OneAndOneIs2

There's an interesting article linked from places like Linux Devices and Linux Watch on the whole GPL v2 / GPL v3 thing.

I haven't been able to read it in any great depth - too many other things are sapping my concentration - but it seems a worthwhile read. I'll no doubt come back to it later.

But it reminded my of something I wondered about a while ago: Namely, if software companies had had more faith in copyright in the early days, would GNU or Linux ever have happened?

Here's the basis for the speculation:

In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused the software's source code for the Xerox 9700 laser printer (code-named "Dover"), the industry's first. Stallman had modified the software on an older printer (the XGP, Xerographic Printer), so it electronically messaged a user when the person's job was printed, and would message all logged-in users when a printer was jammed. Not being able to add this feature to the Dover printer was a major inconvenience, as the printer was on a different floor from most of the users. This one experience convinced Stallman of the ethical need to require free software.

(Wikipedia)

The whole FOSS ethic as we know it was kicked off by this event: Stallman couldn't edit the software, so he opted to start a crusade for freely available and editable software. The GNU utilities were a direct result.

But software wasn't split entirely into "closed" and "free" back then - any more than it is today, really. One particularly well-known example is Linux's inspiration, Minix.

Minix was originally a copyrighted piece of software: If you wanted a copy, you had to buy Tanenbaum's book or pay Prentice Hall, the publishers, a royalty. But all the source code was available, on floppies or printed in the book. You couldn't distribute it, modified or untouched, because it was copyright. But it was available.

So imagine if all software had gone with that: Instead of closing the source code and shipping binary-only, they shipped source code. Copyrighted, illegal to distribute, source code. But source code that you could patch and recompile for yourself.

When RMS came to try and hack that Xerox printer, he wouldn't have had to get in touch with Xerox and be told "No" - he'd have simply taken out the disk the printer driver had come on, grabbed the source code, and edited it as desired.

He wouldn't have been able to distribute the modified driver, but he would (probably) have been able to distribute the patch, so anybody else who had the printer, and therefore the driver, would have been able to patch it - in the same way that newsgroups like comp.os.minix traded in Minix patches. You had to buy the Minix software, but once you had it you could freely share patches for it.

Minix was proprietary but still had a huge hacker following. Like Linus himself, for example..

If proprietary software had still been fully-hackable, would FOSS ever have gained the momentum that it did? If explaining the difference wasn't "It's modifiable vs. unmodifiable" but "They're both modifiable, but you can only distribute the modifications and that makes it hard to keep organized" how would the non-hacking PHBs get a handle on this new kind of software development they're being asked to fund? Black & white is much easier to grasp than different shades of grey.

Even more interestingly: If Microsoft had released DOS and Windows as copyright-but-available code, they would still have been proprietary, but they would have been MORE attractive than Unix in many ways for hackers. They'd have been hackable! They'd have been able to cherry-pick all the best hacks and buy them very cheaply for official inclusion in the next version. They'd have been able to brag about the extensive, free, (admittedly un-guaranteed) third-party patching and debugging available.

If they'd played their cards right, they might have owned the most hacker-friendly OS in the world, with the biggest community of developers as well as the biggest userbase. And that would have stolen a huge amount of GNU and Linux's thunder, had they ever existed at all. And best of all, from their standpoint, Microsoft would still have owned and controlled their code completely. Oh sure, it would have been easily-pirated, but then, it was easily pirated anyway: Before the web made ubiquitous online registration a possibility, there was nothing MS could do to stop you using one set of installation discs on a hundred different machines.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Sometimes, there are advantages to being a geek.

Today was presentation day. I had to discuss effective ways of using video in schools, and half an hour to do it in.

So after asking about the existing experiences with videos in class observations, which went a lot better than expected, which was handy, I started with the obvious: Kids aren't too big on going home and reading a book, but they'll happily watch TV all evening - video is something they're already interested in. There's lots of science stuff in the news these days - climate change, nuclear things, etc. etc. and it's always good to relate the theory taught in the classroom with real life events, to make it seem relevant and worth knowing.

I went on to talk about how it can show things that you can't easily, or cheaply, or possibly demonstrate in a classroom. Volcanoes. Big explosions. Events that take place in the space of a second, or the space of a week. Events that are too small to be seen by the whole class at once time.

