My blog has moved!

Over the next few days I’m going to move this blog away from wordpress.com and host it at my own domain, http://www.kerneljack.com.

Please head over there from now on as I am going to stop updating this here.

Some writing tips

I’ve spent the past 2 weeks on and off reading ‘Bugs in Writing’ and have definitely learned about some mistakes to avoid in writing. In order to fix these mistakes, it is best to do a lot of your own writing so you can find them and eliminate them. I will try to write a brief note about some common mistakes here. I haven’t asked the author for permission, so I will try to do it here in a very general and concise manner.

#1. Avoid using passive voice. Passive voice just means that when you say something about the world or some event that happened, make sure you identify ‘who or what’ was involved. The ‘who or what’ is commonly referred to as an agent.

For example,

Wrong:
The tea was made.
The program was written.
The computer was dropped.

Correct:
Mark made the tea.
Jane wrote this computer program.
Christopher dropped the computer.

#2. Speak directly to your reader. Never address your audience as the reader or refer to yourself as the author. You should speak directly to your reader. You should refer to her as you. If you are the sole author of a book, use I and if you have co-authors, use we. In addition, avoid using one, as in One should realize … or One has written.

#3. So, So that and Such that. Just remember the following:

So means therefore
So that means in order that
Such that means in such a way that

#4. Two or more. Use the terms between, each other, either, and a couple to refer to precisely two entities; and you should use among, one another, any one of, and several to refer to more than two entities.

I will add some more tips later on, but probably not many. The problem is that I haven’t gotten permission from the author and several of the tips have examples that are best quoted verbatim from the book.

Been too long …

I know I haven’t updated this blog for a while … in fact I frequently abandon it for a few months while I carry on with life’s struggles. Keeping up with my job, finding time to spend with my beautiful wife, all the while attempting to keep current with the fast pace of technology growth.

Starting today, I will try and change that. You see, in order to motivate myself to keep this blog updated I have decided to set myself a goal and complete it. I will keep updating this blog not only with my progress, but will also write about what I have learned as I go along.

So my first goal will be ‘to improve my writing skills’. I have enjoyed writing stuff for a long time now and friends have occasionally told me that ‘you could be a really good writer’. Well I’ve finally decided I should give it a shot.

To be honest, I’ve never been good at grammar, and people find that hard to believe. I’ve simply developed a good ear for what ’sounds right’ based on my perusal of several newspapers, magazines, novels and books over the years. Learning a lot of vocabulary while preparing for my SATs and reading ‘lots’ has really helped.

The first book I’m going to try and read and understand is going to be Bugs in Writing, which I bought several years ago, but never got around to reading. It is written mainly for people who come from a scientific or technical background and hence is perfectly suited for someone like me. Each chapter aims to analyse and fix a single ‘problem’ and you can read each chapter in whatever order you like.

With that, I bid you farewell. I believe my next post is going to be about ‘passive/active voice’. Exciting times indeed

WordPress finally supports WXR imports!

I’ve been waiting for so long now to import my old WP blog from my old web server to this site. The problem has been that until now, wordpress.com blogs did not have an ‘Import Self-Hosted WordPress Blog’ option so I couldn’t move my older blog across. The only option I had was to spend many days manually adding all of my posts to kerneljack.wordpress.com and correcting all the dates, which would have been a nightmare.

Thankfully I just discovered the wordpress-to-wordpress plugin which allows me to export my old blog as a WXR file which wordpress.com can then import. Now that I am back I will try to keep updating this blog more often.

Yahoo’s new RSS + SMS service

Yahoo has started a new RSS + SMS service, but reading about it, I’m really not sure what I use I would put it to:
RSS + SMS

As Russ has already mentioned, it’s typical use case is not the elite digerati who subscribes to 500 feeds, it is instead useful if you have a more focused feed (let’s say within a company) and want employees to be alerted to certain critical events. The use cases i’ve thought of so far that might work for me are:

- Sysadmins being texted when there are new updates on a server? This is assuming that whoever provides the updates publishes an RSS feed to go along with it.
- Employees being texted reminders from their Outlook or iCal calendars. A lot of online calendaring apps like Backpack allow you to publish your reminders as RSS feeds so you should be able to get alerts for those.
- Any other scenario where someone needs to stay updated on a certain topic every hour or so. I assume you can configure the Yahoo service to send alerts out only every hour or so, so it sends them in a “batch” format instead of 10 updates per hour. This should help alleviate the 50 updates an hour problem.

