July 24, 2008
--> Manchester Geek Girl Dinner
Possibly of interest to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
saintmaryuk, haggis and others, this recently appeared on the Manchester Free Software mailing list:
Manchester Girl Geek Dinner #2
When: 7:00 PM Friday, July 25, 2008
Where: University of Salford, University House, University of Salford, Salford, England M5 4WTWho can attend: Girl Geeks! A lady who has an interest, or is involved in the Science, Engineering and Technology industries. Blokes can come too, but you need an invite from a Geek Girl!
Cost: Around £15 (includes 3 course meal, coffee and drinks)
What: For those who haven't been before, it's dinner, wine, talks from inspirational women, networking and discussions afterwards.
Currently two talks planned, if you want to get involved and speak about women in engineering, science and technology, please do get in touch.
The talks: Gemma Cameron - How to get young people interested in Geekery!
Rachael Hoyle - winner of the IET's Dyson Young Woman Apprentice of Year Award. Rachael will be delivering an extremely interesting talk around the stigma of women in engineering. This will cover how ethics and equality are the dominant factors in employment, and whether this is damaging the industry, rather than encouraging diversity.
Links: http://www.manchestergirlgeekdinners.co.uk/
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/859931/
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=22778411401
July 23, 2008
--> Bike Fail
When riding home on Monday night (thanks to work deadlines, I hadn't left the office until gone 8:30pm), I noticed that my ride was wobbly. Looking further, I realised that my back wheel had at least two broken spokes. This was serious - I walked it down to the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-Operative, locked my bike to a Sheffield hoop outside, and got the bus home.
I got the bus back in the morning to take the bike in for a service. It's not a long-winded repair job, but they're swamped at the moment and won't get a chance to look at it until 1st August. The bike's not rideable until then, but I've got them to do a full service and fix another couple of niggles (including repairing brake pads) which I've not gotten round to.
The annoying thing is that replacing spokes is not hard; I even have a spoke wrench to do it myself. But balancing a wheel is hard and not something I've ever done before - if I get it wrong, my wheel could collapse under me, and that's not something I want to happen again.
So I'm going a week and a half without cycling, which sucks. I love cycling, it's a great stress reliever for me (something I could really use right now). It's going to be hard to get through this without getting miserable as a result.
--> Headshaving
Should I shave all my hair off and trim my beard to a short goatee? Please leave a comment below indicating your opinions.
It's like a poll, only with thoughts required and words and stuff. It'll never catch on.
--> Squat Research
Just picked this up on the Basement Social Centre's mailing list, I figure it may be interesting to some people on my friends list...
I'm doing a piece of research on squatting in the Manchester area and was wondering if anyone would be available for an interview in the next couple weeks. This includes anyone who was involved in the April 12th days of action, the basement social centre, or residential squatting in Hulme in the 80's. Please write me back at your next convenience.
You can contact Adam Woodhead on Adam.Woodhead@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
July 22, 2008
--> Revisiting
Firstly, a couple of updates on recent posts - I gave up getting my new wifi to work upstairs, its just too frustrating. I’ve also had further problems with the fan on my downstairs computer. The new fan is larger than the previous one, and catches on the motherboard, causing the machien to overheat again. However, I think I managed to solve this problem by wedging some paper underneath the powersupply.
So, I’m on school holiday now, so I have the time to resurrect a couple of projects I started a while ago. The first is multistanza, my free version of ubuntu’s multiverse repo. Now that I run gnewsense, not having packages like vlc or mplayer in main or universe is becoming quite annoying. I rewrote a substantial part of my multistanza creation script, so that it doesn’t require root, and doesn’t accidently include the non-free povray. My rewrite should also make it easier to support multiple archectures, as I am now working out the package url and wgetting it, rather than relying on the system-specific apt-get cache. I am also using my new(ish) hosting to host a repository - multistanza.freedomdreams.co.uk - but I must be careful not to pull too much bandwidth. I wonder if the people at gnewsense would be willing to host it for me.
The other thing I’ve had another look at is my Freedometer. This is a program that will scan your system, tell you how free it is, and help you make it more free. I wrote some code for it a while ago, but never publicised it. What I’ve done recently is clean up the code a little, and build a proper website, so that I can publicise it to try to find other people to work on it with me. At the moment, its written in python and only works fully on debian based distrobutions.
