There are other hardware projects I’ve got cooking, yes, but none so immediately useful or easily implemented. The great thing about this is the hard work (read:software) is essentially done already. At worst I’d need to hack some kind of interface driver, but, really, it’s pretty much functional as is. And, because it’s already been ported to Linux and BSD, it’s really trivial to build a barebones system upon which to base it all. Preserving keyboard + mouse input is a totally necessary design parameter anyway (for reasons of network stream integration, titling(!!), etc.) so hardware can be periodically switched on as it becomes available. I’m tempted to pull apart my languishing Athlon XP, but it feels too powerful for the task (not even kidding… this thing is lightning fast) and I wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of the RAM in it. My biggest concern is tracking down capture hardware that’s Linux or BSD friendly. Ideally there’ll be a security capture card that does PAL at full frame rate and has 4 inputs, because essentially that means it’d be trivial to add a few extra cards and, all of a sudden, it’s quite foreseeable to have a 12 input vision mixer that will key and title away til the cows come home.

One concern I have is that the mixer component only takes two sources… which is much the same as on any hardware mixers I’ve used (two buses: select source on A + B bus, mix buses), but it feels really inflexible. I’d chain them together but think that might necessitate extra genlocking time and increase overall latency. I can’t actually think of a usage scenario for this one, though, so it’s not a big deal. Because keying exists independently of mixing it’s not a concern of 2 sources + keyed source, and that’d be the main situation in which such a thing would be at all necessary.

The other cool thing about this is you can mix digital and analogue sources with impunity. Need SDI? Sure, get an SDI capture card and add an input source. Firewire? Done deal. Same goes for output: because you can output via FFMPEG, your “vision mixer” potentially also encodes an IP-distributable stream simultaneously with realtime output to a monitor.

This is an inestimably cool piece of software, but the most brilliant thing is it isn’t really anything new. I discovered it because I was looking for EffecTV which I’d last used in a production context over 12 months ago… Gephex uses existing open-source filters and processing solutions and just provides an excellent means of chaining them together. You can create some excellent motion artwork with it, but the most exciting thing for me is that it enables use of cheap and disposable x86 hardware in place of hideously expensive and proprietary (read: more expensive, but also inextensible and not particularly flexible) solutions that the ‘pros’ use.

Increasingly I’m disinterested in ‘professionalism’ about this sort of thing, because that’s way out of my price league and, to be honest, the most common place I wish this technology were applied is in church and Christian event contexts, where (even if there is money) no-one is interested in effective communication through applied technology. So we continue to try and push forward with no money and a bunch of innovative and irreverent (to the pros) solutions.

Ultimately, it’s about achieving excellence in the quality and nature of the work done to share the gospel and build up the body of those who follow Jesus — but excellence can be attained without even a smattering of ‘professionalism’.

That said, I’d still love to own an MX-70.

The new version of Word is a thing of beauty. It just works, and makes sense, and is generally a usability wonder. I’m sure someone will publish a study to the contrary in the next week, but I don’t care — it is perfectly intuitive to a non-Office literate user. Yes, that is myself–I’ve battled with OO.org for years, and am utterly convinced it sucks. I have occasionally fought with MS Office products in this time, and battled slightly less, but still it’s felt like I’m doing things the slow way. Every essay I’ve written over the last eighteen months is stored in LyX (LaTeX) format: I’ve basically not used a word processor for anything serious in at least that long. And I haven’t used a Microsoft word processor at home for three years (on a horrible laptop), and not on my primary desktop computer for four, or possibly five. Historical perspective: I started using Windows when I was 7, stopped when I was 15 or 16, and returned at 18 ½ — Microsoft have got good reason to be trying to bring me back into the family, because I’ve been away for a long time.

I am as upset as the next web developer about the Outlook team’s brain-dead decision to switch back to Word as the primary rich email rendering engine, but will wax lyrical about the new calendaring features in Outlook!! For they are greatly beautiful. Observe my three calendars (Organised into: Personal & Work; Uni; Church) layered together here:

Groove makes me shrug enormously, it does nothing useful for me. Unless it’s like Sharepoint only… good. But even then, I’ve never dug that whole Intranet collaborative thang. Really, if I were going to run bloat-inducing collaborative software, I should start with Adobe’s Version Cue. But I don’t use it because… too many apps in my tray annoys me, and Firefox eats all my memory as is (screeny from yesterday… it peaked at about 1GB but I couldn’t be bothered taking another):

The only reason I still use that bloody browser is its extensions support: Firebug has stolen my heart where Office 2007 hasn’t yet. Here’s its asset download graphy thingamijig:

It’s even better than Chris Pederick’s toolbar. But oh how I’d love to switch to Opera (or even, shock, IE) full time now. Firefox really isn’t doing it for me with its bloat these days.

