put it to is as a WOL client so wake up other machines in the house remotely so I don't leave them powered on all day (not that I do this anyway), but I haven't configured WOL yet.

Not investigated yet but it seems to me it should be possible to run the OpenPeak apps on Linux too.  These are just flash applications so I should be able to run them on the Linux desktop without any issues which would provide me with the same functionality I would get from the original O2 interface under my own Linux.

You can find a lot more of my information about the Joggler at my Joggler Index post. I also have a list of Joggler Bookmarks.

Joggler Index

This post will be kept up to date serving as an ordered index to my notes about the O2 Joggler; essentially a glorified digital picture frame with a touch screen.  All posts will use the joggler tag too but these may appear in any order.

The very brief tech spec is:

• Intel Atom Z520 with GMA 500 chipset
• 512MB RAM
• 1GB Internal Storage (to run the O2 operating system and interface)
• 7 inch touch screen
• USB port, audio jack, wired Ethernet and wireless network

I have a list of Joggler bookmarks.

Blog Posts:

• Getting a Joggler, the how and the why?
• Joggler Hardware Gotchas
• Pre-built Joggler Images
• Joggler Linux Boot Mysteries
• When Jogglers Go Bad

Letter to Altonians

This is an open letter to the people of Alton in Hampshire, my home town:

People of Alton (and there abouts),

There is a battle raging in the town over whether the Coors Brewery should be permitted to sell their sports facilities (what's known as the Bass sports ground) near Anstey Park.  Many of the local residents object to this for many reasons:
- there is a covenant on the current sports ground stating it should remain in use only for sport
- relocation of sports facilities to Anstey Park means massive loss of public green space in the town
- the coors site would be redeveloped as a supermarket or possibly dense housing

Why should the town lose a park so Coors can profit from land sales on which there is a covenant?

If you agree, you can find out more information from:
http://ansteyresidents.org.uk/
http://www.weloveansteypark.com/
http://saveansteypark.org.uk/
or the Facebook group
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=299652801351

Things you can do to help:
Display the poster from the weloveansteypark.com web site
Object to the two planning applications concerned,
  http://www.ansteyresidents.org.uk/object_to_footballhub.php
  http://www.ansteyresidents.org.uk/object_to_supermarket.php

These campaigns are all fighting the same cause with the aim to protect our open spaces and ensure any development is sympathetic to the surrounding area and sited appropriately in the town.

Thanks for your time in reading this,

Graham White

New Lens

I've saved writing about the new lens I was given at Christmas until I've had a decent chance to use it.  I've wanted this for quite a while now, inspired by my friend Mim and her wonderful portrait photography <shameless plug>you can hire her by the way</shameless plug>.  I'm deliberately not showing off any of my pictures in this post until I've got a little better at using it.

My only other two lenses don't have a massive maximum aperture so it's great to finally have a fast lens in my arsenal.  The benefit of greater lens speed is to widen the aperture which allows for throwing the background of your subject out of focus.  This has the benefit of making the subject stand out and drawing the eye towards it.  It's particularly great for portrait work.

The other great plus to this particular lens is it's just about the smallest, cheapest, lightest lens Canon make.  This thing is tiny, weighs something like 130 grams and is less than 80 quid!  It's just about the best bang-for-your-buck you can get in my opinion.

Usage is obviously quite simple as it's fixed focal length so there's no zoom ring to worry about.  You only get a focusing ring and an auto/manual focus switch, no image stabilisation switch to worry about either.  It does feel very strange to use at the moment though, because of it's size and weight it gives the camera a completely different feel.  Not to mention that I'm used to zoom lenses so there's nothing to twist unless you're manually focusing.  You have to move yourself in order to frame the subject as you want and while none of these things are bad, it does give a different feel to the experience of taking pictures.  The results, though, speak for themselves, you can produce really great images from this lens which is a real shocker given the price.

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

Recently I've been playing around with creating HDR style images. I'll save the full technical explanation for someone else.  In my own simple words for the uninitiated, it's a post processing technique where you combine multiple images of the same scene taken at different exposures. The reason for doing this is that your camera is only capable of "seeing" a certain range of light and colours, you usually tell it which range to use i.e. whether you want an underexposed or overexposed image. Some scenes are too mixed in terms of different light levels, you could expose for the dark areas or the light but perhaps not both. This is where a technique such as HDR comes in handy, allowing you to retain the detail in the shady areas as well as the well lit areas for example.

HDR images can look like they're not photographs, perhaps computer generated, depending on the algorithm used to render the final image.  However, in the right hands they can look pretty cool, for example this one from the Flickr HDR Group:

I'm still very much learning, I've been working with these three images:

My best attempt so far is:

I think I've still got some way to go, but it's been fun trying and learning.

Contributing to BloGTK

I was meaning to talk about BloGTK before my previous post on the topic but never quite had the time so here's a quick follow-up to fill in the holes...

At the end of last year I decided it was about time I filled in a scripting gap in my knowledge, namely Python, so set about finding something to code.  I'm also a blogger (D'uh) and have always been frustrated at the lack of a decent off-line client for the Linux desktop.  Enter BloGTK, both a blogging client and written in Python.

Step 1 before thinking any further about contributing or reading any source code is to seek permission from my employer.  I was glad (and surprised) to find getting permission to contribute to open source projects is actually very quick and simple.  A short note to my manager and a couple of days delay later yielded the rather simple response:

Graham

Approved

Regards, ...

BloGTK didn't do a couple of things I consider essential for my blogging purposes, the main one being support for uploading and embedding images.  I wrote and submitted a couple of patches to the project, learning a lot about Python along the way.  The latest development snapshot of BloGTK (which will probably become version 2.1) includes support for uploading to Picasa and Flickr.  If you went looking for Flickr support as a result of my previous post then you'll either have to grab the development code early or wait a while until the release of the 2.1 version.  In the mean time I'll do battle with Flickr to find out why they think BloGTK is a personal web site or gallery in order to publicise the App through the App Garden.