The only problem I see is that I’m sure people *already* have ways of doing this stuff. I can easily write a script that checks my server for updates every day and sends me an alert or email about it. Granted, Yahoo’s service is supposed to be free, and SMS will cost me, but still, it’s already been done.

When this comes to the UK (if), I’ll probably configure it to send me an alert about system updates for my servers, etc. If there isn’t an RSS for it, I’ll create it.

Trip to Oxford

We had a great time on our trip to Oxford last weekend … I took quite a few pics, particularly of the landscape while on the train but many didn’t turn out so well. The trip itself was great, we took a full bus tour and saw most of the interesting sites, from Christ Church to the Carfax tower and the [Museum of the History of Science](http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/). They’ve got an original blackboard there on which Einstein scribbled some equations for determining the age of the Universe! It’s pretty cool to see that.Overall Oxford seems a pretty small and tightly knit town which is absolutely full to the brim with students. I have never seen so many bicycles in my life! All the campuses and colleges, etc are so close together in a small space that students simply ride their bikes to wherever they need to go. All those bicycles reminding me of China in a way.

I’ve put up the best pictures I could find at [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kerneljack). The best thing about Flickr is that you can simply search for all pictures tagged with “oxford” and you will see a LOT more than we got to get; there are just so many people taking pictures and uploading them to Flickr that you can find pictures from almost anywhere.

Buzztracker

Discovered Buzztracker through Slashdot today. What I really like about buzztracker is that it allows me to see at a glance what the most talked about news items are for today. What it’s really doing is mining Google News and creating links between the geographic locations of articles. It’s quite useful to check out the popular news for the day.

Here is a glimpse of what the map was like today:

* Baghdad (38%)
* Vatican (13%)
* Rome (05%)
* Boston (04%)
* Islamabad (04%)
* Cairo (04%)
* Khartoum (03%)
* Beijing (03%)
* Washington (02%)
* Delhi (02%)
* Kathmandu (02%)
* Mosul (02%)
* Pyongyang (02%)
* New Delhi (02%)
* Moscow (02%)
* Oslo (01%)
* Tokyo (01%)
* Chicago (01%)
* Beirut (01%)
* Jerusalem (01%)

Notice the list associated with this map which is quite useful as an adjunct to the map, showing you more clearly what the picture doesn’t. I will definitely use this from time to time to see what’s popular newswise *at the moment*. The great thing is they publish an RSS feed, which easily keeps you updated within your aggregator of choice.

John Carmack is blogging!

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc

This is very cool, I’ve always admired Carmack for his technical abilities and his abilities to quickly get down and dirty with any new technology. For example in his post about mobile games he starts off with “dusting off my java in a nutshell book” and then talks in details about java’s threading issues, mobile latency issues, java bytecode disassembly, portability issues, timing issues, circuit switching standards.

Very refreshing reading and definitely something to look up to. I wish all tech people had this much intimate knowledge of the platforms they work on everyday. I know that at least I will try even harder to achieve this from now on.

The only thing disappointing about the site is the lack of a feed to subscribe to, RSS, Atom, whatever so I’ve bookmarked the page in http://del.icio.us/kerneljack instead.

BlogBridge

A superb blogging app written in Java, and it also allows you to save your state so you can pick up where you left off on a computer other than your regular one. Just try it using the supplied Webstart link; you don’t need to create an account the default list of supplied feeds is excellent.

Some cool stuff on the Ars Technica Holiday Gift Buying Guide. Mmm.. iPaq

Superb commentary and speculation from Russ on the iPhone This sounds plausible, but a lot of the comments against it also make sense. Apple will have to compete in the market that is already swamped really badly, and they will also have to deal with the mobile phone operators. In short, a lot of work in a lot of new territory for them, if they take up the challenge.

weedshare

Finally, music artists have come up with a way to earn money and circumvent the music industry through weedshare, and online service that allows artists to put up their own songs and charge as much as they want for them, but usually up to a dollar for a song. I think it’s a great idea, if it takes off that is. At least artists now seem to be starting to move towards a model where they make their own rules and earn their own keep on their own terms. Also, the more you share and other people share the better. This is better explained in this section in the FAQ:

The concept is pretty basic: Weed rewards people who share files and respect artists’ rights.