Speaking of bloat, Office 2007 is one 500MB download. It doesn’t download a 500MB stub and then install the rest — no, that includes Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, Publisher, … and all the other random crap I installed but will probably never use. Fantastic.

Everything is pretty fast (but it emphatically encourages you to install Windows Live Desktop, and seeing as I’m a beta tester for other Live stuff pretty willingly, I figured I may as well, and when you first install that indexing makes everything chug) which is excellent — but I’m still looking to buy a new dual core 939 sometime soon. Graphics are fine because I have no intention of upgrading to Vista (read: needing DirectX 10 and a $1000 graphics card) in the next 18 months at least, but… well, another 2GB of RAM would go down nicely. Shame it’s still relatively expensive, though.

Microsoft, I wasn’t going to pirate your software because it’s not that good, but thanks for the discount, anyway!

Actually, that’s a lie, but I’m feeling a little vitriolic (oxymoron?). Ubuntu didn’t work at all, and of a sudden CentOS did. It’s not quite as polished but I could grow to love it (maybe). I just need to look past this whole RPM thing, which really is ugly compared to the breadth and depth of apt options available. IMO, of course. And the whole ports gig just scares me so I’m gonna stay away from FreeBSD here for a while longer (until this one breaks in another two years?)

I’d forgotten how much work I’d put into making Samba shares behave as well as they had been for the last forever, too. And was convinced there was nothing of value left on the computer (I didn’t delete the home directories, just in case… that was really easy because they’re even on a physically separate volume, it was basically less effort to just leave them there) and consequently (yet again) deleted a MySQL database with StuffOfValue™ in it. In this case a CYIADA survey database I’d built because there were no other options available and (you probably guessed it) I hadn’t sorted out hosting by IT at work yet.

So the aim now is to setup a similarly solid server that’ll last me another two years, barring hardware upgrades (this thing desparately needs more RAM even though it’s got half a gig–I have no idea where it all goes). This time around it’ll be more web-production-esque in its role, which basically means it’ll have more than just being a quiet Samba PDC and file server and web dumping ground on its plate, at least until everything I’ve got planned for it today reaches maturity, or my situation changes to the point that paying for a VPS or real dedicated server somewhere else is a viable option. Loki does, indeed, work quite well, but I can’t screw with it quite as much as some things make me want to (not that I’d want to do that to Loki… in between catastrophic hardware failure it’s amazingly stable and the lack of general screwing-around-ness is probably a big part of that! Probably… :P)

No aspirations surrounding the idea of a media server this time around. Though there’s a possibility I’ll look at maybe building a terabyte RAID server later this year, which would mean rethinking whisper’s role somewhat. It’d probably be relocated to downstairs (it’s cooler there) and replaced by a case with better ventilation and requiring better ventilation. The EPIA board I’ve got isn’t passively cooled, but I reckon it can deal with getting toasty that much more because it’s got a fan stuck to it. It’s a borderline fan requirement, anyway — the hard drives get hotter than the processor (highest I’ve seen the drives is about 62° C, the processor would only hit 55, tops) on forty-something degree Sydney days. If the storage upgrade is called for I’d probably look at getting something with a bit more grunt though, just because if the space requires better ventilation then that lets me stop constraining the system power according to temperature!

Anyway. Now I’m a CentOS kid. Which makes me feel kinda dirty inside because of the whole Prominent North American Upstream Provider All In Title Case issue, but I think I can live with myself for the time being.

And yeah, I’m sure it’s all great quality and magically never crashes and all the rest of that marketing crap. Good for you guys. I’m gonna wander back over the other side of the room here and install Windows on my equally-powerful system for, oh, about 40% of the cost. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of your monitors. I can pick up an equivalent Dell 30″ for $600 less than your offering… and if I’m content with a meagre 23″ then I can get a 24″ Dell for $400 less! Even the 20″ screens are $500 apart. Seriously, it’s completely unjustifiable and no-one in their right mind should be prepared to spend that much more for a brand.