Flickr Appgarden Violation‏, really?

Today I unexpectedly received the following from Flickr in reference to BloGTK.

Hello,
 
The App Garden is a place for software developers to
showcase applications they've created. Because your app
doesn't appear to fit this description it has been set to
private.
 
Your API key is still active and fully functioning , it's
just not public in the App Garden.
 
The App Garden is not a place to showcase a personal
website or gallery. Please only publicize app pages for
applications that you have developed and that are related
to
the Flickr API. You can review the App Garden guidelines
here:
 
http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/about/
 
Thank you for your understanding.
 
Regards,
Flickr Staff

I hold Flickr in very high regard for their openness, interaction with the community and the great API.  This is also the reason I'm happy to sign up for a pro account vs other services I use heavily (such as Geocaching.com) which are a closed managed community.  So I was surprised to find this note in my inbox this morning which appears to be an automated message or at best the staff member simply hasn't looked at the application before criticising and taking action.

Teach, Yourself

I've recently had the opportunity to teach a class of students on a couple of different occasions. Something I've not done for quite a while now but something well worth doing every now and then. I say every now and then, I don't think I have the vocal stamina to do it for more than a few days and I especially don't think I have the special quality it takes to teach children. The classes were both very different, one a knowledgeable internal audience for a days course, the other a three day course for a customer where the participants were only a short way along the road towards learning what I had to say. Both were similar, on the topics of Linux cluster administration and all the various technologies it takes to run a cluster.

Clustering technologies really are varied and it takes a few years experience before an administrator has a good overview of the inner workings of how everything hangs together. For example, I mostly covered Linux administration and clustered administration with xCAT but to fully understand it you need a fair bit of background knowledge. Your Linux OS, hardware configuration and control, network architecture, storage, clustered file systems, remote management, parallel computing, computer service (NTP, DNS, FTP, NFS, HTTP, TFTP, etc) administration, etc. The list really is quite long and while this is starting to sound like a "Look at all the stuff I know!" blow-your-own-trumpet type blog post, the point I think I'm trying to make is the list of people who know (and I mean really know) all this stuff in any given company isn't very long. You'll know the guy, the one who everyone always asks when something is wrong with their machine, the "he fixes everything" guy. While these people are hard to find locked away in a small room somewhere (think IT Crowd), it can be even harder to teach the "I already know quite a lot" guy but I took up the challenge anyway.

There's nothing like teaching every now and then to keep you grounded. Some people in your class will challenge what you're saying so you have to make sure you're right and know how and why you're right, the how and the why are very important when teaching. Some times the class miss the point of what you said, this resets your view on the assumptions you make, the assumptions you work with every day. When someone in the class misses the point it's often to do with how you've expressed it rather than their lack of understanding. Some people might find this challenge to their knowledge of the fundamentals of what they work with quite stressful but I look at it as an opportunity. Sure, you might set yourself up for a fall but that's all part of the thrill. Fortunately, I don't mind speaking in front of a crowd, at least not about something with which I'm familiar, but the audience does add to the experience.

I can be a bit of a show-off, I know that, so teaching can be very satisfactory. Great for the ego, almost. However, I take great pleasure from imparting knowledge on others. The opportunity to help others understand something about which they previously knew little is not to be missed as far as I'm concerned. It plays to your inner show-off if you're prepared to stand on and risk falling off of the pedestal you put yourself on when you stand in front of a class.

If you're knowledgeable in a certain area then I would heartily recommend you share what you know in front of an audience, risk making a fool of yourself in front of your audience. I think the rewards are good if you don't often teach. Have what you know challenged. Have your assumptions highlighted. Find out the little gaps you didn't think you had. Most of all, have fun doing it.

Macro Extension Tubes

For Christmas I asked for (and was lucky enough to receive) a set of extension tubes for my camera. Having no experience with these before, I started off with the cheapest set I could find on Amazon. Whilst they're nowhere near as functional as the more expensive varieties available they are a decent starting point and would make a great present for any enthusiast.

For the uninitiated, Wikipedia has this to say about Extension Tubes:

An extension tube is an accessory for cameras with interchangeable lenses, used primarily for macro photography. The tube contains no optical elements; its sole purpose is to move the lens farther from the image plane. The farther away the lens is, the closer the focus, the greater the magnification.....

I don't mind using a cheap extension tube because it's just a hollow tube and has no effect on the quality of the image produced. The real disadvantage of this set and the reason they're at least £100 less expensive than the next set (and many hundreds of pounds cheaper than the Canon equivalent) is there are no electrical contacts, they're simply plain tubes. This means you're not able to control the aperture of the lens and must use manual focus; manual focus being no biggie since that's advisable with such a small depth of field.

Here are my first test images to see how they perform (click to see larger versions over on Flickr):






Both of these images were taken using my kit lens at 55mm and F5.6 hence the depth of field is so shallow on the magnified image with the tubes attached which also had a lot longer exposure in order to expose the image correctly.

For greater depth of field there are ways, not recommended by Canon I should add, you can change and lock the aperture of the lens before you add the extension tubes. This means if you're really desperate there's nothing stopping you getting a much better depth of field with these tubes at the expense of even longer exposure times of course.

For me, I think I shall experiment with these a little more. Should I catch the macro photography bug then I'll have to make a decision about whether to get a better set of extension tubes or even at some point treat myself to a proper macro lens. For now though, these will suffice quite nicely.

EDIT: My Amazon Review has now been published.

