Graham Davies and Catherine Millar

When living in California you tend to forget about the most basic of living requirements. Washing up and laundry dried in about 7 minutes (great if you ignore the canyon-like fissures that were your knuckles after a few months), light and sun almost came through the walls and there were normally about 4 open WiFi networks within range. In Manchester it seems that achieving all three is more tricky. Catherine and I spent a year living in a flat in a particularly leafy part of already leafy Didsbury. The converted nursing home had tall ceilings and windows but had obviously been shoehorned into a former janitor closet and as such was a compromise of space over light. Despite being North-facing, the flat got amazing morning sun (on those rare occasions when 400 feet of solid cloud were not in the way) and warmed up like a little beauty. All great and good - but I haven't mentioned yet that the total floor space was about 40 square metres - which means little until I say that the bedroom had about 8 inches on either side of a 4 foot 6 inch bed. So we had to move and move we did - all of 100 yards across the road to a flat about twice the size. Yay! Buy hold on a cotton picking minute. Have a guess how long it takes Tiscali Internet Service Provider to move our account these few steps? 2 hours? 24? 5 working days? No - try over 3 weeks!

There is nothing better than the joy of new gadgets. However, this week I have been overdosing. Last Sunday was a first for me - I bought a new device before it was even announced. Normally I faff about for months deciding if I really need it, then convincing myself that it is crap, then too expensive, then that the new ones will be out soon. Finally I end up buying it just before it goes obsolete. This time was slightly different. I had been doing the above with the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and was at the point of 'the new one will be better' - when out of nowhere came a digg.com rumour that CompUSA had the not-yet-announced Nokia N800 (the update!) Within 45 minutes I had bought it - without even looking at the box.

The main complaint of the 770 was that nobody could work out exactly what it was for - after all it is not a phone. Instead it is a screen on crack - with WiFi and bluetooth for connecting to whatever internet or phones you can find. Modularity it seems is the goal of Nokia - quite the opposite of the subsequently announced iPhone - which attempts to do everything (as pointed out by a Conan Spoof). I'm sure for the average person the iPhone might be a dream come true (ignoring the battery and size issues) - but for me the N800 is genius. It runs Linux for starters, so I can geek away to my hearts content installing random open source junk, writing python programs for it and the like. Then you have the screen - 800x480 or something crazy - allows you to browse websites without zooming or faffing about with rotating the screen. Then you have the complete lack of phone charges or plans - the iPhone is about $960 for the obligatory 2 year contract.

Definition:
tar -cf - /some/file | ssh user@host.name tar -xf - -C /destination

Definition:
Breezy Badger will be the next release of Ubuntu Linux. This release follows Hoary Hedgehog and Warty Warthog. This goes some way to explaining why it is my current favourite Linux distribution - it also happens to be a very good Debian-based system.

URL:
http://www.ubunutu.com

Well I'm not quite sure what precipitated this - but here goes another switcheroo. This time from Xoops to Drupal. Ok - so this implies that the Jaxon was right all along but hey things could have been so different. Xoops was great - and still is - but for some reason I lost faith and so did a lot of other people. I get the impression that the rats are leaving the sinking ship - but I may be totally wrong and Xoops may spring back to life any minute. I've always kept an eye on Drupal and only when I experimented with CivicSpace did it all become clear. The switch may seem a little premature since they are just about to release a new and shiny 4.7.x version, with AJAX goodness, but the tables in 4.6 were actually more compatible with Xoops than 4.7 - so why not. Drupal also has Gallery 2 (that actually works), and migration of photos from xoopsgallery was simple, once I updated albums using the latest 1.5.x version. All this of course means nothing to anyone - and the only reason I mention it is that it has taken a bit of fiddling to achieve. Hopefully the novelty factor will kick in and new stories will be posted a plenty. Until then - there is nothing to see here - move along.

Since finishing Half-Life 2 I had to find something to do with these cold, dark, netflix-free evenings while Catherine is watching The Apprentice. So I've been trying to get back into a bit of coding. Xoops provided the ideal framework to start learning PHP, SQL and object orientation. The first project was to get images in news items to be uploaded and resized in one go. The next two were to add the comments and wordbook entries to the RSS feed. These files can be downloaded in the new Downloads Section.

Without ruining it for you by increasing you expectation... Half Life 2 is amazing. Why? Interactivity. You can pick things up, wander around and either put them down or chuck them. After you emerge from the tunnels very early in the game you find yourself outside in a square. You walk around and find youself standing in a playground. You nudge the swings - they start swinging. Ok you think ver nice... lets push them a bit more. Now the initial excitement falls away slightly as they don't bend like real swings but are rigid. You wander over to the see-saw - and it hits you that here they don't have such a difficult problem. This time the see-saw doesn't disappoint it reacts exactly right: you run along it... then you see some breeze blocks... you place them on one end - it tips... you place on on the other side - it almost balances. A doll lies on the floor - you throw it againt a crate - it smashes.... I do not need to continue. If this is just a bit of scenery - imagine the rest of the game!

If you want something done properly you should probably do it yourself. Ok so I am making excuses already. Spit it out man... So I got a Virtual Private Server. There I have admitted it - this completes my journey into geekdom. What does it mean - you may well ask! The summary is that I now have a lost of space and the ability to do with it what I will. Alistair Edwardes and Vern Long were the first to be lured into my lair with the offer of free (for now - muh ha ha haaaa) space, mail forwarding and domain parkage.

An added bonus was that while I was looking for another domain name to make the shift from one server to the other easier I noticed grahamdavies.net had become available... so snapped it up. I'm trying to think of a generic domain that could be used in the form of bob.fascinatingsite.com (which is an option). This would allow people to get onboard without having to get a domain name.

Well it arrived one day after the order was submitted... thanks newegg.com. Installation of the bits went smoothly with the only shock the size of the AMD 64 chip... it's tiny!? After a lengthy install, SP2 update, nvidia driver install, reboot, reboot etc etc... it was time to install and play Doom 3... and what a beauty. High quality... 1024x768x32 not a problem... very smoooooth and a totally different game from the one being played (pointlessly) on the laptop.

For some reason (not entirely sure why) I am now installing Ubuntu Linux. This cheeky debian based distribution is the only one at the present time that has Gnome 2.8, yes you heard... Gnome... why? I was surprise too... 2.4 and 2.6 were just wrong but 2.8 for some reason seems right. Maybe it is just that Ubuntu has got the fonts and colours to look good for a change (cf debian). For the google bots out there the fix to get the nvidia nForce ethernet to work under linux on the MSI K8N Neo Platinum is to modprobe the forcedeth module.

I am rambling now while I wait for the apt-get dist-upgrade... which has now finished. Trajedy... the nvidia 64Bit drivers require a full 64Bit linux... which ubuntu clearly isn't... luckily I am downloading the 64Bit Fedora Core 3 DVD... we shall see how the 64Bit chip really performs.... where is OS X Panther and matching Doom 3 when you need it!

/end of rambling nonsense

After weeks of libra-ism I finally managed to press submit on my order for a new PC. The laptop just wasn't cutting it anymore and with the recent release of Doom 3 and Half Life 2 around the corner it would have been rude to wait any longer.

For the fellow geek the system is based on the AMD 64 3200+ chip - with a dual G5 at work how could I go back to 32Bit? The graphics card is an eVGA Geforce 6800 which should handle Doom 3 at high quality - which on the projector should be tollerable :-D