NiceGuyUK Blog
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Jason continues to breed!Congrats to Jason and Emma on the birth of their new baby son, Alfie, born yesterday (is he saying "You must think I was born yesterday" yet?).
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
Frozen Bubble hits the web!One of my favourite games for Linux, Frozen Bubble, has been ported to Java so you can now play it from your web browser here Yay!.
Why Santa didn't get you any presents....If you've been good all year and still didn't get any presents this Christmas, this could be why....
[Thanks to Reservoir Gods for this one]
All bunged upWell, the cold that was going around the office finally made its way to me - I've been sneezing all the time this last 3 or 4 days and I'm all blocked up in the head. Blah!
[Listening to: vic - 303 (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]
Monday, December 29, 2003
New laptopNo, not me, quite happy with mine. My fiancée decided to spend some of her savings in the post-Christmas sales and got herself this Toshiba laptop. I've been getting it set up with the basics for her (Antivirus, Firewall, Office etc) and it seems a nice little machine for £799. There's a few features missing that I would have liked if it was for me, but I'm much more of a power user than Alison. Will probably post a little review after she's had it a while and we've seen it in action a few weeks.
[Listening to: Powa - Mega 4 Disk Mag]
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
Too busy to blogI'm still alive (honest!), I just have more work to do than days to do it in - we have a big deadline coming at work, so that's why things are a bit sparse around here. Hope to get some more interesting stuff back on here after Christmas.
In the meantime, I'd like to thank my regular readers for dropping by so often over the last few months, and to Google for sending the not-so-regular readers here too! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone and I'll see you in 2004!
[Listening to: Cube / Aggression - Admirables menu 32]
Friday, December 19, 2003
Friday, Payday Woo!Well here we are at the end of a hectic week - deadlines at work, financial pressures and the looming spectre of Christmas all contributing to that one. Payday has arrived, and my new "sort my finances out" plan is in full swing now that I have got my online banking with NatWest sorted out and loaded into Microsoft Money 2004. I'm usually loath to praise Microsoft, being a Free Software advocate, but the more I use the package, the more impressed I get. I did briefly look at GnuCash but it seemed far less intuitive to set up my accounts and I couldn't find the OFX import feature it claimed to have. I'm sure that it is a very good package, as most of the GNU software is, but in terms of getting results quickly, sorry guys, but Microsoft got you beat....
[Listening to: Psydrop - Live @ Moscow Art Center 02-15-2003]
Thursday, December 18, 2003
Shrinking snacksIs it my imagination, or have Monster Munch got smaller?
[Listening to: Skip - Planet Potion part 2]
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Commuters' Christmas PartyHad the 17:35 train from Charing Cross Christmas party last night. A bunch of us regular commuters that usually meet up for beer and games of Uno got together with beer, wine and port, crisps and mince pies and proceeded to dominate our carriage. Dave and Les missed the train though, so we all hopped off again at Tonbridge and waited for them to arrive, before the party resumed. Great fun and silly hats - what more could you ask for on a Tuesday night?
[Listening to: Cube / Aggression - Amok]
Monday, December 15, 2003
New blogging toolOk, I finally found a Linux blogging tool that is on a par with w.bloggar. Check out BloGTK
Pooping PenguinsSuperdrug sell these really cool "Walking Penguin Pooper" toys - basically its a clockwork walking penguin that dispenses little chocolate candy pieces from its butt! I want one of those!!!, so if someone would like to spend £1.99 on one for me, that would be very nice.....
[Listening to: cyborg jeff - inner worlds underground (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]
Metacity always on top keybindingA quick tip for Gnome users. One of the new features introduced with Gnome 2.4 is the ability to force a window to be always on top. It's a long awaited feature, useful to watch videos while working, checking documentation while coding, etc.
Its implementation can be traced by following Gnome bug #98387, which was opened almost a year ago on November 13, 2002. The bug was not resolved earlier due to a philosophical conflict between the people wanting to keep Metacity's features to a minimum, and the people needing this particular feature. During this bug's life, a few patches were produced, implementing this feature with different ways to control it (a window menu item, a keybinding, etc.).
With Gnome 2.4, it appears that a consensus has been reached with the introduction of the new toggle_above keybinding. If you need this feature, open gconf-editor, navigate to apps/metacity/window_keybindings and assign the new keybinding a key combination.
[Courtesy of Ludoo]
Friday, December 12, 2003
Amusing advert
Ok, I'll tidy up this post later, just need to quickly mention it. Amusing advert from EA Canada here - see comments explanation!
