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I find these objectionable though – they appear to be Wordpress and I guess are using a plugin to pull feeds in and publish as articles. They’re not as bad as flat out plagiarism – which I’ve experienced. Mind you even that isn’t the worst, I once wrote a howto which was CC licensed and I realised it had been ripped off when someone posted a comment on it suggesting (quite strongly) that I had taken it from the thief!

So it occurs to me that maybe this is a Wordpress thing. Then again maybe not. Like so many of us I get stuck in my ways and Wordpress is like a pair of comfy shoes. Maybe I should try a new platform, so I wondered what was popular out there in Ubuntu-land.

I’ve tried Drupal (I don’t like it, sorry Emma), Serendipity and Pixie (I quite liked that but baulked at the theming system). Mind you I also have quite a lot of time to myself over the next four months, maybe I should roll my own, I’ve hacked around in PHP but have never developed a large project using it.

So let me know, suggestions on a postcard. Maybe just a comment here will suffice.

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Basically it’s like spot the difference, see how many things you can spot that are wrong with it and post them here.

Here is the post in question and it is a cracker. I can think of several things that are wrong with it but see what you can come up with. Here’s a starting hint – man visudo.

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• Very good battery life
• No solid state disk (SSD) – they’re too small and were a bottleneck on the Aspire One
• Under £300
• Must have a microphone, web-cam and reasonable speakers – Skype is an essential

Restricted to what PC World stocks, it came down to three choices – Acer 531, Samsung NC10 or Toshiba NB200. The NB200 dropped of their stock list sometime between Christmas and New Year and they only had the NC10 in stock when I got to the store so I guess that narrowed it down.

It’s a Windows XP home system although Windows 7 Starter is available if you pay more. With 1 Gb of RAM, Intel Atom processor and 160 Gb hard disk, it has a  1.3 mega pixel web-cam and a comfortable keyboard and touch pad, the latter resplendent with buttons beneath the pad. They quote a nine hour battery life and all for £249.99 (although, with discount this was a ridiculous £212.49).

Battery life is excellent. I couldn’t expect more. There are three modes of operation, cycled through with a Fn+F8 key combination – silent, normal and speed. I’m in normal now and have been since I started typing this post, the fully charged battery is now showing 8:28 remaining. This is fairly stable too, and the system is perfectly responsive for writing, surfing and so on. Without doing tests, this is subjective but I had the system on normal earlier with my Blackberry, MP3 player and and external Western Digital hard disk connected to USB and got four and a half hours from the system. It’s a relief to see that Samsung didn’t opt to use a shiny screen – these drive me crazy, especially when the back-light is low. I’ve a lamp behind me at the moment and there’s no bright reflection.

Generally, I find Windows systems come with so much cruft preinstalled that a clean install is needed. I also tend to lean towards Dell hardware as they provide installation disks rather than restore disks and I’m glad to say I can add Samsung to this list. The restore disk is slip-streamed Windows XP Home SP3, although it’s a shame that there isn’t a utility provided to push this on to a USB disk.

Preinstalled software consists of Samsung’s software and a trial McAfee license. I removed the preinstalled McAfee as I have a licenced copy through my ISP. Samsung software is OK, focusing on improving XP’s failings – such as managing display, audio and WiFi, managing backup and updating drivers.

Anyway, how does it fair with Ubuntu?

I used an Ubuntu 9.10 live USB session to see what was working. I was pleased to discover that it appears to be everything. Wireless, bluetooth, correct resolution, touch pad and keyboard. Battery life is not noticeably different to Windows either. The only minor criticism is that although the screen is rotated, the mouse is not but I’m sure that’s something that can be addressed with some poking around.

It is refreshing to see hardware working out of the box and is becoming common. This might be down to Samsung’s choice of hardware but probably not as their website mentions only Windows 7. Checking the community documentation, it would appear that some configuration was needed with 8.10 but there is nothing entered for 9.10. So I think its not an unrealistic conclusion to say that work done on the kernel in the last year is responsible. The ath5k kernel module has been significantly improved since kernel 2.6.27 – this is the same chip set that the Aspire One A110 had.

I’m relieved to see such improvement in such a relatively short space of time. We can have all the bells and whistles but its the out of box experience that most new users will judge us on, right or wrong. I know it’s unfair that a clean Windows install supports far less hardware but many of our users are unaware that they have a restore CD. With Vista being a farce and Windows 7 starter being an uncertainty, I hope we have a chance to let Ubuntu shine through on these devices.

