Passing Thoughts

Experiments in Google

One of the good things about trying out another platform is it breaks you out of your comfort zone. Sometimes that is a bad thing: a computer without Quicksilver feels desperately broken to me. Sometimes however you get a pleasant surprise: I was tinkering with google docs & spreadsheets earlier using it to write a document for work. After writing some of the text I clicked around to see what you could do and found some settings for publishing to your blog. And lo and behold - this post comes to you from that very tool It has been edited on my Sony Picturebook and I did a quick edit from my Powerbook while waiting for children to do things...(and even cooler when I came back downstairs the version on my picturebook contains the edits I did upstairs without needing to refresh).

So what is google docs like? Pretty nice I have to say - it has virtually no features compared to Word - but the features it does have are the ones I actually use (you know - the things to do with actually editing text....). The collaborative and sharing features are the kind I use (ie. email a document to someone) and I love the fact my documents are accessible from where ever I am without copying them across machines and ending up with 10 different versions here there and everywhere. I guess there there is a possible trust issue with Google - I might not use this for sensitive documents but for 99% of the stuff I write it seems ideal.



Mind you it didn't get the title right when I published it...

Peter Watts, Richard Wright and Cory Doctrow

The Creative Commons is a wonderful thing. Thanks to the tireless promotion by the likes of Cory Doctorow and many others there is a lot of very high quality content out there (including Corys excellent books):

Peter Watts writes fairly dark science fiction. The Rifters triology starts with Starfish, set primarily at the bottom of the ocean with a bunch of characters who might, most charitably, be described as 'damaged' - it is full of the paranoia of the alien movies (without an alien) and some very interesting science. Highly recommended.

Also highly recommended are my friend Ricks (Richard Wright) books. He has released a brilliant collection of his short stories most of which have been in print in once place or another but are now very hard to get hold of. If you like dark fiction with a knack of getting into your head and messing with it (not to mention the odd dab of very dark humour) then rush over there and download it now. You won't be disappointed.

Happy Christmas

Well the children didn't get up until after 6 and I only spent an hour assembling things so all in all not that bad from my point of view. Of course despite having lots of new toys everyone wants to play with the same thing at the same time.

Out in the real world I notice that James Brown has died - the passing of a legend.

I am posting this from my ubuntu picturebook which is turning out to be a surprisingly usable little machine. There are one or two thing things missing that would stop it being my main machine but ubuntu is a real winner.

Happy Christmas Anyway...

Ubuntu

I switched to the Mac from Windows about 2 years ago. I was finding Windows increasingly frustrating - unix has a great collection of powerful tools and paradigms that suit the things I need to do and not having them was a pain. My first attempt at switching was via Linux using Fedora Core. This gave me a lot of the things I was looking for but at a cost of not having a lot of the things Window does well - what you might call the consumer side of things - easy configurations, auto-detection of hardware etc. When I became increasingly surrounded by people using Macs I was quickly sold. Here was a platform that had all the Unix power and had a slick consumer grade interface on top. I moved over and never looked back.

So when Cory Doctorow announced that he was leaving the mac for Ubuntu I was intrigued. Cory is very much a 'power user' and if he is prepared to give up his Mac for it then it was got to be worth a look.

Fast forward a bit. I recently found myself wanting a smaller machine downstairs - I have my Mac upstairs with the second screen setup and sometimes I just need to be able to do the odd bits and pieces while I am downstairs with the children. Nothing great - bit of ssh, reading a PDF or surfing the web. I looked at the Palm TX but the problem with PDA's is that they have tiny screens and you can't type on them. Just before I moved to the Mac I bought a Sony Picturebook. A great little machine but because it has no integrated networking I had never managed to get it working properly with wireless. Time to try again I thought.

I found that there is a version of Ubuntu for machines with less than 192Mb of memory and thanks to this blog entry I had it installed in no time at all. This in itself was a breath of fresh air. Last time I had installed linux on it there had been 2-3 days of messing about trying to get the installer to understand the display, let alone put linux on the machine. Next step was wireless. I have a PCCARD thing that came with it - Ubuntu can see it which is a start but I could not find anyway to make it see it as a wireless device at all. Next stop was a USB Netgear WA111. I had more success with this in that I could get Ubuntu to see it and recognize it as a network device but (after diving into config files) I could not get it to see my network. After a bit of googling I found that I could pick up a Belkin USB wireless stick up quite cheaply and people seemed to be able to get it to work and so I ordered one. Ubuntu saw it right away but could not see my network. After some googling I dumped the open source driver and tried ndiswrapper and as if by magic - it all worked. Still this was a lot more work than it would be under either Windows or the Mac and I can't quite see someone like my Mum doing it - even though she is quite computer literate.

So having got it all working what is Ubuntu like? Very nice indeed. They have gone for a sudo like scheme for using root just like the Mac which I find very attractive. The desktop is clean and good looking and very easy to use. There are still one or two integration issues - cut and paste is not quite as smooth across apps as it is on the Mac or Windows. All in all very very useable though.

So would I give up all my Mac loveliness for this? Nah - OSX still manages the seamless blend of Unix and Consumer grade gloss that I find lets me do pretty much all that I want. Is Ubuntu a viable alternative to Windows? Not quite - but it is not far off and it certainly would be for some people.

I am going to setup the other old laptop with Ubuntu for the children (we already have arguments in the house about whose turn it is on the computer) so that they get some exposure to other operating systems. It will be interesting to see how they get on with it

Box

I guess Amazon are running out of boxes. They have just sent the highlighted item in the box it is sitting on. As for what the item is and what it is for that will hopefully be the subject of a post in a day or two.

