To that end, just some of my new years resolutions are below.

• Environmental
  Recycle more. We actively recycle as much as we can at home, or I should rephrase that, we recycle as much as is currently collected. Our council don’t collect certain items that could be recycled and we tend not to make the effort to get these said items recycled either. We should collect these and make sure they are recycled.
  Expand our space. Somewhat in contrast to the above is my family either need to move house or expand the one we are in. Currently we are four persons living in a smallish three bedroomed house. We will either move house or extend the one we are in, which ever is environmentally and financially sound.
• Technical
  Lead an open source project I’m proud of. It been a while since I had a major project that I was ‘leading’. What I mean by leading is ‘lead developer’, ‘founder’, ‘steering force’. I’ve concentrated in making improvements in existing projects for so long that I’ve forgotten what its like to create one. This year I hope to make a difference with an open source project that is born from my own grey matter.
  Become a MOTU. Something that means a lot to me is becoming a MOTU. I’ve always been an active contributor to open source software and kind of prided myself in being a free-software hitman. I’ve flitted between projects, fixing problems, adding functionality, and moving on when projects seem to increase momentum under their own steam. But one thing that has been consistent since Warty, has been my use of Ubuntu as my operating system of choice. I’ve often looked at the MOTU program and thought I should make strides to become a MOTU but I’ve always had some other excuse. This year I will become a MOTU.
  Be a game changer. Contribute to a ‘game-changing’ project. This is on the wish-list, not only for me but for my employer, Canonical. In modern times the iPod was game-changing, as was Google’s emergence from search engine to software giant. This year I want to be right there contributing to something I can talk about with members of the family that are ‘too old to understand computers’ but will of heard of it none-the-less.
• Physical and spiritual goals:
  Explore religion. Lets get this straight, I’m pretty religion-neutral, mainly due to my scientific background. I see lots of merit in people believing in ‘something’ and the power that brings but every religions rules, scriptures and tales seem to fall down when science is applied to it. One religion that I personally feel has more merit that others is Buddhism. This coming 12 months I will devote time to learning more than I know now about this belief with the hope of bringing something of it into my life.
  Be healthy. My diet is pretty ad-hoc. Sometimes its extremely healthy with many portions of fresh fruit and vegetables, sometimes its random items from the heart-attack list of shame. My goal this coming year is to have a consistently ‘good’ diet. No extremes, no highs, no lows, just a healthy and balanced diet.
  Be alcohol free. This is a hard one. I’ve been a very active sports fanatic for sometime, 6 years of rugby union, getting seriously into weight training for many years, running 500+ miles a year but 3 years ago I really busted my shoulder up bad on a cold and rainy afternoon playing rugby. With no chance of training at all for 12 months and doctors advice to never play rugby again I slipped into the habit of ‘a few beers’. A ‘few beers’ with mates down the pub, a ‘few beers’ watching a film at home, its all taken its toll. I’m still going to the gym semi-regular now that my shoulder is somewhat better but my waist-line has expanded and I seem to have picked up a bad habit in the process. My goal is to go 12 months alcohol free, which is an extremely lofty goal given today’s society, perhaps the hardest of all my new years resolutions. Alcohol seems to have slipped under the radar of what is acceptable in today’s society making it seem ‘abnormal’ not to drink but I’m not one for conforming and I like a challenge.

There are many more resolutions but the ones above are a good sub-section of what I want 2010 to bring. I hope my 2010 happens and I wish you all the success that I’m hoping for too.

Now I’m a big media fiend, just ask my wife. We now don’t have a garage because I went and converted it into a home cinema room (8 foot screen, HD projector, 500+ films archived, DVD+Blueray+HD-DVD sources …). I hack on the Entertainer Media Center project (although its a little stale at the moment, effort really appreciated) and I’m a former user of XBMC on the first generation XBOX’s from Microsoft and now uPNP of the XBOX 360. So when someone says to me they have a £150 tiny and silent PC, running Linux and decoding HD material, I got a little credit card jumpy.

