New Semester; Other Updates

Well, since I last posted my brother got married(!), I moved into my new house for the year, started lectures, built a server, finished up a website for Mum’s school and got my first package approved for Fedora and into F9 updates-testing. Doesn’t sound like that much, but it feels like I  haven’t stopped for the last two weeks.

My Brother’s Wedding

This was a really fantastic day! Matt and Sarah both looked awesome, lots of family and friends made the trip down to sunny (for a change) Cornwall, and my best man’s speech went perfectly. We certainly couldn’t have asked for anything more, and it’s the perfect start to their new life together

Think Mum and Dad are finding it a little strange with Matt married and me at uni, but they’re getting used to it and already reaping the benefits with a holiday to the Lake District in half term!

Moving House

Last year I lived in catered halls, so didn’t have to pay bills or cook; this year, I’m living in a private house with 4 friends, having to arrange and pay for utillities, cook for ourselves, and do all the general things you do to keep a house in order. So far, I love cooking Had a crack at a roast dinner on Sunday, hardly a typical student meal, but it was Fay’s birthday and she loves roast potatoes!

General living is the same as last year, but a little busier during the first week, heading out to see lots of different friends again etc.

Bills are rubbish though, and I think I’m going to need to earn a little bit of cash to help me through the year – any body got any suggestions!?

Started Lectures

Have less lectures time tabled this semester, but I think that’s due to Hebrew being 30 credits but only 3 hours. Means I have a fair amount of work to do outside of class this time, but I’m confident I have plenty of room to step up my efforts compared to last year. Besides Hebrew, I’m doing modern theology and the divine world in the Hebrew Bible this semester – both look like they’re going to be really interesting. Hebrew is definitely going to be even better than last year, as we’re doing actual translations and criticism of translations – will help a lot with my understanding of how theologies develop etc.

Trying out the Cornell note taking method this term, as referenced by Life Hacker. Seems cool so far,  but I’d like to look into reading methods to help me approach that better too.

Built A Server

Partly for fun, partly because I’m paranoid, I’ve built my own server for hosting all my web related activites. Still working on and learning to deploy the software properly, but it’s been cool so far with lots of learning happening!

Mum’s School’s Website

My Mum’s school were in desperate need of a new website, and while I’m no web designer, anything I did would be better than what was already in place! Finally got that online this week, and all seem pleased with the result.

ume-launcher Package

After switching to the Mini Inspiron 9, I decided to try out my packaging skills from FUDCon and package a few of the Ubuntu netbook packages. I think there’s 5 in total, and I just got one of the major components through review and into updates-testing for F9. Found a bug with it not building for rawhide and F8 which I’m working on now, and I’ve also got to deal with the other reviews and fix the problems with those packages. Hopefully we’ll have a full set of netbook packages in Fedora within the next month or so.

All In All

Things are going well for me… Feel tired tonight, but I’m taking the time to recouperate a little bit. My best wishes to everyone who reads this far, you certainly deserve them (even if you didn’t read this far, you probably deserve them anyway!) . For now, I’m off to read a little non-theology, non-geek related stuff: Pilgrim On Tinker Creek – my Dad recommended it and I’m really enjoying it, although taking it slowly.

Second Hand Tranquil T7?

Hi all,

I’m looking for a second hand Tranquil T7, or similar system (linutop would do, so would any low powered, low cost, low energy system). I’ve tried ebay and Amazon but without much luck, so if anyone has something like this that they’d like to get rid of, give me a shout

A touch technology frustrated

Just one of those times when what I really want is for everything to work exactly like I want it to.

My MacBook is a pretty good piece of hardware, and the reasons why I chose this over a Dell (keyboard, position of the headphone jack, power lead) or a Thinkpad (price) still stand, but there are a couple of things I really regret about it too. First, that I have to use ndiswrapper for my wifi. This must be one of the only wifi cards that doesn’t have an open source driver at least underdevelopment now, and although Livna does a pretty good job at keeping up with kernel updates, I was left hanging for a number of days this week (Note, I’m not grumbling at Livna, those guys do a great job, just at the lack of an open source driver for this broadcom card).

Second, I must be doing something wrong with my setup because it just hangs on that grey screen for the better part of a minute before grub starts loading. I don’t have Mac OS anywhere on here, and have grub installed on the MBR, don’t know how else to do this. I know there was some work in the pipe for EFI support in Fedora previously, but I never got it working even with help from the developer. Maybe that bugs been found now and I should try again.

Thirdly, weight. I didn’t realise but this is actually a pretty heavy laptop for its size (found out during my previous week’s visit to London town). It’s lighter and better put together than my old 15 inch Toshiba, but it could still be more portable. This is a pretty important element for me as I travel a reasonable amount and I like to have my computer with me when I do.

Also, I’m wholly unsatisfied by my mobile phone experience. I have a 5MP camera on mine, but it’s such poor quality optics the image is nearly always blurry, and it takes ages for the shutter to react. Wifi would also be nice, a decent keyboard, email client, and web browser too (although the latter too don’t make much difference considering the price of mobile data still).