As an aside I had a curious conversation with someone about Windows. He suggested that Windows 7 was unnecessary on a netbook, as XP was less resource hungry and you only need video playback, VOIP, web browser and word processor. Logical enough I suppose, however I suggested that the same was true of Ubuntu, only to be told that it’s too different and that it doesn’t run games (despite this not being a requirement). Maybe we can’t win but for those who venture in, if everything works then its one less thing for naysayers to argue.

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Recently I met a creationist and very keen to promote his beliefs he was. I could spend many hours on this post but I’m not going to because the first argument he presented is so misinformed.  When your argument is “the bible says so” you need to make sure it actually does.

The statement was that the Earth is 6000 years old. This is based on the James Ussher’s chronology¹ in the 17th century. Considerable  scholarship was required in this endeavour and chronology was considered an important question at the time. Indeed Sir Isaac Newton addresses much the same question in The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms. Ussher proposes a date of 4004 BC. He derived this value by considering three ages – the early times (which the bible gives lineage and ages for each male descendent); the early age of kings (the bible only gives reign of kings); and the late age of kings (which is derived by comparing events in the bible with other culture’s records).

Fifty years later, in annotated versions of the King James bible, Usher’s date began to be added to Genesis as the age of the Earth. It isn’t actually in the book of Genesis.

The early age is based on the Hebrew bible’s description of the lineage of Adam which differs from the Septuagint by 1500 years. That’s a considerable potential margin of error.

Regardless of its accuracy – if the statement is “the bible says so” that cannot extend to annotations.

1. Ussher, J, 1650. Annals of the World: James Ussher’s Classic Survey of World History ISBN 0-89051-360-0 (Modern English republication, ed. Larry and Marion Pierce, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2003)

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As I got into my late teens, I discovered that if a subject interested me I could study it and study it to a greater depth than was required to pass exams. I enjoyed university, working alongside others with similar interests and broadening my knowledge.

Now in my thirties, I have been studying for a degree in a named subject and have lost sight of the pleasure of learning. I’m not interested in every aspect of the current degree I am studying (B49). In particular, I have found a great deal of the Java development a pointless chore. Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against Java. It just seems to have been a lot of learning with no tangible results, I mean I haven’t really developed anything.

I’ve been looking over the Open University’s prospectus for 2010. I think I might want to try something I’m interested in – so am considering a Certificate in Legal Studies or a Certificate in French. Then again, Mandarin Chinese might be interesting.

Is it a good idea to step out of an ascribed program at this stage though? Who knows and who cares. Learning should be fun.

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I don’t advocate copyright infringement but I do fair use.  I am regularly away from home and take a hard drive with me on which I want to have copies of DVD, rather than carry around lots of DVD.  I would have thought that a fairly simple interface was required for this.

Fortunately, Lifehacker pointed the right direction with bitRipper.

bitRipper's main interface

See, there’s nothing too complicated here – pick the track (which granted can be an art form on some DVD), choose output and start ripping.  Of course, the options are there and it uses any available codecs.

Ripping

See now that’s better.  I have used Handbrake but with mixed results and it seems top easy to click the wrong box and after sitting for an hour find that the file is, for example, soundless.  VLC can stream output which does work but tends to lose the first few seconds in a garbled mess.  Both of these have the advantage of being cross platform however.  So if you know of a Linux alternative then feel free to let me know about it.

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This is because of vi compatible mode and is easily redressed by adding “set nocompatible” in “~/.vimrc”.  I understood from this page that this was the default but I might be misreading.  It seems to be a peculiarity of Ubuntu, I didn’t notice this in RHEL, Arch or Fedora (three distributions I use fairly regularly).

Is this an indicator that vim is not perhaps as popular in Ubuntu?  I notice that most times I see a guide online it will suggest using gedit, even if invoked from the terminal.  Perhaps, as I’m not au fait with Debian, our lineage prefers the compatible mode.

I’m sure its not important and we all have our preferences for editors but I do like vim and wish that this behavior was default.  One of the paradoxes with OSS, GNU/Linux in particular, is the freedom afforded allowing us to configure our environments in whatever fashion we prefer creates a diversity that is difficult to train new users, especially between distributions.

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