A couple of days later the Revo arrived. I was a little in two minds on whether this was a good purchase or not. I count at least 23 computers in my house so another was probably not a good idea but none-the-less, I justified it as a replacement for the excellent but slow Viglen MPC-L which, coupled with many USB disks, was a great file server. The first thing I did was install Ubuntu Karmic Koala. Out of the box it worked great (no surprise there ). Install the Nvidia drivers, tweak the screen resolution for my plasma TV, install XBMC and away we go. One tweak every media concerned individual must do on this device is to disable compiz. For some reason, on full screen playback, compiz causes video tearing. It took me a little while to figure this out and I don’t mind admitting that I was initially disappointed to see video playback on this machine (when compiz was enabled) but my god did things change.

I enabled my old Windows Media Center remote, added all my video sources to XBMC, tweaked the interface a little and now, all I can say is WOW. The Revo+XBMC combo ranks up there with the best of my purchases. The interface is wonderful; the little things like showing you the actual time a video you are watching is going to end, the UI which puts every set-top-box maker to shame and the shear extensibility of the thing is immense. I won’t even mention that this is running Ubuntu, doing my work-related backups, downloading (legal) torrents, running scripts, mail, and a whole host of other services, and drawing a trickle of power.

If your considering replacing a uPNP enabled XBOX (which I did) or PS3, getting rid of your aging server or just wanting a great media experience, I whole-heartedly recommend this combination.

I know what I want

I first thought that one of the new i7 CPU’s from Intel would be way to go but on careful consideration I found that the price for the chip itself is at a premium and a motherboard to support it is also expensive. I settled on a nice quad core instead.

Another thing on my wish list was lots of RAM. Again my initial assumptions were wrong. I thought either 6GB or 8GB would be the right way to go but after doing a lot of research online it seems that anything over 4GB isn’t really worth it unless you have a special use case, which I don’t. I settled on 4GB.

What I actually got

The full list of parts was:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz (Retail 775)
ASRock G43Twins-FullHD 775 DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard
Corsair 4GB TwinX DDR3 PC3-10600 1333Mhz Dual Channel DHX DDR3 (2x2GB)
1.5TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 SATA-2 Hard Drive
LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray Disc Rewriter & HD DVD ROM Retail Kit
Thermaltake TTM5 Midi Case
OCZ 400W StealthXStream Power Supply PSU

Bought later (see below)
Gainward nVidia 8400GS 256MB Fanless Graphics Card, TV/DVI/HDTV

So as you can see, the PC isn’t a screaming, bleeding edge computer but it is a great example of price vs performance. If you take out the Bluray burner which was an indulgence of mine, the above parts came in at just over £400. Not too bad for a very over-clockable quad core CPU, a good amount of RAM and hard drive space and a recent motherboard.

Problems

The only part of the list which I was a little concerned with was the motherboard. Traditionally motherboards can cause problems with Linux, especially new ones but my fears were seemingly unfounded as there were examples of it working fine. But it seems I was right to be concerned.

With the add-on graphics card that came with the board, Karmic wouldn’t even boot to the installer Launchpad Bug:429908. Jaunty would install but gave a lot of problems with the X server. The on-board graphics worked with Jaunty but performed terribly so my only answer was to purchase another graphics card. Fortunately the Geforce 8400GS was less that £25 delivered and works flawlessly with the Nvidia proprietary drivers.

Conclusion

So I now have a fast PC running Jaunty. I really want to upgrade it to Karmic but my experience with Karmic isn’t great at the moment. Alpha 4 on my laptop ran great but a ‘sudo apt-get upgrade’ a couple of days ago resulted in a non-booting machine. I suspect its something to do with the change to upstart that Karmic is doing at the moment but I’m not sure. I’ve also had a lot of trouble initially trying to installing Karmic on the PC. Maybe now the Geforce 8400GS is there instead of the add-on card it will work but I can’t afford to risk it yet.

All in all I’m happy with the machine. Bluray movies work (although I have to rip them under a Windows XP virtual machine) and the speed is great, I’ve even tried some overclocking; I’ve had it at 3.2GHz stable.

