I am nervous. This is because I am gonna do my orange belt karate grading today. This is my second grading and it is pretty nerve wracking. Fingers crossed. 😀

I got up today and went downstairs to get some breakfast. I got on with some work as usual and then at around 1pm Sooz had some problems with some possible spyware. I took a look and it seemed to have taken the net connection down. I unplugged the cable modem and lo and behold, no connection. This was very concerning as my network is all protected by a skinhead Smoothwall box in a black bomber jacket.

I called Telewest to see if there were any service problems and the guy could ping my modem. It seemed therefore that this was a network issue. This was again concerning because surely Smoothwall could be affected by this spyware? After some tests there was a problem for sure. I could not access any sites and could not even ping IP addresses. This was no DNS issue. Bugger.

I decided after I got back from my reflexology session that I was going to need to re-install Smoothwall. I had run out of problems and was in dire need to get on the net. This whole saga seemed in many ways a blessing in disguise as I needed to upgrade to Smoothwall 2.0 to make use of some features that were not in the 1.0 version. I then plugged my laptop in directly, downloaded the ISO and unplugged it straight away afterwords. We went out this evening and when I got back I installed it. We are now finally up and running. 🙂

What was interesting is that when I got Smoothwall 2.0 up and running I could not access domains but could ping IP’s. This was a DNS issue and when I called the weary sounding dude at the end of Blueyonder technical support he gave me a stack of DNS IP addresses. I changed these and bang!, I was online with DNS support. This must mean that they are having some troubles with their nationwide DNS IP’s. I should call them and inform them of this. This would also tally up with some weirdo DNS issues earlier this week.

Jees, what a day. While doing all this I also managed to write a good chunk of a PHP forum for a chapter in my Manning book. I want to get it finished over the weekend so I can get it written up by wednesday.

Cubase SX 2.0 arrived today and wonderous it is too. It really is a superb piece of software. What makes it shine however is the Groove Agent VST plugin that I have been using with it. This plugin is simply amazing. I can’t wait for you to hear the music I am writing at the moment with it. Cubase is so clear in its sound reproduction and it is a brilliant for doing what I want to do with my music. Yes, I know its not on Linux. If it were though I would use it on there. I have looked at alternatives but there simply are none that stand up to Cubase.

Added some bits to my book today and we should be going to the 2/3 review soon for it. I look forward to that. Both books are pretty much nearing the end of the writing phase now and they are really maturing. I am looking forward to them being released.

Great LUG last night. Woke up today a bit worse for ware but felt better as the day went on. The countdown is now on for the third LUGRadio episode to be recorded over here on wednesday. The forums have exploded with activity and it is great to see people getting involved. 🙂

Oh, and I found out tonight at Karate that they want to grade me on Sunday. This should be cool. I will be going for my Orange belt. 🙂
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Got quite a lot of work done yesterday and managed to get a few things out of the door. I have a few things to get out this morning and then I am gonna spend some dedicated time on the books.

Yesterday PRO-53 arrived and tomorrow Cubase SX 2.0 should be arriving. I am looking forward to giving these a whirl and using them in future writing. They will be featuring in my What Guitar? studio series.

Yesterday I was also revisiting a lot of KDE development work. I have not done any development for a while, but I was doing some research for a new series in Linux Format and it was great going over things again. I tell you what though – documentation is far better in KDE 3.x than it was for KDE 2.x. Don’t even think about KDE 1.x docs. Ugh.

LUG meet tonight and I am sure you all know what that means. 🙂

We went to see the mighty Arch Enemy last night. Support was given by the stonking Stampin’ Ground. It was a great gig and both bands played really well, but were plagued by a dodgy sound. Lots of moshing, crowd surfing and headbanging was had. 🙂

Busy day yesterday. I wrote and submitted an article for Linux Format, and I have a few to submit today. After these are complete I am going to make some updates to the book and then I will be doing some research about Cocoa for a MacFormat series.

Speaking of MacFormat, I have had a complete nightmare recently with an article about installing Yellow Dog Linux on a Powerbook. I wrote the article fine and everything installed fine, but I then had the challenge of grabbing screenshots of the installer. Nick from Linux Format had a bit of a crufy hack to grab the shots and I gave it a go. No luck at all and I am instead in touch with Yellow Dog trying to gewt some shots from them directly. This was one of those things that you never generally think about – getting shots at such a low level of OS operation.
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I have been thinking about something recently regarding the potential of a solid, defined API. I like Qt, but Qt is only available as a graphical toolkit. If I want to write an application I will need to have a GUI interface to run my Qt program. I have been thinking how cool it would be to take the API of Qt and map it to anything else. Take for example console mode applications such as the rather impressive Motor. Many of these applications use dialog or ncurses for their interface – surely these interface components could be mapped from the Qt API. This should be theoretically quite possible in Qt due to the fact that Qt emulates the native interface by drawing the widgets. This emulation just needs to be re-mapped to the console interface.

