Canllaith.org

I read a pretty neat article today from http://www.43folders.com/2004/11/18/hack-your-way-out-of-writers-block about how to get past writer’s block. A lot of the comments to the article are really excellent as well.

One of the tips in particular that really resonated with me was:

“Write crap - Accept that your first draft will suck, and just go with it. Finish something.”

That’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time, and for me at least it really is the key to being a productive writer. It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of wanting what I have to say to be absolutely perfectly formed in my head before I commit it to paper. I end up staring into space endlessly polishing sentences and lining up paragraphs, marching in lines all in my head, before I’ve even touched pen to paper.

It’s a productivity killer because the longer I polish something that doesn’t exist yet, the longer it’s going to take me to actually get started. When I started actually meeting deadlines at least most of the time was when I learned to do what I called ‘Just write’. I would go away from my computer and away from the internet with a pen and some paper and just go and get any old thing down. I could check my facts later, research content I wasn’t sure of when I got back to my laptop. The most important thing was to separate writing from researching, and just write some crap down.

I found it was a lot easier to get into a zone where I just wrote and it flowed if I used pen and paper and got away from the computer. In the interests of not having a million notebooks around the house and never being sure which one has which article in it I’m after, I’m trying very hard to digitise this process. To save me from myself I’m in the process of doing up an apple e-mate. No network connectivity, long battery life, sunlight readable screen and an absolutely fabulous keyboard. I’m hoping it will help me learn how to spark that creative process sitting at a keyboard, while still providing me with the distraction free environment that paper does.

These are by far the two most effective tools in my arsenal against writer’s block. Just write some crap, and turn off the darn internet.

Now ironically, I should stop procrastinating from working through the writer’s block on my latest assignment and go and just write some crap.

I finally decided to mod my macbook, and ordered a bit of pre-made cellophane from icolors.ca to replace the white apple logo on the back of the screen with a retro style apple logo.

(Yeah, I’m a filthy mac user at times.)

It was surprisingly easy to get into the mac - there’s two screws deep in the hinge that are awkward to get at, and then the back just pops off with the help of a credit card or similar thin tool. The clips holding the back of the screen on very easily disengage without any fear of breaking them. Well, not much anyway.

Once the back is off, it’s just a matter of carefully removing the white plastic that’s already covering the logo, cutting the cellophane to size and then fitting it to a recess the white plastic is covering. The white plastic can be carefully pressed back down again afterwards, with enough residual adhesive left to keep it there. At least, I hope so.

I love the end result, it was definitely worth spending 20 minutes fighting with the hinge screws. Now I’m keen to find ways to mod my non-apple laptop.

Monday I woke up when the sunlight and birdsong flooded through the window of my room at dawn. The campus grounds are simply beautiful, with green lawns, tall trees and lovely old buildings. The weather has been stunning, hot clear skies and a light cool breeze.

I fronted up to the registration desk on Monday morning to get my name tag and loot bag, and was amused to be asked whether I was here for the partners programme. Because obviously women at conferences are someone’s wife or girlfriend, naturally!

The loot bag is really quite nice this year - a nice large light-weight bag with a laptop sleeve and a lot of pockets, and some nice things inside:

I then ventured into the city in search of some ethernet cables and had some unintentional transport adventures. It turns out if you don’t have any coins, you can’t get a ticket on the tram. It also turns out that one gets on and off trams in the middle of the street, dodging cars to do so.

I finally tracked down Aaron who’d been MIA for 24 hours. We all went trooping off into the city in search of something vegetarian to eat and a store that sold alcohol. One thing I’ve noticed about Melbourne is that really great food and wine is really cheap here, and there’s a really large selection of great places to eat.

I hadn’t attended any talks on Monday - the miniconfs on the first day didn’t seem as interesting to me as those on the other days so I decided if I was going to go sightseeing and check out the city, Monday was the day to do it. So far LCA is a heck of a lot of fun, and seems to involve a lot of red wine.

In three days I fly to Melbourne to attend linux.conf.au. It’s the first one I’ve been to in a few years and I’m really quite excited about it.

