Dean Sas's Weblog

Married

// November 20th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

At 3pm on the seventh of October I married the gullible gorgeous Sara-Kate Smith at Ringwood Hall, Chesterfield.

The whole day was just amazing, so many of our friends and family all came to share in our day. We had a “small” (40 people) wedding and I still feel bad that I didn’t spend enough time with everyone. How those people that have a hundred guests or more cope I don’t know.

The whole day was just amazing, I’m still savouring the experience, looking through photos, mentally replaying moments and talking about it. The eager anticipation building inside me all morning, the inevitable last minute panics, the first sight of Sara walking up the aisle, being cheered by our family & friends, the emotions in the room during the speeches and the really bad dancing.

A couple of days later we flew off to Barcelona for our honeymoon, more of which later. In the meantime I’d just like to say thank you again to our guests and we hope that you enjoyed the day, we certainly did!

Photography by Lloyd Bunting

Kindle

// September 5th, 2010 // 10 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

It was my birthday on Monday, and on Friday I finally received my present, Sara, Lemon and my parents had bought me, a Kindle 3G. I’ve been using it for a few hours (finished reading Bram Stokers’ Dracula this morning) and I’m pretty impressed. I’ve not had or even played with an ebook reader before.

The stand out thing is the screen, it just doesn’t look real, more like those fake screens that are sometimes on display handsets in mobile phone shops. I have sat and tried to read an ebook at my computer before, staring at a bright light at an uncomfortable desk or contorting my self trying to lay down and read from a laptop gave me both neck ache and made my eyes not feel quite right. In contrast I have quite happily sat and read on the Kindle for hours, just as I could a paper book. The display isn’t lit, the contrast is perfect, it works by some kind of magic.

So far I’ve preferred holding the Kindle in two hands in landscape mode to read, one hand to hold and another to keep pushing the next page button. It seems very comfortable and not too heavy. I usually read whilst laying down alternating between laying the book down and holding it with one and to read the opposite page. The Kindle supports this posture very well too, though you don’t need to keep moving to read the opposite page or struggling to keep the book whilst holding it down with one hand.

The shop integration works well, it’s pretty fast over wifi or if you’re somewhere with a decent 3g signal. You have the usual “amazon reccomends” and bestsellers lists, as well as being able to drill-down through hundreds of thousands of books sorted by genre. Once you’ve found a book you like you click buy and it’s downloaded and ready to read within seconds. Instant gratification. I’ve downloaded several free out of copyright books through it, to buy books you have to set-up a card for one-click ordering, I imagine it may prove expensive! Combined with Project Gutenbug this may prove the beginning of the end for penguin classics.

Another big reason for getting the Kindle is the free 3g access and the built in web browser, which is surprisingly capable, it does javascript and cookies but not java or flash. Even javascript heavy pages such as Facebook loads and seems to work reasonably well. Gmail fails to work at all though with a message saying “Web Browser is unable to display this web page”, which is a shame as that could have been handy in a pinch. The web browser is mainly intended for reading text heavy pages such as wikipedia. The browser’s article mode tries to reflow the main page text and hide the frills to make it more book-like to read, this works really well for wikipedia,. In some ways reading specific articles on wikipedia using the Kindle article mode is more pleasurable than using my desktop, the browser is not best suited for those rambling wikipedia browses where you end up with dozens of tabs open though.

XKCD is right, the browser and wikipedia does turn it into the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy. It’s a slight shame the text to speech function doesn’t work on the web just to round the effect off.

I think the kindle is going to change my life in a few ways, I’ll probably read more now I can read project gutenburg books in a sane way. To Sara’s happiness, the big cupboard full of books will probably stop expanding. Also to Sara’s happiness, our suitcases won’t be full of books whenever we go on holiday, I’m not one to spend a whole week sat at the side of a pool reading for a whole week but I usually finish two or three books while in the airport and flying as well as the time I spend reading during any downtime.

[Update]
One downside is the way books are organised, currently they are organised by collections (tags), however you have to enter all of this metadata yourself, and enter it on the Kindle. It would be nice if Amazon marked-up their ebooks into collections, so downloading “Rendezvous with Rama” straight to the kindle would automatically create and ‘fiction’ and ‘scifi’ collections and add the book into them. Also for ebooks I transfer over usb to use the directory name for the collections it should be in. So NonFiction/Travel/foo would be in the NonFiction and Travel collections.

It would also be nice to have a ‘read’ and ‘unread’ collection that the Kindle populated automatically.

Crackful thinking: multiple monitors and auto focus

// August 15th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

I don’t very often use multiple monitors, but when I do it always takes a while for my head to come to terms with how focus works. I’ll do something in a window on one monitor and then look at the other monitor and start typing before realising that the window in the first monitor still has focus.

It would be a cool hack if my head could be tracked to figure out which monitor I’m looking at and focus the last active window displayed on it.

I have a webcam integrated into the display of my laptop and the Monitors tool knows where my screens physically are, so some of the parts would be.

I don’t know what you’d do in the case that a window is displayed on both screens at once and it would be annoying in the case that you want to type into a window on monitor 2 whilst looking at monitor 1.

Then and now

// April 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

Following the meme currently running on Planet Ubuntu here is one of my first linux desktops (the oldest screenshot I have). The install was set-up in 2002 I think. Mandrake 8.2 using the fluxbox window manager. It didn’t get used an awful lot as I could never get my ISDN modem working.

Today I run a close to stock Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid install. There’s not much to see on this screenshot, I use desktop_as_home_dir for quick access to my files (who cares if the desktop is “clean” I don’t stare at it, I use it).

