&c.

On being a geek

The trouble with being a geek, as pointed out by my fiancée Emma, is that half the time I write stuff that no-one else understands.  Things that interest me, like blogging, computers, social networks and Free Software, have no relevance to the majority of the people that I interact with in my social life.  Work is slightly different, as being a systems administrator means I am working daily with people that understand what I'm talking about, and the people that don't understand are grateful for my help when they have a problem they don't understand either.

The trick is to balance the two out.  When I am at work I can be as technical as I like, and it means that communicating with the people I am working with is faster because they are on a level playing field.  They understand what I'm talking about.  When I am at home I tend to focus on my lifestyle, which means I can interact better with the people around me in my social life.  There is some cross-over with friends, where they have a mild interest in technology, but then generally the conversation with my friends revolves around cars (an interest shared mainly with them).

Knowing when to be a geek, when to be a car nut, and when to talk about Eastenders is what stops me from looking like the comic book guy when I am socialising.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Asus Eee PC 900A

On Friday I bought myself an Asus Eee PC 900A and thought I would share my first impressions of the machine. I had decided on this netbook in particular because of it's diminutive size and weight, being portable enough to easily drop into a bag and take with me. I also wanted a machine with a Solid State Disk, to increase the battery life and avoid having to keep the mains lead with me and ensure a power socket was nearby.

It has a nine inch screen running at 1024x800 pixels, meaning that despite it's size there is ample screen real-estate for all your windows, and the keyboard is tiny but perfectly usable for small to medium amounts of typing—though I wouldn't want to write a dissertation on it.

I played around with the supplied Xandros-based operating system, liking the speed at which it boots and the compatibility with the hardware, but the whole system felt slightly outdated.  This was mostly due to the use of a low-resource menu/button toolkit, and issue with the update manager failing repeatedly.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix is a variant of the Ubuntu operating system.  Most of the underlying software is identical, but there is a different theme and a new program launching interface that is much easier to use on the small screen than tiny menus.  Installation was simple from a 1GB USB flash drive, which avoided having to find a USB CD-ROM drive.

Boot time is around 10 seconds from powered off to desktop, which is slower than the Xandros-based OS but still faster than most other operating systems.  Currently just under 2.5GB of disk space has been occupied on my root drive, so you may wish to keep this in mind when partitioning the drive.

The operating system is fast to use and all of the software from the standard Ubuntu repositories will install, so you shouldn't have any compatibility issues with unusual or missing libraries.  This also means you can install the full compiler suite to build applications from source if needed—something I found quite difficult with the Xandros OS.

All of the hardware apart from the webcam and microphone are working.  Suspend and resume work as expected, and I had no issues with my wireless or 3G network connections.  Battery life from a full charge is around three hours; plenty of time for light work while you're out or for sitting in the garden for a couple of hours, but not long enough to manage a full working day.  This point is moot however, as the keyboard is a little too small to use for eight hours solid.  Some of the hardware keys such as the wireless radio switch and the sleep key do not work, but the volume and brightness keys all work fine.

The solid state disk is robust and seems fairly reliable, and due to there being no moving parts it really helps with the battery life and the operatng temperature of the machine.  Running it directly on your lap it can get a little warm due to the air vents in the side, but if you were to use it on a table or even on a book on your lap you should notice very little heat from the machine.

Overall I love the combination of the very portable hardware and the well-designed Ubuntu operating system, much more so than Windows or the Xandros-based OS on the same machine.  So if you have an Eee PC, or indeed any netbook, give Ubuntu Netbook Remix a try and see if it works for you.

Laptop woes

My laptop developed a fault last Friday where the power lead got damaged to the point of failure.  This meant that I was without a laptop for over a week now.  I am going to pop into Toys 'R' Us on Friday and pick up an Asus Eee PC 900A as a replacement until I can get my EOL MacBook's power supply fixed.  I'm hoping the compact design and light weight will mean I can take the Asus with me more often and focus on my writing for this blog.

The Web as a Social Network

Social Networks have become big business on the World Wide Web, with companies like MySpace and Facebook worth millions of dollars.  They make their money through a combination of advertising and customer lock-in, where people have to use their service because that is what their friends use.