Ah… this is all pretty irellevant though. Not to get all philosophical, but I can’t seriously complain when I consider that I have all this in the first place.

In other news, I’m home from London and should be more on the ball with Fedora related things again, like websites’ meetings, Fedora TV etc etc. Internship continues, but once again remotely. After spending a week in the ORG offices, I have even more respect for the work they do than I did when I started!

Status Update

Just a quick note to say that I’m not at home at the minute, and haven’t been for the last week. This explains my slowness Re: updating the Fedora TV feed, and also my general quiteness in mailing lists and IRC.

Although I’ve had internet access all through the day time, I’ve been working hard at my internship and haven’t had time to think about Fedora things! It’s all fun and games here though, and I even got to do a little tiny bit of coding this morning putting my two weeks of python knowledge to the test :p With a little help from some friendly people in #fedora-python, I got the job done

There’s loads of other stuff I’d very much like to blog about, but I’m probably not going to get a chance to until next weekend. Until then, my best wishes to everyone who reads this!

Privacy Online

So, as part of my internship I’m putting together a guide on how to maintain your privacy online. I’ve covered basic computer security tips, and I think that section is reasonable. However, I’m struggling to figure out what material to present, and how to present it, for sections on:

• How and when to reveal personal information (e.g. secure connection for banking, signing up for websites, emails from “organisations” requesting details)
• Specific threats, and how to counter them – plan to cover cookies, Tor and encryption (GPG).

Is there anything I’m missing here? Do people have suggested starting points on these topics, or ways to tackle them?

I want to explain the ideas behind them, rather than just saying do this and this, so that users can make informed choices about the level of security, privacy and annonymity that is appropriate for them.

Had fun this morning searching the net for content for Free Me, turns out that Librvox have some freaking awesome audio books that are superbly well read And Open Source Cinema has a super cool rotoscoped video of Girl Talk performing.

Open Rights Group Internship

I started today and so far I’ve quite enjoyed myself. It’s a bit strange because I’m doing the majority of it remotely, but fortunately being part of the Fedora Project has stood me in good stead. We’re mostly using a combination of IRC, Skype and Google Docs (urgh, two proprietary apps are not so good, but it’s what they’re used to – wonder if I can improve this over the next 6 weeks?) and it’s worked really well today.

About 50% of time on the internship is to be spent on my personal project which is to finally finish Free Me and get it distributed and sent out, while the other half is to be spent on general ORG related activities such as drafting content, researching, reviewing etc. Though today was mostly spent on doing the planning for Free Me and I’ve prepared a planning document that we’re going to run past ORG’s chief, Becky Hogge, on Wednesday after spending a little bit more time drafting it. Free Me is really exciting, even if I do say so myself 6 weeks is a tight schedule, but I think we’ll pull it off.

Anyway, here’s to Micheal and ORG – they’ve never done a remote internship before and are taking a chance on me to see how it will work out – thanks for taking a chance!

p.s. If you don’t know who the Open Rights Group are, they’re a campaign group here in the UK who work on all kinds of “digital rights” issues, such as copyright term extension, privacy, electronic voting etc.

Dean’s Commondation

Awesome I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this on my blog already, but my end of year exams went really well! Well enough that I wish they actually counted towards my final grade. Well enough that when I got home yesterday and checked my post I had a letter from the university – it had a letter in it and a certificate from the Dean of Undergraduate studies to say congratulations on just how well I’d done. I’ve no idea what the actual criteria are for getting one of these, but I guess it’s a good thing!

Other good pieces of news include having figured out where I’m going to stay in London, although it’s only for a week now which is sad, and having only one day left of the SAS (student associates scheme) before I a) get paid, and b) don’t have to get up at 7am to go do a job that I really haven’t enjoyed. I’m going to have to find another way to keep making money over the summer, but I know a few people who’d like some simple websites doing (simple being the operative word, I can’t do anything too complex). There’s lots of things I’ve been tempted to spend money on lately, like a new monitor or phone (the Freerunner is tempting, but not really suitable for every day use as far as I can tell, especially without a camera).

Oh and Python learning group is starting to get rolling and is going quite well. I figured out classes the other day which was cool, but I think I need to learn to plan anything I work on. I also think I need to read lots of code (obvious) because there must be a thousand ways to use this stuff that I’ve not thought of yet. Will be easier to do these things when I’m not working in school anymore.

That’s all from my random life, I really just wanted to puff out my chest and shout a little about my dean’s commondation :p

1 Down, 2 To Go

Woah, it’s been another one of those crazy weeks. This was my first full (1 down, 2 to go) week doing a work placement in a local school, and it’s been hard work. I said it already, but teaching is definitely not for me! I tried to stop some children from play fighting the other day but it back fired and they started trying to tie my shoe laces together – I made sure not to let them succeed at doing that but that they even tried says a lot I think :S (Probably one of the funniest things to happen to anyone doing this placement…)

Also this week, I returned to uni for a day to see friends for one last time before the summer, move out of my room and collect results. Seems strange to think that my first year (1 down, 2 to go) has finished already, but it’s been really enjoyable and I did just fine in my results despite worrying about them (highest mark in my year, apparently ). Leaving my own room wasn’t that strange, but saying goodbye to the friends I’ve made and thinking that I won’t be seeing much of them for the next 3 months, and not living with some of them next year, seemed very strange!

