&c.

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.

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.

New college year

Some of the students have returned to college now, which means the start of the annual mad rush to get everything set up and working.  Usernames need to be given out for the computers, induction tests need to be running and the need to have the college VLE running becomes more and more critical.

Most parts of the Moodle install are completed now, with a bit of extra coding on my part, and I have learned a little about PHP objects in the process.  I needed to add a few extra lines of code to the database enrolment plugin in order to pull the full name of the course from our Student Records database, rather than just the course ID number.  After about an hour I had it set up, tested and working, so now staff and students are automatically added to courses in Moodle based upon their enrolment in the database, and the courses that are created automatically are given all the correct information.  Initial tests show it is working well.

The final steps now are to install the plugins that the college needs and to improve the appearance of the front page, but these are much less critical and will take less time to complete.

T-Mobile G1 repaired again

I finally got my T-Mobile G1 back from the repair centre yesterday, after what seemed like months trying to arrange it.  In the end I got fed up of waiting for the delivery packaging in the post and went straight to the store.  The repair note ominously said the phone had received a replacement sticker, which was one of the repairs it had already had before going wrong again the following day.

The phone has seemed okay so far but I am not getting my hopes up yet.

Edit:  Within minute of posting this entry the fault has occurred again.  This is getting past rediculous now.  I will take it back to the store today if I have time, or tomorrow otherwise.

T-Mobile G1 screen fault

I have had a T-Mobile G1 mobile phone since early July and about a month after receiving it a fault developed with the screen.  The phone itself was working, and I was able to answer calls and could hear it beep when I received text messages, but the screen would not turn on.  The buttons on the keypad would light up but the display would stay black.  Initially it happened rarely, and it would fix itself after a few minutes.  Then it got worse and more frequent, and I had to remove the battery to get it working.  Eventually even this wouldn't fix it, and the screen stayed black permanently.

I sent the phone to be repaired by T-Mobile and it returned with a note saying it had been given a "replacement flex" and a "replacement sticker."  The phone now worked correctly, but the following day the problem returned, as bad as it had been just before it was sent for repair.  T-Mobile would not replace the handset immediately, but offered to have it repaired at the higher-level repair centre (in the words of the support assistant: "I have never seen a phone leave there without being fully repaired").  I understand that they will likely receive a lot of handsets with relatively minor faults, but it is very annoying having to send it away twice for the same problem because the first-line repair centre did not repair it correctly.

Hopefully I will have more success the second time around.  If anyone else is having or has had a similar problem with their G1 please let me know in the comments, as when I initially had the problem I was unable to find anyone else with similar problems on the Internet.

Update:  My T-Mobile G1 has finally been repaired properly.

SharePoint training and use

At work we are in the process of rolling out Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 across the college, and as a result I went on a three-day training course in Milton Keynes to get up to speed with the system.

SharePoint is best described as a Content Management System, or a Portal system.  It is designed to allow users to create web pages, and to expose information from external systems via web pages.  We are using it to allow departments to easily publish information that they may find useful to other departments, and also to give each user their own MySite (a personal space that they can use to upload anything they like).

SharePoint is a massive system however.  It takes a multitude of servers to get the content to the end users, and installing it is not a simple process.  There are additional systems that need to be linked in, and customisations such as themes and templates need to be installed.  It is, however, a massively customisable system as well.  There are dozens of page and site templates, from blog publishing to document storage to website homepages, and there are features such as workflows and approval tied in at every level if needed.

This makes it an incredibly useful and powerful system, but also incredibly complicated.  All through the training, and in my normal use at work, it is apparent how difficult it can be to enable the simplest features.  Many of the options are in unintuitive places, which can be very time consuming when you need to enable something on a multitude of sub-sites.

The training did show me a lot of useful things though, and I am looking forward to trying some of them out on our system at work.

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.