Here I used my first prop. I finally found a real, valid use for my infra-red webcam hack to highlight a way to use video devices to illustrate things that can't be seen with the naked eye. This wasn't as easy as it sounds, as I had only the minute or so before my presentation began to find out if I could USE this webcam or not, so I was quite proud of how I worked it in :o)

And I was quite surprised at how interested everybody was in it: Showing them the projector screen appearing blank because the image they were seeing wasn't infra-red, and pointing out how bright a blue flame was on the IR cam as compared to barely-visible to the naked eye, made for a really good example. So I was happy there.

I mentioned a few other things, and then went on to pointing out that as well as using videos that you as the teacher make or buy, you can get the pupils themselves making them for you. I dredged up some statistics about YouTube here: Over 100 million video views a day, over 65 thousand new videos added each day, over 70% of users aged 12-17.

Ergot the age range we're going to be teaching is the biggest sector of a MASSIVE video-making culture. So replace essays with videos as homework and you're laughing. And so are the kids.

Then I highlighted the huge advantages of ripping DVDs: To show them a one-minute clip of Blue Planet, I first went through the low-tech DVD method. Putting the disk in the machine, opening Windows Media Player, waiting for it to scroll past the copyright, navigating the menus to the correct episode, and fast-forwarding to the bit I wanted them to see.

Obviously, I spent more time getting the video to this point than I did playing the video.

Then I showed them the same bit of video, but this time it was ripped and embedded into the presentation. Instant playback of exactly the right bit.

Again, I was surprised at the interest in this idea. Because DVD ripping is something I'm well familiar with, I've always been aware of the possibility of extracting video from a disk and putting it somewhere more convenient. But it was new to my fellow students, so I fielded quite a few questions here as well.

And then I pointed out that they could answer all the questions I had posed about the video I had showed them, even though I had made no effort at all to make them pay attention to it - highlighting my point that video is a really useful tool for teaching, and ended by saying that video is inherently effective for teaching, there's no secret thing you need to do. There's just a few pitfalls you need to avoid to make sure you don't ruin it.

Seemed to go down pretty well, all things considered. I worried that I was talking (well, lecturing) too much, but the feedback was pretty good, so I guess I didn't.

Our presentations are all recorded, so if it ever makes it onto YouTube I'll give you the link ;o)

Much as I enjoy the busy half of the course, it doesn't half leave you tired at the end of the day.

I have to give a presentation tomorrow, and my biggest problem is fighting the urge to let my eyes fall closed.

I guess it's good that the idea of giving a lesson doesn't scare me so much I can't sleep, but still...

At the end of each day of the popularly-considered less-enjoyable half of our course, we're supposed to write up a "What we did today and how it relates to what we'll do in classes in future" thing. With references to the literature, and so on.

It's not exactly a task universally-loved. I found a way to make it more bearable: Start pointing out the mistakes they're making.

I hold that you can't put a hundred students on a course where you highlight, in great detail, the things that a teacher SHOULD and SHOULDN'T do, without an expectation that you're instantly going to be analyzed for adherence to those same rules.

So when they, say, run out of time after emphasizing the importance of working to deadlines, I'm pointing it out in my log. And giving references as to why they shouldn't do it, and pointing out how bad it would be if I were to do this in class.

I hand the first batch in tomorrow. I expect them to mark me as a "Room for improvement" kind of student..

My laptop's wifi may work, but the USB is broken, and it has no built-in disc drives. Hence I ponder a new one, now that Dell's website is working.

Apparently, a new Ubuntu Dell with dual-core & Intel graphics and wifi with the spec I want would cost £376 all-in.

It's tempting... I might get some of it back from ebaying my old laptop, after all, and that's a pretty good price for a new laptop even if I don't.

And in other laptop news, the OLPC laptop has FINALLY, it seems, given the official nod to the "Buy one for you and pay for a second for developing nations" idea.

I don't think they're usable for adults, which is a shame, but I might consider buying one at some point.. just cuz they're cool :o)

For the first time since mid-July, money has come INTO my bank account: My first bursary payment. Nice to see that, at least, has gotten organized.

Now I just need them to get off their posteriors and pay me my student loans & grants, and I'll have no further worries..

I mentioned before that my course is split into two distinct sections.

This morning, we were asked to give some feedback on the course in general. We split into twos and threes and worked out what we wanted to say. Then we wrote our feedback on the board.

