DavidCraddock.net

I finally setup my Dell Lattitude D630 laptop the way I wanted it last night, and thought I’d do a quick writeup about it. Here is the parttition table:

1. A 40GB Windows XP partition, with VMWare Player installed, which I will be using for Windows applications that don’t play well in virtualised mode (eg media applications). I will also be using it as the main platform for running VMs.
2. A basic 5GB root + 1.4GB swap 7.10 Ubuntu server partition, with VMWare Server installed (for creating, advanced editing and performing network testing on VMs). I used these VMWare server on Ubuntu 7.10 tutorials.
3. A 36GB NTFS partition for storing VMs
4. A 26GB NTFS media partition for media I want to share between VMs and the two operating systems on the disc.

We use VMWare servers at work to host our infrastructure, so this setup will be very useful for me. I can now:

1. Take images off the servers at work and bring them up, edit them and test their network interactions under my local VMWare Server running on my Linux install.
2. From within my windows install, I can bring up a Linux VM and use Windows and Linux side by side.

I will be attending Brighton Barcamp 2 on the weekend of the 14th March, and presenting on a new web project I’ve been working on.

See: http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/BarCampBrighton2 and http://www.barcampbrighton.org/ for more info.

Update: Brighton Barcamp 2 is now over.

This was really interesting, and I learned a huge amount in a very short amount of time. Thanks to everyone who talked to me. I’ll definitely be attending future Barcamps.

This is going to be absolutely huge:

My friend Adam has a blog featuring interesting internet finds. Check it out:

One Idea

I’ve been trying to learn a lot about search engines lately, as I’ve been starting at an internet marketing firm. I found this excellent list of online materials for university courses related to search engines:

http://clair.si.umich.edu:8080/wordpress/?p=11

In particular, these seem especially relevant:

• The Structure of Information Networks - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs685/2002fa/ (a good introduction)
• Search Engine Technology - http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~radev/SET07.htm (a great course)
• Information Retreival and Web Search - http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mooney/ir-course/ (less math than the columbia course, and thus somewhat easier follow)
• Networked Life - http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/teaching/NetworkedLife/ - (a course on networked societies for humanities students, relavent to social networks and such)

I just noticed that US bulletinboard giant Craigslist.com has opened a Brighton UK section of their website! There are a few posts already. At the moment, Gumtree’s Brighton Section is massively popular here. I’ve recurited several flatmates using Gumtree, and am basing my local housing search around it.

It will be interesting to see how Gumtree.com fares now that Craigslist.com has competition in the Brighton local area.

Nabaztag (Armenian for “rabbit”) is a Wi-Fi enabled rabbit, manufactured by Violet. The Nabaztag is a “smart object”; it can connect to the Internet (for example to download weather forecasts, read its owner’s email, etc). It is also fully customizable and programmable. - Wikipedia.org

Here is our Nabaztag - Francois Xavier:

Of course, I’ve been messing around with poor old Francois’s programming..

With the help of OpenNab, a proxy server that masquerades as an official Nabaztag server, you can make your Nabaztag do all kinds of tricks. At the moment I’m getting him to read out what’s currently showing on TV when someone presses his button.

Here’s the technical details:

Whenever the button is pressed on Francois, he sends a message destined for the official Nabaztag server, that is caught by the proxy server. The proxy server then executes a PHP script. This PHP script grabs the current TV listings from a RSS feed, composes them into a readable list, and then sends the list to the official Nabaztag server, which converts the list (using a text-to-speech synthesis program) into audio files, and streams those audio files to Francois.

The result is a rabbit that reads the TV listings. A useful addition to our TV room.

Coming soon: More technical information on how you can do this yourself.

My GeForce4 MX 420 didn’t work properly with OpenGL under a fresh install of Dapper Drake. Fixing it, however, proved to be really easy:

1) Install the nvidia package:

$ apt-get install nvidia

2) Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace the ‘driver’ where it says ‘nv’ with “nvidia”:

Section “Device”
Identifier “NVIDIA Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 420]”
#Driver “nv”
Driver “nvidia”
BusID “PCI:1:0:0″
EndSection

3) Kill X with control-alt-backspace

4) Login again and test if it works by running glxgears and glxinfo on the console

This blog will be about my perspective on technology. Anything that catches my interest will be fair game, but mainly it will revolve around internet technology and the development of such.

It will allow me to create an online presence, and to improve my writing skills.

I hope you will find the time to check back on this blog and watch it progress.