Dark Liquid

Been using Windows 7 a little bit and hit a few snags. It didn’t detect the Macbook hardware very well but sticking in the OSX Leopard Install Disc and installing the drivers sorted that out. The two-finger scrolling isn’t very smooth and to right click you need to hold two fingers on the touchpad then press the mouse button. Weird. I’ve installed a bunch of security updates and done everything it recommends (install anti-virus, run a Windows Defender scan, etc) and I’m just waiting for the anti-virus scan to finish. So far it’s not been too annoying though and most of the dialogues have actually been useful and helpful. The only thing that I’ve been annoyed by so far is the autorun functionality. The Windows Explorer program displays your devices (when clicking on the Computer link) as a bunch of icon button things and clicking them only does autorun it seems, to actually look inside the disk I had to open the tree view of the computer tab link thingy and browse into the disk. Didn’t seem very intuitive. Also, the autorun popped up asking whether I wanted to run the autorun programs but when the autorun programs actually run, it asked again about whether or not I would like to allow them to modify my computer which was kind of annoying since I’d already agreed to run them. I get that running the program and allowing it full system access are two different things but it would be nice if perhaps they could detect it was an installer or something and ask me this all at once rather than have two similar questions asked separately in quick succession.

Aero seems to run a little slowly which is quite disappointing considering compiz under Linux seems to run very well now I’ve applied the changes I mentioned in my last post. Perhaps the drivers or graphics card needs driving in some better way similar to the changes I made under Linux but no idea how I’d make them, sounds like I need to do some searching on that one if it’s even possible.

IE8 is still as horrible as IE7. I hate it’s interface, I hate the way it does things and it renders stuff weird in some cases, such as the TinyMCE controls on WordPress’ Post Entry box. I just find it a chore to use and it UI just seems to get in the way of what I want to do. I haven’t used it for doing anything complicated like debugging a javascript app or anything like that but I don’t imagine I’d be in for a fun time if I did given my previous experience with older versions of IE.

I found the font rendering looked pretty shitty by default, but playing around with the ClearType tool made it all render much better and I can’t really complain now, though I think the rendering under Linux looks better.

Conclusions

So far though, no major complaints, most things seems fairly easy to find and fairly well explained by the help text. I think generally the actual system maintenance and customisation tools are much easier to use and far more friendly to new users than they used to be in older versions. Not a bad operating system as far as they go so far, but not tried to do much stuff yet, still only really had some basic usage out of it, not tried developing anything or messing with multimedia of any kind yet so the jury is still out on that one.

Well, since my macbook decided to screw up after a failed software update under OSX (thanks Apple) I decided to rebuild my system from scratch.

Since I’ve been considering doing this study-from-home Games Development course, I need Windows and I don’t too much fancy paying for it, Windows 7 is available legally for free, so I decided to use that. Since this was a new build, I upgraded to Leopard since my old OSX install was Tiger and my old linux install was an old Intrepid install that had been dist-upgraded to Jaunty so this time I decided to use Jaunty from scratch.

First of all, I booted off of the OSX disks and partitioned my 120GB hard drive into two sections. The first was 30GB for OSX, the rest was free space.

Once OSX had finished installing, I used Disk Utility from within OSX to further partition the drive’s free space to give me a 20GB partition for Windows 7, a small 1GB partition at the end of the drive for swap and the rest was given over to Jaunty. I formatted all 3 of these partitions as FAT or MS-DOS format. I couldn’t actually format them this way from the partitioning tool s after I created the partitions with the Mac filesystem, I reformatted them with Disk Utility individually. I probably didn’t need to format them at all, but what the hell.

Why didn’t I just use BootCamp? It seemed annoying. The BootCamp Assistant insisted on not letting me have control over my paritions and seemed very Windows-centric, not offering any mention of Linux. It also didn’t mention Windows 7, just XP and Vista so I decided since it didn’t seem to be supported anyway that I’d go with other methods instead rather than try and force it to work how I wanted and pray it worked.