The same basic trend emerged from all of us: One half of the course, we couldn't find anything bad to say about. The other half, we couldn't think of anything good.

Hopefully things will improve a bit. If not... Well, we're only in this phase of the course for next week, then we move into the first school-based section.

Ho-hum.

Apparently, USB version 3 will be out next year. It'll be much faster, apparently.

All well and good, but the biggest bottleneck I have when using USB drives isn't the USB part, it's the write times. Can't say I'll be rushing to buy something that can transfer data quicker

I suppose, on the other hand, tho, that it'll make USB 2 flash drives even cheaper. So I guess there IS something to look forward to..

I usually expect to get 400 miles out of a tank of petrol. A little more right after it's been serviced, a little less when it needs to be.

I refuelled at the weekend and then spent the week driving to & from my course. Today I finally had to refuel, when the fuel light came on after 430 miles. By the time I made it to a petrol station, I had done 460 miles on on tank of petrol. If every car could get that much of an increase in mileage, we could stop bothering about the Kyoto treaty

The A29 is a nice road. Unlike the A27, which I have to continue the journey on half the time. The A27 is a close runner-up to the M25. About the best thing I can say for it is that it at least supplies a small amount of mental stimulation: There are a bunch of roundabouts in quick succession. The right line of the carriageway moves faster than the left, but the left lane moves quicker at roundabouts.

Deciding when and if to swap lanes is about the only thing that keeps my brain going some days. I keep an eye on the other drivers and I generally win against the sheeple who pick a lane and stick to it. It gives me something to do.

Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time series, died on Sunday.

Insert all the obvious "Poor guy, it's a tragedy, heart disease sucks" statements here. But I have to say, although the first I knew of his health problems was when I heard they'd killed him, I gave up reading his series several books ago for basically this reason.

Whether because I'm deeply cynical, or because I have an uncanny instinct for these matters, I didn't want to read a series that would never end because the author died.

That's genuinely the reason I stopped reading them.

The fact that the story was getting WAY too long was a factor, I admit. The rot started to set in when I read an entire book cover-to-cover and then was unable to think of a single answer to the question "So what happens in the new book then?"

A factor, yes, but not the deciding one. For whatever reason, for no reason I'm aware of, I always expected him to die with the series unfinished.

It's a damn shame I've been proved right. I hope that the notes he left behind are enough to allow somebody else to finish the job: I can't believe he'd be happy in his rest if his magnum opus went unfinished.

But for once, that's not a problem, thanks to that visit, many months ago, to that shop that ISN'T in Old Bond Street... I might have far more badger hair and sandalwood soap on my bathroom shelf than most, but it's come with advantages.

Not only do Taylors sell nailfiles that are so good that I gave up on chewing my nails, but they sell an aftershave balm. It's got avocado oil in it, but mostly it smells of the wheatgerm extract it also contains.

The lime skin food from Trumpers I've been using recently smells more "zesty" and soaks into the skin in seconds. But even using it daily, it left me with my old nemesis: Chapped lips caused by exposure to cold air.

So I switched back to Taylors' stuff. It leaves skin feeling a bit greasy for an hour or so, but it might be slightly better at moisturising, I figured.

And suddenly, no more chapped lips. First time in years!

It's almost worth risking being considered the kind of person who would have "luxury herbal aftershave cream for gentlemen" in his bathroom..

Remember their names. It totally freaks them out.

If there's one thing that worries me about the idea of being a teacher, it's the mob of kids you have to be able to identify. Hundreds of the little sods. And they don't wear name badges, oh no...

So as part of this course, I've made it a personal goal to learn as many names as possible. This means the dozen people on my science course, and the 20-odd people in my generic group.

First day with both sets, I noted down the names and then spent the rest of the session memorizing them. It seemed to work. This morning we had to give our presentation and we were the only group to start off by getting the rest of the class involved.

Because I lead the intro, I was the one who asked the people with hands up for their input. By name.

I'm not sure how big an impact it had on THEM, but it worried my co-presenters a bit ;)

But it was at lunchtime that it was most amusing (for me). One of the blokes I was lunching with was trying to point out one of the other people sitting at another table. His attempts were of the "The one with her back to us. In the blue top."

Without thinking, I asked, "What, X? The one sitting opposite Y?" and there was this sudden silence, followed by "How the hell do you know all these names??"

