Matt's Blog

Back, But Leaving

2006-08-29T21:41:00.000+01:00

It's been over a year since I posted any blog entries, but I've decided that I'll give it another go (again). But not here. Instead, I've installed WordPress onto my own website and I'll continue to blog there instead. I've also imported all the posts from here onto that blog. So the new location for my blog is: http://www.mattmarsh.net/blog/ So long, blogspot.com... thanks for everything.

Spaceman Bounties

2005-04-17T14:03:00.000+01:00

Mark Shuttleworth really is one of the good guys with both great vision and ability to make things happen. Of course, he can afford to be a good guy - anyone who can afford to be one of the world's first space tourists is certainly not short of cash! The Shuttleworth Foundation that Mark has founded has some great aims, a lot of which is focused to South Africa (that being his country of birth). The belief that Africa in general can be aided by improving the education system so that they have many bright, talented people showing their full potential seems like a reasonable idea to me. Of course, one of the main reasons that I've found out about Mark is because of the good things that he is doing in the Free Open Source Software community. Mark is funding a number of projects such as Ubuntu Linux and the SchoolTool project. Naturally a lot of the projects that Mark funds are related to the aims of the Shuttleworth Foundation and it's just good to see someone helping to fund projects in the FOSS community. Another thing I noticed when browsing the Ubuntu website were that anyone can get "bounties" for implementing certain features. There are a few open source type projects that are now offering bounties for this sort of thing. If only I could make enough money from those things to make a living out of it! I'd really love to work full time on free/open source software...

School Sense

2005-04-14T14:50:00.000+01:00

Every day on my way to work I pass by a school and if I'm unlucky/disorganised enough then I get there just as the thousands of parents drop off their child in their 4x4. The school is situated right on a junction and the parents' cars just get parked everywhere. I take extreme care driving past, so worried that some small child could dart out from between two cars, it all seems so unresponsible to me. So I started thinking of some "creative" solutions to this problem... Perhaps they could stagger the start times for each class so that there wouldn't be so many parents turning up at one time? Or perhaps there could be an incentive for parents that car share, like their children get to be in a class with less pupils? But then I realised, there is a much better solution here. Why not have forced boarding school for all children Monday to Friday? This surely makes a lot of sense? Traffic would be reduced enormously, parents could go out to work, schools could give kids a healthier lifestyle by controling what the children eat/do after school, you know it all makes sense!

Radio Boyd

2005-04-13T22:51:00.000+01:00

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Tommy Boyd has been back on the radio since January. He seems to have a regular weekly spot now on BBC Southern Counties Radio. I used to listen to Tommy's fabulous cult radio show "The Human Zoo" on Talk Sport radio station where he allowed callers straight to air with "no screening"... It certainly made for an eclectic set of characters that would call up with their rants, bits of prepared audio or general abuse of Tommy. If you've never heard the show, then you should listen to some of the clips from his shows. Unfortunately his format/attitude lead to his downfall when he failed to cut off a caller who, on the day of the Queen Mother's death, commented on the royal family that we should "shoot the f*cking lot of them". The Human Zoo was a bit of an acquired taste, but there has always been a bit of a hole in my Sunday evenings since its demise. I'll be tuning in to Tommy's latest show, though no doubt it will be nothing like The Human Zoo, especially as it's on the BBC. At least being on a Saturday evening from 9pm to 1am it may have some interesting content, we shall see.

Who Am I Voting For?

2005-04-13T09:45:00.000+01:00

If I vote Labour in this year's General Election, am I voting for Tony Blair, or Gordon Brown? I'm strongly of the opinion that should Labour win the election then it will only be a matter of months before we start hearing more and more about the Blair/Brown rift again and there will become more and more pressure for Blair to stand down... And if not then I'm sure a leadership challenge will take place forcing Blair out of office. I'd be amazed if Tony Blair is still in No. 10 at the end of 2006. So really, a Labour vote is a vote for Gordon Brown isn't it? I'm not sure if that makes me more or less likely to vote for them. I still have no idea who I will vote for, I'm a classic floating voter at this moment in time... Every day I change my mind. I hate all the lies that they all put through my letter box, they are all as bad as each other. I think the Lib Dems have the best policies relating to technology, best views on software patents etc. But I'm not sure that I could vote based on that one issue alone and I'm just not really convinced that they would make a good job of running the economy. I doubt I'll vote for the Conservatives, they just don't seem trustworthy at all to me... So am I going to be left with only Labour to vote for? Maybe I just don't like change. One thing is for sure, I wont vote for the Greens... Doubt they would approve of all the computers running 24 hours a day at home - would get taxed to oblivion!