There are LinuxChix, Gaming and Systems Administration miniconfs that I’m very keen to attend, as well as talks on security and networking. Of course I’ll have to attend Aaron Seigo’s talk on creating user interfaces with plasma, and catch up on various KDE gossip with him over a drink or nine.

I’m taking a decent camera & lens with me and my long-suffering KDE laptop so with any luck there should be a lot of blogging about the conference. There’s going to be internet access in the conference accommodation which should help - during the conference talks I’ve discovered I rarely have the time or concentration to actually write anything useful, and really rely on being able to go back to my room with some notes to write things up properly there.

I’m looking forward to being back in Australia for a week - the temperature looks to be getting as high as 35 degrees Celsius. I’m packing t-shirts, shorts and sandals - don’t let me down Australia!

If any other KDEers are going to be at LCA don’t hesitate to drop me a line if you want to catch up.

In a recent mini-article I wrote about my impressions of Kubuntu Gutsy, I mentioned that it was disappointing that Kubuntu did not support Cisco LEAP wireless authentication as I’m stuck with using it for work. Is Cisco LEAP actually relevant to most of the world? Of course not. Sadly I can’t change our infrastructure though so without this support, no wifi for me.

One of the developers contacted me on IRC after reading the article and pointed out that Kubuntu Gutsy does indeed have Cisco LEAP support, and mentioned how to get to it. He also mentioned it would be interesting for someone to actually test it since almost no-one ever uses this dreadful backwards protocol.

It’s taken me a while to get my Kubuntu laptop into the office to check it out, but the LEAP support is indeed there, works great, and I’m sitting on it now to post this entry. Thanks Kubuntu!

The development team have my apologies for not looking into the matter further.

KDE 4

Originally uploaded by canllaith

I’ve been crazy busy with so many writing projects the last few days. I’ve got a review of the Eee to complete and some articles on KDE4, as well as (hopefully) some more Eee content. Almost all paying work, so hooray for that.

I thought I’d take a moment out to flick a screenshot of the current state of KDE4. It’s very attractive although there are still a lot of rough edges visible. Now I’ve finally managed to master the cmake build process I might even manage to write some docs. Possibly even finish the half draft of the first KDE4 focused ‘This Month in SVN’ I have lurking around. Sleep is not all that necessary, right?

I do have a panel, but for some reason it’s vampirish and did not show up in the photograph. I’m going to blame Aaron for that.

Yesterday I managed to get my hands on the new Asus EeePC. I’m saving an in depth review for another time and place, but really this little guy is just too awesome to not talk about.

It’s a 7″ ultraportable with wireless, webcam, and a flash-based hard disk that runs a modified Xandros Linux. While the UI is heavily customised, it includes a lot of KDE applications.

I’m sitting at the moment in a server room waiting for a colleague to finish up, typing this on the EeePC using a HSDPA USB modem. It’s small, light, amazingly portable, and incredibly well put together. Despite being so small the keyboard feels pretty nice, and the wireless range is really strong. It’s also amazingly cheap at $600 NZD.

Did I mention it’s very small? The looming blackness behind it in the photograph is my small handbag. It actually fits inside the handbag, albeit with a little bit of Eee poking out the top.

I’m really sold on this little guy. If I didn’t already have an ultraportable notebook I would see myself taking it *everywhere*. As it is, I’m almost disappointed these weren’t around when I bought my VAIO TX - I’d have saved myself a lot of cash, and while this is certainly nowhere near as powerful or featurepacked as my VAIO, for writing work, it probably would do.

It’s great to see really excellent consumer products based on Linux, especially using KDE applications. I wish something like this was available a couple of years ago when I was looking for a cheap. light notebook to run Linux on and found nothing.

I think Asus called it the ‘eee’ because they somehow knew that was the noise I was going to make while jumping up and down and pointing at the box in the store.

Yet another ‘wow, I can’t believe how awesome Linux is getting’ post.

I went over to a friend’s place tonight to give her a hand configuring her Kubuntu laptop. In the time we’ve known each other she’s reinstalled Kubuntu a few times now, mostly to upgrade to new versions cleanly as she uses a lot of manual configuration that doesn’t survive a dist-upgrade well.

