Writing about:University of Warwick: Linux Specialist

So, Warwick is looking to recruit someone with

...sound technical knowledge of Linux, and experience of delivering Linux desktop clients and applications on a large scale (1000+ workstations)...

Curious. I wonder if this signifies a move away from the microsoft/Novell desktop that they’ve used here for the last decade?

Today, my geekiness reaches new heights. I’m hiring a van to take all my furniture back to mum’s house, so obviously I need a van that will fit all my stuff in. Will a short wheelbase Transit do the job? Only one way to find out…

Writing about: PhotoBox

Despite all the rush into digital imaging, I’m very much a fan of printing out images – the quality is always better in print than on screen, and you know that your paper copies will never crash, be accidentally deleted, become outdated or anything else.

Photobox is a website where you can upload your digital images, and they’ll print them on minilab printers (Fuji Frontier) – these are the same things that you’d get your photos printed on if you sent a film for processing. The quality is excellent, and the colour matching is perfect.*

Prints are 18p for a 6×4” print (the normal size), but you can get the price down to as little as 10p if you buy print credits. To put this in context, I recently printed 152 images at 6×4, at a cost of just over £18 (I bought 200 credits, which makes it 12p each) – this is slightly less than the cost per image for getting print film developed, and that doesn’t include the cost of film. When I shoot slide film, it costs 20p per slide all up, including film and processing.

The service from photobox is excellent. My order of 152 images was submitted on saturday night, printed on Monday, and arrived on Tuesday. If you order on a working day, they print on the same day.

The biggest problem with services such as photobox is that you really need to have broadband internet to upload any significant number of images to them. Each file from a modern digital camera will be in the region of 2Mb, and over a modem transferring that much data is painful.

All up, highly recommended.

* If you shoot in sRGB (i.e. most digital cameras, by default) it’ll be fine as is, if you use a wide gamut such as Adobe RGB (which I do) then you might want to get hold of the ICC profile from Dry Creek Photo which I’ve found to be very accurate). The files need to be sRGB before you upload them, though

Writing about: Blogs in the guardian, 05/05/05, every nightmare begins as a dream

Well, I’m in the Guardian today – hello to anyone who’s come here from reading the article there.

Here’s the full detail of the questions I answered for Jim. I stand by what I say here, although in reflection my tone is more negative than I’d intended. You can see my posts discussing these ideas in more detail here and here

As you’ll probably discover, I’ve sent the same basic questions to Dan Lawrence and Helen Ryan.
You know they’re a couple, right?

By the way, are you part of the staff at Warwick? Or part of the student body? Or a bit of both?
PhD student. We’re in a kind of limbo. We’re full students, NUS cards and all, but we’re paid to be here, rather than the other way round. Most do a bit of teaching, although in Chemistry, we generally only do lab demonstrating. Anyway, here they are…

1. When did you start your blog? Had you been blogging before?
I started about a year ago, and no, I’d never had a blog before.

2. What did you expect from blogging when you started your Warwick blog? Have your expectations met? What’s surprised you most?
I was interested to see if any productive work was done with them. I thought it was a strange thing for the university to invest so much resource into. I came to it feeling rather cynical, but decided to throw myself into it anyway. I saw the potential for group interaction very strongly – I’d never seen anything quite like that before.
I’m not really surprised by the way that the project has gone – more on that later.

3. Has the blog helped with your academic work? Or is it more of a social thing?
I try to use it for my academic work where possible, when there’s a need for reflection or record. I’ve taken to writing to-do-lists on it, although that’s just for convenience. It’s definitely a social space, and although cliques do form, they’re not exclusive – it’s very easy for newcomers to get involved.

4. Have Warwick Blogs affected the wider real world culture of the university?
No, I don’t think so. The number of people who have interacted in the real world due to some event on blogs would qualify blogs as one of the smaller student societies here.

5.Whose Warwick blogs do you read – is it people who were already friends? Or have you become friends with people after getting to know them via their blogs?
I’ve met a small percentage of the people whose blogs I read. There are occasional “blog socials” arranged, although I haven’t made it to any yet. I also read the blogs of my co-workers.

6. What’s the general feeling about the blogging project? Browsing around, I ‘ve noticed some unease about how useful they are, or rather some irritation/upset over abuses of the system (e.g. anonymous comments etc) – is this just a phase that will pass, or does it indicate some larger problems with the project?
It is early days for WB, but there seems to be little interest on the part of the university in assessing how the thing is going. They’ve started this thing, but seem to have lost focus on what the original idea behind it was. That’s the impression that I get anyway. The freedom of speech of the bloggers is being compromised by the university’s Acceptable Usage Policy for WB, which is (compared to most blog sites) draconian. The blogs admin appears to suspend student’s blogs on some very shaky reasons, and they are essentially untouchable. There is no information regarding the admin is, how they reach their decision, and who to appeal to if you disagree.

