- I saw some quartet play in Cambridge- Beethoven, Shostakovich and Ravel.
- I went to London to see some friends, and while I was there,
- I went to a talk by Simon Phipps about open-sourcing Java.
- UCAS is finished for now as I have heard from all the institutions I applied to.
- Started reading the K&R C book.
This will be expanded on in time, when I have time.
Ubuntu Edgy Eft was released on Thursday, and today I thought I would check it out. To sum it up: I'm impressed.
The hardware detection was immaculate. The only thing that I had an issue was the bcm43xx driver for my wireless card. This was using the reverse-engineered driver and the only reason that it didn't work was because it didn't have the firmware (which they're not allowed to redistribute)- so I just copied the firmware from /lib/firmware on the hard drive to the ramdisk, restarted the module and bingo- it worked! I haven't been able to get this working on my Debian installation yet, but I'd prefer to use ndiswrapper than not having wireless- so to be honest, I haven't tried that much! My preferred resolution (1600x1200) was activated immediately and I was even able to download and install apps from universe and they ran perfectly too! The thing that is hard to compete with is the simplicity- everything was just so easy for everyone!
I am very impressed and the Ubuntu team have done a great job! This really will be the start-point for more people using Linux. Although I'm not going to jump to start using Ubuntu now, I will certainly consider dual-booting it with Debian next time I re-install Debian.
I went to LinuxWorld Expo on Wednesday. It was really interesting and I enjoyed it, although I did spend a little too much time there. The emDebian stand was interesting and I chatted about HTC phones running Linux for a while. The Hula stand showed me a nice installation of Hula. I was impressed with this and have tried getting it working on my server, failing so far on the fact that I need to use apache2 and this is broken at the moment. There were other interesting stands, but you know 'em. I listened to Jono Bacon's talk on Ubuntu in the community, or something like that. It was alright, but a little tedious as I already knew about Ubuntu! In fact, this week has made me appreciate Ubuntu a lot more. Another thing that I thought was interesting at the expo was the fact that some stands had people who didn't really know much about the project, or direct competitors, which was a little odd. An amusing thing was the corporate stands- as soon as they saw I was representing no company they realised I must be a student and promptly ignored me! I got several bits of free stuff, including:
CakePHP is the best thing I have come across for a very long time! I had previously looked at it but wasn't quite interested. But I had a look at the Ruby on Rails screencasts. And after hearing that Cake was the Ruby on Rails of PHP. I am learning it right now, and am loving it- all hail MVC!
Also- today was my Total Dvorak day, and my brain hurts!
On the second of my servers I had a nice installation of Apache 2.0, PHP 5, modpython multi-project Trac, Subversion with modsvn and SSL; and I liked it! However, yesterday I did a little upgrade of Trac (to 0.10) and it upgraded some other stuff leaving Apache2 broken. Instead of bothering to work out what was wrong I saw this as an ideal chance to try out lighttpd. So I removed apache and all its mods and installed lighttpd. After a bit of config problems with Python I have now set up:
- lighttpd 1.4.13: At the time being the configuration files are a little horrible and I need to separate lighttpd.conf into parts for virtual servers, but it works.
- FastCGI: This required no effort, but the fact that I'm using it feels nice.
- PHP 5.1.6: This worked nicely straight away following instructions from the informative lighttpd wiki.
- Trac 0.10: This is working as a nice multi-project installation, except authentication currently does not work..
- MoinMoin 1.5.3: After much messing around, I finally got this working as a single wiki installation. I would however prefer this as a wikifarm kind of install..
So this leaves me with much todo:
- Sort out lighttpd config files.
- Sort out Trac authentication across multiple projects.
- Install Subversion support.
- Add SSL support for svn.
- Add support for a MoinMoin wiki farm!
I have learned about lighttpd, MoinMoin and FastCGI though, so
all isn't lost, even though it isn't totally working yet. Anyway,
it feels like food time and I can smell bread rolls! 
A few things to ponder over:
- This new theme for Wordpress is lovely! I edited it a little to remove the left sidebar, add the description to directly under the header and to remove all tag support. I love it!
