Fitting the battle of life

I’m all in favour of competition. I think competition is a very healthy to have. Let’s look at a case study, bank accounts.

• Different banks offer different current accounts.
• These may have different implementation of the same features – interest rates vary, all accounts offer some kind of card but it could be Maestro or Visa, and so on
• Some have features others don’t – online banking, for instance.

These differences help consumers choose between which bank they’ll use (and others, of course – is it in Iceland or Ireland?). However, whichever account they choose, they’ll still be able to do these things:

• Put money in and take money out from branches
• Use cash machines, regardless of who is running the ATM itself.
• Make payments to any other account, regardless of which bank that account is held by.

Now, I don’t think you’d find a product surviving very long if it didn’t let you take out money transferred to your account from a different bank. It would be laughed off the high street.

So why do we accept it from software?

Next Thursday is the release of Ubuntu 8.10, codenamed Intrepid Ibex, and there’ll be another London release party organised by the lovely folks at Canonical, details of which you can find here.

The cake was not a lie last year!

I’ll be going – second party in a row – and I hope to see you there too!

In the meantime, I’ve only ‘broken’ my Intrepid install once, and that was a problem with graphics that just required a quick switch of drivers. It’s all looking grand – roll on the release!

This is ridiculous. One little post about a new desktop background in Ubuntu 8.10 and suddenly I’m the fastest growing WordPress.com blog of today? Well, my pageviews are up 50 times on yesterday – nearly a thousand when I last looked – so I guess it kinda makes sense. That’s more views in one day than I’ve had before in an entire month. Good job it’s WordPress.com and not self-hosted.

Today's stats

It’s a pretty big leap, and I think I know vaguely how it happened.

My blog was picked up by paulmellors.net, which got aggregated onto ubuntuweblogs.org. From there, someone at Lifehacker saw it and again linked here.

Today's referrers

I’m guessing 153 people don’t have my RSS feed coming to them – most will probably by Lifehacker, right?

The problem is, I doubt many will be coming back. I don’t have anything else particularly interesting (and the post linked to wasn’t particularly interesting either – just a screenshot of my desktop, and a short comment) on the blog anyway. That’s a thousand people who for one fleeting moment knew this site existed. It’s not even enough to call myself an overnight celebrity.

It does demonstrate the strange nature of the web, though: a link picked up by one person can quickly escalate and turn into a lot of views. This will be the day of views I will never replicate, although I suppose it’s something to aspire to.

I’d better just find something interesting to write that people will come back to.

Well, it’s been nearly a month since we launched the new UCL Union Debating Society website over at debating.org. The old side was a bit of a beast, requiring updating by hand and not really being very extendable.

We (that is, myself and Alex) decided to go with a WordPress installation that would allow us to have static pages describing what we do and rolling updates of what’s going on in the Society, how debates have been and who’s won competitions, in blog form.

Header image on debating.org

It took a little over the 5 minutes advertised – but only because we first had to work out whether we actually did have MySQL on the server and how to use it. Neither of us had been near anything like this before, but once we’d worked that out, Alex had to go and I was left in Gordon’s Café in the Union with my laptop.

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I like surprises. I’m not following the build-up to the release of Ubuntu 8.10 very closely (having far more pressing things like writing 3,000 words on books I’ve not yet read), so when some of those minor little changes occur they sometimes make me smile.

I found this after a few updates today:

New background for Intrepid (Ubuntu 8.10)

(The updated themes caused me a couple of issues to start with, but it all got ironed out. Seems Ubuntu forgot which theme it was meant to be using and switched to a horrible grey boxy thing. Ewww.)

There are quite a few photos I like to use as backgrounds, but this is the kind of look I will probably keep for a while.

So, I have a lovely modern shiny laptop that is underpowered with too little storage (hey, it was free from these guys for winning their competition) and a three-year old laptop that makes my room noiser than [text deleted by the PC brigade]. I also have a fscking awesome wonderful new camera (a Canon 450D) that’s producing rather large RAW files that need processing.

I don’t, unfortunately, have much money. The shiny laptop was free, the old laptop a birthday present and the camera also a birthday present. In January, however, I get a nice chunk of student loan in again, and I am working during term so I can save up a little cash.

The problem to solve is, I would quite like to buy a desktop PC for a) working at home on a machine that’s not ridiculously tiny and bad for my fingers to be typing on, b) a nice large screen to see my nice large photos, c) a computer that’s powerful enough to process said photos and d) that isn’t too expensive.

At the moment my decision is between a £799 iMac (because they’re supposed to be good for that kind of thing) and a comparable Dell running Ubuntu (because I like Ubuntu and can do everything for two different values of free with GIMP and ufraw instead of acquiring buying Lightroom/Aperture/Photoshop etc). I haven’t ever had a desktop of my own, and am not really sure I know what I’m looking for. Any suggestions, tips or warnings (and hatemail for the iMac comment), please do let me know down there in the comment box. I won’t be buying until the New Year, but it would be good to have an idea of what I’m looking for before I start looking!

