David North

I bought myself an Advent 4211 last week (you might know it as the MSI Wind; they’re essentially the same thing). So far, it’s lived up to expectations; there are just a couple of things to say…

• Mine seems to have the decent Synaptics touchpad - read The Register’s review for the warning about the other one.
• You really need to use headphones with it if apps you’re listening to don’t have a very good sound level - inevitably in a device this size, the speakers aren’t great, especially at full volume.

How the Linux install on it goes is something I shall let y’all know shortly…

I did a lightning talk to CompSoc last night on whether 64bit is ready for use on the desktop - if you’re bored, you can download the slides and the second of my famous sketch and scanned graphs.

Twelve months ago, I installed Linux (Kubuntu) on my laptop.

Twelve minutes ago, I got the wireless card working with my WPA-PSK home network.

A combination of the progress made on drivers over the last year, and finding which of the squillions of instruction sets out there Actually Worked has finally got things going - rather than recount it all here, I’ll point owners of the HP Pavilion dv5157eu to this page, and advise everyone else as to how I found it: do a Google search for some combination of ‘ubuntu’, ‘wireless’ and your laptop’s exact model number.

Edit: My wireless happiness sadly didn’t survive a hibernate or a reboot. Turns out the line of the page which says do ’sudo echo ndiswrapper > /etc/module’ actually means, as far as I can tell, that you should do:

sudo -s
echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules

As ever, follow my advice at your own risk.

Musings on public transport, and a look round The Other University

So, full term ended yesterday, and I had to get over to Cambridge for a dinner. The X5 bus proved reasonable, both in terms of cost (£15 open return) and time, though the long stop to change drivers in Bedford lengthened an already long enough journey.

After a very pleasant afternoon being shown round Cambridge, I’ll have to begrudgingly admit to being impressed by it. King’s College Chapel, in particular, was spectacular. Even the weather wasn’t bad.

The train journey home from Oxford was tolerable, though prolonged by a needless half hour stop in Birmingham - it wasn’t so much the stop that annoyed me, but the fact that nobody bothered to tell us about it.

Yesterday only served to reaffirm my belief that public transport is mediocre at best, and ghastly at worst. Our rulers will have to try harder if they want to convince me not to use the driving licence lurking in my wallet, as soon as I can afford to…

Spam. It’s not going away, and nor is my increasing annoyance at some of the things we need to do to avoid it. Like making a separate email forwarder for every service I sign up to. Or, like CAPTCHAs. I can see exactly why we need them, but deciphering squiggly letters against a low-contrast background isn’t easy on the eyes. I was intrigued to see a possible alternative solution called Asirra, which Microsoft Research have come up with. Who knows, I might give it a try myself to keep the bots away from my comments section - although Bad Behavior seems to be doing a good job at the moment.

In other news, I appear to have reached the end of another Oxford term with my sanity intact. The first six weeks were great, it just got a bit wearing for the last two. Some of the non-academic stuff, sadly, is going to have to take a back seat after Christmas, but ah well.

Last week, I gave a Lightning talk to CompSoc on the subject “Linux vs. Windows- which is better?”. It seemed to go down fairly well (I wasn’t lynched outside afterwards…), and following a request from Will for the, er, “interesting” graph that was on one of my slides, here they are. There’s also a JPEG of the graph as I scanned it, and my speaker’s notes.

So, as those not reading via one of the planets will be aware, I’ve rolled out the fourth (or is it fifth?) new theme for this site since May 2007. I’m definitely more pleased with this one than any of its predecessors, and intend to stick with it for a good while.

In other news, I blew £160 on new technology for my desk this week: specifically, a new 4GB USB pendrive to replace my ailing 256mb one, a 250GB external hard disk for my backups, and best of all, a 19 inch TFT monitor to act as a second screen for my laptop.

All of the above were very reasonably priced over at Dabs, and the £100 inc delivery cost of the monitor in particular came as a very pleasant surprise.

This is the first time I’ve given multiple monitors a serious go under Linux (specifically Kubuntu), and KDE certainly puts Windows (at least up to and including XP) into the shade here: a taskbar on each monitor? Yes, it can do that. Separate background images per monitor (without silly hacks involving stitching image files together)? Yes. Only show the buttons for the windows on this monitor on this monitor’s taskbar? Certainly, sir.

It’s only been two days, but I’m already wondering how I ever managed without a secondary screen. It certainly made finishing the new theme for this site a lot easier.

Every Friday, I get emailed a big spreadsheet of dinner menus for the next week. And every Friday, I spend 25 minutes copying, pasting and typing out times to get these menus into daily events for ‘Lunch’ and ‘Dinner’ on a website powered by the Mambo CMS.

Actually, of course, I got bored of that after the first two weeks and lashed together a PHP form to cut out most of the effort; that reduced the task to about 5 minutes’ worth. But that’s still 5 minutes of my life I’ll loose each week…until now.

Enter Python, specifically python-excelerator and xls2list. Amazingly, it turns out some clever people have already done the hard work of getting Python to read .xls files, so all I had to do was write a parser to fish out the menus.

After some fiddling around, it seems to do the job on test data from the last few weeks. So now all I need to do is wire it up to a special email address at one end and make it output the menus into the Mambo backend database at the other.