&c.

Using Windows on the desktop again

For a long time now I have used free operating systems on my computers and laptops at home, including various versions of GNU/Linux and OpenBSD. I have always loved Free Software, and especially UNIX, but recently I have found myself growing tired of the constant struggle to get things working. The most recent time this occurred for me was last week, when trying to watch a video on Channel 4's 4oD service. The service uses Adobe Flash to play the videos, and at one point I needed to confirm that I was 18 or over (the program in question was Shameless).

It turns out there is a bug in Adobe Flash Player on Linux where the Flash window will always appear above every other item on the page. For the most part this is not even noticeable, but in this case the video was appearing above the dialogue box I needed to confirm, in order to start the video playing. I tried in Firefox and it wasn't working, so I tried getting Firefox working under Wine with the Windows version of Flash Player. This wouldn't work either, and Internet Explorer would not even install into Wine. I thought I would try another browser instead, and it turned out that the version of Linux I was using had libraries that were too old for Google Chrome to install with.

Whilst most of the time I have not had much problem with Linux, this had frustrated me enough that I grabbed the Windows XP Home disc that came with my PC and re-installed it right then. Whilst I love using Linux and UNIX, the fact that everything just works under Windows is massively appealing to me now, particularly as I do not have anywhere near as much free time to play with the OS and spend hours configuring things—I just want to get on with using the computer and not worry about the OS.

This could be part of the reason that Linux has not taken off on the desktop as quickly as everyone had hoped. It requires much less time and effort to install but in the long run an average end-user would need to add all of the same components that a Windows user would need (such as Flash for example) plus there would be many other components that would be much harder to install (MP3 codecs for instance, or a service such as Spotify which would require Wine).

Orange internet connection

Our home Internet connection is currently provided by Orange. Last week our connection died so, after leaving it 24 hours to see if it would sort itself out, we phoned the technical support line. They took us through rebooting the router, entering the username and password, rebooting the router, factory-resetting the router, entering the username and password, rebooting the router… I think you get the idea. After about an hour of this they relented and, insisting that no problems had been reported, said they would do a line test and we would hear from them in the morning.

We got a text message the following day saying there was nothing wrong with the line, and could we call them back. We did so that evening and, during the call, the connection came back on its own. It turns out that workmen in one of the nearby villages had put a spade through one of the fibre-optic cables. Orange were aware of this yesterday, but had not told us and had not put it onto their website or their service status telephone message.

Orange technical support used to be very good. There was a time when I had an old GPRS PCMCIA card, and was trying to connect an HP Jornada Pocket PC running Windows CE 3.1 to the Internet with it. Now this is in no way a 'supported' setup, especially as this was in roughly 2004—before the advent of iPhones, and before Smartphones took off like they have. I got past the first-line support fairly quickly when they had no idea what a Jornada was, and second-line and third-line were very supportive in helping me out. I don't remember the man's name now, but with his help I finally got the modem communicating with their network and was able to connect to the Internet. After my experience with the call centre last week I cannot imagine them being so helpful now, especially where the only component that Orange had supplied was the SIM card.

Building a Windows Vista PC

I have just spent the best part of this afternoon installing Windows Vista onto my ageing Asus PC (1.6GHz processor and 479MB available RAM; ouch!).  The installation of Windows didn’t take much time at all, but installing Microsoft Security Essentials and the Windows Live Essentials suite took absolutely ages.  It is currently trying to install 95 Windows Updates and taking it’s time with them (currently four hours into the download/install process).  It will be good when it’s done, as I will have Service Pack 2 and Internet Explorer 8, but I just wish it was a little quicker to do it.  I could have saved some time by getting hold of an installation disc with SP2 on it already, but that would have meant either trying to streamline it onto an ISO—something I have never done before—or borrowing a disc off someone else and using my product key with it.

