OneAndOneIs2

I'm unemployed now. I have to spend the whole month of August not doing any work whatsoever.

It's a hard life.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. With 7 as the bonus ball.

Yes...

I'm good at telling the future, clearly.

It always surprises me, which things I write become popular. When I wrote the defrag post, for instance, I thought it might be used occasionally on a few Linux forums for a while and then vanish into obscurity. Instead it hit the front page of Digg and still gets around 700 visits a day, a year after it was first published.

A few other posts get a moderate amount of traffic: The guide on tunnelling Portable Apps traffic securely through your home PC gets a gratifying half-dozen hits a day, for instance. I flatter myself that it's a useful guide.

Most of the posts that I would consider useful, though, tend to fade away into the ether. And throwaway ramblings like last week's "GPL v3 killer" wind up plastered on TuxMachines and the front page of FSDaily.

Makes me wonder why I bother working on all the useful stuff, really. Maybe if I just rambled a bit more...

So... more posts like this one, coming up!

After eight years working in this department, today is my last day. As of tomorrow, I'll be unemployed. A month later, almost as bad, I'll be a student again.

I thought I might escape the "photos plastered all over the desk" treatment, and I almost got away with it - but somebody thought of looking on Facebook so they found me with an Orang Utan picture.

One, naturally, has the caption "A self-portrait?"

My leaving gift turns out to be book tokens - no great surprise there - and a ribbon-bound bundle of red pens "for future use" :o)

The Gillette Mach 3, contrary to popular belief, isn't a razor. It's a self-torture device with clever marketing.

So I would have sworn after it made four long years at university noticeably longer. It's amazing how much sore bleeding skin can impact on your day.

But I'm a curious type, and I couldn't help but wonder how well it would work if, instead of using it on dry skin covered with gel out of a pressurized cannister, I used it with my now-customary brush-applied lather.

So this morning, I dragged my old enemy out of retirement and gave it a go after my shower.

It's actually a very weird experience, dragging a flat plastic cartridge across your face when you're used to a more traditional type of razor. It kind of reminds me of a potato peeler we've got in the kitchen...

Ah well.

I didn't get a single nick or cut. I'd have been genuinely surprised if I had, to be honest - soap-based lather really does make that much difference. I was, however, expecting to be left with somewhat scraped-feeling skin. Three passes, four (and even five) in places, using a three-bladed cartridge... that's a lot of wear & tear.

However, I can honestly say that the mildest single-blade razors I've got do more damage than the Mach 3 did. Even the Alum block test agreed that there was no damage done - not the slightest tingle.

So all-in-all, a hugely different experience than I had ten years ago (God that makes me feel old.) The Mach 3 used to be painful, bloody, and not a very good shave.

Today... two out of three ain't bad. As stated above, in some places, I actually applied lather & shaved five times to get a reasonably good finish.

The Mach 3 did a pretty good job on flat surfaces, such as my cheeks. But it struggled badly with the area under my chin, which is admittedly densely-packed with hairs. And it just couldn't do anything with my jawline: The sharp angle was just too much for it.

I think I'll keep some spare blades around for it: If nothing else, it's very easy to shave with - no worries at all about maintaining the right angle.

But there's no chance at all that I'll switch to it full-time. Regardless of what the marketing & sales people may say, it just doesn't shave as well as a single-blade.

Or does "silicon laser modulator" sound like something Marvin the Martian would use to blow up the Earth because it obstructs his view of the planet Venus?

They were going to install Vista, but it couldn't cope with the eyecandy without upgrading the graphics card. So they went with Linux.

As you may well have heard, the BBC has launched it's online video service. It hasn't done so to universal enthusiasm.

The main stumbling block? You need Windows XP SP2 and IE 6+ - so if you have a Mac, Linux, or even Windows Vista, you can't use it.

Unlike many, I don't have a problem with it being XP-only to start with: So long as multi-platform support is on the way, and it apparently is, if they have to support one platform at a time, and they apparently do, then they might as well start with the biggest and work down.

No, it all starts with the "support a platform" issue.

Why do they need to do this? There are numerous video formats that are fully platform-independent. Ogg would be the ideal, but even MPEG, with its legal issues, can be easily run on Linux, Solaris, BSD, you name it... And as YouTube has made very clear, Flash can do a lot...

But they haven't gone with any of these. No, they've gone with something that only works on a single platform.

Why? DRM! It's vital that DRM be put in place, to prevent piracy.

Even more than usual, this one inspires the rebuttal: What a crock!

DRM is pointless at the best of times, for reasons everybody outside of the media industry fully understands. However, in the BBC's case, it's even more so.