7. Does you blog help at all with PDP? I know you’ve raised some concerns that early hopes that the blogs would allow for ‘guerilla PDP’ haven’t really been met yet… do you think blogs are just very different from the whole PDP idea or might they be able to work with it in some way?
A vanishingly small proportion of the people who blog write anything reflective at all. If the idea was “that if we get students to start blogging, they will gradually start to do PDP” (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/elearning/workshops/presentations/blogs/) then it has so far not happened, a year in.
I have never seen an answer to the question “Why on earth should I publish my private reflections?”. I don’t think that a public forum is really the place to be as honest with yourself as you need to be to gain from the kind of reflection required for useful PDP. There are “private” entries on blogs (restricted to just the author), but I’ve never written one. If I wanted to do that, I’d use a diary.

8. Will you continue blogging once you leave Warwick?
Probably. I’m undecided at this stage. I’m extremely unlikely to carry on using Warwick Blogs, anyway.

OK, so I’ve provoked some discussion about what people are getting from WB at the moment. My list of things that would make this a more useful tool for work (and reflection/PDP) is:

• Excerpts in all the aggregate lists.
• Trackback to and from external blogs.
• Multiple categories selectable per-post.
• Multiple references (writing about) per post.
• Notify when a trackback is created on my blog
• Some less corporate designs. More ability to personalise.
• A more human admin. Needs to be more transparent, perhaps
• Display commenter IP. “Report a Comment”
• Take external RSS feeds. It’s all very well being able to harvest the RSS that WB puts out with bloglines or whatever, but that’s of limited use because it can’t authenticate as you. If you could parse RSS on the site (as software such as Drupal does), it’d become useful. Yes, I know bloglines does it well already, but I want to read posts that are restricted.
• Export entries.
• Search restricted stuff. At the moment the search only works for public entries. This is utterly useless. If I want to go back and find something that I noted in a restricted entry, I have to guess what category it was in, then just read back. Not helpful, especially since most things that I may need to refer to are in restricted posts.

• Scrapbook – favourite posts. I’d quite often like to just note an interesting post to come back to later.

  Most of these are other people’s ideas, and some have been discussed in great detail. There are probably already JIRAs for some of them. I remember having a long discussion here or in forums about how categories should work, perhaps a year ago. As it is, it’s just not enough for me at the moment, not if I want to try and organise my thoughts using WB.

... Seems bleak. People are leaving, left right and centre, for various reasons but it seems primarily due to issues with moderation and ownership ( link , link , link ).
The amount of PDP going on here is trivial.

The amount of directed academic work seems to be similarly low (only one response to a question about who uses blogs for academic work – there are examples, but I’m sorry Submitting essays via blogs is a bizarre use of the medium).

We may have 3192 blogs, and lots of entries (~150/day) but probably less than 15% of those blogs are really being used (link). The presupmtion seems to have been “make the tool, advertise it, and it’ll be a success”. Has WB been a success? Really? for a few people (such as myself) who don’t really write anything close to the edge, the issues with moderation are lessened, but I don’t like being so strongly tied to the university. In common with most bloggers here, almost nothing that I post is directly relevent to my uni life.

Rob O’Toole recently presented at a conference some of the ‘key characteristics of the “blog phenomena”’ (all emphasis mine):

• A blog is a personal website, it has an ‘owner’;
• But it is much more – the extension of the owners mind and life onto the web – journaling;
• An extension of their personal identity;
• But also a way of trying out different identities;
• A sandbox or demilitarized zone;
• A place for reporting experiences;
• A place for making sense of experiences, or not as is sometimes the case;
• A place for just recording experience (a “bucket”);
• A place for defining what is important;
• A place for combining disparate experiences;
• A place for expressing ideas and opinions about the world;
• A place for testing out theories;
• Develops ideas and themes over time;
• A way of developing writing and communication skills;
• Not necessarily serious or authoritative;
• Sometimes quite scurrilous, close to the edge of the acceptable;
• Dynamic and changing;
• Snapshots of points in time;
• Ephemeral (but archived);
• Public and private;
• Networking – a means for advertising oneself and seeking like-minded friends;
• A place for developing or criticising each other’s ideas;
• Democratic;
• A simple but powerful tool that anyone can master.

My emphasis is on those statements that may be true of blogs in general (and I don’t agree with all of them), but are not true for WB. And these are some of the most important concepts of blogging, on the net in general.

I like WB. I like the way that everyone here is from the same environment. But I’m not sure it’s either fulfilling the role that “normal” blogs fulful, nor is it fulfilling the lofty goals in terms of helping with PDP (link). In fact, it seems necessary to persuade people of the value of PDP fullstop. The question has never been answered as to why someone should want to use a blog to do personal reflection.

So I don’t know what the future for WB is. I shall continue along here for the time being, but I’ve got my own separate site with duplicate posts on it. I’m going to start linking to each post there from here, to help with the google rating.

