22 Balmoral Road

Well, my laptop is playing up and getting a bit old so I'm in the market for a new one. I only want to buy one with Linux pre-installed, not for any anti-Microsoft reasons as such but just so that it can be noted that there is a market out there for Linux computers. My current laptop was bought from Dell with Ubuntu installed on it, which has done me well for the last few years, so I decided to give them my repeat business. Checking their Linux website shows no current devices available, so I decided to try and contact them to see if there were any future plans.

First off, when trying to contact Dell for any reason, they don't supply an email address! I find this most bizarre as I don't necessarily want to phone, snail mail, or chat online with a sales person. I bit the bullet and went to the online chat to ask the question and here is the conversation:

I got a new laptop about a year ago directly from Dell. I did this for two reasons, they had a good deal, and I wanted to support a company that supported Linux! So far I've been very impressed, it worked right out of the box and about the only thing that I did to it in the first few months was upgrade the OS to 7.10 (Gutsy).

Of course, that didn't last long. I soon started messing around with beta versions of Ubuntu, doing some messy upgrades and installing patches in a fairly piecemeal fashion. After about 9 months of this and breaking various things, 8.10 (Intrepid) came out and I decided a fresh install was called for.

Just watched a fantastic documentary last night called "Metal, A Headbanger's Journey". It is a walk through metal history, talking about the roots of the music, the culture and the stereotypes. Produced and staring a long term metal fan, who also happens to be qualified anthropologist. Lots of interviews with the original rock/metal icons such as Lemmy, Alice Cooper and Bruce Dickinson, along with some of the more recent bands such as Slipknot and Lamb of God. Well worth a watch, or even better, to buy!

Guess what, I've got another gadget! I decided to take the splash and get one of the new Sony ebook readers, the PRS-505. I'd heard a lot about the e-ink displays, but never seen one in real life.

Well, so far I'm impressed. The resolution is fantastic, very readable in just about any light, infact it is pretty much just like reading a real book. Even better, it plays very well with Linux due to the fact that the reader itself, along with any memory cards inserted, act as a simple usb mass storage device. Plugging the reader into my laptop simply opens up the drives in seperate windows meaning I can just drag and drop any supported document. Of course, some formats work better than others. TXT and RTF files are the simplest format and work well, tho there are no chapters or any other fancy information. PDFs are more or less usable, tho they usually need to be zoomed in which ruins the layout. The best format that I've found so far is LRF which is Sony's binary format for the PRS-500 and PRS-505.

I've just finished moving my blog from running on Serendipity to a Drupal installation. Drupal seems a lot more stable and more customisable. Serendipity was only really a blog, but Drupal is a full content management system so I thought it might be a better idea to learn how it works!

Something I've been meaning to get round to for quite a while is setting up an openID server. I've finally done it! Even better, this server is linked into my ldap server which allows for consistent passwords for everything. Getting it working took quite a while. The openid-ldap software was fairly tricky to configure and the apache configuration was a nightmare for me of regular expressions, something that in all my geek years I've managed to stay away from in any depth. (I've learnt a fair bit through osmosis, but never sat down and looked at some regexp documentation). Read on for my instructions on setting this up.

Had a trip down to see Martyn and Em the other week and ended up having a day trip out to Bletchley Park, home of the code breakers during World War II. This is the place where the Enigma code was decoded, and the worlds first programmable computer was produced, Colossus, which has been lovingly rebuilt from eight war time photos and some illegally kept partial circuit diagrams.

Recently I've been playing a game that Lionel put me on to called Tribal Wars which is very good fun. Basically its a web based strategy game where you build up your village, recruit some thugs, and plunder other villages around you, eventually taking over other villages and growing your empire. To help all this you can also if you wish join a guild and enlist the help/protection of hundreds of other players. The best part of all is the fact that it is set up to play over a very long time.