--> OpenWRT Failure
Many moons ago, I purchased an Asus WL-HDD - a little box which can share a laptop hard drive over a wired and wireless network, and do some neat auto-synchronisation with a USB key. I didn't actually want any of this, mind - I wanted it because it was a cheap box with USB which ran the OpenWRT general-purpose firmware.
For ages it's just been acting as a wireless access point. The plan was eventually to connect one of my Alcatel SpeedTouch USB modems to it, have it connect to the Internet directly, and share the connection via the wired and wireless interfaces. Chances are I could have stuck in a hard drive and run rtorrent as well.
To cut a long story short, when flooks moved out, I stuck with what I know and set up my old laptop as an Internet router, figuring that I could get round to sorting out the Asus box at a more leisurely pace. This is just as well - after a couple of evenings messing around with cross-compilation toolchains, and begging for help on IRC and a web forum, I've determined two things:
- I need to run a 2.4 kernel on the device to support the Broadcom wifi
- I need to run a 2.6 kernel on the device to support PPP-over-ATM for an ADSL connection
So it looks like the Asus box is useless to me. At this point, I'm likely to just buy a Linksys-type ADSL router, and use that with the standard firmware; I could probably scrounge up some old hardware to run another IPCop box but it'd be unreliable and noisy.
Update: I have purchased a Linksys WAG200G which should arrive soon.
July 20, 2008
--> High & Dry Glossop Sailors Breeze to Victory
After the Glossop team's Southport 12 Hour Race's prerace publicity last week, Janice West, Press Officer at Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College, has put out this press release:
A depleted youth squad from Glossop Sailing Club achieved 10th place out of a field of 28, their best ever result in the annual National Junior Twelve Hour Race, held at Southport, despite their sailing club withdrawing their support and leaving them high and dry without a boat on the day of the competition.
Team Captain, Tim Dobson, 18, from Glossop and Iona Ludlow, 17, from Stockport, both students at Cheadle & Marple Sixth Form College had spent hours with their teammates training for the event, only to receive news on their journey to Southport that the sailing club would not be supporting the team or providing a boat for them to sail in the event. Fellow sailors, South Windermere Sailing Club came to the rescue - they had a boat but needed additional crew members. For Tim, who last year was introduced to Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, in recognition of his contribution to developing youth sailing, it was a bittersweet victory. As he explained,
“The Glossop Sailing Club Team had arrived full of enthusiasm and were eager to sail but unfortunately our boat failed to materialise. We are so thankful to South Windermere Sailing Club who were short of crew members and suggested that we merge with them to form a joint team ‘South Windermere & Glossop’. With a skeleton crew of four from each team we sailed their boat into the highest position that any boat from either club has ever completed the Southport 12 Hour Race!”
Teammates: Iona Ludlow, Alex Hewitt and Glossop Team Captain, Tim Dobson.
(click to enlarge)
This was a truly remarkable achievement for both clubs and we know that we have made some friends for life. Whilst we were extremely thrilled with our result, I just felt so disappointed for our team members who could not compete. For us, this event is the highlight of the year and everyone had worked so hard on their preparation and training. The reasons for the club withdrawing its support are still unclear. They were well aware of the amount of work that had been undertaken and knew the arrangements for the day. We have done nothing different to what we have done in previous years and from that point of view, we were devastated.”
The Twelve Hour Race is a real challenge where the object is to cover more distance in the twelve hours than any other boat. Young sailors take turns to be on the water, two at a time, so the boat is going non stop. The field included a number of national champions and Great Britain sailors so the camaraderie amongst the new team was vital,
Peter Murphy & Iona Ludlow from Glossop Sailing Club competing in the Southport 12 Hour.
(click to enlarge)
“It was quite windy, but nothing that we couldn’t handle,” said Tim. “We were crewing with people that we had never met before, but everyone just gelled together and we all had a brilliant time, but we missed our Glossop teammates. As a result of our success, we have now developed a relationship with South Windermere Sailing Club and we are investigating the possibilities of working together more in the future and competing in some more friendly races.”
Contact Janice: 07885 465866
Contact Tim: tdobson.net/contact
About Tim
--> LUGRadio Live 2008
The Crowd
Well, here is it.. my yearly write-up of LUGRadio Live. Unfortunately the LUGRadio team have decided to call it a day after 5 seasons of the podcast, although it was announced at the event that LUGRadio Live will continue, which obviously I am very happy about, as I do really look forward to it each year.
