Today I put a new song online called Banished. This is a pretty heavy song that I wrote a while back. I had the tracks knocking around for a while (the music tracks) but I needed to record the vocals. I am pretty pleased with it. 🙂

Friday I head down to laandan taawn (London Town) for a meeting with Microsoft. It appears they have struck another deal that they are showcasing, and they have invited me down to what the fuss is about. It should be interesting to see exactly what is going on. I will keep you posted when I know.

LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 16 is out and doing the rounds. Go and grab it. It struck me today that the large and growing LUGRadio community tend to know more about the show than we do. That is kind of weird and also kind of cool – certainly more on the cool side. 🙂 It is incredible to see how the show is growing, and each one of us is so pleased to see it happen. We are also incredibly pleased to have met all of our new friends in the community. I can’t wait until LUGRadio Live to meet the ‘orrible lot.
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Had a nice weekend. Worked all day on Saturday on the book, fixing some code and proofreading, and then on the evening we went to Burton to see my parents who were working in nearby Derby. We went for a lovely meal and caught up. It was great fun. On the Sunday, Sooz and I again worked after we had been to see Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith. I won’t bore you all with a huge review, but we both really enjoyed it. It was great to see what happens after so many years of waiting. 🙂

I am chuffed to my back teeth to see that a Python EPlugin interface has been created for Evolution. When I am thinking about building graphical applications and extensions, Nautilus and Evolution really are central to the desktop for me. It seems that the dim and distant days of having to write extensions in C or C++ are gone. Whatever your language, be it Python, Java, C, C++, Ruby or whatever, if we can write plugins with it, it means more software. I look forward to writing something when it is stable. 🙂

The days are building up to GUADEC, and I am looking forward to getting over there. I have a few objectives while at GUADEC. Firstly, I want to get a good idea of what is going on with GNOME at the moment and get a feel for the project. Sure, I read the blogs and I occasionally read some lists, but meeting people, having a few jars and seeing some talks is always far better. In addition to this, I want to be involved in some of the discussions for GNOME 3.x. Although I am not a GNOME developer, I would like to contribute to some of the discussions to determine where the focus of GNOME is going. Much of where I think GNOME should go I wrote up in Remixing how we use the Open Source desktop. There have been similar rumblings within the GNOME camp, but I get the impression everyone is holding out for GUADEC. Of course, in addition to all this I plan on drinking plenty of beer, taking lots of pointless photos while drunk and making lots of new friends. I do like grassroots conferences for grassroots projects. 🙂

Oo, and according to the Wolves LUG brethren, I look like the bassist from the German Eurovision band:

Bastards.

A few cool things are going on:

• On Thursday and Friday I gave a PHP/MySQL training course, and each of the students signed up to PHPWM. Glad to see the group is growing.
• I have recently been asked to sit on the EuroOSCON Commitee, so this should be good fun.
• Last night I finished off and edited an article I have been working on for a few days. This article is the first in a series of installments explaining how I got into computers and then into Linux and Open Source. I figured it would be interesting to write this down, and useful so I don’t forget it. Go and catch Becoming Open – Part 1
• LUGRadio Live is going extremely well, and we have 16 exhibitors confirmed in addition to the 12 speakers. We have also sold nearly all of the paintball tickets.
• Next weekend I head over to GUADEC with Paul from work. I am really looking forward to hooking up with a number of the GNOMEies that I have met recently.
• LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 16 hits the net on Monday. A good show with plenty packed in. 🙂

Shock horror people, I have put a new song on here. After a bit of a hiatus away from my own music, I finally got round to recording and mixing a song I have had in my head for a while. The song is called Price Of Freedom.
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Been busy this week building some code for some different things. Much of this is to be used in the PHP and MySQL courses that I am doing, one of which begins tomorrow morning.

I have been learning a lot about databases recently. When programming in PHP, I tend to naturally see most of the processing taking place on the PHP side of things as opposed to the database side. With all the coding recently, I have approached things much more from the database side, and this has been an interesting learning experience.