Next, I did all the system software updates for OSX so that they wouldn’t interfere with any later steps. I then downloaded and installed reFIT, a nice EFI bootloader that made everything else very easy.

After that I rebooted and installed Windows 7. Windows 7 insists on a NTFS formatted partition so I formatted my previously FAT formatted 20GB partition and let it use that. The install went quite smoothly without any issues. After each restart, the reFIT bootloader should display a Windows symbol with a harddrive overlaid on it in it’s menu. Boot from that until you are finally at a working Windows 7 desktop.

At this point I rebooted and tried to access my OSX install using the option on reFIT, it worked fine, much to my surprise, and it seems thatinstalling Windows no longer trashes your bootloaders.

After that, I booted my Jaunty install disk (I used the alternate install disk because my normal one wouldn’t even boot in the computer). Installation was easy but there are a few things to watch out for. Make sure to select custom partitioning at the partitioning stage and then select the large empty FAT partition as the main / parition for Linux. I used ext4 as my filesystem but use whatever you like. Then select the small 1GB FAT partition for swap. I am assuming you have a basic grasp of how to partition and format things with the Ubuntu installer which for the most part is fairly self-explanatory anyway. Another thing to watch out for is the bootloader installation. With my paritioning layout of EFI, OSX, Windows 7, Linux and Linux Swap, I opted to install the GRUB boot loader onto (hd0, 3) or directly into the linux partition. Once the installer finished, I checked I could still boot into each system and everything worked fine, no hassle. The reFIT menu now had three icons an Apple, Windows and Linux one, each with harddrive overlays and they all worked fine.

At this point you have a working triple-boot system. However, the linux install doesn’t perform very well out of the box. I followed the very good instructions to improve my Linux experience on my macbook here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook2-1/Jaunty

UPDATE!!!

I was having quite a few driver issues and things such as sound wouldn’t work. However thanks to the advice of Jonas Wisser I decided to download the BootCamp drivers from the Snow Leopard prerelease. These worked a treat and basically fixed everything as far as I can tell so far.

Some words of warning:

• My original system got trashed because an OSX update died, I’m guessing it tried to update the EFI firmware which I had replaced with reFIT. Having reFIT installed could make your system unbootable after you do an OSX update so I’d recommend keeping the reFIT installer around so you can reinstall it after doing updates before rebooting, just in case.
• Windows 7 is a free release candidate until March 2010 where it will apparently degrade until you either pay for the full version which should then be released or it stops working all together.
• Some stuff in Linux doesn’t work perfectly on the Macbook, such as the iSight having a green capture issue. This is discussed more on the page linked to previously.

Conclusions

So far I’m very pleased with my new install. Nothing has exploded yet, no weird errors, the installation was flawless. Basically nothing has really gone wrong or broken. I’m not much of a fan of Windows and I’ve barely even touched my Windows 7 install but I’m quite impressed by it, it seems pretty stable so far and it’s not done any of the things that normally annoy me immensely about Windows yet, so for the time being I think Microsoft might have finally released a decent version of Windows. I wont be switching any time soon, or ever, but so far I can at least tip my hat to Microsoft on what so far appears to be a job well done. I haven’t played much with Leopard yet, so I can’t really say how I feel about it other than it’s not very much different to Tiger so far, except with a little more polish in some areas. Jaunty I had running on here before and so far it’s working nicely. Just need to fully test out all the changes I made as recommended via that link I posted earlier to see if I can make it even better.

Haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been crazy busy, not quite sure what with but it seems like I’m always doing something else and never have enough time for anything recently.

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to talk about was the ridiculous prices of some books I’ve been looking at recently.

As some people might already be aware, I’m working on designing a computer architecture from scratch in my spare time. I’m using Verilog to synthesise the hardware because it’s prohibitively expensive to play around with this kind of thing with discrete logic chips, not to mention difficult and unwieldy. Now, I don’t really know Verilog very well so I’m learning it as I go, I also don’t know much about some kinds of optimisations you can make to do things like binary multiplication happen quickly in hardware. With that in mind, I thought I might buy some books on the subject.