Brawlers, Bawlers and Orphans

'and the last thing that he said on earth is "God is great and God is good"
And he blew them all to kingdom come upon the road to peace'

Tom Waits - The Road To Peace

I got hold of a copy of the new Tom Waits album and it is a corker. The music ranges over all of the styles Waits has touched upon since swordfishtrombones and more and from what I have heard there is not one duff track. After Alice and Blood money I lost my in Waits a little but Real Gone (which took a while to grow on me) and this triple album are absolutely brilliant.

(disclaimer: If you click on the image to buy the album from Amazon I earn a small commission via my associate account).

Government 'thinking'

While we are on the subject of government thinking about IT. I have just spotted this announcement that the government intended to piggy back their ID card scheme on the back of existing databases. They seem to think that this is going to make it cheaper. However I reckon that they have at least just doubled the cost. Given that there is no single database of all the people in the country and their details they are going to need to integrate information from a number of sources. This data won't all match up (any large database is full of 'dirt' - bad records, spelling mistakes, mismatches etc. This cannot be avoided.) so the integration will be complex. There will be far more scope for error (and where there are problems there are a stack of people waiting to exploit those problems).

I have personally stopped worrying about ID cards. The government is just not capable of implementing the schemes they have in mind. It will either all fall to pieces and be scrapped once the costs spiral out of control or we will end up with some half arsed 'passport v2.0' scheme which will be something like making everyone have a passport if they need one or not.

Things that go Bleurrgh in the night...

One of the delights of school age children is the collection of infections and bugs they bring home with them. The last two nights Milo has been up being sick. After he was sick last night I took my bed downstairs so Milo could sleep on the sofa and I could keep an eye on him - of course this all woke Gabriel so he ended up downstairs too. Mind you he still was keen to go to school so I guess he is feeling better.

The drive to school was all frost and mist and distant mountains.

Tired this morning - fixing things and listening to this quietly in the background.

Weekend

When they hear that I work from home people often ask how I manage not to get distracted. However I actually have quite the opposite problem - left to my own devices I would work all of the time. In order not to get burnt out and also so my girlfriend and family don't leave me I make an effort to keep my weekends free. This weekend we ended up in Dalkeith visiting family. The air was crystal clear driving up, with a tiny cap of snow on the highest mountains. The image above was taken on my camera phone in the near by park.

One of the consequences of cheap reliable lighting technology is that outdoor decorations have also become cheap and reliable. This has led to some amusing excesses - the drive back took us along the A702: If you should ever chance along that road at night at this time of year you will pass a house that has a (large) garden crammed full of lurid illuminated signs - at least one every couple of square feet. Also worth watching out for on the drive back: along the M6 just outside Carlisle is a row of houses covered in so many signs that at first glance I assumed it was a warehouse that sold the signs. Fittingly, when we got back we discovered our neighbors had also been indulging themselves and lighting their house up just in case no one can see it from space.

On a more serious note I notice that the NHS move to electronic records is moving forwards. This is in my opinion a good thing. The cost both in terms of manpower and the consequences of lost or hard to obtain paper records must be very high. I am sure that the initial cost is going to be awful but in the long term things should be better. One thing that I find very annoying though was a government spokesperson on the radio claiming that the system will be secure. Now I don't know if the government actually think that it is possible to build totally secure software systems but anyone who has had any involvement in building these systems will tell you that it is not. This is due to a simple fact - the attacker has the advantage- when you build a system you plug as many holes as you know about or can imagine being attacked. You then release your system which is then probed and poked constantly. And I do mean constantly - if you look at the logs of a webserver or your firewall you will see that all machines on the internet are being scanned and tested for vulnerabilities all of the time. One way to envisage it is if your house was always surrounded by crowds of burglars looking for ways in. All is not lost though. You can do a lot about the situation for example having multiple layers of access (so called Demilitarized Zones or DMZ's) which will slow any attacker down considerably. The point is though that it would be better if a) we where sure that the government actually understood this about it's systems - because if they do there will at least be a vague chance they are managing it properly and b) it might be good spin now to claim a system is invulnerable but surely that is at the cost of very bad publicity later on when that security is breached. Surely it is better to manage expectations now and give the public at least a glimmering of understanding about how these systems work in practice so that they can make informed choices. Mind you- perhaps that would only make sense in a democracy.

Starting again

I have been meaning to start blogging again for some time. I tend to use my site as a test for web archiving crawls (see below) and enjoy re-reading it so I am going to make an effort to start writing it again. I have been planning to do a relaunch but I haven't got round to that just yet. Perhaps the best idea is just to get on with things and redo the design when I have time.

So what am I up to?

I have moved yet again (there's a surprise) and we now live in Ulverston. Just up the road from where I grew up. Despite spending a lot of time as a teenager thinking that the grass was greener elsewhere - experience shows that that is not the case (Yorkshire is not bad though). I have to say - it is beautiful here, considerably quieter and we are right out in the sticks, the sea is 5 minutes drive away and we are pretty much on the edge of the Lake District. I can also physically feel that I am less stressed by not having to commute as well.

My professional life is taken up entirely with Web Archiving now - both for the European Archive and my own fledgling company Hanzo Archives. This tends to involve a variety of things - software development, running crawls and poking around the underside of the internet incredulous at the weird things people do.

My Family life is also much better. Not having to commute means I get to see a lot more of them.