tonywhitmore.co.uk  

Another link that I’ve had floating around for a while, meaning to post:
http://news.com.com/Driven+to+distraction+by+technology/2100-1022_3-5797028.html

“The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.”

It’s good to see articles delving into this problem. With so many communication channels available, it is becoming harder and harder to disconnect from the rest of the world and make oneself unavailable. This holds particularly true in computing because you work at the device that is most likely to distract you. When working at a computer you have at least e-mail, IRC and instant messaging to distract you and plenty more scope for procrastination on the web. But even if you are earnestly working on a problem, doing your best to concentrate and have shut down your e-mail client and messaging programs, there are still the interruptions over which you have no control.

When trying to figure out a knotty problem, whether it’s programming, working out why a system is misbehaving or tracking down the cause of a problem, uninterrupted thought is essential. Lots of programmers talk about having to get into “the zone” in order to program quickly and produce good code. Background chatter and the telephone going off all distract me from work at times. After an interruption you can spend several minutes getting back to where you were with the problem. You’re much more likely to miss some element of the problem as well, when you’re being interrupted. Also, the attention you give to the interruption is less than 100%, because at least part of your mind will still be on the problem in hand. Multiple interruptions over a short period of time compound the problems.

So everything suffers – the speed with which you solve the problem you’re working on, the quality of the solution and the attention you give those who interrupt you. In addition to which your own stress levels and mental demands increase as you try and do everything at once. Hopefully more can be done to improve this situation for all.

This evening I found this really nice design on oswd.org. It’s a really good looking template, IMHO. I’m surprised that I don’t see OSWD mentioned in more places in the FLOSS community. It’s a site full of web design templates that users can modify and use to their own ends. A lot of the designs aren’t that impressive so browsing the site is something of a lucky dip, but there are some very effective templates on the site and it’s definitely worth digging around in. If nothing else the templates can give you some new ideas and directions when tackling the redesign of a site. The design for my website was originally on OSWD, although I did hack it around a fair bit to make it behave in the way I wanted.

Whilst killing time on Wikipedia today, I found the entry for Lancaster, where I took my degree. That led me to the website for the Duke’s Theatre in Lancaster, where I worked on an open-air production and did the get-ins for several plays. I found the archive page and was looking through the photos of the productions on which I had worked, remembering the good time I had with Brent, Johnny, Jono, Marie, Gaz et al. Looking over the photos for Burn This, a play for which I worked the get-in for back in 2002, I thought I’d seen the actress playing Anna in something more recently. When I saw this photo I knew I recognised her.

I’ve been watching and enjoying Extras over the past few weeks. All through the series I thought there was something familiar the character of Maggie. However, all the publicity I’d heard about the show said that she was an “unknown” actress prior to being cast, so I assumed that I was confusing her with someone else. But I now know why she seemed so familiar – she played Anna in Burn This all those years ago. I remember the play pretty well now, prompted by the photos, and I really enjoyed it. It was a moody play with a bit of sex and violence thrown in for good measure. Set in the states (New York, IIRC) all the cast did great jobs with the accents. The studio (or Dukes Theatre Two as they seem to be calling it these days) is a great venue for creating a really intimate atmosphere, you can sense the tension between characters, something that really paid off in this production.

So, I’ll be settling down to watch the last episode of Extras tonight, without worrying why Maggie looks so familiar.

I have written a Rattle-throw generator. The classic rattle is is something that Andy Smith (aka grifferz) from lug.org.uk often puts in e-mails to the LUG when someone has had a tantrum and stormed off. So I decided (probably with subliminal prompting from Alan Pope who had the same idea) to write a rattle-throw generator in PHP. It features a cool animated version of the rattle throw and allows specification of names either in the URL or via a form.

Thanks to Hugo Mills and Lizard’s tutorial on ASCII animations for the javascript. Hugo has suggested I set up rattle.tonywhitmore.co.uk, so I’ll look into that.

I’ve decided to let my Hotmail account lapse. I’ve had this account for about 6 years, and have lived through many revisions of the webmail interface. However, these days I hardly ever check it. All my important e-mail comes to accounts through this domain. It’s been a couple of months since I logged into Hotmail before today. The only mail that comes to it is junk or circular e-mails from companies. Occasionally there is another e-mail relating to Core Linux or View Askew – it was still given as the contact e-mail address for my website. I have now changed that (and introduced some nice javascript from Automaticlabs.com to obscure the new address from harvesters.

