teh bigbro blog(tm)

State of the Map Conference 2008

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:15:00 GMT

An international team of citizen cartographers is preparing to descend on Limerick, Ireland, in what has been called a 'mapping revolution.'

Open Streetmap.org's second annual gathering will take place in the Kilmurry Lodge Hotel on the 12th and 13th July. The project groups over 40,000 volunteers who - armed with GPS receivers, bikes and notebooks - are surveying the streets, footpaths, peaks and rivers of the world. Anyone can contribute and anyone can use the resulting map.

Often compared to Wikipedia, Open Streetmap differs from traditional internet maps in its depth of coverage (others are restricted to just streets) and its open philosophy.

Anyone can download the Open Streetmap data and make their own map from it - one popular example being a unique webmap of worldwide cycle routes, where bike-friendly roads are emphasised and motorways toned down. By contrast, other maps are covered by restrictive copyright rules, such as those produced by Ordnance Survey of Ireland or by Google.

Registration for the conference is open, with further information available from www.stateofthemap.org or www.openstreetmap.org.

Firefox 3 Offline Mode in Ubuntu

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:39:00 GMT

Since upgrading to Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) I've noticed that Firefox on my laptop drops into 'Work Offline' mode every time I suspend and resume my laptop or change connectivity type. While offline mode is indeed useful, I'd much rather I had to manually select this mode, rather than have the hassle of having to repeatedly tell Firefox it's online. I use a combination of wired, wireless (802.11b/g/n) and 3G connectivity throughout my average day, so perhaps this affects me more than it would others.

It appears that Firefox 3 on Ubuntu queries Network Manager to see if it's online or offline, and sets its status according to this. A neat feature, but it appears to only indicate an offline state, forgetting to turn it back online again afterwards. The internet suggests that this might be due to a bug though it seems there's some debate as to whether it's a Network Manager bug or a Firefox bug.

In order to fix this, I specifically disallowed Firefox from conversing with Network Manager (over dbus), with the net result that Firefox always chooses it's default mode of being online.
Edit the /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf file and replace each instance of
<allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/>
with
<deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/>

You will have to restart dbus for this to take effect, and I noticed some slight strange effects until I rebooted. Firefox now appears to be firmly convinced it's always online, which was the aim; and probably not far from the truth on my laptop. Note that other applications that query Network Manager in a similar fashion, such as Pidgin will also assume they are online all the time, since they are also denied access to query Network Manager.

Thanks to Nikitas350 for his helpful post detailing this solution.

Firefox 3 Launches in Dublin

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:20:00 GMT

After a 24 hour period of downloading, trying to set a world record for the most downloads in the world ever (or at least for a browser release in a 24 hour period) the firefox party in Dublin kicks off. There's badges galore, stickers and branded lanyards a-plenty, and even a respectable assortment of temporary tattoos with a firefox on them.

In mostly unrelated news, Reilly would like to formally proclaim her l33t awsumness!!!!111oneoneeleventy Reilly would also like to point out that Thom is 'hot' and has a nice ass. I see no donkeys in the proximity of Thom, so must assume that he left his odd-toes ungulate at home.

Congrats to the Firefox team for releasing another fine product, and thanks to the organisers and sponsors for making the Firefox launch a tremendous success.

Voting on the Lisbon Treaty

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:39:00 GMT

I'm travelling to Limerick to vote on the Lisbon treaty today. It's my own fault for not managing to move my vote to where I actually live on time, but I feel voting is important enough to travel the distance. Whether you're going to vote no or yes, be sure you vote. Kev also feels it's important enough to travel from Dublin to Galway to cast his vote. Hopefully Ireland will make the right decision for Europe today.

Happy 1st Birthday...

Fri, 30 May 2008 11:11:00 GMT

... to the roadworks happening outside my office. Thus far, all the parties involved in extending the Luas Line have spent 365 days creating havoc with traffic, generating noise and large holes in the ground, depleting the worlds tea stocks and generally making life just a little more unpleasant for all of us working here in the IFSC. Oh... I almost forgot... they have succeeded in laying all of approximately 30 feet of track, of the hundreds (if not thousands) required for the 7 minute journey time they're adding.

Yay!

Sat, 24 May 2008 19:29:00 GMT

Yesterday evening I had the privilege of seeing one Joe Satriani who rocked out in Vicar Street here in Dublin - and today I got to see my native Munster beat Toulouse in the Heineken Cup Final. Yay! :-)

Exam with answers on the back...

Thu, 22 May 2008 14:28:00 GMT

This report from the BBC made me laugh out loud. I think everyone who has gone through years of education and examinations can remember the stress of walking into an exam, with the only slightly irrational fear that they will be unable to produce a single answer. How much more convenient it would be to live in a society that has so much fear and confusion surrounding musical copyright law, that the exam board just prints the answers on the back of the question sheet.