I love looking through the random images in blogs. There are a few sites that do this for livejournal, I think it would be a nice feature for WB – photos give a snapshot of something that’s going on in someone else’s life.

In the meantime, here’s a selection of the randomness. Anybody you recognise?

Writing about: The end of the North Warwickshire Dairies, 08/04/05, The North Warwickshire Diaries

It’s sad to see someone stop blogging here because of the juvenile, but yet threatening antics of our esteemed rugby club. I enjoyed reading Nick’s blog, and will miss it.

Again, our “elite sportsmen” as they like to think of themselves have demonstrated themselves to be the least gentlemanly mob you could ever have the misfourtune to meet.

So why can’t IT Services help with this? It seems that members of our university have been impersonating someone else, in a threatening manner. This could potentially be a criminal offence, so I’d imagine that ITS would prefer to handle it as a first recourse. But apparently not.

Nick, if ITS won’t help, go to the police. Someone making threats under your name is a serious matter.

Writing about:GNOME vs. KDE

KDE

A big room somewhere in Europe with lots of chrome and glass and a great big whiteboard in the front with lots of tiny, neat writing on it. There are about 50 desks, each with headphones and pristine workstations, also with a lot of chrome and glass. The faint sound of classical music permeates the room, accompanying the clicky-click of 50 programmers typing or quietly talking in one of the appropriately assigned meeting areas. (Which of course consist of elegant contemporary white pine coffee tables surrounded by contemporary white pine and fine leather meeting chairs.) Coffee, tea, mineral water and fruit juices are available in the break area.

At the end of the day, everyone checks in their code and the project leader does a “make” just to make sure it all compiles cleanly, but it’s mostly only done from tradition anymore since it always compiles cleanly and works flawlessly. When all milestones have been met, and everything has been QA’d, (usually within a day or two of the roadmap that was written up 18 months previous) a new KDE release is packaged up and released to the mirror sites with the appropriate 24-hour delay for distribution before being announced.

KDE developers are generally between the ages of 16 and 25, like art made of lines and squares and the colors white and black. When/if they finally stop taking government subsidies and get around to getting “real jobs,” most of their salary will be taken in taxes so the socialist government can subsidize the care and feeding of the next generation of KDE developers, just like it did for them. A high percentage of KDE developers, during their mandatory 5 years of government military service, crack from their years of cultural dullness and flee Europe to become terrorists for the sheer joy to be found in killing random strangers for no discernible reason.

GNOME

An abandoned warehouse in San Francisco, kitted up as for a rave, electronica playing at 15db louder than “my ears are bleeding and I’m developing an aneurism” volumes and the windows all painted over black so that the strobe and spotlights and lasers can be seen better. Computers, mainly made of whatever stuff has been exchanged for crack or scavenged from dumpsters behind dot-bombs, are scattered around on whatever furniture is available, which also consists of whatever stuff has been exchanged for crack or scavenged from dumpsters behind dot-bombs. There’s no break area, but you may be able to bum a beer (or more likely something harder) off of one of the developers hanging around, and they will probably be too jacked up on X, coke, acid, heroin, ether or all of the above to notice that you’ve taken anything.

Development strategies are generally determined by whatever light show happens to be going on at the moment, when one of the developers will leap up and scream “I WANT IT TO LOOK JUST LIKE THAT” and then straight-arm his laptop against the wall in an hallucinogenic frenzy before vomiting copiously, passing out and falling face-down in the middle of the dance floor. There’s no whiteboard, so developers diagram things out in the puddles of spilt beer, urine and vomit on the floor.

At the end of the day – whenever that is since an equal number of programmers will be passed out at any given time – or really whenever someone happens to think of it (which is rarely), someone might type “make” on some machine somewhere, with mixed results. Generally nothing happens, so he/she shrugs his/her shoulders and wanders off to look for someone who might have more pink/black-striped pills. Once in a great while, generally in the unpleasant time between the come-down from the last thing they took and before whatever it was they took just now comes on fully, someone will tar up a bunch of random files and post it on a website someplace it as the next GNOME release, usually with a reference to some kind of monkey.

GNOME developers rarely live past 25 and prefer “alternative” art – generally stuff made of feces that’s “too edgy” for most people to “understand” or “like.” Core GNOME developers are heavy Ketamine users. The bodies of GNOME developers can often be found in dumpsters or floating face-down in any sufficiently large body of water.

Copyright 2002, Derek Glidden.

Following on from the discussions on Warwick Blogs a while back about noise reduction, here is a good example of the power of specific noise reduction software. Here, I’ve used Neat Image Pro to knock back the noise on a shot I took at 1600 ISO on my D70 (this is a 100% crop of the image) –

If you’ve got time to profile your camera (or scanner), or if someone else has already published the profile for it, the results are extremely impressive.