I really just don’t feel the need for a Hotmail account any more. One of the nice things about having your own domain is that you can do anything you like with your e-mail structure, including providing your own webmail service. Hotmail give me 250MB storage – I can offer myself nearly 40GB. The only other reason for me to have a Hotmail account is to use MSN Messenger (or rather, Gaim on Linux) to talk to people online. However, that’s what IRC is for. I hardly ever log in to Messenger anyway and when I do there is no-one online who I can’t speak to via IRC.

Apparently you can’t just shut a Hotmail acount so I will have to let it timeout.

It looks like Wolves LUG are thinking about redesigning their website to make it easier to maintain and update, along with re-vitalising their meetings.

There have been suggestions for various CMSs for their site, along with tighter integration with their wiki. I’m going to come out and say it – I love our wiki. I’m really proud of it too. At HantsLUG we moved from a frankly undermaintained static site to a wiki in March 2004, having run the wiki side-by-side with the static site for about a year first. Right from the start LUG members really got behind the wiki, which was hosted on the end of my ADSL line. Within a few months, we had notes from meetings and technical content generated out of discussions on the Mailing List. The wiki became a place for collating opinions and reviews of ISPs, software and the like. Before long an effective structure for the site had evolved. The homepage has links to all the most important stuff and has information about the latest meeting. The other content is divided into “stuff about the LUG”, “stuff about Linux”, “stuff about hampshire” and “stuff about the wiki”. The first two sections have the most content and have evolved to help us manage all aspects of running the LUG.

Some of the content isn’t terribly original but it’s important because it represents the opinions and experiences of people who are likely to be working in the same field and have the same expectations. Everything that is on the wiki has been considered worth documenting by the person who created the page. Once done, that page is then offered up for the world to reference. Because of the ease of editing wikis (OK, there are a few basic syntax commands to learn on the wiki we use) it encourages editing through minimal effort. (Unlike having to edit some HTML or PHP, save the file, upload it via FTP or SCP…)

Only today we’ve had a discusion on small-scale hosting in the UK, which then branched to small-scale hosting abroad, which then followed on to questions about how backup DNS and MX servers work, and then into a debate about the usefulness of backup MX servers. The comments coming out seemed useful and could be difficult to find in the archives in a few months time when the issue crops up again. So I created a new page on the wiki and summarised the thread on it. It took about ten minutes, and most of that was copying and pasting to get the formatting right. Whilst I was doing that, another member got busy and wrote a page giving a brief overview of DNS, umprompted but in response to that same thread. Now that the pages have been created, other people can add and amend comments about the hosting companies they are familiar with, and can help expand the article on DNS too.

Although we have over 50 people who have created a personal page on the wiki, We have about half a dozen active members who admin it. They check changes made for formatting, spelling and spam. Monitoring the wiki is made much easier by the RSS feed. This usually means that changes are checked out within an hour, often less. Any graffiti content is removed quickly. (We don’t get much thanks to some patches to UseMod written by LUG members.)

We have only a handful of pages on the wiki that can’t be edited by anyone. The front page is locked to protect it against spam. (The front page is not only targetted more than the other pages, but because it is the first page new visitors to the site would see, we want it to be presentable at all times. Also, the existing structure of the wiki allows members to create pages at appropriate places elsewhere in the site.) The finance and election pages are locked to prevent people altering the data. If we really felt it necessary, we could make these static HTML pages and link to them, but it’s so easy for the authorised people to edit, set up tables etc. that we haven’t.

The openness of a wiki and the ease which it can be altered has enabled us to respond more rapidly to points raised by newbies or non-members. People mention at meetings that they read about something on the wiki and it solved their problem or post to the mailing list saying that they’ve looked at the wiki and can’t find anything about a particular subject. (This usually results in the creation of a new page within a couple of hours.)

I’m not suggesting that Wolves LUG should do what we have done and replace their site with their wiki. But it’s certainly worth thinking about whether the duplication of effort and management in running effectively two CMSs on different servers it worth it when a powerful, flexible and easy-to-use solution is already to hand.

I’ve had this screenshot kicking around for some time, just never got round to posting it.

From my ISP:

Great news! Your broadband account speed has been successfully upgraded for free, at no extra cost per month.