Let's say, for argument's sake, that I want to get the next series of Dr. Who on my Myth box. The BBC offers me three ways to do this:

- A (currently) Windows-only download service that will let me get a DRM'd copy of the episode for seven days, which will become unwatchable after 30 days. AKA iPlayer

- A fairly CPU-intensive capture & encoding of the analogue broadcast

- A high-quality DRM-free digital stream that can be saved to hard drive without even having to encode it. AKA Freeview

In other words, the BBC first transmits the episode in a form ideal to be saved to a hard drive, completely unencumbered by any form of DRM. And then they make it available online, and are suddenly obliged to wrap it thoroughly in protective encryption to prevent it being misused.

Can you see the logic here?

I mean, at least in the "unprotected CD vs DRM'd iTunes" argument, somebody has to actually pay for the CD before it's available to be ripped to DRM-free.

Something that's broadcasted across the country? Needs DRM? Come on! Has anybody engaged their brain here?

The other argument that worries me is the "I pay my license so the BBC has to make their content available to me without forcing me to pay for Windows" one.

Not that I disagree with this as far as it goes. I've paid my license fee, I should get the same opportunities as everybody else who's paid the license fee.

But then, a bloke I work with, he's got a Windows XP computer. But he's on dial-up, not broadband - it'll take him forever to download worthwhile amounts of content. And he's only got 7 days.

A few other people I know don't have PCs at all. (Luddites, the lot of them!) They can't get any value from this new service at all. And yet they've paid the same fees I have.
So arguing that Linux users should be catered for because we've paid the license fee is tantamount to saying that the BBC should provide free broadband-connected PCs for everybody who's paid the license fee.

So I wonder: Considering the amount of fuss being kicked up on the "It has to be available to everybody who's paid the license!" front, the BBC could take the easy way out.

They could make it a separate service, not covered by the license, for which you pay separately.

Just because it's BBC, doesn't mean it's got to be free to license-payers. I know, I've got over a hundred quid's worth of their DVDs sitting on the floor at home.

They say Linux support is on its way. I, for one, am happy to just let them get on with it. There are worse alternatives than being the third in the queue.

P.S. I found this to be a quite insightful illustration of why DRM can never attain its ultimate goal.

That's twice I've signed up for a LUG meeting, twice I'd been emailed the daily reminders for the week prior to the meeting, twice I've been fully aware that there was a LUG meeting happening that evening, and then utterly forgotten about it upon leaving work.

Just what kind of a memory did I get fitted with, to be this faulty? I ask you...

Oh well. There's always next month...

My webhost finally got their rear in gear and sorted out the issue - apparently, the dates of the hosting and the dates of the domain name got out of synch so renewal of one didn't trigger renewal of the other.

Don't ask me, I just pay the bills.

But oneandoneis2.com is now back up & running - just as well, since I invariably give a .com email address when signing up for any online sites. So ebay, amazon, and just recently facebook have all been unable to contact me.

They've coped admirably without me, though ;o)

I see Intel has just released the previously-commercial-only Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under GPL v2.

And this has reminded me of the complications Qt has brought up being v2-only, and it suddenly occurred to me that there's a way MS could bring a really sneaky anti-v3 strategy to bear.

MS has a number of proprietary things that the FOSS world would like to get inter-operable. The NTFS file system. The Office formats. Etc. etc. And the EU has been nagging at them to release interoperability information for ages.

Since MS seems to really dislike GPL v3, they could solve a lot of their problems with a simple move: Release all the code necessary to get interoperability under Linux working. Under GPL v2 only.

Take Samba. Samaba is going GPL v3-only. If MS released some significantly-big v2-patches for the last v2 version that resulted in much better Linux-Windows networking compatibility, a lot of people would use the MS-patched version of Samba: Most end users are more concerned with how well software works than with which license it's released under.

That would leave the Samba team with two choices: Stick with GPL v3 and have a less-popular, less-functional fork of their own software. Or cave in and go back to GPL v2 so they can take advantage of the GPL'd code from MS.

And either way, MS would be able to show to concerned parties, such as the EU antitrust people, that they have finally released the code that the FOSS people have been demanding, under the single most popular FOSS license in use.

That being the case, I think we should look with deep cynicism at any sudden code releases from Microsoft over the coming months... Despite it being a real chore to take code and turn it into a specification that can be used for a clean-room implementation, it would probably be worth doing.

I use vi. I have O'Reilly books on using vi (the plural thanks to a nice complete stranger who bought me one of my Amazon Wishlist items) When I write code (Must get back into that) or edit config files, I use vi. When I expect to use a computer for any length of time, regardless of platform, I install vi.

So this isn't a statement from an Emacs user, you understand. However...

Is there any hack more utterly pointless than vi on an iPhone?!?

Vi - a text editor notorious for its plethora of keyboard shortcuts. The iPhone - notorious for having no keyboard.

I mean... what are you supposed to DO with it??

Seriously?

This is a well known fact. There are no "proper" games for Linux, and the only 3D-accelerated software available is Tux Racer.

