A Quickie Before Bed

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 31st August, 2005 @ 01:16

It's certainly been an interesting few days. Have spent most of the long weekend with Aaron. It's been nice getting to know him, and great fun having a little cultural exchange. It's amazing seeing all the things I take for granted for the first time through his eyes, and discovering a nice little walk around Bedford.

Had another lovely meal in the Black Horse in Woburn (my third in August, eep). Can thoroughly recommend it, food is excellent, the place itself is very pleasant and the staff are incredibly friendly. And it's very reasonably priced. Best of all, instead of mints with the bill you get a little bowl of Smarties, yay! I'm thinking of moving to Woburn so that it'd be my local.

Sorry, this is about to get rather tedious... I love Green & Blacks chocolate. And to my frustrations I can only seem to buy it in Sainsbury's, which is on the wrong side of town to me (though it does mean I get to see the lovely James), but thanks to Aaron dragging me through every isle of Tesco, I've discovered they keep it with the cooking chocolate instead of the normal chocolate and sweets isle. Why?!

Hmm, thinking about chocolate, maybe I'll have to have a quick nibble on one of my Canadian treats before I head off to sleep. But which one? I'll report back soon as to what happened :)

Thanks again to Ally for the balloon ride last weekend, and thanks for emailing me the new pics, I'm loving this one...

I can't remember exactly what was happening here, but I guess it must have been during the take off while the basket was being pulled around by the balloon. That goes in my collection of ridiculous facial expressions I've pulled.

Freakymoosemats - Live from the Apple Store

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 25th August, 2005 @ 18:46

Greetings from the Apple Store on Regent Street, London. I'm currently sitting in the little theatre and a nice, and rather attractive young man is doing the Switch at Six demo. It's just soooo cool that I can get online and it's free and such a relaxed and groovy place to do it.

Currently I'm trying to resist purchasing a Mac Mini, and I'm trying less hard to resist purchasing a Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse for my living room G5. I'd swear my Mac works faster in the store, and I don't mean the Internet connection, I think it just feels like it's home :)

I must go and frown at users with PC laptops. Unless of course they walk out the door with a Mac.

Also today, I've been to work, where I found my boss Richard was sneakily watching what was going on outside.

When he spotted me, he quickly ran inside and pretended to be working hard on his laptop. It wasn't very convincing though, because the only thing on his screen was his website with his latest blog entry in progress.

Last night, I finally met Aaron who'd not long arrived from Canada. Had a really fun night and he'd very nicely brought me a lovely present of a bag full of Canadian goodies, including a little moose who now lives in the back of my car and I've decided to name Maxwell Moose. Big Brother reference is completely coincidental.

And then there was video

Posted by stephen on Monday, 22nd August, 2005 @ 00:11

So I've created a videos section now, currently all you'll find there is a short from my little trip in a hot air balloon. Enjoy.

On a side note, this evening I have been mostly trying to install a SunFire V100 and it's unnecessarily complicated!

It's now been FreeBSD'd up (was going to be Linux, but 5 CDRs later and I still wasn't there) and I'm quickly learning how to use it, and it's proving quite nice. Just need to work out the firewall and packet shaper parts of it now.

More Ballooning Images

Posted by stephen on Saturday, 20th August, 2005 @ 18:18

You can find lots more pictures of this morning's ballooning adventure over here.

It was certainly a unique experience, and a most serene one, floating above the beautiful English countryside. The landing wasn't quite so peaceful, but great fun none the less. Being dragged on our backs 50 feet along a stubble field! Anyway, thanks to Ally for the invitation. Next up, I think I'm going to have to try a parachute jump!

On another note, here's some cool kit, and a cat...

Exciting Morning

Posted by stephen on Saturday, 20th August, 2005 @ 10:26

Well, it's 10.20am, and it's my bed time. Was out till about 3am, then up again at 4.45am. Before I go to sleep though, here's a quick preview of what I spent my morning doing...

See the little dots in the distance? I was in a little dot too!

I'll post loads more pictures and maybe talk about it too later.

That's not me either

Posted by stephen on Friday, 19th August, 2005 @ 16:40

Following on from my last post about searching for my name on Google and having my site relegated to third place, slipping behind someone talking about me and Australian Reverend Me, I've had a look and found the situation is even more dire if you search for the alternative version of my name, Steve Newey. When I last looked, the first real me is this site, and it's at the bottom of the first page of results!