Sigh.

I need to open a buy-a-new-computer account and start putting money into it. Well not really… I just need a new harddrive and various software licenses I guess. I think I’d miss Ubuntu too much (maybe)… I don’t even know why, nearly everything I can do here I can do in Windows (haha — does anyone else notice the beautiful inversion of that argument? I actually think I’ve been running Linux for too many years now to have posted about it in any currently-stored online blog entries! Crazy) except anything requiring a terminal. That’s almost definitely my greatest frustration, but no matter. I need software that doesn’t run in Linux and is too intensive to work well in virtualized conditions. Best option for me would be to get a whole separate computer, but then… well, this thing can feel flaky after being on for two weeks. Windows I’d probably get that every two days or so, but at least I’d think to reboot. Here, I just kill processes and at worst logout. Kernel patches are the only thing taking this down, basically.

Moral of the story… something like don’t waste your money on a shiny new Mac.

Point of irritation #1: None of my contacts are stored on-SIM. There is no way to STORE contacts on SIM that I have yet discovered, only to import them off it. Hence, hell will ensue if I ever decide to change handsets (as it did when I moved from a CDMA handset to a GSM one a few weeks back… this point is fresh in my memory, and still rather painful).

Point of irritation #2: Because I swapped the SIM out, I left the phone with the SIM socket readily accessible so I could easily replace it when I got home. This meant leaving the battery out. PDAs can survive a few minutes on residual charge (backup batt?) somehow, but apparently leaving it alone for… three hours (? I wasn’t out long because I’m working tomorrow and… well, a few reasons) means that it’s prone to nuking everything in ROM/RAM/whatever the heck it stores its stupid information in.

Fortunately I’m pretty good with my backups (2/6/6 was the last). But I still lost a handful of calendar items, more than a few messages, one or two contact additions/modifications, my latest email sync info, and, more significantly, Bejeweled high scores. I know, I know. I nearly threw it into a wall when I discovered this. But that would have been unkind to the wall.

That’s ridiculous. But true.

Anyway, I’m planning on violating (yet again — serial offender, here) the “No user-serviceable parts” sticker on the now-dead power supply so I can fix it to use it in another system. I swapped it out for some generic Happy Star Lucky Fortune Power thing (yeah, the name is parodic… it mightn’t have to be, though!) I had lying around — only 250 watts, mind — and everything turned back on again.

Well, kinda. The web-cam still doesn’t work on this machine, but I’m inclined to think that’s Linux (kernel-level/modprobe crap) being screwy, and not hardware particularly. Might be power again, but I doubt it.

And the web-cam is fine. I tested it on a Windows box and was delighted with the rather-un-crappy quality of it. Which you’d kinda expect seeing as it does 1.3MP still images, but I digress. Fixed-focus, but the exposure auto-balance is pretty decent, so I’m happy. Good exposure capabilities are what make crappy cameras less crappy.

As for the hub-that-wasn’t-a-switch, well… it’s going back this afternoon, if the place is open. They open IT-shop-like hours (i.e. open late, close later :P), so I’ll head down after midday. Hopefully I can just get a refund on the 3Com hub, because I don’t really need a new switch after all (though I want one that’s more solid + doesn’t make squealing noises incessantly!).

Oh, yeah, pictures. Here’s the 3Com hub on the inside. Because I had to unplug the fans, which were grinding annoyingly (barely spinning), and because I make it a habit to open up any bit of second hand gear to check for… dust, insects, anthrax. Whatever. The real reason is geekery.

Note howit’s designed to readily accommodate 24 ports. The 6 port model, reputedly, also has the same design, though presumably you’d need different types of chips there (divide 12 by three then try and multiply by a whole number to get 6… you can’t). Anyway, it’s after 12… I’m off!

Dependencies, incidentally, were the main reason it didn’t get installed on a Debian system as originally planned. Pacific Internet’s apt repository seems to have been borked the last few days, so there were missing packages and packages in the database but unable to be installed and all other kinds of junk… When it got to the point I couldn’t even get something to install from CPAN because of lower-level dependencies in Perl itself, I kind of gave up and started downloading Asterisk@Home. That was yesterday. I cancelled the download because Pacific was being too slow for my liking (Telstra Cable has spoilt me with downstream), and this morning before heading in I downloaded the distribution from Sourceforge in about 10 minutes. Bad checksum. Downloaded again. Burnt to CD. Still faster than it would have been to download at work. Ah well.

