Mostly Harmless

I tried installing Lyceum a few months back but couldn’t get it working right. Decided this evening to give the latest version (0.34) a whirl and I’m pleased to report it installs smoothly. Simply point the webroot at src/lyceum, pop the database info in the config file and go through the installation wizard and you’re done.

Now that’s complete you have a working system that lets you easily run a blogging community. Creating a new blog is as simple as filling in a registration form and checking your email for the password. There is also a plugin to hook up with LDAP - which must be very exciting if you’re into that sort of thing

It’s interesting that whilst Wordpress has it’s own multi user version in Wordpress MU (used on wordpress.org) that even has a supported Enterprise version someone has felt it necessary to provide an alternative solution with a substantially altered structure. Lyceum has a FAQ entry on the differences.

I’ll be giving installing MU a go tomorrow and then fiddling with er… appraising each system to see which is best for my purposes.

Rowan :: Apr.30.2007 :: Lyceum, Web Apps :: 1 Comment »

Anyone who hasn’t yet go check out Nine Inch Nail’s new release Year Zero (go on you can listen to the whole thing online I’ll wait). You also NEED to swing by NINWiki and read at least some of the back story.

Most importantly it’s the first album I’ve heard to actually mean something since 1994’s The Holy Bible Rather than harp on about it I’ll let you discover for yourself.

lefsetz get much more excited much more effectively that I ever could, go have a read - however the one thing I’ll really disagree with about their entry is the stuff about Mac owners. Creativity or even participating in cool online goings on is not determined by the brand of your hardware!

I’ve considered Macs multiple times but at the end of the day having to pay a premium for the fact that it’s a Mac is as bad as having to pay a “Microsoft tax” on a new PC. Yes Garageband is great but Audacity is a good first stop for anyone who wants to play on a Windows or Linux machine and LMMS is also worth checking out. Or if we’re talking about Reznor’s source files and you have another fave editor / sequencer just convert the files to WAV and away you go if it won’t open GarageBand files.

The money I saved by buying a non Mac Laptop (even with a three year onsite warranty) will let me go to about six NIN gigs and with a decent Linux distro installed it can more or less do everything the cool people on Macs can do.

As for the tracks being available to listen via steaming on the band’s website it’s clearly the way of the future. It didn’t stop me buying the CD, it made me pre-order it. It helps that the Year Zero digipack feels worth having (lyrics book, cool artwork, colour changing CD).

RIAA dinosaurs take note, change or die.

Rowan :: Apr.26.2007 :: Music, Personal Entries :: No Comments »

Doing an OS upgrade is often troublesome. It is better to back up your data and do a clean install. Most of us don’t for various reasons. I always try upgrades before clean installs - it’s probably a form of self abuse.

This version of Kubuntu has a shiny new upgrade wizard which made this a pretty easy upgrade and would definitely be do-able for the Linux Newbie. However there are still a couple of gotchas that might catch out Mr “average user”.

Following the upgrade instructions here is simple, but could do with being in better English. Screenshots or even a screencast would lessen the opportunity for error. A user who wishes to upgrade may not be wholly comfortable adding a source for example and need a little hand holding.
The upgrade took about three hours to download (2GB) and then about half an hour to apply on my Core2 Duo system.

The only actual difficulty was when mdadm installed. This is probably part of my system because my hardware features onboard RAID controllers, however the only active RAID is hardware only and thus transparent to the operating system. I was asked the question “which arrays should be started on boot?” - the correct answer is none. Answering all or entering devices may prevent your system booting if like me you do not have any arrays. If questions like this are likely to occur, information on how to answer the questions (other than the normal “go read man mdamn” bs) should be readily available to the user when the question is presented.

On reboot, SMB4K refused to mount shares once again as a user, this can be fixed by a quick

sudo chmod +s `which smbmnt`

Aside from that everything seems to work without issue. That’s very nearly a flawless upgrade. I’m impressed.

Rowan :: Apr.25.2007 :: Linux, Operating Systems, Reviews :: No Comments »

Managed to pick up X3 Reunion Game of the Year Edition at Woolies for £6 which given it has the latest patch from February and a whole host of other bits and bobs was a pretty good deal.

However to play one of these games you really want a Force Feedback Joystick (a space sim with a keyboard and mouse? ugh) which meant I found myself dusting off my SideWinder ForceFeedback Pro. Small problem, my latest gaming PC doesn’t have a midi / gameport.

Some quick thievery of an ancient Turtle Beach Montego 2 sound card from an ancient Dell tower later and I was trapped in the hell of old devices. This is a quick run down of what I had to do to get it working. The games machine is based on the Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard.

• Plug and Play OS Support enabled in PCI section of BIOS (without this enabled machine would not POST with joystick connected!)

• Windows would not start without hopping into safe mode first after the above - go figure. All fine after a quick visit to Safemode and a reboot.

• The midi / sound features of the soundcard should be enabled as apparently these are used for the ForceFeedback (I’d originally intended to have the gameport only enabled)

• No Sidewinder drivers are available for XP. Use the Sidewinder option under add game device in the control panel. Force Feedback strength and other options is now game specific rather than configured within control panel.

The game takes up a shocking 4GB of disk space and takes a fair amount of time to install. Review coming as soon as I’ve played it

Rowan :: Apr.25.2007 :: Game Hardware, Games :: No Comments »

la redoute appear to require a lesson in basic manners. Sending letters out to your customers which state “you haven’t bought from us since 2004, so if you don’t buy something soon we won’t send you a catalogue” is somewhat unlikely to inspire customer loyalty. Especially when they’ve had recent orders from the same household, but due to the oddness of their database system we have about 12 customer numbers between us.