Speak My Protocol

2005-04-12T13:04:00.000+01:00

I have five different Instant Message accounts; MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ and Jabber. That's four proprietary systems and one open one (Jabber). Of course, no one wants to have five separate IM clients on their desktop so you end up using some third-party software which can communicate with the different systems such as Kopete, GAIM or Trillian... And upgrade any time that one of the proprietary systems change their protocol slightly (after a couple of days have passed to reverse engineer the protocol change of course). This is all clearly insane and a good example of where companies insisting on having their own proprietary protocols just results in a big mess for the end user. I don't even see what MSN, Yahoo etc are gaining by having proprietary protocols in the first place? It's not like they are charging for the service or anything. Is it all about them standing up against each other with how many users they have on their network? These are the reasons that we need the open software movement to prevail. Even if companies are going to write commercial software, let's at least have open standards and protocols to connect it all together in a friendly fashion.

Hello, Operator?

2005-04-11T18:01:00.000+01:00

I've been wondering for a while now whether I should put together an Asterisk PBX setup. Granted, it would be totally overkill for anything that I need (I'm lucky if I get one phone call in a week), but Asterisk does look like a nice bit of technology to play around with. I like the idea of being able to integrate VoIP calls with regular phone calls so I could pick up VoIP calls from my regular DECT handset for example. It would also be cool to then have voice mail which would work seamlessly for both types of calls. Additionally, I suppose if I was away from home I could have normal calls routed via VoIP to whichever hotel I happen to be in? As I say, all this would be totally overkill for anything I need, but hey that's what half of being a geek is all about isn't it? Skype seems to be gaining a lot of popularity as a VoIP client for the masses which maybe a good and a bad thing. Good that people are getting into this technology, but bad that it's proprietary and therefore not compatible with SIP based products. Currently the fact that it is all proprietary means that there doesn't seem to be a way of integrating Skype with Asterisk at the moment, though I'm sure it will happen as I can think of several (albeit somewhat hacky) ways of implementing such a bridge even if it's still proprietary. Incidentally, Adrian Bradshaw had some things to say about VoIP on his blog today (parts 1, 2 & 3) and he mentioned the Asterisk@Home project which is a full Asterisk distro so that you can install it and have a working Asterisk setup out of the box. Might be a good way to give this a go if I feel the urge at some point... Yet another project for the list! But for now I shall stay focused on my current projects I think!

Party Statistical Nonsense

2005-04-10T11:50:00.000+01:00

Now that the UK election campaign is in full swing I have had about half a forest of propaganda from one party or another thrown through the letter box. Mostly they seem to be interested in putting down the other parties in one way or another, with both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems being at pains to tell me how they're the only party who can oust the current Labour MP here, Claire Ward. The Conservatives, with their candidate Ali Miraj, have decided to try and show me that the seat is a close run thing between them and Labour by use of a nice bar chart from the last general election in 2001: As you can see, the Conservatives are not that far behind Labour and the Lib Dems are a long way behind... But now look at the figures there... That's approximately a 5000 vote gap between Labour and the Conservatives, and approximately a 7000 vote gap between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems! What scale are they using there exactly?! And they are the party who are supposed to be campaigning about honest and trustworthy politics? My suggestion to the Conservatives: stop spending money on bits of paper to put down the other parties and use the money saved to buy a ruler.

Really Silly Syndication

2005-04-09T09:46:00.000+01:00

When I first came across Really Simple Syndication (RSS) I thought that it was a fantastic idea, and granted it does offer a great way for keeping up-to-date with blogs and other news on the internet (personally I find it best for relatively infrequently changing sites such as blogs which are updated only every few days of more or notification of software releases). RSS is not without its problems though... The whole polling nature of RSS is obviously non-perfect. If each of the blogs were sending me an email when they changed it would be a lot more efficient use of network resources, rather than me polling every hour to find out that it hadn't changed. The other problem I've run into is that RSS is not very easy to deal with when you want to check your feeds from several locations. If you have separate RSS aggregators in each location they will both end up alerting you to the same articles, even though you may already have read them when you were in your other location. My solution to that one is to use rss2email which checks for changes to RSS feeds and emails them to me instead - works for me at least. The jury is still out on RSS for me. I think it is a good thing, which has solved a problem, just not necessarily in the fullest way possible. I don't think RSS will be the end story on syndication.

