1,000 mph on the streets of London

I like fast cars, and none come faster than Britain's latest attempt on the world land speed record - Bloodhound SSC. SSC stands for Super Sonic Car, which is precisely the aim of this latest project - a car which breaks the sound barrier (around 750mph) and then press on to over 1,000mph. Fiction you might think? Well, think again, as today the full-sized mock-up of the car was on-show on The Strand in London.

I have childhood memories of Richard Noble breaking the record in Thrust 2, but it was Thrust SSC (the first and only official supersonic record holder) which really captured my imagination. This car was run in the Black Rock desert in autumn 1997, a time when I was in Canada attending an extended software training course at Nortel. It was a fantastic time, and to be able to follow the record attempts on line, via the web site and e-mail updates, was cutting edge at the time and really engaged us followers in the runs. The webcam pictures of the Airshelta told you when the car was running (i.e. it was empty), and I still remember checking my e-mails in the classroom when instead I should have been paying attention to the lesson, and the day the record was broken. I wish I'd kept that e-mail!

Now the team are attempting to break their own record with Bloodhound, and I'm both a member of the supporters' '1K club', and an educational ambassador for the project, which is one of the key objectives of Bloodhound. In a world where land speed records may be a little out of fashion (ecologically, financially, etc) Richard Noble has put the emphasis on Bloodhound to make it a vehicle to inspire young students to pursue careers involving Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. To this end, Bloodhound is working closely with the UK government's STEM organisation, and ambassadors like me are taking the Bloodhound message into schools and hopefully inspiring more kids to go on to be the UK's technology pioneers of the future. I think it's a great idea, and I understand Bloodhound is proving a very popular addition to the curriculum.

Below are a few shots from today's demo in The Strand (including an appearance by Mr Noble who is a real star wherever he goes). I hope the traffic wasn't held up too much - buses, taxis, coaches, and even traffic wardens were pulled in to help set the scene! Good fun. Meanwhile, I urge you to visit the project's web site, and join the 1K club or contribute in any way you can.

[edit]
Some of my shots made it to the project's web site!

Thanks for reading,
Nick

A brand new word processor from 1995!

I received an e-mail out of the blue last week from a stranger. His name was Andreas Magerl from Germany, and he asked the a question: "Are you the Nick Harvey who wrote TextEngine for the AMIGA?"

After a quick flashback to a pre-internet 1990s, I recovered enough to reply "Yes"! As it turns out, Andreas runs an online magazine at http://www.amigafuture.de/ servicing what appears to be a thriving Amiga community. TextEngine was a hobby of mine during my younger years. As an owner of an Amiga A500, and later an A1200, I decided to programme my own simple word processor just for my own use. By today's standards it's no better than Windows Notepad, with a couple of additional features. But for me it did the job. For fun I submitted version 1.0 to Amiga Format Magazine who very kindly included it on their cover disc (issue 25, August 1991 to be precise). From there I released it into the Public Domain as a fully functional shareware product (via 17 Bit Software in the UK - now Team 17 -  if I remember rightly), and was very lucky to receive some donations from generous users all over the world.

Even though back then the Internet as we currently know it didn't exist, there was a growing FTP site called Aminet, the de facto repository for Amiga Public Domain software. TextEngine has resided there in good company for many years, and looking back it feels like that was in some way one of the places today's open source community has grown from. I hope it was.

Anyway, getting back to Andreas - he suggested I re-release TextEngine as a freeware product. Once he convinced me there would be a demand (I was rather sceptical) I fired up Devpac (within the incredible WinUAE emulator running on my PC) and was quickly making changes to my 15 year old 68000 source code. The result?

http://aminet.net/package/text/edit/TextEngine

And Andreas was right about the demand - it's been online for 2 days and has so far had over 100 downloads. So many thanks to everyone who has downloaded the 144kb file and still find it useful. Also an especial thanks to everyone who sent in money during the Shareware days - your names all still appear in the Amiga Guide file which accompanies the programme. And a final thanks to Andreas for giving me a brief opportunity to return to the good old days. TextEngine was a real pain to programme - I wouldn't do it again, and have no plans to return to it, but seeing it on-line, on magazine cover discs, and in magazine reviews (even the bad ones!) was very satisfying indeed.

And for those young kids amongst you who never enjoyed owning an old 16 / 32 bit computer such as the Amiga, here are some screenshots...

TextEngine's icon on a sparse desktop

TextEngine, editing its own source code

A very basic spell checker, but better than nothing

Thanks for reading,

Nick

Cool stickers from Google's GMail Team

I'm a GMail user, and received an envelope full of nice stickers in the post this morning. Here they for the curious:

Thanks Google! But what does it all mean...?

OpenSUSE 11.3 - just how do you configure this animal?

In my last post I complained about issues in the latest OpenSUSE 11.3 release which annoy and frustrate me, especially as I believe they could be easily avoided. I've persevered with the distribution for a couple more days, hoping I could get to like it, but I'm rapidly loosing faith. Mainly due to the very confusing settings system SUSE employs.

