Guardian moves to OpenOffice
This is late coming to me as news, but Charles Arthur of the Guardian posted this tweet a few days ago:
The Guardian is said to have the largest installation of Macs in Europe, although Windows computers still use MS Office, and Google Apps for your Enterprise is also used across the board, according to a discussion on the BBC Backstage mailing list.
Anyway, I couldn’t find much more reference to this in a quick Google search and this week’s Guardian Tech hasn’t been released yet, so I don’t know if they’ll be making reference to it there. Still, 1,000+ installs of OpenOffice must not only save the GMG a tidy sum in these difficult economic terms, but also shows just how far open-source technology has come, for such a large organisation to drop a well-supported MS product in favour of it. This, of course, follows large installs of Ubuntu in the French public sector and elsewhere – I sense, perhaps, a tide slowly turning.
[Update: I've found a couple more links on this, including one from March 2009 in the paper itself stating that "This paper is a recent convert to OpenOffice", although another that confirms the move to OpenOffice but quotes "Andy Beale, technology director of enterprise operations at GNM" as saying that "We’re promoting [Google Docs] as the primary productivity application“, which takes away some of the importance of the OpenOffice move.]
How I learned to stop worrying…
…and love the recession. Or at least not worry about it, too much.
As a student, money has always been tight over the past three years. From rent being due at the ‘wrong’ time (e.g. a week before the next loan instalment is due to come in), to finding I barely had enough money left at Christmas to get home to my mother’s house, it’s not been an easy ride. I may have overspent in my first year, but I’ve learnt those lessons and have more or less stayed on-budget this year – and I’m still struggling.
Food prices have gone up, going out is as expensive as ever (especially in London), and that blonde idiot BoJo even had the tenacity to put the bus fares up by 10p. It may not sound much, but it means I get one less bus journey (potentially halfway across the capital) out of a £10 top-up on my oyster. My bike is coming out of retirement, and I’m walking a lot more. (It helps that the weather is starting to turn, and I’ve invested in a good, sturdy brolly…!)
Anyway, for posterity, and anyone who might stumble upon this, here are some of my hot tips for a) surviving as a student, and b) surviving as a student in the recession. Read the rest of this entry »
Easy peasy
I ought to feel bad posting this, but it’s a good example of how some things are just made too easy.
I’ve been playing on Darts on my iPhone for a couple of days now, and doing pretty well. It’s not the hardest game on the planet to beat, let’s face it. While my girlfriend was playing it, however, she discovered that by flicking not just straight up the screen, but from the lower-right corner to the centre of the screen, the dart would always land exactly where your crosshairs are.
I don’t know whether this was originally intended for the developer to be able to quickly check the maths was being done right, which is the only logical explanation I can think of, but it makes the game just too easy, and it’s not a habit I can now break.
I blame my girlfriend.
Jaunty boot time
I’ve blogged before about boot-times and using bootchart to measure them, but back then I was impressed with a 30-second boot. Now, courtesy of the latest version of Ubuntu, 9.04, which is due to be released as a final version later this month, I have recorded a 19-second boot – an improvement of just over a third in less than two years (Gutsy, 7.10, to Jaunty, 9.04):
Bootchart for Jaunty, 7th April - click to enlarge
It’s not instant-on, but it’s an improvement nonetheless where prior experience of upgrades has been to expect more bloat and slower loading times. On four-year old hardware, no less. My ancient laptop has 512MB of RAM and a 1.83GHz, single-core processor, and yet manages to put at least Vista to shame.
So, here’s a big thank you to all Ubuntu developers, whether working for Canonical (or, indeed, upstream) or as part of the wider community. You rock my world.
Card vote ’09
Just a brief list of a few problems I have with the manner in which the card vote to abolish/keep the card vote at NUS Conference 2009 was held:
Next year I shall be (assuming I pass my degree), ex officio, delegation leader for UCLU. And I may just be proposing a motion to bring back the card vote. Let me know if you want me to explain why (and to save me from revision for a little while…)
Good old geekery
It’s been too long since I messed about with geekery, but it’s revision time again, so my powers of procrastination have just received a massive boost from the gods of timewasting.
Anyway, long story short, I hang about on IRC from time to time. I used to a lot more than I do now, which I put down to a combination of having a girlfriend (not that she stops me, per se – I just have less time on my own!), and actually being busy and working. You’re most likely to find me in ##photography, but occasionally #ubuntu-uk too.
When I’m at college, I am usually unable to connect to IRC – the traffic seems to be blocked, which is interesting given that bittorrent traffic isn’t, for instance. I don’t know why it’s blocked and can’t be bothered to ask, but I have finally set up a way around it.
This involves port forwarding on my router – sending traffic on port 22 to my Ubuntu machine. From college I log into that machine via SSH, and then running irssi with screen. Easy, but required that tiny bit of setup that I couldn’t previously be bothered to engage in.
Go go gadget geekery. Just don’t tell my girlfriend I’m not revising.
[ps - it's always good to remember that Macs don't play by the rules. You can't Alt+number to change windows within irssi - it's Esc+number, instead. For more irssi/screen tips, check this fantastic article.]
Jogging along with Jaunty…
Well, it’s that time in Ubuntu’s 6-month release cycle that I update my old laptop to the latest beta release, and that now is Jaunty – Ubuntu 9.04.
Everything that worked fine under Hardy (8.10) still works fine – indeed, I feel it’s all a bit speedier. The only bootchart I’ve generated so far gives a boot time of just over a minute, but I think that’s partly because it was trying to run a disk check as well. Resuming from hibernate, however, is lightning quick (although the first time it decided to fail to resume and booted normally, which wasn’t much of an issue as I had no work open).
The only problem I’ve had, which I would assume is because I’ve done a fresh install rather than an upgrade, is the performance of my Dell 720 Printer, which used to work flawlessly using Lexmark drivers originally intended for Red Hat. Now, however, following the same instructions I have before, there seems to be a problem, and by seems to be, I mean there is: I can’t print.
I know this is something to do with CUPS, but I have little time spare to look into it in much detail. My first final-year exam is later this month, and the last one almost a month later. It’s mostly annoying because there’s no support for the same printer on a Mac, which is my other laptop at the moment. Oh well – it might act as incentive for me to actually go to the library.
NUS Conference
This week I am off to Blackpool for the annual NUS Conference, which should be an interesting choice given that I have seven finals coming up, with the first on the 28th April.
That said, I’ll be able to bump into a few old faces from other unis, and or course (and more importantly) help take the opinions of the students of UCL Union to the body that represents us nationally.
With an HE funding review coming up, there’s no more pressing time for the country’s students to be organized and vocal about the issues that affect us directy. Conference is our chance to debate the stance we’ll be taking over the coming year.
I’ll be updating twitter as often as I can during the conference, and the accepted hastag is #nusconf if you want to see what other student tweeple are saying.
AudioBoo testing
I’ve signed up for AudioBoo, with the app on my iPhone, and have so far only made two ‘boos’ as I think they’re knowing. I’m not entirely sure if it’s a useful service or not, which will probably be answered by the number of users in six months’ time. So far only about two of the 100+ people I’m following on Twitter seem to be using it.
Anyway, here’s me testing whether I can embed it on wordpress.com or not:
Okay, so the embed code automatically turns into a link to an mp3 of the audio. Harrumph.
Hugin rocks my socks.
It’s free. It works on any platform (ok, well probably not any platform, but at least Linux, OS X and Windows) And it produces images better than Photoshop. What more could I possibly say?
A couple of great snow panoramas via Hugin from myself (below) and daubers.
Panorama from the top of Primrose Hill, 2/2/09