It was actually pure luck: X is in my generic group, and Y was somebody I talked to on our first day and happened to know the name of. But they didn't know that. :o)

I'm no longer quite so worried about my ability to remember names. Or at least being able to bluff my way through it...

...that I now have a platinum credit card with a limit of thousands on it, right?

Do you think maybe I should have written a letter to my bank to inform them of it as well?

Because I had two letters arrive today. One was my new tax disc for the car. The other was a letter from the bank, telling me I could apply for a platinum credit card with a limit of thousands of pounds.

*sigh*

A small spruce tree in Norway gave its life to bring me this missive. I think it died in vain.

This course is split into two parts: The subject-specific bit that only the science people do, and the generic bit that all the teachers-to-be do.

Thus far, the generic bit isn't impressing me.

Today's task: To work in a group of four to prepare a 15-minute presentation that we will deliver in concert tomorrow.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I've never known any school that had so many teachers it could put four of them into one lesson. What are we DOING this for??

Ho-hum.

On the plus side, the weekend was pretty good in a rather geeky way. Firstly, I managed to get wifi working on my clapped-out laptop (apparently a package named linux-wlan-ng is what's needed - courtesy of my local LUG) and secondly, a persistent bugbear has been eliminated when it comes to Thunderbird & my MP3 collection.

Namely, the arseache of keeping the files in synch on more than one machine. The reason I never used Thunderbird for email & RSS until recently was that it was too much hassle to have my email on one machine and not on others.

This one was courtesy of a linux.com article on an app called Unison. This little gadget was designed to synch files between two machines, and runs easily via an SSH connection.

I'll make a confession: I *have* set up RSA keys so I don't need to use a password. I know, I know...

The best bit is, it can even be run via the Web, such as it was over the weekend, not just over the local network. A big advantage when you're away from home and realize you need to synchronize before you can get your mail.

It's well worth a look into, if you have more than one machine. Even if one of them isn't Linux-based!

Being back at university for a year, I don't really have a proper income any more, so getting interest on what I do have has become of more importance. Since current accounts get a lousy rate of interest, I wanted to put as much cash as possible into my savings account instead, which gets about 5%

The downside there is, of course, that emptying your current account makes it tricky to avoid going into overdraft territory when you spend money, and the bank charges you interest for being overdrawn.

So I opted to finally cave in and get a credit card. I held out for 30 years, that's more than most. The idea being that I could (mostly) empty my current account, put everything on the credit card instead, and then pay off the card every month and, in theory, maximise the amount of interest from the bank without getting hit for using an overdraft.

My bank offered two basic options for a credit card. More, if you count the ones that you pay to own. Which I don't. So, they had two options. One would have gotten me air miles, which I don't have any use for. That left the platinum option, which is free to own and has only one drawback: You have to spend at least £100 in each of the first three months.

Can't see that being a problem...

So I applied for that one, and it arrived yesterday. The PIN number arrived the day before. Ho hum.

It needed to be activated over the phone, so I rang them and went through the palaver. Naturally, "whilst we wait for the computer" they ran through a bunch of attractive ways for me to give them even more money.

I think I confused them.

"Would you like to transfer the balances from your other credit cards to this one?"

"No thanks, I don't have any other credit cards."

"Oh. Would you like balance protection in case you're unable to pay the minimum repayments on your outstanding balance?"

"No thanks, I won't be using the card to buy something unless I already have the money for it."

"Then what the &*^% do you want a credit card for in the first place??"

Okay, they didn't say that last one. But I could tell they were thinking it :o)

Those little issues aside, they activated the card without a problem. It's rather impressive that the first card I own should have an authorized limit of seven thousand pounds - I could have bought my current car outright with this thing.

Easy to see how people can get into so much trouble with their credit cards when banks let you put that much onto them... One of the reasons I never wanted one. I always got such incredulous looks from my peers when I said I didn't have a credit card. They'd always ask questions which essentially boiled down to the same thing: "Then how do you buy things you can't afford?" and couldn't seem to grasp the logic that if you can't afford something, you shouldn't buy it in the first place.

Oh well. I shouldn't complain - their bank charges are what pay for the interest on my savings account :o)

As some wit on Slashdot noted, ATI's GPU spec is less than a quarter the size of MS's XML document format spec. An interesting point.

