Moved

I have successfully moved house! Huzzah!

So, I now live in Royal Berkshire. This is the first time I've lived outside of Somerset (except for when Avon existed, when I lived at the in-laws for a few months in Bradford-on-Avon and when I was an in-patient in Bristol Children's).

And Bartleby the kitten has moved in. Nightmare! :-)

For some reason, it's going to take 3 weeks to install my landline. Luckily one of my neighbours has an open wireless router. (Which I'm definitely not using - that would be against the law!)

Gracey + kittens

Gracey + kittens,
originally uploaded by mapnjd.

We're getting the black and white kitten in the middle :-)

Cats, (My)Eclipse, Scratching that Itch

So, after 15 years, our cats have come to live with us. Bob (now down to a svelt 12lb) and Shmoo seem pretty happy, although Bob did escape for 48 hours causing me to walk around the neighbourhood, calling "Bobsy" in a ridiculous voice, shaking cat biscuits (in a Sugar Puffs box) and commit several acts of trespass.

Our house is now full of purring, cat hair and "accidents". Plus child 2 running around constantly chasing and attempting to carry the aged felines.

I upgraded Eclipse to 3.2, MyEclipse to 5.0.x and E-P-I-C to 0.4.0 which is pretty cool. I look forward to playing with Mattise4MyEclipse soon.

Helpful hint: NTLM authentication for proxies should be performed in Window->Preferences->MyEclipse->Internet Tools->Proxy, not the other, random locations for configuring proxies.

At last my attack of prickly heat is over. Phew. I never thought I'd complain about hot weather!

I keep thinking of useful open source/free software that I could scratch my itch on, and then find that someone else has already done it.

Dell Inspiron 6400 and FC5

Yep - it's officially simple. I now have sound, graphics and wireless all working.

1. Sound - cured by using Alsa drivers from at rpms
2. Graphics - you need the 915resolution hack
3. Wireless - newer FC5 kernel (2122); ieee80211 rpms and ipw3945 rpms
4. Lid fix - shutting the lid now no longer blanks the display permanently ;-)
   

You can get a lot more help from:

1. Malmot's blog (FC5)
2. Jacky Vuillemin (Mandriva 2006)
3. Graham Williams (Debian 3.1)
4. Jennifer Tsai (Ubuntu 5.10)

Dell-icious

Hmmm. New Laptop. :-)

My new PC, a Dell Inspiron 6400 was delivered today. I've whacked Fedora Core 5 on it (getting rid of the evil OS completely), and over the next few days I'll fix the remaining issues:

1. Sound - none
   
2. Graphics - looks shit in so-called 1280x800
   
3. Wireless Firmware

Nice!

Swing vs. Web 2.0

Evan Summers's Blog: Swing trumps Ajax and Web 2.0

Interesting. But unfortunately, dream on.

First week in my new job

My first week has been damned good. The people in my department and immediate team are really nice. I think that this is always my biggest fear when I change job - will the people be nice? I'm glad to say that they are, and this includes all the managers with whom I've had contact.

Similarly, the knowledge and talent of everyone I've come across has been impressive. These are seriously clever people. Having to understand real IT issues as well all the ins and outs of the complexities of 3G networks means that everyone there is top-notch.

I already have a career plan and know what is expected of me and how I'll be measured.

Plus we went out for Thai food on Friday which rocked! :-)

Tomcat dedo-dedo-doo

Most amusing. But the last sentence is a huge insight into the real world.

New job

Long time no blog. Well it's been an interesting few weeks to say the least. After 4 years (and a total of 7, if you include my previous stint) at my previous employer, I've left for pastures new.

I've been offered a job (subject to medical and references) at Ericsson Services Ltd. and have accepted. I'm looking forward to working in such a big company with a major IT, technical and service focus.

FC5 and stuff.

OK. So I'm still feeling rubbish. But enough about me.

Some stuff about FC5. FC5 in a nutshell: Fedora finally catch up with Ubuntu. Suspend works on my laptop (yay!). Using the testing kernel (2069) I can get fglrx to work which means that X no longer runs at speeds of c.1998 :-) I haven't got AIXGL working yet.

FC 1 and 3 were really good, 2 was average and 4 suX0red. Ubuntu's releases have all rocked. But now I can revert to the fold and use my Red Hat knowledge and feel safe and secure in that. :-)

Congratulations to Red Hat, Fedora people and Livna.org for picking up their game and getting back up to scratch.

Around the world:

40+ suggestions to improve GNOME

Manager 2.0 (Kathy Sierra does it again!)

From around the blogosphere....

Porky Prime Cuts:

Someone at Sun linked to this, the most amazingly useful book, with the best customer review ever at Amazon: How to Avoid Huge Ships.

Another Sun-ite linked to FreeMind which looks damn useful.

Changshin Lee ponders over whether we should have Java Widgets. Well yes, Java is a better language for this sort of thing, but I don't have that much RAM. (Can you imagine using 256MB just for a clock :-).

The IT Training Doctor explains how to train properly through the magic of Lego and Harry Potter. He also links to an amusing video of if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging.

Creating Eclipse Warnings with AspectJ

A good use of AOP. At last I begin to see the light.

Creating Eclipse Warnings with AspectJ: "We have made some experiments with the creation of an Eclipse Warning to detect the usage of the println in the code. Every time a developer type System.out.prinltn(...), the warning icon appears beside his code. A sample code is provided."

Go Bristol!

Bristol Switches to StarOffice.

Anyone can do it... Some PCs (in Woolworths of all places) come with StarOffice pre-installed. When I was at Amtrak (UK parcel company unrelated to American trains) they had thin client (X11) access to 3 Solaris 8 (x86) PCs which ran StarOffice 5.2. Enough for 100 users.

Yes, MS Office 2003 is pretty damn fine and some people may use sharepoint etc. but not many people do. So stop paying for MS Office, please. StarOffice is cheap and OpenOffice is free.

Sometimes I hate PHP 4...

PHP4 is OK. Let's face it, it's the Perl 5 of web-languages. It has an OO system that's not that great but it's there and means you can do most rudimentary things. But apparently you can't do this:

$this->getFoo()->bar();

which pretty much is a standard way of thinking in my brain. Arse.

ATI Petition for Adequate Drivers in Linux Petition

ATI Petition for Adequate Drivers in Linux Petition

Are online petitions pointless? I don't know. But I'm an ATI user, and many laptops are ATI based. So let's ask ATI to please make us some decent darned drivers.

PHP Integer size

How to tell how big your php integers are:

<?php

  $one = 1;
  $big = 4294967297;

  $mod = sprintf("%u", $big);

  $a = ( $one == $mod ) ? 64 : 32;

  echo $a. "\n";

?>

Tested on 32 and 64 bit builds of PHP 4.4.1 on Solaris 8 (SPARC).

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Here comes the mirror man...

On monday I start a new position as the full time developer of JISC Mirror. Yay!

Please send all comments through the normal channels (as opposed to me directly). Obviously there's a lot we (Eduserv) want to do. So let's get it on.

Duke in a wheelchair

I shouldn't laugh, but someone's heart is clearly in the right place designing this logo, but Duke's "legs" look really bad in this picture.

world of java

world of java

My new Java blog.

Gmaps Pedometer

Gmaps Pedometer

This rocks!

Apparently, it's a 1km walk to school, and just 700m from the park and ride stop in town to my office.