GNU Slash Stallman

2005-04-08T17:49:00.000+01:00

I was listening to the latest episode of The Linux Link Tech Show (ep.78) last night and they were having a go at Richard Stallman whom they had approached for an interview. RMS had only been willing to do the interview if they changed all the 'Linux' references on their website to 'GNU/Linux'! They declined the offer :-) Don't get me wrong, I think RMS has made some fantastic contributions to the whole free software world and I use some of the software he's helped to create almost every day; but his whole insistence on the 'GNU/Linux' thing is really not doing him any favors at all, it just feels incredibly petty. Get a life Stallman, or I might switch from Emacs to Vim!

I Went To Your School

2005-04-08T14:47:00.000+01:00

It's amazing what you learn by browsing the Wikipedia. Last night I learned that I went to the same school as Nick Park, creator of the Wallace & Gromit animations. I remember the first one I saw (The Wrong Trousers - still the best one IMHO), it really amazed me with its quality animation, good plot and humor. The whole idea of a penguin putting a rubber glove on its head to disguise itself as a chicken is just priceless. There is no info in the Wikipedia to link me to the school though, so no opportunity for Nick Park to be thinking "hey, I went to the same school as the guy that wrote that Palm Converter app thingy". You have to love the Wikipedia.

I'm Back Baby, I'm Back

2005-04-08T11:17:00.000+01:00

Well, as my first post did point out, I started my blog with some amount of skepticism at my ability to stay interested in posting entries for long enough... (I know what I'm like!). I managed three entries and, as you can see, it's now been months of drought... Sorry for all you guys that have been returning every day to see if there has been a new entry :-) Though of course, you really should have been using an News Aggregator to check for changes, so it's your own fault :-) Anyway, I'm going to give this another go and see if I can keep up with it a bit better... I really would like to make this a part of my website if I can manage to keep updating it... We shall see. Right, talk to you again in a few months :-)

Life On Hold, Please Check Back Later

2004-11-01T13:34:00.000Z

They went and did it again... they are going to take another couple of weeks out of my life by releasing the latest Grand Theft Auto game... If it's anything like the last one I'm not going to be doing much else for the next few weeks until I complete it! I get hooked on these things way too easily and I'm not even a big game player at all... The latest release, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, seems just as good as the last two and I haven't really done much else all weekend... Oh well, there goes my life for the next few weeks... again.

Soldering Irons At The Ready

2004-10-29T09:37:00.000+01:00

My latest phase has been to play around with electronics, mainly digital electronics with microcontrollers. I know that this is just yet another phase that I'm going through and no doubt some day soon I will drop it to lie dormant for any number of years, but for now at least it is giving me some fun. Last night's task was to rip apart a Fantazein clock... I'd really love to modify one of these things so that I could connect it to a computer and display custom messages - maybe stock quotes, news headlines and who knows what else. This is a bit of a daunting task for someone with only a small amount of electronics know-how like myself though! Whilst googling for information on modifying this clock I did come across T.J.Bordelon's website. TJ wrote the firmware for one of the versions of the clock and after emailing him he has given me some good information to set me off in the right direction. He's an incredibly impressive guy, some of the projects on his website are just nuts, such as trying to get an object into space! I also came across a project with some info on connecting a JStamp (some sort of Java based microcontroller?) to a Fantazein clock. This JStamp Fantazein project isn't exactly what I want to do, but not far off and may well give me some help and ideas along the way... I made some progress on one of my other electronics projects last night too which is to create an auto-scorer for a table football game. I was able to write (or steal from other of my projects) about half of the code neeeded for the microcontroller so that's ready to have a circuit built now and some testing done - hopefully I'll get going with that this weekend if I get the chance...

With Some Pessimism

2004-10-28T11:29:00.000+01:00

I've never been too interested in setting up one of these blogs, mainly because I'm pretty sure that I won't keep it up... And how many blogs do I read where I come across that phrase "Well I haven't blogged for a while" or some variation of it... But I'll nevertheless give it a go and see what comes of it, though I think you'll be lucky to see an entry here every week or even every month! I don't mean to be so pessimistic, just being honest!