Bog Roll

Paint

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:52:00 +0100

When I finished my first degree I spent a summer working for John Ashworth & Partners. It was a very interesting job and at the same time I learnt a lot about the paint industry and how poor most paint actually is.

One of the things they invented and I got to play with is ECOS^*, their zero odour paint system. It is a 100% volatile organic free paint system. Basically it is a water based system that actually works.

The problem with ECOS is the same as the problem with Linux and a whole host of other things, it doesn't matter that you are vastly superior to the brand leader, the fact you are not brand leader make it almost impossible to sell the stuff.

Now I own my own home, I have to put my money where my mouth is and actually buy their paint to use on my own house. For the past few weeks I've been running down paint the house came with, soon I'll have to buy fresh and it's going to be UK invented, UK made, top quality stuff!

* Warning, the ECOS web site is a bit hippy and full of tree hugging nonsense, but the paint that is in the tins is brilliant stuff.

Redcurrant Jelly

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:53:00 +0100

I've just finished this year's batch of redcurrant jelly. We got the redcurrants from the PYO farm on Saturday, yesterday I processed them down to juice and today I cooked them to jelly. We started from about 1.5 kg of juice to which I added the juice of a lemon and 1.5 kg of granulated sugar. Yield from this was 6x370 g jars and one slightly larger jar, so not huge.

We did redcurrant and strawberry last year, so it's been two years since our last batch of redcurrant jelly, and my better half has been missing it as it's her favourite!

Busy Weekend

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:52:00 +0100

This weekend has been and will continue to be busy.

Friday evening started with reassembling my bike chain - a rather messy business but it's done now.

Yesterday we went to Andover in the morning. We started at the Le Creuset warehouse sale, where we got a good price on a 3-ply 24 cm/6 l casserole pan, nearly half the retail price. We then went into town and did a quick whizz round Waitrose getting all the stuff we can't get in Basingstoke. On our way home we went to our local PYO farm to get redcurrants (Ribes rubrum).

In the afternoon we went down to "The Chalkies" to help the local Wildlife trust carry out a Cut-leaved Germander (Teucrium botrys) survey. Several hours later we made it home for a round of house work.

Today started with more house work and several hours turning redcurrants into redcurrant juice suitable for jamming tomorrow. The dining room currently smells of turpentine as we have waxed the dining room furniture today. Turpentine may may not be very good for you but it smells fantastic and as it evaporates out of the polish it leaves a gorgeous wax shine behind!

Next I have to realign the derailleur gears on my bike and the then it will be time for a nice cup of tea!

Novatech V13

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:58:00 +0100

Last year just before Xmas/New Year I bought a cheap Novatech V13 small notebook. Though Novatech say it's made in the UK, it's quite clear that it's actually a Clevo W83T made in China.

Installing Debian on it was interesting, it has no optical disk, so I had to do the install off a USB device or PXE boot over the network. It was happy to boot off the network, but alas the Debian stable kernel didn't have the JMC250 driver in, so the install couldn't proceed. It was happy to boot from an image on a USB hard disk, and after copying a kernel over from Debian testing, I even had a functioning network.

I don't have WiFi at home, my router predates cheap WiFi, and as wires are cheaper, faster and more secure than WiFi I've not bothered to buy a WiFi access point. The Clevo W83T has a fairly new Realtek 8191SE WiFi chip-set. While Realtek provide a driver for Linux, it only went into the 2.6.33 kernel, which isn't yet available in Debian testing.

Today I downloaded the Realtek driver direct (rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0017.0507.2010), built it and loaded into the 2.6.32 kernel I'm running at the moment. Press the right button on the keyboard to activate the WiFi chip-set and the KDE Network Manager now says I have an active WiFi and would I like to join a local network.

Woot!

AMD/ATI Bugs

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:14:00 +0100

A few days ago I bought a cheap ATI Radeon AGP graphics card to try and extend the life of my desktop system.

The first bug I encountered was that the OpenGL compositing in KDE4 wasn't stable. I added some extra bits to the xorg.conf config file that is supposed to help (it didn't seem to on it's own) and I told KDE4's kwin that it wasn't to do a compositing compatibility test, it should just do it. With that all in place, OpenGL worked and everything was fine and dandy.

