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Ah, here come the armchair heroes who've played some WWII game and think they know everything. Clearly you're right - I'm lying. Obviously I have massive amounts to gain from lying on Slashdot about my dad's achievements.

Bluntly, you are being daft. Did you not notice the language I couched it in? I'm no WWII expert and don't intend to be one, I'm recounting stories I was told as a kid by my dad. There'll be people who know more than me about this and will correct me - 'lying' doesn't begin to come into it.

Here's my dad guarding Belson, by the way. Picture 1 and Picture 2. They were one of the first forces into the area - please let me know when you've achieved a tenth as much.

Anyway, that link shows my dad to have been in the 11th Armoured Division. It seems you're right - not Berlin, but Lubeck and Neustadt. So yes, turns out I'm inaccurate. But lying? No.

Cheers,
Ian

Ah, here come the armchair heroes who've played some WWII game and think they know everything. Clearly you're right - I'm lying. Obviously I have massive amounts to gain from lying on Slashdot about my dad's achievements.

Bluntly, you are being daft. Did you not notice the language I couched it in? I'm no WWII expert and don't intend to be one, I'm recounting stories I was told as a kid by my dad. There'll be people who know more than me about this and will correct me - 'lying' doesn't begin to come into it.

Here's my dad guarding Belson, by the way. Picture 1 and Picture 2. They were one of the first forces into the area - please let me know when you've achieved a tenth as much.

Anyway, that link shows my dad to have been in the 11th Armoured Division. It seems you're right - not Berlin, but Lubeck and Neustadt. So yes, turns out I'm inaccurate. But lying? No.

Cheers,
Ian

The UK only ever got Series 1 hardware - is this likely to work with a series 1 device?

Incidentally, for some more of those infamous hacks might I recommend TivoTool for the Mac and my own cross-platform TivoPodcast for handling podcasts of digital radio.

Cheers,
Ian

Err...by moving. Using its wheels (or legs).

...when was the last time you saw a robot that was ANY practical use WHATSOEVER for the home?

This weekend, as it vacuumed my house (shortness of video doesn't do it justice).

Cheers,
Ian

I noticed that screens towards the top end of the scale seemed to show up more than screens towards the bottom (ie. if you had twenty images, images one to ten would should up more than eleven to twenty). I did some sort of multipass algorithm to stop this happening - I forget exactly what I did now and the source is lost, but I definitely had to change things to make it acceptable.

Cheers,
Ian

This mushroomed when I got an Atari ST - still the most influential machine for me. I got it for the games, but also spent time learning C on it and got into Steingberg Pro 12 - I bought the excellent for its time mono monitor, and never looked back.

Main inspiration for learning electronic music as a kid would be the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Always remembered for their Dr Who work, it's often forgotten that they did an awul lot more than this - the incidental music for the nature series Life On Earth was superb, and it's a track called The Astronauts (Through A Glass Darkly album, Peter Howell) which finally made me decide I wanted to play.

I've since decided to try learning piano as well as keyboard (very different - left hand work especially), but I'm essentially a keyboard player dabbling with piano, not a pianist dabbling with keyboards.

So, who else then? Any links to music? I've barely put online anything I did, but there's some really early teenage stuff from me and also a couple of ~1999 tracks available here. Don't laugh too loudly please...I've written better. Honest.

Cheers,
Ian

I quote Howard of Howard's Homepage: "For it is said in the book of Tao that it is better to .org than .com"

Of course, I happen to agree...

Cheers,
Ian

Tape. Back it up onto tape. Useless as an everyday access medium, great at archiving. Also, try to keep multiple redundant copies.

... the whole "what can I give a gurgling baby" thing is not really stuff that interests geeks.

Well, it interests me for similar reasons. The site you're looking at there contains photos and some smallish video. They are backed up in a copy of the site at home, backed up in a copy of the individual media files on a seperate machine, backed up to DV tape (not the best, but better than nothing) and also backed up by my co-lo ISP nightly.

So...make at least three copies (live, on-site, offsite) and try to get at least one of those copies onto stable removable media, such as tape.

One last thing - make sure you keep the hardware and software around to read it. About twelve years ago I was involved in a rushed-job project to read some tapes and format the data. The reason? My employer at the time had brilliantly decided that they didn't need those old tape-reading machines that didn't connect to anything, and threw them away. Of course, when the contract came in for processing that tape format, as it did year after year, they suddenly found themselves unable to do a thing with it.

Cheers,
Ian

It exists. I've worked on some. I'd like to think I haven't produced any, but then - everyone likes to think they're perfect, don't they? Probably I have.

However, a large amount of the open source stuff is frankly crap as well. Just compile the kernel for example - watch the warnings come pouring out.

I believe bug reporting to be more important than philosophical origin. For example, a while ago I wrote some Mac freeware for System 7 (over here if you're interested). v1.0 was purely for me, it worked on my environment and sticking it out on the web for download was purely an afterthought on my part.

It was taken up enthusiastically, to my utter shock, and then the bug reports and feature requests started rolling in. I decided to clean things up immensely, stuck out v2.0 (extra funcionality justified the major rev. number). Although drastically better than v1.0, funnily enough this wasn't software nirvana either and so the bug reports started arriving for that too. Obscure stuff - "it doesn't work on a Mac Plus in Japan? Huh? ...ahh, yes. Sorry about that - fixed now.". And so v2.0.1 and so on.