Receiving your catalogue is not a privilege, we may wish to use it to exchange money for goods…

Stick to sending out vouchers and special offers please.

Rowan :: Apr.20.2007 :: Marketing, Personal Entries :: No Comments »

Breakfast TV today was talking about another sterling piece of research on the working habits of men and women. On the findings that men actually work harder than was thought the pundits made the interesting points that “most of the men were probably lying” and “if these new men exist I’ve never met any”.

Good to have a balanced discussion on morning TV to really get you thinking isn’t it? These are the same comments on this sort of survey / research I’ve been hearing what…oh yeah, all my life! (Yes I ought to stop watching breakfast TV). As a child it was bemusing, now as an adult it’s just got really really old.

I can just imagine the research interviews now… (if you close your eyes you’ll almost hear the carpet crackle).

The researcher begins to question me about how hard I actually work. I break into a cold sweat because I work from home, sit in the garden with the laptop in warm weather and only hoover when things off the carpet obviously start to stick to my feet as I walk on it.

The research assistant is young, pretty and most importantly looks a bit gullible. I glance around… good no other men within earshot.

Making sure I maintain eye contact throughout so that the interviewer doesn’t think I’m lying, I report that I work a sixty hour week, do all of the housework and am home teaching the two children I don’t actually have. She records it diligently and YES I think she’s bought it. She’s looking at me in a new light, if I were only ten years younger, single and could actually be bothered.

Male pride restored I then go home, shout at the other half to “clear this f**king mess up now” and sit down to watch the football whilst throwing empty crisp packets and cans onto the floor, because I work hard enough lying to researchers about how hard I work to use the bin.

Oh please.

How about spending research money on something worthwhile, there are plenty of actual issues in the world to solve. Go fix ‘em…

Rant over.

Note: I’ve had a browse round the BBC site and I can’t find the actual research, which I wanted to have a glance at in case the whole thing was simply misreported I often seem to have that problem with the BBC site as there is just so much there.

Edit - here is the link if you want to try and get the BBC to accept your snippet of wisdom :p

Rowan :: Apr.19.2007 :: Personal Entries :: No Comments »

Since finally getting round to installing OpenSuse 10.2 on my laptop, I’m going to be trying to live without MS Operating systems on the desktop during working hours. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. The reasons are mainly stability, transparency of errors when they do occur and ease of upgrading / adding software.

Featured Linux Distributions

OpenSuse 10.2

Kubuntu 6.10

For completeness, I ought to state that at work we are currently standardising on CentOS for our Cpanel/WHM servers (there are a few instances of Fedora Core hanging around but those are being phased out).

I will also have to run Microsoft OS’s in Virtual Machines for support purposes at work as we need to be able to attempt to replicate reported issues with XP and Vista - as well as keep them around simply to remain familiar. Having these as (hopefully) throwaway virtual instances will aid us in instances where the problem must be reproduced with an esoteric set of desktop software that would be difficult to put in place or downgrade to on a “proper” work desktop.

Whilst I personally believe it’s fine to promote and indeed increase your skills in one technology over another, being too blinkered can lead to a sort of career sepuku No matter how much as a troubleshooter or admin you may learn to love Linux keep your existing skills polished.

Next time

I’ll be looking at the applications on Linux that have replaced their Win32 predecessors.

Rowan :: Apr.15.2007 :: Giving up Windows, Linux, Operating Systems, Vista :: No Comments »

I’m typing this from my Dell M1210 laptop after finally installing OpenSuse 10.2 on it. Not everything works (the webcam may need a little work) but the things that really ought to work out of the box do

• Wireless (WPA-PSK)
• Flash (with sound)
• DNS resolving at full speed thanks to the installer option to disable IPV6
• Fonts available out of the box

There were however a few downsides

• Installer couldn’t cope with the fact that Dell by default use all four partitions and the fifth extended one and suggested deleting everything and starting again
• Despite adding Internet sources during the installation the main, non oss and update repos had to be added manually using Yast after the install was complete

Seemingly we’re getting very close to a desktop Linux, freely* available on the Internet for download that can be installed on a consumer laptop without too much hassle. If we imagine the user wants to wipe all their partitions and not be able to download updates that is…

In all seriousness though, the amount of extra configuration really isn’t anymore onerous than after installing XP (and in terms of downloading updates, is actually easier because constant rebooting is not required). Yes I’ll have to install Nvidia’s drivers to get 3D support, but I’d have to do that on Windows too. It feels slick on the Core 2 Duo and practically everything works.

Maybe when 10.3 is released eh?

*And by freely I mean with mostly everything working out of the box whether or not you’ve had to agree to a tiresome EULA or similar that you didn’t read anyway. (Naughty I know).

Rowan :: Apr.13.2007 :: Linux, Operating Systems :: No Comments »

So I finally got my copy of Vista Business through from Dell for my M1210 laptop after a month or two of waiting - I paid £11 for the privilege and it took an impressive two days to get from the US of A to the South Coast of England. Funnily enough, Vista is only worth $2.70 according to the customs statement.

But I can’t come up with a decent reason to actually install it…

Continue Reading »

Rowan :: Apr.05.2007 :: Operating Systems, Vista :: No Comments »