I didn’t get in til 9.30 because I was burning CDs etc, and had a functional system calling between PCs and with voicemail, reception message, etc., by 11.11 (I noted the time, it being a seminal moment in my personal VoIP-using history, even if I did cheat and use a pre-packaged version!). Good stuff.

Also, if you’re going to use Asterisk@Home in Australia, install the OpenVoice IVR prompts and recordings. It’s much better than listening to that American voice which was driving us nuts even whilst testing :P Having said that, you may need to restart the server when changing voice files… ours was doing some weird thing where it seems to have cached the old files in voicemail IVR prompts. The voice would be chiefly Australian, but for a “one” sound. Might’ve been the inflexion (falling “one” or neutral “one” instead of rising “one”), but I didn’t think they had particularly concerned themselves with that when writing most PBX/voicemail systems… could be wrong. Anyway redialing the voicemail extension a few times seemed to help resolve things. Bizarre.

The Asterisk box, to borrow a term (Hi Steve :P), is running with 256MB of RAM — but is sitting perilously close to swap whilst running. It doesn’t help that it leaves two instances of mpg123 running in the background for hold music, as well as vsftpd (seriously, who’d use that on a telephony server? If you need to backup voicemail, write a cron job to copy the files to a remote server. Bingo, no FTP server required! Grr.) and a handful of other crap. Anyway, it’s probably going to get more memory before it moves into production use. There are two Fritz! ISDN cards in it, but they haven’t been set up yet. Anyone seen a site about installing Fritz! cards with Asterisk? All I’ve seen about them is that they need kernel recompilation for chan_capi stuff… and recompiling kernels has never struck me as particularly fun. (The few times I have tried, bootloaders have been unco-operative… i.e. I didn’t know what I was doing!)

Someone alluded to this on a mailing list I’m a member of (Roy Schestowitz, on lyx-users), and, being the day before an exam and all, I couldn’t help but check it out. I remember playing with Xara tools back in the day of bundled garbage on computer magazine CDs (that was also my first brush with a full version of Flash, at version 3, but that’s another story. I’d played with FutureSplash sometime before then, too.) — it looks as though it’s come a long way.

I’ve used Sodipodi on Linux to do some useful things, but haven’t had a chance to play around with Inkscape yet… though it looks similar, maybe even a fork? Definitely on the to-do list. Anyway, the folks at Xara want people to spread the word they’ve got a cool GPL’d app coming for the Linux desktop (Mac OS too), and I think it’s a great thing for the Open Source community, which is why I’m pimping it here.

There’s a version on their xaraxtreme.org site that is functional already, though it only views files at present… editing functionality is… presumably some way off.

I think if someone offered Pantone swatches for sale with a good quality open-source app, I’d go for it. Their business model seems solid enough after they’ve got it off the ground, but only time will tell. One hopes they stay around, because this appears to be a far better contribution than Corel’s abortive attempts to launch a graphics app on the Linux desktop (closed source, of course — Photo-PAINT 9, if I recall correctly. It was a RAM-guzzling beast that I may have even enjoyed at the time — circa 2000 — had it not been for the fact that I was trying to run it on a middle-of-the-road Pentium (1) with 32MB of RAM) before their silent acquiescence was purchased by Microsoft.

If nothing else, it’ll stir up the space a little bit and hopefully the mention of open source will get otherwise-complacent Adobe innovating again in the Mac space… or, alternatively, it could go the other way and they might just ditch that platform altogether in favour of Windows, though I doubt it.

*Listens as creatives the world over unite and raise arms in an unprecedented revolution against a software company. Hey, it could happen.*

I’m pretty sure they were rebadging Sony monitors even when this thing was made, so it’s probable there’s another model number that goes with it, but perhaps not. Basically, I used it because it went with the computer and, at that time, we didn’t have any other spare monitors of any decent quality.

This screen is okay in terms of resolutions/refresh rate support (it does 1024x768 at 85Hz, which is very good for a cheap vendor from the late 90s — and yes, it was cheap — this is a Celeron 400MHz system, though we’ve pumped up the RAM from probably 64MB or (optimistically) 128MB to 256MB to make it usable with XP. It is, however, rather blurry.