So last night, I wasn't bored of Mah jong and I didn't go looking through my drawers for something more exciting to play, and I didn't rediscover an old favourite. Nor was it the first time I'd played said game (because there wasn't one) on my new flatscreen monitor with a higher resolution (1400x1050) than my old CRT.

The game in question wasn't Darwinia, one of the few games I've actually considered worth spending money on. It isn't (I'm sick of all these negatives, that's the last one!) a 3D strategy game with a somewhat Tron-like feel to it. It's multi-platform, running on Windows, OS X, and Linux.

The object of the game is to wipe out the invading virus and save the little green men, AKA Darwinians. You can't directly control the Darwinians, but you can create "squads" and "engineers" - squads shoot things, engineers reprogram infected machines and gather up "souls" of dead Darwinians, infected or not, so they can be reincarnated.

You get more things as you go through, as you find "research" cubes scattered around. The first one upgrades your squads so they can lob grenades as well as fire lasers. Others let you drop bombs, arm the Darwinians, and do other such fun things.

The good thing about the game is that, although there's only so many levels, as you learn more about the various upgrades & strategies, you can play them different ways.

For instance, the first level, instead of slowly fighting your way through half the viral infection to get to the grenades, you can instead send an engineer on a rather circuitous route around the infected areas so you gain the grenades before you go anywhere. Then your squads can quickly wipe out the infection and get on with the game.

Second level, you have to disinfect as many Darwinians as possible. This can be awkward, as you have to fight your way through hundreds of infected individuals before you can reach the reincarnation machines, and you only have a short time to rescue the "souls" of dead infected Darwinians before they float away and you lose them.

So whilst fighting your way through seems the way to go, a better ruse is to use decoys: Send a couple of engineers straight through the infected area. They will be killed as the viruses follow and destroy them. But they'll leave a clear path behind them that you can use to send an engineer right the way around the island, where it can reprogram a reincarnation unit for you, before you've killed a single infected Darwinian.

Then you can put a squad there, and attack from the rear, and almost every Darwinian can thus be saved.

My next goal is to upgrade the Darwinians as fast as possible, because the sooner they upgrade, the sooner they'll be armed with guns and lasers. When that happens, you can use them as a fairly intelligent attack squad that takes the burden off you having to use squads, which only work when you actively direct them.

If you fancy a go on the game, download the free demo - it's how I got started!

Tried my new razor today. It's a Merkur razor, so I figured I might as well start with Merkur blades.

Just as well I did! I dread to think what Feather blades might have done to me - those being the ones made in Japan by ninjas who also use them as throwing starts.

Okay, that's probably not true. But they're the most lethally sharp blades going. I use them when I want a very close shave and can face the idea of the inevitable nick or two.

I think, though, that I can safely assume the Merkur HD razor has a more aggressive setting than what I've been using so far, because it resulted in a Feather-close shave even using the Merkur. And several small nicks, which I've not had with anything but a Feather blade in a long time.

Shall have to modify my technique slightly, obviously. But I do like the new razor: It's completely eradicated stubble, even in the problem areas in my neck that my old razor could never quite get.

Applying the new (and rather nice) Trumper's Skin Food aftershave balm afterwards just highlighted the "BBS" results (that's "baby's-butt smooth" in shaving forum parlance, not the more usual "bulletin board system")

I'll probably try a Feather blade at the weekend, when I've had a few days' practice.

And if you assume from this exhaustive update on a razor that I'm extremely bored at work right now, you'd be right. A week before my imminent departure, they decided to completely change the seating arrangements, so everybody but me is busily swapping desks, and very little work is getting done.

Roll on next week.

My webhost did something to email recently, finally making all my email accounts accessible directly through Horde for the first time since the upgraded it a few months back. I had a work-around for it - using POP to download the mail - so I didn't care too much, but when I noticed a day or two later that it wasn't downloading from my @oneandoneis2.com addys, I figured it was a bug in the upgrade and would go away again soon.

Just a minute ago, I saw that my FSF icon over in the sidebar wasn't loading. Attempting to access it directly took me to a "This domain is parked free!" advertisement.

WTF?!?

I checked the domain directly: http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.com/ - and apparently "This domain name expired on 07/14/07 and is pending renewal or deletion"

Excuse me???

So as far as I can tell, despite renewing the .com account, they didn't renew the domain name itself. Which is very helpful of them.

So I've fired off a letter and hopefully it'll be sorted out ASAP. In the meantime, I'm devoid of half my domain names

Normal service will hopefully be resumed shortly

There were, in fact, TWO packages - one left by Royal Mail.

The first, totally sealed up in sellotape, was French Chalk off ebay.

Why? Because I'm a cheapskate. But more because I have an irrational dislike for having to fill things back up.

Seriously. I bitterly resent having to recharge batteries and put petrol in my car. The first thing I look for when buying a phone is its battery life, and the MPG and fuel tank size aren't far down the list when I look for a car.

