bellyphant

So, the other day I downloaded Ubuntu 8.10 Beta. I tried it out on the computer at work, without a whole lot of success. Everything worked, except for networking. Which, these days, makes it kind of useless. Essentially, after a lot of reading (you think they’d put this in big flashing writing on the website), apparently they disabled the network driver in that build, because it kills network cards. It’s the network driver for nearly all modern motherboards with Intel chipsets. My network card wasn’t actually one of the ones being killed by the driver, but I would have had to rebuild the kernel to get it going. And that was about where I gave up.

So I took the disk home and tried it on my older laptop. Success! The wireless stuff worked (not on the live CD though, I think it had to save my WPA password somewhere, but it couldn’t), the wired networking worked, and the graphics worked. These are usually the things that suck. Even the Bluetooth seems to work (not that I have much to test it with). I’m quite impressed. It all just works.

So, much to my surprise (I’d tried various version of Xubuntu and Kubuntu 8.04), I actually quite like it. I guess my impressions of Linux from nearly 10 years ago have become rather out-of-date. I reckon I may actually stick with it. There’s something nice about a decent OS that still has 15Gb free on a 20Gb partition, even with a bunch of stuff installed. If I can set up a nice text editor, I can probably do most of the stuff I need to do, and Wine seems to run some stuff well, although Google Earth sort of killed the computer.

I know it isn’t exactly news to most people that Linux can actually be good. I guess I’ve basically just become lazy — Windows XP was familiar, and worked for me. And I still had those memories of tedious tweaking from years ago. In fact, tedious tweaking is one of the things that I hate. I like stuff that just works. I hate options, that’s why I kind of liked my iBook G4 (if only it weren’t so heavy). I think it’s also why I disliked KDE, GNOME seems to provide much less scope for fiddling.

It was an article on PowerTOP that really got me thinking though. Linux has made some pretty decent advances in recent times — it really is pretty damn good. (I guess all the setting up of SliceHost slices I’ve been doing for work, and getting the Pandora probably also helped push me in this direction.)

Interesting, interesting. I recently pre-ordered a Pandora — a very nice OMAP3 based handheld. It was originally designed for emulation, as a sort of sequel to the GP32; but to me it’s more a sequel to one of these.

And today the news that Google have open-sourced Android. Exciting news indeed — I sense there may have to be some sort of combination of these two things…

Finally, after working in Clerkenwell for about a year and a half, I’ve found a coffee place I like (and that actually serves nice coffee). Brill at Exmouth Market even serves flat whites. And CDs (it apparently started out as a CD store).

What a pity we might be moving offices soon :(

Don’t buy from DABS. They truly seem to suck. Apart from their horribly unusable website, with laughable faceted navigation, the customer service seems to really be quite terrible.

They apparently have a policy of reducing customer interaction (especially phone-based interaction). Perhaps if they processed orders properly, that might reduce customer interaction. What they have at the moment seems to be just a “get the payment, then who cares” mentality. I’m sure a business process analyst would probably explode if they had a look at how much inefficiency there is.

I should have known to steer clear of them, we ordered some stuff at work from them, and that was processed in a similarly terrible fashion (including the return of a motherboard and graphics card when both didn’t actually work). But the price was too compelling… Why do I always buy based on price?

I ordered at 11am today. No news until 5:30pm, when they email (not phone) me to tell me my card details aren’t right and could I please correct them. Considering most other websites manage to do this in real-time, this is pretty lame. But what makes it even more lame is that the card details were right — I can’t correct them because they’re not wrong! My billing address is correct. My phone numbers are correct. What the hell am I supposed to do?

This, combined with the previous experience and their terrible website lead me to think that your shopping is best done elsewhere. If you’re in the UK, and you’re thinking of ordering some computer stuff online, don’t order via DABS. They suck.

Update:

Some links for DABS phone numbers:

• More Trouble with Dabs.com (read the comments, they seem useful)
• DABS.com Delivery Problems
• Yahoo Answers

Towards the end of 2006 (yes, that long ago) I became interested in building a new amplifier to have over here with me in the UK. I had a fairly decent LM3875 chip amp setup at home, which I built a few years ago. Anyway, stuff moves on, and I read about some new Class D modules available from Hypex. Anyway, I gave up on that plan.

Then about a year later, I was interested again (these things tend to go in cycles for me; also, the prospect of another UK winter made me want to have something nice to listen to when it’s freezing outside). I found a forum post from a guy in China called Fumac (well, that’s his forum handle anyway). He was building some modules based around the Hypex UcD ideas, but with a much higher switching rate (around 1MHz). It seemed like an interesting idea to me, for various reasons. Also, his modules called MCD, were cheaper and easier to setup (more stuff built-in to the modules, like speaker protection etc, and a power supply). So I ordered some from him.

