So to re-cable my (OEM) Rega RB300 tonearm, I have have to use feeder wire, in my case, a high E string from my electric guitar. (As the folk in the guide on Vinyl Engine did). It has to be straight to go through two narrow holes. 

At this point it enters the main arm body, but it needs to then go forward, but of course, it doesn't want to. 

The Vinyl Engine guide recommends kinking the wire, but I couldn't get a kinked wire to exit the lower part. 

Anyone got any advice?

Update 25th July2014: I'm going to send it back to Audio Note for repair. It's far too hard and I broke the earth wire.

It's Alive

Oh yeah, baby! I'm bringing the blog back. Blog 2.0. Whatever. More uninformed content will follow. Soon.

Closedown

I think it's pretty obvious that I am now an ex-blogger.

I am just noise in the signal-to-noise of the internet.

You can keep up with what I'm doing on twitter and Google+, links are on http://worldofnic.org.

Ooh. Android.

So it appears I can blog from my phone. I'm not entirely sure I'd want to, but if push came to shove, I could.

Happy X10 Mini owner.

Android FTW!

Oracle vs Google. .NET and Mono

Miguel de Icaza (Mr. Mono) has written an excellent piece on ORCL suing GOOG over Android/Dalvik.

Oracle, as Sun, extracted $1.6bn from MSFT, and $900m of this was for patents. So we can safely assume that  Microsoft's .NET implementation is covered by this deal.

Now Miguel and  Mono folk will be crowing about how wonderful the Microsoft Patent Licence Grant is (and it is a generous gift). However, one small point: Mono is also likely to be in breach of Oracle's patents, but Microsoft do not have the rights to confer these rights to Mono.

So Mono folks - you're just as likely to get a visit from Oracle as Google, or at least you would be, if NOVL had a Market Cap 50-100 times the size of it's current woeful state.

Book Review: Bernard Sumner: Confusion - Joy Division, Electronic and New Order Versus the World

Confusion - David Nolan's book on Bernard Sumner tells us more about the man than we knew before, including his real name.

Yes, we have to put up with reading about Ian Curtis' untimely demise and that nightclub somewhere up north again, but the necessary duplication is kept to a minimum.

It's not an official biography, but Bernard interjects corrections occasionally. At the end, we do know more about him, but still not much. He's a private person, who doesn't want fame and doesn't even want to clarify people's misconceptions! Frustrating and confusing.

Luckily, Nolan writes well (if with the occasional amount of repetition) and has interviewed many, many people from Bernard's past and it's this combination of research and good writing that keeps you going through the mystery of Bernard's life.

8/10 - well worth reading.

How a die-hard UNIX head switched to Windows

If you know me, you'll have heard me lavish praise on UNIX and Linux and deride Microsoft for nearly everything. But as Keynes said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Here are some facts/opinions/hunches

Windows 7

• Windows 7 is fast enough. It's a lot faster than Vista -and boots in a similar time to Ubuntu
• Windows 7 has a usable, attractive, well-thought out UI.
• Windows 7's power options and Switch-User work. Consistently.
• Office 2007 still beats OpenOffice 3.x and is only £50 for 3 licences (assuming you have a kid).
• Most stable version of Windows on the desktop yet.
  

Development

• Visual Studio 2008 is better than Eclipse, Netbeans, JDeveloper, etc.
• The CLR is more efficient than the JVM in terms of RAM and speed.
• C# is better than Java. (Being, fundamentally, a re-engineered, re-thought out version of Java with more features).
• LINQ to * (very clever).
• Silverlight 3 beats Flash and Java applets hands down in resource usage.
  

Servers

• Windows still may not have UNIX-levels of stability, but 2008 does appear to actually be stable. At last. (I don't have enough data to judge this).
  
• Active Directory is the de facto SSO/Directory mechanism for many enterprises. It works.

The Linux desktop

• I don't like KDE - it's brilliant "under the hood" but isn't usable.
• GNOME is usable, simple and attractive. It would like to be written in C# and run on the Mono CLR, but there's no way a bunch of Free Software advocates are going to do that. Expect a fork and both versions to die slowly. KDE wins (and usability suffers).

Other comments

• It's just a shame that Outlook and Exchange suck so much. ;-)
  
• I have no experience with SQL Server 2008 but I hear good things
• Is IIS 7.x stable?
• Expression Blend is pretty cool
• I wish I had multiple desktops.
  