Upgrading Fedora 11 to 12

After writing recently about my previous upgrade experience, it seems fair to report my latest upgrade experience going from F11 to F12 using pre-upgrade on the same machine at home.

Everything progressed very smoothly, even more so than last time as I'm pleased to report the bug I had written about is now fixed. Fedora now detects hardware raid devices and employs the correct work-around solution to ensure the upgrade proceeds unhindered. So far so good then and I thought I would be sailing through to another smooth upgrade. However, it appears even at Fedora 12 level there are still some small issues as it proved later in the upgrade process.

This time the upgrade was smooth right through to the end of the upgrade process, after all the packages had been installed. Just as the bootloader config was being adjusted I was presented with a rather user-unfriendly Python stack trace with an "unhandled exception" error. By switching to another console I was able to work out the upgrade had in fact completed successfully all except for the final adjustments to the grub menu and removing the pre-upgrade cache. I reported this behaviour in a new Red Hat bugzilla bug report and have been informed this bug has already been fixed upstream in Fedora development and should not occur in pre-upgrade F12 to F13, lets wait and see.

So it seems the pre-upgrade path for slightly more complicated configurations such as the one I have at home is finally starting to look good. I'm slightly disappointed it's still not quite there yet though but all things considered this was another smooth upgrade and one which someone less informed about Linux might be successful.

Upgrading Fedora 10 to 11

Writing on the day of the scheduled release of Fedora 12 it might seem strange to be talking about two previous versions. However, I thought I would take stock briefly looking over my shoulder before moving forward with the very latest and greatest.

I upgraded both my home machines shortly after F11 was eventually released in early June after I had been tweeting about it for some time. Aside from a small problem with my main machine at home, both upgrades progressed seamlessly with the Fedora pre-upgrade tool. I'm a bit more conservative with my main work laptop usually staying 3 months behind the latest release, after eventually finding time to upgrade I've been running F11 on my laptop very smoothly for over a month now.

The issue I had upgrading my home machine was related to the fact my boot partition is on a (hardware) RAID device. It appears there is a bug in pre-upgrade in this area which I found out after a rare question to the fedora forums. In my experience pre-upgrade is pretty decent these days but beware that it still has some pitfalls such as this!

After pre-upgrade finishes your box reboots, in this case taking you from your F10 desktop to F11. All in all I've noticed very little difference between the two versions which raises some interesting questions for me, basically summarised by "What's the point in upgrading?". Having noticed very little difference after the upgrade this may well be a question many less experienced users ask too. On F10 my laptop worked flawlessly, I had compatibility with all the apps I need, accelerated 3d graphics with RandR 1.2 support (for easily switching between display devices), printing and some of the more traditionally contentious Linux functionality worked perfectly, namely wireless and suspend. F11 was exactly the same after my first boot into the system, flawless.

So what, indeed, is the point in an upgrade such as this? For me, I like to stay near (but in the case of my main machine not on) the bleeding edge of development. The upgrade for me was all about getting a few little extras in the Kernel (namely support for hard disk parking which I've not yet played with, and better web cam support) as well as all the little feature additions and bug fixes you get with every library and app you use on your box. The main point though, and the clincher, is that the upgrade process SHOULD be this smooth; these things SHOULD happen without causing any new problems while fixing as many old problems as possible. I'm glad to say F10 to F11 did work like this, it was a breeze, Fedora are getting this right and long may it continue.

The Best Venn Diagram Ever

A colleague and good friend has this venn diagram printed out at work. I've been looking at it for ages and currently see it every day, I think it's fab...

I often describe my work role as "Professional Geek" and I suppose this diagram gives that some context. We all aspire towards intelligence (well most of us anyway) but most of the people I work with have a slightly obsessive enthusiasm about their subject matter that places us firmly in geek territory.

I can think of people I would place in each of these categories and I bet you can too. Which one are you?

Light Box for Peanuts

Haha I'm funny, err yes well... I really have built a light box for peanuts inspired a while ago by Nick's tent. Although I have used it to take a peanut (right) it's built out of nothing more than stuff I had in the house already.

Aside from making it for next to nothing, I also wanted to allow it collapse so I don't have to store a huge empty box when it's not in use. Here's how I went about it, you'll be needing:

• For the box:
  • 1 cardboard box (say about 12"x18" but that can vary depending on your use)
    
  • 3 sheets of light diffuser (I used greaseproof paper, but tracing paper or white material will do nicely).
    
  • Velcro (just a short length, say 6")
    
  • A spine bar (long plastic paper binder thing)
    
  • Sticky tape
  
  
• Tools:
  • Scissors
    
  • Craft knife
  
  
• Camera Kit:
  • Camera and subject (D'uh)
    
  • Tripod
    
  • 2 or 3 lamps

Now it's time to get all Blue Peter...

Cut the box open at both ends. Seal one end back up again with a few little strips of velcro, leaving the other side open. I stuck packing tape onto the box first as the sticky velcro fixes better to that than cardboard. This will allow the finished box to collapse flat for storage. You should now have a box with a single opening so cut off any of the remaining flaps as you see fit, I just removed the top one and left the other three in place.

Cut three large holes, one on each side and one on the top, leaving a small border of about half an inch or so to fix to. Cut three sheets of your light diffuser about half an inch bigger than the holes in the box. Fix these over each hole with sticky tape.

I fixed a spine bar at the top back of the box. This will grip any sheets of paper/material you wish to use as a background to the photos you take in the box. So far though, as in the pictures above, I've found a simple sheet of white paper on the bottom has worked for the small objects I've taken (such as the peanut above). For best results, don't forget to white balance against your sheet of paper first.

