Birthday
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 21st June, 2006 @ 23:10
In about a month it'll have been a year since I brought this website back to life. And amazingly I've actually managed to maintain it to some standard this time round (the third attempt since I first registered the domain). My posting has been a little sporadic, some months have gone with very little said, and the last few days seem to have received huge input. Overall though, I'm pretty happy with how this first year has gone. So thanks to everyone who has the patience to actually read it, comment on it and inspire me with ideas for it.
What I didn't realise until a couple of days ago is that, like the Queen, this site has two birthdays. And they are remarkably close together. On July 18th it'll be one year exactly since my first post to this incarnation of the site. But as my recent domain renewal reminded me, on July 14th it'll be 6 years exactly since I registered the freakymousemats.com domain for the first time.
It's amazing how much my life has changed since then, and yet in some ways remained the same (Richard). Anyway, to commemorate the occasion (how self important of me), I've dugg into archive.org and grabbed some screenshots of the four incarnations of freakymousemats.com (including the unpopular, but I still like it, attempt at replacing this version). Click on the original version below to take a look...
Human perception of value and probability
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 21st June, 2006 @ 23:09
Daniel Gilbert, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, recently gave a presentation entitled "How to Do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times" at this year's South By Southwest festival. It provides an incredibly enlightening, and surprising obvious and simple explanation of how, in general, humans attribute value and determine probability (in a non-scientific manner) and usually do so incredibly badly!
You can take a listen. (22.65Mb MP3)
It's a long listen, but I definitely recommend it if you're considering spending money on anything or are sat crouched under your table in case of terrorist attacks! Here's a little summary of a couple of the points that really stuck with me...
- You're at a supermarket checkout, having attempted to choose the shortest queue. Yet someone in the next line who joined *after* you is already paying and out before you've even got your goods on the line. This always seems to happen!
Except no, it doesn't, it only happens every now and again. But the times you pass through without issue don't stick in your memory. Therefore it seems most probable to you that you'll end up in a queue that'll ultimately frustrate you, because those are the incidents you remember most clearly. - There's a lottery to win £10,000. For some strange reason there are only 10 tickets being sold, and for only £1 each. What a great deal. You've got a 1/10 chance of winning 10 grand! Then you discover that the 9 other tickets were all bought by one person, George Smith.
Apparently in this situation most people would decline purchasing the remaining ticket, feeling that the odds are stacked against them and the Mr Smith is bound to win. But the odds didn't change at all, it's still 1/10. The perception that it's not a fair game distorts reality.
Ubuntu X
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 21st June, 2006 @ 23:09
So you're smart enough to not use Windows and are enjoying all the benefits of the fantastic Ubuntu distribution of Linux. But you look at those annoyingly smug people with Macs and are secretly jealous of their gorgeous user interface?
Help is at hand! It may not be a workalike, but it's a definite lookalike...
A Fin by the name of Lauri Taimila has put together a guide of how to customise your Ubuntu GNOME desktop into something with a little more X factor. What amazes me is how much nicking the Apple fonts makes all the difference. Check it out and wallow in the heightened sense of smugness it'll give you over your Windows friends.
Principals.. gone
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 20th June, 2006 @ 18:42
I seem to have become a blogging engine this past couple of days. And rather overload you all with an overdose of Steve and have you miss out reading my insightful posts due to lack of time, I've decided to betray my principals and stretch out the boredom for you. I've got 4 other posts finished this evening but I've set them to be published one per day. So if you read the ATOM feed or the home page you'll have something new every day. If you'd like to skip ahead, click on the June link from the 2006 section of the archives and all the posts are filed under the 21st.
Last.fm is so cool
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 20th June, 2006 @ 17:32
I know I'm incredibly late (by years) jumping on this particular bandwagon, and I've got no excuses really other than laziness. Seriously, if you've never tried it out, check out last.fm. I'm not even going to explain why it's so cool, just know that you really ought to try it.
It makes sitting at my desk pretending to do some work a much nicer experience, having looped through my iTunes playlists hundreds of times in every conceivable combination. Check out what it's feeding me.
What's really surprised me is I'm currently listening to a station built on artists similar to Robert Miles. What I didn't expect was just how varied the results would be. It's playing me loads of music I really like and wouldn't have connected to Robert Miles at all. I guess that's the power of taxonomies, social networks and other buzzwordy Web 2.0 phenomena.