Oracle and Sun - uninformed comment

Just like the rest of the Internet - here's some uninformed thoughts on the Oracle-Sun deal:

1. GlassFish vs WebLogic (and erstwhile OAS). I suspect that GlassFish 3 has had it from Oracle's perspective. It'll carry on as an unsupported, but great, open-source project.
2. NetBeans vs JDeveloper and Eclipse. Goodbye NetBeans. Like GlassFish it will carry on, but wither on the vine.
   
3. MySQL vs Oracle DB: Support and Sales. Well, there's some wondering in the blogosphere as to who at Sun actually works on/supports MySQL now, but, be that as it may, Oracle can now sell you (cheapish) support for MySQL. So SMBs outgrowing their roots can get infected by Oracle sales, and Enterprises can run the many MySQL-based apps.
4. MySQL vs Oracle DB: Migration and up-sell. I still expect some sort of automated MySQL to Oracle DB product, and/or a MySQL-api call into the data in an Oracle DB. Ease of Migration.
5. JVM and Java language. And the JCP. I expect Java to become more open. Why? Kudos. Looking-good. (While still selling tons of expensive WebLogic, DB, etc., etc. licences). Plus it will be good for Java (and hence Oracle).
6. That pesky hardware business. Sun's ailing hardware business is what has brought the once-huge company to it's knees. Dell and HP make perfectly good (and rather scalable) x86-64 servers. The vast majority of people do not need E25Ks. Honestly - will it be wound down - sold off to HP or even the fledgling Cisco? Or can the expensive software vendor make the case for a one-stop shop to customers? "Here, our hardware is pricey too, but you get our excellent support - all in one place"
7. Sun xVM and Oracle VM. One will stay, one will go. (Sorry - stating the obvious there).
   
8. (Open)Solaris and Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL). Is Solaris (Sun's other millstone) just legacy now? Does OpenSolaris really offer throughput advantages over Linux? Will ZFS become GPLd and available in Linux or a commercial addon to OEL? Does btrfs offer all of ZFS' feature set (should have researched that bit, sorry). I suspect Solaris is history, like Netbeans. In 5 years, it will be a fond memory.

The Sun is dead, long live the Oracle. Dear Oracle, please look after Sun and Java, we've had a lot of good times together, and we want it to continue.

Oh no, mono

Why do I ever bother with Mono? Why? Well I have a belief that large complicated software should be written in an appropriate language. At the moment, that either means a JVM-based language (like Java) or C#. Java doesn't really work on the Desktop (even though I'm a user of Eclipse, Oracle SQL Developer, and many Telco products that are Java desktop apps) as running many, small memory footprint apps for more than a few hours at a time is the desktop experience - and that isn't Java's forte.

On Linux, we have a top quality CLI/CLR implementation and bindings to write desktop apps in Mono. The only problem is, we don't have the tools. :-( Monodevelop is flaky, unstable and let's face it, unusable. Perhaps it's better on (open)SUSE, but 1.0 RC1 on Fedora 9 is, um, crap. Sorry to be so blunt.

Now, it may be because I have some legacy crud in my home dir, but it is confusing, freezes, claims to build solutions when it hasn't, gives cryptic error messages, and is just not ready for prime time. What are add-ins for (I knid of know)? Why are mine "wrong"? What is the correct repo URL? Why don't they update?

For Java, there's Eclipse, Netbeans, and (non-free) Idea all of which are excellent. I've used the Express editions of Visual Studio, and while they're not as good as Eclipse (!) they do the job well. (Another thing: why isn't VS free to download? If you want more decent Windows apps, don't raise the barrier to entry). (Aside: Oracle SQL Developer 1.5 is pretty fantastic for writing PL/SQL. As good as Toad? Well, better than the old, shonky version (7.x?) I had ... obviously it doesn't have Toad's DBA functions, but still. It rocks).

So, the moral is - stop f_cking around writing Moonlight or whatever - fix the development environment.

Bob

My lovely cat, Bob was put to sleep today.

Why all PCs need 2GB RAM

Mem: 2065992k total, 1615628k used, 450364k free, 24k buffers
Swap: 5242872k total, 1118284k used, 4124588k free, 209792k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
22034 nic 20 0 2087m 803m 26m S 0 39.8 9:52.67 java
15540 nic 20 0 375m 206m 22m S 27 10.2 93:32.82 firefox-bin

And I'd just shut down Jetty... Grails programming in Eclipse

Home Virtualization Question

An open question to all:

Which virtualization solution should I use on my home server? You're choices are: Xen or VMware server.