This situation obviously needs addressing, and maybe, just maybe, mentioning myself, Steve Newey a couple of times here will be enough to fix it. If not, then I appeal to you, link to me as Steve Newey too! I'll link back to you and mention every version of your name I can.

Allow me to demonstrate. My good friend Dick Overton has a website. Some people know him as Richard Overton. Yet others know him as Rich Overton.

See, I could do that for you too! You can also link to me as Ste Newey if you like, though I'm currently second in that results page, so I'm not overly concerned. The real effort must be put into making me Google's number one Steve Newey!

And on a side note, talking of Google searches, I'm currently the second site listed if you look for Star Wrek Pirkinning, after the official website! The film is actually called Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning. It becomes available for legal download upon it's release tomorrow. I'll talk about it more when I've seen it so that my second Google place is actually deserved.

It's Not Me

Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 16th August, 2005 @ 01:21

For a while now searching for me, "Stephen Newey", on Google resulted mostly links to me, and they appeared before links to the other few Stephen Newey's on the Internet. Those being a Scandinavian pro-golfer and a Reverend from New Zealand. Along with another in the UK who likes to comment on the BBC News site. These people are not me! But I took solace in coming in as the first few results.

But something bad has happened...

Whilst I do rather like Cal's Noted software and have pointed out a couple of things about it, and I run a website called Freakymousemats.com, I have absolutely no interest with sharing the good news about Jesus Christ.

It's been more than 2000 years now, so I don't really count it as news anymore. I've just checked on News 24 and they're not mentioning it.

So anyway, that Stephen Newey isn't me. Maybe if I mention my name enough my site will move above that one. And you can help too! Link to my site and mention my full name when you do it. Go on, I'd do it for you too.

The Rearrangement of Things

Posted by stephen on Monday, 15th August, 2005 @ 23:36

Well, I decided to be all domestic this past Sunday and do something about a little corner of my house. So I've rearranged my main bedroom, shoved the bed over to the wall, assembled a computer desk I've had for months that was intended for bedroom two, installed it in bedroom one, along with one of my many PCs, my previously underused hi-fi, the Airport Express from downstairs to extend the network upstairs without wires and finally my laser printer is actually hooked up for use, through the Airport's USB port.

Through this process the room now looks a lot tidier and the carpet is considerably less weighty. Allow me to demonstrate. Here are some pictures. The vacuum was empty when I started.

From via to

Not only does the main bedroom have more space now, but so does the second bedroom and the living room, and I've thrown nothing away. Somehow the assembly of things reduces the overall volume consumed.

Oh, and yes, that is a PC I have setup. It has an aerial pointing to the mighty Sandy Heath transmitter so I get Freeview, along with streamed TiVo content and DVDs in the bedroom now. I'm sure I had loftier goals for that a few blog entries back, but it'll do like this for now, and my only purchases have been ?30 in Argos on a desk lamp, a new optical lead for Airport Express to hifi and a new Y phono-jack for PC to hifi.

And in case you're concerned, music downstairs is provided by the G5 behind the TV, so the Airport was vaguely redundant down there now anyway.

A bit too cool (warning: geeky)

Posted by stephen on Sunday, 14th August, 2005 @ 00:20

Blimey, I think I need to tech up the Passat a bit after looking at this.... MazdaPC. And the mad thing is I already have quite a bit of the necessary kit to do this.

My favourite quote has to be... "A live showing of 'Buck Rogers' being streamed from my house, over Verizon's EVDO network into my car over bluetooth. God I love technology". This guy sounds a bit like me!

Needing inspiration

Posted by stephen on Saturday, 13th August, 2005 @ 23:35

Well, it's seems I've done an excellent job of making some high tech tools available to me that could allow me to explore all sorts of creative outlets.

I'm all tooled up to write (both on this site and any fictions that may come to mind), to produce music (probably the least likely avenue I'd explore), to produce photographs and art (even 3D stuff) and to produce film (probably the one I'm most excited about).

I don't know if I've got much talent for any of that stuff. But I'm free to explore myself and find out, which I think is pretty exciting.

The only major barrier left is being inspired, finding something that gets me excited enough to actually drive me into making something.

The really cool thing about all this is that most of the stuff that I've mentioned above has been enabled by a single tool, my Mac. I suppose it could be said of any computer, but the Mac gets me most of the way there out of the box, and I think more than any other computer I've used, it gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do.

I guess it's made me less of a geek in a way. Computers feel more like a means to an end now, which they absolutely should be. Before I treated them as an end in themselves.

