Dr Jan’s Tips From The Top

I’ve recently upgraded my home PC from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9. One of the big benefits (apart from getting the very latest Firefox and Thunderbird packages) is that F9 features KDE 4, the latest version of the KDE desktop window manager.

Fedora 9
To upgrade, I followed the excellent instructions at http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f9-tips.php. The key point is to use the ‘preupgrade’ package to sort everything out:

yum -y install preupgrade
preupgrade

This downloads new F9 versions of all the RPM packages you have on your system and then sets everything up so that when you re-boot your machine it will start F9.

It’s an excellent idea, and for me It Just Worked.

KDE 4
KDE version 4 is all rather new. Initially I had version 4.0 installed. The biggest drawback to this version was the absence of the Fuzzy Clock. However, I’m pleased to say that on my first ‘yum update’, my system was upgraded to KDE 4.1, complete with Fuzzy Clock. Whilst version 4.0 was looking a bit rough round the edges, 4.1 is a far more polished affair.

One of the new features (on System Settings, Desktop, General tab) is the ability to ‘Enable desktop effects’, which makes the whole machine much more Mac-like in the prettyness of the desktop. However, I noticed that with this turned on, even when nothing else was running, I was using about 50% of my CPU power just to run the desktop. So I turned that off

The other annoyance in KDE4 was the lack of launch buttons on the panel for my favourite applications. This was really getting on my nerves until I realised that the default ‘tab’ shown initially when clicking on the ‘K’ menu button is the Favourites tab. To add things to the Favourites tab just find the application in the labyrinth of menus on the ‘K’ menu, click it with the secondary mouse button and select ‘Add to Favourites’ from the context-sensitive menu. Now all your favourite applications are just 2 clicks away on the ‘K’ menu button.

Tonight I dined at the Yo! Sushi in Poland Street, London.

It was completely fabulous! The key feature is a continuous conveyer belt which passes every table in the restaurant. On the conveyer belt tonight… is a never ending selection of dishes. These are mainly sushi, but lots of others too - I had a small fresh fruit salad for dessert. If you see something you like the look of, just grab it as it passes and tuck in. Each dish is coloured and the different colours represent different prices. I sat at the counter, where there are two dispensers in front of each station. One each for still and sparkling water.

So, you can just grab things you want from the conveyer and top up your drink whenever necessary. When you’ve finished, the waiter comes over and counts the number of dishes for each different colour that you have on the table and marks a sheet with this information. Take the sheet to the cashier and you can pay and go!

It’s simple, unfussy and very modern. The food was good too, and I enjoyed the whole experience

When we visited Norwich recently, we had dinner at the Thai on the river restaurant.

It’s a floating restaurant, which adds an extra dimension to the occasion The food was good and the prices were reasonable. All in all, recommended

I was recently reminded of the excellent ‘units’ program, available with all good Unix systems.

Units will convert quantities expressed in one unit in to another unit. Here’s an example:


$ units
2439 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units

You have: 12 miles
You want: kilometres
* 19.312128
/ 0.051780933
You have:


So, 12 miles is equivalent to 19.312128 kilometres. OK, that was an easy one to warm up with. Units knows about all kinds of arcane measures and can happily convert between them all. Here’s an example from the man page:


$ units
2439 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units

You have: furlongs per fortnight
You want: m/s
* 0.00016630952
/ 6012.8848
You have:


I actually needed to use units to find out my weight in kilos:

$ units
2439 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units

You have: 20 stone + 1 lb
You want: kilos
conformability error
127.45946 kg
1000
You have:


My goodness, that’s a large number!

Units should be available in most versions of Unix and Linux - just get a terminal session (telnet or ssh for example) and type in ‘units’. As usual, read the manual page by typing ‘man units’.

Previously on Twin Peaks I wrote about the problems I was having with the Lightning calendar add-on for the Thunderbird email client, to the extent that I had to un-install the add-on and the associated Google Data Provider add-on (which synchronises calendars between Lightning and Google Calendar).

I’m pleased to report that since the release of version 0.8 of Lightning, and the corresponding update of the Google Data Provider add-on everything seems to be working well. I can now update calendar data in both directions.

This, in combination with GooSync, which syncs the Google Calendar to my mobile phone (a Nokia N95), means all my calendars are now easy to keep in sync.

For work I use a Blackberry 8300, and I’m pleased to say there’s an official Google application to sync the calendar.

Phew! Synchronising calendars has been a surprisingly difficult problem to solve, but thankfully we seem to have licked that particular problem now

Fedora Linux is the operating system of choice for both my home PC and my work laptop. KDE is my preferred window manager.

The main reason I use KDE rather than Gnome or another system is the Fuzzy Clock. The clock in the lower right hand corner of my screen uses real English to tell the time. So, for example, 11:22 would appear as ‘Twenty past eleven’. The fuzziness is adjustable, but the minimum setting changes the time every 5 minutes, which is more than good enough for most things. This means that the clock will say ‘Twenty past eleven’ until it changes to ‘Twenty five past eleven’.

Recent versions of KDE also include a nifty utility called ‘kbluelock’. When you enable kbluelock, it scans for Bluetooth devices nearby. Select your phone from the list shown, and if your phone ever goes out of range, kbluelock will enable the screen saver, automatically locking the screen. Effectively your phone is being used as a ‘presence detector’ - it indicates if you are at your computer.

