I decided today that I am going to teach guitar. I have been thinking this for quite some time, and I used to teach people a few years back. I created an ad today and went and put it in a few music shops. Should be fun. 🙂

Tonight I did some writing, re-installed Fink, recompiled KDevelop and I am now compiling KOffice. I also played around with some SHOUTcast stuff and played with ShoutTuner a bit.

The next thing to mess around with is remote printing on the network with Samba. I have never done this before so it should be interesting. I quite like the idea of bringing together a number of these network resources into a single IT infrastructure. I think this is the point of networking – you should be able to transparently access resources.

Oh yes, I also registered on Orkut. 🙂

I have been playing with Samba and working on getting everything working smoothly in my CVS copy of KDE. This involved running the Lisa daemon, fixing some things on my servers and then accessing the files in Konqueror. All works pretty well apart from a crash in Quanta – I think this needs a recompile though. What did surprise me however was that Mac OS X seems pretty flaky when handling smb connections and took a bit of poking to refresh the network resources available. I noticed similar instability when trying to get the Powerbook to connect to a Windows computer-to-computer network a few weeks back while away. It grabbed a DHCP address but had a weird subnet mask like 255.255.0.0 or something. It was pretty strange and I am going to test it again when we are away next to note the strange subnet mask down. You can all tell me then that it is normal. 😛

Tonight I sat there with a stack of magazines that I have written for and added many of the articles I have written. This is not a complete list as many issues seem to be missing and I am still finished adding all of the articles. 87 are entered in now though and I am interested in seeing what the final total will be.

Today was supposed to be the day when I was going to build my studio PC. I got up, went to the computer fair with Craig and quickly discovered that all of the roads near the location of the computer fair were closed. Bugger. After half an hour of driving round listening to Soilwork, we went back disappointed. There is a fair on Tuesday and I will go down there to get my parts…hopefully. This should end up being quite a fast Pentium IV (I am going Intel due to problems with AMD VIA chipsets) with Serial ATA and a shedload of RAM. This is all part of my grand studio plan that I am putting into motion – I am just waiting on getting the parts through.
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Tonight I have updated the Writing section of the site to make it a little more scalable. This is my initial work on the section, and I have some more plans for it such as comments , sorting, searching and publication info. The plan now is to dig up the details of all the work that I have had published and list it in the section. This should be quite cool when it is finished.

A few days back I mentioned that I had a nice email from a chap called Tom Dierickx regarding my O’Reilly essay The hacker ethic. I was impressed with Tom’s email and asked his permission to reproduce it here. I feel that it adds some interesting points to my original thoughts written in the essay:

I really liked your blog https://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4331 alot. You've described my driving personality today as well as my start in computers at an early age quite well, except mine was a borrowed-from-a-friend Commodore Vic-20 and my BASIC program was:

In conclusion, great article and it strikes a chord with me for sure. My rambling above simply adds that such curious spirits are in a constant struggle between (a) the endles desire for "perfect progamming" (in the form of better and more open-source tools and languages) and (b) conformity to existing processes, team, others' skill levels, interests, and ambitions. If I write the best Perl or Java or PHP/MySQL system in the world but nobody else in my organization understands it, how valuable is it really? If I leave and there's nobody to maintain it? But, you create a VB or Microsoft Access app and there's a lot better odds of somebody else being able to step in off the street. But, see above, this is only because of their dominance. As ambitious developers/programmers evolve their skills, open-source continues to grow in popularity, and businesses look to trim costs, it could be a moot point. I don't know, it's an interesting dynamic and the next 12-24 months will tell a lot (i.e. the success of Micorsoft SQL Yukon, Longhorn, and Whidbey) if Microsoft is still relevant or not. In any event, I like you, enjoy figuring out how things work for myself and am not going to stand still waiting on them when there's open-source equivalents evolving faster and that are in many cases better - ahh, the endless pursuit of better, better, better...

Thanks for this Tom; inspiring comment. 🙂

UPDATE: A pointless update, but I have to get it off my chest. I cannot stand that frog on the Fimbles. Someone needs to take a stick with a nail in the end to it.
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Yes, jonobacon.com vanished for most of today it seems. I am not entirely sure what the problem was, but I think it was related to our ISP’s network. Nevermind, we are back now. 🙂

Yesterday I read and article on the BBC that seemed to accuse of the Linux community of authoring the MyDoom, despite there being any evidence. I was shocked by this level of journalism and called the BBC to complain. After having difficulty finding a suitable phone number, I called and was told to use the complaints form on the website. I refused to do this and requested to speak to someone and got put through to BBC Information. I made my complaint and I have summarised my thoughts in a ramble entitled The BBC and Linux. Go and have a read and leave your thoughts. 🙂

Went to a relexologist today and had an indian head massage among other treatment. This was not for any real reason, just to see what it is all about. Pretty impressive stuff you know, and I would recommend it for those people who use PC’s a lot. It really takes away those aches in your shoulders.
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You know, I like Groklaw. It is an example of a well run, well maintained, authoritive website. I log on at least once a day to read the latest details about the SCO case. I say details because most other news sites lack the meat. I think that their new project will be particularly useful in the case.