Or not, because they are all over £100!!!

What the hell!? I can understand that there would be a premium on specialist knowledge like that, but what about hobbyists? Self-learning materials are either non-existent or prohibitively expensive or aren’t self-learning materials at all and are instead reference guides for people who are already experts. There are tons of cool things I’d like to learn but don’t have the time or inclination to sit down with a tutor and learn properly. Besides, so far everything job-wise that’s gone right for me has happened as a result of things I’ve taught myself, so paying for education from someone else isn’t something I’m too hot on.

With these issues in mind, I’m going to do my best to document my learning process so that others can follow it. Hopefully someone will find it useful or entertaining in some way.

Wow, things have been a little crazy recently. Work has been ish and we’re down to just me and the boss for the time being which is pretty sad. Hopefully thing’s will pick up again soon and we’re taking this as an opportunity for a company reboot so we’ll see.

My WiiFit exercise regime isn’t happening. I’m always busy with something it seems so I never get time. I’ve not actually used it for exercise in about 3 weeks now. Terrible I know. At least my body seems to be pretty happy hovering around 15.5st rather than still ramping up the pounds of fat

I’ve still been trying to write as much as possible and have managed to get Dru to start contributing more to protagonize which I am now a moderator of! So now I get to abuse my power for evil good. Woohoo!

I’ve been trying to keep the Bournemouth.rb Ruby Group up and running recently. So far we’re only small, but we’ve managed to run a few meetups so far. Currently we’re trying to find some projects to hack on together – if you have any ideas post them up on the Bournemouth.rb wiki. I’m quite enjoying this whole community lark. Let’s hope it lasts! If you are a rubyist in Bournemouth or if you’re just interested in the Ruby programming language and looking to get into it then try coming along, signup on the Bournemouth.rb mailing list for more info.

I’ve been bitten by the literary bug recently. Badly. As you probably already know I try and write on Protagonize, a cool online writing community. I’m currently collaborating on a really amazing story with some fantastic authors, namely Eloosive, Archi Teuthis and Bill Hartzia (not forgetting to mention the brief but awesome accompaniment of Cheshiregrin!) called Tagged which I’m sad to say I haven’t put as much work into as I would have liked, though this is something I am working on changing.

I also recently started up another story called This Polaroid Truth, you can read more about in on the site. So far I’ve posted a new chapter every day I think, as well as also adding some more to some stories I’ve left dormant, such as Her Ladyship’s Wife. I’ve got a real hunger for writing at the moment but not only that, reading too.

I read a lot of books as my spare bedroom can attest (it’s stacked full of them!) but sadly I’ve never read very much on Protagonize. Yes, I read the odd thing that pops up on the front page but generally I find the site hard to engage in when looking for things to read. I’m not sure what it is about it but I find browsing through it looking for things to read quite arduous. However, I’ve been putting in a special effort recently and have pledged to myself to try and comment on everything I read. Often I find I have nothing to say because I’m not really interested in the story or it’s good, but doesn’t really give me anything in particular to comment upon. I’m forcing myself to write at least something, even if it’s just ‘That was okay’, just to get me into the habit. I’ve said many times before on the site that commenting is something that’s extremely valuable and I don’t want to be a hypocrite. Short meaningless comments don’t help others much but getting myself into the habit of commenting at least will make me more likely to make decent comments in the future.

Apart from writing and reading, I’ve been making use of Spotify a lot. Spotify is a cool relatively new service similar to last.fm. It’s a streaming music service with a certain social aspect (shareable, communal playlists) but unlike last.fm you can choose exactly what tracks/albums/artists you want to listen to. Unlike last.fm, the radio stream has adverts injected into it for free accounts, but they aren’t too bad, essentially just like listening to the radio over the airwaves. It also integrates with last.fm to scrobble your plays so you can benefit from both. Their client software doesn’t exist for windows yet but I’ve found it very easy to setup using WINE. I typically use last.fm to find new bands to listen to and now spotify fills the gap with the ability to actually listen to them without needing to commit to buying an album without knowing whether I’ll like them or not. Great stuff.