Now if only I could get Karmic working.

Update

I bit the bullet and did an “update-manager -d“. Everything is working as far as I can see, yeah!

On a related note, the schedule is filling up but there is still time for you to submit a talk proposal. If you have a cool subject to talk about, either in a lightning session or longer talk format then you should edit the wiki as soon as possible.

The announcement can be found here and the new #launchpad-dev channel on freenode should be used for any Launchpad code questions.

This really is a massive move by Canonical and lets hope this furthers the adoption of Linux by making development so much easier.

Apple

No-one can deny that Apple has completely pushed the boundaries of what the smart phone users of this world expect. They want bling, they want pizazz and most importantly they want it all to work with their PC (or Mac). The iPhone ecosystem ‘just works’. Its pretty robust and offers a rich user interface-come-desktop-tie-in that no other mobile device can compete with at the moment. I met with a very ambitious start-up today that are banking a large proportion of their future business on the iPhone but yet hate the development experience. How can a platform that its developers really don’t like succeed and succeed to the extent that the Apple model does? The development rewards, that’s how!

Although pretty slim, there is a chance that “your cool app (TM)” will succeed in the app store and make you a small fortune and believe it or not, you lottery playing skeptics, this is a big incentive for developers. Nothing else competes with the low barrier for entry and the potential rewards at the moment. The hardware is great, especially the new iPhone S, and the development has the XCode eco-system behind it meaning that, while not straightforward, development is seldom insurmountable.

The down-trade for these riches? You sell your soul to Apple (maybe, I haven’t read through the fine print yet).

The Bigger Threat, Android

Android for me is what has got everyone scared. A free-to-license mobile operating system and SDK with the clout of Google behind it. Its like the 500lb gorilla in the corner that ‘has a pleasant nature’ but it could also rip the head of the mobile industry if it wanted, and oh how I think it wants to in 2010.

Android is the major player here. Apple may have the numbers at the moment but there is a huge amount of people who refuse to buy Apple for one reason or another and for them (some 90% of the desktop population for comparison) they need an alternative. Android will be rolled out in a scale unknown to the mobile industry. I predict that every manufacturer will have an Android based phone by the end of next year, Nokia included, and that pretty rapidly it will become an Android Vs iPhone war for the smart-phone crown. So where does Nokia’s flagship Symbian fit in?

Symbian is a transport mechanism, we sell phones!

Unfortunately for the Symbian guys (and gals) I think Nokia’s transposition to a more service and app based company will leave Symbian behind. The push to bring Qt to Symbian signals Nokia’s intent for a cross-platform ecosystem and the natural progression from this would be to completely take out the hardware below and concentrate on the higher level. Why would Nokia continue to push Symbian, and for that fact Maemo, if they could satisfy their main business objectives on any platform that Qt is available? At the moment that includes everything but the iPhone. The other telling fact is that Nokia are concentrating on bringing Qt to Android.

I believe that Nokia know that they cannot compete with Apple or in fact Google. Google have brought out “the alternative”. Motorola, LG, Samsung and other members from the LiMo Foundation have seen the writing on the wall and have concentrated their efforts on Android instead of their own Linux based solution and while Nokia continue to hold 40% of the mobile phone business, they must be looking at where they fit in for the future generation of mobile users.

Nokia’s willingness to port Qt to any and every platform gets me thinking that they know their dominance of the market is over. Their acquisition of Trolltech’s Qt software stack did have me wondering what they were hoping to achieve at the time of purchase but for me its clear now that Nokia are “betting the farm” on Qt’s success on every platform.

Whether that happens of not, we will just have to see.

Currently Dave Neary, Valério Valério and myself have been going over the submissions, ironing out the details and approving (mostly) the talks but the schedule still has plenty room for more. If you have a suggestion for a cool talk, a lightning session or would like to speak but need help, then make yourself heard now!

Make a suggestion with your subject being pitched to either Users, App Developers, or Platform Developers. It doesn’t have to be a full 25 minute talk, it can also be a 5 minute Lightning session.