[Courtesy of Kasia]
Linux Bashing Now Considered a Hate CrimeWashington DC - The President signed into law yesterday legislation that makes Linux bashing an offense covered under the hate crime statute. Anyone convicted of Linux bashing will now face Federal charges. The law is in response to the recent beating of a Linux user at the University of Colorado by a Windows 2000 Users Group.
Law enforcement officials have been given some guidelines to follow when determining if a crime is covered by the statute. For example if a person beats someone to death with a hammer they would just face murder charges in a state court. However, if a person beats someone to death with a hammer while yelling "You Linux using bastard," then they would be charged under the hate crimes statute and face trial in a Federal court.
Many oppose the law, because they feel that it is unfairly targeted at one particular group. "This makes it near impossible to do our job properly without breaking the law," said Microsoft PR representative Bailey McClain, "the Feds are taking away one of our most useful tools."
It is commonly believed that 10% of the population are Linux users. Linux users often hide their use from friends and family members. Meeting other users in Linux only bars or IRC channels. Openly Linux using people often face extreme prejudice and discrimination from co-workers and IT departments but say that this bigotry must be confronted. "I’ve never been beaten because of my open sourceness, but I get a lot of ‘Linux sucks’ comments," said Jared Yttrium, "I’m glad the statute is there to protect me."
Others in the Linux community were confused by the ruling. "I went to Linux Bash 2000 and it was one helluva party. The feds shouldn't be stopping that," said Jacques Robert.
In related news Microsoft Windows users are now covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
[Courtesy of bbspot]
Thursday, December 11, 2003
We wish you a curry Christmas....Works christmas meal with a difference tonight, as we all head off to the Masala Zone curry restaurant in Soho, after a few warm-up drinks at Bunker (formerly Freedom Brewery). Tonights festivities include a bad-shirt competition (think of the most in-your-face hawaiian shirts!) and a "Secret Santa" gift exchanging. Should be good fun!
[Listening to: Moby (no, not *that* one!) - Danny Elfmania - ]
Return To Castle WolfenLinuxGot Return To Castle Wolfenstein working under Linux last night, but not as easily as I'd hoped. It kept crashing out and after scanning Google I worked out that it was a sound related issue. So I've now managed to get it working without sound, which means I can play it, but its much harder, since you can;t hear when alarms are going off, or when you;re being fired upon. Lots of other people seem to have posted to newsgroups and forums about this one, but I've yet to see an answer to the problem.....
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Linux goes monoMy my, another Linux related post - this is becoming a bit of a habit! I managed to get a workable C#.Net development environment for Linux put together today, using Mono, GTK# and Anjuta. Not quite got the compiler integrated into the IDE so I can just hit "Compile", but I don't mind having to compile from a shell for now. My first little GNOME application worked (after I fixed my typos - doh!), although its only a little "Hello World" proggy just to test the compiler/libraries setup. Looking forward to making some nice little programs now!
[Listening to: Rez(Eclipse) - Irish biniou Song - ]
Monday, December 08, 2003
Linux gamesStarted putting some games on my linux machine. Ao far, been playing TuxPuck, TuxRacer and Frozen Bubble, but I have installed Duke Nukem, Doom Legacy, Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Quake too - just need to get the game data for them off my Windows CDs now
Friday, December 05, 2003
Patches! Doh!Typical isn't it? The day after I do a kernel upgrade on my laptop, a patched version becomes available to fix the Linux kernel do_brk() security hole, so I have to upgrade the kernel again only 24 hours after the last time.
[Listening to: Count Zero / Inner Circle - Untitled ]
Thursday, December 04, 2003
More Linux madnessUpgraded my kernel to a slightly newer version (2.4.20-gentoo-r6 to 2.4.20-gentoo-r8), and added in SCSI emulation support in an attempt to get the DVD working, but its still not created /dev/scd0 anywhere for me to symlink /dev/dvd to. Any Linux gurus out there able to help with this one? Modules loaded include scsi_mod, sg, sr_mod and ide-scsi
Linux .NetJust setting up Mono and GTK# on my machine - hopefully I can make some nice little C# GUI apps just as easily under Linux as I can in Windows. Nice screenshotsw of apps developed using this combination available here
[Listening to: machinae supremacy - bouff]
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Works quiz nightGot a quiz night tonight as a work event - something to do with team-building. I'm not much into team-building, but I do like quizzes, so I'll go along to that one.
SCO : Linux user lawsuits to begin next yearYeah, Darl McBride can kiss my ass if he thinks I'm paying $199 for each copy of Linux I run.....
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Blogging for GnomesOk, so the test of Gnome-Blog wasn't as exciting as I'd hoped, but the software is still in the early stages of development (version 0.7), so there's a little way to go yet. The good thing about it being Open Source is that I have the Python source code, so its a good excuse for me to have a go at learning Python and adding in any features I want.
