Laney's blog

photo credit: James Nash (aka Cirrus)

I got a new N96 a couple of weeks ago, as my old Nokia was barely functional any more. No backlight and ~8 hours battery life is not good, I tell you now.

The good:

• Build quality is nice. Some people might say it's a bit big, but I like it. Despite its size, it's still quite light – I weighed it against an iPhone and it came out lighter.
• Huge, excellent quailty screen.
• 16GB of storage, for plenty of music. Goodbye iPod.
• FM Radio(!)
• Uploading geotagged pictures to Flickr works a treat. You do have to remember to have Location Tagger running though.
• BBC iPlayer, not that I've used this much yet (see below).
• Tonnes of apps thanks to Symbian. Decent ones include:
  • PuTTY for Symbian OS
  • Opera Mini
  • Google Maps for your phone
  • ??? (I'm sure there are more good ones that I don't know of yet, please let me know)

The bad:

• The firmware that it came with is, quite frankly, shocking. Crashes and bugs galore. The worst part of it seems to be the accelerometer – the screen redrawing when it detects a rotation is awful. Seeing half drawn applications in each orientation is not what you want to see on your expensive new phone. There's also some general slowness with apps taking a while to initialise, but I suspect this is inherent.
• The camera, despite being touted as excellent, seems to produce pretty grainy pictures to me. I hope it's just the way I'm using it, because I'm getting the feeling that "Carl Zeiss optics" aren't as good as Nokia try and make you think they are.
• iPlayer works great on wifi, but the videos never start over 3G.
• If you actually do stuff with it, the battery life can be quite terrible – just doing a bit of 3G internet use (SSH or WWW) is enough to drain the battery to nothing in a few hours.
• Closing applications on a phone is odd, and I keep forgetting to do it. Some applications close when you hit the red button, and some don't. I need to get used to this. Annoying the "Log" application doesn't close after you use it to make a call.
• Shutting the slider while on a call doesn't end it.
• I've had it freeze up while a call is coming in and refuse to answer it, causing me to miss the call. It was from a withheld number too, so I couldn't call back (not that I should have to).

There was a letter in the box apologising for the quality of the intial firmware so I'm quite hopeful that a lot of these issues will be fixed when an update is release. I don't know how good Nokia's track record is on this, but we'll see. All in all, I'm fairly happy with it, and when the bugs get ironed out it'll be awesome.

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Well, hello Planet! Since I've been approved as an Ubuntu member, I figured this is as good a time as any to post some drivel. I'm Laney, and I am very pleased to have your attention. I am 22 years young and in a small number of weeks will be a PhD student at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham.

I might as well use this platform to ask for your help. No, not for myself, for the Intrepid Ibex. Look at the picture up there, he needs you to help him. You couldn't say no to that, could you?

James Westby has made a much more comprehensive post on this, but I'd just like to retierate the testing part. If you feel you're able to recover from any problems that might occur (should not be too severe now we're in feature freeze) and your system is not mission critical then please do consider helping out. It was with some hesitation that I made the switch a week or so ago, and I've certainly found my fair share of bugs and have to live with a slightly more unstable system (particularly audio-wise), but it'll be worth it in the end when we ship an excellent Ubuntu 8.10. If you do test, I urge you to get involved in bug reporting, otherwise you're just putting yourself through pain for no gain. When you come across a problem, search Launchpad and the affected program's upstream bug tracker for the issue and see if you can add any more information. If there is no bug, or if you just don't have the time to be searching bug trackers then please do still file the bug on Launchpad and a triager will deal with it for you (maybe asking you for more information). As the ever wise Tesco say, "Every little helps". I've definitely come across a few bugs (probably some I've forgotten here):

• Banshee crashes on Last.FM login
• terminator crashed with AttributeError in get_first_notebook_page()
• seahorse crashed with SIGSEGV in IA__g_object_set_valist()
• file-roller crashed with SIGSEGV in find_image_offset()
• tracker-applet crashed with SIGSEGV in signal_emit_unlocked_R()
• Can no longer configure keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs

A lot of the bugs have a similar format: "x crashed with y in z". This is apport at work, an excellent tool which takes a lot of the work out of reporting crash bugs. Even just reporting these bugs helps to stabilise the system.

So, I urge you, please do run update-manager -d (Ubuntu users) or adept_manager --version-upgrade (Kubuntu), and get involved!

Ever since I switched to Banshee I've been a bit annoyed that I didn't know how to annoy others by advertising my currently playing song. I always knew the trick for Amarok which Theory posted a long while ago, but had no idea how to adapt this for dbus which Banshee uses. Now, thanks to kees, this has all changed.