For anyone who has never heard of it, LUGRadio Live is a community conference for supporters of Free and Open Source software. The event was again held in Wolverhampton at the excellent Lighthouse Media Center. I decided to bring my Asus EEE with me this year to note things down as they happen, so you won’t have to rely on my sketchy memory afterwards for details of the talks and goings-on.
Saturday
Saturday was a very early start for me, 6am to be precise:
Rufus Pollock
Rufus was first on the main stage, with his talk on open knowledge. Presently much of the data collected by government agencies (especially in the UK) and other organisations is locked away or distributed in awkward formats such as PDF or human-readable TXT. Surprisingly the US government happens to be excellent at releasing its data to the public (and why not, they paid to collect it) and Rufus stressed that this is essential for open data to have the success that open code has enjoyed.
Rufus also pointed out the hazards of data and information being locked away with the example of the 800 patents which currently make up the mobile phone 3G standard, and how this presents a great danger to innovation. It was an excellent talk, and I will certainly look into this matter further.
Jeremy Allison
Jeremy Allison - Google
Jeremy works at Google and is a major contributor to Samba, the free-software implementation of Microsoft’s SMB (network file sharing) protocol. Jeremy gave a fascinating talk, detailing the history of Samba from it’s conception, and giving a brief idea of the future plans for the software. He also talked about Samba’s love/hate relationship with Microsoft, and some of the EU and US court cases around Microsoft’s lack of interoperability with other products, this resulted in MS having to release specifications for their protocols, which Samba has now benefited greatly from.
Glyn Wintle
I spoke to Glyn briefly at last year’s LRL, and joined the Open Rights Group not long afterwards. This particular organisation was formed in 2005, and does an excellent job of “defending our bits” as they put it, protecting our civil liberties when they are threatened by bad or inappropriate digital technology. They do this through a combination of: responding to government consultations, writing to and meeting with MP’s and publishing information for the media (one of their spokeswomen, Becky Hogge, is quoted on the BBC News site almost weekly). I was also impressed that ORG now have a member based part time in Europe, monitoring the EU’s latest rulings and proposals.
Although perhaps not as well attended as it should have been (shame on those who did not attend!) the talk was highly informative, covering topics such as Phorm, E-Voting, RIPA, and copyright extensions on music. I was particularly amused by the story of the recording industry’s full page advertising, listing musicians who would lose out if copyrights on music were not extended, this included several artist’s who were deceased, with one who died more than 40 years ago!
The ORG does a fantastic job, and anyone who can afford it should check out their website and donate as much as you can!
Sunday
Bytemark's Gaming Rig
Sunday was a little quieter (as usual) but there was still plenty to see and do, Bytemark’s massive gaming rig was an excellent sight to see, and they should be congratulated for bringing it all that way!
Dotwaffle - Demo Scene
I had been wowed by dotwaffle’s demo scene talk at LRL in 2006, and so was looking forward to the latest innovations. The demo scene started off as a way for software pirates to ’show off’ about their latest cracks, although quickly developed into quite an art form. Dotwaffle showed several different types of demo, most of which are below 8MB in size, including music. An excellent example is “The Popular Demo” which is only 3MB (or 5Mb with music).
I can’t really think of a good way to describe demo’s, except to say that they are similar to a computer generated music video, with all sorts of fancy effects, although it is important to note that no video is used, demo’s consist of only code and graphics. These are then entered in competitions to win prizes.
I was particularly impressed by the size-limited demo’s which included 64kb and even 4kb demos. One 4kb demo in particular (Atrium - Loonies) was particularly well done, starting off with a 3D spinning object in outer space, and then building an entire three-dimensional building with walkways and other objects, with a full musical soundtrack, all within 4 kilobytes, which is absolutely phenomenal. Definitely something to check out!
The Mass Debate
Mass Debate
The mass debate this year included Jeremy Allison of Google, Max Spevack of Novell, and Matthew Garrett. Topics included GPLv3, OOXML vs ODF, and Microsoft’s release of its product specifications. The debate was stimulating, and some good questions were raised. There were also plenty of joke’s cracked at Hans Reiser’s expense!
Tango - Designing an Icon
Pascal Klein gave an excellent non-technical overview of the Tango icon project, how things work, the process of creating icons, and an summary of the legal problems that Tango has experienced over the past few years.
Tango provides a standard icon set for use within applications and operating systems, which are all free for usage in any project (as long as credit is given to the Tango team) and are now being used within many Linux distro’s to give a standard look and feel across all the pre-installed applications, which have the added benefit that when the operating system’s icon theme is changed, it changes not only GNOME/KDE, but all the applications and menu’s which utilise the same naming conventions.