My talk for the next BUNIX meetup is coming up soon. I’ve been writing some software for it but need to sit down and bulk out my slides a bit. There are a couple of extra things regarding DSLs I want to talk about now, such as the awesome Cucumber and how it uses ‘treetop’ to make it’s DSL with a parser rather than interpreting actual ruby code. I’m not the greatest public speaker but I guess I need to get over it some time or another and now is as good as any. Besides, I’m trying to get more into the Bournemouth geek community and going to Barcamp Bournemouth, even though I didn’t actually speak there has given me the confidence boost I needed to make me at least attempt that.

Well, my first barcamp has come and gone. Hats off to the BambooJuice, Yahoo Developer Network, Clipper teas, Twitfaves and TwitterJobSearch for funding it and Mark Ng and Adam Mills for making it happen.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I’m glad I went, it was awesome. Basically, it was just a massive 2 day geek fest. We hung out, played games, ran and went to talks on all sorts of interesting topics. Some of the talks I went to including one about The Skiff, a cool coworking/hackerspace down in Brighton, one about how to get into freelancing, one by ORG (the Open Rights Group) on protecting your bits and a few more. I even kind of ran one with Dan and Diccon, where we basically set up a couple of games of Polarity, which got a pretty good response. I got in a few good games but alas, I didn’t lose once, which was a shame.

The main thing about barcamp though was the awesome community spirit there. Everyone pitched in to make it a really fun weekend and it turned out marvellously. I met some awesome people and had a great time. My twitter following and followers lists are expanded thanks to that little event.

One of the best things though was when I became Pseudo-Mark for the new sport set to sweep the nation (probably not) – Tea-Stacking! Clipper Teas had given the barcamp a metric fuck-ton of tea, Yahoo Developer Network had provided frisbees. Combined, with geeks and prizes, a new sport was born. Basically, the competition was a tournament to stack boxes of tea as high as possible while people with frisbees tried to knock them down by hurling the frisbees at them. Mark Ng disappeared half-way through so I took his place as Pseudo-Mark and nearly got to the finals, but was beaten at the end by what was definitely not favouritism at all Apparently I nearly ate a frisbee, but I don’t recall this (maybe it’s the concussion ).

Tea-stacking and frisbee eating at barcamp bournemouth 2009, courtesy of Andy Trickett on flickr

I’m doing some extra-curricular coding for a change. Quite frankly it’s been too long, I’ve always been busy with other things. I like to watch new anime, films and other media, read new books, play and hopefully complete my various video games as well as write at Protagonize.com and roleplay both in real life on Thursday and Friday evenings and on RPoL.net. With all that stuff going on, not to mention the fact that I also code all day at work which mostly satisfies my need to code, I’ve not been working on much outside of work.

However, I’ve got a couple projects on the go one of which I’ve probably already mentioned before. I’ve finally started on a project that I’ve wanted to do for a while with some friends of mine, namely designing a complete computing architecture from NAND logic upwards. I’ve put together a basic toolchain for the very beginnings of this using Rake and Icarus Verilog up on github as gc-arch (for GeekCoalition Architecture).

Another project I’m only barely beginning is a basic DSL for describing presentations which can then be processed into backends to target different medias (PDF, HTML, etc). I’ve gotten absolutely nowhere with this as of yet, which sucks because the impetus for this was to write and use it for a presentation on DSLs in Ruby at the next BUNIX meetup, so I have limited time to get something up and running!