Or, was. We acquired it just as we moved into this house, so I didn’t really have a lot of time to spend just setting it up properly… I was trying to get, you know, four other computers and the network setup, whilst working out how to configure the phone system… oh, yeah, and I had to move into my bedroom at some point, too (in actual fact I still haven’t unpacked all the boxes… there is one or two remaining but I know what’s in them and they’re being stored in the bottom of a wardrobe, so that’s okay!)… basically I threw it on the desk and plugged it in, formatted and installed XP, made some trivial administrative software changes (probably via RDC because hot desking is, like, so much easier than turning around and using another KVM setup!), and promptly forgot about it.

So today I actually had to use it for a bit and its blurriness irritated me enough to bother doing something about it. It’s got one of those doors that covers controls and pops open to reveal a rotary switch that doubles as a button, so I did that seeing if there was anything I could do to fix it in there. Alas, no software focus utilities to be found (must poke a screwdriver in the back of it sometime), though, importantly, there are both Vertical and Horizontal Moire adjustments available under the More option from the core menu. This monitor had a fairly significant moire problem (I’m not sure if I’m using that term correctly, though I know the problem was with that), so playing with these settings for a bit made its lots more pleasant to use.

Admittedly, its focus towards the edges drops off fairly significantly, but that could be an unavoidable limitation of the device (that is, it’s a curved CRT display… so the focal length physically does change fairly significantly).

It appears that capacitor did absolutely nothing.

Earlier this afternoon, I played with a bunch of hardware trying to find some stuff that worked for Marcelo, before establishing that the best of the bunch, the motherboard I’d broken (or ‘broken’) — it seemed to be really good quality in the whole time I was playing with it — was absolutely fine. After much changing and plugging and everything else that’s involved in building a computer from scraps, we wound up with the following specs:

• Pentium 3 866
• Gigabyte 6VXC7-4X-P motherboard
• 384MB of RAM
• 16MB Voodoo3 (2000, I’m pretty sure… it had TV-out, too — as in the socket was there and soldered on — but the blanking plate covered it… go figure. Didn’t have time to pull it apart/an S-Video cable to test.) AGP
• Two hard drives… a 10GB (his original) and a 13GB (added)

And it all seems to work without any problems, despite missing that 400^th capacitor lost one fateful day ;) Ah, I love technology when it just works even when it shouldn’t!

Having said that, however, MPlayer did manage to decode the first 25 frames of (strangely enough) the higher resolution (1920x1080) video. If I had to give a reason for the image appearing to have bled, I’d say it’s because the application was failing to decode each frame in realtime, although I’m sure there are far more plausible explanations out there (like, oh, let’s see — the application doesn’t officially even support H.264 at all in that version?). You can click on the image below to see a ratings advisory screen in truely mean detail, even if it has bled a bit. And been compressed a bit. Okay, so it’s not really that great — but the resolution!

No, the real and present danger at this point is that I will waltz across the room (or, you know, spin my chair around and move two metres or so) to an otherwise-perfectly-okay Pentium 3 running Windows XP, and try installing Quicktime 7 to playback the same file. Actually, I’d be perfectly happy if it could adequately playback the 852x480 version, I think.

But then, it’s Batman, and I don’t think I could actually care that much…

I had, of course, planned (and publicly announced) my intent to buy memory sometime this morning… so that part is okay. I failed to clarify just how many different pieces of memory I’d be purchasing. I bought the cheapest possible 512MB stick of DDR-RAM (PC2700) that my favorite stockist had in store, despite it being cheaper next door.

I walked into Computer World, to the desk of someone who was desparately trying to look busy (as they do in that place, in an attempt to avoid actually having contact with customers), and lent across his work area asking “How much is your cheapest 512MB stick of PC2700 RAM?”. He answered, somewhat reluctantly — “$125″ (this is Australian dollars, for any foreigners who think this is ridiculously cheap/expensive: exchange rates are crazy things). I said thankyou, turned, and left the store. Just to clarify for those who haven’t been reading my online ramblings for too long, that store was the bane of my life for a few weeks over warranty issues… I’ll now never buy anything from them, but maintain that they are a useful resource for bargaining leverage at other stores. Like the most excellent THX (or TX, they seem to be having an identity crisis at the minute) across the foyer.

I went next door, and asked the same question… they were, of course, far more helpful, so no leaning-across-desks was required. The price was $139, from memory.

