rodneys mi7 community feed

computing humor

rodney — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:10:46 GMT

Quotes of the day:

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. ...The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)

Now you're thinking "oh God, another Linux zealot going off about Windows"... until you see who wrote it: Bill Gates. Full story at Gizmodo Note: this is actually an old story about Windows XP. Vista, as we all know by now, is even worse.

Symbian is Free Software

rodney — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:07:47 GMT

News just in is that Nokia have bought up Symbian, and intend to release it as Free Software (under the Eclipse Public License) as of today. As far as I'm aware Symbian is currently the most widely used Operating System in the world - there were 100 million phones running Symbian in 2006 - so this means that as of this moment Free Software is now more widely used than proprietary software. That's a pretty significant shift in the way of things, especially considering Symbian own 67% of the smartphone market, with Windows Mobile holding only 13%...

Real World stuff

rodney — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:42:03 GMT

Oh, forgot to mention in the last post: I've been spending some time recently talking with The Cedars, winners of the MI7 Real World contest. Looks like the plan is for me to produce the session at Real World Studios sometime next month, if all goes well. I'm very much looking forward to it, they are a great band, and I think we could create some damn fine tracks there. Let's see...

back from being a hermit

rodney — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:36:40 GMT

I haven't been posting much in the past couple of months, mainly because I've been taking time to work on a new book and get some personal business stuff out of the way.

Things are looking interesting though... we've been approached about a new record deal, and asked to play some more festivals at the end of the year / beginning of next year. So the plan is to spend as much time as possible in the studio over the next few months and finally finish off all of the things that have been sitting on the hard drive for ages in a half-finished state.

So someday soon I might even get round to putting some new songs on the music player! :-)

looking for the mouse

rodney — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:37:51 GMT

Very possibly the best article ever written about blogging, MMOs, and the participatory culture of the Internet: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

April is the cruellest month

rodney — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:46:06 GMT

Well, April is nearly over now, and I can't wait to see the back of it. It's been a horrible month. My home office got burgled twice - and the second time while I was still at home! I lost a ton of my gear, computers, phones, passport, credit cards etc.

Luckily all my data was backed up and I'm slowly getting back to normal, but it's taken some time. So if you've been trying to get hold of me and didn't get an answer, now you know why...

back in the studio

rodney — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:31:51 GMT

Been up in Manchester at the studio last couple of days, and it's been fun so far. Managed to recreate the lost backing track of a fabulous Cassandra Complex song that we've never been able to play live before, so I think we'll be premiering that at the Bath gig on Friday. Also I think we may have finalised work on a cover song that we'll be playing there too. So far everything sounds fantastic... let's see what the gig itself brings...

linux starting to hit the mainstream

rodney — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 11:34:57 GMT

Seems like the market for low-cost Linux-based laptops is just a teeny bit bigger than was previously thought:

Since its launch in October 2007, Eee PCs have shipped more than 1 million units, as of the end of March, and Asustek is optimistic that it will reach its goal of shipping 5 million units of the low-cost notebooks in 2008, the sources said.

That's pretty staggering. I think the discussion of "Is Linux ready for the average user?" is pretty much over now. It's still not trivial to install Linux on machines that weren't originally designed for it, but actually using it is not an issue any more in the great majority of cases.

The Cassandra Complex in Bath

rodney — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:02:36 GMT

For any UK members in the South West, we're playing in Bath next Friday...

the robots are on the way...

rodney — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:36:23 GMT

I think we just took another step closer to SkyNet:

Open source 3D printer copies itself

Seriously though, this is really quite remarkable.

Climate target is not radical enough - study

rodney — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:25:36 GMT

Nasa scientist warns the world must urgently make huge CO2 reductions

One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.

In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.

More at The Guardian. It's pretty scary.

EeePC

rodney — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:14:37 GMT

Spent much of the past couple of days playing with my girlfirend's new EeePC 701. It's a wonderful device, a typically solid, well thought out Asus design. And it's so small! Though admittedly that just makes it look exactly the right size when I see it perched on her lap, since she's a teeny speck herself.

The screen is super small too, but very clear, so the fact that it's only 800x480 isn't too big a problem. And you can connect an external monitor and get more screen space that way, which is nice. It's also incredibly light, which is great, since I'm getting increasingly tired of lugging huge laptops around. There's no Hard Drive, instead using a 4GB Solid State Drive, so you can shake it around as much as you want without fear of problems. Very nice in a portable device.

The Xandros Linux OS is almost brilliant, though it has a couple of very annoying niggles:

When you update the installed software, there's a bug that makes the icons for some programs disappear, thus making it near-impossible to run them
The Xandros software repositiories don't have some very common and necessary Linux programs in them (e.g. GIMP, GnuCash), so installing them means adding new non-Asus repositories, and possibly ending up in dependency hell. Yes, this has happened to me already - I'll probably have to wipe everything I've installed and start again from scratch later this week. Ho hum.

So basically if you want to use it as a real computer, rather than just a Web and media appliance, that means installing another version of Linux. And without a DVD drive, that looks like a bit of a bitch. So I reckon getting an external USB DVD drive is the way to go, then putting Xubuntu on it. Or maybe Mandriva, since the new version of that is specifically tuned for the EeePC.

Would I recommend it? Right now, probably not for most people, unless you spend a lot of time walking, or on trains and planes, and/or are a Linux geek. However once Asus fix the OS bugs, and the whole thing generally gets a little more mature, it'll be a killer A1 purchase.

There's a new version coming in a few months, the EeePC 900, with a bigger screen, bigger Solid State Drive, and also available with Windows XP. Might be a useful box for portable music applications, like DJing...

bork bork bork

rodney — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:51:46 GMT

My Swedish-English translation software just produced this wonderful exhortation:

Barley your matrix!

That's a real translation of some business term. Don't ask me what, if I knew the answer I wouldn't need translation software... I will try to keep that advice in mind for the rest of today though.

Frankfurt Musikmesse

rodney — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:47:41 GMT

Haven't had time to update much in the last week since I was busy doing presentations at the Frankfurt Musickmesse for Steinberg. Lots of detail coming when I get a moment to relax, but for now, here's a link to some video of me on the stage showing the amazing new Steinberg hardware units...

new video

rodney — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:33:15 GMT

I've just posted a new video clip to my profile - check it out!