Where the Hell Have I Been?

Where have I been, you might ask? Well, you probably won’t since most of you will only turn up here when blo.gs says that I’ve updated, but even so when you arrive you might wonder why you haven’t been here in a while and anyway all I have to say is about why I haven’t been about in a bit.

So, yeah. Architecture. Hard course, y’know? Lots of work and work and computer modelling and real-world modelling and stuff. I don’t know how she does it. Makes CompSci look a doddle — and having a real job. So I figured I should help. As you saw previously, I was helping out with some modelling.

Since then I’ve finished off that model:

Seen from the front: Model of a small village (all painted green) with a set of interesting buildings merged into the contoured slope to the South, in brilliant white for contrast

Seen from the side: The same model as above, in the background showing some smaller concept models of the same sort of single aspect contoured housing

This basically just involved a lot of wandering around Homebase going “yes, I really do want this shade of green, don’t worry I won’t paint the nursery this colour or anything, no that brighter one just _won’t_ do” and then spending a lot of time with a newspaper bib on trying not to get green paint all over myself. Oh and a whole lot more intricate, hand-injuring modelling of the little white buildings which are actually Elly’s project — and pretty damn cool.

You can’t really see a lot of the actual little buildings from those photos, so to do it some sort of justice here are some of the visuals from the project:

Four panels of visuals of people in some single aspect housing, looking out over green hills

The whole thing is pretty cool and has had a lot of inspiration and sleeplessness poured into it. I took Monday and Tuesday off last week to help and ended up working Fri & Sat nights on the door at my regular job, then from Sunday 11am all the way through to about 2am Tuesday. Not my record for working hours in a row, but definitely the record for working on someone else’s project. This meant that my shortened week back at work was tired (especially as it included a trip to Newcastle) and manic, since I had 5 days work to complete in about 2 office days. This weekend I’ve not had much to do as it’s all on computer (and we only have one with the necessary software and frankly I don’t have the skillz anyway), but next weekend I’ll be spraymounting things and slicing foamboard with the rest of them. It’s all quite fun, but only if it’s not your degree on the line, I expect.

I realise this post was a bit LiveJournal-esque, but I figured it was better than absolute silence continuing for another couple of weeks … and you have to admit those models are cool ;-)

Funny-haha and Funny-weird

Geneva, Gay Marriage and 29 Feb

Well, I’m back from Geneva and it was lovely. Sunny, just cool enough to be pleasant to walk around, great ice-cream, mountains that reminded me of home (except for the snow) and a massive jet of water in the lake which appears to be the main attraction. I took photos but unfortunately don’t have a digicam — I’ll try remember to scan in and post at some point

As a result of two days travel after a very busy weekend, I am behind on my reading but I did find the following:

Tiny Models

I haven’t blogged in a little while because my offline life sometimes conspires to remove my online presence from the web. Last week it was work being busy, various meetings about where I might want to go once I’ve graduated and having Friday off to help Elly with her final year architecture project.

Fri, Sat and Sun were all spent helping with aforementioned project (with time off in between to go earn money tutoring maths and then working as a doorman), building a little village worth of tiny 1:500 scale models of houses, outbuildings and shops. They didn’t have to be hugely detailed, just showing what was in the area surrounding the main site, to give El’s design a bit of context. So they fell to me.

Here are a couple of pics:
Photo of the model showing a number of small buildings modeled in grey cardboard

Similar photo showing some other buildings evidently from a different angle

I have learnt a few things this weekend:
– scalpels are often sharper than you expect, even when blunt
– my hands are too big for tiny tiny models
– thick cardboard is a bastard to cut
– RSI makes your hands shake

The combination of these means my hands are sore, there are blood specks on some of the buildings, but there is a little carboard village in existence because of me.

Now I am off to sleep, as tomorrow I have to get to London and then to Geneva. Public transport all the way, baby.

Pop Culture in the UK

  • This is more than mildly disturbing: “Is it because I is Tory?” — an MP keeping his position by doing Ali G impressions. For anyone who doesn’t know Ali G, don’t worry, be happy and enjoy that fact. via MatthewMan
  • Another from MatthewMan is this article about advertising guerrilla Dr D who is defacing/improving billboards around London. Looks like fantastic stuff. Might even make a trip into that smoky hellhole worthwhile
  • Great little tutorial/code examples piece around CSS layouts : Little Boxes, via Anil

And yes, I know I should get around to doing a followup on Because We Are Geeks now that it’s grown legs and run off to be linked and commented all around this here intarweb, but right now more than anything I need to go home and find aspirin. So catch you tomorrow

Pizza, Old SciFi Plots and Dead Things

Because We Are Geeks

Most people that are heavily involved in IT, in writing systems, in websites, in development are at least to some extent geeky. We like tech. We think it’s funky. Show us a Devil Duck USB gadget or some precariously stackable lamps and we’ll lust after them until we finally can afford to get them. Similarly, we ache for Powerbooks and similar shiny tech. We love to hack things, to understand how they work to get the most out of them. We treasure little tips and tricks and efficient use of systems (even though they eat away our lives). We all have terminal cases of NADD.