So what are you waiting for?

It would be a little pompous of me to say, today we should all be living in a fearful community where as part of the employed masses, we should contemplate our job futures. But with the same token it would predominately be true. Every day it seems we are bombarded with news that company x, multi-conglomerate y, is venting a whole host of talent that are shell shocked at being relieved of their livelihood. A whole host of talent seemingly gone to short-term waste and although we are sympathetic, its a little ‘off the radar’.

Well, what if every unemployed person was given a FLOSS course and assigned a project to either document, use and report bugs on, or even contribute code to? Not only would it give the individual a valuable means of education, it would benefit free software users in general. We would see unprecedented levels of contribution. Unprecedented coverage. WOW, maybe I should run for local council here in the UK and push these issues

So, why do I bring this up? Well, my current company, as are many companies, are trying to find their way in a down-turn market and inevitable that means cutbacks. So I’m free for business so to speak. There are many things to pursue but some things stand out more than others. LinuxUK as an entity is great, a growing business, contractual and predominately short-term contract based, and it will continue to be that way. But I don’t think it can sustain another full-time employee, namely me.

So what would be the dream job of a 30 year old senior software engineer with 10 years commercial experience and a pretty good track record in the open source environment? Well, one just has too look at the like of InDT (WOW!), Nokia’s Maemo initiative, Openismus and CodeThink to see some very cool companies. Companies that are pushing the boat out. Companies that any FOSS developer would be proud of being a part of. So, I guess, as an out of work FOSS fanatic, there are possibilities.

So what does the future hold? I guarantee its immensely cool and productive, but lets wait and see!

All the talk (and sometimes ranting) about Nokia’s so called next tablet got me thinking about the state of the potential market for a device like this today.

First lets go on a trip down memory lane.

History

Nokia released their first Internet Tablet towards the end of 2005. It was announced at the LinuxWorld Summit earlier that year and was a curious device. Not quite a phone and not quite a laptop, the 770 came before the current wave of netbooks had begun descending upon us and was met with some resistance. Many complained about its apparent slowness, but looking beyond this one could see that it had potential.

The N800 came next at the beginning of 2007 to a better reception. A faster processor, more memory and greater expandability meant that the adoption rate was much higher for this device. An improved N810 came later that year which added a keyboard and GPS but by this time other devices had joined or were about to join the party.

Elephants in the Corner

June 29th 2007 saw the release of the Apple iPhone. With its tablet like dimensions and pretty UI, Apples juggernaut redefined the mobile web experience. In contrast, Nokia’s tablet seemed somewhat pedestrian. Whist the Maemo based device gained a small community of devoted followers, the iPhone market exploded.

Now lets get this straight, the iPhone isn’t a direct comparison to the Nokia tablet; they do different things but where they overlap is in the core activities of the devices and this means they are competitors. Sales figures and blogs alike prove that the iPhone was hurting Nokia’s tablet sales.

Towards the end of 2007 saw another behemoth enter this space, namely Google with their Android platform. Arguably more of a competitor than Apple, Android is designed to run on a plethora of hardware from phones to netbooks. It has since seen a wide adoption rate with many manufacturers promising or postulating on bring out devices of their own.

A little later came the netbook revolution. Cheap and small sub-notebooks with small screens and even smaller storage designed to browse the web among other things. Two things happened in respect to Nokia’s Internet Tablets when this happened, one, Nokia now had a serious problem price-wise. These netbooks are cheap, typically well under £200 ($320) which put doubt to Nokia’s £300 launch price for the N810 (it has now dropped below £200 but only because of its impending successor). The second thing that should set the warning bells off at Nokia’s headquarters is the value for money aspect. Consider this. Joe user, which I’m sure Nokia would love to sell their hardware to, walks into an electronics shop with £300 in his pocket. Does he buy the ‘mini-laptop’ with 10″ screen, 40GB SSD, 90% size keyboard and all the bells and whistles you could ask for or a nice little ‘Internet Tablet’ that runs a quirky Linux OS, a small amount of storage and a 4.1″ screen? You could argue that they serve different markets but again, the use of such devices overlaps so much its hard to dismiss these as a serious threat to the Internet Tablet.

