David Kitchen

I was recently contacted by American Express as part of a market research thing.

The market research involved several members of the market research company interviewing me with a film crew present, and some other people who I guess were employees of either AMEX or the market research company witnessing proceedings.

Continue reading ‘Why hasn’t on-line banking experienced a Web 2.0 overhaul?’

I’ve got something in the region of 17,000 emails stored at home on my Windows PC in a program called The Bat! It’s a great program, I really love it and my love for it has been the biggest delaying factor in my moving to Linux on a permanent basis.

Recently I’ve been using 4 PC’s, all Windows and Linux, and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to get to my email. Previous solutions have involved webmail (for the stuff I haven’t picked up yet), and remote desktop (for getting to older mail remotely). But that isn’t really great because now I’m dual-booting my home desktop, I can’t get to The Bat! all the time I’m in Ubuntu.

So I’ve been considering the merits of uploading my 17,000+ emails to something like Gmail. Having everything online and accessible from everywhere. The concerns over this though pretty much come down to organisation and access.

In The Bat! I have something in the region of 130 folders holding the 17k emails in a nice hierarchy. I can find things pretty damn quick as I know where I would’ve filed things of certain topics and I’m always right. With Gmail there is no hierarchy, just labels. What I am uncertain on is whether it’s possible to label 17k emails in such a way that it is really easy to find what I want? Labels to me are ways of pre-filtering searches, to seperate an email on the purchase of a hard drive from an email on a hard drive failure that a friend has had by choosing to label one ’shopping’ and the other ‘friends’. But it seems that before I perform an import I should probably think about the best use of labels in reducing 130 folders down to something filterable, searchable. So that’s the first thing that concerns me… how best to re-organise such a quantity of mail for a different way of working.

Access is the second concern, and by this I mean the question “What happens if Google close my account?”. I can’t think of any reason why they would, but they do not provide a business critical service, they provide free webmail, that’s it. There’s no accountability should my account become corrupt. No guarantee that in the worst case scenario I could extract my emails from their system. And there’s no way back either… once you’re heavily reliant on Gmail, you can’t export everything and use a different service. This concern doesn’t just apply to Gmail, it applies to all webmail. It’s perhaps a far-fetched scenario, but still one to be concerned about. It’s almost as if I want a “Gmail for businesses” product in which I can gain a level of confidence over the long-term security (business IP value perspective, not physical encryption) and accessibility of the mail.

So my question to you the reader is… where do you store your email? What are the shortcomings of storing it that way? Can you get to it from everywhere? Is it even important to be able to do so?

Ubuntu is up and running, but it wasn’t all quite as simple as it should’ve been… so here are the list of things encountered and how I got around them.

#1 Screen Resolution

During installation you are prompted for which screen resolutions you want to use, however there are two blocks of text… the top one implies that marking a resolution will ‘remove it’ from your system, and the lower one-liner implies that marking a resolution will ‘add it’ to your system.

Initially I followed the first and didn’t mark anything… bad idea… then you get virtually nothing available except for three default modes.

The key is to mark all of them, at least that way you get the choice.

To repair xorg and to make the other screen resolutions available you can do this:
1) Stop xorg (this will drop you to a command line):
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

2) Reconfigure xorg (note that it helps if you have your monitor’s Vertical and Horizontal Sync numbers available):
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

3) Fire up xorg again:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

I found that information here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=454217

#2 Skype

I couldn’t get Skype and a few other programs working under Ubuntu AMD64 at all. Instead, install Ubuntu i386. Yes, it’s not so nice to have a 64-bit CPU and then install a 32-bit Operating System, however you’ll notice immediately that there is far more software available on i386 and it’s far less buggy… even Easy Ubuntu loves i386 but not AMD64.

#3 Grub Error 17

I have three harddrives installed:

Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120000061440 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14589 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1       14588   117178078+   7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          31      248976   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              32       38913   312319665    5  Extended
/dev/sda5              32       38913   312319633+  8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 620181 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1      620178   312569680+   7  HPFS/NTFS

As you can see, hard drive 1 is Windows, hard drive 2 is Ubuntu, hard drive 3 is an NTFS disk full of files.

During installation of Ubuntu I disconnected the NTFS disk of files, as that and the disk I was putting Ubuntu on are the same make and model and I was afraid that I might overwrite the wrong volume.

So… disconnected hard drive 3, installed Ubuntu on hard drive 2… and it worked

Until I re-connected hard drive 3.

It turns out that this was because hard drive 2 (Ubuntu) was actually plugged into the mother board in SCSI5. Hard drive 3 (NTFS files) was plugged into SCSI2. All looked fine in the BIOS but once grub has started up, it recognised hard drive 2 as /dev/sdb2, but grub expected to find the /boot partition on /dev/sdb1.

The solution was simply, plug Ubuntu into a lower numbered SATA (SCSI by appearances) socket. So I moved Ubuntu to SCSI1 and grub worked perfectly.

#4 Accessing Windows and NTFS partitions

Couldn’t figure out how to do this at first, but the answer is over here:
http://www.ubuntuguide.org/#windows

So that’s everything up and running… well, the basics. Next up is seeing whether the webcam will work, figuring out what to do with email (I used The Bat! before and I’d like to use it again, but there is no Linux version… so it may be a case of using Wine).

Merging my near fanatical obsession of music and technology, Justin Frankel (he of WinAmp, Gnutella, Waste, and Shoutcast fame) has recently been toying with his new company (cockos.com) and created the Jesusonic in the process.

The Jesusonic is a guitar effects pad powered by a custom PC and application. It’s low latency, heavily extensible, and as Justin’s blog shows… being constantly improved.

This I like the idea of.

I’m no guitar player (having tried and realised that I really had no talent for instruments), but one thing that really got me was the cost of pedals and the quantity that you would need to have to produce the sounds you wanted.

Most bands already use computers onstage, could this software can be run from existing hardware with only mild modifications (home made pedals, cabling and interface)?

Too many of my musician friends are burdened by the cost of hardware, maintenance and the overheads of transportation when they do gigs. If this technology can be utilised to replace a lot of the existing pedals (reduce cost, lower maintenance and no more things to carry) whilst at the same time giving them more tools for their creative toolbox, then we might really start to see technology finding a way onto the stage and giving us a whole new sound.

Music for the moment: Sonic Youth - Pattern Recognition