We went to a funeral today. These occasions are never nice, and although very sad, I think it is always important to remember the person for their days when they were happy and they made you happy. Today was filled with rememberence, and I am pleased that these are happy, inspiring memories.

When we got back from the funeral, most people were quite tired, so we stuck a film on and people slowly drifted into sleep in their chairs. I decided to stick on the laptop and try and fix up some things at this point as I was not terribly tired. I spent the next three hours battling with cron to fix some backup issues and now everything seems to be working. You know, I like cron, but its so called simplicity can turn into a nightmare very quickly.

Saw a great article today about the SCO case. This pretty much sums the entire case up, although it is obvious that the articles takes a rather pro-Linux agenda. Nonetheless, a good read it is, and I recommend giving it a few minutes, particularly if you are not too up to speed on the case. Note the rather menacing picture of McBride on the cover too. Hmmm.

Recently I have been playing with the O’Reilly Safari network and it has to be said, I am impressed. I have always loved O’Reilly books, ever since I read my first one (an Emacs book strangely enough*), and this service basically sticks them all online at my finger tips. Not only are there O’Reilly books, but there are others thrown in there too, although it seems I need to enable something else on my account to view these. This is going to be an invaluble resource.

Right, I need to do a bit of writing before I hit the sack.

*No I don’t like emacs.

Yes, jonobacon.com went away for a while today again. I am not sure why, but I think it was a problem that I have fixed on the server. We are due the upgrade soon, so you will notice a much faster site when it is up. I will let you know as soon as I do. 🙂

Got a nice suprise today when I took a look at Dick’s Diary. He made a rather flattering post which was rather nice of him. No, I did not bribe him. Cheers Dick. 🙂

I updated my About page tonight. Added some more detail about various things, and I still have some bits and bobs that I need to add to it.

I have been keeping this under wraps until now as I don’t usually like to discuss unfinished projects, but I am writing Linux Desktop Hacks for O’Reilly with Telsa Gwynne. The reason I am making this announcement is that I will soon have a blog on the O’Reilly site, and it seemed only fair to announce it first here.

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Tonight I have been doing some writing and admin work on my site. As I was perusing around asking some questions about MySQL, I met this dude in a chatroom and the subject turned to caffiene. This person told me that they drink lots of caffiene to stay awake and he/she had weened themselves down to three hours a night sleep.

This kind of thing is concerning to me. Within the free software community, caffiene seems to play a role where it is cool to take a lot, stay up late and hack your software. Sleep depravation seems close behind as a “cool” second place. This is quite frankly, complete crap and is harming the health of those who subscribe to it. Coca Cola is an evil substance with very addictive qualities. I used to drink 6 cans a night when I was in my first few years at Uni because I foolishly bought into this whole “caffiene is cool” nonsense. I drunk the coke, I bought the Jolt cola, I stayed up late and I hacked about with Linux. Yes, but I also got quite sick too.

Caffiene is addictive and as such should not be encouraged. I am certainly not one to say that people should not do this or that – each to their own, but within the free software community this is just madness. I asked this person who I was chatting to if they believed in free software. The response was unsurprisingly yes, at which point I noted that they were no use to free software if they were not around. I think this had a bit of impact and I truly hope fewer people make these mistakes.

Right, I am off to bed as it is 4.11AM and I need my 8 hours. 🙂

Hola…

Got up today to sound of Sooz’s sister Annette beckoning us to the Hungry Horse pub to eat way to much food and a bowl of hot chocolate. In the true spirit of gluttony, we accepted the kind offer and I now feel sick.

After eating a burger the size of a plate we came back home and I had the joy of seeing that this site was down. I pinged the server and got nothing back, so I txted Aq. He managed to get every site up and running apart from mine which was a bit concerning, so I looked into it. It seemed that MySQL had managed to wedgie itself and was refusing to die after I repeatedly prodded it with a stick. After manually killing each process we were back online again. How strange.

I just got back a lightly edited version of an article that I wrote for Linux Journal in Germany. This is a tutorial series showing how to use Trolltech’s Qt and should be quite interesting to write. Last night I also sent off an article about LUGs to Newsforge.

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My god I have written a lot today. It is now late, everyone is in bed and I am still going. Today seems to have involved me sat in front of a computer all day long, and most of the night. I plan on sleeping in pretty late tomorrow.

Sparkes has written a nifty RSS ebay thing. This is something I like about him – he thinks that something would be cool and just goes ahead and does it. I am gonna give it a whirl when I get some time to play with it.

Still no luck finding a MoinMoin exporter for different formats. I think I am going to have to look into writing it. The problem with this is that it will involve lots of string magic, and to be honest there will be no Yes Paul going on with my kind of string magic. I know it should be fairly straightforward to write, but I would like it to be able to export to PDF, Plain Text, LaTeX and various others fairly easily. This will involve me learning PDFLib. Hmmm.

A weird thing happened recently. Years and years back I used to run a site called the Triaxis Page. This relic was aimed at being a portal for those people who use the Mesa/Boogie Triaxis preamp. As time went by I left it and moved onto other things. It now seems that someone has brought it back to life. This is cool, but I am in the process of flogging it. I am looking to get one of these. 🙂

It seems that BSD seems to be getting quite a lot of press recently, particularly given the SCO vs Linux case rumbling on. Does this mean that more people will move over to BSD? I hope not. I have nothing against BSD as I have never really used it (well, ahem, I did use it back in the early days when I was trying to install Linux for the first time, and BSD actually installed properly), but I don’t like seeing people giving up on Linux. If you give up on Linux, SCO win mindshare. We need to battle on, secure in the mind that this mess will be sorted out at some point and that IBM, HP and various others are on our side.