Don’t just stop at the console though, how about a web interface? A QPushbutton could be mapped to a clickable image or actual form button. The other alternative is creating a plugin that creates a shockwave like interface for Qt authored software. You could even map Qt to XUL. The potential is great and it is indeed possible, certainly for the console (see Cursed GTK). There was a spoof Qt-Console as an april fool, but it would be great to actually see this happen.

I am shattered. We went to the Planet in Wolves last night and had a good night. Yesterday I also managed to grab a few hours to get ALSA working. It all seems to work now, but I need to figure out the specifics of the breakout box. I also looked into getting GnomeMeeting working, but I suspect my Smoothwall box will get in the way. Next is the webcam to get working with the OV511 driver. Finally, I had a band practice today.

Right, I am off to watch TV and chill out…
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It was Sooz’s birhtday yesterday and we went to Birmingham shopping. While we were there I bought a pair of huge studio monitors. They are Tannoy Active monitors and they sound cool. I needed some of these for mixing my songs better. Fingers crossed an improvement should be heard on the music and possibly LUGRadio too. To finish off, we went out last night for mucho curry. It was good. 🙂

Today we are taking it easy. I still need to set up some stuff on the studio Debian box, but we are gonna watch Commando. Classic, classic film.

It seems that the new Blender book is going to be ready soon. This is great news and I am looking forward to it arriving. Blender has made some huge improvements recently and the UI changes are pretty impressive as well as integration of Yafray support and other things.

I got a mail from Mick that POD Control is now compiling for him and it should be ready to GPL release soon. I am looking forward to getting cracking with some MIDI programming and hopefully submitting some useful patches to him. I also gave the normal Line 6 Edit a go and it runs really well. This should be interesting. 🙂
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Yes, another random and pathetic blog title. They get harder to come up with as time goes on.

My MIDISport 2×2 finally arrived today. I am hoping this is going to open up a new world of poking around with amps via MIDI. The new studio machine that this little box is attached to is pretty much set up with Debian now. The only problem is still the Belkin wireless card that has a cruftily hacked driver running it with 2.6. It is a bit of a nightmare really – run 2.6 and ponce around with the wireless get but get ALSA for free, or use 2.4 and ponce around with with ALSA but get the wireless card for free. I think I need to write ADMTek a nice email and ask for a 2.6 wireless driver update.

LUGRadio continues to rumble on and I stumbled across some rather nice comments on some blogs about it. The first was from Simon willison’s blog:

LugRadio rocks. It’s a collaboration between Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Stephen Parkes and Matthew Revell, all members of the Wolverhampton Linux User Group. They’ve just released their second episode after over 1,000 people downloaded the first one. It’s witty, laid back, saracastic and quintessentially English – in fact just listening to some genuine British banter is enough to make me a little homesick. Thoroughly recommended.

There was even a response to this blog entry saying:

Great material indeed. I’m listening to episode 1 right now. Catching half of the words (In France, English teatchers would never talk like those four fellows), but I’m really having fun ! Can’t wait the next episodes !

Cool. You got it damn right that we would not be typical english speaking fodder, particularly pride-of-the-black-country sparkes. Next, on David Johnson’s blog I saw:

Nice to hear episode two of LugRadio today, named the “Donut Driven Dialogue” – and I even got a mention. Yay! The guys have clearly put in a lot of effort and got (another) great end result. It’s a shame we have to wait two weeks for the next episode!

Cool again. 🙂 It really is great to see the show getting a good response. I think we were all a little nervous how it would come across. It will however continue to improve, particularly with the sound engineering. It is great to see new ideas in the LUGRadio forums being posted too. Bring it on.

Matt pointed me to this Newsforge article that has announced the Linux User & Developer Awards. I also noticed on the site that the Linux User Expo conference schedule is now online. All good apart from the fact that I am going after Jeremy Allison of all people! Yes, thats right. The guy who invented Samba speaks, and then I do. I am however really looking forward to being involved with both the awards and the conference though and it is only just under a couple of months away. 🙂

Yes people, LUGRadio Epidsode 2 is online and ready for download. It is 42.57mins of banter and sarcasm. Enjoy people and remember to dontate your comments and mirrors. Also check out the LUGRadio forum.

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