However, the more interesting point is that, as promised, ATI specs are now freely available, so an open-source Linux driver can now hopefully be written & maintained.

At last, my laptop's crappy 3D desktop performance might smooth out a bit!

My university evidently had to consider this question recently. With regret, I must inform you they got it wrong.

Instead of saying "Hey, our machines are slow and the monitor resolutions are pitiful, let's upgrade the hardware", they appear to have instead opted to invest the money on putting the most bloated MS office software yet released onto already-struggling machines.

Ah well.

On the plus side, their decrepit PCs have USB ports. So their lousy choice of software and their draconian firewall can both be laughed at with disdain, courtesy of portable apps and a blog post I made on using them a while ago.

Besides, I won't have to spend too much time using them: Most of the course is school-based and I found out today where I'll be starting on the first of October. Happily, it's a school just a few miles away - no more hour-long voyages!

So I came home and checked their website, as you do. And I see that it's a "day and boarding school" for girls aged 4 to 18.

Bloody hell...

Today centered largely around getting properly registered, so was necessarily admin-heavy. So it was probably the least-enjoyable day of the course so far, in that respect.

On the other hand, I've got a decent morning routine sorted out with a bit of shuffling around: Still getting up at half-five, I can go for a half-hour jog and still get onto campus in plenty of time to park. That's good, since (as previously stated) I hate not jogging in the morning.

It's not all that warm at that time of day, tho. I might have to move from t-shirt & shorts into my longer-sleeved and -legged gear.

Arriving an hour before classes, I was intending to get some extra reading done, but there was a mob of my classmates in the refectory when I got there, so it didn't happen. Ah well, good intentions, eh? :o)

And we got access to the university computer network this afternoon. They've got the latest version of MS Office, would you believe... more money than sense, obviously!

We're going to try & sort out a Facebook group for our "class of 2007" - most of us having accounts on there & all. Watch this space..

Well, that was fun. Got up at 5:30 in the morning, it's now quarter to eight in the evening and I've only just finished for the day.

The course structure, I should explain, outside of the school placements which start next month, is to spend Thursday and Friday at college on subject-specific stuff - i.e. learning how to be a science teacher - whilst Monday to Wednesday are spent on campus, learning to be a teacher. So today's classes had up to around a hundred students in them, doing everything from History to PE. Then we got split into our study groups of around 20 and got on with the rest of the day.

Irritatingly, after all the paperwork etc. said that today was registration day and everything had to be brought with us today, they put it off to tomorrow - causing a certain amount of resentment, it must be said, but so it goes.

The "link log" is going to be a bit of a chore. Writing up what you learned that day is one thing. Linking it into the professional standards and supplying references to back up/expand on your points is quite another.

Oh well. It's only three days a week, I suppose, and if I wanted a career without annoying forms to fill in and tick-boxes to keep religiously checked, I shouldn't have opted for teaching, I guess :)

*Deep breath*

Well, the first day of the Secondary Science PGCE is now done. Bloody Hell, they're not lying when they say it's going to demand a lot of time & energy...

Let's fall back on chronological order..

Woke up to my alarm clock at half five.

Half past FIVE! Such times have no right to exist in a civilized world!

Went through my usual morning routine, with the exception of the lack of sunlight and not going jogging. Then headed towards Bognor. Due to lousy radio reception along that route, I switched to CD.

Funny thing, I never much liked Pros & Cons in the past. Maybe my tastes in music matured a bit over the years. I still wouldn't play it at home, not start to finish, at least. But (and I hate to admit this knowing my mum's likely to read it) it may well be the single best album I've ever heard for playing on hour-long car journeys.

Even if it isn't, the first minute or so of the title track is worth an hour's wait :o)

The roads were mostly empty the whole way. There was one gem of a moment tho: I have the habit of sticking to the speed limit, which irritates many of my fellow drivers. At one point, I was trundling along at 30mph when the BMW Z5 behind me decided he'd had enough of being stuck behind slow old me, floored it, and rocketed past.

Only to immediately slam on the brakes and drop down to 20mph or so as it followed the large tractor for the mile or so before I turned off.

Childish of me, I know, but it put a smile on my face.