In eight years the linux desktop has gone from hobbyist to viable competitor.

See Jono, Jonathan, Michael and Leandros take on this.

First impressions of gnome-shell

// September 24th, 2009 // 48 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

GNOME Shell is the proposed interface for Gnome 3, it replaces the window manager, the panels at the top and bottom of the screen and everything that sits on them. It’s in the repositories for Karmic, install gnome-shell and then run gnome-shell –replace to give it a try. You should note that it’s still under heavy development and isn’t finished, or completely designed yet.

I’ve not used it much at all and it does feel quite weird so far but it makes a refreshing change and definitely looks nicer. As it’s still very much a work in progress I’m sure it’s only going to get better. That said there are some downsides.

One of the main changes to my mind is that it does not have a window list on a panel. You switch applications by visiting the Activity “overlay” and then clicking on the window you wish to switch to. This doesn’t really affect me much in practise, I usually use alt+tab to switch windows anyway, where it does affect me is for applications that change the window title, e.g. messenger or gmail, I now have to cycle through alt+tab to check for people replying to me etc.

Rather than a window list the panel now lists the name of the currently focused application. It seems a bit useless, most applications have the application name as part of the window list and I’m not likely to forget the name of an application I’ve started.

As I’ve said gnome-shell replaces the current panels and everything on them (well except the notification area). This includes application launchers, it’s now quite a bit slower to open a terminal every time I need one. Hopefully this just needs some performance work to fix though. Previously I swung my mouse to the top of the screen and one mouse click. I now need to hit the windows key to bring the Activities Overlay up, wait a second and then type “term” and hit enter. It’s given me the impetus to make the apps I manually start via launchers on 90% of logins to auto-start.

The clock has regressed, it now no longer displays the date, or has it accessible at all and doesn’t have a calendar. I’m not sure how much of that is down to design or just a lack of time. It’s worth noting the storm in a teacupt when there was a proposal to change the Ubuntu configuration to not include the date.

There is also a sidebar which is turned off by default, apparently this is still very young and indeed it looks it. You can enable it by clicking on your name in the top right corner and checking Sidebar. By default it shows another, different, clock, some application launchers and recent documents. The application launchers as in the activity overlay seem to be hard-coded to open office and evolution, two apps I never use. I assume eventually they will be replaced with the most frequently used apps or be made configurable.

I’m quite conservative with my desktop usually, I like the default Ubuntu configuration and know it well. That said I’m enjoying using gnome-shell and intend to use it for a while at least. I’m looking forward to it evolving, including new concepts and growing more popular. The negatives I’ve noticed I think are mostly down to lack of time. I’m not sure if it’s going to be “ready” for the targeted date of next March and am not sure that it should be – there’s plenty more to prototype.

Added screen shots:

Student loans cost increase

// May 20th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

The Student Loans Company have just announced that they are to increase the real cost of post 1998 student loans.

Student loans are supposed to be linked to the lower of the retail prices index (RPI, a measure of inflation) and the Bank of England base interest rate +1%. The idea being that inflation does not erode the cost of the loan and so you pay back in real terms exactly what you borrowed. Thus the only cost to the government for the loan facility which encourages thousands of young people into higher education, is that of administration and of opportunity cost, and over the life term of the loan there is effectively no cost to students.

Unexpectedly, since this system came into place we’ve had a bit of a recession and now the RPI is at -0.4%. The government has decided to lower the student loan interest rate to 0%, which is 0.4% higher than the cost of living, meaning that students are now paying more for their loan than they have borrowed. This isn’t lots of money, about £40-£50 per year but government forecasts expect RPI to hit -3% by the end of the year, which is more like £300-£400 extra per year. This breaks the understanding that I think many of us had when taking out the loans.

If you feel strongly about this then please sign the petition or better yet, write to your MP. You can use my letter to Paul Holmes as an idea of what to write but please do not copy it word for word – MPs get that many copy and pasted identical letters that they don’t tend to pay them much attention.

Dear Paul Holmes,

I’m writing to you about the recent decision to lower the interest rate
of post 1998 student loans to 0% between 1st September 2009 and 31st
August 2010.

As you may know, student loans are linked to the lower of the Retail
Price Index (RPI) and Bank of England base rate plus one percent. The
aim of this arrangement was to keep student loans in-line with the cost
of living so that students will payback the same as they loaned in real
terms.

With recent figures showing that RPI is -0.4% and the government
setting student loans at 0% interest, students are now paying back more
than they loaned in real terms. It is only a small amount but the
forecast in the last Budget was for RPI to fall to -3%, which would
then cost students and graduates hundreds of pounds each year.

Given your record of voting against top-up fees I hope that you will do
what you can to oppose this.

Yours sincerely,
Dean Sas

Ubuntu One

// May 14th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

Dave wrote

The fact of the matter is there are proprietary drives in Ubuntu and you choose whether to use them or not, why should this service be any different?

I think the difference is that this is proprietary software (or at least the back end is) that is branded as Ubuntu. Personally I don’t have any problem with Canonical making money from this commercial service, just as I don’t have a problem with them selling Ubuntu t-shirts and mugs. My annoyance is Canonical using the Ubuntu branding to market a closed source program, when closed source programs are against the Ubuntu philosophy

At the core of the Ubuntu Philosophy are these core philosophical ideals:
1. Every computer user should have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees.
Our philosophy is reflected in the software we produce and included in our distribution. As a result, the licensing terms of the software we distribute are measured against our philosophy, using the Ubuntu License Policy.
….
we are working to ensure that every single piece of software you need is available under a license that gives you those freedoms.