No Vetta II yet. The waiting game is not fun you know, particularly if you as impatient as I generally seem to be. I am pleased however that it has not arrived yet as I would be sat playing on it all day instead of working. 🙂

Matt Revell has a new blog and it seems pretty cool. He is a pretty switched on guy so it should be interesting reading his thoughts.

Nothing much else to say at the moment as I have not had much time to mess around with things due to work.
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Last night I sold my Mesa/Boogie Triaxis and Simul-Class 2:90 to a nice chap from Wales. Amazingly he used to play in a cool death metal band that I am into called Desecration. Small world. 🙂 Anyway, I stuck a stack of cash in the bank today and promptly ordered a Vetta II and FBV foot controller.

I got a nice email from a chap named Tom Dierickx who sent me some comments over regarding my essay The hacker ethic. Tom sent me some really interesting comments about how hackers work within the bounds of the Microsoft subsystem yet know that Open Source is truly viable option. He also commented on the fond memories of yesteryear where hackers played with early micro’s and developed an interest in pushing technology. Thanks for your email Tom. 🙂

Recently I have been really messing around with my desktop and I was wondering what other people’s desktops look like. To find out more I have started a thread on the Wolves LUG list to ask people to post their screenshots. I am looking forward to seeing what people have as their normal desktop. I stuck up a picture of my desktop at the moment in the Gallery.
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I compiled KDE CVS and all is looking very good. In addition to kdebase, I compiled kdevelop and the new kdewebdev module that contains Quanta. This all looks very cool. To top things off I downloaded a new icon theme and the Thin Keramik theme. It looks really nice.

KDevelop is really becoming a great piece of software. It is so feature packed that it really impressses me how much functionality is stuffed in there. I was playing around with it last night to make a QMake project and mess around with handling Qt Designer files. It seems that since I last used KDevelop that they have really refined the Interface. The only problem I had last night was taking my QMake project from my Linux box to the Powerbook and recompiling it for a Qt/Mac port. It seemed to think uic was in /bin/uic and got stuck. I checked the Makefiles and project file and it does seem that uic is sourced from $QTDIR as it should be. Weird.

Had a jam last night with Emelye and did a stack of writing afterwords. Work is going pretty well it seems. I also saw that my ugly mug has been added to my O’Reilly blog. Lucky readers. 😛

Oh yes, and Blender 2.32 has been released. It has a huge amount of changes included in the release and when I get time I will play with it.
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I went to the optician today and it seems that I need glasses. Well, this was to be expected really as I needed to wear glasses years ago and ignored the advice. My sight is not too bad, but the glasses will help. Sooz had a test and needs a some also, but hers are not required. The most expensive trip to Boots in living memory.

Last night I updated my KDE CVS copy and compiled arts and kdelibs. I am now currently compiling kdebase and it seems to be going fine. I am particularly looking forward to giving the CVS Quanta and KDevelopa peek. There also seems some interesting improvments to OpenOfice.org. to merge it into the KDE Style Guidelines. Cool.

Can you believe it, but RMS has visited the indian president. Love him or hate him, he is indeed a good speaker for free software, and things such as this can only increase awareness. I have recently been reading some of his comments in O’Reilly’s Open Sources book.

Last night I was writing my comment piece for Linux Format magazine and I thought of an interesting idea for gathering case studies of free software being used in different organisations. For more information, read this page and go and contribute your case study. This could be a great opportunity to develop a good resource.

Oh, and the first two parts of my PC Plus Blender series are online in the Writing section. When the third part is released I will let the Blender community know.

After some head scratching I managed to get Qt/Mac compiled. It turned out that the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variable that I had set was causing me problems. I reset it and it compiled fine. I now need to figure out how the application directories work in Mac OS X so I can run Qt Designer properly instead of cheating.

Lazy day today, well until about two hours ago when I started doing some writing. I have written some more hacks and done some more proofing. Things are really taking shape now and today I have been playing with WINE, NTP and other things. You know, WINE is pretty cool. Despite the fact that it has been in Alpha for years, it is an impressive project, and I can perfectly understand why it has indeed been Alpha for years. That is one hell of a technical acheivement. I plan on seeing if it can run some of my most commonly used software such as Cubase and Magix Audio Studio. Hmmm, we will see.

Oh yeah, I assume you are all aware of the fact that today was the day of reckoning for the MyDoom virus that was intending on giving SCO a bashing. I woke up today, saw the news on Slashdot and low and behold they did get a bashing. Although I do not really like the idea of DoS attacks on anyone, it does seem that SCO’s options were pretty limited. As of this time:

jono@forge:~$ host www.sco.com
Host www.sco.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
jono@forge:~$ dig www.sco.com