Matt Daubneys Blog

Simply apt-get install libnotify-bin and then add the following to your crontab

*/10 * * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 XAUTHORITY=~/.Xauthority notify-send “Don’t forget”  ”you’re awesome”

Then every ten minutes, this will happen:

Just to cheer yourself up after a really rubbish few weeks.

My fight against distractions has carried on further. This brief episode is brought to you by the theory of “scratching your own itch”.

There are a lot of things that annoy me with various tasks I perform every day. This past week I’ve been taking note of each one, and I count 78 in total. Each one of those 78 things could probably be fixed very easily, but because I’m generally running around like a headless chicken trying to get things done, I don’t even think about fixing them, I just put up with them and carry on. A fair few of these are things that take a while to fix, like the office being short of physical space because of all the orders coming in/out at the moment. Other issues are easy to fix, like the fact that it takes me 30 minutes to an hour to do a quick analysis of some testing data. This is a problem I can solve easily with a smattering of python and a little concentration. In fact, I’m intending to tackle this on Sunday by going into the office when it’s quiet, and just making this problem vanish.

A few other problems on that list of 78 can also be solved with code, some easily, some not so. Some can be solved by a few simple changes in my work routine, like the fact I constantly go to do a task, get pulled away by something else, and then forget what I was going to do. Keeping a simple log book of what I’m doing during the day would solve this easily. It would be better if this was digitized in some form, but for now a simple notebook will probably make a huge difference. This distraction on its own has probably caused me to lose my train of thought more times this week than any other on the list.

So how id my fight going? I’m much more aware of what causes me to be distracted after the past week or so. It’s taking me time to come to terms with each of those distractions and to deal with them, but ultimately, I am becoming more productive in a given period of time. The next big thing I’m going to have to tackle is project methodology. Since I don’t even have a passing familiarity with any of the standard methodologies, this is going to take some research, some thought and  a lot of conversations in order to find the best one to suite the needs of my team at work. As always, any pertinant reading material suggestions are always welcome.

For a little while now I’ve been getting quite annoyed with myself for being very easily distracted (be it with llamas, badgers, narwhals or whatever). This has meant that my general level of productivity has been somewhat…… low. I have a list of running projects as long as my arm, none of which get enough attention because I flit form one to the other almost hourly. The situation as is obviously needs addressing.

From what little intelligence I can bring to bear on the problem, this should be able to be broken down into a few different variables:

1. Environmental
2. Physical
3. Grey-mushial (?)

Environmental

Fixing environmental problems is relativley easy. If I want to concentrate on a task now I use my Mac Mini. Not because OSX is any more productive than Ubuntu I hasn’t to add, but because it is in a room on a desk with a comfortable chair in a comfortable working position. There is no television, no games consoles or anything else around to take my attention away from what I’m attempting to do.

In the office at work, I try and keep my desk clear of clutter. When there is a lot going on, or a lot of noise around, the twin help of Spotify and a decent pair of headphones can help keep me inside my own head and in my comfortable work zone. Anything I would sit and watch constantly for updates or results is now being reworked to email me or notify my some other way so that I can carry on concentrating on the more important tasks rather than waiting for something else to finish.

Physical

With this I refer to my general physical fitness and general wellbeing. I am quite aware that I don’t get enough exercise, but have yet to generate a plan to resolve this. Until recently I had no idea how well I ate. Throwing together a nasty hackey database in Django (code), I actually discovered I don’t eat too badly… but can binge on chocolate when things get a bit stressful! This is quite easy to rectify by stopping buying lunch and making it in advance. I still crave the chocolate quite a lot during the day, but hopefully this will fade away given some time!

Grey-mushial

This is what’s going on in my head and possibly the hardest part of the whole cycle to change. When I get frustrated with something I lose the will to carry on with something. This is normally the major factor in why I jump from project to project, task to task without completing things. I get frustrated and annoyed that I can’t do something so move onto something else I can do. This has a lot of negative impact as it means that sometimes I struggleto learn something new and overcome certain issues. This is quite hard to change, but I’m attempting to bring some positive re-inforcement to bear on the problem. Craving chocolate when being frustrated isn’t helping things, however, if I now manage to solve a problem that’s frustrating me then I can have some chocolate. This helps me motivate myself to push through the problems that keep me stumped, frustrated and annoyed.

Actually keeping my mind on task is another seperate problem. This, at the moment, I have no idea how to solve. I’ve started reading around this and started reading up on Zen as a lot of Zen practice seems to be based on either keeping your mind on a single thing or emptying your mind of all things completley. This may help, this may not help! Anything I struggle to concentrate on I make a note of what it is, hopefully some kind of pattern will emerge from the mess over time. For some reason, one thing I really can concentrate on without being distracted is painting my 40k models. I have no idea at all why this specifically is so easy to concentrate on, but an interesting observation none the less.