So... a number of years ago, I took up scuba diving. (There is a link, just wait.) Being a cold country, divers here tend to wear drysuits. Drysuits mostly have latex seals. Seals keep the water out, so you need to keep them in good condition. Putting talc on your seals absorbs oils from the sea and from your skin, and keeps them from rotting.

Or so some people will say. Other people will say that talc rots your seals like nothing or earth, and should be avoided at all costs.

The reason for this is that people don't appreciate that there's a big difference between talc, and what they think is talc.

What they think is talc is the talcum powder sold in various shops. The trouble is, talc is a rock. Not a fragrant cosmetic.

Talc should be applied liberally to latex to stop it rotting. Typical talcum powder is hideously bad for it. The difference? Talcum powder is talc with added perfume. Talc itself has no odour, you see.

And perfume is oil-based. So applying oil-laden powdered talc to seals to get prevent oil damage is a bit of a hiding to nothing.

So I hunted down some unadulterated talc for my drysuit, and since it was there, I used it myself as well. No point having TWO bottles of talc, right?

The upshot of this ramble is that I don't like scented talc any more, and my bottle of "Simple" talc is almost empty. And I resent having to keep buying bottles (see above) and I'm not fond of paying the hiked cosmetic prices for a powdered lump of rock.

So I bought some "French chalk" off ebay - because this is just unscented talc. A kilo of the stuff. Should last years before needing a refill.

The other delivery was a new razor. I've not yet used it but I'm already glad I bought it: It's small and comes with its own case, making it vastly more suitable for travelling than my current razor. So even if it's no better, or even slightly worse, it'll do for days when I'm away from home.

I keep meaning to do a post on shaving, but this one's long enough as it is. So:

The End.

I've had run-ins with delivery services before, that lead me to think they're an odd bunch.

I just had a phone call. This one from Parceline. I was at work, he was at my flat. He had a delivery for me. It had to be signed for.

For a moment, I thought "He's not going to ask me to come back and sign for it, is he? It's scary enough that he knows my phone number, if he knows I'm going to be going home for lunch in five minutes, I'm going to be scared."

But no, he just wanted me to give him permission to leave it outside. Apparently, his claim that he phoned me and asked amounts to the same thing as a signature.

I happily gave him permission - saves me a trip to their depot to collect it. But I think I'll cross them off my list of "people I would trust to deliver expensive items for me that require a signature"

When I retired my electric razor and switched to the old fashion soap/brush/safety razor combo, I did all my shopping in an internationally-renowned shop: Taylor's of Old Bond Street (who are slightly tricky to find as they're not IN Bond Street, go figure...)

I've been pretty pleased with almost all my purchases from there. I can get a really good shave with no soreness and almost no nicks, which is a big advance on the crappy shave from the electric razor and the multitude of ingrown hairs it left me with.

The only question mark was the razor itself. No sooner had I mentioned I'd bought it on a shaving forum that I've found is good for advice/reviews, than somebody piped up with "I hope you didn't get the twist-to-open razor" - which of course, I had.

So there's always been this nagging doubt: every time I have any kind of problem, I wonder "Is it the razor?"

Being exceptionally bored, today I went looking for a replacement with a good reputation that I could do some comparisons with. Whilst looking, I came across this shaving brush

Now, admittedly, since badger hair is badger hair, a lot of people make their purchase based on the handle of the brush. But really... is there any appropriate reaction to this, other than "It's made of WHAT??"

A recent post on the LinuxBIOS mailing list highlighted that some recent developments in the world are looking very promising in the BIOS world.

The BIOS is the thing that gets your computer up & running when you turn on the power: You might think that the OS does that, but how do you think your PC knows that it's supposed to boot an OS?

It's an important function, and the BIOS has served well for a number of years. But it's not without its problems. Most BIOSes are proprietary, they're fairly slow, and all-too-frequently they're buggy - due in a large part to being written in hard-to-maintain assembly.

The LinuxBIOS hopes to solve all these problems by creating an open-source, 32-bit, C-coded BIOS replacement, based on Linux. The biggest problem they have is getting the necessary hardware support: Linux has many many hardware drivers, but they only know how to use the hardware once it's up & running: Getting them that far is the BIOS' job. Spot the problem.

So the first thing of note is that Intel is getting involved with the OLPC. Intel's been doing pretty well with open-source drivers etc. lately, but not so much when it comes to the BIOS area, where they're pushing their own replacement, EFI.

If Intel truly wants to benefit from the OLPC, they'd need to get their hardware into it. To do that, by the OLPC's rules, they'd have to release source code for it.

And if they release the source code, the LinuxBIOS devs can of course use it in their own project. So from that point of view, the more Intel puts in, the better - an open-source EFI could be very useful...