Always Use Protection
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 20th June, 2006 @ 01:53
Since my original 12" PowerBook I've always liked to know my laptops are safe. At first I did this with a hideous and inconvenient generic laptop bag, then later I discover the exactly fitting sleeves that I call laptop condoms, or, to name an actual brand, second skins (sounds very condom like to me).
This let me ditch the nasty laptop bag and instead seal my laptop away in it's snug little sleeve and throw it into my rucksack. My first was bought for me by the lovely Matt for Christmas and saw me through both my 12" PowerBooks and continues to protect the second of those.
But sadly, my new MacBook adds an extra inch (which I now consider a vital extra inch, like a proper little gay boy) and was just too big for a 12" sleeve. And a 14" sleeve for the original iBook wasn't really suitable either, little Falcor would be slip around like nobody's business in such a thing. Being so new to market at the time of purchase, and also being an unusual form factor for a laptop, new sleeve designs were not forthcoming.
Then I discovered Wrappers, a lovely little British company (see, I am patriotic, despite not having massive St George's flags splayed everywhere at present). Within two weeks of the MacBook being announced they were in production of sleeves! And not only that, they are sleeves that you can customise with 15 characters that'll be hand sewn on the side. Not only that, but they are actually cheaper than the majority of sleeves I've seen at just £17.99.
And I loved both the sleeve and the service so much I just had to write them an email telling them. And they loved the email so much, they put it on their website! (see Customise your MacBook sleeve on the homepage).
So, if you're in the market for a condom for your MacBook, or indeed you iPod, I definitely recommend them.
Pure Comic (Life)
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 20th June, 2006 @ 01:53
For those who couldn't be at or watch the live web feed of Richard's party on Friday night he's helpfully prepared a couple of comics to illustrate the affair. Go take a look.
Comic Life is fantastic, and bundled with all new Macs, which is my preferred way for you to buy it, just tell them Steve sent you, they'll be impressed. Just don't say which Steve.
Pluto Home
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 20th June, 2006 @ 01:52
First off, I wanted to thank Michael who posted a comment a few weeks back in response to my talk of using MythTV and Asterisk. It's nice to know my site gets seen by more than just the people that knew me already!
He pointed out the Pluto Home project, an open source endeavour that integrates lots of functionality into one convenient package, including MythTV based PVR, Asterisk VoIP telephony, network audio streaming, home automation and security. It's combining lots of existing open source projects, making them easily installable and adding lots of it's own glue to make using it an integrated and versatile experience. Imagine managing your whole home from your mobile phone when you're hundreds of miles away! Might give the cat a fright.
At the time of writing I'm happy with my setup of MythTV and Asterisk as it is, but I'm definitely planning on playing with Pluto Home more and maybe even investing in some of the home automation hardware when I have the cash to spare on such unnecessary things.
Though a big part of me likes doing these things myself and learning about them on the way. It's more fun than playing with a finished product!
Bill Bailey: Part Troll
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 20th June, 2006 @ 01:51
I've had this for a while now and it's a fantastic show. Watching it a couple of weekends back with Chris reminded me just how good.
This is no doubt breaking copyright law to the extreme, and I'm happy to remove this clips if asked, but I present them not so that you don't need to buy it, but to encourage you to get on Amazon and order it right this minutes.
Two of my favourite pieces, an overview of Argos (3.93Mb) and a rendition of the News 24 theme (3.95Mb). You'll need QuickTime 7 (of course) or something else capable of playing H.264 (perhaps the great VLC).
Loyal kitty
Posted by stephen on Monday, 19th June, 2006 @ 17:01
Sophie doesn't like straying too far from me when I'm working at home, it's quite sweet really, but I do have the perverse urge to print something!
Roundup: Server Things
Posted by stephen on Monday, 19th June, 2006 @ 01:56
And finally.... I took it upon myself yesterday to sort out Neuron, mine and Cal's original hosted server prior to Neuron2, where this site, along with countless others (most of them his), now come from. The original Neuron is still functional though, acting as secondary mail exchanger and DNS server, along with hosting some sites we never got around to migrating to Neuron2.
I generally hate RedHat, but unfortunately at the the time of getting Neuron I wasn't familiar with the procedure to remotely reinstall a machine with Debian (which I fortunately did manage to do by the time Neuron2 came along). My solution at the time was to run Debian inside a chrooted environment on the native RedHat 7.3 server. And it's worked pretty well, everything considered. But it was running woody, with all kinds of bits of backports, and of course underneath all that was RedHat 7.3, so it was hideously out of date and no doubt massively insecure whilst also being an upgrade nightmare.
