Fitting the battle of life

Well, I heard about debatewise earlier last term when the guy running it came to one of our debates to talk briefly about it, but it’s only now (when I remembered about it and dug out his card from a pocket) that I’ve had a good look and signed up, and started to contribute.

Today I came across a debate titled ‘Macs are better than PC’s‘, which, aside from its flagrant misuse of the apostrophe, is just a silly thing to `debate’. I will keep half an eye on it, but we all know what happens when an argument (yes, argument, not debate) like this starts up. Rule #2 of the internet: Reason holds no sway over the fanboy.

I’ll admit I did step in to offer a counter-argument, but that was only to point out the futility of the topic. I’ll blog about the actual concept and the site itself later this weekend; I just needed to get that off my chest.

In other news, I think I had better sort out my categorization and tagging.

This one’s for Londoners: follow the tubinator for updates one which tube lines are currently playing up (updated every 15minutes). However, the short form of tweets means messages can be cut off, as in the current “Broken tubes: Circle (Part suspended), District (Part suspended), East London (Bus service), Hammersmith” - surely removing the ‘Broken tubes:’ bit would be sensible, as you’re reading the status for a reason. I might message the guy who created it; it appears to have surfaced earlier this month.

So, to recap my twitter treats:

• twitter from irssi,
• google calendar integration,
• follow the plotline of a short story (or at least, one strand of it),
• and now tube updates.

Is there anything twitter can’t do? Aside from make me another cup of tea?

Well, everyone knows what facebook does, right? It’s a social networking site, the bane of productivity and a spam folder for all those useless applications you’ll never use, yes?

Check out mirror.facebook.com. It’s a repository for plenty of open-source applications.  Who’d have thunk it?

This is a wonderful story about how the French press was so easily deluded by things that were said and done on Facebook, believing them to be true. Moral of the story: just because it’s in a book (or newspaper) doesn’t make it true.

Following on from my post this morning about the non-cost of OpenOffice versus MS Office, what happens when you don’t have much money to buy a new computer? The ‘average’ consumer isn’t going to want to be scouring the shops for bargain parts, worry about static discharge and getting jumpers set right by either upgrading their computer or building one from scratch - especially if they need the mobility of a laptop (and 2008 could well be the year laptops overtake desktops in terms of sales). So, what to do?

[Note: I've started with the base models from Dell and tried to match specs as closely as possible.]

As an Ubuntu user, I would always recommend anyone to use it. I’d almost go so far as letting them take my laptop for a test-drive for a couple of days. (Almost.) I’m sure with a little gentle encouragement, a little guidance when they need it, they’d fall in love. Oh, and it’s free, I’d tell them. You can get it from Dell, I’d tell them. Wow, all this for free? I’ll get one of those, not one of those hideously expensive Vista machines then, they’d say.

Well, here’s the problem. Take the base models, the Inspiron 6400 and it’s Ubuntu counterpart, the 6400n. With the same specs (1.60GHz cpu, 80GB hard drive, one gigabyte of RAM, the same Intel graphics), the Ubuntu machine actually works out £10 more expensive than the Vista Basic machine. (The Ubuntu machine starts at 512MB memory, which would be enough, and is £20 cheaper overall, but in the interests of fairness…)

So what is that extra £10 doing there? It’s there because companies pay to have their software pre-installed on retail computers, which of course reduces the overall cost (and, in a way, locking you in) - remember all those ‘get your internet here’ icons on the desktop last time you bought a Windows computer? Ubuntu doesn’t do that - it wouldn’t fit with the philosophy, for a start, and you can’t make something free any cheaper.

One argument that says that the £10 doesn’t matter is that Ubuntu comes pre-installed with even more (useful) software than Windows does out of the (retail) box. Look at the GIMP, for instance. It’s not an equivalent to MS Paint. It’s an equivalent (for simplicity’s sake!) to Adobe Photoshop. Which costs over £500. And that’s with a 10% discount from the nice people at Amazon.co.uk. Look at it like this: that £10 pays for a whole lot more than it looks like it pays for. Think of it, perhaps, as a one-off registration fee for unrestricted access to the Ubuntu software repositories. To the community support network that exists. To complete customisability of and freedom over your computer. And £10 is less (to continue a theme from my last post) than ten pints of beer. So you’re only losing what, two nights (maybe even one!) of drinking? (Remember also that Dell is enabling multimedia out of the box, so the £10 probably covers some kind of license for that too.) Let’s also bear in mind that Vista Basic is, well, basic. Ubuntu comes in one form, like Mac OSX, which has all the features in it, not some myriad different forms that give you more as you pay more. So it probably isn’t a fair comparison to choose the Basic option anyway…but we’re going for a cheap computer here.

To return to the £10, it’s also a signal to send to companies like Dell that there is consumer demand for Ubuntu-based (or even GNU/Linux-based in general) computers, and that’s a signal that in my opinion is worth £10 to send.

The £10 ‘Linux tax’ on Dell computers is actually very good value for money, I would say. Just wish I had the other £330 to buy the damn computer with.

This is more of a discursive, get-my-thoughts-down-quickly post. Apologies to anyone who isn’t at all interested in this.

This mainly comes from my recent work on (you guessed it) Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets. Now, this is a collection of some hundred-odd poems, and to be quite frank, I’m not going to write an essay that includes all of them. I don’t even want to have to read them all, to find out which ones are easy. So, I sat down with the book and a bit of paper, and noted down which ones dealth with, for instance, the art of poetry (so looking for reference to the Muse, to poetry, other poets, etc).

