Planet HantsLUG

Come to OggCamp10 – in Liverpool 1st-2nd May!

2010-02-08T10:36:05+00:00

OggCamp10 is an unconference, which means that the schedule will be finalised on the day. So if you come along, you can not only have a say in that schedule but you can offer be part of that schedule.

What to expect…

OggCamp10 isn’t just about software. You can offer to talk about anything at all. And if people want to hear your talk, you’ll be able to give it. Even if your talk isn’t on the schedule, you can still meet up with like-minded people and discuss the things that are important and interesting to you.

At last year’s OggCamp, we had talks on how to hook your house up to Twitter (or Identica!), politics and geeks, online privacy and security, engaging young people in open source, how to explain programming to your grandmother, just what is Pokebook(!), and what your pig says about you (yes, really).

You can see the final schedule from OggCamp 2009, plus photos and Twitter/Identica feeds from the weekend, on the OggCamp 2009 website.

OggCamp is jointly organised by the Ubuntu-UK Podcast and Linux Outlaws podcast teams. OggCamp 2009 was a one-day event in Wolverhampton, UK and about 120 people turned up – which was fantastic! OggCamp10 will be a bigger and better two-day event in Liverpool, UK at The Black-e community arts centre.

Audio trailer…please play

Our resident Liverpudlian, Dan, has done this brilliant audio trailer for OggCamp10 (MP3 or OGG). Have a listen! If you produce your own podcast, we’d be eternally grateful if you’d play it for your listeners – thanks!

Sponsorship opportunity…

And finally, if you are interested in sponsoring OggCamp10 by contributing towards the cost of the venue hire, or by providing prizes for the event, or if you have any cool novel ways to support us, please email me: uupc@lauracowen.co.uk. Thanks.

Whoops!

2010-02-08T01:31:00+00:00

Today I have:

1) Corrupted a student (male).

2) Come within a hairs breath of being kicked off campus and had to explain myself to the head of University security.

3) Used up an entire role of electrical tape.

4) Run with scissors.

And the day is only an hour and a half in.

You seem uncomfortable.

2010-02-06T21:13:45+00:00

I've been trying to remember to post the pictures I like online for the past few months. So this is a reminder to myself.

This image below didn't turn out quite how I wanted it to:

I was hoping for a nicer sihouet upon the lady's face.
The tree-branch on the left irritates me.

But that said I keep on coming back to look at it. I like the lighting, and I love the way that the brick wall on the right hand side angles towards the building on the horizon.

Enjoy. Or not.

A similarly "not perfect" image is this outdoor shot. I have only one irritation with this shot - and that is that the trees are clipped at the top. Meh, such is life.

(I have two styles of photography; semi-random where I snap what is in front of me, and staged where I try to construct a particular picture - the two images above? One of each.)

ObFilm: Bound

This week at school

2010-02-05T18:06:12+00:00

This must be a first, a post about things that happened at school on this blog! Here I go. Monday: Well Monday was pretty stupid. I will now type up the thing I wrote on a little scrap of paper as I was bored out of my mind because… well, you’ll see if you read [...]

Perl is Alive: Speaking to hardware

2010-02-05T13:18:00+00:00

Today I'm performing some minor enhancements to a hardware interface I wrote some time ago. The program isn't a perfect example of object orientated bliss, with automated regression tests, but it's a fairly cleanly written procedural program that is divided into subroutines, however it's not to hard to maintain.

Speaking of surreal

2010-02-05T02:21:00+00:00

When I have students who are a bit low. I encourage them to try to get early nights.

The reason for this is simple. If you end up doing the whole 'sleepless' nights thing, this can actually lead to you having less contact with the world. If you sit there alone at 2:21 am while he rest of the world sleeps around you, you can end up feeling entirely disconnected and that's not good for your mental state.

However I have found another solution to early nights: Spend the early hours of the morning listening to the Chris Evans breakfast show. Get ready for the new day that has just passed before heading off to bed at 4am (after all you're not going to be there to hear it live!) and the whole thing takes on a happy-yay-breakfast-almost-drug-induced surreal quality to it. And I should know, I've eaten breakfast on more than one occasion.

On today's show Chris meets the CEO of the Deed Poll people.

Apparently he's never changed his name and his favourite deed poll of all time is the bloke who changed his name to Yellow Rat Foxy Squirrel Fairy Diddle.