A quick review of the EV1 account admin system for Neuron revealed that those lovely people at EV1 had given us serial console access at some point in the past. This gave me some confidence that I'd be able to pull off another remote reinstall. Knowing that you can get to the system before the OS loads, especially when the bootloader is GRUB, is certainly comforting and useful!
My choice for the upgrade was a little out of sorts from my usual Debian server plan. But I'm pretty sure it's the route I'll take in future wherever possible. I decided to have a crack at installing Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS on the box. LTS stands for long term support, and means that Canonical, the British company behind Ubuntu pledge to support the server edition for five years per version. Which is very comforting too.
Ubuntu is effectively a stabilised version of the latest development version of Debian. So I feel very at home using it and have had great experiences of it as a desktop Linux OS. APT makes my world a better place.
And having all the latest versions of Apache/PHP/MySQL etc is a definite boon as I otherwise tend to use Dotdeb and other backports to make sarge (current Debian stable release) more useful for me.
Being Debian based meant I could also apply the instructions for a remote Debian installation mentioned above. Except it's a little bit different, as things have changed since that was originally written so I had to make some of it up as I went along as I couldn't find anything more recent.
With the help of the serial console (and the lack of help of the two ethernet interfaces on the server being detected in a random order, so the IPs didn't always get assigned to the correct interface) I got everything up and running again.
I also somehow managed to prune 24Gb of stuff from Neuron's disk that was no longer of any use before moving it over to Neuron2 (and then moving it back again).
It didn't take long to re-establish the machine as a secondary MX and DNS for Neuron2. Only this time it's configured in a much nicer and more secure way so that Neuron2 doesn't have passwordless root access to Neuron.
As with anything I do, I never get it all finished in one go, so those few remaining sites are running inside the original chroot, but this time only MySQL and Apache are needed from it. And migrating them to Apache2 and a proper MySQL install shouldn't be too great a problem.
This weekend has really reminded me why I love Linux.
Roundup: House and Garden
Posted by stephen on Monday, 19th June, 2006 @ 01:27
Next, the house change around... I decided that the TV was being underused above the iMac. It wasn't practical for normal second monitor tasks (email and IM), and was a pain to use when wanting to use Front Row or MythTV (both of which appear on the primary screen only). So the original plan has happened and it's gone into my bedroom attached to the Mac Mini. It's quite nice having a big TV up there. The shelf I'd created now stores the surround decoder and front speakers, freeing up enough room on the desk for both the 17" LCD and my laser printer. And I can honestly say the 20" iMac screen makes for a very reasonable viewing experience.
Continuing on the house theme I finally got frustrated with the back garden and decided I must spend some time out there this year enjoying the occasional nice weather and entertaining with the odd BBQ. So Friday saw me entering my 5 foot grass jungle with the strimmer (I'd assumed the lawn mower wouldn't cope with 5 foot grass). A rather fruitless endeavour. The strimmer immediately clogged itself up with grass and seemed generally rather useless.
In desperation and out of curiosity I thought I'd give the lawn mower a crack at it. I'd purposely bought a mower with wheels rather than a hoovering one. And fortunately it also came equipped with metal blades rather than silly plastic ones. And to my great surprise it was amazingly effective. It just needed me to stop every five minutes to unclog the grass catcher exit shoot (I didn't use the grass catcher, but even then the shoot isn't designed for that volume of grass. What I'm left with from Friday is a bit of stubble and some long bits at the edges I didn't quite get to. A lot like my attempts at shaving really!
So in the course of this week I hope to finish the job, throw away some of the crap that's gathered in the garden and once again make it usable. Then I can finally test how this glossy MacBook screen copes with outside daylight, on those hard sunny days of working at home.
Roundup: VoIP
Posted by stephen on Monday, 19th June, 2006 @ 01:23
On to VoIP. Asterisk is now configured and calls to my sipgate number connect to my normal DECT phones via my Cisco ATA 186 box. Outgoing calls are also working and I've credited my sipgate account for this, and I don't even need to dial 9 before the numbers any more as I was doing when I first started (as long as I use the full area code). My NTL phone line is now set to divert all calls to the new number and the new number is being dished out to those that need it.
There's only two niggles with it at the moment. First off, for some reason anyone calling didn't receive a ringing tone while my phone was been called, so had no idea if they'd dialled properly or if something was amiss. I've fixed it by putting a little message at the point Asterisk picks up the call ("please wait while we try to connect you"), and for some reason this is followed by the normal ringing tone.