Blogs are a form of social network on their own.  People can upload their photos, share their favourite links and write posts and memos.  Some will let you use microblogging; others can integrate this from other platforms such as Twitter.  All will let you comment on them somehow, and using RSS and Atom feeds you can subscribe to other blogs and keep updated on what your friends are doing.

All of these mean you have an extremely flexible and extremely open social network that is accessible to any operating system, with an enormous number of desktop- and web-based clients.  You have the ultimate redundancy in that it would be impossible to bring the whole network down in one go.  Blogs hosted at larger sites will have some sort of fail-over of their own, vastly increasing the resistance of the network as a whole to attack or failure.

And all it takes to join this network is a blog of your own—either hosted yourself or with a third party—and a feed client.

Resorting to paper

As a self-proclaimed geek and gadget lover I have always used gadgets to manage my time.  All of my phones since around 2002 have had usable calendars and organisers, which I have always used because they were convenient and I always had my phone on me.

I have also however had the joy of trying to synchronise all these devices into different desktop systems, which is not as easy as it sounds.  Synchronising one device with one computer is relatively easy, but add any more devices, or other computers, and the number of problems you will experience increases exponentially.  The number of times I have had to save my calendar and contacts by trawling through them and removing duplicates is more than I care to remember.

Electronic devices like this are supposed to be making our lives simpler, but instead they are introducing their own complications and problems.  So I had the idea recently of getting rid of all of this complication, and working purely on paper for organising myself.  I bought myself an organiser and dug out my favourite fountain pen from my school days, and started copying all my appointments and my important phone numbers into it.

Initially I wasn't sure how well it was going to work.  I like the ability to set alerts and recurring appointments when I am using Outlook at work, and I like the ability to add people to events and have them confirm or deny their attendance.  But I realised that, although I liked these features, I wither didn't use them as much as I thought, or the people I was organising meetings with didn't use them either.

As it turns out, having a notepad, day planner and contact list in one file makes it a lot easier to keep track of what I'm doing over the week.  I use the A-Z organiser dividers to group projects and companies together, and make use of the notes pages to keep track of everything I need to remember about that company/project.  The contact sheets mean I can keep contact details with the projects, and I can find everything within a few seconds.

I wasn't sure how much difference it would make, using a planner instead of Outlook, but being able to use it when I'm not near a computer, and being able to make notes in it faster than on a screen, have made me feel a lot more productive.

Using RSS and Atom feeds

Two weeks ago I gave you a few tips for writing your own blog, and hopefully it provided a few of you with the incentive to get out and start a new one, or breath some life into your existing one.  Blogging is not just about writing though.  A large part of it is reading other people's blogs, and adding your own comments or trackbacks (posts in your blog that are replies to, or reference, posts in another blog).

With so many blogs out there it would be tedious to visit each one in turn, checking to see if they had any new posts.  In 1999 Ramanathan V. Guha from Netscape created RSS as a way of pulling other website content onto the Netscape homepage, and Bloggers quickly saw the potential for sharing their blogs with a wider auduence.  All the major blog platforms added RSS feeds to their site, and later the similar Atom format was adopted as well (it was technically better than RSS, which had some compatibility problems between versions).  Software for the desktop was created which allowed people to subscribe to these feeds, and be notified when there was new content.

Over the past couple of years RSS and Atom have started appearing all over the web, easily identified by the bright orange 'radio wave' symbol.  If you see this logo on a site or in your browser, it means there is a feed available for you to subscribe to.  Popular feed readers are Liferea for Linux and FeedReader for Windows, but many other programs and websites are able to use the feeds and display them.  Microsoft Outlook can display them as a folder of messages similar to your email, and My Yahoo and Google Reader allow you to view them on a website.

Subscribing to a feed generally means clicking on the orange icon on the page, or clicking the feed icon in your browsers address bar, to load the feed in the browser window.  This will give you a preview of the feed and normally will give you a couple of options such as adding it to Live Bookmarks.  When this page has loaded, copy the URL from the address bar.  Next, switch to your feed reader and press the New Feed button.  Different feed readers use different buttons, menus and terminology, so look in the Help menu for that program if you are not sure.  Paste the URL you copied into the New Feed dialog, and the program will download the feed and make it available, highlighting all the unread messages.