All this makes us perfect for playing with new tech. We want to understand it, to use it, to make the most of it. We live through the frustrations, spend hours making things elegant, efficient, pretty, packing in features as if there’s no tomorrow. If we can have it, we want it all-singing, all-dancing, with bells on. The inventor of the Swiss army knife was definitely one of us.

We are, however, crap “average” users and crap at developing for them and selling to them. We can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want or need all the extra functionality we can think of. Why they might just want to do the task a simple, easy to learn and remember way (yes, command line whores, I’m looking at you ;-) ). That advances in user-friendliness and usability in those core areas is immensely more important than all the cool things we can think to add to the system. But the worst impact of our very nature is when we are trying to roll a product out, to sell it to the users. Because we are geeks.

Because we are geeks, we assume that people will buy something just because it’s cool, or funky, or has great new features, allows you to calculate how much of your time you spend getting stupid statistics about how you spend your time. Normal people don’t buy things because they’re funky — not systematically anyway. Geeks don’t even buy normal mugs — they all have to have clever slogans.

So why do non-geeks buy things? And how do we adapt to sell to them better? I’d love people’s thoughts on this.

Games and Web Stuff

  • This little game has wasted a lot of my time this weekend: Blast Billiards v 4 — basically pool with a couple of twists and a time limit. Surprisingly engaging!
  • Kayode has an entry about an interesting service for protecting your privacy — seems like a great idea to me, looking forward to seeing it tested
  • More because I need to remember it’s there for when I redirect people, but also because it looks like a great resource: Dave Shea’s Roadmap to Standards
  • Tim Bray has a great article about Web services practice and theory, a great 2 minute guide to what’s already working in the web services arena and what is probably a bit too pipe-dreamish to bet your success on just yet. Insightful and easily digestible. A previous insight on real life business usage of syndication is worth a look too :-)
  • I managed to miss that the NHS might ditch Micro$oft, but I’ve decided that this article contains possibly the best summary of Linux ever:

    “Linux is an ‘open-source’ system for running computers invented by a young Finnish student in 1991 and refined by thousands of programmers working together across the internet.”

  • Doing everything with Movable Type is an interesting look at how MT can be used as a general content manager and expanded beyond the blogosphere. via Simplebits
  • Attack of the Homosexuals — quality comic :: “We come seeking equal marriage rights; take us to your courts”
  • Quality story over at GGA about a blind date contestant choosing PS2 over the girl

Installing Debian — Trials and Tribulations

So I finally decided to take the plunge and install Linux. To be honest I wasn’t particularly phased by the thought — when I started using computers as an 8 year old, it was all about the DOS command line and I missed that a lot when Windows rocked up. Windows seemed very limiting and the interface always annoyed me … and as you might have picked up by now, I’m no fan of Micro$oft. So I backed up all my data, put together a Linux box and wiped the old 10GB hard drive that I’d put inside it.

I’d been told that you needed to make sure you had another machine with net access alongside the one you were installing on, to look things up, create rescue disks if everything went pear-shaped etc. On this machine I had a look at the various distributions, chose to install Debian, partly because I’d heard good things about it, but mostly because my housemate runs it (and our home LAN) and I figured he’d be happiest helping troubleshooting his favourite distro if it all went wrong. (Me? Predict disaster? Never)

I had a read through of the installation manual and chose to make a minimal bootable CD and install the rest over the net. I chose the LordSutch.com version and burnt a bootable CD with no problems at all once it had downloaded.

On the destined-to-be-Linux box, it booted fine and went straight into the installer. Although this required some fairly detailed info, it was hardly brain surgery and quite well structured. So base system installed, I then just had to try and get the rest off the net.

Ah, right, the net. Whoops.

So we have a home network, yeah? My (extremely technically able) housemate runs it and its rather complex really. So it didn’t really shock me that my fledgling Deb box didn’t want to play with the home network … or that the network wouldn’t talk to it. I went through the usual routine : check the cables, check it’s plugged into the right part of the network, check the little flashy lights, trying pinging a Google server, try traceroute anything.

No dice. OK, call in the sysadmin of the house. No problem, he reckons, just manually configure the network using ifconfig. OK fine and it works, for a while. So I run tasksel and get the basics that I want to start out with: desktop environment, C, LaTex and the other cool useful-to-a-computer-scientist things that were my reason for finally getting the whole Linux shebang going.

