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.

Large Hadron Collider (+ Politics)

This is probably the coolest experiment to happen in my life time, and seeing all the news reports about it has gone some way to rekindling the excitement I used to feel about science, and in particular physics, when I was younger. Tempered by my interests of the day, however, I can’t help but reflect on this, making comparisons between international projects like the LHC, like the International Space Station, like free software, and the world of politics. The contrast is marked, too.

In the former of these two spheres, we see people from all around the world working together for the love of what they do. The LHC involved over 111 nations in the design and construction of this project, and the research that they’re going to produce will be available to anyone who is interested. The ISS is the work of 7 seperate space agencies, drawing on many more countries through their involvement with each of the agencies. And then there is free software, the work of contributors from almost every country on the planet, working together to “get stuff done”.

In the latter, we see a very different picture. In the ten years that I’ve had enough awareness to think about events revolving around politics, and particularly international relations, I can’t help but think it doesn’t have to be this way. In the recent events involving Russia, it seems the EU and the US decided that the best way to resolve the issue was by threatening Russia with exclusion, rather than offerring to sit down and work with them and Georgia to find a solution to their problem. The same with Iran, where rather than sitting down and taking part in honest negotiations, we place conditions on Iran that they have to meet before we’ll meet with them. This isn’t an approach that gets stuff done; this is an approach that causes animosity and division, that benefits a few people and causes stress, fear and loathing in the majority of people.

It’s a depressing picture, but out of projects like the LHC, like the ISS and like free software, I take some hope that the world isn’t completely crazy and believe that there’s another way forward, just waiting to be discovered. The question is, who is going to step up and answer this challenge?

Airport

Half an hour until my flight home now, and I’m just sitting at the gate watching the queue build even before the gate has opened! I figure I’ll keep surfing the internet for a while until most other people are through, and then I’ll be able to pick up my stuff and walk straight through

Having free wifi access at an airport is pretty cool. Stansted only had paid for options, and they were pretty expensive too, at around £6 per hour. The only downside I can find to this is that I’m now mindlessly browsing the net, wondering about swapping my computer for an even more portable system, rather than reading my book.

Once again, FUDCon was great fun, and thanks to everyone else for making it so…

Goodbye Brno!

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

Fedora Usability SIG

/me thinks outloud

What’s its status? I think it’s pretty flat right now, and perhaps it’s time we kickstart it.

I’m going to be at FUDCon, hopefully doing some usability testing for our websites, but maybe this is the opportunity we need to get this going properly again.

Also, completely unrelated, but is there anybody reading this who has some time to answer a few questions Re: FAS? I realise most of our infrastructure people are busy right now – keep it up, and you’ll have us back in shape in no time. Here’s another line from If … by Kipling to help inspire you

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

…

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

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!

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!

I demand a re-count :p

Although I’m sorry to not have gotten a place on the Fedora Board, my sincerest congratulations to those who have been elected. You all do excellent work for the project currently, and I have complete faith that you will continue to now that you’re elected (maybe even working harder!). Congratulations, Seth, Jesse, Tom and Jef

Even though I didn’t get elected, I feel just running has been well worth my time: some people have taken this opportunity to say such kind things to me and about me that I’m extremely flattered and proud. To all those who have said such things to me, thanks! I may well run again in the future, but perhaps not until I finish my degree …

In the mean time, I plan to start making to-do lists and start crossing off a number of Fedora items that have been swimming around in my head for too long now.