And they sat around for a few months (along with the transformer I ordered) — suddenly I was very busy at work! Then I bought some speakers (EPOS M12.2 — somewhat similar to these; it seems they’ve been updated, oh well…), and thought I should probably get the amp working. So an entire day of walking between four different Maplins stores got me enough stuff that I could hook something up. And by midnight I had one channel working through a car speaker — terrific!

About a week later (work again!) I had the new speakers hooked up to the modules, and the whole setup sounds wonderful. Actually significantly better (I reckon, non-scientific of course) than the same speakers hooked up to a Roksan Kandy amplifier — this is what I tested in the shop. Bass is terrifically well controlled — subtle, but you can definitely hear the difference between different types of instruments. And, whether it’s the speakers or amplifier, the treble never gets annoying or grating.

I really am pleased with this — the MCD-255 amplifier and speakers sound absolutely magnificent. I’ll post some pictures later…

(oh, Happy New Year and all that too… :) )

These two posts on TechCrunch: “Australia joins China in censoring the Internet” and “Australian Government equates freedom of speech to liking kiddie porn”.

Are poorly written, needlessly inflammatory, and in the case of the second one, totally wrong. I think Duncan Riley (the author) seems unable to separate his political leanings from his reporting. TechCrunch isn’t a political blog; it’s meant to be about the web industry. I don’t read it for lame political commentary from people with a primary school approach to politics.

But that’s not the reason I don’t read it anymore. The real reason is that, after writing several comments highlighting my issues with the first article, the second one came along, and posted a comment there. Essentially saying what I’m saying here — perfectly reasonable, perhaps slightly harsh. But considering the state of the second article, and the fact that it totally misinterprets the quotes that form the basis of it, I think being harsh is just being fair.

But my comment disappeared. And was replaced by a comment from Duncan telling one person they were an idiot, and another they were naive (in not those exact words). I would like to give Duncan the benefit of the doubt, especially since part of my comment was talking about the juvenile way the original article was written. But it seems like a strange coincidence to me. Also, I now appear to be blocked.

Lame.

On the way home from work tonight, the odometer on my bike ticked over to 3000km — somewhere on the hill just before St John’s Wood high street. Apparently it ticked over 1000km about six months ago (I’ve no idea when it ticked over 2000km). So 2000km in six months — a lot of that commuting (I really know that stretch of road pretty well by now).

But what else have I been doing? Not blogging, that’s for sure. 250 or so kilometres of that cycling was in France — from Dieppe to Paris, over three days. That was pretty amazing (pretty rainy on occasion too; and certainly hilly) — zooming through quaint French towns that I’d assumed wouldn’t actually exist as they do. 100km was in the Netherlands — from Hoek van Holland to Amsterdam. That was done on one sunny day — pretty much the best cycling I’ve done for a while, actually.

Other stuff? A lot of work — stuff at Moneyspyder is going pretty well, and I’ve learnt a bunch of stuff about Ruby, Rails and e-commerce. I’ve been to a few spots around Britain, Paris (twice); various visitors have come and gone, and I’m halfway to getting a different visa. Summer (as in the weather) in London pretty much sucked. And it’s definitely turned autumn now, so I’m preparing myself for several months of darkness (or at least dullness).

So there you go, a summary of stuff… See you again in six months!

NCA gauges interest in winter twilight markets. This sounds great! Having experienced a European market like the one talked about in the article, it really would be good. For all the people in Canberra (reading this; admittedly a small subset) — make sure you support this. Should be good; provided they can get enough stalls etc.

Using a little online tool, it seems I need to do some more travel. The bits in red are the countries I’ve been to. Clearly there are some continents I should pay more attention to… (just in case it’s broken, the picture below is supposed to be a map of the world)

create your own visited countries map

I couldn’t really justify ticking “USA” — I’ve been to Hollywood, and Hawaii. Not the entire rest of the country — and it would highlight just a little too much. I also didn’t tick any places that I’ve only been in the airports of, since that wouldn’t be very sensible. Come to think of it, I haven’t even been to most of the northern half of Australia. Hmmm…

Just before I arrived at work this morning, my cycle-computer odometer ticked over to 1000km. So, taking out the around 100km of non-commuting, that’s about 900km of cycling to work — I’ve been cycling pretty much every day since the start of January.

Assuming my total daily commute is about 15km (which it basically is — I go a slightly longer, more scenic way), then that’s 60 days of cycling (12 weeks). If I had caught the bus instead, that would have cost me £120, and taken approximately 30 hours longer (in total, 15 minutes extra each way, on a good day). If I’d caught the tube, it would have cost £240 (and only taken slightly longer on a good day). (Although I guess I would have weekly or monthly passes, which would push the price up, but I wouldn’t have to pay for transport on the weekend). Obviously the cost of the bike has to be taken into account, but I reckon over a year, it will be offset quite a bit. And it’s much more fun.

So cycling is a pretty good option for me — not many downsides, and I get to wander around in the sunlight — and with a much better chance of predicting when I’ll arrive than if I caught the tube or the bus. (Now to get my back wheel fixed — it’s a bit wonky; from potholes I think.)