The Host OS will probably be SLES 10 SP1 (which I think means Windows should run under Xen) - but what are the gotchas? I'm less familiar with Xen. Can you get a GUI session up on a Xen client? Can either solution mount partitions from the local server (useful providing a network share around the house without a huge OS image)?

nic

REDUCE

REDUCE
Originally uploaded by worldofnic

After yesterday's claim that MOP and Functional programming were a blast from the past - I bought this cheap, yet fully geeky T-Shirt from Primark. (It has a PDP-11 in the diagram, too). I didn't notice in the shop, but the microVAX in the diagram lists REDUCE as one of the programs it runs.

I loved REDUCE. So clean, so simple, so... what happened?

No, not April Fools.

While I sit here, hopefully upgrading our BusinessObjects installation, I thought I'd note a few things. Things that have either been on my mind, through my mind or out of my mind.

First, let us talk of Adobe AIR, and indeed AIR for Linux. Now here's a turn up for the books, while many apps seem to be going "on to the web" and running in a browser, AIR shows us a new way. Lots of apps that can run on a desktop. No, not klunky, minimal widgets, but full featured apps that read/write to apps "out there" in web-land. Pretty, damn schweet.

Now, some smart-arses may be thinking that this is nothing new. Indeed, this is what I thought MS were going to do with .NET and Windows 6/Longhorn/Vista, when .NET was initially mooted, but no. They chickened out. Which is a shame, because the .NET runtime (a.k.a CLR), C# and VB.NET aren't bad (being MS rewrites of the JVM, Java, and er.. a .NET-ified, "it's a proper language now" version of VB, respectively). However, the Adobe AIR runtime seems a lot better at memory management than the JVM, or my limited experience of Mono's CLR implementation - this makes it more suitable for desktop-based RIAs. Maybe there aren't enough, really rich apps out there yet for AIR to tell, but I'm sold.

Talking of .NET apps: why do I run more .NET (Mono) apps on Linux than I run .NET apps on Windows? On Linux:

1. F-Spot
2. Banshee
3. Tomboy
   
4. gTwitter (although I'm using Twhirl on AIR at the mo')
   
5. beagle

On Windows XP:

1. VisualBasic 2005 Express
2. Trivial apps I've writting in VB.NET...

Talking of Mono (neat segue, here) - I've recently tried openSUSE and will be playing with SLES 10, somewhat soon. What do I think (bear in mind previous comments I've made), well the fact that GNOME is available (good job too, considering the number of GNOME/Mono experts at Novell!) and has the best interface of all GNOME versions is a boon. Being able to choose between drivers for my wireless card (unlike Ubuntu - old driver only, and Fedora - new borked driver only) was a cool addition. Things worked pretty well, and I'll blog more later in the year.

(Small interruption while BO thinks it's upgraded - let's see... Now redeploying wars...).

Mentioning .war files, I've been playing once more with Grails, now it's hit it's 1.0(.2!) release. It's a lot more polished and very, very cool. At this point in time, both Java and experienced, MVC-using PHP programmers can either choose to try (J)Ruby on Rails or Grails. Neither is perfect, but if you do bother learning one or the other your (future) productivity will rocket.

JRuby has the distinct advantage in Sun sponsorship, with Netbeans integration etc. Grails has the advantage of being written in Groovy/Java and thus you can get at all the Java classes for free. Grails also has the fine, familiar underpinnings of Spring, Hibernate, SiteMesh, GSP (which are so like JSP) which most Java-heads have dabbled with at least.

Groovy at least isn't particularly performant (as some recent bloggers have shown) but neither was Java all those years ago... (Unsure about Grails, which has large parts written in Java - my own apps aren't accessed often enough to tell).

It's funny how things come around: when I was a full-time postgrad (1992-6), Java 0.9 came about, but most "powerful" machines only had 32MB RAM and well-sub-100MHz CPUs. We were all LISP fans/programmers - OO stuff was used, but among the some of the faculty, Functional programming was often looked upon as some sort of god-like beauty. Now, Java 7, Groovy, Scala, ... are all closure/Functional-programming obsessed. The Art of the Meta Object Protocol will always stick in my mind because of how much a couple of people were excited by it (and it had a great cover) and look at all that lovely MOP in Groovy.