Worried Yet?

This alone should have Nokia worried without even mentioning the likes of the iPod Touch (maybe a better comparison?), Moblin’s recent efforts in conjunction with Intel, Canonical’s (the guys funding Ubuntu) efforts with their netbook remix designed for mobile hardware, and maybe even a smudging of the Palm Pre that just screams to be put on hardware outside of the phone space. Nokia’s next tablet enters a very different environment from the one it pioneered in 2005.

Reading Between the ‘Leaked” Lines

There is a lot of talk following the ‘leaked’ information detailing the next Nokia tablet. Most of this information you would already know if you followed last years Maemo Summit coverage but here for completeness is the list in full:

Dimensions: 59.7mmx111mmx18.2mm
Weight: 180g
3.5″ 800×480 (WVGA) touchscreen
OMAP3430 500/600 Mhz processor (Fun Trivia: Same CPU as the Palm Pre)
Bands: GSM Quad-Band 850, 900, 1800, 1900. WCDMA 900, 1700/2100, 2100
5 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera with dual-LED flash, autofocus, and sliding cover
Though the renders we’ve seen show two lens-like circles near the screen, we’ve got no word on what’s behind them. However, we feel safe in assuming that its a proximity sensor and a front-facing camera.
1GB total virtual runtime memory (256MB physical RAM, 768MB virtual memory)
Wi-Fi, HSPA
32GB internal storage, expandable up to 48GB via external memory
Keyboard variants: English, Scandinavian, French, German, South European, Italian, Russia
In the box: Connectivity cable, headset, charger, battery (1320 mAh), Video-out cable, microUSB adaptor, cleaning cloth

There are a few surprises there though, one of which is the mention of a change in screen size. Some have argued quite vehemently that a smaller screen will turn them away from the device but it has to be noted that the iPhone uses a similar sized screen and others in Nokia’s smart phone line-up do aswell.

Another thing that was a little surprise was the inclusion of a 5 megapixel camera, previously a 8 megapixel had been promised but obviously something changed since then.

All in all the new specs indicate that the device will be very similar in size to an Android G1 albeit with a slightly bigger screen (3.5 inches as apposed to the G1′s 3.2 inch) and very similar to Nokia’s own N97. So are we just seeing the Linux/Maemo version of the N97?

How can it Succeed?

Well, this is a tough question. Obviously Nokia are pretty excited about this device which indicates they have something up their sleeve yet to show us. But with the impending new device from Apple widely touted to arrive July, new Android based devices on the horizon along with version 2.0 of the software, and new netbooks being released daily it seems, how can the Maemo 5 based tablet make its mark in an already impressive market?

Well the hardware specifications don’t hint at anything special so it seems we are relying on Nokia to release some exceeding good software to go along with it. Software that makes this device compelling to buy, makes the consumer want this over what the competition has to offer, and keeps evolving to meet the ever demanding needs we as consumers are placing on the mobile industry. Most importantly, will the new Maemo device succeed or become the last in a line of good, but not quite good enough mobile devices?

I guess only time will tell.

Well, the future isn’t exactly clear but it could mean a boost for Maemo. Exactly why is clouded in mystery somewhat.

oFono.org

Lets be clear, oFono isn’t a new operating system, it is an initiative to develop telephony solutions in an open manner. From the oFono.org about page:

oFono.org is a place to bring developers together around designing an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications. oFono.org is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono.org also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with open source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. The plug-in API functionality is modeled on public standards, in particular 3GPP TS 27.007 “AT command set for User Equipment (UE).”

OK, with that out of the way, what does this mean for Nokia, Intel and Maemo?

Commonality

Traditionally Maemo has had nothing to do with telephony outside of implementing ‘everything but the phone’. The internet tablets have GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, in fact one of the most common questions I get asked when I’m in public with the Internet tablet is, “what kind of phone is that?”. But with the new collaboration between Intel and Nokia there is a consensus that maybe, just maybe, the drive between the two companies could produce something special.