The other niggle I've noticed today is the odd short pause during conversations, which I think is due to network performance (and not at my end as there was no real Internet traffic here and I've configured my router to always leave some bandwidth spare). We'll see how that goes, but I feel confident that I'll be able to ditch the NTL phone service too eventually. Next up I must try and setup voice mail.
Oh, and one more VoIP thing. I discovered my Nokia N80 might include a SIP stack, but doesn't come with a VoIP application to make use of it. Therefore my plan to use the mobile as a home phone didn't really get anywhere. There's a couple of third party VoIP apps for Series 60 out there, but both seemed tied to specific providers so weren't much good to me.
Roundup: MythTV
Posted by stephen on Monday, 19th June, 2006 @ 01:21
Next up, MythTV. This is working pretty well. The TiVo has been unplugged for a couple of weeks now and hasn't really been missed. I cancelled the NTL TV account only to have them call back and offer 5 months free TV with no tie in, so I accepted and will consider attaching the NTL box to the Myth server and seeing if I can get it under control there, utilising a Hauppauge PVR card to do MPEG2 encoding in hardware.
There are some niggles with Myth. The frontend program on the Mac is very sensitive to dodgy MPEG streams and has a habit of crashing out now and then. This could be cured by opening the MPEG file over a Samba share and playing in QuickTime directly. Though they are a little too raw in their native state and need cleaning up into nicer MPEGs using MPEG Streamclip (which is oddly based on QuickTime APIs, so not sure why it copes and regular Player doesn't).
For channels using QAM64 modulation (which is most bar the BBC), I occasionally get a problematic signal. A new portable aerial from Argos helped but hasn't entirely solved this problem. QAM64 modulation allows more channels to be squeezed onto a multiplex, however QAM16 (as used by the BBC) is more robust when it comes to buildings, interference, etc.
It seems like a relatively straightforward task to build some scripts that use the MySQL Myth database and automatically process the files as needed once the recording is complete, name them sensibly and then place them somewhere linked into the Front Row Movies option, so I can use the Apple Remote to fully control my TV viewing experience. Maybe I'll get a chance/motivation to play with that in the next week or so.
Roundup: Webcams
Posted by stephen on Monday, 19th June, 2006 @ 01:18
Firstly, as I pretty much expected I got bored of having the camera's on and having to regularly poke QuickTime Broadcaster when it got disconnected from the server (there's an automatic reconnect option, but it's permanently greyed out, guess they never finished that bit of code). Ultimately that little experiment served it's purpose and Richard was able to stream his party on Friday night to a small audience without any real technical problems. And I've now got experience of Apple streaming media technologies which might come in handy one day.
Roundup
Posted by stephen on Monday, 19th June, 2006 @ 01:17
Just looking through some recentish posts it occurs to me I've mentioned a few things I've start on but not really mentioned how they are progressing...
Change of plan... this turned into a massively long post, so I've decided to separate it out into little bite-sized chuncks. If I was Richard I'd release one a day to make it look like I'm posting something new every day. Either that or backfill the days that don't have posts. But I'm not doing to do that. I'm going to splurge it out all at once...This means you can read one a day if you like and are sufficiently bored on a daily basis (not talking to any people in particular, honest!).
Obsession
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 15th June, 2006 @ 16:03
Well, it appears I am somewhat obsessed with either streaming lots of video and/or making sure every Mac I own has something to do. I present you with Streetcam, live from my bedroom window courtesy of my Sony Handycam and the Mac Mini.
This time there is actually a point to it, honest! We're currently pitching for some work providing cameras that both stream full resolution video over a LAN/MAN and webcam level footage to the general Internet. This one should be up more consistently than the others I've setup lately and serves as an example of what we can do for the webcam side of things with a hosted server and a Mac Mini. Finally I might get to sell a Mac into a large organisation, woohoo!
The LAN/MAN MPEG2 streaming is handled by one of my trusty and tiny mini-ITX systems running Linux, VideoLan Server and a Hauppauge PVR-250 card. I love playing with networks and video. You might even call it IPTV!
Steve TV Mobile
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 13th June, 2006 @ 23:41
Following on from the last post, I've added a Live Mobile Webcam for the sake of completeness. Will almost certainly be rarely turned on, but hey, thought I should do it anyway. It allows me to become ?ber narcissistic...
And of course mostly I did it because I can. My reason to do nearly everything geeky. Now really must finish sorting out my bedroom so I've got somewhere to sleep tonight.