Which of course means I need to think of something more for my name. I had felt that the whole colour thing would mean that I wouldn't need a surname, but clearly people could mistake me for Mr Rat Foxy Squirrel Fairy Diddle.

Perhaps the internet could assist me with suggestions of an appropriate second name.

SSL breakage and client verification

2010-02-04T14:09:16+00:00

Hopefully this may help others.

I’ve recently been trying startssl.com for an SSL certificate for a customer. Their wizard unfortunately insists upon generating them with “www” in front (although it provides altname of “DNS: www.example.com, DNS:example.com” (names altered BTW)) - however firefox ain’t happy. So I’m going to get them to sign my CSR.

However I couldn’t login - it failed with:

The page you are trying to view can not be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.

After trying to figure out WTF was happening, I’ve finally found: #561918. This is the real problem. Unfortunately there isn’t a straightforward solution as the reason it was disabled was due to a nasty bug someone found in SSL renegotiation.

The workaround for now is to start firefox with:

export NSS_SSL_ENABLE_RENEGOTIATION=1
firefox

Revenge is not good. Once you're done. Believe me.

2010-02-03T20:11:59+00:00

I was interested to see Adnan Hodzic discuss life without evolution in the GNOME environment recently.

I too use GNOME as my desktop environment (I sometimes toy with various tiling window managers before getting annoyed at something or other).

My solution to the GNOME problem is to purge the gnome-desktop-environment package and instead my own local package gnome-desktop-minimal. This package is a meta-package which includes a smaller selection of GNOME packages, notably ignoring several that the gnome-core package would pull in such as eog - why install that when I prefer qiv or feh?

If I believed we could agree on precisely which packages to include I would submit a bug to the gnome team "Please provide gnome-desktop-minimal" or similar. Still I suspect individual biases/preferences will make such a suggestion contentious at best and impossible to satisfy at worst.

ObTitle: Léon

Fonts and font-family

2010-02-03T19:10:54+00:00

Yesterday, on Twitter, I watched a discussion emerge as one person I follow pointed out that another person's hosted wordpress.com blog was illegible on her computer, with all of the content appearing in ugly bold italics.

While we never got to the bottom of that issue (I couldn't reproduce it), it's worth backing up and examining font use on the web.

Fonts, unlike any other aspect of web browser rendering, depend on the platform, not the browser version.

The reason is simple: fonts are not bundled with the browser, but with the operating system, or installed with some creative applications.

If you select fonts based on how they look on your computer, they will look different on another computer with a different set of fonts installed. Also, fonts are matched by name in CSS, so when you write

font-family: "Helvetica", "Arial", sans-serif;

you are requesting a font named "Helvetica", then one named "Arial", then the default sans-serif fonts. This is a very common thing for people to write, because Helvetica is a popular choice on Mac, Arial is a popular choice on Windows, and sans-serif is a catch-all. The intention is to select a nice sans-serif font on each platform.

Unfortunately, "Helvetica" can exist on Windows and Linux as well as Mac. Helvetica has been around as a typeface since 1957, and there are different versions of it around – by what route, or with what degree of intellectual property infringement, I do not know. There are also a fair number of variants that your computer might also consider, if they are installed.

On Linux, Helvetica was historically an X bitmap font (ugly, impractical things that are now effectively dead). These days it is generally an fontconfig alias for a free sans-serif font, but renders with iffy hinting and kerning, perhaps to conform to the original font's metrics (ie. it has been shoehorned into exactly the same space, so that printed publications don't come out wrong). I actually find this font quite uncomfortable to read.

On Windows, you may occasionally find Helvetica exists, perhaps even as the same font, installed on its own, or with some software suite, but if you do you'll find several browsers on Windows render fonts with Microsoft's ClearType renderer optimised for legibility, not the Mac's quality-optimised renderer, also used in Safari 3 on Windows. Microsoft own fonts have been tweaked to work well with ClearType – others may not. Linux is (as ever) more flexible: it's possible to configure the amount of hinting to use through fontconfig, although most users will keep their distribution's defaults.

Ultimately it's an impenetrable picture – you cannot be sure that the fonts you list will give anything like the browsing experience you were expecting. The same overall picture applies with serif fonts and monospace fonts.