The second is Dell. Having recently started selling Linux machines, they already see enough enthusiasm that they're intending to expand and thus they have two things to think about: Firstly, proprietary BIOSes often present problems for Linux; and secondly proprietary BIOSes are actually quite expensive and bump up the price of the hardware.

Both problems are solved with an open-source BIOS. So we see that replacing the proprietary BIOS with LinuxBIOS has actually made it into Dell's top 10 in a list of priorities.

If somebody like Dell throws their weight behind LinuxBIOS, hardware manufacturers would start falling over themselves to get their hardware supported: Lack of support means lack of Dell selling your stuff.

So there we are, the tipping point where the clapped-out, primitive BIOS gets replaced with a superior open-source alternative is getting ever-closer.

And the main advantage here is that if the hardware is supported well enough for LinuxBIOS to initialize it, then it's supported well enough for Linux to run it. Which means that the FOSS-only machines we're all waiting for are also getting ever more likely to be made at last.

Something I've been coming across with more frequency than usual lately: Posts from Linux wannabes.

You all know these guys: "I do want to switch to Linux, but it just isn't friendly enough yet/doesn't have all the apps I need/doesn't have enough games/doesn't support something-or-other so I uninstalled it and will stick with Windows for a bit longer yet"

Mostly these are people who genuinely like the idea of free & open-source software, but can't put up with its (perceived) shortcomings enough to use it full-time.

That's fair enough - nobody ever said there aren't at least some advantages to using Windows. Well, some people do, but they're mostly morons.

And you know, there's things that my laptop can't do (as yet) under Linux that it could under Windows. Can't suspend to RAM. Can't do WiFi. Buggy graphics driver. Etc. etc.

Of course, when it had Windows XP installed on it, it crawled along at a snail's pace because XP is still a fairly resource-hungry OS - when you've got the anti-virus and the firewall & all the other crud installed and running, at any rate. But whilst it was slow and constantly paging to the hard drive, everything did still work.

The problem most people have is that they've been conditioned by the zealots (on both sides) into thinking it's an "either-or" situation: You either use Windows, or you use Linux.

So until Linux can do everything you need it to do, you have to use Windows - no matter how slow, buggy, and virus-ridden it might be.

This is a mindset that badly needs correcting. Linux is free. Dual booting is easy. There's no reason not to have both installed.

Full-fat Ubuntu runs at top speed on my laptop, which struggled badly with XP. If you yearn for Linux's performance and security but can't tear yourself away from MS Office, you don't need to compromise. Have both.

When all you want to do is browse the web, check your email, and chat to a few friends, Linux is right there with Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim/Pidgin.

When you absolutely can't do without Microsoft, a quick reboot is all that stands between you and Windows. And even though they might be slower on a more memory-hungry OS, you can still use Firefox, Thunderbird and Gaim/Pidgin from there.

What's more, with a bit of cleverness and a shared FAT partition, they can all use the same user profiles and be identical between OSes with no updates required.

If Linux meets some of your needs, but not all, there's no reason to remove it. Keep it installed, use it for what you can, and use Windows when you need to.

It won't cost you anything, it'll keep your options fully open, and sooner or later, your increasing familiarity with Linux will combine with its increasing functionality and you'll finally be able to make the switch full-time.

Don't try it out, decide it isn't quite good enough to be your full-time OS yet, and throw it away. Leave it where it is.

What have you got to lose?

but only because it was pretty good at its job.

Like most geeks, I have a lot of music living on my hard drive(s). Although, unlike many geeks, none of it's from P2P downloads.

Some of the music files are years old - dating back to some crappy MP3 shareware ripper I used when I was running Windows. And a lot of ripping software stumbles & falls when it comes across compilation albums: The only reason "Various artists" wasn't the biggest directory in my collection was because it was split into "various", "vairous" and "various artists"

The number of tracks that had the artist's name as part of the title was unreal. And although you can generally edit such information via your music player, bulk renames can be a real trial. It's not a good way to edit literally hundreds of tracks.

Enter EasyTAG. Not only did this make it about as easy as you're likely to get such a task, permitting such things as bulk adjustments of names (Like editing a whole album of tracks from "Surname, Forename" to "Forename Surname" in one go) but it makes it pretty simple to track down duplicate tracks as well - e.g. I ripped "Ladykiller" from the compilation album of the same name some time before I bought & ripped the whole "Best of Lush" album, but the former was found under "V" for "Various artists"

It did seem to have an option to completely re-order the file locations as well, eliminating the "Various artists" directory once and for all. But I wasn't brave enough to try that without a backup, and backing up that many gigs just isn't my idea of fun.

But I thought I'd mention it, as it's genuinely improved the quality of my music collection.

And if you really want to know more about what's in my music collection, try the "last.fm" link up near the top of the sidebar ;o)

You may have heard the complaint - people who are determined to find fault with GNU/Linux complain about the non-intuitive names. How are people supposed to know that the graphics program is called "Gimp", that "Gnome" and "KDE" are popular GUIS, that "amaroK" is a music player, and so on.