(BO upgrade/using wdeploy failed to notice previous version and duplicated entries in conf/server.xml - crap).

So either the modern computing industry is really 15 years behind theory, or... I don't know. I wonder if Order Sorted Algebra (my old field) will make it's way into modern rigorous computing! Heh.

Ah, BO is back up. All hail!

This is nic, signing off.

Fedora 9 alpha

So I'm posting this from Fedora 9 alpha 1 which I'm running from my USB key. Freaking schweet.

This is pretty good. a) it came up fast b) it detects hardware properly and the Intel wireless (iwl3945) driver now works (I currently use the old style ipw3945 driver under Fedora 8 - that's what Ubuntu still ships) c) The media buttons on my Dell Inspiron 6400 now work (they always did with Ubuntu, but never with Fedora).

Along with the improvements in Fedora 8 (like Codeina) - Fedora are finally on a par with Ubuntu unless you count the fact that it's a piece of cake to use less-than-legal codecs in Ubuntu, and you need some knowledge in Fedora.

Ahh - happy,

Sent using the "Blog entry poster" app on the desktop (then edited online to get the title right - darn Blogger API).

JavaScript frameworks part II

Hmm.

It would appear, that YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) is the "best" of the bunch, if a certain guarantee of cross-browser friendliness wishes to be achieved. Testing on FF 2.0, IE 7, Opera 9.25 and WebKit (on Nokia N95) - only YUI seems to work properly on all.

OK, so maybe there's a chance I introduced some CSS/JS bug somewhere, but my experience is YUI works better (than Prototype or Dojo) in most cases. I just wish it had Prototype's $() function.

OK - back to playing with Spring and Apache Derby,

Spring, JavaScript toolkits

Went to the Spring Exchange 2008 which was great. I learned a lot more about Spring 2.5 and whats coming up in 3.0. I finally realised that Annotations might be a good idea (and can't wait to try them in the new improved Spring MVC c. 2.5.3). I also learned more about OSGi (through a talk on "Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi") than I had before - very interesting and cool technology.

I'm happy for the Spring folks that Spring Source looks like like it has a great future. But what will happen to Java EE (previously called J2EE)? Will it wither and die to be replaced by elegant, simple POJO-based apps? And what will happen to the leading vendors? BEA/Oracle, Sun's Glassfish/SJSAS, IBM's Web's Fear, and Red Hat's JBoss? Certainly Oracle, Sun and IBM can handle the pain, but Red Hat? Hmm.

Changing subject...

I've piddled with Prototype which is really easy (mainly thanks to the $() function) and YUI which has great documentation, but started using Dojo as it's going to be included in a tag-library for Spring Web Flow 2.0.x (at some point). It's also a strong contender and like YUI doesn't need hosting at your own site. (YUI can be called directly from Yahoo!'s servers, and Dojo from AOL's CDN).

So much choice!

Liberation

Having recently switched back to Fedora (8), I thought I'd try out Red Hat's free Liberation fonts, and they are beautiful. Don't get me wrong, Bistream's fonts (which they kindly gave away freely to us Unix-heads) are very nice and set a new standard, but I'm blown away at the quality of the Liberation fonts.

They're available for most platforms, and I'd strongly suggest you give them a try.

JBoss migration

Successfully migrated all clients from Jetty to JBoss 4.2.1GA. Pretty smooth - so why did I have so much problem with the beta of 5.0.0?

Hmm.

But at least I have a Java EE 1.4-and-a-half server to play with and lots of JMX goodness.

Zimbra

Are you looking for something a bit nicer than a traditional Unix IMAP server? Fancy (shared) Calendering, cool AJAX implementation, LDAP address book? SSL setup is a synch.

Then look no further. Zimbra rocks. Basically, it builds on some top quality Open Source software (Postfix, OpenLDAP, Tomcat, SpamAssassin, clamav, DSPAM, MySQL, ... ) and makes it all work well together. Not just well, but really well. There's an Open Source edition and a pay-for edition (which adds Outlook connectivity, and other stuff). The Pay-for version is still relatively cheap (compared with the competition) and could be worth the extra depending on your needs. You get all the required software bundled together in guaranteed working versions.

There's also a good community of users (there's a wiki and active forums). It's really easy to install (so that'll save you some more money). It's certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and can be bought from Red Hat Exchange if you're that way inclined. If you want to try it there's a VMware appliance you can try it on. (That's how I demoed it).

You can't afford not to try it.