I do pity the poor students who glossed over the copyright statement, not realiseing that the answers were there for all to see.

Podcasts

Wed, 14 May 2008 09:13:00 GMT

I'm relatively new to the world of podcasts, but have finally found a number of them that I enjoy. Linux is my operating system of choice, and Amarok (on the eeePC) and RhythmBox (on any of my Ubuntu machines) provide all the RSS functionality I require. I can enter an RSS feed URL and it will merrily download any new episodes that appear.

But how do I listen to them? Specifically, how do I keep track of the episodes I've listened to and those that are waiting for my eager ears? One suggestion I've received from an iPod user is that iPod and iTunes keeps track of the number of times you've listened to tracks. This makes things simple since I can make a playlist in iTunes of Podcast tracks that have a listened to count of 0 (zero.)

But what if I don't want to use iTunes - or an blog-at-signal2noise-dot-ie - any suggestions, particularly those encompassing Linux and a Creative Nano. If the best suggestion is really really good, I'll even award a prize - along with publishing it here :-)

Skynet Awards : Congratulations

Mon, 12 May 2008 21:53:00 GMT

Congratulations to daren (Daren Nestor) who was voted System Administrator of the Year and to tyrion (Dave Dolphin) who was voted Society Person of the Year in Skynet, the University of Limerick Computer Society. Good work guys, and congratulations!

Still running blosxom...

Mon, 12 May 2008 16:10:00 GMT

In response to some upgrade nonsense re Wordpress earlier I would like to point out that I'm still running blosxom (slightly hacked version, though still with some of the original code... I think... probably...)

I guess the problem with Perl is that it's so easy to make software work the way you want it to :-)

Random Pintage in the Porter House

Thu, 08 May 2008 23:17:00 GMT

Tonight was random pintage night in the Porterhouse, Templebar - basically an excuse to meet Jan Lehnardt and chat about things CouchDB related and things categorically not CouchDB related.

A good night was had by all :-)

OpenOffice Bug

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:54:00 GMT

This week, I've been mostly...
...using Open Office to create pretty graphs. It has mostly worked very well indeed, but see if you can find the really obvious bug in the graph below. I've still not figured out how to fix it, since the data is correct - just the labels on the graph are a bit wrong. Suggestions to the usual blog-at-signal2noise.co.uk address.

Ubuntu Hardy Upgrade

Thu, 01 May 2008 08:52:00 GMT

I upgraded one of my machines from Ubuntu Gutsy to Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) the latest and greatest from the Shuttleworth camp. The upgrade manager tool reminded me that a newer release was available, and upgrading was literally as simple as clicking the provided button and answering a few questions along the way.

Of the (perhaps) five questions in total asked during the upgrade procedure, two questioned me about upgrading or keeping a configuration file that I had allegedly changed, though I'm pretty sure I never changed it. Diff'ing using the provided options in the upgrade menu allowed me to double check that there were no material changes and that an overwrite was permissible. The other questions were regarding configuration files I definitely had changed. While I couldn't find a way to accept some of the new changes and merge back in my changes, it was a simple job to make a note of the filenames and put my changes back in after the upgrade procedure.

While I've not tested extensively, it looks like everything functions after the upgrade, including wireless networking, X, etc. The one gotcha at the moment is that Firefox is upgraded to a version that is not yet supported by Foxmarks which means I can no longer synch bookmarks to/from that machine. I expect this will be rectified soon enough, and of course the bookmarks that were there previously are still there. The Foxmarks blog suggests that a version for Firefox 3 is in beta test, so I won't have to wait long.

All in all, given the not-so-large sample set of one single laptop analysed, I can say that my experience with Hardy has been good. ftp.heanet.ie has served out over a petabyte of data due to the upgrade being released, so I anticipate that we'll be seeing a lot of Ubuntu Hardy in the wild as of now.

ILUG PotD

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:47:00 GMT

The Irish Linux User Group (ILUG) will be holding a Pint of the Day (PotD) in the Longstone Pub, Townsend Street, Dublin on Thursday next, 1^st May 2008, starting at about 7:30pm.

Come along and join us - we're easy to recognise due to the proliferation of penguins, and possibly technology. See you there...

Google Reader

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:15:00 GMT

I've been looking for a method of centralising my RSS feeds for quite a while, and have found Thunderbird an excellent reader.

However, I use multiple machines and laptops and Thunderbird provides no method of sync'ing either the list of RSS feeds or which articles I've read between machines. Something like a special folder that can write to a designated IMAP server would do the job excellently, but it appears that Google have beaten the developers to the punch with Google Reader.

