port7 – co – uk

Had a spare few moments so thought I would blog a little with a few random thoughts….

First I need to pimp the StereoGrafiti PodShow, this is a local Manchester podcast by a guy who I worked with a few years back, Andy Goddard. It’s just a local show featuring the best of the local music scene, I have listened to a few shows already and am very impressed with the quality of the music. One of my new years resolutions is to try and get to a few gig’s, its quality stuff!

This year I decided to see what all the hype was about and try and do my roasties in goose fat! All I can say is believe the hype! They were IMHO the best roasties I have ever tasted! Soft and fluffy inside and lovely and crunchy on the outside with a nice flavor.

I also need to moan a little, over the holidays I am moving my CD collection to a digital format, ready for dumping to my new iPod. So I have been using Grip to get the music off the CD and onto the Hard Disk. So you put a CD in, Grip detects the CD, does a CDDB lookup to determine the CD, then you just need to press the button and it rip’s the stuff from the CD into your desired audio format.

What I need to moan about is the (lack of) quality of the data in the CDDB databases. For example I am currently ripping 100% Pure Groove 2, a double CD of 80’s Soul music. The 1st CD in CDDB tells me the disk title is 100 percent pure grove yet the 2nd CD in CDDB tells me the disk title is 100% Pure Grove (Cd 2). See the differences? One uses a % while the other uses the word percent, one has indicates it’s the 2nd CD of a collection the other doesn’t tell you anything. This sort of thing is typical, you can have double CD collections with different generes and years for each CD, you get single CD’s with spelling and gramatical mistakes. I know CDDB is a voluntary effort, but come on have some pride in your data people!

I am not sure what could be done to fix this apart from maybe trawling the database manually and checking for errors. I am doing my bit by resubmitting the cleaned up data. But that sort of thing annoy’s me, there is no excuse for bad data!

On a positive note, over the holidays my wife has had to do a little work for her company. So I have set her up on the LTSP Thin Client upstairs, and VPN’ed into her office. All she needs is access to E-Mail and to edit a few Office Documents, so naturally I have set her up with Evolution and Openoffice.org. She is working on an Excel spreadsheet and needed to print it out and she has just commented to me that ‘my system’ prints it better than her’s at work. What she means is that printing this Excel spreadsheet from Excelon her computer at work prints a certain range out very small and unreadable, yet printing that same Excel spreadsheet on Openoffice.org formats the print correctly in a legible size!

Openoffice.org prints Excel spreadsheets better than Excel! Score another point for Open Source!

Happy Christmas! Well its the holidays, I am sitting here with the smell of freshly cooked Turkey (for the buffet tomorrow) watching Queen on the Live Aid DVD I got for Christmas….Lovley!

I also have upgraded to Hoary and it went pretty smoothly. Though there was a little issue, and so I decided to submit my 1st ever bug report! I don’t know whats come over me in the last few months, my linuxness has come on in leaps and bounds!

Last wednesday I was stuck in the longest trafic jam I have ever been in. I had to go up to Scotland for work and the day I went there was a crash on the A74 / M6 which resulted in one massive jam getting out of the car in the fast lane to have a piss is a little strange.

All in all Santa was good to me, got a few DVD’s & some nice bits of clothing, and more chocolate than I know what to do with.

Just thought I would do a Christmas post!

It’s been a good day, spent the morning chilling at home, opened my pressies (list to follow), then we went over to Brother-In-Law’s for dinner. A nice roast dinner with local Lamb (very nice!), then after that I crashed on the sofa in front of Men In Black … nice

I also spent some time working on the OQO and tweaking OpenVPN. I wanted to get it so that when you initiate a VPN connection it brings up the GPRS connection via Bluetooth automatically and drops the GPRS when the VPN drops. I wanted a ‘One-Click’ connection experience. This was done by using the xxxx_pre.bat and xxxx_down.bat scripts mentioned in the documentation with OpenVPN GUI, and the Windows rasdial.exe command in those batch scripts.

All in all a nice day, some chilling with some geek action too.

My Presents

* Stargate Season 6 DVD Boxed Set
* Apple 60Gb I-Pod
* Wagamamma Cooking Book
* Will Young Biography?
* Star Wars Episode 3 DVD
* Wooden Back Scratcher
* Chocolates (Various Varieties)
* Nice Green T-Shirt
* Track Suit
* Lynx Smellies
* Brylcream Smellies and Hair Dressing

Not3Bad I think….