“Over there can do it for $125, how much lower can you get it?“
“Hang on, I’ll check for you.” She looks at the screen for a few seconds. “Sorry, the lowest I can go is $130.“
“That’ll do!” I shout, ever eager to avoid the perils of Computer World after-sales, should something go awry. To me, avoiding those people is worth far more than five dollars, any day of the week.

The inevitable question cropped up, as it always seems to in retail, “Is that all” or “Can I help you with anything else?”. In recent times, I’ve been more and more dissatisfied with my clunky Walkman in which the tape player doesn’t work, and I use exclusively for listening to radio. Not only that, I never did own a portable CD player, so all my music stayed at home, and the radio went with me. Motivation for an MP3 player? You bet.

The MP3 player part of my spending was the “impluse” element… I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but if there were something with a nice feature-set, I’d buy it. My requirements were simply that it be solid-state, compact and DRM-incumbency free… and preferably under $150. With this in mind, I was expecting to get some MP3/USB drive thingo with 128MB of storage, towards the $100 mark. Admittedly, I ended up spending more ($149 — right next to my limit!), but it hits my requirements pretty nicely… not only can I carry my music (and 256MB of it, no less!) with me, I can also get FM radio on this thing. That’s okay, but the “killer feature” on this thing is that it doesn’t need external batteries.

I know, I know: if it’s anything like an iPod’s battery, it’ll bite me in two years. Big deal! I think I’ll have moved on from 256MB in a few years, but that’s a problem for then. Right now, I can have 12 hours of usage between recharges via USB. How cool is that?

I’ve got three gripes with the thing right now:

1. The interface is seriously crap.
2. From the speed of transfers, I’d guess it’s only USB 1 — no blazingly fast uploads, which is a shame
3. Tuning digital radios really gets to me. I need knobs and dials!

Of those three complaints, only the first is significant. I’ve taken to dumping music in the root folder, because it’s easier than screwing in the menu until I figure out how to change folders for playback. Admittedly, I’ve only been using it for a few hours, and I’ll probably get used to it later, but it seems a tad prohibitive. That’s what you get when there’s only a five buttons (“Menu” and playback controls), I suppose.

The worst thing about the design is the positioning of the 3.5mm audio socket. It’s designed so that when a cable (or headphones, whatever) is connected, it’s amazingly difficult to press the menu button in a natural fashion. Whilst human physiology would dictate our fingers press buttons from the side, the positioning of the button is such that you’d need to stick your finger through the audio connector to get to the button comfortably. It doesn’t look so bad, but believe me, it’s irritating.

It also does 20 hours of voice recording (in what format, I have no idea), and yes, it is tiny. I just grabbed a ruler (I don’t think dimensions were listed on the specs sheet, which is generic to the firmware and whole line of models in different form factors), and it’s about 56mm x 38mm x 11mm — about half the size of my phone. What can I say, I like small tech!

This computer is noticeably more snappy with three quarters of a gig of memory… I like it! I’ve got the GIMP sitting editing about 10 moderately large files, with two windows of Firefox filled with tabs, a WISH app, my email client, an RSS reader, and my code editor of choice open, and it’s still zipping along. Sweet.

Hmm. Aside from that, of course, other things have been happening. Yesterday was my brother’s 8th birthday — I would say happy birthday, but he doesn’t read this, so there we go. :P We went out to Juanita’s, a great Mexican restaruant in Kensington, and… umm… ate food. As you do.

The rest yesterday was spent on a variety of things, from frantically editing CSS and the occasional graphic (all visual design work, thankfully — I’ve decided that I shouldn’t make a habit of programming, as it’s something I regularly fall flat on my face trying!) for an upcoming website, to reading Henrik Ibsen’s 1877 play, A Doll’s House.

I’m struggling to decide which was more enjoyable, too… this website features some rather well implemented gimmicky elements of design, and it’s immensely satisfying to watch come together, from paper mockup to digital reality (haha, I’d never noticed the irony in that before — funny how us web people turn even the concept of “reality” itself on its head, hey?). At the same time, A Doll’s House was an excellent play. I think a comparison of which is more “enjoyable” is truistic, because the play is certainly not enjoyable, even if it was incredibly worthwhile reading.