Without paying for a research assistant, I don’t want to do this myself. It’s a tedious task that takes up time that could be spent doing other things, like actually reading and responding to the poems themselves. Oh, and then of course I need to find poems by other authors, or other poems by the same author in different books, that treat the same subject. Admittedly, often there will be introductions that give you some kind of overview of a writer’s context, but what if you’re not reading an edition aimed at students? An older edition, perhaps, or a website?

What we need - and by ‘we’ I mean lazy literature students like myself, and by ‘need’ I mean ‘could do with to let us be even lazier’ - is some kind of metadatabase of poetry. Google are already digitizing books and making them searchable, but I’d like to see this go further. Why show you the whole book, when you need only the one chapter on the history of the sonnet for your essay? For poetry, it should suggest other poems that are similar - sorted by importance. Poems by the same author on the same subject would be ranked highest, and then other authors, those closest chronologically ranked highest. Some kind of weighting could be factored in to show a known connection - we know Wordsworth read Smith, so perhaps he should rank higher than Shelley, for instance.

The only problem is, such a database would require a vast amount of work. All books currently digitized would need cutting up into individual poems, chapters - perhaps so far as paragraphs (which would return Wordsworth’s ‘There are in our existence spots of time’ verse-paragraph out of Book XI of the Prelude). And then tagging: form, style, period, author, subject (this would be a little subjective). I don’t know how it would work. I’d just like it to! It would also help to make concordances and other geeky English things like that.

Maybe there is something already quite like this, maybe not. Perhaps I should spend my summer scanning out-of-copyright books and making my own database. But maybe I shall just wait for Google Books to come out of beta.

Saw this and wanted it, even if I don’t know why. I mean, who wouldn’t want a big plastic Tux sitting around flapping its arms all the time?

I read, as those who know me will no doubt know, the Guardian as my paper (well, actually, being a broke student, website) of choice, and especially make sure to catch the Technology supplement on a Thursday, simply because techy stuff is a minor passion of mine. I’ve noticed over the past year or so (perhaps since I started actively looking) more and more mentions of Linux, and particularly Ubuntu. So it came as no great surprise to find this post by Kevin Anderson today.

He has been using Ubuntu for six months, and comes to the conclusion that it is “ready for advanced computer users, but not most mainstream users”, for example his parents. However, not only has he not asked his parents to try it, but the issues he brings up as ‘cons’ include mainly driver issues. One comment from an American describes a large group of Ubuntu users whose average age is 74 all humming along quite nicely, and (from my own experience) my mother is quite happy using Ubuntu - and I certainly wouldn’t call her an advanced computer user. After several comments, (including my own!), the author conceded: “I guess, that’s not much different now with a Windows machine”. Victory is ours!

I do admit that the issues he had with his own machine are genuine issues with certain video/audio drivers, but with the likes of Dell offering pre-installed issues in the mainstream market, the ‘average’ computer user simply isn’t going to run into the same difficulties. And, of course, it’s well known that Windows has driver issues, worse than GNU/Linux does. But I won’t turn this into a MS-bashing post.

The simple fact is, while all publicity is good publicity, articles such as this slightly skew the perspective an ‘average’ user has of Ubuntu. It would have been a very different article had the author taken a new Ubuntu Dell for a ride, instead of installing it on his own, older system. Articles like this do highlight the benefits of Ubuntu (and there is indeed a list of praise-worthy points), but at the same time aren’t entirely constructive. While the author added an update to the main article with a link to various features coming in Hardy, he didn’t update it to clarify his remarks about the ‘your parents’ test, which many people would miss in the comments.

Rant over.

Ah, cartoons of my childhood. But that’s not what this post is here for, of course.

It’s been eight months since I started using Ubuntu (and Linux as a whole, of course), and I’m finally comfortable with using it. From installing apps via the command line to writing my own back-up script, I think for a beginner I’m doing pretty well. I managed to upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy pretty easily (via some trouble with my ATI graphics card, but having a separate /home partition meant I could just fresh install), and am finding the whole thing very enjoyable. I’m also close to getting two friends to install Ubuntu on their computers as well.

I’ve used Firefox for a good few years now, and had some experience with OpenOffice.org as well, so the move to an open-source OS was a natural progression and one I made with enthusiasm, if a little trepidation as to what might go wrong. In the end, I’ve found any trouble I’ve had solved quickly and effectively with the help of a wonderful community, especially in the #ubuntu-uk IRC channel. The community is a brilliant (and free!) resource, and always happy to help when they can - a big thank-you to all those who’ve helped me in the last 8 months!

So, now my Ubuntu-related posts should be syndicated on the Ubuntu-UK planet feed, and although I can’t promise in-depth how-tos for setting up obscure server apps, I can give my general experience from a non-techie’s perspective (although I am, admittedly, a geek). Hopefully something I write will someday help another member of the community in some way, or encourage someone to make the switch to what is, in my opinion, a brilliant OS and an even better community. (And I’m going to try not to be ill for the Hardy release party like I was for Gutsy!)

My sister asked me, frustrated with her own attempts, to resize a batch of images so they’d be small enough to upload to Bebo. How long did it take? Two seconds, and here’s how.

I suppose I had an unfair advantage: the laptop she was using runs Windows XP, compared to my far more powerful (in terms of OS) Ubuntu installation. After a quick question in the #ubuntu-uk channel on freenode (where other UK Ubuntu users just sit and help each other, in the spirit of the community), I found out there was a simple tool that would do this for me, included in the ImageMagick package. A simple ’sudo apt-get install imagemagick’ later, and I ran the following command (the files were all jpegs, all in the same folder, and I was working from the folder containing them):

mogrify -resize 75% *.jpg

A short while later, and all the original files had been replaced with versions 25% smaller. It was as simple as that. How would I have done it on windows? No idea, but I wouldn’t have come up with a solution that was that easy and did all the photos in one batch, at least not without expensive tools.

It’s days like these I smile smugly.