But the something special part is what is currently under debate. Intel are primarily a chip designer and producer. Although they have many fingers in many pies they signaled their intent by backing Moblin, a project, from their own website, described as an initiate to produce an operating system for “netbooks, MIDs, and automotive”. What does this have to do with Nokia’s Symbian phone software or their Internet tablet software? Exactly nothing. So where do the two companies potentially overlap?

Well, with a little give and take they could be shoe-horned into one other. Nokia’s internet tablet could be considered too small for a netbook but with a couple of inches screen real-estate and a better keyboard could be considered a reasonable netbook? Moblin’s OS on stripped down internet table hardware in the dashboard of you next car purchase? The heavy-weight status of Intel behind Nokia’s struggling platform ensuring a rosier future for both? Lots of questions without a lot of answers at the moment.

A Bright Future?

In the undertones of the Nokia community they see the potential. A car based solution called Canola is the perfect solution for many a car journey. It’s just waiting to be picked up by the likes of Ford or Audi. Nokia’s strides with Maemo 5 and an OpenGL ES/Clutter based interface would be wonderful on a netbook or MID. Nokia’s experience with the ever present Symbian OS gives them a huge share of the market already familiar with what they have to offer. So what is the answer and is there such an answer in existence yet?

Predictions

Here are a few bold statements. If they are wrong then its a case of 2 + 2 = 5, if they are right, and I suspect there is a lot of truth underlining this here, then a clever connection of the dots has already spelled it out. So what will happen to Nokia and Intel’s foray into the telephany, MID, automotive, internet tablet, and netbook arenas?

Here are LinuxUK’s predictions.

1) Nokia release Maemo 5 on OMAP 3 hardware. Slide out keyboard and slightly smaller but clearer screen. Clutter based interface is an instant success as Nokia demonstrate the power of 3D effects on a small but very functional device. HSPA interface is first treated with contempt as people are tied into a contract with no phone services. Nokia brag about Skype and hope the concerns go away. Camera is amazing BTW.

2) Nokia soon after announce Symbian and Maemo live happily together. Based off of their efforts with QT, they bring cross-platform to a thorny beginning with apps designed for both targets.

3) Nokia announce a partnership with a major car manufacturer to produce in-car entertainment devices using Intel based chips. Appeasing both Moblin and Maemo camps, announces that its an open platform for both parties. Open source car tech, wow!

4) Meanwhile, Intel announces a MID based on its own hardware but utilizing hildon and various parts of Maemo software. oFono telephony software slips into the MID form factor.

5) Nokia announce, in partnership with Intel, they are looking at bringing telephony to their Maemo platform. Early adopters of the Maemo 5 based hardware rejoice. They may get a phone after-all.

6) Telephony stack is ported to Maemo 5 hardware, Intel and Nokia bring out a sexy phone, much sexier than the internet tablets based on Maemo, for the masses. Internet tablet users convince themselves they bought their tablet because it didn’t have a phone but quietly admire the new device.

7) Android, looks on in disgust, quietly scared.
…?

Reality

I believe the the major clout of Android and Google means that they believe they will win the phone OS war. In their targets are iPhone, Blackberry and the act of converting the dumb-phone Nokia users into smart phone users. For Nokia’s sake, I hope they are wrong. I truely hope Nokia and Intel can combine to produce a platform to rival Android. Yes, internet tablets are cool, but they don’t sell units. Shifting units is what is going to win this war. Lets not forget <a href="http://www.limofoundation.org/"LiMo. An effort to bring an open source operating system to phone users. I would bet my bottom pound that most LiMo users have never hear of, let alone read the GPL.

There is a fear that Nokia will die in the age of the smart phone although Nokia has been producing smart phones for longer than any competitor. I hope for Nokia’s sake that their foray into open source, namely Maemo, combines with Intel to bring them out the other side firmly holding an open source phone/tablet to rival Apples and Google’s emerging dominance.