As you read, the program will mark the messages as 'read,' similar to an email message, and you will be notified when there are new messages available.

Hopefully that will be enough to get you started with RSS and Atom feeds, and get you started on reading many more blogs and websites.  As you read them jot down any ideas you get for your own blog.  Reading other people's blogs is a great source of inspiration.  Just make sure you link back to theirs if you mention them.

Feed icon from www.feedicons.com.

Communicating as a team

 

During a business trip to Birmingham the other day I happened to notice a sign taped to one of the chairs.  In two different styles of handwriting it displayed the following conversation:

- Do not use
- Why?
- Back broken

This simple conversation via the medium of an A4 sheet of paper got me thinking about the ways we communicate with our colleagues, and how it could be improved.

The sign on the chair is a great example of simple, efficient communication.  The question and answer are taped to the item to which it refers, meaning anyone who would see the message immediately knows the context.

Another form of communication that got me thinking was during a visit to the local hospital during the nurses' handover, where one group of nurses updates the next group when they change shifts.  All of the nurses would go around together in a group of eight or so, telling each other the state of each patient; what they had given them, what they had eaten, and any other useful or necessary information.  The nurses about to start their shift would all take notes so that when they needed to see to the patients again later they would know what needed doing and what had already been done.

This struck me as very thorough, and I remember thinking at the time that if this practice were to be adopted in some companies it would greatly improve communication between the staff and could enable everyone to have a better idea of what their colleagues were doing.

The current darling of the web is Twitter, a real-time messaging and status system.  Users can post updates on what they are doing and others can subscribe to these updates, or 'follow' them.  Some companies have used Twitter extensively, with reports that it has greatly improved communication and collaboration amongst their team; far more than email had previously achieved.

For companies not wishing to rely on an external system, either for security or stability reasons, software such as Laconica can provide a company with the same messaging and presence facilities but hosted on their own internal servers.  Allowing your staff to post frequent updates on what they are working on means that every member of the team is updated on their work and can follow their progress.  It is also incredibly useful for real-time updates on server status, or for warning users of current or future outages.

For more advanced communication, something like Google's recently-revealed Wave platform, which again can be used on Google's servers or installed locally, may be more appropriate.  Details on Wave are currently scarce but the protocol specification has been published under an open licence, meaning anyone can build it into their systems or create their own implementations without paying royalties to Google.

Until recently the extent of collaboration via computers in the workplace seems to have stalled at email.  Companies are unwilling to explore microblogging and social networking because the people who make the decisions are not able to see the potential in allowing greater communication between their employees.  Microblogging and blogging in general are a great way to let people within the company know what is happening, and the openness this creates means the staff become more trusting and more excited about what the company is doing.

It gives them a voice, making them feel equal and more a part of the team, and it allows greater communication between different departments.  I know from my experience working in a college that different departments would rarely communicate purely because they didn't know who worked there or what they did.  Allowing an internal, Twitter-like communications platform lets every member of staff know what every other member of staff is doing, and will allow them to create networks and contacts that will improve their skills and make a big difference in their willingness to communicate with each other.

Having a presence on the Internet

Social Networks are very popular at the moment, and are a great way of keeping in touch with friends and family.  They only really help though for keeping in contact with people you already know.  For communicating with people you do not know already, or for creating a professional image on the Internet, blogs can be incredibly powerful.

Blogging is something I have always had a mild interest in, but recently I have tried to put a lot more effort into it and so far I am liking the result.  They are a great way to communicate and present yourself to the world and to future employers, and can be set up in a fairly short amount of time.  Once you're set up, just start to write about anything you find interesting.

That sounds minor, but it's a key point—write about anything you find interesting.  If you are bored, telling the world you are bored will not be interesting to read.  Likewise, if you force yourself to write about something you are not interested in, it will not make an interesting article to read.

Setting up a blog can be very easy, and should take very little time depending on your skill level and what you hope to achieve.  For a corporate environment or someone who is likely to run a lot of blogs, a self-hosted solution such as Movable Type (also available as Open Source) would be ideal.  This allows you to run a large number of blogs from a single installation, and with a suitable theme they can look very professional.  For single users or smaller blogs you may prefer to host your own WordPress installation, which can be installed within a couple of minutes on almost all web-hosting platforms.

