I’d heard that Dell were offering Ubuntu Linux on some of their laptops and I hadn’t really looked into it. But I came across this page the other day and it’s pretty neat to get Ubuntu (or any Linux) preloaded on a laptop from a major vendor:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=d

It’s good to support coming from a major vendor, and Dell even offer’s a repo so you can get BIOS updates for support hardware:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/02/05/dell-bios-updates-using-linux/

However, I’m still partial to getting Lenovo’s T400 over a Dell.

Support Boston’s Pine Street Inn this year and buy holidays cards based on a photograph I took:

http://www.pinestreetinn.org/store/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=61

The photograph also came 24th in the Boston Globe’s 2008 Winter Wonderland contest:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/02/22/winter-wonderland-24/

Penny over at BostonZest did a write up on this and asked me to comment on the picture:

http://www.bostonzest.com/2008/10/holiday-cards-to-support-pine-street-inn.html

I figured it’s time for me to try and install kde4 again! Previously I had to remove KDE4 due to package conflicts. There are installation instructions at:

http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/experimental.html

So following the instructions there on what changes to make to your sources.list, and then run:

aptitude update

I’ve had some dependency issues, and installing the kde4 package (a meta-package that will install all of KDE4) would not install due to dependency issues with the kdegraphics package. The way around this is to install the kde4-minimal package and whichever of the other packages you want. So I installed everything, minus the kdegraphics package via the following:

aptitude install -t experimental kde4-minimal kdeplasma-addons kdegames kdemultimedia kdenetwork kdepim kdeutils kdeedu kdeadmin kdeartwork kdetoy

Be prepared for a lot of packages to be installed, for others to be removed, and to possibly break your existing kde3 installation (if you have one). See the first comment to see what I had to install and remove.

Firstly, KDE4 does not import any of your KDE3 settings, which is pretty annoying, as all of the applications start with the default settings, and is really annoying with applications like kmail … however some has created a tool to import the settings:

http://silentcoder.co.za/silentcoder/?page_id=330

My only complaint about the tool, is that it requires root to install it. I’d also like the option to be able to run the tool without first having to install it. Anyways, it seems to work pretty well and imported all of my mail into kmail, the only thing it didn’t do was import account settings into kmail.

This post is a work in progress, I’ll update it over the next day or so with any further instructions as I install, configure, and test KDE4.

I thought I’d start looking at using Debian’s experimental E17 packages. I commented out all other E17 repo’s from my source.list and installed the debian e17 package. It installs a minimal amount of related packages, and there doesn’t seem to be lot of e17 packages available in the experimental repo

sudo aptitude install e17
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states… Done
Reading task descriptions… Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
e17 e17-data{a} libecore-con0{a} libecore-evas0{a} libecore-fb0{a} libecore-file0{a} libecore-imf0{a} libecore-ipc0{a} libecore-job0{a} libecore-txt0{a} libecore-x0{a} libecore0{a}
libedbus0{a} libedje0{a} libeet1{a} libefreet0{a} libembryo0{a} libevas-engines{a} libevas0{a}
0 packages upgraded, 19 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 8110kB of archives. After unpacking 15.5MB will be used.

This appears to provide a good basic E17 Desktop, but provides no additional themes, and I’m not sure how many modules it includes. Here’s a screenshot:

If you want to use this add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib

This also includes KDE4 packages. You’ll want to be careful with this repo, that you don’t pull in and install too many (possibly breaking) packages from it.

Look for my latest posting on E17 as this information could be out-of-date:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/category/e17/

WTF is Citibank thinking with their web interface:

When I’m looking at my old statements I don’t want to have to wait for a PDF to download, then for Adobe Acrobat to open just so I can briefly look at an old statement.

Come on there Citibank, give me a default option to view this information in HTML (as a webpage) so I can see if it’s the information I need, then let me choose if I want it as a PDF, or excel file …

I’m thinking of getting a new laptop either the Lenova ThinkPad T400 (which is a replacement for the T61), or the IdeaPad U330 to replace my aging Dell 700m

The big thing for me is do they work with Linux (for me specifically Debian or Ubuntu).

For anyone interested in either laptop, looks like the the U330 works (near) flawlessly with Ubuntu. See this posting on this thread for an enthusiastic comment:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5741753&postcount=5

And with the T400 you’ll have some work to get everything working smoothy. Such as the dual-graphics cards which is how Lenovo get’s up to 10 hours of battery life from the T400.

However, if you don’t mind using breaking stuff, the new Beta version of Ubuntu appears to work reasonably well on the T400. See this blog posting and this thead on Lenova’s forums for more details.

I’m torn between either, the small size of the U330, versus the better battery life of the T400 (and the fact that both are a weeeeee bit dear).

OK, I’m tired as I write this, and I find sometimes when I “blog while tired” that my grammar/spelling/ability to make sense suffers, so maybe I’ll rewrite this in the morning.

On Sunday Jeannie, me sister, and I went to Murvagh beach on a lovely sunny afternoon (or the Backstrands as me Dad used to call it). We spend about 2 hours paddling in the water and walking along the strand on a beautiful warm sunny day, with a big black cloud slowly approaching. I got, what I think are, some amazing photographs. I took so many now I have a hard time deciding which to post on Flickr!

Here’s a video I made of the tide coming in:

A while back I scanned some old postcards of Donegal Town that I borrowed from my Aunty Isabel. They’ve been pretty popular on flickr.com, with this one getting over 900 views:

And this one getting over 1800 views:

Both of these were taken sometime in the 1970’s and I can’t take credit for taking the pictures, that would have been John Hinde or the postcard company he owned of the same name and sold in 1973 (right around the time these pictures were probably taken).

I really like these pics, they’re very nostalgic for me as the the postcard themselve remind me my childhood, as these were sold around the town up to the late 1980’s (even after the center of town changed they made the center into an open plaza with any cars on it). I can barely remember the town looking like, I would have been 3 or 4?

This is a common mistake that people do when given presentations, they run out of time. This appears to mainly be because they’ve written their persentation (usually on PowerPoint) and haven’t done a trial run to determine if it will fit into the time allocated. Today for example, someone gave a presentation in a meeting that lasted 2 hours and after 1.5 hours was only 1/3 of the way through their slides.

So either the subject they;re talking about is too complex for this format, or they (which is I think is the most common problem) under-estimate how quickly they can do the presentation (or how long it will actually take them to present it!).

Also, just because a meeting is scheduled for X length of time, it never means that you actually have X time to work with. First, people are always late*, or it takes time to get the screen-sharing working, dial into the conference call. Then people have to do the verbal handshakes Based on my experience where I work now, this is in the range of 5 to 20 minutes. Unless you have a meeting co-ordinator or chair who’ll promptly get things going and make sure all the tiddly bits, such as the screen-sharing  … are set-up and running.

And, if your presentation doesn’t take all of the allocated time, you’ll get more feedback, and the undying gratitude of all the people in the meeting, who had to attend but have no interest in the meeting, they’ll get a few minutes of their day back so they can get back to work***.

* People are alway late: At least where I work. A lot of the time this is because if they have back-to-back meetings one meeting runs overtime (bad meeting management) so they’re late for the following meeting which won’t start until they show, which runs over cause they’re late and creates a snowball affect.

** Verbal handshakes: The banter at the start of meeting where people introduce themselves, or exchange pleasantries with peole they know at the meeting “How are you?”, “I’m so-and-so.” … and so on

*** Back to Work: Unless they have a laptop, which means they spend the whole meeting clattering away on the keyboard distrupting the people sitting near them.