Being home is super cool though, I’ve met up with my closest friends from school a couple of times already, though I haven’t been able to spend long with them due to all sorts of others things going on. While I’m at uni I don’t often think how much I enjoy spending time with them, but when I’m home and with them it always hits me how much I like them! Things always seem to click straight back into place whenever we meet, which is pretty incredible after we’ve all been doing a lot more of our own thing for the last three years or so.

Here’s to friends!

Updates

Lots of things I want to comment on, sorry for sticking them all in one post!

Learning To Code (Python)

We’ve now got a group of three together and have decided on Python as our language of choice, with a few more potentially interested in joining us. We’ve also picked up some tips from others about the best way to proceed, so we’ll get off to a good start Still looking for a mentor, and if you’re interested in fulfilling this role and meeting us via IM/IRC/VoiP once every couple of weeks or so then drop me a message – or even if you’re wanting to learning with us send me a message and we’ll get you involved!

In the mean time, I’ve been playing with Python and put together a really simple command line feed reader – was lots of fun to do and I think I might use it as a way to try out new techniques and ideas as I progress.

FUDCon

Wish I was there! Reading all the posts on planet has been great so a huge thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to write up their experiences. I think there’s loads of exciting things happening in Fedora at the moment, particularly interesting to me is all the work on making Fedora the very best place for contributors to be, but also there’s some cool sounding stuff going on with tools like Func.

The best post I’ve seen so far though was Jeremy Katz’s summary of Jim Whitehurst’s talk. Sounds like Jim Whitehurst has his head screwed on tightly and is a great guy to have leading Red Hat. Also interesting was a report I saw on Paul’s state of the union, and the news that we’ve gone from 2000ish Fedora account holders to 7000+ since FAS2. Congratulations to everyone who helped make FAS2, now we all need to make sure that as many of these new account holders as possible get integrated into the project and become great contributors!

Fedora Websites

Looks like we might have our work cut out for us :p Mairin Duffy did a trail usability test at FUDCon and the feedback was mixed but it certainly highlighted a number of areas we really need to improve. The next Websites Team meeting should be interesting as Max will be reporting on the spins hackfest which I hear was over 5 hours long!

Fedora Board Election

Firstly, I wanted to say I was flattered to see both Jeremy Katz and Nigel Jones mention me in their blog posts Re: the election, and I’m extremely flattered by the kind comments they made about me.

There’s not long left to vote, so if you haven’t done so yet, DO IT! And of course, feel free to vote for me

General Life

I’m spending the next three weeks on a work placement in a local secondary school, and I can tell you at this very moment that teaching is not for me! Still, the money will be good, and it’s a new experience which is always worth while.

I went to a shop with my brother and his fiance yesterday to pick out suits for his wedding which is in September. The suits look awesome, and Matt and Sarah both seemed really pleased with them Slightly worrying was having my waist measured, and it turns out I’ve lost quite a bit of weight lately but then a number of my family have been pretty slim in the past so I’m not too worried.

Ah, and I go back to Exeter this week to pick up my exam results and clear out my room properly. Hopefully the exam results won’t be too bad, I think Hebrew went really well but I’m less sure about the others – will wait and see. Foruntately it’s only the first year so it doesn’t count towards my final degree, all I need to do is pass!

Journeys Home (and Pitivi)

I’ve just arrived home from university for a week of rest, relaxation and revision! Exams start for me in three weeks time, and I really need a chance to get my head down and start making some progress ploughing through the massive amounts of material I need to know. I did well in my mid-year exams, but my only problem was ensuring I had the breadth of knowledge needed to do really well – if I get started now that shouldn’t be such a problem.

The trip home itself was awesome too. Firstly, it has to be one of the most beautiful stretches of railway any where in the world, and is the perfect length of time to enjoy the sights and get some jobs done (like minuting the websites team meeting!). Secondly, I travelled first class! It turned out that it was only 80p difference to do so, and it really was cool … the seats were comfortable, the drinks free, and the tables were huge and full of free newspapers to read – even better, it was quiet and spacious

Anyhow, to celebrate the beauty of the journey, I recorded some video (about 20 seconds) on my phone and then used Pitivi to edit the two clips together. For this simple task, Pitivi was excellent. As I’ve seen on Planet Fedora before, it could definitely use some support for fading, but it really couldn’t be any easier to cut clips together and produce a good final product, exported in whatever file format you want. I would post it here for people to see, but I don’t know that WordPress.com supports OGG Theora, even if I buy the $20 space upgrade. Instead, here’s a screenshot from the video:

Here’s to a nice holiday, and I hope everyone else has as nice a week as I’m going to

Oh, and p.s. Has anyone else seen the annoucnement about the new OLPC? I sincerely hope this will be built to run free software … that aside it looks *amazing*