- My UCAS form is totally complete and now out of my life. Well, I lie- I still need to decide what college to apply to at Durham- any suggestions?!
- Half term is coming up and a few things on the card: Linuxworld Expo (yay) and visiting people...
- I watched Revolution OS which was a bit of a laugh to listen to Stallman, Perens, Eric Raymond, etc. but was informative at the same time! Pointed out my ignorance of the actual roots of the GNU project.
- Funny- my sixth form tutor is learning LaTeX!
- Got the Old Dispensary Concert after half term in which I've playing the first movement of Brandenburg 4 and Meditation from Thais by Massenet- I should really do some practice soon.
- Oh, and on the music front- the House Music Competition is this Thursday! It is bound to be a laugh with School House singing Feeling Good, a version by Michael Buble, in the ensemble; and as a whole house singing "Masachism Tango" by Tom Lehrer!
That is all, for now.
Yes, that title did take me about three seconds to think of, and it only works when you pronounce Dvorak as Vorr-shark (with the sh in shark much like that character in Russian- you know the one)...
I am starting, or have started a week-or-so ago, to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. It certainly is not coming easily and the F key is still catching me out! I am still cheating on most password entries- not being able to see what I'm typing scares me at the moment! Oh and on things like MSN when I need to say something, but I'll just get frustrated because I can't type!
Also- new Family Guy season out- w00t!
As I write this, I am listening to: Sibelius Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 (Oistrakh, USSR RTV Large Symphony Orchestra, Rozhdestvensky)
I've been looking into getting yet another mail client. I never seem to be happy with the ones I come across these days. I've gone from Outlook to Sylpheed-Claws to Evolution to (currently looking). Here are a few that have taken my fancy:
- mutt: This is a well-known ncurses client. Read its homepage for more. The only downside I can see in it for me is the requirement to set up an MTA on the computer, which I don't really want to be attached to..
- elmo: This must be a fork of mutt from some point. Its main advantage is the disadvantage of mutt- it doesn't require a MTA on the same computer and can connect to a remote SMTP server.
- pine: Actually, yet to checkout..
You may have noticed the console-basedness of these clients. Yes, I like the console and if I had a ncurses mail client then I could get my MSN, IRC (both run through irssi and screen of course, and bitlbee for MSN) and email all from SSH anywhere. That is, unless the following events occur (this only applies to IRC and probably email if I do run it from home, as MSN is run elsewhere):
- Mum switches on the iron and presses the wrong button
- The trip-switch is flicked (is that the correct verb?!) and the power goes off. Of course it is switched back on pronto but the server is now down
- Either: the server isn't switched back on and therefore I can't connect to it obviously, or the server is switched back on but the no-ip dynamic update client doesn't load (I should really fix this instead of blogging about it, especially as it's so easy to fix!) and therefore I don't know the IP address..
As I write this, I am listening to: Adagio, Underworld
After a hectic number of days, I have returned.
Pro Corda was fun and seeing everyone was great once again. Musically it was alright. The Dvorak went quite well and we played the second movement in the Cream Tea concert on the penultimate day, and the finale in the concert on the last day. The Bargiel turned out to be a bit of joke and no-one else knew it at all so our coach (Jan Schulmeister, second violin in The Wihan String Quartet) cut almost half of it out- shame. In orchestra we played the Death and the Maiden which was good, but would have been more successful if there were only four players. Enough of Pro Corda.
I also just returned today from Devon where I stayed with my grandparents. There is not much to report from this journey apart from that he is kindly going to start making me a Viola. I am already playing on both violin and viola made by Peter Lamb, but the viola is a very early (number 4- he has just completed number 23) and certainly is not as good as his later instruments. I had a go on number 14, which is a viola that was originally in a pair made for Herbert Downes, and this was a very nice instrument.
School starts tomorrow.
As I write this, I am listening to: Haydn: String Quartet in D «The Lark», Op. 64 No. 5 (Aeolian Quartet)