It seems that the music baton was passed on to me from ging-a-sing-a-sing-a-song-a-ring-a-ding-a-ding-dong. Well, here goes:

Total volume of music on this computer: 9.9GB

Last CD I bought: Dimmu Borgir – Death Cult Armageddon

Song playing right now: Nothing, I am watching Game On. 🙂

Five songs I listen to a lot, that mean a lot to me:

1. Pit Of Zombies – Cannon and ball Corpse…er…I mean Cannibal Corpse
2. Take No Prisoners – Megadeth
3. Spheres OF Madness – Decapitated
4. Rip n’Tear – Overkill
5. Hatebreeder – Children Of Bodom

Five people I am passing the baton onto:

• The Bald
• The Anger
• Paul
• TownX
• Sparkes

OK, for fans of the cute dog photos, here are a few more. The other day we decided to bath Banger for the first time and he was a little unsure of the water:

After his bath (well, sink), we dried him with a hairdryer on a cool-ish setting and he fluffed up:

It seems the PHPWM group is growing more and more. It is good to see some discussions getting going, and this morning I wrote a pastebin for the list. If you are new to PHP or like to hack on PHP, why not join up. 🙂

You know, sometimes advocating Open Source is tough when the companies who are expected to do the work end up being pretty useless. I have been working with a client recently who wants a plug-in writing for Evolution to connect to SugarCRM. I figured Novell (who do a lot of Evolution work) would be able to help, so I called their UK office. The person who took the call was fairly clueless, so I called the US office. Again, no-one knew where to direct me. I then called Red Hat and had exactly the same experience, although the guy on the phone was a bit more knowledgeable. I don’t think that bespoke software development is all that unusual, and enquiring about it certainly is not unusual, so I am a little dismayed at this. This is not the first time Novell and Red Hat have not exactly revelled at customer service…

Anyway, I posted to evolution-hackers about it. I can’t believe I need to join the developers mailing list to find out about this.

What a hectic day or so. Firstly, last night I was fiddling around with getting Luminocity working. This 3D OpenGL driven window manager contains the so called wobbly windows that have been discussed across the net, and last night I got it working. Here is it in action:

If you grab the window and spin it around enough, you can see the back of the window which is kinda weird:

Finally, the wobbly windows effect is applied to menus as well as windows:

The virtual desktop switching tool and live updates is pretty cool too. Its great to see such fascinating work going on. 🙂

Just after I got Luminocity working, I figured I would upload these shots to my site. Then, my net connection dropped. I checked the date and it is around the time my ADSL was due to be disabled as I am switching providers. So, I was in a bit of a bind – no Internet.

I decided to have a crack at connecting via Bluetooth and using the 3G net access on my phone. This was actually easier than I expected. I have a Nokia 6630, and this how you do it…

I will assume you have a Bluetooth setup working, but you need to edit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf and have a block like this:

rfcomm0 {
bind yes;
# Bluetooth address of the device
device 00:01:02:03:04:05;
# RFCOMM channel for the connection
channel 1;
# Description of the connection
comment "Nokia 6630";

The main point of this file is to add your MAC address (get this by dialing *#2820# into the phone) and ensure it is on channel 1. Now take down your existing network cards with ifconfig eth0 down (change for eth(n)), and then you need to create your PPP connection. I used pppconfig to create the connection, and used the following details for the Orange 3G network:

APN: orangeinternet
Username: just add a single letter, it is not needed but adding a single letter avoids problems.
Password: just add a single letter, it is not needed but adding a single letter avoids problems.
Primary DNS: 158.43.192.1

Secondary DNS: 158.43.128.1
SMTP Server: smtp.orange.net
Phone Number: *99#
Speed: 230400

When you have created this, first open an xterm and keep an eye on the messages log file with tail -f /var/log/messages and then run pon . You should then see something like this in your log file:

May 15 01:54:56 localhost pppd[8861]: pppd 2.4.2 started by root, uid 0
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: abort on (BUSY)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: abort on (NO CARRIER)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: abort on (VOICE)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: abort on (NO DIALTONE)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: abort on (NO DIAL TONE)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: abort on (NO ANSWER)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: abort on (DELAYED)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: send (ATZ^M)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: expect (OK)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: ^M
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: ERROR^M
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: ATZ^M^M
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: OK
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: -- got it
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: send (ATDT*99#^M)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: expect (CONNECT)
May 15 01:54:58 localhost chat[8862]: ^M
May 15 01:54:59 localhost chat[8862]: ATDT*99#^M^M
May 15 01:54:59 localhost chat[8862]: CONNECT
May 15 01:54:59 localhost chat[8862]: -- got it
May 15 01:54:59 localhost chat[8862]: send (\d)
May 15 01:55:00 localhost pppd[8861]: Serial connection established.
May 15 01:55:00 localhost pppd[8861]: Using interface ppp0
May 15 01:55:00 localhost pppd[8861]: Connect: ppp0 /dev/rfcomm0
May 15 01:55:02 localhost pppd[8861]: PAP authentication succeeded
May 15 01:55:04 localhost pppd[8861]: local IP address 10.34.22.206
May 15 01:55:04 localhost pppd[8861]: remote IP address 10.6.6.6

Now check ifconfig, and you should see an entry for ppp0 and you are set. Well, it worked like that for me. 🙂

In other news, we went down to the Terrace Bar to make final plans for LUGRadio Live. Its gonna be awesome!

Well, my experiments into web services have borne fruit. I successfully managed to connect to the Amazon web services and perform a query. The code was written in PHP and I used the PEAR SOAP extension. The basic premise is that you create a WSDL client with the SOAP extension and then pass a request to Amazon. You are then returned the results in an associative array. I know I am a bit late to the ‘ol web services shenanigans, but its pretty awesome. So much potential…

I am pleased to see that my very first article on IBM developerWorks has been put online. I am quite pleased with this as I know IBM developerWorks is a quality site. I would love to do more work with the site, but my writing time is currently taken up with my second book. When the book is finished, I plan on doing some more IBM work. Speaking of writing, I have a few ideas knocking around my noggin that I am planning get written up on my O’Reilly Weblog sometime soon.

I just registered with Amazon to use their web services API. I have to confess that I have not done any web services work before, but I am quite excited by the idea of hooking into some existing sites to play with their data. I have a few ideas at the moment for what I could do, and hopefully I can grab some time this week to play with some of the code. Incidentally, this article seems to provide a pretty decent introduction to SOAP. Maybe when I have worked through this I can contribute to a SugarCRM plugin for Thunderbird. 😛

I will keep you posted.

I switched to GMail for my email today. After spending last night battling with IMAP, which was surprising as the last time I set up an IMAP server it just installed. GMail is superb and I am feeling the Google love. Not too much Google love mind you, just enough. 🙂

LUGRadio Live is still forging forward and it has been getting quite some press recently. This is great. It is going to be an awesome few days. 🙂

Having the pooch around the house has called for some clever thinking. We have been wanting to leave him outside to play while we are in the house, but felt uncomfortable, just in case he eats a badger or something. So, I have set up the dog cam:

It is a wireless camera I picked up from a computer fair that has been rather elegantly sellotaped to the window of our conservatory. This is what we see in the living room:

Today at work, we looked at some CRM bits and bobs and we are considering the move to SugarCRM from XRMS at OpenAdvantage. this means a port of the database and we are also looking into Thunderbird integration. There is a Thunderbird extension for vTiger (a fork of SugarCRM), and at a glance, the SOAP requests look fairly similar. As I hunted round the net, I then found this that looks like a port of the extension to SugarCRM, but it turns out to be a commerical version. My suspicious mind suspected this was the Open source vTiger version hacked and the license not adhered to, so I diff’ed it and there is a odd mix of similarities and differences. I don’t know enough about XUL to determine what is stub code and what isn’t though. Anyone care to offer any more thoughts on this? I am sure there are some diff junkies out there.

PHPWM seems to be kicking off and over 25 people have subscribed in a day. 🙂

Oh, and LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 15 is out. go and get it!