From the Orient

I’m not sure why I decided to try out “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ today but I’m glad I did. I’d heard about it on its release (and before in fact, but it didn’t have a name then) of course, and in fact downloaded a disk image of warty.

I’d had a small epiphany at work today and managed to get ssh tunneling working though the firewall and could grab my home email directly from my trusty Debian woody server. I think it gave me a small boost of linuxness that made me try it out.

The main reason for my previous reticence was I could never get my wireless network card to work on any previous variant of Debian. Woody just couldn’t see, and I had so much trouble with Sarge, I gave up.

The whole installation process was flawless. I had to answer a few questions, but they were not questions that the installation process could guess. It did say it couldn’t find my wireless network but I simply entered the required details and it just worked. Roughly twenty minutes of package downloads, a reboot and that was it. A working desktop. Looks nice too.

I am certain that this is the beginning of Linux working as a desktop. The developers have done a marvelous job. I will be installing it on one of my work machines tomorrow. If all goes well, I’ll have a go at installing on my laptop.

Just a few issues to sort out. Getting Firefox 1.0 (it comes with 0.9.3), finding and installing printer drivers, and getting the dual boot system to start with Windows XP so that the kids can play their games.

By kids I mean me, and by games I mean Half Life 2 which appears to be lacking a Ubuntu version.

Paul UNIX

Aparently Congress wants to outlaw fast-forwarding through commercials [via "Mike Krisher":http://www.mikekrisher.com/2004/11/fast-forwarding-past-previews-on-dvd.php]

They want to make it illegal to use software or hardware to skip all of those commercials and previews that the studios are placing before the beginnings of movies on DVDs, something which is freaking ridiculous since it’s your DVD playing on your DVD player in your home. How about making it illegal to not pay attention, too?

Luckily my children don’t live under the laws of the US Congress (although give it time because where US lead, the UK follows) because they have a number of Disney DVD’s and they find it very annoying that they have to wait for Nemo or Sleeping Beauty for Disney to try and force them to winge at me so they I will buy them more Disney DVD’s (luckily I wear my winge avoiding pants and am immune).

They’ve discovered this wonderful invention called a button on the remote control that allows them to skip past the adverts and onto the wonderful goodness of animation that lie past the thorns.

I hate the adverts on these movies (they seem more prevalant on Disney that anything else; there were certainly no adverts on my Shaun of the Dead DVD) that I am forced to rip a copy of these bought DVD’s and extract the movie segment only. I’m only doing it to protect my children from becoming criminals. That, and protecting the original DVD from sticky fingers and being thrown around the room like a frisbee. It’s a backup.

Paul Digital Media, General

Stuart has written a new DHTML script called DOM Image Annotation to do “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com like stuff to images.

Cool stuff. I had an idea two years ago to do something like this, but it was a weird image refractal idea that you clicked into the picture and it lead you somewhere strange and interesting, like an interactive fiction map. Never got to the planning stage that one.

Added to growing list of links to stick in the blogaggregatorwiki-software-that-will-never-be project that will never start because in this summer I went outside and played with the children instead and this winter I’m learning new stuff with the Open University.

Paul Web Coding and Design

Choice quote from a block who walked past me whilst I was at a Fireworks display Saturday night.

“The Americans really go for Halloween, but don’t do anything for Bonfire Night. I don’t know why, you’d think they’d like all the loud bangs”

Paul Culture

Sorry ’bout that “last post”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2004/11/03/exclusive-poll-results, I should have pointed out a couple of things :-

1) I’d love to visit San Fransisco and I’m sure the people there are really cool, but I was thinking of the Bush led “security” that my wife might have to face at the airport. Heck, I’ve stopped over in Colombia and had my bags searched at machine gun point (whilst there was a riot going on outside the airport) and I never felt under threat. I just don’t want to go to a US airport until the so-called “anti-terrorist” security is “relaxed”. I’m sure nothing would happen, but still …

2) Maybe you can treat the Election Results map as a “places where it is safe to go” I think it was on HIGNFY the other day that Boris Johnson looked on a UK map, pointed at Liverpool and said “Here Be Dragons!”

3) I forgot that the excerpt wasn’t seen on the actual page (in only appears in RSS feeds) so here it is :-

51% of Americans are stupid

4) Some of my best friends are American

5) Everything I say can usually be taken totally tongue in cheek, especially point 4 which is a clear parody.

6) You should have seen some of the headings I was thinking of writing, e.g. “Well, that’s the world fucked”

7) It might almost be a good thing Bush got back in. There is a chance that someone will find something really bad Bush has done, and he will be impeached. (Of course, a lot of the bad things he’s done he has admitted, gotten away with, and still got voted back into office for). It would have been really hard for Kerry to do any good with the situation he would have faced, and it could have been even worse in 4 years time.

I say, almost, but having George Bush as president couldn’t be much worse, could it?

Paul General

Oh well, I’m glad I don’t have to live in America

You know, my wife is possibly going to New Zealand in the new year. When I looked on the internet for a flight, I found a fairly cheap one that included stop overs in two different cities. Guess which one I thought the following about “Oh no, I don’t want her to have to go there!”

London -> Singapore -> New Zealand
New Zealand -> San Fransisco -> London

Paul Culture