Here's the velcro doing its job:

And the spine bar:

Canon EOS 450d Updates

Further to my first post about my new camera and starter kit, I've just added a few more little bits to my starter collection. So here's what else I've got:

• Hama USB 2.0 Card Reader
  
• Hama Bellows Blower
  
• Hoya 58mm PRO1 UV Filter
  
• Yongnuo Remote Control Switch

Card Reader (my Amazon review)
For years I've been using the older version of the reader I've just bought. They're both cheap as chips at under a fiver in spite of what price Amazon may have them up for now. However, the first worked so well and reliably I bought the new one. The difference? Simply that the new one reads SDHC where the old one didn't and I've just moved both my cameras onto SDHC now.

Blower
Not much to say here. Kept getting dusty/dirty lenses that I didn't want to wipe clean for fear of scratching. A blower appears to be the solution that works.

UV Filter (my Amazon review)
I already had one of these but got fed up of swapping between my two lenses so bought another. Sadly, they'd gone up in price quite a bit!

Remote Control (my Amazon review)
Probably the thing that spurred me on the most to order more stuff because I can't use 2 hands to take pictures right now. Also very useful for some ideas I have about getting close to some wild garden birds I'd like to capture.

This remote is made by a far Eastern company who have simply worked out how to interface to various makes of camera and put together their own set of controls. I would normally stick with Canon or other recognised makes but since this bit of kit has no bearing on the output of the camera I thought it worth a buy. Compared with a genuine Canon remote of the same price (the RC-1) it provides the same functionality but does it using a radio rather than an infra red link. This gives the advantages of using over much longer distances and without line of sight to the IR receiver on the camera. To get this capability from a Canon remote costs hundreds.

I've put more detail in my review on Amazon about this remote. However, in summary I would say you can tell it's cheap but it works well, not missed a click yet. It would probably work more effectively in the hands of a better photographer, but it does work.

BT i-Plate

I discovered a new (but rather boring) gadget before Christmas reading through the Think Broadband news. The BT i-Plate could help speed up your ADSL connection so more recently I decided to grab one and try it out. It's marketed through BT Wholesale as a customer installable device so it's very simple to fit and costs less than a tenner to get it to your door. The cheapest I found was £9.29 inc delivery from Broadand Buyer.

Any potential speed improvement results from reducing interference and improving stability at your master phone socket. The improvement seen by some people are staggering so worth a go I thought. The two pictures show before (left) and after (right) fitting. To fit you simply 1) remove the phone cord; 2) unscrew your master socket face plate and remove; 3) slot the i-Plate over the wire to the face plate; 4) plug the i-Plate into the master socket; 5) attach the face plate to the i-Plate and screw in. The socket now stands out from the wall about 1cm or so further than it did. Even with my right hand injured as it is, I managed to complete the installation quickly with one hand.

I did the installation a few days ago (Tuesday) so I've given it some time before comparing results before/after to allow my line speed to be adjusted (this is done automatically on all ADSL lines to keep your speed optimal for current conditions). So the big question is what has it done for me?

Before installation my ADSL router was connected at 5024kbps down and 448kbps up. This gave me an average download speed of 4352kbps and upload speed of 375kbps as measured by speedtest.net. Immediately after installation my connection speed had increased to 6016kbps up and 448kbps down, surprising. However, my download speed hardly changed at all. Today my router is connecting at 7008kbps and download speeds are around the 5200kbps mark using the same benchmark. It seems clear then, I've seen some improvement of around a 20% boost for downloads and hopefully a little more to come as my line stabilises with a little more time. Upload speeds remain the same as before on my "up to 8mbps/second" line, my current ISP is PlusNet.

Dear Wonky BT

Dear British Telecom, please when you send an engineer to my house to install a second line would you ask them to take as much care over presentation as getting the line working. Thanks, yours very wonkily!

This week we've had another phone line installed at home for reasons beyond comprehension. The young engineer was very concerned to take care to get things working as well as possible. However, he was only permitted to surface mount. That means any sockets or cables have to unsightly on the walls, not hidden or nicely recessed. Strange, as the first socket (on the left and also not straight) installed in our house before we moved in was recessed. I can live with that restriction perhaps, but is it unreasonable to expect better care over the position of the socket? I don't expect all engineers to be armed with a spirit level but this is just so clearly off level it's ridiculous.

Canon EOS 450d

I've recently had the dubious pleasure of turning 30 and having been considering investing in an SLR camera for quite some time decided this was the excuse I needed to splash out a bit. Amazon wish lists come in very handy, I just picked the stuff I wanted and saved to a list so people could just buy from that. My whole family were all very generous and all chipped in to get the following bits and pieces that now make up my starter SLR kit:

• Canon EOS 450D Kit (incl EF-S 18-55mm IS f/3.5-5.6)
  
• Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS
  
• SanDisk Extreme III SDHC 4GB Card
  
• Canon ET-60 Lens Hood
  
• Hoya 58mm PRO1 Circular Polarising Filter
  
• Hoya 58mm PRO1 UV Filter
  
• Lowepro Rezo 160 Shoulder Bag
  
• Lowepro Cirrus TLZ15 Case

This is my first venture into the world of SLR so I'll spare trying to do a full review and leave that to the pros. If you're interested, you can see the specs over at Canon and three pro reviews from sites I would recommend are Camera Labs, DP Review, and Steve's Digicams.

It was never really going to be much of a contest for me as to which brand and camera to go for since I've been using Canon compacts for years. When the 450d came out it immediately caught my attention as a very decent starter SLR and had the much reviewed live view feature that being a regular digital compact user I would expect to see. Now I've been using it for a while though I find I hardly rely on live view at all instead preferring the view finder. For me this actually feels quite retro - how often do you see a compact user with the camera up to their eye? This has a lot to do with the view finder in an SLR being far superior to those on compacts but also the live view is a lot clunkier to use. Using the SLR has made me realise just how fantastic and how much is packed into a decent compact camera like my current Canon A650 IS.