Update: It seems that Intel is indeed looking at the mobile space as a way of expanding its business model. A post on UMPC portal has good commentary on Intels road map which has just been leaked (Intel even use pictures of Nokia’s phones in the material).

In the spirit of open source, I modified the code slightly and you can now get the remove-trailing-white-space-but-not-the-last-blank-line plugin from here.

Unpack the two files into your ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins directory (create one if its not there) and start up GEdit. Select ‘Plugins’ from the Edit->Preferences menu and enable the “Save without trailing space’ plugin from that menu.

1. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
Well, as this is one of the most read (and often lied about being read) books I though I should take a look. A tour-de-force of writing skills that paints an amazing picture of a bleak future (for the time). A book that you must read but don’t expect sweetness and light. Starts off good, lulls a little in the middle and finishes with a strong surge. The last few pages left me a little wanting at the time but on reflection, they did exactly what they were supposed to do.

2. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
I started this with little expectation and despite the books simple message; successful people are the ones born with quite a bit of intelligence, work extremely hard and have some extraordinary breaks in life, I really liked this. Written well with a good if steady pace, another book I’d recommend.

3.The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and Reg Keeland
Well, this book has got a good reputation and without knowing anything about it I though I would pick it up based on that. For me, its slow to start and I admit that at times, I lost track of the various characters names as the story unfolded but the final third of the book had me hooked.

4.The Undercover Scientist: Investigating the Mishaps of Everyday Life by Peter J. Bentley
This book caught me by surprise. Another one that I had no idea about before I picked it up but it wasn’t what I expected. The book is written as a day in the life of an unfortunate person who has his unfair share of problems. Where the science comes in is in the explanation of what is actually going on in each of these scenes. A lot of the science behind this I already knew, but being in the science field already its to be expected. All in all an entertaining read in a format that makes you smile once in a while.

5.Bell labs, the jewel in the crown by Narain Gehani
I don’t like to criticize books too much so I’ll leave it at dry, dry, dry; avoid.

6.7.8.9. Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer
Now a 30 year old man and teenage vampire/werewolf romance saga’s don’t usually go together but I can honestly say I’m unashamed in liking every one of these books. I started the 4 four books wanting to know what all the hype was about, I didn’t manage to put them down until all four books were read, cover to cover. A great tale that appeals to all ages although I do feel I’m well in touch with my teenage girly side For the sceptical (like I was) read twilight and I dare you not to read the other 3 books (breaking dawn was my favorite BTW but probably because there’s more action in it than the others).

10. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray
Umm, ah, I .., ah shit, read it because the other half recommended I should read it. As always, she got it wrong Terribly obvious and utterly boring book. Before I get flogged by the feminists that say all men should read it, I did read it, assimilated the contents, rolled over and farted after drinking a beer. OK (it was entertaining at times though I admit). ]]> http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/05/recent-reading-marchapril/feed/ 0 http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/jaunty-released/ http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/jaunty-released/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:07:13 +0000 Jamie Bennett http://linuxuk.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/jaunty-released/ It seems Jaunty has hit the Canonical servers now.

Go get it!

http://www.ubuntu.com



]]> http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/jaunty-released/feed/ 0 http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/royal-mail-now-deliver-curries/ http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/royal-mail-now-deliver-curries/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:56:02 +0000 Jamie Bennett http://linuxuk.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/royal-mail-now-deliver-curries/ This is what the postman brought me today at work, a Mas Parental Curry Pack from Rafi’s Spicebox. I’ve heard about Rafi’s before from a few friends and being the curry fan that I am, I decided to try it.

Rafi’s basically do all the hard work for you, adding the spices, chopping the chilli’s e.t.c, all you have to do is add the meat and any other ingredients that you want. This particular curry bag requires some coconut cream and chopped tomatoes too.

Mmm, now to get home and cook it!

]]> http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/royal-mail-now-deliver-curries/feed/ 0 http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/rsstorrent-version-0-3/ http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/rsstorrent-version-0-3/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 08:09:32 +0000 Jamie Bennett http://linuxuk.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/rsstorrent-version-0-3/ I’ve released version 0.3 of rsstorrent after some good user feedback.