I was particularly impressed with how things are beginning to be standardised through the Tango naming conventions, and the Tango style guidelines. Pascal also covered the recent announcement that the Tango icons are being released into the public domain, which will surely increase their usage, and a new project ‘TangoNG’ will be started to create a brand new icon set, hoping to avoid the licencing problems which plagued the Tango project.
Summary
Another great LRL event, very well attended (also I stayed in a much nicer hotel this year!) and I’m extremely happy that the guys have decided to return for a 5′th event next year.
Jonathan
Update 21/07/08: Lucy pointed out that I hadn’t covered the news of the Tango icons being released into the public domain, so I have added this into the article.
--> Frustrations
Well, this weekend has been an interesting one. I finished school on the friday, ate pizza and watched Wall-E. On the Saturday, me and Joe went to Lugradio Live, which was really cool. Now you may wonder what either of these things has to do with the title of my blog post, well not much. There were a couple of minor annoyances with lugradio live, such as the fact I only went for one day 
and I didn’t manage to meet up with Fred.
However, the main topic of this blog post is about my frustration with my computer setup. Firstly, something that has been annoying me for a while know. Being quite a novice to the insides of computers, I managed to snap off part of my SATA hard drive data cable, so the connection is loose, and I have to constanly stick it down with tape (which only works so well). Soo, if anyone in the Manchester area has a spare sata cable…… otherwise, I may end up buying one from amazon.
The other annoyance is wireless. I did have both my computers networking working perfectly fine with ubuntu, but I hope to switch to gnewsense, and both computers have freedom hating network cards. One is plugged directly into the router downstairs, but the ethernet card requires non-free firmware; the other, a desktop upstairs, is connected via wireless (and is some distance from the router) - the wireless card, of coures, also required firmware.
So, I bought a Linksys WUSB54G, a usb card that seemed to be highly recommend by the FSF. And yes, it did work with gnewsense, didn’t require any firmware, but its wireless capabilities are quite frankly crap. It is not usable upstairs. With a lot of palaver I managed to get it working in one minute bursts, but only with WPA turned off. Now, AFAICT, neither of these problems are due to the drivers, since it works fine on my downstairs computer, when right next to the router. This is useful to an extent, since it allows me to use gnewsense, despite the non-free ethernet, but I had hoped to be able to use the linksys card on both computers.
So, I don’t know what to do, I hoped to try to use 100% free software for a certain length of time, but at the moment, I still need 24576 characters of non-free firmware for my freedom hating wireless card. Is there anything I can do to improve the reception of the linksys one? Solder a new antenna on? baked bean cans?… has anyone got any ideas?
*sigh*
--> "Military Pride" and the Imperial War Museum North
I suppose while I'm lying in bed it makes sense to scribble something about last weekend's trip to the Imperial War Museum North. Thanks to a lift with haggis and fluffyarmadillo, we arrived there with relative ease. The bag search at the entrance was a little disconcerting, though they didn't complain about my crisps and tuna mayo sarnies which I'd brought along to save a little cash. We obtained a natty purple wheelchair for greyeyedeve, and headed off into the museum.
The first exhibition was the Horrible Histories
Frightful First World War which was aimed at kids but entertaining nonetheless. Being a big kid myself, I could have spent hours at the interactive projected trench floor where you could splat rats by stepping on them; Eve's wheelchair was particularly good for this. The exhibition tries to engage as many senses as possible; the olfactory exhibits were a bit too much for my delicate sense of smell.
Afterwards, we tried to find our way to the Military Pride exhibition. It wasn't mentioned on the leaflet we'd picked up at the front desk, and didn't seem to be signposted anywhere. Eventually Daz stumbled across it while looking for the loos. The Waterway
is the name of the 20-foot-long corridor leading from the main exhibitions to the café. The exhibition was painted on the walls of a busy gangway. All in all, it was horribly disappointing; it concentrates almost exclusively on history since the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, has very little content other than a timeline of LGBT reform with a slight emphasis on military regulation, and a small number of short quotes from service members.
As you might expect from an exhibition created with assistance from Stonewall, the B and T words were almost entirely missing - the B word popped up in someone's quote, the T word with reference to a specific case of trans discrimination by the MoD. All in all, it was short on detail, short on inclusion, and short on historical depth. I was hoping to learn more about life in the trenches for gay and bisexual soldiers (I can hear apiphile drooling from here), international perspectives, the blind eye turned to homosexuality among the Allies in World War 2, compared to the gay-hating Nazis, or even the Americans in Vietnam.