Because I had no idea of traffic etc. on my route at that time of day. I'd left with plenty of time to spare, and turned out to be the first of the dozen of us on my course to arrive. Only one familiar face in the whole mob: a chap named Neil whom I'd met on the Taster Course I did at the start of the year, and who had subsequently been interviewed for the course on the same day as me. Impressively, it's a 50/50 gender mix, and they all seem nice enough.

We did the inevitable "go round the room and introduce ourselves" bit, met a few of the key members of staff, talked quite a lot, did some group work & presentations, and gathered up lots of paper. Lots and lots of paper.

We were told by our tutor that the school head, who gave us a short talk first thing, thinks we're a good group - apparently, gut feelings count for a lot in this game. Our tutor said at the end that, having spent the day interacting with us & all, he agreed: There is, he said, an "X factor" that makes you a good teacher, and you either have it or you don't. If you don't, you're never going to make it, however much you try. We all have it, so he's happy. And relieved.

(I kinda know what he means by this. On our interview day, one of my fellow candidates seemed like a perfectly nice person, but within about 30 seconds of conversation, my only thought was "Please don't let this person get a place on this course, they'll ruin it!" - and sure enough, no sign of them today, which was a genuine relief. Sounds cruel, maybe, but it's the truth.)

We finished a little before 4pm. We have three exam papers to get through, each of which we have an hour and a half alloted to us for. We also have to hand in that critical commentary thing I mentioned before on Monday, which is actually the official start date of the course. So I reckon that's about six hours worth of work we've been given before we've even enrolled at the university!

I came back home & went jogging. I hate jogging in the afternoon instead of the morning - it's hotter, more crowded, and there are more bugs around. Going to have to work on this...

Then I went through all my paperwork from today and sorted it into some semblance of order. Wrote up my notes properly, filed everything away, and generally got organized.

I'm going to need a diary, as a matter of urgency. There's already a whole bunch of dates I need to note things for. I know I might be expected to use my laptop or a PDA, but for personal organizers, I always have and always will prefer something paper-based. You don't have to plug it in and/or wait for it to boot up, apart from anything else... and handwriting recognition isn't as big an issue for me as it is for a PDA :o)

(I spent eight years deciphering the handwriting of foreign doctors that had been through half a dozen fax machines, I can read ANYTHING!)

All in all, then, a very busy day. Things'll get easier later, as the routines get settled and so forth. Workload won't get much lighter, I suspect. But that's OK - it's for a good cause! :o)

Despite the fact that I don't use, or even particularly like, KDE, I'm looking forward to seeing version 4, based as it is on the next Qt release. It's got some innovations in it that could get it finally noticed by the mainstream computer world, potentially bringing the *Nix desktop up to OS X levels (and far surpassing Vista, tho let's face it, that ain't hard)

So it was nice to see a Linux.com story about the new release candidate.

But.. just what the Hell is BLOB, the 'hero' from the 1980s game "Starquake" doing in a screenshot of KDE 4??

I expect to see him on my GP32 - it's still one of my favorite games. It was one of the first I ever played, too.

But on KDE 4? That's just wrong...

Two bits of news from ATI about their graphics drivers for Linux.

One: They're going to improve their much-maligned closed-source drivers. Yawn.

Two: They're going to enable the development of open source drivers - something we've been clamouring for for years!

What does Slashdot put on the front page? Point one.

Sigh.

And a lot hairier than I expected!

If you don't posses an encyclopedic knowledge of old cartoon strips, you're probably very confused by the post thus far. It all makes sense to me, tho.* It's a downside of having a phenomenally good memory for things I've read. Particularly if it's funny. I've got dozens of books of cartoons: Dilbert, Calvin & Hobbes, User Friendly, Perishers, Garfield... I never read them. I just glance at the strips from time to time. No point in looking any closer, as soon as I see it I remember it word for word.

I remember one time at university, I used to borrow Garfield books from a bloke down the corridor when I was bored. He once went through the two or three dozen books, picking strips at random and giving me the first line. I gave him the exact punchline to every single strip. It was worrying, really...

Anyway, the point of this whole post was just to say: Bloody Hell, tomorrow is my last day off! Where the Hell did August go???

Doesn't time fly when you're doing absolutely nothing for an entire month? All those things I was planning on doing...