Steve TV
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 13th June, 2006 @ 20:12
QuickTime Broadcaster + Darwin Streaming Server = Cool
Earlier today Richard bothered me about wanting to get a party he's having on Friday broadcast live on his website. I didn't dare ask what kind of party it would be or if he'd be charging his website visitors to view the feed.
Anyway, it led me to recall I'd previously installed Darwin Streaming Server (DSS) from Apple on my server in the US. The trouble with hosting a web cam of course is that you need to provide the bandwidth of the video stream times the number of viewers. Which isn't very practical on an asymmetrical broadband connection. Using Apple's QuickTime Broadcaster it is possible to send the webcam stream to a server running DSS and have your users stream from there.
I'd tried this before, hence the DSS install on my server, but never succeeded. I'm not sure why it didn't work, but fresh perspective and a few months between tries and I managed to get it functioning pretty much within half an hour on the second attempt or there abouts. So Richard is happily running his cam.
And not to be outdone, I've decided to set up my own so that he can tell that I'm actually sitting at my desk at 1am doing some work :)
Thus, I present to you, Steve TV.
Living Room Changeabout
Posted by stephen on Friday, 09th June, 2006 @ 14:02
A couple of days ago we had a power cut that lasted a couple of hours. A couple of years ago I bought a UPS to power the TiVo, NTL box, cable modem and wireless router. The UPS did it's job just fine. Unfortunately the NTL street cabinet seems to require power too, so my reasons for having a UPS are effectively nullified. But never mind.
Power cuts leave me restless with not much to do. I couldn't even clean the house properly because I couldn't power the vacuum cleaner. So I decided it was time for a little rearranging. When I work at home I'm usually in my bedroom with the iMac. I decided I wanted to get work out of my bedroom so I thought I'd swap the iMac with the TV setup and use the Mac downstairs and the TV upstairs in my room.
The iMac handily makes a half decent TV so is still useful downstairs. Then I had another idea...
My Mini is currently feeling rather spare, but I think it's destiny is to go into my bedroom with the 17" LCD to be a nice TV and music centre up there.
What a Vista
Posted by stephen on Friday, 09th June, 2006 @ 12:56
Out of curiosity (and so I could poke fun) I decided to throw in the towel and run Boot Camp on my iMac now I've got a nice full system backup in case anything goes wrong. As Microsoft recently released Vista Beta 2 as a public beta I downloaded the 3.5Gb ISO (how the hell can an OS be 3.5Gb?!). A flawless partition resize from Boot Camp rebooted me into the Windows installer.
Finally the installer is graphical from the beginning! It took a very long time, but finally completed leaving me with a non-bootable Windows install that I was expecting having read about someone else's attempt at the install on the iMac. Rebooting the install DVD and running a repair fixes the problem within a couple of minutes and viola, Vista boots.
Of course I'm totally biased against Windows, so don't expect any kind of fairness in my comments here. I will however say that it is a beta, so perhaps can be forgiven for a few things.
I was pleasantly unsurprised to find that Apple have nothing at all to worry about. Windows still massively lacks the attention to detail you'll find in OS X. At various stages of initial boot up and login there was zero feedback to indicate the computer was actually doing anything.
Windows now pops up a little authorisation dialogue whenever it wants to do something risky. But in doing so it blacks out everything and forces you to make your choice immediately, whatever you might have been in the middle of. Add to that the interesting little feature of the dialogue seeming to appear in completely random places with each request (at one point on the lower left corner of my second monitor where there wasn't even anything running).
The visuals are improved somewhat, but in my opinion they are rather garish and overstated compared to OS X. And the little Alt-Tab alternative (Windows-Space) that lets you cycle through windows by rotating them to 45 degrees and looking through them like a deck of cards seemed to have horrible jagged lines and very badly scaled window content. Come on Microsoft, sort it out!
And I'll leave with one last helpful tidbit. Whilst working out what hardware I've got and installing drivers, Vista failed to find the driver for a particular thing online so requests the driver CD. But the prompt rather unhelpfully doesn't tell you which device it is!
At last, an explanation...
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 01st June, 2006 @ 15:02
For my condition that sums it up quite nicely and proves that it's actually quite workable and useful if managed properly.
UPDATE: Currently not responding apparently, probably the Digg effect.
In summary, I'm a procrastinator, constantly putting things off. But this doesn't mean I sit around doing nothing all day, quite the opposite. Instead I busy myself with less important tasks to put off that which seems most important. And in so doing, actually manage to get quite a lot done! It's just a matter of more important tasks being added to the top of the list to keep me productive!
