A friend sent me this today http://www.animalsontheunderground.com/the_animals.html One of those internet gems

It’s not quite 4OD, it’s 4OD catch-up, but as far as I’m aware the only difference is the inability to watch archived shows, such as old episodes of Green Wing or Black Books… but maybe in time this will become a reality too.

So what has prompted this new service? I’d like to think demand from mac and Linux users, but who knows. The shift from Microsoft’s WMP to Adobe’s flash player has certainly made the whole thing more accessible though. Whilst it would be nice to have a completely FOSS solution, this is unrealistic at present and I think Channel 4 should be applauded for taking steps to make life easier for non-windows users.

If you’re getting an error when you try to produce a pdf, or any other output from Lyx using the built in Journal of Physics D style, then try the following:

Download the following file to your home directory: http://www.danbishop.org/downloads-files/iop.tar.gz

Then run the following commands:

sudo tar zxvf iop.tar.gz -C /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex

sudo texhash

Voilà! Don’t even have to restart Lyx

There has been a midisport-firmware package in Ubuntu for as long as I can remember… and it’s been broken for as long as I care to remember. Today though, it has been fixed! I’m not sure if this will be backported or not, but if you’re using Jaunty Jackelope all you have to do to get your midisport to work is “sudo apt-get install midisport-firmware” then plug it in!

The bug report detailing why this doesn’t work in previous versions can be found here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lyx/+bug/301439

There has been some major development of www.weblex.org, however, the offline version of Lex hasn’t received much attention for the last few months. Unfortunately I’ve had to put my degree first for the time being, but I do expect to get a little bit of work done on both online and offline components in my Easter holidays… I do have exams straight afterwards though

I am also hoping to do an internship this coming summer, but as that should be fairly 9-5-esque I can’t foresee that slowing development too much.

In terms of the online version, I’ll be looking for beta testers soon, the search component is functional, but requires some work still, the submission component is fully functional and the review component has made significant progress.

Two of my housemates (Fiona and Claire) and myself have decided to complete the following 50 tasks before we graduate from York. We’ve got quite a way to go…

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Dell Mini 9

I bought a Dell Mini 9 from Tesco Direct about two weeks ago now, unfortunately, the battery was dead when it arrived, but after a quick chat to Dell the laptop was collected from my house the next day and redelivered with a new battery and a new motherboard the next week.

Since then I have been VERY impressed with it. However, the version of Ubuntu that came pre-installed is a specially customised version of Hardy Heron 8.04, I really need at least 8.10 so that I can use LyX across all my machines properly. Installing 8.10 was easy and everything except the sound worked out of the box. To fix the sound a single line had to be added to a config file (easily searchable on google).

The problem came, however, when I tried to use LyX and my “” kay didn’t work. I tried all the other keys on the keyboard and discovered that [ and ] were also non-functional.

My inital assumption was that I needed to specify some special dell keyboard layout in xorg.conf and as two of my friends also have Mini 9s running the default pre-installed version of Ubuntu I thought this would be quite easy to find… Their xorg.conf files were very standard though, nothing  Dell specific at all.

Finally, after much searching, I found this:
Setting keyboard matrix:
1. Turn off your computer.
2. If your computer is connected to the ac adapter, disconnect the ac adapter from the computer.
3. Press and hold <Fn><K>.
4. Connect the ac adapter to the computer (assuming that the AC adapter is already plugged into an electrical outlet).
5. Release the key combination.

It worked! This came from someone who had replaced the keyboard and was having the same issue as me, I have not read of anyone who has instaloled 8.10 and had the same issue. I can only assume that my issue came about because either, my keyboard was also replaced when it went in for repair, or, I did upgrade the BIOS to A04 before installing 8.10,  so perhaps that had something to do with it…

I could definitely recommend the Mini 9, it is perfectly capable of full screen iPlayer playback, the battery life is around 4-6 hours and the keyboard, though small, is actually very pleasent to work with.

Spotify Logo

Spotify is a free, legal, ad-supported way to stream music. Their catalogue of music is HUGE and whilst there is no native-linux client there are very comprehensive instructions for how to run it under wine on their own site (this is very easy too, no hacking around).

At the moment, the service is in beta and you need to be invited to join it, or pay for one of the premium services. However, for a limited time, if you’re in the UK you can use this link to sign up: tinyurl.com/spotifylink. There are native clients for Windows and Mac OSX… perhaps with a little bit of lobbying a native Linux client will be released too.

I couldn’t find a nice table with all the data types and the limits associated with them in it, so I thought I’d trawl the web for each individual one and make one. This table is by no means exhaustive, but it does contain most of the common ones and will be updated as I need to use more of them for WebLex it also assumes that mysql 4.1 or greater is being used. Else some default values might be incorrect.

Well, it’s 2009 and I’ve abandoned my old username and website and decided to start using my real name… why? Why not? Ok, firstly, and perhaps most shockingly, it would appear that the British education system is not capable of raising a nation of people who can spell, or in many cases even pronounce, the word ‘vicious’. It’s a major headache if you have to give your e-mail address to someone over the phone…

Secondly, my e-mail address is about to start appearing on CVs and vicious doesn’t send out quite the right image (I hope!). I’ll slowly be moving everything over to this site, but until then the old one will stay online.

I also intend to post more regular updates about the progress of Lex here.