This reminds me of the Active Badge system, although that used infra-red technology rather than Bluetooth wireless. I like the idea of using my phone to indicate where I am (within limits

RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. It’s an easy way to keep up to date with frequently changing websites.

Let me give you an example. This web page changes every time I write a new post (admittedly not that often). Rather than periodically checking this page for updates (or, more likely, forgetting all about it until a year later), you can subscribe to it using a feed aggregator or feed reader. Then, whenever I post a new article on this page, it will automatically appear in your feed reader shortly after I publish it.

OK, this may seem to be a bit of a convoluted way to keep up to date with Dr Jan’s Tips From The Top, but when you subscribe to a number of different blogs, the feed reader starts to make a lot more sense.

Below, I’ll go through setting up a feed reader and subscribing to various feeds.

Of course, there are a whole raft of different feed readers available for free download, as well as several which are entirely web-based. Personally, I use Google Reader.

To get started with Google Reader, open a new browser window and navigate to http://www.google.com/reader.

If you already have a Google account, login, otherwise create a new account. Once you have logged in, you should see the ‘Welcome to Google Reader!’ page. You can take the tour or watch the video for further information. Or you can jump right in and click on ‘Get started by adding subscriptions’.

You can select from the bundles that Google offers by default, or, if you have a particular feed in mind, just scroll down the page to the Search and Browse section. In the box, copy and paste this feed address:

http://www.dr-jan.com/tips/feed/

then click the ‘Search for feeds’ button.

Google should find one matching feed, ‘Dr Jan’s Tips From The Top’. Click the ‘Subscribe’ button and, once you see the message confirming your subscription, click on the ‘All items’ link on the top left hand side of the screen. You’ll be taken to the main Google Reader screen with the most recent posts from this blog shown.

As you scroll down the screen, reading the posts, the current post will be highlighted with a blue border. When you move down to the next post, the one you’ve just finished with is automatically marked as ‘read’, so you won’t see that post again in the normal course of events.

You can easily add more subscriptions by clicking the ‘Add subscriptions’ link.

Lots of websites use a small orange icon like this or one of these (shown enlarged for clarity):

to indicate that a feed is available. Normally, you can wrong-click on the icon and select ‘Copy Link Location’ or equivalent command, then paste the results into the Google Reader ‘Add subscriptions’ box.

There are lots of feeds for things other than blogs. For example, BBC News is available as a feed. Check out this page for an introduction to RSS feeds along with a list of some of the feeds available from the BBC.

If you’re searching for a job, most job sites will let you create a feed containing jobs which match your search criteria, so you’ll always know about the very latest jobs as they appear.

Just look out for those small orange icons and you’ll be surprised at what you can subscribe to with your feed reader

Today I was in the unfortunate position of not being able to use Thunderbird to read my email. I recently installed the Lightning calendar addon together with the Provider for Google Calendar addon. What’s supposed to happen is the calendar within Thunderbird (provided by the Lightning addon) is automatically updated from (and updates) my Google Calendars.

In practice, what happens is that when Thunderbird starts, not much happens until I get a popup dialog box telling me that a script on this page is taking a long time to finish. Even if I try and cancel the script, nothing responds until I manually kill off Thunderbird completely.

Which is a shame.

So, Dr Jan’s Tip From The Top for today is…

You can start Thunderbird with all addons disabled by using the command line:

thunderbird -safe-mode


Once Thunderbird has started it’s then a simple matter to use the Addons screen to disable or uninstall the offending addon.

It seems that the problem for me was the Provider for Google Calendar addon. The Lightning calendar is excellent, and getting better at a good rate too. Unfortunately, without the Google Calendar synchronisation it’s not much use to me at the moment.

I’ll probably try again when a new version is released

If you’re working overseas and you are planning to use taxis to get from the hotel to the office and back, create a taxi card.

• Use your favourite word processor to print the hotel address and the office address on a single sheet of A4 or letter-size paper.
• Use landscape mode and select a bold sans serif font at 36 point or more (the length of the address will determine the largest font size you can use - bigger is better).
• Arrange the addresses so that when you fold the paper in half longways there is one on each side.
• Print 3 or 4 copies (in case a driver inadvertently keeps one).

Now when you get in a taxi it’s easy to communicate your destination, even if the driver doesn’t have his or her reading glasses handy

I attended the FogBugz 6.0 World Tour presentation this morning at the British Library in Euston Road, London. Joel Spolsky was the speaker and he made an excellent job of describing some of the funky new features in FogBugz 6.0.

The Evidence Based Scheduling (EBS) is sufficiently similar to witchcraft to warrant further investigation Joel has a good explanation here - it’s a long article but well worth reading.

I’ll attempt a summary here, in case you can’t follow the link above. EBS tracks developer estimates of time required to complete code and compares this to the actual time used. From this data it can work out how effective your estimating skills are. It doesn’t matter if your estimates are inaccurate, but if you are consistently inaccurate (say, you always underestimate by 100%) this can be taken in to account quite easily. A bigger problem is inconsistently poor estimates, where sometimes the estimate is 12 times too small, other times it’s twice as big as it needs to be.

FogBugz collects all this data and uses the information to produce a probability curve of your likelihood of shipping code on a particular date.

Check the link for more details with pretty graphs and everything

Crucial things to know are:

1. You can sign up for a free 45-day evaluation of FogBugz on the website.
2. There is a (not yet publicised) Student and Startups edition (for up to 2 users) which is free. Hurrah!