Why bring all this up on here? Well, for a start this place is one of my projects that gets overlooked quite frequently, and secondly so that if anyone does have any dealings with myself where I start something and don’t necessarily stick to it for a period of time….. let me know in case I haven’t noticed. There is a lot of Ubuntu stuff I’d love to do if I could just get over these daft concentration issues!

Having had MythTV running on a monitor for a little while, complete with it’s scheduling fantasticness, I finally caved to getting a machine to play it out to the big TV. An obvious candidate for this was the, very affordable, Acer Aspire Revo.

The spec of the machine itself is not that impressive when compared to modern desktops, a 1.6GHz single core Intel Atom, a lonely GB of RAM, a 1Gb LAN connection, an atheros 802.11n wireless chipset and no real expansion capabilities. The saving grace of all this is he Nvidia ION chipset inside the box. Using a media player that can utilise libvdpau this means that using the onboard hdmi port it can play HD video quite happily at 1080p \o/

The machine I purchased supposedly came with Linux pre-installed, but when I first switched it on all it did was through a screen full of “99″‘s . This didn’t bother me overmuch as I’d already intended to stick Mythbuntu on it. Sticking Mythbuntu on a bootable USB stick and then installing it took about an hour in total using the fast connection in my office. Once installed, I plugged it into my TV at home, booted it up and …. nothing. It just didn’t appear on the TV. A little reading around the interwebs and it appears that the HDMI connection is not discovered unless the TV is switched on before the machine is booted. So switch on the telle, stick it on the correct channel, reboot and it just works!

After connecting it to the wireless network and letting the mythtv frontend find the already running backend. Turns out the onboard wireless doesn’t play nice with my existing router. While playing back SD stuff was fine, there just wasn’t the bandwidth stable enough to stream HD stuff across the network. A little research and a touch of thought later, I had my hands on 2 Devolo 200Mbps ethernet over powerline adapters. These have allowed me to watch HD content I can get from the BBC iPlayer on the big TV!

How cool is that \o/

A couple of weeks ago now I bought myself a new laptop. My poor Dell had been battered too much and was finally giving in to it’s poor treatment. Dead pixels, missing keys, noisy fans, it just had to be put out of it’s misery. So now I have a shiny new Packard Bell.

I’d actually been in the market for a Thinkpad, based on their reputation of being practically indestructible. I soon chaged my mind after being promised deliveries that never arrived by a few online retailers. I ended up going to PC World, pretty much ignoring the sales staff and wandering around with my Pre checking compatibility and pricing on the interwebs. I’ve been a bit skeptical of the build quality of Packard Bell for a little while, but this seems quite a solid machine. Time will tell whether it remains that way or so I must admit, but one can hope!

Spec wise, the machine is a 2.2GHz Core2Duo (T6600), it comes with 4GB of RAM, a 320GB HDD and an nvidia Geforce G210M card with 512MB of dedicated graphics memory. It’s got a broadcom wireless chipset (b/g/n) and a gigabit ethernet port. All of this works out of the box with Ubuntu bar one. The driver for the NVIDIA card has a nasty bug. It doesn’t seem to detect the EDID information correctly for the monitor, so some hackery is required in the xorg.conf to prevent you getting 6 miniscreens instead of 1, or for getting a horribly fuzzy screen. Nvidia has recognised this bug, so hopefully it’ll get fixed soon. The open source nv driver doesn’t have this bug, but you lose a lot of the shiny 3d effects and so on, which is a bit of a downside.

The webcam in he lid also works out of the box.

All in all, it seems quite an able machine, but time will tell if I made the right decision or not!

Friday marks the beggining of a new year under the gregorian calender, so it’s a good time to reflect on various things from the last year, and suggest some changes for the next.

Last year was, for 6 months at least, a rubbish year. With Uni going rapidly down hill, being diagnosed with depression, and everything generally going wrong, I’d rather forget most of it. The last few months have been significantly better. Acquired myself a CCNA, and a job doing things that I enjoy.

So what needs to change next year? Well, in no particular order:

1. One of the downsides of having a job that is largely programming is that I don’t get that much exercise any more which has led to me putting on some weight. Ideally I’d like to turn this around, but would initially be happy for it to be stemmed. Hopefully a bit of Wii fit every other night will help this while it’s dark in the evenings, and as it lightens up I’ll try and start doing some walking or some such.
2. Start putting away more moneys, now my debts have gone (hooray) I can start to put away some pennies for the future.
3. I intend to increase my participation with Ubuntu community in the coming year as well. Hopefully culminating in gaining Ubuntu membership. In order to achieve this, one evening a week will be dedicated to contributing to Ubuntu, be it through support, bug squashing, testing or whatever. This will probably be aimed at Wednesday evenings, but will shift around a little as real life things will undoubtedly get in the way.

I think 3 is enough to be getting on with. Hopefully this year will be better than the last

For the past few weeks life has been busy, and when I say busy I mean hectic beyond belief. In that time I’ve had a few OSS revelations I’d like to share.