You can play a Weed file three times for free on any PC. After three free plays, you’re asked to pay for the file. You can use any current Windows Media-compatible player software to play the file. The Weed software, which keeps track of your account information, is used to purchase files.

Once you purchase a Weed file, you’re free to play it all you want on up to three PCs. You also can burn the file to CD and play it on your stereo system, or transfer it to a portable device like the Creative Labs Nomad, the Rio S10, or any current Windows CE PDA.

Best of all, you can share Weed files with anyone you like, as long as the files remain in their original form as Windows Media files. And if someone you share a file with purchases that file, you’ll earn a payment for helping to distribute it.

Specifically, the artist always receives 50% of each sale, and the rest goes to those who helped distribute the file. You get 20%, the person who shared the file with you gets 10%, and the person who shared the file with that person gets 5% of the sale price. Weed receives the final 15% for service and software maintenance costs.

All purchases and distributor payments are made into your Weed account through PayPal. Deposits and withdrawals from your Weed account cost 50 cents, but all other transactions are free. You must have a PayPal account to make deposits to your Weed account.

Some friends were over and I took some pictures of their baby daugher which they loved. My Olympus camera is over 3 years old right now and this got me thinking about what new stuff is available. I bought my 3 megapixel Olympus camera for about 300 pounds and now the superb Canon IXUS 5 Megapixel is only 239 pounds! It’s quite an amazing camera, more than good enough for a lot of things. A great recommendation.

Upgraded to MT 3.2

I finally upgraded to MoveableType 3.212. I really wanted to upgrade, if just to get the Comment Moderation feature as comment spammers are bombarding my site pretty badly right now. Everyday I get about 20 pieces of new comment spam. This feature allows me to approve comments from unregistered users before they appear on the site. That doesn’t cut down the work for me, but at least it defeats the spammers’ purpose: free web advertising through search engines like Google.

I haven’t been reading blogs regularly these days and I just found out that Russell has started working for Yahoo!. Wow! Way to go! I have always enjoyed reading Russ’ posts (sometimes not completing them as they tend to be really long and I’m looking forward to any changes at Yahoo! that he will influence. Good luck, Russ. On another note, this image he has put together of the phones available in the US this Christmas is awesome.

Star Wars Trilogy is out!

Hmm.. Russell just received his Star Wars trilogy set, I feel like I should get it too, it was just 29.99 at WHSmith’s on the day of the release and is only 26.99 on Amazon right now. I was seriously expecting it to be much much more expensive than that, though I am glad it isn’t. I never managed to watch any of the movies as a kid, they were never to be found anywhere. It was only about 7 or 8 years ago when I was in Cyprus that I watched them properly. I do believe the new movies suck though Episode II was definitely better than I.

I almost completely missed the rumour that Google is thinking about creating it’s own browser, namely gbrowser. That should be interesting, though I still haven’t managed to get a gmail.com account. Google has hired away a few people from Microsoft who used to work on IE. Jason Kottke has more on it, and apparrently Anil Dash thought it was a good idea last year Good call.

MSN Music and the iPod

Regarding my comments on MSN Music and the lame comments by some people, Daring Fireball has made some interesting observations on the help site for MSN Music. Microsoft claim that Apple’s store uses a proprietary format and it is difficult to use the store with the 70 other standard music players on the market. Interesting spin, though as is pointed out in the post, those 70 or so other players also work only with WMA or MP3. In the case of Apple, the iPod only works with AAC and MP3. So both are DRM-encumbered, but, Microsoft makes a really big spin on it and makes the iPod look like the beacon of incompatibility.

The only format of music you can buy on the MSN Music store will be DRM-enabled WMA. Most players that support Windows will play only this format plus maybe MP3. The MSN Music store only works in IE and uses ActiveX. So who’s being incomptible with everyone else here? Apple makes iTunes available for both Mac and Windows and people have even been able to play the stuff in Linux as AAC is a standard format, unlike WMA which requires you to get the Windows DLLs from somewhere to play in Linux. Anyways, enough of this rivalry. They both have their limitations and lock-ins. Let the best man win. I have a feeling Microsoft might eventually take the lead again somehow because they have deeper pockets and most people who get Windows with their PCs will not know any better to go out of their way to buy music from Apple. Yes I know Apple is the leader in online music sales right now, but for how long?