For beginners or anyone who is not comfortable or able to run their own website, a hosted blog may be a more suitable option.  WordPress.com provide a hosted system based on their WordPress MU platform that can be simple to install, and gives you an unlimited number of blogs.  As it is a free service however, they will run advertisement banners on your blog unless you pay a small subscription fee to remove them.  Blogger is one of the biggest blog-hosting solutions, run by Google and with tight integration with the rest of their online services such as Picasa Web Albums.  This may be ideal to you if you already use Google's services heavily.

For more professional hosting, TypePad is a hosted blog platform from Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type.  They do not have a free service but there is a 14-day free trial available for anyone who would like to try it out before they commit to a subscription.  It is not quite as advanced as Movable Type but does not involve the added work of having to host it yourself, and it has a very good support system in case you ever have any problems.

Now that you have your shiny new blog set up (and hopefully you've left a comment with the URL so that I can have a look), what are you going to write about?  Inspiration can come from many places, and at any time.  I tend to write about software- and web-related stuff, as it is what I am most interested in, but friends of mine write about engineering, beer, their home town and even about writing.  The more interested you are in something, the more you will find to write about it.

You may find when you start that you sit down to write a post, you draw a blank and cannot think of anything to write.  This happens to everyone, so don't fret too much.  Take a break from the computer, flick through the news, go for a walk, and once you have cleared your mind you may find an idea just pops into your head.  This may happen at any time so if possible make a note of it.  I use the Notepad application on my phone to jot down any post ideas, and I often have four or five posts in draft mode that I can flesh out when I get time.  You do not have to write an entire article and publish it in one go—write what you can and if you get stuck just save it and come back to it later.

Blogging is like any other form of creative writing.  It takes time and work, but in the end it is worth the effort and you will quickly build up a presence in your own little corner of the World Wide Web.

Ubuntu 9.04 on a first-generation MacBook

My main computer at home and on the move is an Apple MacBook laptop.  I haven't run Mac OS X on it since 10.5 was released, as I did not want to pay for the upgrade and the number of applications for 10.4 was getting smaller.  Until Monday I was running openSUSE 11.1, but after half an our of messing with the 3G card connection I decided I'd had enough, and decided to see if Ubuntu was any better for hardware support.

I'm not normally a fan of Ubuntu, as they modify the packages quite a lot from upstream, but it does mean that you get a very nice integrated system.  The installer was quick and the live CD picked up all the hardware, meaning I could browse the Internet while it installed.  Once the installer had finished I rebooted and proceeded to poke around the system to see what worked.

The touchpad threw me at first, as the two- and three-finger tap functions are swapped from openSUSE (in Ubuntu, a tap with two fingers is middle-click and a tap with three fingers is right-click—openSUSE works the other way around) but once I had worked this out everything seemed very smooth and intuitive.  The only piece of hardware that didn't work was the built-in iSight camera, but I was expecting this as I have never got it working in any version of Linux.

The 3G card worked first time, as did wireless, sound and even Bluetooth.  Suspend and resume work as expected, and I did not have the issue of the mouse playing up after resume as I did in openSUSE.  So far I haven't found anything that I haven't been happy with, which is always a good sign.  The only disadvantage is the number of applications installed as standard—no IRC client or RSS reader in the base install.

Switching channels in EPIC5

EPIC is an IRC client for Unix and Linux, based upon the earlier ircII client.  It's behaviour is similar to ircII, which may confuse new users.  It is simple to install, and runs in a terminal window.  Start it with:

• epic5 nickname hostname

This will connect you to the hostname IRC server with nickname as the name everyone will see you as.  Join a channel with:

• /join #channel

If you join more than one channel you will want to switch between them.  To do this, map a key to the SWITCH_CHANNEL command.  To use Ctrl-X to switch channels, type the following command:

• /bind ^X SWITCH_CHANNELS

This can be placed (minus the initial slash) into the file ~/.ircrc so that you don't have to type it every time.