After looking into the problem with content-disposition responses from some tracker sites it became clear that the actual files that were being downloaded were .torrent files, just without the .torrent extension. One dependency removed (wget) and a quick bit of python code and now rsstorrent appends the extension to these files enabling your torrent client to use them.

Go get the files from http://code.google.com or directly from the git repository at GitHub.com.

]]> http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/rsstorrent-version-0-3/feed/ 0 http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/entertainer-0-4-released/ http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/entertainer-0-4-released/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:02:41 +0000 Jamie Bennett http://linuxuk.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/entertainer-0-4-released/ Version 0.4 of Entertainer has just been released. There are an amazing 50 bugs that have been fixed since 0.3 showing that the team is firmly committed to ironing out those teething bugs that creep into any new project.



Some of the highlights include:

1. Full screen support.
2. Improved translation support (7 languages with partial support for many others).
3. And don’t forget the many many fixes!

See the release announcement here.

Plans for the future include full clientserver support, mouse (and future finger) support, kinetic scrolling and many more.

Hop on over to the Entertainer mailing list, join us at irc.freenode.net (#entertainer) or checkout the Launchpad.net page for more information.

]]> http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/04/entertainer-0-4-released/feed/ 0 http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/03/start-them-young/ http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/03/start-them-young/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:59:57 +0000 Jamie Bennett http://linuxuk.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/start-them-young/ A 13 year old boy named Dmitri Gaskin has just given a short talk at DrupalCon DC. What makes this even more amazing is the fact that Dmitri has already been developing drupal software for 3 years (this site is based on drupal) and that last year he was a Google Summer of Code mentor and will be again this year!

When work is seemingly getting you down and you think you are struggling to get to the dizzy heights of open source stardom even though your trying hard, think again. At 13 years old I think I was still playing with action men!

]]> http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/03/start-them-young/feed/ 0 http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/03/rsstorrent-version-0-2/ http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/03/rsstorrent-version-0-2/#comments Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:23:41 +0000 Jamie Bennett http://linuxuk.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/rsstorrent-version-0-2/ Some rss feeds contain url’s that use something called content-disposition. From the HTTP/1.1 spec:

"The Content-Disposition response-header field has been proposed as a means for the origin server to suggest a default filename if the user requests that the content is saved to a file. This usage is derived from the definition of Content-Disposition in RFC 1806 [35].

content-disposition = "Content-Disposition" ":"
disposition-type *( ";" disposition-parm )
disposition-type = "attachment" | disp-extension-token
disposition-parm = filename-parm | disp-extension-parm
filename-parm = "filename" "=" quoted-string
disp-extension-token = token
disp-extension-parm = token "=" ( token | quoted-string )"

All this means is that when you request a file from a site that uses content-disposition, you probably won’t get the filename that you expected. This used to trip up rsstorrent, until now. As a quick fix, I have enabled wget support which is used when rsstorrent comes across content-disposition in the header field of any torrent address. This may not be the best solution but it does work. I’m looking for a better solution but wget is a pretty ubiquitous application and fits in with the lightweightness of rsstorrent. It does mean that rsstorrent now depends on wget and while I was at it, I upgraded pythons urllib module to urllib2 as urllib is being depreciated.

Go download the latest version from code.google.com or get the git repository from github.com.

]]> http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/03/rsstorrent-version-0-2/feed/ 0 http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/03/ubuntu-running-on-the-nokia-n8x0-tablets/ http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/03/ubuntu-running-on-the-nokia-n8x0-tablets/#comments Sun, 15 Mar 2009 19:16:18 +0000 Jamie Bennett http://linuxuk.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/ubuntu-running-on-the-nokia-n8x0-tablets/ Wow, just wow. The fruits of the arm port of Ubuntu are starting to flourish, behold, Ubuntu 9.04 on the Nokia N8x0 tablets.



]]> http://www.linuxuk.org/2009/03/ubuntu-running-on-the-nokia-n8x0-tablets/feed/ 1