Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Andy, and I work for IT Services at the University of Birmingham in a Service Desk management/development role. In my spare time I listen to and write about music, dabble in free and open source software (mainly Ubuntu), and am sporadically involved in the Isles of Darkness live action roleplay society.

What hardware are you using?

At work everything is largely generic. I have a Dell desktop that is coming to the end of its life, but that is still more than capable of dealing with most of my emailing and calendaring needs. It is plugged into a 17″ Sony monitor that has been with me for about 4 years now, and which I keep holding on to as it is one of the few desktop monitors I’ve used that doesn’t give me a headache after hours of staring at it (yes, I know a new monitor and more breaks might be a more sensible plan).

Most of my actual work is done on an (again) fairly generic Fujitsu Siemens laptop, which I started using a couple of years ago, and which allows me to type for hours without my wrists hurting. I wouldn’t recommend this laptop above any other, but it does the job.

At home I have pretty much left desktop computers behind. My main workstation is a Sony Vaio VGN-NS10l (dual core, 3Gb ram), which I bought a couple of years ago and deals with anything I throw at it. I’ve also got a 10″ Dell Inspiron Mini, which goes everywhere with me, and is increasingly becoming the computer I do most of my web browsing, email and writing on. My backup machines are a G4 iBook and a EeePC 701, and we’ve also got another Mac and a Wii plugged into the TV downstairs. My wife has several other computers which I’ll not mention here except to say that we have more computers than there are rooms in our house (by quite a lot). And that’s not counting the ones that are propping open doors or otherwise not really being used for anything productive any longer.

And what software?

Work is a mix of Windows XP (desktop) and Ubuntu 10.04 (laptop). In Windows I largely use Outlook for email and calendaring, office communicator for collaboration, and very little else. In Linux I use Firefox for browsing (with Chrome and Epiphany for testing), Evolution for email, Empathy and Dropbox for collaboration, OpenOffice.org for creating documents and spreadsheets, and (generally) Bluefish for coding. Recently I’ve been using GIMP a lot too, and have also been dabbling with a few command-line image conversion tools. I also maintain several instances of Mediawiki, as well as a full LAMP environment for development, and use google calendar to plan and maintain my work-life balance.

At home both of my laptops are running the latest version of Ubuntu, which I’ve used as my primary OS since 2005. I use largely the same software as I use at work, although I’ve recently reverted to using gedit for writing blog posts and other bits of text, and only venturing into OpenOffice when I want to make something available to other people. Home is also where I spend a lot of time playing with WordPress and Virtualbox, and where I use Rhythmbox to listen to music (and Last.fm to catalogue what I’m listening to). I’ve also recently started using Google Reader, and I now don’t know how I coped without it.

My Macs run a very stripped down version of Leopard, and really only get used for iTunes and other media related things now (although I’d still use my iBook as my main portable computer if it weighed a little less). They also run Dropbox (as does every computer I own), and I’ve been syncing all my important files between all my machines for a couple of years now. I still can’t understand why more people don’t do this, and I’ve lost count of the number of times this one piece of software has got me out of a hole.

What would be your dream setup?

I change my mind about my ideal working environment a lot, but what I basically want is a laptop that is thin, light and stylish, and that can perform at the level where I could use it as my only computer (including storing 100gb of music). The nearest thing I’ve come across is the 13″ Macbook Pro, although I’d be happier with something the size and weight of my 10″ Dell Mini with all the power and stylishness of the Macbook Pro. Being able to run OS X and Ubuntu at the same time would also be great.

Of course, having used an iPad for the first time recently, I’d probably have to add that to my wish list, just because it’s a really stylish and functional piece of kit.

I also wonder if having a desktop computer with two large monitors would make me more productive. I have a feeling that most of what I do can be achieved on a single small screen, but it would be nice to have the opportunity to experiment with these things.

Question format borrowed from The Setup under the Attribution-Share Alike license.

It’s fairly basic at the moment, but I think with a bit of development it could be a powerful tool. I particularly like the ability to add and remove calendar entries from the command line, the ability to query different calendars, and the fact that I could (should I wish) delete every entry on my calendar containing a specific keyword with one command.

For example, google calendar list today title gives me a list of everything I have to do today (times would be great, but I can’t seem to get that to work as yet), and google calendar add "Dinner with Steph tonight at 8pm for 2 hours" will add a two hour appointment to my default calendar. If I had a calendar specifically for dinner appointments (called Food for the sake of this example), I could add the previous command to it by typing google calendar add --cal Food "Dinner with Steph tonight at 8pm for 2 hours" instead.