Yesterday I upgraded my Debian "squeeze" system and AMD/ATI's fglrx driver was upgraded to version 10-6-1 from 10-5-1. When I restarted X it crashed horribly. Apparently this is a known bug in Xorg and you just need to make sure you have BusID "PCI:1:0:0" (or whatever) set correctly in your xorg.conf file.

Today I diligently updated my xorg.conf file and restarted X and it worked. However now all KDE4 windows are blank and I can't use them, so I've gone back to the open-source radeonhd driver until I can figure out what I need to tweak next to fix it.

Not that I'm complaining, I am running Debian testing and I am playing with fire in using the AMD/ATI official drivers, which are noted for the unreliability...

AMD/ATI Radeon HD Card

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:23:00 +0100

Our desktop systems use generic Nvidia FX5200 AGP graphics cards. Since I upgraded my desktop to KDE4 I've found that the old FX card isn't really up to the job and runs out of steam quite a bit.

I tried to scrounge a newer card from my LUG but there were none to have, so I broke down and bought a newer AGP card. As AGP is obsolete I didn't have much choice, however I found a cheap enough AMD/ATI powered Sapphire HD3450 card.

After fiddling with X.org to get the right driver loaded, and the Nvidia drivers removed KDE4 started with fancy OpenGL compositing running VERY much quicker. Alas there are some stability problems, but nothing that can't be fixed, I hope!

What Were They Doing?

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:51:00 +0100

This spring we moved into a new house. We are using the same energy company as the previous owners so we can compare our energy use this year against their usage last year.

There were three of them in the house compared with just two of us, but when we viewed the house we didn't see plasma TVs in every room, it seem very normal.

April		May
Gas	Electric	Gas	Electric
-8.5	-92.9	-82.5	-86.7
Our energy use as a percentage of the previous owner's.

Though it's not a strict comparison, though I have been taking fortnightly meter readings they are not all used and power company does tend to average out previous years. On the power companies own figures it's an estimated 4.6 tonnes CO₂ reduction on last year if we continue at our current energy use rate for the year.

Given that I leave a server running 24x7 at home, what on earth were they doing that used so much gas and electricity? If you are thinking hot water - it's not that, our is solar powered!

New Year's Jam

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:57:00 +0100

A bit later than intended, but today I've made my first batch of jam in our new house and for 2010. I made rhubarb and ginger jam using the Mr Miot Method. I started with 1 Kg of frozen and defrosted rhubarb, a frozen and defrosted lemon, 800 g of granulated sugar, 250 g crystallised ginger (finely chopped). However, the rhubarb didn't release much juice when defrosted so I added 200 ml of water to stop the sugar from burning. It made two large pots to keep and two medium and two tiny to give away.

It's the second time I've use Mr Miot jamming method and it is very easy to work with - well worth copying. Buy his book if you want to know how to make really good jam: Maison Francis Miot.

Today was also the first time using our new John Lewis (Smeg) cooker in anger. It performed very well and I'm glad we bought it.

Ikea Billy Bookcase

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 22:08:00 +0100

We bought an Ikea Billy bookcase yesterday after the LUG meeting. Today I assembled it. Compared with a similar Argos unit of many years ago, the Ikea one has marginally thicker chipboard panels and the oak veneer is prettier than the black ash on the Argos unit.

All is not good though, the cutout for the skirting board is too low for typical skirting in the UK, so the bookcase still stands free of the wall. More worrying was the veneer which was so brittle that it kept flaking off when inserting screws and dowels to join the unit and the rear panel broke annoyingly just as I was finishing it all off.

For all it's many sins the Argos unit, may be cheaper, uglier, not quite as sturdy, but it's proved more DIY robust that the Ikea unit.

P.S. If someone from Ikea ever reads this, I'd send you feedback but I couldn't find the option on your web site!

SAP Rfc Again

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:37:00 +0100

A long time ago I wrote an application server for SAP in Perl, that used SAP::Rfc to talk to SAP R/3 and TT2 to generate the web pages. It was used in one project and worked well. Last year we used it again to turn a SAP report into a web page on the intranet, now it looks like we may use it again.

It's a good job it's decent code, all modular with decent design, unlike some of the ABAP I have to work with daily...

Coalitions...