I went with Vista because I didn’t fancy running a nine-year-old operating system (Windows XP was released in 2001) on the machine, however with this little RAM available I may decide to downgrade the machine in a few days, depending on how responsive it becomes when the updates have all finished installing.  The alternative might be to look at upgrading the RAM and the graphics card in the machine to a more modern level; 2GB RAM should set me back around £30, and the graphics card shouldn’t cost much more as I rarely do anything particularly graphically intensive.

Shorter email campaign

Emails get far too long now.  Every message starts with a greeting header, paragraphs of content, a "yours sincerely" or "best regards" line, and then ten lines of signature.  And they are almost always in HTML.  Email used to be short, small and snappy, and I would like to see it return to that.

Put a short greeting on the same line as the first sentence, and keep the content as short as neccessary.  You are writing an email, not a letter, so it does not need to be as formal.  Especially when there could be five or six replies over a ten-minute period.  Keeping the content short will make the conversation easier to read later, and it prevents the email from growing excessively large as new replies are added.

Also, plain text email takes up much less space in your inbox and is often clearer to read.  Work out how to configure your email client to send in plain text, and only switch to HTML when neccessary.

Finally, try to cut down on your signatures.  Eight-line signatures with every possible contact detail are not needed on internal networks, where online address books can find all the needed information in just a few clicks.  For external emails, only put the contact details on the first message and omit them from the rest.

If your company's mail server adds signatures automatically, put "-- " (dash, dash, space) on a new line at the end of your email (or have this as your signature).  Most email clients will recognise this as the signature delimiter, and will display the signature in a different format and normally not include it in any replies.

I will not get into the debate about top-posting versus inline replying, and will leave this to the personal preference of the reader, but if all messages are shorter then this becomes less of an issue.

So if you ever recieve an email from me, and it seems a little short, I'm not me being rude.  I'm just trying to cut out the cruft in my emails.

Cycling to work

As I tweeted yesterday, Emma picked up an awesome bicycle on Friday so that I can get started on cycling to work.  I have two motivations for doing it; to get fit and to save some money on petrol each month.  Getting fitter is the reason I am looking forward to doing it though.

Today being a Sunday, I figured it would be a good chance to do a trial run before the commute tomorrow, so that I have an idea of how long it will realistically take me.  It takes 30 minutes in the car to travel the six miles to work, so I am hoping on the bike it will take about the same time, as traffic will be less of an issue.  Will update below the fold when I return.

1999 to 2009 in review

2009 is nearly over, and I thought I would have a look back on some of the things that have happened in the past ten years that have most affected me.

The first is the proliferation of the Internet into everything I do.  In 1999 I was in my second year of Upper School, with no idea of what I wanted to do with my life.  The Internet was there, but it was slow and the content was difficult to find.  It sparked my curiosity though, and over the next ten years I would research it and play with it, setting up servers of my own to see how they worked, eventually leading to my current position as a website administrator.  Part of this learning was sparked by the growth of Google, which in 1999 was new and no-one had really heard of it.

1999 was also about the time that I started creating my own websites, though I wouldn't register muzz.co.uk for another four years.  It was hosted in various different places, initially being all hand-typed and later using blogging and CMS software to manage the background elements.  Whilst I did not keep the content across all the different versions (which could be both a blessing and a curse) I have always had a site, and tried to put some vaguely useful information on there.

around 2001–2002 I discovered GNU/Linux and Free software.  I wasn't initially impressed with it—I could never get X11 to work and it caused me more frustration than anything else, but in my determination to get it working I gained a better understanding of it and came to love the power and the flexibility it offered.  As I learned more about it I started to dig into the history of the system, which led to a passion for UNIX in general and the BSD operating systems (namely OpenBSD) in particular.

In 2003 I got my first full-time job as a systems engineer, building high-powered workstations and servers for the animations industry.  The experience I had gained from experimenting with GNU/Linux paid off massively here, and I was able to build on it massively as I would now be using it daily on the systems we were building.  I learnt to configure web servers and mail servers, understood TCP/IP routing and network design, and was given a lot of challenges that would enhance my understanding of computers and networks.