Oh well, at least I've been inspired enough to write another blog entry!

Carpenters Connect

Posted by stephen on Saturday, 13th August, 2005 @ 23:18

My boss continues to add to his ever-expanding website. Where I write long, tedious web log entries, he spends the time coming up with lots of random new sections.

One of the most recent sections is rather interesting, it's a quick overview of Carpenters Connect, which is the prototype for a wired up communities TV service that RegenTV is now based upon. It was built at a time when people like Microsoft were telling us it couldn't be done. And now everyone is working on similar technologies.

Anyway, the Carpenters estate in Stratford will soon be running from the RegenTV platform, so the prototype will shortly die. And Richard's chosen to honour it with a section devoted to Carpenters Connect, including lots of screenshots he busily took on Friday while I was doing some actual work.

Geekiness

Posted by stephen on Saturday, 13th August, 2005 @ 22:40

Every now and then I feel like I need a complete change in my life. And that change would be in my career. I feel like there are more interesting and rewarding things I could be doing than working with computers.

I don't actually believe that's true though. I have the best job I could ever ask for right now, it's all about bringing about social equality and building communities and thus is very rewarding, and I get to play with all manner of new toys which is what I love doing.

I remember talking to Matt A about this a while ago, before I had this job. And he said to me he couldn't imagine I'd ever be happy doing anything else and that I'd eventually get bored and want to go back to computers. And I think he might be right, this may well be what I was born to do.

I spent most of my childhood in front of my Amiga 500 making it do god knows what. I don't really remember now, it's hard to imagine as I find computers without an internet connection practically useless these days. But I did find something to do and I loved doing it. And I learned so much in the process.

I'm incredibly fortunate to have a career built on my childhood hobby, and I've taught myself everything I've needed to know. There aren't many decent career paths that let you get started that early.

Anyway, on to the little anecdote that inspired me to create this blog entry...

I think I must have been born to be a geek, I used to take a screwdriver to everything to open it up and look at what was inside. I've always had an insatiable desire to understand how everything works.

But the really telling evidence is the little bit of my childhood my mum likes to bring up now and then. Back when we had a ZX Spectrum +, I must have been somewhere between 5 and 7 years old. I'd sit there in front of the thing, mum sitting next to me. She'd read out the BASIC programs from the book that came with it, and I'd carefully enter each of the commands she recited into the computer. And then the excitement of typing RUN!

Just writing about that brings back over memories from later on, writing little shop keeping programming in AMOS on my Amiga and then printing them out on our old Citizen Swift 9 dot matrix printer, and taking them downstairs to show mum, beaming with pride at just how many sheets some of them ran to!

Thanks mum. I couldn't have got this far with out you. And sorry for the phone bills that started coming in when I finally got my hands on a modem!

BB6 ends

Posted by stephen on Saturday, 13th August, 2005 @ 22:21

After literally months, Big Brother 6 draws to a close. Every year I tell myself I'm not going to watch it, then every year I watch the launch and can't help but watch the whole thing.

Through the wonders of TiVo I think I've probably seen every single Channel 4 nightly roundup show, so I'm looking forward to getting back an hour of my life every day. Fortunately I avoided watching the auxiliary programming this year, along with the usual E4 live stuff.

It's certainly been an interesting year, rarely has there been so much disharmony in the house. Tensions amongst the line up of all the ex housemates on last nights' show were rather apparent. War could have broken out at any moment.

I can't say I'm particularly happy with the outcome. I surprise myself by thinking that ideally Derek should have won. Indeed he was one of the more popular contestants if last nights orgy of screaming and booing is to be considered. He acquitted himself well through most of his stay, though I was rather taken aback with his denial to Anthony in regards to previous conversations about Anthony's sexuality.

My second choice would have been Eugene. He's a bit dull and a nerd in the true sense of the word, but he's Mr Nice and has a degree of humility about him, unlike the eventual winner. It's nice to see him come in second, and even better that he got ?50k, especially as it's effectively been ?150k taken from Anthony's pocket.

Wow, this is turning into a right bitching session, but never mind, it makes for content for the blog, which has been lacking a bit lately!

On to Makosi, who I actually think deserved to win in some ways, she certainly played the game harder and better than any of her rivals. And I don't think anyone deserves the reaction she received on leaving.