The best solution (unless you want to try downloadable fonts, which I wouldn't recommend for body fonts) is to side-step the specifics of fonts entirely and delegate to the user/browser/operating system. There are three suitable aliases for font families: sans-serif, serif, and monospace. These will reliably give you a good font of that category. There are two other aliases, cursive and fantasy which are too poorly defined – you could get practically anything.

Is this really the only option? If you're prepared to go to the enormous lengths required, can you not pick a list of named fonts, test broadly and claim it works? Well, yes, if you test broadly enough you can get say 99.9% coverage. Unfortunately, that's not always good enough.

The topic of a site turns out to significantly affect the statistics of users that visit it. For example, a site about Linux will get more Linux hits. A site about using Photoshop will get most hits from people with Adobe Creative Suites installed, and that comes with fonts. So as a theme designer, what was 99%+ for you could be 90% for some of the people who use your theme.

So, in summary, stick to the safe fonts: sans-serif, serif and monospace. Fonts that are ubiquitious and designed for the screen are also quite safe – Arial and Verdana. You might be able to find some other safe places by consulting statistics if you are feeling creatively hemmed in. But please, don't make font assumptions.

Concrete cows

2010-02-02T21:57:00+00:00

Back in Soton. That was boring! Concrete cows don't get any more interesting.

Right, where was I?

Oh yeah, Giraffe.

Bog Roll: Cheque

2010-02-02T17:56:00+00:00

Yesterday I needed to write a cheque. It took me several minutes to find my cheque book and then I had to check the correct order to write the sum and name. I wrote two cheques each in 2007 and 2008 and none in 2009. It's a wonderfully quaint and obsolete process, perfectly suited for solicitors and estate agents!

To be honest, estate agents and our solicitor do communicate with email and even do electronic funds transfers, but still an awful lot of paper still moves about in the post!

Bog Roll: House Hunting

2010-01-31T17:31:00+00:00

The house hunting goes well. After 8 years of searching we have finally found a house that we would like to buy. We have put in an offer that has been accepted and now we are in the infuriating state between acceptance and completion which could last weeks to months, or fall through, as one in three often do.

We have even found a house to rent to bridge the gap between our current property and our possible new one. Other than the inconvenience of a forced move we could do without, things are actually going rather well.

Hitler Parody Complaining About The RNID

2010-01-31T17:13:12+00:00

First you must enable subtitles to understand this, while its playing hover over the arrow that points up and active the CC button on the right side.

Taking a break

2010-01-31T16:14:00+00:00

Sometimes you just need to get out of the situation.

Sometimes you just need a break.

I feel like getting in the car and then just drive and drive and drive.

I could be at Milton Keynes by daybreak.

The Virtual Revolution

2010-01-31T16:10:45+00:00

Last night's BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, available on iPlayer now, is exactly typical of all internet documentaries I have seen, from the generic title (pick one of "The Digital", "The Cyber", "The Virtual" and one of "Revolution", "Renaissance", "Tomorrow" etc.) to using "web" and "internet" interchangeably, to cutting to shots of computer screens showing something internetty, like repeatedly typing www.com into a browser's address bar (it is a valid domain, but it is enormously more likely to be typed through incompetence), to the intentionality ascribed to the entire edifice, which, they alleged, was deliberately designed to democratise everything ever.

In fact the only unusual thing was the omission of make-up to blend Aleks Krotoski's blush red nose into the rest of her face. I don't mean to be personally insulting to Krotoski – if my nose was coming out bright red on camera I'd want the production team to address it.

The story was woven into a history of the internet as told by "key players and pioneers" including Sir Tim, Youtube, Wikipedia and Arianna Huffington of frequently alt-med promoting rag HuffPo, thus neatly side-stepping the role of the millions of faceless bloggers and web users who pump content into the web and Web 2.0 sites and who are in truth responsible for what the web is today.

Actually, I say sidestepping – blogs were mentioned.

The world of blogging is going through a crisis. Of the more than 130 million blogs active since 2002, it's estimated that over 90% are now dormant.

Ok, a lot of people set up blogs and stop posting to them. But ignore that: what they've reversed here is the fact that there are 13 million active blogs on the web. That is a HUGE number. That means there is one active blog for every 130 Internet users.