I uploaded a bunch of older entries from my weblog yesterday and it is really striking to me how much more funny and free-spirited I used to be back in 1999 Staying awake everyday until 3:00 am, reading a lot of technical books, documentation, eating a lot, watching a lot of movies. All my older entries have a much funnier streak. I hope I don’t lose what I have left as I get older.

20 years

Larry Osterman has written a brilliant post about his 20 years at Microsoft. He’s been through so many changes and reorganizations at Microsoft, he’s basically witnessed the whole of the personal computer revolution and it’s repercussions. I suppose a lot of others have as well, but in any case his write-up is superb:

I still have the letter that Microsoft sent me confirming my job offer. It’s dated January 16th, 1984. It’s formatted in Courier, and the salary and stock option information is written in ink. It’s signed (in ink) by Steve Ballmer. The offer letter also specifies the other benefits; it’s not important what they are. I also have Steve’s business card his job title? VP, Corporate Staffs. Yup, he was head of HR back then (he did lots of other things, but thats what his title was). I also have the employee list they gave out for the new hires, as I said before; there are only about 600 people on it. Of those 600 people, 48 of them are still with Microsoft. Their job titles range from Executive Assistant, to UK Project Troubleshooter, to Architect, to Director

Discovered Metroblogs today, and I quite like the London one, despite all the criticisms levelled at it in the comments. I’m sure it’ll improve in time. It’s made me think about going to the London Wetlands and the Thames Barrier Park.

Torrential downpours

Middle of summer and so much rain around it’s not funny. I was caught in a thunderstorm a week ago with an umbrella in one hand and a kitchen trolley in another Oh and a knapsack which I shouldn’t have brought along. Nevertheless running in the rain and hoping and praying that the lightning flashes you are seeing don’t find a reason to come your way is something I won’t (and won’t want to) experience again soon. I should have had the damn trolley delivered

That was a while ago but recently even more torrential downpours have hit the northern areas of Scotland and England. Lots of flooding and devastation and rescues. Charlie is causing much havoc stateside as well. We have mostly managed to avoid the rain here is london so far but we hear it is approaching ….

Had a really nice time a few nights ago with my friends Phil and Julia and Carlos and Jenny. They were hosts at our first tea party at the new flat. Muchos fun was had by all.

Apple Tablet coming up? new G5 iMacs being released end of August, which should be very interesting. I can’t wait to see their new design for the iMacs as I’m sure everyone else is. Phil Schiller is doing the keynote speech this time though as Jobs just underwent cancer surgery. I wish him a speedy recovery.

XP SP2 install not trouble-free

Looks like XP SP2 is definitely better but proving quite troublesome for many people to install. I’ve read quite a few reports of installations failures and total system screw-ups on different mailing-lists and newsgroups, and this eweek article gives a nice summary of the problems so far:

In Weblog postings and interviews with eWEEK.com, users have reported everything from unproblematic installs to complete system failures. In between, difficulties varied from confusing user interface changes to broken applications to performance slowdowns. Many said SP2’s features improved their confidence in the platform’s security; others said they continue to be surprised by minor issues

The thing that surprised me most was the ability of other firewall vendors such as McAfee and ZoneAlarm to turn off the XP firewall when they are installed. I understand why they would need to do this, as running 2 potentially conflicting firewalls at the same time is probably not a good idea, I do hope these third-party products provide suitable notification and warning of their actions.

I myself am actually a bit glad that these kinks will be worked out or at least solutions will have been posted for most problems by the time Microsoft releases the non-OEM home user version of SP2.