Then we have Kinga. I have to say, maybe I'm just odd, but I really like this girl. She's rather uncontrollable when drunk, but when sober, despite a wild streak, she actually seems very switched on and has the wonderful virtue of being absolutely honest. She got to say a few of the things I've been dying to say all series to the likes of Craig.

For some reason, I want to be in Big Brother, mostly because I just want to bring some normality to it and tell people when they're being idiots. I don't think it's a very good plan though. Even better though, I'd love to be involved in producing the show. I can imagine it's a very exciting, stressful and technically challenging task. Just the sort of thing I love.

Oh, and Craig is really quite mad. Enough said.

My Debian Stuff

Posted by stephen on Friday, 12th August, 2005 @ 16:13

Hmm, I'm not posting often enough here at the moment, and sorry to anyone who's not a geek, but it's going to have to be a geeky post this time.

I'm currently setting up some servers at work to stream digital TV from DVB-T and DVB-S cards over our network, giving our users Freeview and various free-to-air satellite channels without the need for any extra equipment.

We've been running this for a while, but it's all set up rather messily. So as part of our documented rebuild I've zapped our DVB servers with Debian sarge and am in the process of building proper packages to make deploying all 6 servers easier and to make my life easier in future too.

Unfortunately a little while ago Hauppauge changed from a Philips chipset on their DVB-T budget cards to a Conexant one that isn't supported in the stock Debian 2.6 kernel.

So my first task has been to build the latest kernel, 2.6.12. And I've been pleasantly surprised how easy it was to make a Debian kernel package. So I now have my very first package. I've even set up a repository for it.

No doubt this is only of use to me, but hey, who knows. The kernels you'll find here are built for P4 and K7. They're built on the options used by Debian in 2.6.8. There have been some extra options since then and I've answered all of these as the suggested defaults. I've removed DRM as it didn't compile!

You can get 'em by adding this to your sources.list:

deb http://packages.neuron1.com/ stable main

My next pleasant surprise was that sarge automatically matched up the new drivers available with the hardware installed in the server and initialised everything automatically. No more hideous scripts to load third party modules as we used to have on our SuSE setup!

My next problem was that the VLC in sarge, though very recent, seg faults when attempting to stream from our TV cards. Bummer. We've had so many problems with VLC lately. I've compiled the latest version and it works, but I'm going to see if it has the same memory leak we've been getting on the other system.

If it does, I'm going to try the now unsupported VLS that is packaged in Debian and see how stable that is.

If it works fine, then more fun, creating a Debian package from the latest VLC. If I do, you'll find it in my repository!

Either way I'm going to need to build a package that contains our configuration system for what channels to stream, along with a script to stop the multicasts flooding the network.

Yay for Debian!

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 11th August, 2005 @ 18:34

Woohoo! After thinking about it for a bit I remembered that VLC compiles against the kernel's DVB code. So I fished about and found apt-build which allows me to install a Debian package from source. So after a few ups and downs I've got my own homebrewed vlc package and hoorah, it doesn't segfault.

Now to see if it consumes ridiculous amounts of RAM. Fingers crossed. I'm going to rebuild it now, but tweak the version numbers slightly then upload it to the neuron packages repository mentioned in the last post should anyone find it useful. I know I will.

I've still not got around building my own Debian package, want to get all the scripts we use to run VLC and stop it multicasting everywhere packaged up nicely. Watch this space.

Work Webcam

Posted by stephen on Friday, 05th August, 2005 @ 17:16

If you've looked around my site at all you'll notice that where I work we have a webcam, situated on top of a 24 floor tower block, looking out over Stratford. You'll find the webcam here.

Richard O has just uploaded a little time lapse film of the camera being erected, and it's rather cool.

A Changing World

Posted by stephen on Friday, 05th August, 2005 @ 00:27

I'll probably have something to say about this soon, but in the mean time I think I should just post the link as it's a really interesting and insightful article about media, blogging, open source and the world of work.

What Business Can Learn From Open Source by Paul Graham.

Retro cool

Posted by stephen on Monday, 01st August, 2005 @ 12:38

One of our project's blade servers is refusing to boot at the moment. And it seems to have reverted to a bit of it's BIOS from the late 80s. I think this is sooo cool. I'm sooo sad!

The little arrow is actually animated, moving from the disk to the drive. It reminds me of my old Amiga, but far less pretty and graphical. Very much the reason I felt all smug and superior in those days.

I have my Mac for that feeling now. Assuming going Intel doesn't result in there being a PC BIOS instead of the lovely OpenFirmware. But I'm not hopeful.