Your new speed is: 1Mb

Simply reset your broadband modem/router to activate your new 1Mb service.

OK, so this was several months after the work was supposed to have started (May) and several months since we last had news on the project (May), doesn’t reflect the service status for the exchange and is only half the speed I could have expected (distance from the exchange) but it’s better than a kick in the teeth.

Also the last episode in Season 2 of LUGRadio is out.

It’s been an unusually quiet and relaxed weekend, but I’ve still been busy with some computer things. Planet HantsLUG went live this weekend, partly inspired by the Planet installations used by other LUGs and community projects like LUGRadio and partly by the recent talk on blogs and blogging given at a recent HantsLUG meeting. The blogs are not necessarily tech blogs (although I’m guessing there will be a fair amount of Linux related content) so I hope this will be another way for newbies and established members alike to get to know the HantsLUG community better. There are only 5 people with blogs being syndicated by Planet HantsLUG so far (including this one!), but hopefully those with existing blogs with RSS feeds will pipe up over the next few days. Who knows, some people may even be inspired to set up their own blog as a result!

I’ve also been getting the backup of the webserver working properly again, since the recent reinstall. Obviously root access via SSH is disabled on the webserver, but the backup needs to be run as root. The backup is an rsync to the file server on the network. There’s a page on SSH without passwords on the HantsLUG wiki which includes a link to this page detailing setting up SSH keys for single commands. Combined with the “forced-commands-only” option in sshd_config, along with a “from” statement in the SSH key on the webserver, this permits root logins from my LAN only for a particular command. The only thing that confused me for a bit (apart from the americanised spelling of “authorized_keys”) was the command that is run on the remote system during an rsync. Thankfully Google turned up this cached page which suggests a checking script as the target command for the SSH key:

#!/bin/sh

case “$SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND” in
*&*)
echo “Rejected”
;;
*(*)
echo “Rejected”
;;
*{*)
echo “Rejected”
;;
*;*)
echo “Rejected”
;;
*
echo “Rejected”
;;
*`*)
echo “Rejected”
;;
rsync –server*)
$SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND
;;
*)
echo “Rejected”
;;
esac

This seemed to do the trick, and the backup now seems to be running OK.

In other news, I purchased a new central locking remote for the car this week, the existing one only working very intermittently now. (A common occurance it seems for remotes of this age.) This set me back about £35. I asked the guy from the Vauxhall spares desk where I purchased it if it needed to be set up for use with the car, and was told that I just needed to follow the instructions in the car manual. When I tried to do this later that day, surprise, surprise, it didn’t work. Some lengthy searching on the ‘net didn’t turn up anything definite, but most of the posts seemed to agree that new remotes need their identifier entering in the vehicle before they can be synchronised (which is the procedure that the manual details). So, I headed back to the dealership and explained what I had been told the day before and that this wasn’t working. The guy went off to ask some other people and came back with the answer that, yes, it needed to be set up for use with the car. He then just looked blankly at me. I asked if this could be done. He said that they were just parts, and this was a service problem. I pointed to the other desk in the lobby and asked if they could do it. He said no, they were MasterFit, not service. Fortunately the guy at the desk overheard and said that they might be able to do it for me, and asked various questions about the car. After a couple of minutes with their car computer handset thing and £25 lighter, I had a working remote. The Master Fit guys were very helpful, if a little on the pricey side for the time it took them, but I’m still annoyed at a) being given incorrect information by the parts desk even though I specifically asked them whether it needed setting up to talk to the car and b) not getting an apology for this duff information and my wasted time.

Well, I’ve had a busy few weeks and haven’t had the time to update this blog much.

The car’s back on the road, complete with a new (well, reconditioned) cylinder head. I’ve had a significant part of the exhaust replaced today too, but there are still a few things that need attending to in order to make it reliable enough for long journeys again.

I’ve been working on the Meeja Box quite a bit, and have it all basically working. Lots of polishing and tweaking to do, but that’s more difficult to do as I’m actually trying to use the thing now!

We had a good LUG meeting on Saturday. A little quieter than usual, only just over 30 people came. But it is August, so that’s understandable. Luckily the AGM was quorate and for my sins I was relected as Chairman. It’s been a good year for HantsLUG, hopefully the next will bring some interesting things too.