On another random note, though and totally unrelated to SP2, Pizza Hut in London sucks! And I really mean it, I almost lost it today trying to order a simple delivery from them. The person on the other end couldn’t understand my address, had problems with my postcode, the final price was wrong …. I’ll just end it there, I hope they get better

Great Hackers

Found a great entry on Tom’s site today where he comments on Paul Graham’s excellent Great Hackers essay. I haven’t managed to find time to read the essay but Tom’s post about office space makes a good point. I also strongly believe in having a nice quiet space when one wants to concentrate on ‘hard problems’ or even when trying to follow a train of thought to conclusion. Being interrupted at times like these leads to a huge loss in productivity as you have to context switch for however long is necessary to do something else and when you return to the task at hand you might find it difficult to continue where you were interrupted. It’s not like you can simply change the Instruction Pointer in the brain like you can in computer memory to simply resume execution where it left off

If you read Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines you’ll see that he is right when he states that brain neurons basically waste a lot of processing power not calculating, but sustaining body functions. So when a positronic brain is eventually constructed with equal computing capacity to the brain it will function much more effectively at computation as electronic circuits are a million times faster than neurons. Remember though that this “being” or whatever it may be will also have to devote a portion of it’s processing power to maintaining itself. Still, in the end it would be a lot more efficient.

Blog Software Breakdown

Big kerfuffle happening since MT decided to impose some charges upon its users. Mark Pilgrim has a very well-written piece called Freedom 0 which has been linked to death by many people; he ended up writing a follow-up to it. There is a nice breakdown of most blogging software and their features here

I’m still using MT as I installed it last year. Since I’m the only one publishing to this blog at the moment, I don’t see any reason to change over to anything else. Nevertheless I will keep a close eye on WordPress and may switch to it sometime in the future as Tom and many others have done. It’s not that I’m against what MT have done in any way; it’s just something I need to think about.

Been doing a lot of linux work lately at home and am quite pleased with its progress on the desktop Kernel 2.6, Gnome 2.6, gdesklets, etc all make for a really nice desktop and OpenOffice is getting better everyday. The GNOME developers are quite busy these days as can be witnessed by reading the PlanetGnome blogs.

Sony Clies, Mac x86 emulation

Some amazing things happening these days. I’ve been using my Sony Clie heavily for quite a while now and have found it to be so convenient while travelling to/from work. I’ve got several ebooks on it (including Cryptonomicon , some music and some technical audio talks, some movies, a few pictures I took in the office, and every morning I sync up all my RSS feeds to it and read them on the way to work It’s got quite a good battery life, requiring recharging every few days or so, depending on how heavily I use it.

The only downsides to using a clie on the Mac is that some things like Memory Sticks don’t show up on the desktop as mountable drives. This can be fixed by downloading the excellent missingsync for macs, which allows you to use the full functionality of the clie, along with iTunes, iPhoto, etc. Memory sticks are one of the things I don’t like about Sony machines though. They are expensive for the amount of memory you get (about 50 pounds for 128MB – official sony store prices are about 70 pounds!). Yes, ebay is your friend

In other interesting news, someone’s written a Mac emulator for the PC that runs OSX! I’ve only just found out that PC fans are falling all over themselves to try this thing. There’s even a website called www.emaculation.com!

One other thing to check out: musicplasma. It’s really cool.

Hourly doses of coffee beat a cup? I better figure this out and change my daily dose, this might be quite helpful.

Debian Unstable -> Testing -> Stable

Had a great day today. Fixed a major networking-related issue at work which prevented us from accessing some site. I was really pleased I finally fixed that. I’ve also been using Netbeans for some time now and the latest 3.6 is quite good for interface design. I’m using the Mac version and the one thing I really like about it is the ability to instantly preview the interface A lot of other interface designers have been doing this for ages (e.g QT Designer) and it’s about time I saw this in Java

I also spent some time yesterday downgrading my firewall from Debian unstable to stable Despite all the stuff you’ll find after googling about ‘Downgrading is NOT supported!’ I found that its actually not that difficult at all. The best discussion of this I found that helped is here

A lot of discussion these days about A9, Amazon’s new search engine. It allows you to do a web search, book search and look at your search history from what I’ve seen so far. You do need to log in first though. A lot of people are worried about the privacy implications of this, as this allows Amazon to build a pretty accurate picture of what people are searching for and buying. I suppose in the end this is good for the consumer, but still worrying for some people.

Similar privacy concerns have surfaced around Google’s new Gmail webmail system. I simply cannot see why anyone would want to store a Gig of their mail somewhere! I subscribe to many mailing-lists and do have some folders that are megabytes in size, but a gig is just too much, and what if the system is compromised somehow? That’s a lot of my personal life in someone else’s hands. More from jeremy on the issue here