(Because "powerpoint" is the most logical name for a slideshow, "excel" is a perfect description of a spreadsheet app, and what else would you look for to read a PDF file but "acrobat"?)

They say that the names of our distros and our applications are sloppy and unprofessional. Well, read 'em and weep!

If a company called "Fluffy Spider" can have a GUI called "FancyPants", then the hobbyist can damn well get away with having a graphics program called "The Gimp"

I use quite a few Portable Apps in day-to-day life. Firefox & Thunderbird routed through a Putty proxy, for starters.

The VLC player has been portable for quite a while, but it's been a little buggy, and no matter how good VLC is (and it IS good) it can't quite compete with mplayer. Which is now available as a Portable app., complete with GUI, since the CLI isn't that big on Windows...

Mplayer's excellent for various reasons. First and foremost, it plays everything. I have never found a movie file it wouldn't play. Even VLC can't make that claim. It's got superb keyboard-control. It's got no annoying GUI elements that just get in the way (something that always turned me away from Xine.)

The only thing mplayer doesn't do is DVD menus. It'll play DVD movies, but you have to know what track to point it at - on the few occasions where it isn't track one. No big problem, esp. since my DVD drive is currently broken...

Even the music files sound better played through mplayer - although that might just be because its volume is turned up rather high

Problems with GPL versioning is already rearing its ugly head - like Linux and (IIRC) Sun's Java code, Qt - the library KDE is built on - is GPL v2 only.

That means KDE as a whole is GPL v2, and so are all its applications. So projects like Samba going to v3 creates a sudden big problem.

Unless Trolltech relicenses Qt to be v3-friendly, the KDE project as a whole might be forced to fork anything that goes to v3 and maintain a v2 version.

I'm not a huge cheerleader for the GPL v3, but the last thing anybody wants or needs is a big divide in the FOSS community. Hopefully this will get resolved without a need for major forking efforts.

Linux being v2-only isn't a real problem, as it doesn't really get directly linked to applications. Java being v2 is a bit of an issue, but Sun seems to like GPL v3 so there's always the possibility of an upgrade. I've not heard anything from Trolltech on their opinion of the new GPL.

This could be painful.. What other projects out there are v2 only?

I've said before that, whilst I might like to upgrade my computer, I wouldn't do so until I could buy/build a PC that worked fully with nothing but open source: I'm sick of broken suspend states and drivers that have to be upgraded manually because they're not part of the kernel.

I wasn't expecting to be able to upgrade for a year or two yet, but knowing just how competent Mark Shuttleworth is at getting what he wants, in the FOSS sphere and others, that upgrade may be closer than expected - with the release of Gobuntu there's a need for computers that can run it, after all.

I shall watch this space closely..

So goes a popular boast. I can't really understand why it's seen as a good thing, tho: I suffered from it yesterday. Or at least, that's what it felt like when I booted into Slackware for the first time. How many times did I think . o O ( There's a simple way to do this, I used to know what it was... erm... )

Being busy with DVDs, I didn't spend much time on it. The only major problem is that the network doesn't work, and that makes it a bit awkward to Google for solutions...

I know exactly what the problem is: My mobo has TWO ethernet ports, a 3COM and an NVIDIA. Because 3COM support was far better at the time I bought the mobo, I've always used that one.

But the "forcedeth" NVIDIA driver has improved a lot over the years, apparently. To the point that Slackware's configured IT as eth0, which is awkward because there's nothing plugged in to that port.

Should be as simple a matter as stopping it loading up the forcedeth driver at boot and the 3COM will then be assigned as eth0.

There's a simple way to do that. I used to know what it was...

That's how many DVDs we have.

Another way of looking at it: We have four shelves of DVDs.

And you know, those boxes that DVDs come in are all very well, and they do their job and all. But sometime, just sometimes, it would be nice if you had some free space instead of shelf after shelf of frigging boxes.

We've run out of space again in our flat, so we've opted to make DVDs the next on our hit-list. Yesterday, I placed an order on Ebay for some ringbinders. Ringbinders that would hold plastic wallets that could hold 8 discs, four on a side. 400 per folder.

They arrived this morning, while I was in the shower. We just finished removing all the discs from the boxes and putting them all into a folder.

I had already alphabetised our DVD collection a long time ago, so it was no problem to put the discs in order so we'd be able to find them when they weren't all on easy view in the bookshelf.

And it's amazing just how little space DVDs have to occupy when you aren't obsessed with keeping the packaging. Over four shelves have been condensed into a single folder that can be stuck out of the way somewhere.

Obviously, the ideal would be cheap terabyte hard drives that we could put in our Myth box and store the DVDs on virtually. But lacking any of those, just dispensing with the boxes will do.

Now we just have to figure out where to put those boxes. Hmm... there's some empty bookshelves we could store them on. . .