One common but astonishing discovery is that the SUSE integrators appear to have included two of many of the main configuration panels. Granted, the duplication is between Gnome or KDE's built-in tools, and SUSE's proprietary YaST system, but as a user I've just got very confused. How am I supposed to know which tool to use? And who knows what happens if you switch from one to the other, creating duplicated settings for the same devices. Why have they left this choice to the poor, hapless user, instead of doing the sensible thing and removing the Gnome or KDE default where a better alternative exists in YaST?

Not convinced? Well, I'll stop moaning and will let the following screen-shots from a default Gnome installation do the talking. Who says you don't get value for money with Open Source software - two for the price of none anybody?

1a. Keyboard settings - Gnome:

1b. Keyboard settings - YaST:

2a. Mouse settings - Gnome:

2b. Mouse settings - YaST:

3a. Network settings - Gnome:

3b. Network settings - YaST:

4a. Printing settings - Gnome:

4b. Printing settings - YaST:

5a. Software updates - Gnome:

5b. Software updates - YaST:

I'll be keeping Fedora 13 on my netbook thanks, even if it does only have half the configuration options that SUSE offers. Sometimes less really is more.

Thanks for reading,
Nick

OpenSUSE 11.3 - my Linux love / hate relationship continues...

OpenSUSE 11.3 was released this week after an 8 month development cycle, and so I had to download and try it out. This distribution is the only one which keeps me interested in KDE. It is also, in my opinion, the distribution which gets closest to feeling like a proper commercial product, including everything a user needs to get started. 8 months is longer than Fedora and Ubuntu takes to knock-out a release, so I expected the latest OpenSUSE to be highly polished.

I've played around with it for a bit in Virtualbox, trying to decide whether to replace Fedora 13 on my HP Mini netbook, and, well it's not been great. I've always had a love / hate relationship with Linux desktops, and the latest SUSE release has done nothing to help. What follows are my thoughts as to why this is. Granted, some of these issues are not specific to OpenSUSE, but I as far as the general integration and coherence of the Linux desktop is concerned, I think we still have a long way to go.

So let's start with the 'hates':
I installed the KDE desktop first, with default options, and booted-up. First look through the Kickoff menu, I notice the hateful 'Edutainment' category is there as usual, containing only the Marble desktop globe programme. I decide to uninstall this, but when I try I'm told Marble is a dependency for Digicam. Why? What have these two programmes in common? I load Digicam and open the 'Digicam handbook' to investigate. But instead of seeing the handbook, I get a KDE Help Centre error: "The file or folder help:/digikam/index.html does not exist". I give up.

Next, I install Google Chrome and launch it. It complains it is not the default browser so I tell it to become so. But wait, next time I launch Chrome, I'm told again it is not the default. And again, and again. OK, this is a known issue with Chrome but it's been around for months. How frustrating that such an apparently simple, yet annoying incompatibility between two significant open source products can hang around for so long.

Oh, and on the subject of browsers, why is Konqueror still included? I would like to see this removed by default in future releases. It just seems to be irrelevant. So I've just uninstalled it, which worked fine actually, so this annoyance is easily solved.

There are two different control panels: System Settings, and Administrator Settings (YaST). Both appear in different locations in the main Kicker menu, and there's no obvious clue as to which one contains the setting you want to change. In fact, both tools overlap in some areas, such as network settings, date & time, system services, and so on. If I change a setting in one tool, then change it in another, what happens? I'm just amazed nobody has stood back and said "this is confusing, we need to simplify this". Just one single control panel next time will do thanks.

Oh, and one more comment about YaST's omnipresence in the Kicker menu. When I click on the 'Computer' view, I see an icon named YaST, with a sub-title of 'Administrator Settings'. However, in the Applications -> System menu, it appears with the same icon, but now named 'Administrator Settings' and sub-titled 'YaST'. Unnecessary inconsistency - does anyone check for this kind of thing?

It's a shame SUSE has not adopted the Plymouth boot system for seamless graphical boot. It's a matter of taste, but I like my PC to just switch on and take me to the log-in screen without any fuss. MacOS X and Windows does this quite nicely. So does Fedora. But SUSE shows you the Grub menu for too long (8 seconds), followed by ugly text as the Kernel is loaded, and then finally quite an attractive graphical load while everything initialises. It all feels a bit old fashioned.

EDIT 19/07/2010:
Oh, and what appears to be one quite serious bug to make it through to release, is that as far as I can fathom, you can't enable AppArmor. Try it. Go to YaST, AppArmor Control Panel, which brings up a fairly blank panel with a check box entitled 'Enable AppArmor'. Enable this, then click 'Done'. AppArmor is now enabled, yes? No! Open AppArmor Control Panel again, and the check box is de-selected once more.