As an experiment at work I thought I’d try using eclipse as an IDE instead of my normal vim+terminator job. Scary as it is, I find myself actually quite liking eclipse. It may be that my work machine has 4GB of RAM, and so copes better than the machines I’ve used in the past, or it may be that I’m starting to lose my qualms about what tools I use to do a job, as long as a job gets done. The PHP and Python tools inside eclipse have made my life a lot easier, and I really do find little things, like it reading out the docstring I’d put in a function when I hover over that function when it’s called, useful. Has eclipse evolved to where it’s useable or has affordable technology caught up with eclipse? A bit of a quandry for me that one.

The other small revelation I’ve had recently is that KDE4 is now inherently useable, and quite shiny to boot. when I’ve tried it in the past I quickly got fed up with things that didn’t quite fit or where missing completely, but now time has passed, and like KDE4 I believe I’ve changed a bit, and actually quite like it. I won’t be using it at home for a while, as the 7″ screen on this tiny little netbook certainly won’t make it very use-able compared to the  20″ odd monitor I have at work. The one big thing annoying me with it at the moment though is that konquerer doesn’t seem to fit with the default theme. Niggly annoyance I know, but surely that should be a papercut?

The last revelation I’ve had, though it’s not really a revelation, is a pang of guilt. I’m inherently a consumer in the whole Linux ecosphere. I consume by far more than I give back, and at the moment I simply don’t have the time to give back as much as I’d like. So this is my decree, and a proclamation that as of next year (with certain exceptions) I intend to deem one night a week free software night. On that night I will help to squish bugs, I’ll sit on IRC and be patient with people trying to help them through problems, I shall try and get involved in the various mailing list debates I sit and read, and I shall attempt to stop consuming quite so much and start giving back as much as I can.

In order to do this I will need a little help. The whole software workflow thing is a bit of a mystery to me. I’ve had little formal training in such things and as such tend to wing it more than I’d like. Can people point me in the direction of some good literature to help mend this? I’m quite willing to get my hands dirty if people are willing to be patient with me as I learn how the OSS developer crowd works so I can learn and adjust. In a way I’m hoping that this will flow back and help me at work as much as it’ll help me contribute back to the community in general.

If anyone also has a project they might want a hand with one evening a week from the of the month, feel free to drop me a line by your favourite communications method

Last weekend was LugRadio Live 2009 and the first ever Oggcamp. Since, for a couple of years now, I’ve been meaning to get more involved with the Ubuntu and greater Linux community, and having now got a job and be able to afford these wonderful things, I thought this would be a good time to put some faces to names.

Since this was the first event of this size I’d been to, I was a little nervous in all honesty. The only person there I’d ever met before was Popey and I’m not particularly good in a crowd of people who are essentially strangers. What actually happened turned out to be the complete opposite. People were welcoming, open and incredibly friendly. It was good to feel included.

What about the events themselves? Well, LugRadio was very insightful. Wandering around listening in to the talks was incredibly interesting and has actually helped me with my day job. The talk on the OpenStreetMap has got me fired up and interested in finishing mapping my village. I’ve also become reinvigorated in hardware hacking. Given a little time I might start looking at trying to get a hackspace going in Reading, however I’ve got a lot of other stuff on my plate at the moment taking precedence, if you’re interested though, let me know! A shared work load is less work for me!

Oggcamp was just as fun for other reasons. Actually being involved in the day and helping out gave me a fantastic opportunity to meet people and have a bit of a day of random chatting. If this event happens next year (maybe I should be saying when to drop a hint) I’d love to be involved again! Meeting the people in the various communities really has driven me to push forward with community involvement, and hopefully pushing forward with some testing with kit at work that the general community may not have access to to provide more information on bug reports and what not. As my programming prowess increases as well, I’ll start trying to contribute more code to the community as well.

Overall, I have to say a big thanks to everybody who made me feel welcome over the weekend, and an even bigger thank you to the organisers of both events. Seriously guys, well done on an amazing weekend. My advice to anyone attending one of these for the first time, come say hello, get involved, honestly you’ll feel better for it! Hopefully see you all next year.

I finally got one of those mobile broadband dongle thingies in the post this week, and I’m impressed. Admittedly I don’t get any 3 signal at home, so it’s a bit useless there, but once I’m out and about its fantastic. I’m sat in
starucks writing this on my eee and it’s really quite quick. Much quicker than hanging the eee of my mobile, whic
h I used to do previously.

The dongle I’ve got is a ZTE MF627, which was a bit of a fiddle to set up on chruncheee, but I’ll do a screencast
later on showing how to do it. Anyway, my coffee is getting cold!

It’s been etched into my diary now, so I’m going to both Lug Radio Live 2009 and Oggcamp. Both of these will be quite exciting for me as they’ll be the first large scale linux events I’ve been too, however judging from the general community populace, both should be quite friendly and cool!

I’ll be travelling up to wolverhampton from the Newbury/Reading area, so if anyones heading up from that area as well, let me know and see if we can organise some kind of lift share. Hope to see a lot of you there!