It was bad enough when various columnists were doing it. But now even PJ herself has done it: Tried to prove that MS is now bound by the GPL v3 by quoting chapter and verse of the GPL v3.

For crying out loud! Are people so desperate to see MS trapped by the GPL that they're willing to throw their brains out the window to convince themselves that it's happened??

Let's take a really simple and clear-cut hypothetical situation. And then see if it's even worth worrying about MS and it's vouchers.

Here's our situation: A while down the line, MS wants to show off how good its virtualization is so they start selling Vista with a complete virtualized Linux distro installed on it. A Linux distro with all the GNU tools installed, all under GPL v3.

Never going to happen, I know, but just imagine

So MS is now distributing copies of GPL v3 software. So far so good.

Now somebody else starts selling GPL'd software covered by MS's patents. MS promptly sues them. The victim smugly holds up GPL v3's patent protection and declares itself immune.

MS says "We've never agreed to the GPL v3" and thus their patents can still be used.

The defendant points to their distribution of GPL v3 code, and MS simply shrugs and says "Not our problem"

With no proof that MS has accepted GPL v3, the defendant loses and is found guilty of patent infringement.

The FSF hears about this case, and says "Hey, that's our GNU stuff they're selling!" and promptly sues for copyright infringement. MS now has two choices.

They can refute the GPL v3 again. This makes them inarguably guilty of copyright infringment, and they're faced with the usual penalties, but because they simply made illegal copies of copyrighted works, they still aren't bound by the GPL v3.

Or, they can argue that they didn't violate copyright because they did in fact have a license to distribute: They had the GPL v3, in fact.

Only if MS takes the latter and makes a legally-binding statement that they have accepted the terms of the GPL v3, do they become bound by its terms. Before that, they are under no onus to obey the terms, because they can claim to be illegally distributing pirate software.

Either way, they're doing something wrong. But they can't be bound by the terms of the GPL v3 until they're forced to chose one or the other.

That being the case, let's look at these vouchers. MS sells vouchers for Novell's SuSe Linux. The GPL v3 says that this is enough to qualify as putting you under the GPL's terms.

But that's irrelevant. It's copyright law that will determine when the GPL is in force, not the GPL itself. If the GPL could decide when it applies, we could expect GPL v4 to say "By using any GPL'd software, ever, you agree to open source all code you posess"

It's copyright law that determines when you need a license in order to copy a work. MS will only be bound by the terms of the GPL v3 if and when they get taken to court, where it is found that distributing vouchers DOES count as "making a copy", and they then chose to say "We did it under the GPL" rather than saying "It's a fair cop, we've been pirating the software, we'll pay the fines and stop selling the vouchers."

Until MS says it's accepted the GPL v3, it's not bound by it. It really is that simple. Whatever the GPL v3 may say.

Ubuntu's a damn good distro, I'll argue anybody who says it isn't.

But it's really not for me. It's convenient, but I'm not enough of a GUI fan to like a distro that aims to eliminate the need for a CLI.

I was going to try out Arch, or maybe go back to Gentoo again.

Then Slackware 12 was released. With a 2.6 kernel by default (and a very recent one at that) and the latest, modular X.org

Bugger. It's been years since I used Slackware, but most of the things that made me not want to try it again have been removed.

So I've SSH'd to my home PC & started four bittorrent downloads within screen to grab the ISO files I want.

The fact that I thought this would be quicker & easier than downloading the ISOs manually via the browser when I got home in a few hours time probably explains better than anything else why I'm planning on installing Slackware rather than just upgrading Ubuntu to the Feisty release.

We're considering going on holiday in August, since Lou can get some time off & I'll be unemployed that month. And since that's an expensive time to go anywhere and neither of us will be particularly rich, that raises the possibility of our ever-popular alternative: Camping.

But we haven't used our stuff in quite a while, and we both felt the need to get away from it all for a while before August, so I had the brainwave of going away for the weekend to try out the gear & spend a few days away from home and work without using up any holiday - which neither of us has to spare.

So we found a site 5-6 miles from where we live, and I booked us in last week. The weather, which has been miserable for the last 8 months or so, finally broke and gave us a scorcher of a weekend (just what you want with a heavy rucksack on your back!) so off we went on Saturday morning.

We came back on Sunday, with the conclusions:

• We could probably do with a new tent
• Airbeds are comfier than foam bedrolls even if they do take a while to pump up.
• Pubs that don't open till 6, don't take food orders until 7, and don't actually serve the food until 8, deserve to be burnt down
• 5-6 miles a day is plenty far enough when you have a heavy backpack and haven't done any backpacking in a long time
• Visor Buffs are damn good headwear on sunny days, being vastly more comfortable than baseball caps and shading the back of your neck as well
• It's a good idea to check the batteries in your torch before relying on it to find the toilets at night

We also incurred numerous aches, pains, and blisters. No surprises there, I'm sure. It was quite a relief to get home and drop into the sofa at last.