Tue, 11 May 2010 12:29:00 +0100

Poor old Nick Clegg, he has three dreadful options to pick from:

Join with Tories - big differences there, so possibly short term stable, but long term it must explode.
Join with Labour et al. - probably unstable and Labour have offered concessions in the past and failed to deliver.
Join with no one and face another general election, probably doing worse that the current one.

Which ever way you look at it, it's unpalatable. Although popular with their own supporters more than 60% of the population really hate the Tories. Labour clearly lost the election and even with Gordon out of the way, they are not the most popular people in the UK this week.

To add insult to injury, whatever the colour of government it's not going to be popular, with massive spending cuts and tax rises required to balance the books and head of Greek style bailout....

Vote Gold get Rainbow...

Sat, 08 May 2010 20:15:00 +0100

For the past few weeks the nasty right wing British press has been running scare story headlines to persuade people that if they vote Liberal Democrat they may end up with a Labour government by the back door: "Vote Clegg, Get Brown"...

What irony, it now looks like if you voted Liberal Democrat you may end up with a Tory government, but tempered and propped up with Liberal Democrat MPs...

What is annoying is all the stupid Labour voters who voted Labour in safe Tory seats, if they had voted Liberal Democrat they may have given the Liberal Democrats more seats but denied the Tories their lead over Labour in Parliament.

The British electoral system is in an utter mess, the constituencies are all different sizes and with our silly first past the post system millions of votes are ignored. I do favour proportional representation, even though I accept it would give a voice to the nutters on the far right and left of the political spectrum...

Two Out Of Three....

Fri, 07 May 2010 18:24:00 +0100

The lack-lustre general election is over. I didn't get the result I wanted: a Liberal Democrat Government but then I hardly expected that. Most people are easily fooled by the other parties and they vote for 5 more years of lies....

I did get two wishes though, Brown lost in a pretty major way, and Cameron hasn't won. A balanced parliament with LibDems as King makers is an acceptable outcome. The (mostly Tory) press is in apoplexy, warning that somehow it would be better if 30% of the people were able to gain a majority in parliament and "lord it" over the real majority for the next five years. In truth most European governments seem to work quite well, many noticeably better than the UK's and they are mostly coalitions. Indeed the two Tory parties in the UK, "The Conservatives" and "New Labour" are coalitions themselves of groups of people who don't really agree on lots of issues.

The next few days will be interesting. With luck the LibDems will moderate the nuttier wings of either of the other two parties and a coalition will be able to tackle the mess the country is in.

FDF Feedback

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:13:00 +0100

Recently I put out some minor patches to fdf. Having just moved house twice this year and currently labouring with a cold I've been a bit slow it completing the exercise and finishing the patches off.

I've had some more feedback, this time on the interim release, so this is good, I just don't feel up to doing anything about it today, even though I'm off work. Having a cold ruin your day when you are on a scheduled holiday isn't much fun.

UK General Election 2010

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 11:10:00 +0100

This year's general election in the UK is very strange, it's as if it's not really happening. The media is all a buzz with Twitter and the TV debates but in the real world nothing is happening. Even on the Internet and the TV nothing is happening.

We have had three TV debates and while better than watching parliament where our MPs behave like spoilt children, there were no major surprises. Ignoring politics, Gordon isn't a people person and did very badly in all three, Cameron did surprisingly badly in the first debate but did improve later on, and Clegg did very well in all three.

On the Internet the media consensus is the the LibDems are in the technical lead with Labour and the Tories trailing very badly.

In the real world not that many people actually watched the TV debates, and of those that did, you get the impressions that the policies are broadly the same, but the only difference comes down to personality, in which case Brown did terribly - but then even Labour supporters must know Brown isn't the sort of person to be popular - he is after-all a dour Scotsman with bad presentation skills.

Though the media get excited about the Internet and Twitter, as an Internet user I've not noticed anything going on at all, and I follow politically active people and politicians. What is noticeable on the Internet is a strong feeling of disgust of the unfair UK voting system and a strong bipartisan urge to monitor what they are getting up to with our money and future.

At a personal level what does annoy me, other than the voting system it's self, is the fact that many people vote for someone or a party without thinking if that person or party actually does what they want. Yahoo! have a party matcher widget and I bet an awful lot of people would find though they vote X and always have done, party X doesn't actually represent their views and they should vote party Y if they actually want what they think is important done.

Party Matcher (while active)