At the moment the starter kit I've got is fairly minimal but does provide the flexibility to take a lot of different shots while I learn how to handle and get the best results from the camera. I'm using the UV filter as a lens protector for the kit lens with the polariser on the long lens mostly. They're not much of a pain to swap, however, I think I'll end up getting a second UV filter for the long lens and swap in the polariser as required. The SD card is great, the Extreme III series have given me no problems in this or other cameras, would certainly recommend. The bags too are great, cheaper and more flexible than the Canon supplied bags and having a larger and smaller bag offers some good flexibility.

I'd welcome comments on other accessories I could get in the future. On my immediate list will be that second UV filter, a lens blower and cleaner, a remote shutter release and a light box (probably to be home made). Longer term I will consider other lenses, speedlights, a tripod upgrade, and possibly a spare battery although battery life is good on the 450d.

You can see my various attempts wit he 450d over on my Flickr pages.

Eco-Wool Loft Insulation

So now I'm cold, the reason being I've just been in our loft to take the most boring picture (right). But cold is good, right? That means my loft insulation must be working quite well on this cold winters evening. After my previous eco-minded post about our new LED light I thought I'd put up some info about another of our recent projects at home, insulating the loft.

It's a pretty simple job if somewhat cramped, dark and grim. It's well worth doing though as we can testify to having a warm house, cold loft, and doing well in the "who's roof melts the frost first" competition in our street. Loft insulation is supposed to be about the best bang-for-your-buck thing to do in terms of home efficiency; I've definitely noticed our radiators coming on a lot less. We're now up to a whopping 300mm insulation so well above the rafters and above what I still think is the recommended minimum of 250mm.

The real reason behind this post though is to say be careful when choosing what product you use. Don't just go to the local hardware store and buy the bulk standard "space blanket". Grand though it may sound those products are said to cause quite a lot of harm during manufacture. I've fitted Eco Wool (terrible web site, decent product) which is available in the UK through B&Q. While not the most ecological product ever (it uses 15% polyester for binding) it does use recycled plastic for the most part. It's very thick and has pretty good insulating properties, cheap and is easy to get hold of.

Unlike my post about our LED light I can't finish on any drawbacks with this one, there are none. Go insulate your loft, and think about what you lay first! Eco-warrior over and out.

LED Lighting

We're having a little bit of work done on the house and as part of that I had to move the outside light by the front door. On further inspection I found the old light wasn't going to cut the mustard in the new location, it wasn't going to be waterproof for one, which is sort of important. So a great excuse as if any were needed to buy something new and funky!

The obvious choice to me was to look into whether LED lights are available for outside lighting. Imagine my surprise when I found it seems they're actually getting quite commonplace and we were able to nip down to our local DIY store and pick one up. For some reason I was expecting to hunt around Internet sites and order one. The pictures shows what we bought. It's a fairly small chrome effect affair with two plastic panels beyond which are mounted a total of 24 white LEDs, 12 of these are at the front and 12 to the rear.

It provides plenty of light, not massively bright and offensive like security lighting, but easily enough to see your way up the drive to the doorway. The best part of this, as with all LED lighting, is the power usage. My current cost meter doesn't budge when it's turned on, not even a sniff of a change in power usage. Assuming I've not wired it up to some free electric supply I'm not aware of, or accidentally stolen from our neighbours, I can only conclude all 24 LEDs are using less than one watt of power. It's my first LED installation at home and almost certainly wont be the last.

I hate to finish on a downer but there are drawbacks of course. The LEDs are not replaceable so if one dies, however unlikely, you have to put up with it looking silly or replace the entire light. The other is the colour of the light, we've all been brought up with tungsten lighting so the colour of LED light does take a little getting used to.

BBC iPlayer Coming to Linux

As the BBC recently announced they have developed a version of iPlayer that works on Linux, Windows and Mac: "The BBC, working with Adobe, has developed the new version, known as BBC iPlayer Desktop."

In a similar way (and name) to Google Labs, the BBC have come up with iPlayer Labs where they will trial the latest beta features for iPlayer before full release to the masses. This brings an exciting addition to current iPlayer capabilities, the iPlayer Desktop. Written for the Adobe Air platform, it works across all the supported operating systems and desktops, bringing the benefits of Air to the BBC developers. I think this is a safe and sensible choice for the BBC and should provide great functionality for we end users along with the slick Adobe interface. The reason this is exciting for Linux users is the desktop version brings the download capability, so no more 2nd class citizen for Linux users as we can now download the higher quality versions of BBC programming. Thanks Beeb!

If you want to give it a try, go to the iPlayer Labs page, click the link to say you would like to be a labs tester, then next time you attempt to download a programme, you'll be prompted to download and install the Adobe Air iPlayer bundle first. After that, just use the iPlayer desktop app in the same way as your other Air apps.

Plusnet or Minusnet?

After coming back from New York in September, I uploaded my pictures to my personal web site. Nothing unusual for me there, except this time I realised I was nearly hitting the space limit my ISP enforces for my web space. At the time I figured all would be fine so I set about contacting them for a space increase. Now given I've been a customer for many years and always used their premium services (to get better speeds, more usage allowance and no traffic shaping) and the fact disk space is cheap (especially when talking in terms of MB) I even thought they'd probably give me more space at no charge. I hold Plusnet in reasonably high regard, customer service is great, network speeds are OK and things just seem reliable and work well, on this occasion though I was wrong. The conversation between me and Plusnet follows:

Graham

Is it possible to increase my Web Space quota beyond 250MB?
My current usage is reported as 241MB, 96.4%. I use the web space primarily for my personal photographs which I resize to a small size and use JPEG compression so I'm not abusing the space. However, it seems after 8 years or so I'm now approaching 250MB.
Many thanks in advance for the information.