Ah well. Maybe next year :o)

*It goes like this: One of the main characters in the strip was a dog, and once a year he'd be taken to visit a beach, where he'd go and watch the crabs in a rockpool. The crabs assumed the sudden appearance of "eyeballs in the sky" were some kind of apocalyptic vision, and on one occasion a particularly prophetic crab yelled 'Repent! The end is nigh!' just before the dog slipped and fell, rump-first, into the water. Prompting the punchline of 'Cripes, it's nigher than I thought! And a lot hairier than I expected!'. All clear now?

Sorry.

I've been inundated recently with fake new user accounts being created on this blog. As a result, I've had to install a captcha to make it harder for spammers.

On the plus side, since I upgraded the blog a while ago, my captcha options are much more sophisticated. It should only be displayed to unregistered users. So if you find it starts to cause you problems, there's a link in the sidebar on the right where you can register an account at this blog. If you use it, you should never see the captcha again.

If it causes any problems, please let me know!

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Will stick with O.D.F
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Will stick with O.D.F

In the standards
The ISO standards
No O.O.X.M.L
Without standards
True open standards
Software's a harder sell!

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Will stick with O.D.F
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Will stick with O.D.F

Many pages
Thousands of pages
Define O.O.X.M.L
There's no software
No office software
Can implement it well!

Despite the absurd lengths they went to in order to corrupt and buy ISO certification for their horrible new XML formats, Microsoft has failed to get OOXML ISO-approved.

What does this mean? It means that their closed-but-supposedly-open format, with its ludicrous tags such as "useWord97LineBreakRules" written up in a four-thousand page description, has failed to convince the world that it is what they say it is. Unlike a proper standard, such as ODF, which was, by the way, ISO-approved without ANY votes to the contrary. And that's without a convicted monopolist throwing money around like water to grease it through, of course...

Since MS's entire anti-ODF strategy for the last few months has revolved around trying to convince everybody that OOXML is just as good and thus ODF should be ignored, it'll be interesting to see what their next move is.

Especially since all they've really accomplished is giving lots of free publicity to ODF whilst showing that their own alternative is so bad it can't even BUY certification.

Today is Tuesday.

On Friday, I go to Emsworth for the first day of the year-long (Well, nine-month-long, technically) course on which I will (hopefully!) learn how to be a science teacher.

At the end of that course, all going well, I'll be an NQT, or Newly-Qualified Teacher. It will then be time to find myself a school to hire me for my induction year, and ideally beyond.

As crowded and expensive as it is here in the South-East, the temptation is strong to head north, or possibly west, at this point - teaching being one of the few careers that can be done in all parts of the country.

So this time next year, hopefully, I'll be living somewhere else and working on becoming a fully-qualified teacher.

The year after that, hopefully, I'll be a 'proper' teacher & even more options will be open to me. I don't believe in planning that far in advance, tho :o)

But since they say you should have things to look forward to... In a year's time, when I'm not living in a second-floor flat and I'm back to working full-time, I think I'll finally buy & build a Freestyle buggy, because I think they look like fun :o)

(There's a few other videos that you might find entertaining too. Not bad for a mini-engined little kit car, is it? And by next year, they should have the K-series version built too :o)

Having finally installed an OS that has workable drivers for my webcam "out of the box" I can finally have a play with my two.

I bought two identical cams a while ago: One to leave untouched, and one to tear apart and put back together as per the instructions here. By amazing coincidence, these are the very cams I myself bought!

So one of these cams, I took apart, removed the IR filter, and replaced it with a double-thickness black photo negative. And hey presto, I have a pennies-cheap webcam that displays infra-red!

The difference? Well, you might be forgiven for thinking that this is just two screenshots from the same cam, with one turned black-and-white. But they aren't, they're WYSIWYG images from two cams, one on each side of my monitor.

The lighting in this room isn't too good for webcam purposes, unfortunately, but you can see the difference fairly well.

Normal:

IR-hacked:

Screenshots courtesy of the Ekiga IP-phone thingie, as it's the only thing I've got installed that'll display webcam outputs..

(If anyone really wants to, they can probably contact me via Ekiga - oneandoneis2@ekiga.net is my ID, oddly enough. I've no idea if it works tho )

If the cables were long enough, I could show you that my monitor looks normal with the normal webcam, and looks blank with the IR one. But they aren't, so I can't. Take my word for it.

Now then.. I have this IR webcam. What, exactly, am I supposed to DO with it now..?