Posted by George Wright
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:38:00 GMT
I’m not usually one for jumping on flamewar bandwagons, but after seeing this, I felt I had to say something.
After having skim read the comments (there are a lot and most of them repeat each other), I did notice one disturbing thing; the people backing up the original post tend to be male, and the people objecting to the image are female. Or at least, that’s what I can muster from the usernames.
This is a horrendous rift in the community. There’s a big debate taking place on the original post’s comments section which basically involves two disjoint arguments, but I think that the majority of them are missing the point entirely.
Most of the supporters are simply pointing out that it’s legally fine, whereas the opposers are pointing out that morally it’s unacceptable. In the end, neither of these matter because whether you feel it’s acceptable or legal or not, this is pushing women away from the open source community and the comments in the post reflect this. If you don’t believe me, ask a few women how they feel about the post and I’m sure you’ll find the majority will find it offensive.
I’m not going to get involved with giving my opinion on the picture or the surrounding text as, quite frankly, the opinion isn’t what matters. How we perceive it is irrelevant; how the rest of the world perceives it is what really matters, and being a public blog that represents the community, this matters to us as a whole.
Posted in Rants | 148 comments
Posted by George Wright
Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:03:00 GMT
My CF card and CF-IDE converter board arrived in the post and so today I started trying to get Linux installed on it.
At first I thought I’d try installing from a USB CD drive, but this was a horrendous mess and ended up wasting a good 8 hours of my life. In the end, I dumped the CF in a USB reader and debootstrapped hardy on, then booted it and installed kubuntu-desktop.
The installation is still going, but I did have a chance to run a quick hdparm -Tt on the disk; seems it’s doing a fairly consistent 25MB/s which is excellent given the old disk only did 18MB/s or so. hdparm also tells me that the disk is in UDMA-2 mode which is not too shoddy.
In other news, I’ve noticed that the batteries on my X40 are clapped out after nearly 3 years of abuse. The main 8-cell I have is down from 61Wh to 35Wh, and my extended battery which clips on the bottom is down from 27Wh to 12Wh. I can handle paying £30 to get a new 6-cell, as that’ll give a good 8 hours or so of life, but extended life batteries for the X40 are very seldom seen on eBay and the ones which do end up on there go for silly prices.
Does anyone have any experience replacing the cells in a ThinkPad battery manually? I just ripped my extended battery apart (luckily I had the correct triangular screwdriver bit…) and the four cells inside there are shaped in exactly the same way as in the normal 4-cell battery, which leads me to believe they share identical cells. My theory is that I can buy a normal 4-cell on eBay then rip the cells out of it then put them in the extended life battery. The only problem I can see at the moment is that ACPI reports design capacity and last known capacity, and I don’t know how to flush these values for recalibration. I’m assuming the charging circuit should be clever enough to work it out for itself?
I’d appreciate any comments or suggestions.
Posted in Computing | 13 comments
Posted by George Wright
Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:44:00 GMT
In the absence of any sort of reasonably up to date packages for FreeNX, I decided to compile my own and tarball it up on my server.
This is a build of the NoMachine NX 3.2.0 open source components done on Ubuntu Hardy (32-bit) and the scripts from FreeNX are included, so it's an unlimited user server. As it was built on Hardy, only distributions using glibc 2.4 or later are supported, but I've successfully run it on a 64-bit Gutsy installation.
Installation is simple; just untar the package to /usr/NX and then make sure that the command:
$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/NX/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/NX/bin/nxagent
doesn't fail (install any required dependencies if it complains of missing shared libraries), then run:
# /usr/NX/bin/nxsetup --install --setup-nomachine-key
After that has run successfully, you should just be able to log into the server using an NX client (my QtNX in Hardy seems to work fine).
Later I'll upload a build of FreeNX with NX 3.2.0 for older machines (will compile it on Debian Etch).
Update: a build for older glibc versions (tested on Debian Etch) is now available.
Posted in NX | 5 comments
Posted by George Wright
Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:51:00 GMT
I’ve finally got round to booking my trip to Belgium this year to attend Akademy. I did seriously consider not going, but I’ve been all the other four so I figured it would be a tragedy not to go this year (and abuse sebas, obviously). I’ll only really be there for the main conference, so I’m leaving the UK on the 1835 Eurostar out of St Pancras, and returning on the 1759 Eurostar out of Bruxelles Midi.
Unfortunately I missed the deadline for hostel booking and so I’m having to shell out bags of money to stay in a hotel, so I’ll be in the NH Mechelen with the likes of Antonio Larossa and Pino Toscano.
Do let me know if you’re going to be on the same Eurostar or in the same hotel!
Posted in KDE | 1 comment
Posted by George Wright
Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:50:00 GMT
Looks like there might actually be one this year. I’ve now applied for KDE to have a booth, so is anyone up for joining me on the booth this year?
It’ll be the usual story.. sit on the booth for two days getting bored, laughing^Wsmiling at the neighbouring GNOMEs and demonstrating how unbelievably awesome our desktop environment is. Obviously in between lots of lunch breaks.
Maybe we should do what we did a couple of years ago and apply for a combined Freedesktop.org booth with the GNOME people to increase our booth area?
Posted in KDE | 6 comments
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:30:00 GMT
So I buckled under temptation and bought myself a 32GB CF card and a CF-IDE converter board off eBay just now; whole lot came to about 74 pounds including postage, which I think is not too shabby for what should be a fairly good 32GB SSD solution.
Claimed read/write speeds for the card are 36/40MBps which would be very nice if true, but I’m expecting it’ll probably be around half that at best. Still, I’ll do some rudimentary tests with hdparm to see how it is; hopefully it won’t be slower than the 4200rpm 1.8” disk that’s currently in there!
I also hope the battery life improves… I’ve only ever had the X40 down to about 7 or 8W power consumption at minimum; with this setup I hope to inch an extra watt out of it!
Posted in Computing | 8 comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:37:00 GMT
Has anyone seen this - it seems to be fairly interesting. I’m tempted to do it myself as the disk drive in my X40 has died on me..
eBay seems to have the relevant components for about 70 GBP.
Posted in Computing | 4 comments