2006 saw my move from the hardware side of computing to the administration side, when I got a job as a network technician at a local college.  It was my first real taste of corporate networking, and I quickly learnt the challenges involved in running a network of 300 people instead of just five.  Patching, incremental updates, user account issues and Active Directory were all completely different beasts on a network of this size, and I learnt that even the smallest changes need to be tested and performed with great care, particularly if they needed to be made in the middle of the working day.

2006 was also the year I started dating my future fiancée Emma, getting engaged in the February of 2008.  We had a lovely engagement party in the June of that year with both of our families coming together for the first time, and everyone had a brilliant time.

In the summer of 2008 I was promoted to the position of Systems & Web Administrator, which meant I moved from running campus-level projects and hardware to managing systems that would affect every user and campus in the college.  This was a big step, and I hit the ground running by taking command of the SharePoint portal, three college-wide public-facing websites and the main internal Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).  Within a year I would roll out an entirely new VLE to replace the old one, manage the installation of a new web- and mail-filtering system, and assist with the deployment of new learning platforms across every campus and school that we managed.  It involved a great deal of planning, preparation and training at every level, and I loved every bit of it.

I wouldn't like to guess what the next ten years will hold for us, because with the current pace of technology I know that I would be completely wrong.  There will be new projects that no-one has heard of yet, and existing ones that everyone believes to be unstoppable may be completely forgotten.  But I do hope that the next decade is as interesting and as challenging as the previous one, because I have enjoyed it immensely.

Merry Christmas 2009

I would like to wish all of my friends & family across the country and around the globe a very merry Christmas.  I hope it brings you everything you wanted, whether that be a PlayStation 3 or having your family together for the first time in ages.

And in the immortal words of Bill & Ted: be excellent to each other.

Advertising on Twitter

If Twitter wanted to run advertising on their site I believe they should follow the lead of Google and use highly-targeted text ads displayed down the right hand side of the page.  If they were to put advertisements into the Tweet stream they would simply annoy the users, as it would disrupt the flow of information.  But placing ads based upon tweets they have just sent, or that their followers have just sent, could get a decent click-through rate.

Also, they could probably do well to combine it with the Trending Topics that are highlighted on the front page.  If many people are tweeting about Topshop, for example, they could put discreet text-only ads about clothing or something related onto the side bar.

This is just off the top of my head and I have not put much more thought into it than this, but it would probably be the least annoying method of displaying advertisements to users and potentially making a profit from it.

As much as I dislike advertisements, I do understand that they are where a lot of the money is on the Internet and any company the size of theirs needs to seriously consider them.

One other potential method could be to provide "Twitter appliances" similar to Google's so that companies can have their own private Twitter networks, but this may be harder to make a profit with as there are many microblogging platforms already available for free such as Laconica.

T-Mobile G1 finally working

After five trips to the repair centre it seems my T-Mobile G1 is finally fixed.  I had phoned T-Mobile to complain again and arrange for a delivery bag to be sent to my work.  When it arrived I popped the phone in, but noticed that the piece of paper describing the faults said only "screen not working."

Whilst this was true, it would not be at all helpful to whoever was fixing the phone.  I grabbed a pen and wrote a whole list of problems I was having on the piece of paper and dropped it in the envelope with the phone, being as descriptive as I could.

It seemed to work, as when I got the handset back it was working properly again, and so far I have had it for a few weeks without problems.

Web filtering improvements

I am not a fan of censorship at all.  Quite the opposite in fact.  In Education however it is a necessary evil, as the students seem to do everything they can to waste time in the classroom.  The biggest source of all this trouble is so-called Proxy Avoidance sites, where the student can access one website such as Facebook via another without being blocked.  The sheer number and variety of these sites makes manual policing a near impossible task.

As such, we are now in the process of implementing a new web filtering system.  I rolled the configuration out to the first campus at midday yesterday—with no visible change to the users—and I have to admit it was mildly satisfying seeing the list of blocked sites quickly populated with a few dozen proxy avoidance sites as the students unsuccessfully tried each one.