We’ve noticed it getting just a little bit easier with every new version, but tonight on installing ndiswrapper something she said reminded me that a long time ago, I’d written an article about ndiswrapper in the Bad Old Days of doing just about everything by hand. I poked around on the webserver I used to host my things on and it seems it’s still there.

We had a bit of fun browsing through my baby steps in Linux - I’m embarrassed to admit I used to think those little w3m ‘Compliant HTML!’ buttons were cool, and that I used to write HTML tables by hand because at that stage I couldn’t figure out CSS. Moving right along now.

The thing that really struck us going through all these old how to’s though is how markedly they show the improvement in ease of use over the last few years. All of the tutorials describe editing configuration files by hand, compiling kernels and other software by source and even writing custom init scripts for hardware.

Now, installing Kubuntu on my friend’s laptop is the work of a pleasant hour while sitting on the couch chatting. The only thing that isn’t picked up automatically is the Synaptics touchpad and the BCM4318 wireless card. One quick edit to the Xorg.conf and a little bit of fiddling with ndiswrapper (which goes much quicker when I don’t accidentally set the wireless switch to off! Go Jes!) and away we go - and this is on problematic SIS chipsets, about the least Linux compatible laptop I’ve ever seen. On Intel hardware, it pretty much JustWorks.

The attitudes have changed a lot too lately. Now it’s just terrible if I can’t get beryl’s 3d effects working right or my plug-and-play dual head configuration occasionally has a glitch. I almost feel guilty complaining about it when I look back on having to spend 3 days compiling just to get online.

I think I’m getting a bit spoilt :)

Tonight was pretty exciting for me - my first ever lunar eclipse. It was absolutely freezing and very windy but completely worth every moment of discomfort. Of course, we did it the geek way - with every possible gadget.

Me wearing every article of clothing I own, or at least it felt like it.

Next time, I am taking a thermos of hot milo and some handwarmers. My partner made the romantic comment that someone, somewhere, was probably being thrown into a volcano as a sacrifice to appease the moon god. We then did a little moon dance ourselves, and took some photographs.

Then it was back off home for hot soy milk with dark chocolate stirred through to get the blood flowing again. If I walk out onto my balcony I can see the moon still, heavy and dark and somehow more like a sphere than I’ve ever seen it before.

Linux has gotten So. Damn. Cool.

The end result of my Dell fiasco is that I threw a tantrum, demanded a refund, and marched down to my local Sony store to buy their similar product. I’m now the proud owner of a Sony Vaio SZ. Sony haven’t been known for their Linux compatible machines in the past, but these days if you pick a machine with mostly Intel components at least you know there are good Linux drivers for them.

I had some pretty stringent requirements for this machine. It needed to be able to be docked and undocked many times a day from a docking station with very little fuss, preferably being able to switch between dual monitor and single without needing to restart Xorg. I wasn’t even sure if this could really be done - it’s been a while since I used dual monitors under Linux.

I am extremely impressed with the current NVidia drivers and *buntu Fiesty. I can put the laptop on or off the docking station as I please, and all of the devices happily disconnect and connect themselves at the right times without anything getting upset at being yanked away from the laptop. The last time I tried a docking station with a laptop was a few months ago with a Lenovo X40, and it used to kernel panic every time I tried to undock it.

The excellence of the current NVidia driver is what’s really blown me away though. I dropped the laptop on the docking station and connected my external panel up to the DVI port and then ran nvidia-settings. I could immediatley see that it had detected the monitor, so I selected it and clicked to enable Twin View.

I almost fell off my chair when it worked.

I didn’t have to restart Xorg or fiddle with any settings manually - it truly JustWorked the way one expects a modern desktop would. About an hour later I had a meeting to go to - I (a little nervously) pulled my laptop off the docking station and pulled up nvidia-settings again to disable the second display. All of the windows that were open on my external display trotted back to the main one and everything was rosy.

When I came back from my meeting and enabled the second display again, windows that had previously been on the external display appeared back there. It was very, very nicely done and I’m very very impressed.

So, that’s two Sony Vaio machines I’ve bought recently that have worked excellently with Linux. I think it’s my new favourite brand :)

(I still have the itty bitty guy - he’s just not powerful enough to run all the vmware I have to run at work :()