I think I need to experiment further with this, because it has great potential.

Yesterday, I tried to do everything in Mac OS X (Leopard), and also tested out Thunderbird 3. I reckon I could live with a Mac as my only computer, and the only thing that bugged me was the speed (my Mac is somewhat ancient now). I especially liked iCal, and how it integrates perfectly with the Google calendars that map out my whole life, and I love the way OS X renders fonts and colours. Thunderbird 3 was a nice surprise, and I love the way it integrates with Gmail. Maybe I’ll consider switching back to Thunderbird the next time Evolution does something to annoy me.

Today I’ve been using the daily build of Chromium on my netbook. It’s seriously faster than Firefox, and I’m finding that I can do pretty much everything I need to do without a plethora of extensions. This might be one to keep I think.

I’m also having monitor envy. Or possibly screen resolution envy. I think I may be nearly ready to consider spending my day looking at something larger than a laptop screen.

Fast forward a few years, and I realise that over 95% of what I get through LJ comprises of feeds from other websites. So this weekend I’ve been setting up my Google Reader account to pull in every single unauthenticated feed I currently view through LJ, as well as feeds of every website I visit at least once a day (including a few from Facebook which deserve a post of their own at some point due to the pain of getting them working). The theory is that I will be able to access most of what I want to read in one place, and that when I’m doing my daily trawl of interesting things I won’t get distracted by memes, games and other less educational content.

Of course, I have no intention of leaving LJ and Facebook behind (just yet). I’ll just be using them for their intended purpose rather than trying to shoehorn them into directions they were not meant to go.

I should also mention Firefox 3.6, which actually does seem faster than 3.5, and which I’ve been using for a few days now without noticing anything different other than the speed (I like new things, but I also dislike unnecessary interface changes because they cause my brain to have to think for an extra second or two).

Ubuntu users wanting to get hold of the latest releases of Mozilla software might want to try the ubuntuzilla repository which seems to work a treat.

What else?

Well, I’ve not really stumbled upon any other new and interesting technology this week, largely because I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work and have had very little recreational internet time. I have however noticed that Facebook seems to be prompting me to “reconnect” with people I see every day (it’s not suggested Steph yet, but it’s only a matter of time), which makes me wish there was a setting to define people with whom I largely interact with offline. That way Facebook might actually prompt me to talk to people I really do actually need to reconnect with.

Start off by creating a new VM. I went with a totally stripped down installation of Ubuntu (from the alternative CD), adding just openssh-server and apache2 to the default install. I called it Ubuntu Minimal (the name will become important later).

Boot up the new VM, and then on the host machine enter the following commands (replacing the name of the VM with what you decided to call yours):

VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" 2222
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" 22
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" TCP
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/HostPort" 8008
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/GuestPort" 80
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu Minimal" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/Protocol" TCP

Power down the VM, start it up again, and then you should be able to ssh into it on port 2222 and pull up apache’s “it works!” page by browsing to http://localhost:8008. At that point you can install web apps and do whatever else you want with the server.

It doesn’t take up a great deal of memory, so you could probably have a couple of these running on most computers without any obvious performance degradation.

So yes, all change here, but hopefully a change for the better.

Hopefully the first link will give people more of an idea what it is all about, and the second link will give some idea of the scope of what it is capable of doing with a bit of tweaking.

• Listening to the new albums by The Flaming Lips, Atlas Sound, Charlotte Hatherley and Broadcast (all of which I’m really enjoying)
• Updating my main workstation to Ubuntu 9.10
• Learning about Google Wave
• Trying to juggle various work tasks (and not dropping anything hopefully).

Oh, and I still hate this time of year. Even though we had no annoying begging children this year, there is still the firework-hating dog to deal with.

I may have to try a couple of their other offerings, although I’m not exactly sure what all of them are meant to do.

So yes, if you’re still using yahoo groups for your project, or you still rely on a word document emailed around with “tracked changes”, then there is a viable (and easier) alternative.

Ubuntu Customisation Kit does everything on the host machine, and only uses the Internet to pull new/updated packages in. This is light on bandwidth for tweaks, but heavier if you’re making major changes. Suse Studio does things the opposite way round, in that all the building and updating is done on the web, and you then download the finished .iso image. It’s slightly heavier on bandwidth overall, but did allow me to do a lot of the build work from my netbook in the foyer of a hotel in London, as all you need is a web browser and a net connection.