Had a good few days as far as geek toy’s go. Yesterday in the usual round of corporate present giving I received a geek knife thing from what really is my favorite supplier! Thanks guys! It is really appreciated.

Then a project that is running at the moment to look at ways that we can give the sales reps ways of getting up to the minute information anytime anywhere on various sales figures etc. So I suggested we try the OQO as a mobile device, accessing the network via GPRS and VPN. It arrived today, and so over Xmas I will be having a fiddle and play with it. I do intend to install Linux at some point.

Anyway for those that are interested here are some pictures…

We are all quite impressed with it so far, if it goes well we could be getting 300+ of these puppies! Though we are yet to trial some other options, probably a Tablet PC or something similar.

It must be addiction! After 9 days of pain I am now back online at home.

The reason being is that I have changed my DSL provider from Zen to Bytemark, and I have had to do a cease and re-provide as I have blogged about previously.

While I was offline I really missed it! I am a sad git I know but you don’t realize how much you use something and take it for granted until it’s not there. I have had broadband at home now since the summer of 2001 and I don’t know what I did without it!

Still I am back online now, so I am now off to catch up on all the blogs and geek news I have missed.

I am sitting here watching a DVD I bought ages ago but never really watched all the way through, its Standing in the Shadows of Motown and its the story of the Funk Brothers, the criminally unrecognized house band that Motown used while it was in Detroit. It’s a sad story in some ways, considering all the hits they played, in their history they had played on more number ones hits than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and the Beatles combined!

A great story and some phenomenal music, there is a concert where they have got some recent artists singing Motown hits with the Funk Brothers backing them. The performance of Chaka Khan on Marvin’s ‘Whats Going On?’ is just phenomenal, one of them things where you just can’t clap afterwards because you are just so blown away!

Went to Manlug today, Tim Fletcher gave a good talk on Moodle. It was interesting and I now have more of an idea of what it is and what it is capable of. I might give it a go at work and see what the new training department think of it. I found out that the Open University are switching to Moodle, good for them I say and I hope they are good citizens contribute back to the project.

Also picked up on a few good things that are on my to look at list, Helpmeict, OpenVMPS and the School ICT Register. As well as doing some pimping of the Linux Emporium and their new link of Linux friendly wireless cards.

Before hand I also managed to pick up some local sausages from the Christmas fair in Manchester’s Albert Square from Farmhouse Direct (dot com, though I think the website is down ATM).

I have been given the go ahead to get a digital music player for Christmas, great I hear you say! But the problem lies in what one to get….

I want one that I can play through my car stereo, though I can’t mess with the car too much as its a company car and not mine to mess with really. I also would like the ability to play videos and look at images.

The choice at the moment is probably between the nice but propriety iPod Video with a Griffin iTrip to play through the car stereo. The other choice is either an iRiver or iAudio, the benefits is that they both support open formats and are not tied into stuff like iTunes, the downside being is there is lack of options for playing though the car stereo.

Advice anyone?

Well, back from Sharm-El-Sheik all tanned and burnt. Would I go there again? Yes! Would I stay in the Hilton Sharks Bay? Maybe. Would I use Sinai Dive Club again? Yes!

We flew out on Monday 2nd November, and returned on Monday 8th. The flights were OK, typical Med type shuttle. We flew out at 10am and the return flight we left at 5pm, so they were reasonable times, though on the flight out because we arrived in the evening there it felt like we wasted a day. Our room was nice a clean with a view of the Red Sea, there were no roaches or anything like that which is the main thing. Most days we just chilled out on the hotels private beach, it was really nice and we were in and out of the sea as the snorkelling was amazing there being a reef about 2metres from the shore. I only managed to get 3 dives in on the account of a case of Montezumas Revenge 1/2 way through the week. Though the dives I did were amazing, really loved them. I did 2 shore dives and 1 boat dive.

While I was out there I was sad to hear that Fred Dibnah has passed on. RIP to one of the characters of the past few decades.

After a long Friday, and a longer week, I was driving home on the east lancs road. I stopped at a roundabout, and some fool in a merc decides to bump me!

We got out the car and he admitted it was his fault, and we exchanged details. There is not much damage to my car by the looks of it. My back is a little sore so I will get that checked out too. Even though there is no harm done all in all its just the hassle of it.

I have a company car and there is no cost to me, but the transport manager must love me! This is the 3rd incident I have had in the 2 years I have been in the job, none of them my fault I must add! I must be a magnet for bad drivers.