Plusnet

Dear Mr White,
I am afraid it is not possible to increase the webspace allowance on accounts at the present time.
Kind regards

Graham

That's really very unfortunate. Is there really no option to increase the 250MB quota, even if some charge were involved? I even pay a premium for the Your Way Pro service.
I'm a long-standing plusnet customer and one of the reasons I originally chose plusnet was for the web space and hosting of PHP+MySQL sites.
Are plusnet prepared to lose customers based on something this simple? If so, I'll have no choice but to re-evaluate my web hosting solution in which I will take into account my ADSL provider.
Hoping you can reconsider this decision or policy.
Thanks.

Plusnet

Dear Mr White,
Thank you for getting back to us. Unfortunately it is not possible to change the webspace allowance unless you were to move to our top business account. Our system does not allow us to add additional webspace and although we intend to offer this in the future we have no firm plans at present.
Kind regards

I find it hard to come to terms with the fact "their system" must be so terrible and essentially equate the response to the Little Brittain sketch "computer says no!".

This was all going on at the same time Roo was becoming frustrated with Plusnet as well. I can definitely sympathise with many of Roo's points and Plusnet have left me considering my options as well.

The reason I still maintain a web site is purely legacy. There once was a time when the likes of Flickr simply didn't exist and if you wanted to share photos on-line, you had to do it yourself. I'd quite happily move over to Flickr for hosting my pictures, it would be more convenient in a number of ways and sort of removes the need for hosting my own web site and therefore my tie to Plusnet.

It's got me thinking again recently, what services do I use/need and how much am I willing to pay for them. Currently my broadband is nearly £20 per month, with other providers I could get broadband, phone and television for that amount!!! Unfortunately, I don't live in an area catered for by cable services so I have to use ADSL broadband and non-cable phone/television.

If anybody has some good experiences or recommendations, do let me know as I start to look around now.

Edit #1
Since writing Plusnet have phoned me at home to discuss my requirements, another indication of their really excellent customer service. If I do decide to move away from them it will certainly be hard and with regret. Basically, I want something a bit cheaper with no speed restrictions and a sensible download limit if any. Plusnet offer only one service with no speed restrictions, the one I'm using already.
End Edit

Edit #2
As Roo pointed out in his post, Plusnet are using Twitter and search for people talking about Plusnet. They contacted me through Twitter to point out a relatively recent announcement about changes in their web hosting service which are currently under trial. Great stuff, weird how I only find this out through Twitter though, rather than through the formal methods of their helpdesk, through their community web site or by talking with them on the phone all of which I've done recently.
End Edit

Daily Electricity Bill

Way back at the end of July I started looking into how to graph current cost data. I was looking at this from the point of view of putting the information together on a web page somewhere and potentially sending out useful information via e-mail to me and Beth on our power usage.

Recently I've been looking into this again and over the past couple of weeks we've been receiving a daily HTML formatted e-mail with an attached graph image that might look something like this:


This is a really handy reminder each day to try and be as green as possible but also to show us how we did on the previous day. The graph shows two lines, the red one showing the actual power usage in watts and a straight blue line showing our average usage for that day.

Also attached to the e-mail are the charges and a few summary statistics for the day. So on the example above you can see we averaged 240 watts throughout the day with our minimum usage recorded as 61 watts and maximum usage as 2359. The total usage doesn't mean very much without time associated with it, but I've listed it there all the same. The total can be used to work out the kWh reading for the day, total divided by 1440 minutes in the day (and points on the graph) divided by 60 minutes in an hour.

The costs are rather crudely calculated. We're charged for electricity on two levels, our first 225kWh per quarter are at a higher rate than any usage thereafter. For us, this averages out at around 10 pence per kWh cost so that rough average is used to calculate an estimate for the total cost in GBP.

This only a really simple way in which the current cost data can be used, Dale is way ahead of me on other applications for the data. I intend to extend the e-mail we're getting at the moment to integrate into a little web system we can use at home to log in and look through historic records of our usage and also produce other summaries such as weekly or quarterly usage. Also, the ability to add notes to each day will needed so when we look back over historic data we might have recorded what particular spikes in our usage are. All this is an effort to educate ourselves more in our power usage so we can change our behavior to be more efficient with it.

One A Day

I'm taking part in a little Flickr group project at the moment to take and upload one picture a day for a month. The group is called A month in my life... and was the idea of Mirriam, an old school friend I've recently got back in touch with through Flickr.

It's a great idea, I bought a new camera earlier in the year and only really used it in anger when Beth and I were on holiday in New York. Having to take one picture a day is forcing me to get off my back-side and look for interesting things to picture. I'm also finding I'm looking at the world slightly differently, stopping to appreciate and think about light and colour a lot more. If I take a picture of a boring subject I'm thinking about how I can make it more interesting while taking the picture but also with a few trivial editing techniques.

I've been going for 7 days now and so far I think my favourite shot of the ones I've taken is this one:


I'd not heard of this one-a-day type idea before, but apparently people on Flickr commit to doing this for a whole year so it looks like I'm getting off lightly with just one month. There's plenty of interesting work going up in the group at the moment, with a lot more people about to start contributing through December. Should be exciting, I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with too.

Super Computing Project Ends

Not blogged in a while, will spare the details/excuses but back in September I had the opportunity to get back into Super Computing for a one-off project. It's this that has kept me so busy throughout October and into November where I was really very well submerged into work for an extended period. Normally I like to keep balanced in my work-life balance. However, this project demanded a lot of time and attention and fortunately my wife, Beth, was away for a couple of weeks on business too so I really had the opportunity to get stuck in.

