After six months I started running again, trying to lose my 5Kg of paternity weight. I’m up to four bridges again, out of a usual eight.
This gives me the chance to listen to my Pimsleur Turkish course again while running. Hopefully I’ll be able to say very few things well, so I’ll be looking for opportunities to use my small collection of nouns and verbs at GUADEC in Istanbul next week.
Yesterday I received my new Lenovo Thinkpad X61. It’s the UX29DGE model, with Intel GMA X3100 graphics (gnome-device-manager says GM965/GL960), and 2.20 GHz Core Duo T7500. It shows up as Model 76739DG in gnome-device-manager.
After fighting with Windows Vista to reduce its partition size enough, I installed Ubuntu Hardy easily. I wanted to keep Vista around so I can look at it sometimes, but that short experience of it is enough to help me understand why people hate it so much. It’s as if they went out of their way to break all the basic principles of UI design, as if the managers had a running feud with the human interface department and wanted to outrage them. People who hate computers (most people), and who think that computers hate them, will not be surprised.
But it’s great to have a new laptop on which everything works. Even hibernation. I’ve never seen that work before and it’s truly useful. I wish my desktop could do it, in the absence of working session management.
I am a little disappointed that it’s almost as hot as my Acer. I guess this is just how all laptops are. How do people manage to use these things on their laps? Do we need a control panel to limit the CPU speeds, together with the internal temperature sensor, with options for “cosy”, “slow grilling” and “burning trousers”?
While I was in North Berwick, we went through my fathers stash of photos and found lots of slides made by my grandfather showing my father as a teenager and me and my sister as babies and young kids.
I bought my father a Plustek OpticFilm 35mm slide scanner and a Flickr Pro account. He’s using Windows XP (I don’t think this model works on Linux). The results are pretty good, though the Plustek OpticFilm scanner should make it easier to get better colors in its QuickScan mode. Its full scan mode can do better but its UI is incomprehensible to mortals. It can scan 35mm negatives too. He’s scanning a few each day, adding to his Flickr photostream.
The older slides are glass-mounted 120mm (also known as three and a half inch) slides. I took those to Pyramid Imaging in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, who did a great job.
Some links to notable pictures so far:
As much as I dislike Ubuntu’s Launchpad bug tracker, Fedora Linux seems to have made something worse.I guess they want to discourage people from submitting bug reports.
For instance, I want to file a bug about the Glom package. Here are some things I tried:
Go to Fedora’s package page for Glom (I had previously found this and put a link to it on glom.org):
Go to Fedora’s web site like a normal user (I googled):
It wasn’t easy, but I found some accommodation for the 7 Openismus employees who are going to GUADEC in Istanbul. The recommended accommodation (The 2 Hotel Golden Horn hotels) was booked out and I guess it has been for some time. You’ll be lucky to even get a reply from those hotels.
We booked two apartments (Glorya Penthouse Terrace and Glorya Tower View, in BeyoÄŸlu near the Galata tower on the east side of the river.) from Istanbul Holiday Apartments, who are not cheap, but who speak (email) perfect English and are very straightforward.
I seem to have been completely wrong about the cost of accommodation in Istanbul, though it might be easier for individuals. I guess the city has boomed since my last visit. But over the last few years I have noticed that hotels everywhere have become increasingly unlike the places surrounding them. Most people who work in hotels could never afford to stay in them.
Dear Internet, I think this is the hard drive on my Acer Travelmate 4100. How on earth do I remove this metal plate thing and get to the hard drive itself, so I can put a new drive in? I’ve already broken the little tab of clear plastic by pulling on it.
Update: Nevermind. There’s a little screw to the right and then it slides across. I thought the screw was for something underneath.
I don’t know why some projects use Trac, though it’s been chosen by some people who I respect. It frequently annoys me.
For now, I’ll restrict my rant to Trac’s bug tracker. It fails to do the basic things that bug trackers should do: Make it easy to submit a bug, and make it easy to see a list of open bugs.
I’m currently on holiday in North Berwick. It’s been fun but not quite as relaxing as hoped. Liam has started waking at night again after two months of sleeping through the night.
I’ve been getting up early to do a couple of hours work each morning, but this laptop’s hard drive has started hard crashing after a few minutes. Hard drives fail too often. Hopefully it will give me time to finish this blog entry and hit Publish. I guess I’ll be offline until I get back on Monday.
We got lucky again. Jan Arne Petersen will start as a full-time Openismus employee next week, bringing more GTK+/GNOME development skills. He’ll be doing some interesting work on the Maemo platform.
I’ve been travelling more than usual in May and I’m not finished.
I spent a couple of days in Brussels at Thomas Vander Stichele‘s place, getting a crash course in the Flumotion streaming media server because I’ll be writing Flumotion‘s user documentation.
I’m writing quite a lot of documentation these days, and enjoying it as a holiday from writing code. It’s stress free in comparison. I’d like to make Openismus known for creating documentation along with our development and QA work. There’s always a need for it.
After Brussels I spent a few days with Liam’s grandparents in Karlsruhe before heading to Prague for FOSSCamp. Being away from him for so long was not easy.
Things I read on the train to Prague:
FOSSCamp was not quite the dull unstructured talk-fest that I feared, just because of the quality of the attendees, each of whom had something fascinating to explain. It was indeed mostly just talk, with little chance of any resulting action, but it was at least interesting talk.
I quickly introduced Glom to a small group of people who seemed positive and led a larger discussion about updates of stable upstream releases in stable versions of distros, mostly focusing on Ubuntu because only the Ubuntu people seemed to have opinions. Maybe the other distros’ processes are not so easily influenced. I think we already have a result, which I can hopefully mention soon.
I stayed an extra day to meet André Klapper, who is attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit, so we could talk about his bugmaster work for Openismus. We fight entropy. I attended the Ubuntu Mobile sessions in the morning before taking the train home to Munich, but it was impenetrable to anyone not already involved. But that’s UDS – it’s for people already working on stuff.
Both FOSSCamp and the overlap with UDS allowed me to meet many of my favourite people and I am guilty of enjoying their company when I should have been meeting more new people instead.
On Saturday we fly to Scotland (North Berwick) for two weeks so Liam can meet his other grandfather and aunt. I’ve tried to plan the pain out of flying with a five-month old baby for the first time, but it’s sure to be a challenge.