[Updated]:

Dell computer:
Looking at Dell’s site, I can get a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 gig RAM, 320GB hard drive with 128MB ATI card for £310. Monitor I’d buy separately – could probably get cheaper, as with wireless adaptor. Add another, larger hard drive myself, and I’m sorted. Does that sound good enough?

I tried updating my girlfriend’s installation of Open Office to the new 3.0 release. Asking 2.whatever to update itself didn’t work, so I went to openoffice.org to download a new copy. This is the result:

I apologise that it’s Windows – not quite there yet! But there are two things to note:

1. Her usual download speed of ridiculously fast (she’s in uni halls; when we downloaded a movie a whie ago, it took 5 mins for 1.75GB) isn’t quite what she’s getting from the oo.o download server
2. The actual site is reduced to a bare-minimum look.

There is huge demand for OO.o 3.0. I don’t blame their technical team for failing to anticipate this. I congratulate them.

diggnation_01

Originally uploaded by jkblacker

Well, that didn’t go quite to plan. We were stuck on the stupid DLR for aaages and ran into the ExCel centre at just after 7.30. There was a massive queue already and before too long they closed the doors and told us all to bugger off. This wasn’t so good. We hung about a while (and had a brief chat with Jemima Kiss from the Guardian, whom I’d met a few days before, when she walked past).

We went to a bar nearby (couldn’t get into the official Digg meet-up bar) and had a few drinks. On our way out, however, we ran into Alex Albrecht and had a chat. Since he was on his way home and felt sorry for us for not being able to see the show or get into the party, he gave us his own pass…

Inside we met Prager, who is a top bloke. Had a drink with him and then had to leave – needed to be up early the next day, unfortunately.

Anyway, overall a pretty random night that turned out a bit more successful than we first thought. Still not sure if I’ll bother with the crowds next year, but we’ll see. A few more shots:

Oh god I’m so sorry about the ridiculous pun. I ought to be shot.

Anyway, given that I don’t much care for iPhoto’s editing capabilities, or Canon’s own software which, although fairly comprehensive is pretty unintuitive, I naturally looked for something to use on my Ubuntu laptop to edit my growing collection of RAW shots.

I do like the GIMP, I do – but it doesn’t support RAW natively. No problem. A quick google revealed ufraw, which I duly installed.

The only problem with buying a new camera and trying to use free software with it, is that the authors of free software don’t necessarily have the time or money to invest in keeping it completely up to date. Ufraw did not play nicely with my Canon 450D – all the images were turning out purple on screen.

Conversely, the good thing with having a great big community of users of free software is that someone will have run into the same problem, and because (cue overgeneralistaion for which someone will tell me off) a lot of those same users have some technical skill, someone will have written a patch or other solution, and here it is. Although the post mentions Hardy, there’s a version in his ppa for Intrepid as well.

Since I’m at uni at the moment with my other laptop, I’ll have a play later and let you know the results – but it’s not showing up purple, that’s for sure :)

Update:

All works perfectly, taking this RAW image:

And producing this result after some ufraw tweaking:

Not perfect editing by me, but I’m still getting used to the whole thing. I’ll improve. Meanwhile you can check out other shots on my Flickr photostream.

Two of my housemates are a bit obsessed with poker, and I am not unfond of the game. I am, however, pretty bad, and adverse to playing ‘real’ poker when I’m not that confident in my ability. So, I needed something to practice with, and checked out the repositories.

PokerTH is a great app (sudo apt-get install pokerth or http://www.pokerth.net/ for the latest version) that allows you to play on your own computer against up to six computer opponents, or host a local game that people on your network can join (with the option to fill up spaces with computer opponents), or to join a game on the internet (for free, no real money changing hands).

But people on my network use Macs or Windows PCs, I hear you cry! No problem – PokerTH is cross-platform. In my house it’s running on Mac OS X, Vista, Ubuntu and XP with no compatability issues. No one has any major complaints.

The one complaint we do have is joining local network games requires you to know the IP address of the host machine, with no ability to browse the network for running games. This is a bit annoying when the Vista or XP machines are hosting – I can never remember how to find IP addresses on those ones. I suppose it would also help if I set up static IP addresses for the network, but should I really need to?

Personally, I would prefer if the app itself were visually more integrated into each operating system (like Firefox has been in 3.0) – it looks identical across the board. While this means it’s easy to use on any OS, it does look a bit out of place in Ubuntu 8.10 and OS X, to be honest.

Anyway, download, have a play, and hopefully I’ll see you online :)