In order to get at your currently playing song on Banshee from a SSH connection into your box, just run the following script:

#!/bin/bash

PID=$(pidof mono /usr/lib/banshee-1/Banshee.exe)

if [ -z $PID ]; then
    echo "Banshee doesn't appear to be running"
else
    export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=\\
        \$(cat /proc/\$PID/environ | xargs -0 -n1 \\
            | grep ^DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS= | cut -d= -f2-)
    banshee-1 --query-artist --query-title | cut -d ' ' -f 1 --complement | \\
        sed -n '1h;2,$H;${g;s/\n/ - /g;p}'
fi

It will produce output like so:

laney@chicken:~$ banshee-np.sh
Rancid – Corazon de Oro

Now to get it working remotely, just follow Theory's instructions, replacing

command="dcop --user `whoami` amarok player nowPlaying"

with

command="/path/to/banshee-np.sh"

and you should be good to go!

This post brought to you by my burnt hand, which I have to return to the ice pack every 20 seconds or so. Ouch.

You can now call me Iain Lane BSc (Hons), oh yeah. I graduated on Friday, and managed to not fall over or anything. Man is that walking business difficult.

Roll on September, when I get to learn about the real stuff that they don't teach you.

If you haven't heard, today at 1700 UTC, Firefox 3 will be released. The Mozilla foundation are celebrating this with a cute marketing campaign, to try and break the Guinness world record for the most downloads of a piece of software in 24 hours. If they've got the bandwidth to burn, and it helps get some coverage of FOSS, why not? I'll certainly be getting it.

I got my degree result yesterday… drumroll…

Yay!

I'm going to start a series of posts where I walk through various things that I do as part of my Ubuntu development work with the MOTU team. I'm currently trying to get myself up to a level where I can apply to the Ubuntu Universe Contributors team, and then at some point in the future for MOTUship.

This article describes the process for merging a package from Debian to the development version of Ubuntu, currently the Intrepid Ibex. If you want to see how I generally go about doing this, follow the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

I've had a lot on recently. Mainly a never-ending stream of coursework followed by the inevitable dissertation panic. This is all over now, however: all that remains to be done are 3 exams starting in 8 days (better get revising!). The last lecture of my degree has been and gone in the biggest anticlimax ever. Talk about going out with a whimper instead of a bang! I don't know how I feel about finishing my course. To some extent it's not so bad as I'm staying on to do a PhD here (that was another thing which occupied my time and I neglected to post about) starting in October, but this will still be a very different experience. The last three years seem to have flown by, but then when I think back to the sheer amount of things I've done, and the stuff I've learned then perhaps it wasn't so quick after all.

I managed to sort myself out a job for the Summer which will allow me to stay in Nottingham, which I really want to do. It's weird how for half of my University life I considered home to be back in Alconbury, but then something changed and now I feel more at home here than back there. Perhaps it's because most of my friends have moved on, or maybe I've simply become more used to life here. I'm definitely not going to complain. Notts may have its problems, but it feels like it's on the up to me, and is definitely somewhere I'm happy to stay. That's not to say that the choice between York and Nottingham for my PhD wasn't one of the hardest I've had to make. It really tore me up for a number of weeks, but for a few reasons which I won't go into here I plumped for Nottingham in the end. I'll probably keep wondering how different it would have been had I chosen York though.

Anyway, enough about life. What about nerdy stuff?

The Hardy Heron was released not long ago, and I'm very proud to be able to say that I played a tiny role in its development. My goal is to up my participation levels for the Intrepid Ibex. After my exams are over in a few weeks, I'll find myself with a lot more free time which I'll be able to spend working on the distro. My beady eye is already on a few merges to get the ball rolling, and then who knows? I'd say my goal for this cycle is to get to "Contributing Developer" status, once I've learned enough.

Overall Hardy seems like an incremental improvement over Gutsy. I upgraded (using update-manger) to the beta during development, so the major changes aren't that visible to me sadly. Perhaps a fresh install is in order to see the major changes stand out. It's good to have newer versions of most software too, even if there are some regressions that I've found thus far. Such is life. My linux-fu has definitely increased since I started using it 100% of the time. Prior to using Ubuntu, I'd been using Linux on-and-off every few months but always returning to Windows after some annoying problem forced me to give up. Not so this time; my new PC was (almost) fully compatible from the get-go, and I'd decided to have the resolve to see any problems through. It's been a blast so far.

I'm coming out of hibernation to celebrate this announcement. Finally I will be able to watch TV in my room again; there's no aerial signal up here.

An early version of the service is available from 9 April.

Woohoo! I'll be trying this. The only downside is that it's apparently only available in the internet channel. It would be much cooler to have an iPlayer icon on the Wii's dashboard. Can't have everything I guess.

I can only laugh at how the ISPs will moan about the increased bandwidth from this. Seriously, it seems that they're only going after the BBC on this one because they have an identifiable target; with filesharing there's no one individual to go after. Shut up and start improving your networks, please. There are only going to be more and more bandwidth-intensive applications like this coming out and ISPs are not going to stop this. They need to roll with it.

I'm sure that most everyone has heard about the Phorm + BT/Virgin Media/TalkTalk debacle by now, but If not here are some useful links. The point of this post is to encourage you to sign this petition over on the PM's website. You'll at least get a response when the petition closes, if nothing else (which seems to be stupidly long for some reason, but hey…)