It was also a relief to shave this morning - a downside of getting such close shaves again is that missing a day makes for really irritating stubble. I'll have to start taking my shaving stuff with me. But where do I get an unbreakable ceramic mug from..?

This has to be the most bizzare sequence of Google ads I've yet seen:

It showed up (before you ask) on a webcomic page. The first one in particular I find disturbing - an "innovative web service"?? How does that work??

On second thought.. don't tell me.

As I mentioned yesterday, MS has released a convertor for ODF - that doesn't work very well, and it also gets tucked away in a submenu, away from the normal "Save as" dialogue, to make it harder to find & use.

However, ODF is an open standard, so ANYBODY can write software for it. And Sun, being big supporters of ODF, have created a plug-in for MS Word that puts the ODF functionality right where it should be: In the list of file formats in the "Save as" box.

What's more, I just installed & used it on my work machine. And I don't have admin access to my machine - in fact, our machines are so locked-down we can't even change IE's start page. It installed without complaint, and I hunted down a few of the nastier, formatting-heavy, complicated word documents I could find. Saving them as ODF was easy and without complaint, and they opened perfectly in OpenOffice as well.

So yes, well done to Sun, I'm impressed so far by their converter. If you're obliged to use MS Office, you too may be interested in trotting along to their website and downloading a plugin that can free you forever from the problem of proprietary formats.

..I've ever seen on the BBC web page.

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a "ticking time bomb", they say.

Massachusetts, please take note.

How, just exactly how, did somebody manage to sit down and write about the problem caused by Microsoft's multiple incompatible, proprietary document formats - a problem they knew enough about to state that The root cause ... is the range of propriatorial file formats which proliferated during the early digital revolution. - and manage to represent it as a situation in which Microsoft were not only blameless but the "knights in shining armour" charging in to the rescue?

The video at the top demonstrates one of MS's proposed solutions: Use virtualisation to run all the different versions of Windows and all the different versions of Office.

Oddly enough, they don't mention that you will of course need to buy licenses for each and every version of their "legacy" software that you use, should you wish to use this approach yourself.

And I'm almost tempted to write in and complain that they even published the line about OpenXML being an open international standard under independent control.

They do earn at least a miniscule amount of credit by mentioning ODF, I suppose, but it barely gets a passing mention and the whole issue is dismissed with "Well, MS released a translator, didn't they? What more do you want?"

Well, call me picky - but when the problem we're having is accessing documents that were saved in, say, Word97, because it used a proprietary format that we can't understand any more, I'd like a standard that doesn't have formatting tags like "useWord97LineBreakRules" - which you'll find in the OpenXML specification, if you can bring yourself to plough through the four thousand page description of it.

(I'd also like a translator that actually works before accepting it as an alternative, but maybe I'm just fussy)

An open specification that anybody can use? Yes, if by "anyone" you mean "anybody with a complete understanding of all previous versions of Microsoft's proprietary formats", which would amount to... just Microsoft themselves.

Funny, that.

What I find worse that the sentiments in the article themselves is that the chief exec. of the National Archives, having lost some of their documents forever because of closed formats, can even be considering sticking with yet more closed standards instead of insisting unreservedly on open standards which already exist and are capable of doing the job. Even if they don't want to use ODF, what the hell is wrong with PDF? A genuinely open format designed specifically to preserve the precise appearance of documents.

The mind boggles. It really does. These people have nearly 600 TERAbytes of files that their job is to preserve. And yet they don't even seem to show any awareness of what an open standard is, and what advantages it brings with it.

The iPod has become the iPhone, with a lot of positive publicity if nothing else. Ergo Microsoft, the industry's biggest innovation-less copycat, is already beginning work on turning their iPod-killer attempt, the Zune, into a true competitor for the iPhone: The PHune!

Features include:

1. A large, high-res screen so you can see people's phone numbers shown in beautiful fonts as you coverse with them via a cheap & low quality speaker & microphone
2. An interface that looks just like a multi-touch screen but is, in fact, just cleverly-disguised buttons
3. Built-in Wifi that would give you blazingly fast VOIP and Web downloads if only it allowed you to connect to the Internet. Which it doesn't.
4. Ability to send text and picture messages, all of which will be deleted after three days or after being viewed three times
5. A high-quality loudspeaker for use in hands-free operations (thoughtfully disabled by the firmware so you don't violate the DMCA by letting other people listen to your own conversations)
6. Compose your own ringtones and upload them to your Zune! As soon as you assign the copyright to Microsoft, they'll allow you to play it for free (for a while), and also send you a link to the Zune store where you friends will be able to buy the ringtone at not-too-extortionate prices!
7. Connects to the mobile networks using its own proprietary technology so you can only talk to other PHune owners!
8. Also available in brown!