I ended up building three different versions of openSUSE, to suit three specific needs I occasionally have:

1. Gnome, with a web browser (firefox), a terminal (gnome-terminal), dropbox preinstalled, and a couple of work-specific scripts for mounting drives and backing up data. This is a configuration we use at work for data recovery (currently based on Ubuntu 8.04). This was painless to set up, came in at 348Mb, and worked well.
2. A showcase for KDE4. I’m not a big fan of KDE, but it’s always useful to have a VM kicking around to show people what it is like. This was on the same level of detail as the Gnome one, and came in at 350mb. I think I might actually be able to use this to get things done, as it takes away a lot of the un-instinctive KDE apps whilst leaving the very pretty and functional base.
3. An image containing the applications I use every day, which would act as a basis for reinstalling my home or work laptop (both currently running Ubuntu 9.04). This contains Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Empathy, Rhythmbox, Gedit and gnome-terminal, and was still only 484mb (300Mb less than the version of Ubuntu I install from usually).

So yes, all three experiments worked, and while I’ve not tried to use them to get things done yet, I have successfully installed all three as virtual machines and they seem to work as expected.

I think most people could use Suse Studio, and it acts as a good way to learn the basics of how a distribution is put together. I very much expect to see the code base from this project move in interesting directions in the next few months, and I’d be surprised if we don’t see similar projects getting off the ground soon.

More an amusement than anything useful, but it killed 5 minutes of my lunchtime.

(I wrote more about twidge here)

The syntax to make a post is as follows:

twidge update "whatever you want to post goes here"

And before you do your first update, just type twidge setup, which will then ask for your usename and password.

If you want to update identi.ca rather than twitter, then add the following line at the end of .twidgerc:

urlbase: http://identi.ca/api

And that’s all there is to it.

Something else I’ve stumbled upon today is an extension that allows me to post straight to my blog from OpenOffice.org. This post is largely an attempt to get it to work, so I’ll not say anything more than that for now.

I post anything under 140 characters to identi.ca using the Ubiquity extension for Firefox. This then posts them to Twitter and Facebook, and adds them to the right hand menu of this blog using the Twitter Tools plugin. Then, once a day, they all get spliced together by Loudtwitter and posted to my Live Journal.

I also add posts to my LJ using the Deepest Sender plugin for Firefox. I only post there if I need to lock things down to custom groups of people (or if what I write cannot be in the public domain for whatever reason).

Everything else gets posted here. Also via Deepest Sender.

Additionally, everything I listen to all all my computers and my iPod is sent to Last.fm, which then adds the last 10 songs to the right hand menu of this blog.

I think that is pretty much everything.

• mIRC – the first thing I ever used, and what I know a lot of people still use. It’s user friendly, but quite fast and light. Windows only.
• Trillian – an IM client that also does IRC. I’ve not used this for many years though. Windows only.
• Quassel – developed for Linux (KDE4 in particular), but now available for Windows, Mac OS X and several flavours of Linux. I alpha-tested this last year and it’s actually really good for monitoring several channels (on different servers if required) at once.
• Colloquy – Mac OS X only client that looks pretty, but that didn’t seem that instinctive for my needs.
• Empathy – Linux only chat client that also does IRC. It’s what I use most of the time, and it seems quite fast without getting in my way.
• Pidgin – does pretty much what Empathy does, but is also available for Windows and Mac OS X. It’s all a matter of choice really.
• irssi – text based Linux/Windows client that is lightning fast and great on old computers. It also forces you to learn all the commands. It’s what I use when I’m not using Empathy.
• Xchat – Another Linux client that has been around ages and that works exactly like mIRC so is great for switchers. I believe it is now available for Windows although I’ve not tried it.
• Konversation – KDE3 (and now 4 it seems) client for Linux. I used it once around 5 years ago so I’ll say no more than that.
• Chatzilla – Firefox/Sea Monkey extension. It’s basic, but useable.

There are lots more, but the above list is all the ones I’ve actually used.

That’s why I like WordPress a lot, and why I use it for my website. I’m now at a stage where all my online identities feed into WordPress and present a fairly unified view of what I’ve been doing, what I’m thinking and what I’m listening to. And most of it happens without me having to do a lot.

Yes, this took a while to set up, but most of that was experimentation. I could rebuild everything in about an hour now, and all it would take to make the site look current is the occasional bit of text typed in to one of the two firefox extensions I use for updating everything (ubiquity and deepest sender). I can update things on the fly, publish within seconds, and can also solicit responses from other people. All these make the site look like someone gives a damn, which is half the battle sometimes.

So yes, for all those people who maintain websites that were last updated years ago, it might be time to consider something more dynamic or even removing the site altogether. Especially if you want to attract new people to your project.