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August 30, 2004

Wouldn't it be funny...

Wouldn't it be funny, nay absolutely hilarious, if the day Google took GMail out of beta, they deleted all the "testing" accounts?

Well, that or made it a pay-for service, and locked existing accounts until people paid up. :)

[Late note: on the subject of GMail, I still have a spare invite, if anybody desperately wants one. I'm trying to save my last one for someone who actually wants the account, rather than just wanting to get their name reserved or something, though...]

Posted by James at 19:57 | Comments (0)
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It's always something

That's it. I'm done. Linux isn't yet ready for the desktop. Sorry to have misled those people I've advocated it to in the past.

The problem isn't with Linux, though; it's with the hardware manufacturers, and with simple economics. See, if I'm a hardware manufacturer, and I make a graphics card or wireless network card and release Windows drivers for it, the vast bulk of the people who would buy my product will be able to use it - for the amount of extra work, and support headaches, there's no reason for me to produce a Linux driver as well. So the production of Linux drivers is left to those happy hackers who want to produce stuff like that in their free time — and that's great, if you happen to have the same hardware as them. I suspect none of what I'm saying here really comes as news to any of you.

For three years now, on and off, I've been dabbling with Linux on the desktop, and at no point in those three years have I had a satisfactory setup, where all my hardware in a given machine worked happily. Now admittedly this was partly my fault, for buying stupid things like a PCMCIA DVD drive / CD writer, or a USB soundcard (actually, this worked amazingly well) but there was always something. Just recently, I decided to solve this: I'd set up a nice new desktop system for myself, with nice mundane hardware, and I'd check the linux compatibility of everything I used. And it works great, from the Nvidia GeForce FX graphics card, through the RTL-8139 NIC, and even my Microsoft Natural Keyboard. And then I bought a wireless card.

Now, I toddled over to Prism54.org and checked out their list of supported cards, and found a shop selling one of the best supported PCI cards they listed — an SMC2802W. Excellent. Or rather, not excellent, because I later discovered that SMC sell 2 identically branded models of this card, and only the former is supported. No prizes, then, for guessing which card I ended up with. (I've now put photos of the packaging online, and will offer a small prize to anyone who can spot anything on there saying "version 2"....)

So that's it. I'm quitting, for a while at least. WinXP is getting vaguely comfortable, and I can run most stuff on remote Linux boxes, without the worries of trying to get desktop hardware working. Maybe as more people take up Linux and get annoyed with manufacturers for not producing drivers, things will get better, but I'm not holding my breath.

(Incidentally, I half expect lots of comments on the lines of "But it works fine for me...." so I'm going to answer them in advance: that's great. Lucky you. But I reckon I'm not entirely clueless, and if I can't get it to work, lots of other people probably can't either.)

Incidentally, any suggestions as to how I might get this wireless card working under Linux would probably be appreciated; I might yet even change my mind as long as everything else keeps working.... ;)

Posted by James at 17:21 | Comments (3)
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August 28, 2004

Link Splurge: The Return

So it's been a while since I posted an entry longer than about 3 lines — I'm not sure why, really. Maybe I've just not had anything to say (but then since when did that stop me?), or something. Who care^Wknows? Anyway, here's what I've been looking at on the web lately.

Finally, I may as well mention that I've made a few changes to the sidebar which, since you're probably reading this in an aggregator, you won't see anyway. But I think it's an improvement.

Posted by James at 23:30 | Comments (2)
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Less popular than gravitation

Wordcount says that "jimbo" is the forty one thousand, two hundred and fourteenth most popular word in the English language. I'm just behind gravitation, but ahead of notionally.

Blog is, apparently, not currently in the archive.

Posted by James at 22:42 | Comments (0)
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August 22, 2004

On the importance of hyphens

One day this week, at work, one of my coworkers needed someone to sign a document. Only, see, they went and signed the wrong bit of it, or signed the wrong copy, or... well, you get the idea. No problem, though, my coworker (who shall remain completely anonymous) took the document back, and left it on the person's desk with a little note, asking them to sign it again:

"Please resign."

Posted by James at 00:57 | Comments (0)
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August 21, 2004

New toy

Some weeks ago now, I bought a shiny new toy - a Canon PowerShot A80. It's ace, but I hadn't really got round to taking it out to get some photos, or to setting up some kind of online-presence for my photos.

This has now been corrected, so my photos are now online, courtesy of FotoPic. Not that there's a lot there yet, but hey.

Posted by James at 14:36 | Comments (0)
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August 15, 2004

Olympic Fever, Baby!

So apparently there are some people in Athens playing games and stuff. Sounds like fun. I feel like I ought to care more, but somehow I just can't bring myself to — I mean, I didn't even watch the opening ceremony this time round, and normally I manage to stay interested at least that long.

No, instead I've been more interested in the bizarre policies concocted by the powers that be. For instance, the bizarre list of restricted items and activities, which includes cigarette lighters, large amounts of coins (so best not get change when you buy anything...) and food without "proven medical reasons" — presumably it has yet to be tested whether the risk of starving to death counts as a proven medical reason. Also on the list is smoking (cool, but a little surprising) and, well, pretty much everything anyone might ever do. No wonder we're seeing empty seats.

Oh, and "items [...] with distinctive trademarks of companies that are competitive to those of the sponsors" — presumably it's expected that spectators will have a full list of all sponsors, and a good understanding of the industries within each of them operate, or something.

Better still, though, is the policy on hyperlinking to the Athens2004.com site, which I'll be interested to see ever tested in a court. For those who can't be bothered looking, it explicitly forbids linking to the site (like I've just done, oops) without requesting permission from the Athens 2004 "Internet Department". And heaven forbid you should want to use one of the fine logos they provide...

For those who care more about the results than I, there's a Medal Table on the BBC Sport website that you don't need permission just to link to :-)

Posted by James at 21:38 | Comments (0)
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August 11, 2004

In the Olds this week...

In the news this week, we saw an accident at a nuclear plant in Japan. In the news a few weeks ago, we didn't see an accident in a coal mine in China. Obviously just an isolated incident though, because clearly coal power is far safer than nukular.

In other news, man buys lottery ticket, wins prize — must be a slow day in tabloid land...

Posted by James at 17:44 | Comments (7)
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August 10, 2004

Losing the thread

So I've been thinking about comment spam some more, and getting steadily more fed up with it. So much so, that I've enabled MT-blacklist as a spam blocker, as well as as a cleanup tool. The downsides to this, which I feel I ought to mention, are twofold:

  1. Replies to comments will no longer thread properly, they'll just appear as "root" comments. The subject element in the form should still pick up the subject of the previous comment, though, so all is not entirely lost...
  2. It's possible your comments might get rejected by the filter. Don't take it personally, just try taking out any dodgy looking URLs and posting again, or something. I'm sure I'm sorry for the inconvenience really, but it's far less than the inconvenience to me of having to close posts for commenting after a few weeks, or else spend my evenings deleting dozens of spammish comments.

Alas, once again I find myself with nothing more interesting to say. Ho hum...

Posted by James at 23:17 | Comments (3)
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August 02, 2004

Please, don't pick me...

It seems Will Young's new music videos are going to be inflicted on a very select group of unfortunate mobile phone users. Poor souls.

(Get the full story from BBC News Online)

Posted by James at 00:22 | Comments (0)
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