I went to BUNIX yesterday, the Bournemouth UNIX enthusiasts group that is run at Bournemouth University every so often. I heard some cool talks, a demonstration on how to install OpenBSD and what the particular idiosyncrasies in it’s installer actually been to a non-BSD-head. Another talk was given on Cloud computing and what it means, where it’s going and some of the cool things that can be done with it. The final talk was demoing some cool alternative operating systems – GoboLinux, something I’d heard of before which is a take on an alternate file structure and package management system based around grouping things together in obvious to non-techies ways and then making them work with a mass of symlinks behind the scenes. This was followed by two other operating systems coded entirely in assembler which booted lightning fast (sub-three-seconds) and had full graphical interfaces and various cool bits, such as a 3D teapot demo that looked like it’s framerate was somewhere around a billion FPS.

All in all some pretty interesting stuff. At the end of the meetup I got myself roped into doing a talk on DSLs in Ruby, so I guess I’ve got some planning to do for next month!

This coming Wednesday, I will hopefully be meeting up with some other Bournemouth Rubyists for the first ever Bournemouth.rb meetup and hopefully some cool stuff will come of that.

I’ve been using the awesome ping.fm for a while now for tying all my various social networking stuff together. From a single IM I can update:

• My Google Talk status
• My Facebook status
• My LinkedIn status
• My Jaiku account
• My Twitter account
• My Delicious bookmarks

I can also do the same thing via email as well, and by attaching images I can also post to Flickr.

This all ties together wonderfully with my T-Mobile G1 phone. I take a picture, use the in-built share functionality to send it via email to my secret ping.fm email bot address which then posts it to Flickr and makes a post on all my other services telling people about it.

It’s awsome and also incredibly easy to setup. Seriously, go to ping.fm and check it out.

A while ago I, among others, were harassed on the bus. Four young boys were yelling verbal abuse at the other riders, spitting at and indeed on them and otherwise behaving in a threatening and antisocial manner. A poor girl sat in front of me got off of the bus nearly in tears, only to have the kids spit at her through the window – I only hope she at least reached her stop and wasn’t driven off the bus early by the savages.

It was impossible for the bus driver not to notice, yet he did nothing. Noone complained, mostly due to fear of drawings the kids attention, especially since the chances of the bus driver taking action seemed pretty slim given he had done nothing at all so far.

The system seems so unfair and unjust, innocent riders like myself have no recourse but to ride out such incidents when the bus driver does nothing and retaliation is feared due to being condemned for assault. Who can we go to for help? The police? Could they even do anything? We feel powerless when those in authority do nothing and any chance of defending ourselves is taken away by fear of being branded a criminal. Does anyone have any faith that if they complained the camera footage would be watched and the kids consequently caughr? The answer is no. Most think little would happen and any justice handed out meaningless. Not only that but also the fear of retribution, what if the kids took revenge for any punishment or investigation against them? They surely saw the people they tormented and could recognise them again.

I myself feel guilty. I might have done something, but one can not help but feel one is making oneself a target for these thugs when you do, and when you have such little faith or hope of a good outcome, fear is a powerful motivator to sit down and hope things don’t get worse.

When did bus drivers stop caring about their passengers wellbeing? When was it ok for things like this to go on unchallenged? When was it that even retaliation and self defence were things to fear, afraid our own protectors would mark us as criminals?

In fact, I asked this very question of the bus company themselves and their response wasn’t very helpful.

Essentially it boiled down to “We can’t do anything and nor can our drivers, call the police and have them deal with it.”

Now, I can understand that they can hardly make it company policy to put their drivers in harms way, nor would I want them to, but the driver is in a position of authority and at the very least, if they don’t want to get into a confrontation they could perhaps call the police themselves from the relative safety of their concealed seating.

The main problem with calling the police as a passenger is that you are in full view of the assailants and you don’t know how they will react. Will they steal your phone and beat you up? Will they stab you? Will they leave and remember your face to come and get you at a later date? You don’t know. There is the additional worry of phoning. Most people don’t know the number for the police directly, they only know 999 and nobody wants to phone 999 so they can essentially say “someone’s picking on me on the bus”. Doing that in and of itself feels like a crime that could put a ‘real’ emergency call at risk of being answered too late and no-one wants to be told of by the emergency services for wasting their time, which I think is actually a crime.

It’s shit like this that fuels my misanthropy.