The website is currently chock-full of proprietry –moz CSS extensions, which is part of a new strategy I’m trying to cut development time. Basically, the thought behind it goes “Josh sucks when working with the GIMP”, so the idea is I use Mozilla controls to achieve visually what I want in an electronic form, such that what I wish to achieve is evident on screen already, and then simply go about converting that to a static graphical form. Of particular use, at least for what I’d envisaged for this design, is the Opacity property… it’s not a perfect representation of what I’ll end up with, as it effects the contents of the element it’s applied to (i.e. not JUST the background of an element), but it’s close enough for all intents and purposes.

Further into this website, I’ll post estimates as to just how much time this has saved… it’s something of an intangible, but hey, you get that.

Today’s the last day of my holidays! Ahhhhh! This has honestly been one of the shorter holiday periods of my life… ah well. I think I’m going to go and buy some more film and RAM for this computer today… I’m sick of seeing it 30% into swap, and physical usage sitting at 98%!

P.S. Mandy Moore’s song “Only Hope” is suprisingly good — I’d written her off as another pop queen, but I’d cite that song as proof she can sing!

Spoiler: I’m using Liferea. Read on for why.

There’s the staple applications, as always, which people seem to leap at almost on impulse, are feed readers such as Straw, Syndigator or RSSOwl. And, for some reason, I’ve chosen none of these.

Straw

Straw looked good, but for the whole GNOME and Py*insert extension here* dependence thing… I’m currently running KDE on the desktop, and whilst it would have run fine, I’d rather not be tied down. That, and I’m uncertain as to how it would render content. The main thing was my dislike of Python extensions, though.

Syndigator

This, I glanced at fairly seriously, but the dependency monsters overran my utopian world, and as such it was left in the pile of refuse that is my application downloads folder (2.9GB, not including various operating system images which also reside on my hard drive, since about the start of this year). I think it was whinging about Perl or something, so I slammed the door on it before it had even finished speaking. Doo bee doo.

RSSOwl

This is an interesting kettle of fish. It looks most excellent, but, again for platform reasons, I chose not to use it. I’m pretty terrible in this regard, actually. If a product is coded in Java, I’m sorry, but I can’t afford to use it. Not because of any financial cost, or because of anything against the software itself — it’s just that the Java VM seems to swallow RAM like four-wheel drive cars from Sydney’s North Shore swallow fossil fuels… and I can’t afford that much RAM.

I’d be interested to explore this one at some point in the future, however.

So, why did I chose to go with Liferea?

Liferea

It’s easiest just to quote their own website to introduce this reader, so that’s what I’ll do.

Liferea is an abbreviation for Linux Feed Reader. It is a news aggregator for online news feeds. It supports a number of different feed formats including RSS/RDF, CDF, Atom, OCS, and OPML. There are many other news readers available, but these others are not available for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed. Liferea tries to fill this gap by creating a fast, easy to use, easy to install news aggregator for GTK/GNOME.

Cool. I think it scores well on all those scores. The source archive gave me grief, but started co-operating after I installed some development libraries… that said, the — I’ll say “interesting” — file structuring system employed by SuSE 9.1 made errors crop up from various places during the actual build. Which sucked. So, I got lazy, and went off to grab a nice shiny pre-packaged SuSE RPM files from their SourceForge project page. Snazzy, hey?

And then it installed. Sexy. Easy to use. Familiar interface (akin to Ximian/Novell Evolution). Searching. Folders. Can use Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Netscape and Konqueror out of the box, as well as supporting opening links in a new tab (yes, I know it’s a fairly simple command switch… that doesn’t mean many products USE it!). Choice of Mozilla or GtkHTML as internal rendering engine. Docking in the KDE toolbar… and this is a GTK/GNOME product! It’s very cool. Thumbs up to the developers, who suggest that those

interested in mature RDF/RSS feed client projects for GNU/Linux

should consider the other products I’ve mentioned above… pfft! This is great, for me.

If you’re running Linux, BSD or Mac OS X, I’d recommend you check it out… there are people maintaining packages for Debian, RedHat/Fedora, SuSE, Gentoo, Slackware, FreeBSD and MacOS, links to which are available on their Installation page.