As I suspected (from much experience in the area) in my previous post there really was a lot of information missing at the beginning of the project. This is to be expected, the customer cannot be expected to know 100% what they want, they may not even know what is available, possible or on offer. To compound this, even the best sales team can't look into minute details when proposing a solution or making bid. So we had a productive kick-off meeting, made a lot of good decisions and recorded these to concrete the design details.

What happened next you can never be prepared for, but we've probably all experienced it. Yes, the iron fist of the bean counters barged their ugly way into the project. The previously neatly agreed deadlines and design proposals were lobbed into the air with such careless abandon it was almost humorous. The promise at the start of the project from my ex-manager that "this one would be different", and we "wouldn't have to work silly hours or cut corners" was about to be viciously broken into pieces. (Wow, I can sound like such a drama queen). Project deadlines were brought forward by give-or-take 50% simply to meet a financial deadline (of one of the parties involved not IBM I should add) way out of my control. When you're met with this kind of single-minded decision making as the technical leader of a project it's very frustrating but you know there is nothing more to be done except save time where you can and work your butt off. Anybody who knows me and my work will know I hate to deliver anything less than the very best solution I think is right. So I openly request to Mr Financial Man, whoever and wherever you are to listen to people, who like yourselves, are considered the expert in their area.

This was a Linux cluster, which for the uninitiated consists of a number of computers set up to be joined to work together on a single large problem that would take any one of them an unrealistic amount of time to compute. Using the example raised by OzBeefer on my last post, climate modelling algorithms are quite large and complex taking a single computer a long time to run, so loads of them need to work together in order to predict the weather in the future before it becomes the past! Fortunately, the design of this cluster wasn't rocket science and it was quite small. Things progressed very smoothly without any potential problems that might otherwise have occurred and with some very long working hours (read 12+ hours/day) the cluster was eventually delivered to the new schedule at the customer location.

Well I could ramble on about Linux, clustering, algorithms, networks, storage, optimisations and the projects I've worked on for hours yet, which gives me an idea... for those people reading this in the Hursley community answers on the back of a postcard, comment, e-mail or whatever if you think hearing my ramblings about this stuff might be vaguely interesting some time over lunch, tea/coffee, beers, etc?

Squeezebox Duet: My Impressions

Having recently had my little whinge about setting up the SqueezeBox Duet it's about time I said something about the box itself. Both professional and user reviews around the web are pretty much universally glowing with praise for it and I have to say to a large extent I agree.

First of all, there's the hardware which is sleek looking with a glossy black finish. The hardware is in two parts (ignore the odd cable here and there), the SqueezeBox Receiver:

Which, while not belittling the technicality of it, is to the consumer essentially just a dumb receiver box. It takes an audio stream over either a wired or wireless Ethernet connection and spits it out through your stereo using a digital or analogue audio connection. Then there's the controller:

Which is an altogether more exciting piece of kit. It's a wifi-device that can talk directly to your wifi router or be bridged onto your wired network via the Receiver if you don't have wifi. It features a rather strangely arranged set of controls that become familiar after a little usage. There is a jog dial with selection button, then buttons for playback, volume, control of the playlist and navigation around the menus. As you can see, it's got a nice full colour LCD display too. This means you can wander around anywhere within wireless range, control your music and get feedback directly on the device on just about anything you might want to know.

Software wise, things also come in two parts (well three if you count the firmware on the receiver). There's the software on the controller and some software to run on your PC which is listed as optional but I would consider very much essential. Both of these parts are open source with decent plugin interfaces and documented APIs you can access.

The controller runs a customised embedded Linux distributions known as Squeeze OS which is responsible for running the user interface application on the controller called Squeeze Play. The nice thing about this is you can take the user interface part, Squeeze Play, and run it on your desktop too. While the controller software is open source and pluggable, I haven't found anybody having written any useful applets to run within Squeeze Play yet but it's still early days so hopefully those people producing screen savers will come up with some good ideas for applets. That said, I can have a bit of a hack around too to see how easy it is to program for and whether I can produce something useful too.

The open source server software is called Squeeze Center and should be run somewhere with access to your local music collection. It supports a huge number of formats including flac, ogg and mp3 of course. Squeeze Center is hugely flexible and configurable, mostly through a bunch of supplied plugins. It provides a web interface as well as access to other interfaces so it can also be used to control the music playing as well as being the configuration hub for the entire setup.

Out of the box Squeeze Center provides access to your local music collection via a number of sorting methods (such as by artist, album, song, genre, etc) as well as providing standard playlist functionality. It also allows you to listen to Internet radio through a number of free and paid for services such as shout cast streams, mp3tunes and last.fm (a last.fm scrobbler plugin is also included). It gives you a favourites menu so you can tag anything as a favourite and later get quick access to it through this menu. Last but not least there's the Extras which doesn't do a huge amount out of the box (this is where most 3rd party plugins are accessed) but it does give you access to podcasts - you can subscribe to RSS or OPML podcast feeds and have them streamed to your hi-fi, cool!

I like to use dynamic playlists and that's some functionality that doesn't get included by default so I've found some plugins that do that for me now. Being a UK resident I want access to the BBC audio content and some kind person has written a plugin to access all their content too, including Live Radio streams, listen again streams as well as BBC podcasts. The final plugin I'm finding useful at the moment is one that automatically adds tracks to my music collection when I copy them to my music directory using a groovy Linux kernel feature, Inotify, otherwise you have to rescan your collection manually after adding new tracks. The plugins I've installed are tagged in Delicious.