On 16th August there's a chance to go to the IWMN in the evening and question the curators of the exhibit; if somebody wanted to go and call for a more in-depth and inclusive exhibition on a larger scale, that would be great.
In the shop afterwards, I bought a WW2 UK National Identity Card for myself, and a postcard for ms_saffie. We went up in the viewing tower (leaving v15u4l_3rr0r downstairs) and caught a wonderful view of Salford Quays and the Lowry Centre in the sunshine.
--> Debian GNU/Linux Lenny on Lenovo 3000 N200
So far my experience of this laptop has been good. I installed Debian GNU/Linux amd64 "Lenny", which is still the testing release, using the "beta 2" installer. This is a slightly older version of Lenny than currently available (it's a moving target until it's released).
The lack of a middle button for the touchpad is annoying but liveable with. The placing of Page Up and Down next to the arrow keys is very neat, and it's pretty simple to hit the function modifier to turn them into Home and End too. Annoyingly, the volume up/down/mute buttons don't Just Work like they do on my ThinkPad; I'll have to get that sorted because they're very handy.
The main reason I bought this laptop was for its 1680x1050 widescreen display, and this worked straight out of the box, with the free nv driver for nVidia chipsets. I could get some 3D acceleration with the proprietary driver, but I don't want to do that. I'll keep a vague eye on the Nouveau project though.
The wired ethernet works just fine, and the wireless was simple once I remembered to turn off the "kill switch" on the laptop. It's an Intel 4965AG, which according to Intel has drivers in kernel 2.6.24 and up; I just needed to install the firmware-iwlwifi package.
My current niggle which I will be attempting to solve today is that the touchpad's "tap-to-click" function is way too sensitive. It seems to be a Synaptics-type device which means it should be pretty configurable.
I've also been playing with PowerTop and need to find some way to disable the Bluetooth adapter (which uses the same killswitch as the wifi, annoyingly) by default - it seems to be a pretty major power drain. I've not measured battery life as yet.
The webcam seems to be supported by Linux UVC. This isn't included in Lenny's kernel by default, but can be compiled in with module-assistant auto-install linux-uvc. However, the current Lenny version (r193) is not new enough to support the webcam; I had to use an upstream Subversion checkout (r238) to get it working with luvcview. To work with Ekiga I need to install libpt-plugins-v4l2 - currently broken in Lenny. However, libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l2 works as a workaround for now.
July 19, 2008
--> Tent Cities: Serious New Issue the Media Rarely Covers
Direct link
July 17, 2008
--> LugRadio Live UK 2008 LAN Gaming Rig
Wooo, look at this. Bytemark have finished setting up the LAN gaming rig for LugRadio Live UK 2008. They are running twice daily fragging competitions with the winning teams getting prizes.
Come shoot other geeks in a team related frag-fest at LugRadio Live 2008. I will be joining you. Don’t forget that if you’ve never been to LugRadio Live before but you always meant to, then this is you last chance as there won’t be another one.
Many thanks to Matt Bloch of Bytemark Hosting.
--> LugRadio Live This Weekend!
This weekend is LugRadio Live UK 2008 at The Lighthouse Media Center in Wolverhampton. The weekend looks a little like this:
- Friday - 8pm - LugRadio Party @ The Hogs Head, Stafford St
- Saturday - 10.30am - LugRadio Live UK Day 1 doors open @ The Lighthouse Media Center, Fryer Street, Wovlerhampton
- Saturday - 5pm - Recording of the last ever LugRadio show!
- Saturday - 8pm - LugRadio Party @ The Lighthouse Media Center, Fryer Street, Wolverhampton
- Sunday - 10.30am - LugRadio Live UK Day 2 doors open @ The Lighthouse Media Center, Fryer Street, Wolverhampton
25+ speakers. 20+ exhibitors. LAN gaming. Free swag. Great community atmosphere. £5.
Bring it on. 
July 16, 2008
--> Gaming competition at LugRadio Live this weekend
Cool. We have confirmation that Matt Bloch and the gang at Bytemark have put together an uber-flashy gaming rig to bring to LugRadio Live this weekend.
They’ve written about this gaming server, and they’re going to be running a set of gaming competitions on it over the course of the weekend. Those of you who are gamers are going to enjoy this.