I wonder where this madness will end with SCO. Am I going to be sued for writing about this illigal Linux OS that I make a living with? I suspect not as they could not make as much money from a case such as that. Instead they can go and leech of businesses with money to burn (well, money that they did not spend with SCO) and give it to…SCO.

Oh yeah. Trivia time. Many of you may watch the League Of Gentleman where the town they all live in is called Royston Vasey. Do you know where this name comes from? Roy Chubby Brown, thats who. Yes, the loud geordie comic who wonders who Alice pertains to be is actually called Royston Vasey. Now don’t tell me that you never learn anything from this site. 🙂

We (Sooz, Alan, Jaymez, Lisa and I) went to London tonight to see Dream Theater, and what a fantastic display of fretboard delight it was. Very technical music watched by people who most likely like to play very technical music on some kind of instrument. It was cool.

Right, I have a few things I recommend you all having a look at. First is ARLS (yeah, I know the site has nothing on there yet but it will have soon) – this is going to be an intelligent life simulator that will plug into Blender and create a simulated battlefield. It was inspired by Lord Of The Rings and their in house software used there. Read more about it here. While still on the subject of Blender, you should see this Superman development thread, work on Airman by Landis Fields, a nifty way to model your head and a cool driven hand rig.

Right, I need to go and get some stuff sorted out before I can sleep.

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You know, SCO piss me off. They piss me off like you would not believe. They go around shouting all their rubbish about these legal issues and those legal issues, and even before any of this is tested in court they decide to go out and charge a load of Linux users some cash for their licenses.

I was reading Dick Morrells recent post about this and it is incredibly frustrating that this is about to target the UK. FUD is enough of a bad thing, and the pondlife at SCO seems to think it is acceptable for them. If they get in touch with me for a license they can stick it.

I have managed to get on with some work today. I am trying to clear up a backlog of stuff and today I was mainly working on a Qt Article series for Trolltech and Linux Journal. It is going quite well and I surprised myself how much I did not know about the recent releases of Qt. Everyone should use Qt, and that includes you. Go and download it. 🙂

Something I am looking for at the moment is a MoinMoin wiki to PDF/LaTeX/Text converter. I considered writing one in PHP but I do not have enough time at the moment and I was thinking that someone must be writing one. Anyone know of one or do I really need to write it?

Right, I am gonna do a bit more and then get some kip. Night.

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Just added Dick Morrell’s blog to my collection. I am really getting into Blogs. You know, I used to have an Advogato diary some time ago and I used to use it for much of the KDE work I was doing at the time. It was fun and the whole concept of rating members was quite cool. As time went on though I got a little bored with it and it got left in the ether. Recently though it seems that blogs are making a bit of an impact and things such as syndication of blogs using RSS is very cool. I think it is wicked that I can have a stack of blogs in one place that I can read. I am planning on getting some of my blogs syndicated on here at some point, but I am still looking around for particularly interesting blogs for me to read. Incidentally, if you want to syndicate this very blog on your site, check out this page and add it to your site or read it in Bloglines. If you do syndicate it, don’t forget to let me know. 🙂

A chap called Herb wandered onto the forum today and suggested a great idea too create a bootable CD that will boot a Knoppix based OS that includes applications specifically aimed at charities. This could include groupware, software to manage donations and other things. I think this is a spot on idea and really hope Herb has time to flesh it out and make it a reality. I said that I would be more than happy to provide some documentation for it and do some testing. I may even get involved on the software front – I had sketched on my big list of stuff to do “learn how to master a Knoppix CD”. Not got around to it yet, but I will when I have time.

I have flogged the AIBO by the way. It is a great piece of technology, but I am trying to get some cash together to really upgrade my studio. Part of this is me selling a Mesa/Boogie Triaxis and Simul-Class 2:90 amp. These sales should bring in some money to buy a new PC, some professional studio monitors, a Line 6 Vetta II and a Yamaha DTXpress III electronic drum kit. It is gonna be cool and I can’t wait to get some of my new material recorded and released.

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I use Bloglines to read RS syndicated blogs on the net. Currently I am reading Havoc Pennington’s blog and also Aq’s. I am naturally interested in expanding my currently limited range of blogs and I was wondering what you folks suggest.

Do you have any fave blogs with RSS syndication that I could read? Any suggestions?

Tonight I went to the LUG and had a good night. I then came back home and watched some crappy horror films with Sooz. I have also been working on the site and changed the dates to a more readable format and I have also rehashed the blog archive so it looks much nicer. Go and check it out.

It seems that the free software in education document that is getting developed on forge is starting to grow. This is largely thanks to the dedication of Tom and his additions. Fingers crossed this collection of words will continue to grow and will become a truly useful resource for educational IT users. This work should also tie in with some educational things going on soon that I am working on with Aq. We still need contributions to the document, so head over to forge and get involved. 🙂

I am pretty tired now and tomorrow is going to be a long day.
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