So it should all work now, right? WRONG.

Now, the first thing to mention here is that although this seems very compact and 1, 2, 3 steppish when I write it here, what I describe above took about 3-4 weeks. Since I live in London in the week for work and only get back to Bath at weekends (I’ll refrain from explaining just how fun 6 hours a week commuting on British railway transport can be for now) … given that I usually work for at least a day out of every weekend and I have to spend as much time with Elly as her course permits, there’s really not a massive amount of time left for the Debian box. Add to this that the sysadmin of the house is a largely nocturnal animal and we have something of a timetabling issue. But I digress.

Where was I? Oh yes, so now I have a basic system installed and tasksel has somehow managed to get the essentials of the Linux experience that I want. Or so I thought. When I booted up, apart from the little Tux picture going a bit haywire, everything seemed fine. Except that the X server didn’t work properly and although the installer was very helpful and even showed me the (blanK) output from the process init, I had no idea what was wrong with it.

So what did I do? I searched on the error messages: 

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xserverrc: /usr/bin/X11/x: No such file or directory
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xserverrc: exec: /usr/bin/X11/X: cannot execute: No such file or directory giving up.
xinit: No such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.

Now, the reason that I’m posting this here is that it took me a while to wade through the support forums and find a solution, so I thought I’d post a simple analysis of the problem and solution here.
Problem: X is not actually installed
Solution: Install X by typing apt-get install xserver-xfree86

Basically, the Debian installer appears to assume that you will install X yourself, but when tasksel gets you a desktop environment, it assumes you already have X. Which I had assumed as well, which was why it took me another 2 weekends to work out what the hell was wrong. Unfortunately by the time I had realised what was wrong and how to fix it, it was the middle of the Easter vacation uni-wise, so sysadmin housemate had gone home for the holidays and the network had fallen over. Only he can fix it, so we had unplugged all the machines from the normal house network, put them into a different switch, used my XP box to connect to our broadband service and shared the connection (everyone else runs XP too). Worked fine … until I tried to get the Debian box to connect to the internet through the XP connection. I’m sure it’s possible to get a Linux box connected to the net through ICS in XP, but I couldn’t get it to work in less than 5 hours, so I just gave up and waited the couple of weeks for the normal network to be restored.

Right, so net restored I install xserver-xfree86 and use dpkg-reconfigure to configure it to something vaguely resembling my set up. X starts and I can even log in to Gnome or KDE (both are installed with Debian). Unfortunately my mouse doesn’t work for jack, which is fine in a console environment, but not great with a choice of two desktop environments I don’t know and my shortcut keys are wildly inaccurate for. Also it takes me a while to realise that my assumption that my keyboard want to be configured as ‘br’ (for BRitish) when the installer wouldn’t accept ‘uk’ was completely wrong … I have a Brazilian keyboard layout until I ask the sysadmin housemate, who helpfully reckons it might be ‘gb’, which of course it is.

So what’s wrong with the mouse? For a start, it’s a USB mouse connected through a PS/2 adapter to a KVM switch that then connects to the relevant USB ports on the Deb box itself. I’d had similar problems with the mouse-KVM combination when using my laptop previously — I had always assumed the problem was due to the KVM, since when I positioned it just so, it would stop making the mouse race to the top right hand corner (you know, where all the app close icons are in Windows) and double-click violently. However trial and error and a lot of frustration seem to indicate that the problem is not the KVM but the adapters — both the USB–>PS/2 that connected the mouse to the KVM and the keyboard-mouse splitter that goes into the single PS/2 input on my laptop.

So I have a working Debian box, complete with X and desktop environments, but with a mouse that can’t do much but double-click in the top right hand corner of the screen. Brilliant. The mouse is a Logitech Optical Netscroll, so I mess around using GPM as a repeater, as was suggested on some forums, varying the message protocol from PS/2 to ImPS/2 to Netscroll PS/2 (logical, no?) and a variety of options in between. No chance, top right hand corner is the only place the pointer wanted to be.

So how did I resolve it? Well, I haven’t managed to yet — I had to give in and just connect a normal PS/2 mouse to the box direct and mess about with the settings. So now it works, although scroll wheel events only seem to be handled properly in KDE, and I have something resembling a Debian box, a lot of experience in reading and researching error messages, a pretty shitty looking desktop (I have still to work out how to get better, prettier fonts) and a deep conviction that Linux is staying a niche market as long as things are this frustrating. When I compare to installing XP (which took 1 hour, total), for once I have to give Micro$oft credit — they may build shite that is unstable as all get out, but at least it installs itself and autodetects your hardware pretty well.