Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Sudoku is a puzzle game consisting of a grid partially filled with numbers. The presence of a number in a particular square may tell you that in some other squares certain numbers cannot be placed, or that in some other squares certain numbers must be placed. You can then deduce how to fill all the squares on the grid.

The Debian package management system may tell you that if a particular software package is to be installed on your system, certain other software packages cannot be installed on the same system, or that other packages are required to be installed on your system.

Obvious next step - if you're insane - work out how to express a Sudoku puzzle as a set of Debian packages, and let the package management system solve the puzzle for you.

For those who have been missing professional free-software-friendly hardware and support for home users (business users have OzEtek) since David Chapman and OpenPC Labs left town, your long wait is finally over! I have just discovered that Computerland has been selling systems pre-loaded with Ubuntu for some months now. I'm told the response so far has been underwhelming, so tell all your friends: If you're in the market for a new computer, support a long-established local vendor who is making an effort to do the right thing by their customers through selling systems that respect their freedom.

I never get blasé about stuff like this. It always gives me the warm fuzzies.

Day one: I find what I think is a bug in a Drupal module I'm using on a web site, and find someone else reported the issue they day before.

Day two: I investigate the issue further and find it's a trivial problem and well within my capacity to fix.

Day three: The fix is accepted by the module maintainer, and integrated into the code in the Drupal version control system.

Day Four : My Drupal site tells me that an updated version of the module is available, containing the bug fix. Not just me, but everybody else in the world who is using the same module gets the benefit of the few minutes work I put into fixing the problem for my site.

Contrast this with proprietary software: You know there's probably a bug somewhere, but it's illegal and probably technically impossible to investigate further. You report the bug, hoping that the company that owns the copyright on the product (or the company from whom they have licensed the component containing the bug) feels that paying someone to fix it will be in the interests of their shareholders. You cross your fingers and patiently wait for the next Service Pack, or Patch Tuesday. In all likelihood the problem isn't fixed, but for your troubles the update includes a bunch of antifeatures that you never asked for, making the software even less useful.

I'm in shock. I've just heard from Slashdot that the LugRadio podcast is soon to be no more. I've been a sufferer of LugRadio Syndrome - inappropriate giggling fits in public places - since series one, and while I can't say I've ever aquired any useful technical information from the programme, it did once render me breathless and weeping with mirth while in a doctor's waiting room, which I think got me in to see the doctor sooner than I otherwise would have. I've also learned that the proper response to, for instance, Novell announcing an exciting new product is to exclaim "Beard!", or "My chin!", and that you shouldn't give the actor who plays Harold Bishop in Neighbours a hard time about his weight, because he (allegedly) has a blisteringly funny riposte.

I haven't enjoyed a podcast so much since the Slashdot guys did Geeks in Space (of course it wasn't called podcasting back then, and we had to listen to it by piping the output of NCSA Mosaic to an eight-track cassette recorder via a SCART connector). I'm not sure what I'm going to do without LugRadio. The Rissington Podcast is amusing and geeky, but the presenters are, it must be said, Mac users, so there's a bit of a cultural divide to get over. FLOSS Weekly has some great interviews from time to time, but there's even more of a culture problem there (American). Can anybody suggest some others?

Decent web hosting at a price is difficult. There's no shortage of competition on price, but the 'decent' bit seems quite a bit harder.

Low priced hosting is shared hosting. That means you get, typically, a share of an Apache server, usually with quite a few other people, maybe hundreds.

Someone's done a really nice home usability test on Ubuntu 8.04, using his girlfriend as the experiment. Apart from the good old-fashioned flame-bait value of this, I'm finding usability studies increasingly fascinating. From my own experience, it's remarkably common to find features that seem an obvious good idea from one point of view can be intimidatingly bewildering from another (and often I'm the bewildered one).

For example, I have one website that allows anonymous users to post content, although for obvious reasons each post has to be approved by an administrator. When content is submitted, the user is redirected to the site's front page, and gets a message in a little box with a different background colour to the rest of the page, telling them that their post is awaiting approval. Clear enough, you may think. However I got some feedback today from a user saying that the site is broken, because every time they try to post anything, all they get is an error message. You might say that the user should at least stop to read the message, but on the other hand something is wrong from a usability point of view if a message telling the user that everything is working perfectly fine looks at first glance like an error message. Usability is hard.

First of all, a big HELLO to all of you at Club Linux! It's great to still receive the monthly meeting notices and get and idea of what you're up to, and if I'm ever back over that way, like a bad smell I'm sure to turn up again. :)

It's been a while, I know, but you see I've been busy...

I've always been annoyed by slow websites, and even more annoyed by full page refreshes in the browser just to get something you didn't really want to see anyway. So, out with the AJAX!

A bit over a year ago now, I started a project to get my openPC Labs website improved before updating it. I'm afraid it's still not updated because in the process things developed into something much bigger.

I wanted to use AJAX techniques for the site to get the responsiveness I yearned for. I also wanted to fix up the navigation so that the location bar, history and bookmarks would work.

At the time, there was very little support for browser navigation in AJAX. I stumbled on one system called Really Simple History. It was open source, but a bit buggy and a bit too slow for me, I just didn't feel comfortable with the way it was done.

So I started to roll my own..... BIG mistake.... just over a year later I might be able to start updating openPC Labs!

To cut a long story short, Xanjax and xanjax.org were born.

Robin 'Roblimo" Miller has an interesting bit of flamebait over at Linux.com, talking about why it's so hard to switch operating systems or desktop environments withing the one operating system. His point seems to be that our deeply-held preferences are established by first impressions (or even chance), then entrenched by habit, no matter how vigorously we might argue that we have a rational basis for them.

I'm not sure I agree with him; GNOME is a better desktop environment than KDE; both are easier to use than the WIndows or Mac user interface; nano is a sensible choice for a programmer's text editor, because... ah... okay, maybe he's got me there. ^O ^X

"Four species of penguins that breed in Antartica are endangered by global warming," notes Richard Stallman. "Even I, the only man in the world who can get angry from looking at a picture of a penguin, find this bad news."

If it's any consolation, the gnu has apparently increased in number from 100,000 in 1950 to 1.5 million. According to Wikipedia, the collective noun for a herd of gnus is 'implausibility'. This means something; I'm sure of it.

Just a reminder: you can help the other implausible GNU (and indirectly, that blasted penguin), by joining the Free Software Foundation. I finally did so this year, and ever since I have experienced a tremendous sense of tranquility and well-being. I now radiate a dazzling aura of geeky freedom, every Windows computer I walk past BSODs (although that may just be coincidence), and choirs of free software angels herald my arrival wherever I go. It's really cool.

Oh the irony of reading about this on a Microsoft site - link
This bit was particularly interesting -

Microsoft Netherlands spokesman Hans Bos noted that its Word documents were still allowed as equal alternatives to ODF for the moment, and added he expects the company will soon receive approval for its Open Office XML to qualify as "open source."

But he said the company was worried about and opposed other aspects of the Dutch policy.

Specifically, he said, the provision that government agencies should prefer open source was overly proscriptive.

Overly proscriptive?! Now hang on a minute....