George Wright's Blog

Unacceptable behaviour

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:38:00 +0100

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.

ThinkPad X40 SSD conversion and battery woes

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:03:00 +0100

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.

FreeNX package

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:44:00 +0100

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.

Akademy 2008

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:51:00 +0100

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!

LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2008

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:50:00 +0100

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?

Bit the bullet...

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:30:00 +0100

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!

Using a CF disk in an X40?

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:37:00 +0100

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.

First week at Cendio

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:28:00 +0100

So I’ve been working at Cendio for a week now; I must say it’s been one of the best times of my life.

Sweden’s a great place, especially Linköping; it’s clean, cycletastic and everyone is so friendly here. Our office is a fantastic place - it’s spacious, cosy, has a hot chocolate machine (!!!) and my colleagues are awesome! I especially like that I get my own office as well.

Over the evenings and weekend I’ve been on the bike a fair bit, having nearly been run over by several buses (silly traffic driving on the wrong side…) and tomorrow I’m going with Inge Wallin (of KDE fame) on some boat thing on the canal which should be great fun.

The cycle routes around here take a bit of getting used to; in the UK I’m quite happy to cycle alongside cars on dual carriageways and take on large roundabouts without any trouble, but with the combination of being on the other side of the road, and not knowing the customs on the road here, I’ve been sticking to country lanes and cycle paths for the time being. I’ve had no crashes so far this year (as opposed to six last year, including 3 pretty major ones…) and I intend to keep it that way!

I shall be sorry to leave on the 15th July.

Sweden at last

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:48:00 +0100

Today’s been a somewhat hectic day for me; after getting up at 0500 to get to Heathrow by 0700, I managed to get on my 1030 flight to Arlanda and arrive in Stockholm just after 1400. After hopping on a train to Linköping, I was greeted by my contact at Cendio, Peter Åstrand, who has been exceptionally helpful and accommodating with my moving in.

I’m staying in university accommodation which is rather nice; it’s a bit Ikea-y, but not too shabby. There was a particularly bad dead fly infestation in my room but a dustpan and brush seems to have taken care of most of it, and I may have to vacuum around when I can get hold of one. The luxury of an en-suite is always welcome, and I have a 10Mbit/s internet connection which is definitely most welcome!

My room

As for my job out here, I’ll be working on the next release of ThinLinc, Cendio’s flagship remote desktop product. At first I believe I’m mainly doing testing of the upcoming release to ensure it meets quality standards, but Peter is keen for me to dig into the coding side soon.

In my spare time, I decided to bring my bike over and I’ll hopefully spend most of my evenings racing around the roads on it. It really is a delightful little machine. When I’m not on the bike I hope to get some work done on nxcl/qtnx as well.

The bike

Onwards to the summer!

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:05:00 +0100

My exams finally finished about 2 weeks ago, and since then I’ve been vegetating (mainly in bed, on my bike or shooting) so I’ve not really been doing much in the way of work.

My roadmap for the summer is fairly packed; on Monday I move to Sweden to work for Cendio on their ThinLinc stuff then after three weeks out there I’m moving back to London to work from there for the rest of the summer.

Interspersed with ThinLinc work I’ll be doing lots of work on NX hopefully and working on my nxcl 2.x branch with my Summer of Code student, who is starting to make progress with his stuff now that his academic commitments are finally over!

I think this summer will be the best summer for open source NX work there has been; we now have a fairly mature server in the form of FreeNX, and my client is taking shape in the form of nxcl/qtnx, and the work on nxcl 2.x will be a much needed restructuring of the client code.

It would be great if anyone interested in NX at all could take a look at my nxcl 2.x roadmap and give me any feedback as to what they’d also like to see or see changed. I’ll also be working with Seb James on his GTK+ based frontend as well (nxlaunch) and hopefully we’ll see a fairly decent KDE and GNOME client come out of all this work.