EDIT 28/09/2010:
I've actually been running Suse on my netbook for the last couple of weeks having decided to try it one more time. Today a fix for this Apparmor issue has just downloaded and I can confirm this is now resolved. We're heading in the right direction.

OK – that’s enough moaning. Now, what do I love about this distribution?
The installer is very nice - attractive, user friendly, functional, & fast.

I love the way that, on first boot, the system checks for updates and automatically pulls-in Adobe Flash Player (which also works great on the 64bit distribution) and then offers you an option to download Microsoft Fonts & MP3 codecs. OK, slightly at odds with the spirit of free software, but since most users install this stuff anyway, I love the fact SUSE makes it easy (and optional, should you wish to remain free). This is better than any other mainstream distribution I have tried.

I love OpenSUSE's integration of OpenOffice into the KDE theme. Very smart.

Excellent default desktop theme in fact, although why does the Gnome desktop have a larger selection of wallpaper than KDE? Annoying inconsistency [sorry, I know this is the 'love' section]!

YaST, despite the appalling name, is an extremely capable system configuration tool. Probably the best out of any of the main distributions.

KDE's 3D desktop effects are very slick and attractive, and I prefer them to Gnome's equivalents.

Conclusion:
Again, please don't take all of my complaints to be directed specifically at OpenSUSE. These are frustrations I feel with most distributions, but OpenSUSE's latest release just prompted me to write about them. Functionally SUSE has a lot going for it, but it could be so much better with some attention to detail in the user interface.

Fortunately though, with Linux being so configurable, I might just spend some time trying to get things how I want them. I'm not convinced yet that 11.3 will replace Fedora 13 on my netbook, but I might just install it and see.

Finally, I must recognise the fact that OpenSUSE, along with all the other distributions, is completely free. For the cost of a 4Gb download I have a hugely sophisticated and powerful system at my disposal. I can only thank everyone who contributes to these projects, and hope all of these distributions continue to improve over the next few years.

Thanks for reading,
Nick

Fedora 13 & Gnome Shell - looking great.

Having just declared my admiration of Ubuntu 10.04's slick new look, too soon has my in-built need to find something better kicked-in. Not that there's anything wrong with Ubuntu 10.04, but I've always been a Fedora fan, and with version 13 due for release on 25 May, I had to give the latest beta a try. And I reckon it's great.

Having installed the Gnome live CD to my hard disk, all my usual apps have installed well. Fedora's default theme though, despite some attractive wallpapers, is looking rather out of date in my opinion. Having enjoyed Ubuntu's latest look, I went in search of a way of improving Fedora's look, and installing Gnome Shell (a preview of the new user interface due in Gnome 3.0 later this year) seems to have done the trick.

Gnome Shell is still under development and therefore incomplete, but from my initial tests, it is already very usable and stable. If you want to learn more about what it does, I suggest you follow the official tour here. Otherwise, below is a quick guide to getting it working in Fedora 13:

1. Open the Add/Remove Programs package manager, and install the following package:

gnome-shell

2. Once installed (it only takes a few seconds to download), open the Desktop Effects settings, in which you will notice a new option for Gnome Shell. Enable this now:



3. That's it. Simple eh?

Below are a couple of screenshots of the new desktop in action. Of course, getting this working depends on your system having a compatible graphics card and drivers, but I believe if you are already able to run Compiz, then Gnome Shell should work too. My test laptop has in-built Intel graphics and works fine.

So I think I'll stick with Fedora & Gnome Shell for the time being (farewell Ubuntu!), and very much look forward to Fedora 14 later this year, which should hopefully include Gnome 3.0 and Gnome Shell by default.





Thanks for reading.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx): By 'eck it's gorgeous!

After switching regularly between Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu for years, I've finally found a Linux distribution I think I can call 'home'. The lovely Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is it.

I won't go into much technical detail here - by now there will be huge numbers of online reviews picking through the distro in minute detail. Below are a couple of pictures of how my desktop looks on my Acer Aspire laptop. I love the new Gnome theme, and choice of backgrounds. In my opinion this is the closest a Linux desktop has come to rivaling the sleek lines of Mac OS X, and maintaining an original modern look. And I like the new window control position in the top left corner. I tend to drag windows off to the right of the screen to temporarily hide them, so having the controls still visible, poking out from the edge of the screen when I do so, is just better.

Behind the scenes, everything seems to just work: apps install easily through the Software Centre; security is handled by the reasonably simple ufw firewall and Apparmor; and it all happens really fast, boot and shutdown especially so.

I've also installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my HP Mini 110 netbook (the full desktop, rather than the netbook remix) and it runs beautifully. Additionally I've upgraded my media server to Mythbuntu 10.04 from 9.04, and all is well. Finally, I have tried Kubuntu 10.04, but have yet to commit it to hard disk - Ubuntu's new Gnome theme is just too nice to leave!

So, go try it - it's awesome. I'll leave you with a couple of screenshots and an obvious 6 May pun: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS get's my vote!