Overall, the system seems to work very well. It's great having the flexibility of having an entire music collection at your finger tips ready to play, no messing with things that spin any more, and having access to all the additional content over the Internet is another real bonus. The packaging and interface of the components are really nice and are only set to get better over time, particularly as they're open source. This means I can get my hands on extra code in the form of those useful plugins as well as writing my own. But it also means when Slim Devices get caught up in adding support for new products or bug fixing as they inevitably will, new functionality will always be progressing at least through the community. So now I've got everything fixed up in my config, listening to music at home is quite a cool experience, happy days!

Squeezebox Duet is alive at last

Back in the middle of May I decided to set up my home stereo properly in our new house so I ordered a new stereo (an Onkyo CR-515) and decided to replace an old Thinkpad I used to store my digital music collection with a new device on the market from Slim Devices, the SqueezeBox Duet and a low-power PC as a media server.

Initially I wasn't able to set it up as I was experimenting with using a Linksys NSLU2 (or slug) as the media server. Unfortunately, this was vastly underpowered for the job so I had to re-think that part of my solution. In late June I had my new server so I looked out some pictures I took while unpacking and wrote my first post about the SqueezeBox Duet.

It's only now I'm able to write that I've successfully set up my complete solution as of the start of September. I've been having huge difficulties getting the box to stream audio properly with all sorts of symptoms. I'll spare the long description and cut to the solution, I changed my wireless router settings from its default channel 11 setting to channel 1 and everything sprung into life. During my 3 months of debugging to find this simple solution I contacted Slim Devices through various means, forums, chat channels, and official support. While the staff were extremely keen to help and reasonably responsive given the time difference between California and the UK, at no point did they give me any useful suggestions towards the successful solution. It was this that prompted me to think about the different types of open source. Now I can conclude that you're pretty much on your own with a SqueezeBox, but that's something I can live with quite easily, so now it's working I'm a happy bunny.

For future reference, next time I move house I'll do a scan of the local wireless networks much earlier and change my channel accordingly. I'm no wireless expert but then I'm no dummy either, so when I can communicate over my wireless network with several devices including more than one laptop, a Nintendo Wii and the SqueezeBox Duet Controller, I would suggest it's reasonable to expect the other half of the Duet (the Receiver) to work too. Not so apparently.

Turning my house off

After talking recently about the stand-by power savers I've been messing with at home I've made another small investment in the Home Easy range. We now have a switch I've located downstairs we can use to turn one or more sockets off in the house. It's a small step I know, but this simple device will effectively become the on/off switch for our house. Currently, we're only using it to control one socket to switch off all the electrical gadgets in the living room such as the TV, DVD hard disk recorder, Wii, etc.

I like the idea of being able to turn your whole house on/off. So this switch has the potential to be extended should I make further investment into Home Easy kit. We could eventually have computer controlled devices all around the house to activate lighting or any electrical device. With one press of this button the whole lot would turn off in order to make power savings as we leave the house or overnight though. As well as saving some cash it gives you a great green feeling of energy saving too, safe in the knowledge that only the essentials are left on at home. For us right now, the essentials are the home server, network router, our fridge-freezer and currently a second freezer to store our surplus vegetables from the allotment. These typically use 130 watts as an average total which goes down from something like 170 watts I think when we turn off the stand-by switch.

I was hoping for a certain amount of traction and community to build up around the Home Easy range, being the first reasonably complete and affordable range of radio controlled devices in the UK. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. I have loads of little questions I would love to ask Home Easy, mostly about future products and their intentions. So far, it's been difficult to communicate with them or other users of the products. For example, their web site has a forum link with a few registered users on the forums, including some staff from Home Easy. In order to get access though, you have to e-mail one particular guy and wait for him to approve your access which isn't ideal. I e-mailed several months ago and I'm still awaiting my ID. Conclusion, the forum isn't very active and the community I was hoping for doesn't exist, yet.

Dipping my toe back into super computing

I've been out of university and working in IT for a good few years now and held several different roles along the way. When I started work I was doing an internal support role after which I moved to my current department, Emerging Technologies, where I've held several roles including being an emerging tech specialist and working for IBM's Linux Integration Centre.

I've used the attention-grabbing title for the work I very much enjoy doing but due to certain circumstances thought I had left behind in my career. Super computing sounds very grand and conjures up all sorts of ideas along with other grand titles for the type of work I do such as Beowulf Clustering. The term I prefer, but can also be misleading, is High Performance Computing (HPC). There are all sorts of misconceptions about HPC but easily my favourite is when people pretend to joke, but expecting a serious answer ask something like “Wow, how many frames per second can you get on Quake with that?”.

The opportunity has come up for me to go back to this area for a one-off project, working with some of my ex-colleagues. I'm very much looking forward getting stuck in as the work is usually interesting and my old team are fantastic. As ever with these projects, there are an enormous number of unknown's at the start of the project. I already feel at home knowing the list of things we don't know yet – where the hardware is right now (delivery due soon), what the software stack will be, firmware levels, network layout and design, naming conventions, management and monitoring required, storage requirements, job scheduling, operating system, tweaks and configuration, etc. That's all part of the fun though, I get to work things out along the way and fill in the gaps for areas that, for no fault of their own, people just don't think about answering until implementation time. The kick-off meeting is due soon now so I'm looking forward to getting people to think about all the tiny details I'll need in order to supply our customer with the best suited system I can.

Ubiquity for Firefox

Today I was introduced to a new Firefox extension called Ubiquity via the blog post from Mozilla labs. It's a completely different take on the user interface and usability of your web browser. This video explains better than I could...



It's only at version 0.1 right now and it's already amazing so I'm really looking forward to seeing new versions come out as it develops. I'm already a big fan and thoroughly recommend trying it out for something a bit different in your web browsing life!