I’ve been playing around with domains and forests (mmm trees) today. Connecting domain servers to different computers all talking to one central DNS box. Oh my how I love windows. Everything just works. Really I love windows. I don’t care what anyone else says. I find it stable, fast and easy to use. Isn’t that what computers are meant to be like? I also spent a far bit of time on a 12″ iBook with OSX 10.3.x very nice too. I like these operating systems because they have one company behind them pushing them in one direction, not some linux distro which has been split so many times it isn’t funny, or a technology release gone wrong (fedora anyone?). You need direction when building an operating system and that is what Microsoft and Apple both do. Great job guys.

Linux, whilst not guided in the same unilateral manner as both OS X and Windows, is still capable of consistent development values and policies allowing for a highly efficient, scalable and usable platform.  Linux on the desktop has not yet reached the maturity of even Windows (let alone the sophistication of OS X), a claim which I am yet to see contested.  Development policies resulting from Open Source are, by their very nature, open.  This does not REQUIRE fragmentation such as that which was described, although this is often a result.

The lack of control by a monolithic entity over a product permits innovation in the marketplace, resulting in technological advancement for the greater benefit of the entire community, not the bottom-line of a TNC software monopoly.  Not that TNC monopolies are bad — well, they are, but that isn’t the issue being discussed here.  TNC monopolies stifle innovation, and subject users to the decisions made by aforementioned monopoly — users have no choice, at this point, but to wait for the situation to change, or to switch platforms.

I can’t help but notice a striking parallel between Roman Catholicism and closed-source monopolist-software vendors.  My reasoning is a little abstract, so bare with me, here.  Both enjoy monolithic, absolute control over those within their respective structures — this, arguably, is a good thing — people with the knowledge are making decisions for the greater good of the organisation as a whole.

But what if those with knowledge aren’t making the correct decisions?  Or are pursuing a path which allows users no input or control over that which they are subject to (i.e. their belief system, being dictated by the Pope, or their software environment, being dictated by Microsoft)… are users supposed accept this path as being right, going with what those with knowledge tell them, or is there room for individual choice, even if this means questioning the entity, as Martin Luther did?

Open-Source, like the Protestant movement, does not require users follow an established structure.  To an extent, it allows users to choose for themselves — any apparent church structure within whatever denomination shouldn’t have the power to dictate the beliefs of individuals who profess that faith (as conservative Roman Catholics would believe); matters of faith are individual, as are all beliefs (n.b. this does not make individual beliefs CORRECT).

Because of this inherent propensity for deviation and fragmentation to occur, it has — not all people will see eye-to-eye on all things, and a framework in which people are free to make up their own mind does result in fragmentation.  Not always for the better.

Likewise, the Open-Source community allows for fragmentation to occur.  This is ideal for individuals, although not always for the community as a whole — this is where product vendors come in.

A key example, most relevant given comments made regarding Fedora Core 2, is that of RedHat.  They are an OS application vendor, with strong Open-Source ties, specifically in their financial and developmental support of the Fedora project.  Fedora exists both to serve the Open-Source community as a whole, as well as provide an environment in which development and testing may occur for the refinement of RedHats’ commercial-grade/Enterprise offerings.

In this, RedHat operates as an integrator.  Whilst the quality of freely (as in beer/speech/whatever else) available software released by the Fedora project may be of dubious quality at various stages of development, RedHat, operating as a commercial software solutions development organisation, ensures that the quality of their enterprise-grade offerings do not suffer.

Windows just works?  Often… although I would venture that in terms of ALL server related tasks, a solution from one proven OSS vendor would prove just as adequate.  Worried about interoperability?  That is a separate concern — remember, Windows doesn’t have a monopoly on the server market, and it is far from interoperable with *nix platforms.

Windows just works on the desktop?  Sure, in between the spyware and malware and virus outbreaks and other various system compromises.  I spent an hour today trying to get crap off a computer used by my brothers.  Spybot, AdAware — latest definitions, multiple scans, nothing resolved.  I spent the remaining 20 minutes manually hacking things down, thinking “this wouldn’t happen if this computer were running Linux”.

And it wouldn’t have.  I was (and am) sorely tempted to install a locked-down heavily customised version of Fedora (heh, Core 1, because 2 sucks, apparently ;)) on there, with Mozilla, aMSN and OpenOffice, and leave home indefinitely.  They would be perfectly fine until it ran out of disc space.

If they wish to play games?  Then why are they still using a Pentium 166 (OC’d to 200) with 48MB of RAM?  That doesn’t appear to be a consideration from where I am sitting.

What a shame, they won’t be able to install any software they want.  No dialers for you, I’m sorry.