Youtube in particular is noteworthy only for being the most popular video distribution site. As a site neither pioneering or unique, you wonder how their CEO's opinion could possibly be more valuable than that of it's more popular video bloggers. Incidentally, unlike many sites, such as Facebook, there's almost no drawback to switching to a competitor, such as Vimeo.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, on the other hand, is truly visionary. Nobody would have thought a wiki could scale to the size of an encyclopaedia and beyond without its quality suffering a lot more than Wikipedia's actually does. The result is the most useful site on the Internet outside of Google. Wales did not, of course, invent the wiki or prove the wiki concept itself.

But the main thing this programme gets wrong is simple definitions. The whole episode laments the fact that the internet was supposed to be democratic, but they claim it isn't because everyone uses Facebook, or Youtube, and sites like HuffPo get more traffic than your average blog. The word oligarchy was used.

Wrong. People can choose which websites to use or not use. Remember Myspace? Owned by News Corp, one of the world's biggest media companies? What happened to that? I suppose, as oligarchs, they must have decided for us that we weren't going to use it any more, right?

I won't bother with the rest of the series.

Tick Tick Tick

2010-01-29T23:52:00+00:00

Today I got my pay slip for January.

Five to go.

Just for the record

2010-01-28T00:40:00+00:00

I didn't do it. I was at home. In bed. With my assistant.

He didn't do it either.

Good that's that one delt with. Everything plausably denied. There will be no roumous circulating now.

Yahoobuntu!!!

2010-01-26T21:44:42+00:00

Ubuntu is switching the default search from Google to Yahoo!

Those of you testing out the development version of Ubuntu Lucid should notice a change in Firefox very soon. The default search provider for new installations of Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) and upgrades will be Yahoo! and not Google. Canonical have struck a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! which generates income for the company. This revenue should help pay the wages of Ubuntu Developers employed by Canonical, and support the infrastructure required to develop and build the distribution.

So when using the search box in the top right corner of Firefox on Ubuntu, you’ll be taken to a Yahoo! results page rather than the old default Google one. If you are upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 and you had Google as your search provider (the previous default) then this will change to Yahoo!. You can of course change the search provider, this is merely the default for Lucid. Doing so will mean your search revenue won’t go via Yahoo! to Canonical. That’s your choice, clearly.

In addition, the browser ’start page’ – that is the page you see initially when you open the browser – will reflect whatever the default search provider is. So in the top right, if you choose ‘Google’ you’ll get the Google start page, and conversely if you choose ‘Yahoo!’ you’ll get the Yahoo! start page when you first open the browser. Again, you can change the start page to be blank or use some other search provider. These are just the new defaults.

It’s possible that additional search vendors may be added to the list – Bing anyone? – but it seems that for Lucid there will be at least the two mentioned above. Users who already run Ubuntu and are upgrading to Lucid, but don’t use Google won’t notice a difference, but they’re welcome to manually switch to the new Yahoo! search provider if they want to financially support the Ubuntu project that way.

No doubt this will cause some consternation within the Ubuntu community, as many find changes to “their” browser to be tantamount to breaking and entering their home. Indeed when these things were previously messed with there were a few heated complaints and reports of broken-ness.

Hopefully the dialog on this change will remain civil and, well.. lucid.

Repository issues: The Custom Application

2010-01-26T18:06:05+00:00

After a project meeting today, it was suggested that I keep a note of all of the "interesting" issues that I encounter with the various data repositories I encounter on the project. So, here's the first of them.

At least two of our repositories consist of custom-built applications. One of them is a fairly large piece of PHP, backed by a MySQL database. The PHP for this repository is complex, and only understood by one person. The database schema is also fairly cryptic, and almost entirely undocumented. To make matters worse, the web user interface implemented by the PHP is actually a GUI, developed with (I think) Google Gears. The only way of querying this data store through an alternative interface is to access the database directly¹.

Response

2010-01-26T14:09:00+00:00

There are various ways in which you can respond in any given situation.

How do you like to respond there, people of the internets? Shall we take a moment and consider the things we do when present with difficulty.

(At this point, just sit quietly for 30 seconds - normally I like to time pauses for reflection for the congregation, but as I'm not actually there you'll have to do this for yourself

You could try this video

although you may find the sound distracting you reflections)

Now I'm going to try the one response you probably weren't thinking of. I'm going to respond to the current situation in my life with surrealism. The next thing I do is going to be thought out and executed with four legs and a neck and persistence of memory. So tonight I'm going to take my assistant out for a spot of illegal activity.

Watch this space. And indeed this one too.