Firefox, my web browser of choice supports 'live bookmarks', which keep track of updates to a site, but I've been hearing good things about Google Reader so I thought I'd give it a whirl... I've not regretted it.

By creating a google account, (I phoned a friend of mine who works for Google and he's assured me that they will not at any point be stealing my soul, nor requiring my first-born for any purposes) I can now use Google reader to subscribe to all my RSS feeds. I can access them anywhere provided I have web access, and upon logging in I'm greeted with an up to date list of articles I've not yet read. Even better, I can download the last (up to) 2000 articles using Google Gears and read them even though I'm offline. Connecting to the internet once more and selecting 'online' mode synchronises the list of read/unread articles back to the server. It works perfectly on my eeePC so I'm happy with my new, ultra-mobile, globally accessible, RSS aggregator :-)

On a slightly related note, I use Foxmarks bookmark synchroniser to ensure that I have one, common set of firefox bookmarks on the multiple machines I use.

eeePC with a larger screen

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:41:00 GMT

It looks like the larger screened version of the Asus eeePC is now becoming available. The specifications are online, but I've not seen any information on pricing yet, nor technical information on the expected life (predicted number of write cycles) of the new style SSD drives, which appear to use a combination of built in SSD and flash memory.

This definitely looks like a real option for those of us that want to work in the cramped confines of a train or plane. For their next trick, I hope they add in a 3G / GPRS modem and a GPS. Then I really wouldn't need to bring anything else around with me :)

Making iPod video work on an eeePC

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:23:00 GMT

Since the eeePC has no CD/DVD drive, and I wanted to watch some DVDs I bought here, a friend helpfully encoded them for me on his MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, he chose the h264 video codec since his settings default to encoding for an iPod type device. This works very well on an iPod, but I got audio only output on the eeePC. Fortunately, mplayer has decent debugging (as does smplayer, which provides a menu to view the logs of mplayer) so I had a good idea about what the problem was. Mplayer on the eeePC does not come with the h264 video codec.

Digging about on some forums led me to the suggestion that I would need to pull an alternate version of mplayer to get the codec. Here, in brief, is exactly what I did, which now enables me to watch h264 encoded video without having to install Ubuntu on the eeePC.

Open a terminal, using Ctrl + Alt + [T]
Su to root, using sudo su - and enter your password.
Add, using vim or your chosen editor, the following line to the end of your /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free contrib
Save the sources.list file and in the terminal, run aptitude update
Once the update completes, run aptitude install mplayer=1.0~rc1-12etch2, which should install the Debian version of mplayer, which includes h264 support.
You should now remove, or comment out the deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free contrib line from your sources.list file, to ensure that no other updates are accidentally pulled from the Debian repository. Many may not work on the Xandros distribution on your eeePC, and may cause it to break in unspeakable ways. You have been warned!
h264 should now work for you - though I highly recommend running /usr/share/mplayer/scripts/binary_codecs.sh install which will install another ~10MB of various useful codecs for mplayer.
Exit your root terminal session - root is not a plaything and you should not be using it for your normal day-to-day activities :)

Note: I have tested this on an 8GB eeePC, running the original Xandros distro that it came with, but this information is provided as is and at your own risk. While this works fine on my machine, there is no guarantee that this is or will be the case with any other current or future model of eeePC. You may find it difficult / impossible to get support for your eeePC software if you upgrade in this way, so do so at your own risk - and take a backup of all your important data beforehand.

Irish Rail...

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:30:00 GMT

...have once again screwed up my day. Signalling failure (allegedly) has resulted in the 2033 train leaving Connolly at an untenable 2119. Every Friday evening, Irish Rail habitually and repeatedly screw up the train service. I imagine it's some kind of sadistic game that us passengers are merely pawns in, played ritually by the powers that be in Irish Rail's operations office.

I admire the brass-neckery that allowed the station announcer to announce that the train was running '10 minutes late' when the figure was immediately presented on the board as 22 minutes late - which changed to 'delay' once Irish Rail realised that they couldn't remove their heads far enough from their collective orifices to arrange that a train get from a point A to a point B.

Any suggestions as to why trains in Dublin invariably break every Friday evening? Am I just being paranoid?

Definition of futility

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Thanks to Niall O'Broin for providing me with a laugh. When it was suggested he ask his ISP for a statically assigned IP address, his response was the very telling:

"My ISP is $ISP - I might as well ask my cat. And I don't even have a cat."

Train Cancelled

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:52:00 GMT

Irish Rail have cancelled the train I was hoping to get to Balbriggan this evening. I imagine they will be in contact with me shortly to offer me a reduction in the ticket price, given their repeated reductions in service.