Note that at no stage was the source open. It still isn't, and never will be as annoyingly I've lost a rather crucial file (TRandomFile.cpp...for a file randomiser. Oops.). However, it improved in leaps and bounds due to the amount of feedback received. I don't then believe the closed source/open source-better thing. I believe it depends on interest, feedback and attitude of the person or group doing the coding.

Cheers,
Ian

Oh absolutely, please don't misread my post. I bought a 12" Powerbook a few weeks ago and am extremely happy with it. I also used to own a Mac in the System 7 days (have a look at Startupfrills for a bit of fossilised freeware I wrote back then), and I'm definitely pro-Apple.

It's just that the comments so far have been a bit too gushing in my opinion, and a little more realism might be nice. There were features from XP that I missed when using the Powerbook, user switching being the main one, and it would be remiss of me to claim otherwise. I think that the features being added are solid, worthwhile additions and I welcome them. However, from what I've read so far I regard this as workman-like progression rather than a new leap into a wonderful world.

That's fine. Sometimes, workman-like progressions are what's needed. Now on the new hardware front however, I'll gush with the rest of 'em.

Cheers,
Ian

Not a thing the RIAA can do about it. And that's the answer - you don't want them to control it? Easy - don't use music that they control.

Cheers,
Ian

Since becoming parents, cinema is the one thing that we (my fiancee and I) have had to give up. It's utterly unfair on everybody else, and it's also unfair on the baby. Everywhere else we can still go - even restaurants, because if our daughter becomes upset one of us can just go outside for a while and settle her back down again. But cinema? Nope.

Cheers,
Ian

Absolutely agreed. However, until someone tries to put it out on the desktop, the situation will always stay that way.

One of the early open-source mantras was "release early, release often". Actually, that doesn't have to be confined to open-source stuff - far back in the mists of time my freeware Startupfrills was written like that. It's no longer developed, but eight years or so ago it did very well for itself by getting a wide distrubtion and lots of feedback from users. Though its basic premise was set, its features and interface were shaped by user requests and bug reports.

A Linux desktop distro needs to do that now. It needs to be released to a large group and then torn apart by real live users, who will berate it mercilessly. Only by listening to them, and implementing requests whilst staying true to the overall premise, will a genuinely good desktop distribution appear.

Oh, and personally my first step would be to concentrate on what to cut out, not what to put in. A thousand calculater programs, three web browsers and fourteen office suites might well be available, but that's no reason to overwhelm my machine with them. Pick your defaults, one app and one only for each area of functionality, then stick with 'em. Users advanced enough to both know of and also care about the alternatives are also advanced enough to install things themselves.

Cheers,
Ian

I do try and make sites navigable by text alone. Go to my homepage in Lynx and you'll find it's as navigable as possible (obviously the image archives and video clips won't work...).

Also notice that the site layout is different - since I used only CSS for layout rather than tables or frames, the text-only navigation is quite clean. Again, excepting the image archives.

Cheers,
Ian

Oooh - rude words. How clever. 'Something to be proud of', no doubt.

By the way, did you read the bit about him spending more time with his daughter? That's something to be proud of and arises from correct application of your rude word outburst.

Given the opportunity, I'd also spend more time with my daughter too. Believe me - I've been writing code for 21 years, enjoyed most of it and yet never achieved the same happiness I get from being with my daughter and fiancee.

Cheers,
Ian

Oooh - rude words. How clever. 'Something to be proud of', no doubt.

By the way, did you read the bit about him spending more time with his daughter? That's something to be proud of and arises from correct application of your rude word outburst.

Given the opportunity, I'd also spend more time with my daughter too. Believe me - I've been writing code for 21 years, enjoyed most of it and yet never achieved the same happiness I get from being with my daughter and fiancee.

Cheers,
Ian

Hope that helps (the site is just my homepage by the way, nothing special).

Cheers,
Ian

Remote Desktop Display is the ability for me to see and use my desktop as if I were sitting at the monitor, but from some remote location across the internet. Like VNC, if you're familiar with that. It's built in to XP (admittedly the first version of Windows to do that), and I use it to do....wait for it...my accounts! In spare time at work, rather than wasting time at home in the evening.

The video conferencing is stupidly irritating. Basically, they just need an H.323-compliant app. They've got all the basics, and the open source OpenH323 works for audio. A bit of work on that project from Apple, and they could turn it into their standard video conferencing app.

I'm an ex-Apple user, from the LC days, and used to earn my living writing code on the Mac. I also wrote a freeware app, quite successful in its day (StartupFrills, if you're interested), so I'm not anti-Apple. I really would like to go over (or back, to be more accurate). It's just that I find the software situation worse today than it was when I last moved in about 1992.

Cheers,
Ian

So, one night whilst out for a drink I grabbed the little packets of sauce that were on the table. I laid down three packets of tomato sauce and said that these three packets could be represented by a single packet of tartare. Then I put down two packets of tartare and asked how many packets of tomato sauce that represented.

That was her first exercise in symbolic representation for about thirteen years. She passed it, and has gone on to take access courses before studying for four years to be a dispensing optician. She's now done her finals, involving such things as ray tracing and equations of quite ridiculous lengths that usually had to be re-arranged and substituted into other equations. We're waiting to hear the results, though she's passed everything else so far.

So there you go. My small contribution to the world of teaching - applied mathematics using packets of sauce in a pub. Not the most conventional maths lesson of all time, but it worked.

Cheers,
Ian

Interesting one this.

I was working in Singapore for a couple of weeks with my then boss, who I got on well with. We went out for a meal somewhere (I believe Boat Quay for those that know the place) and ordered Chili Crab. A few moments later, a waitress came out with a live crab on the end of a rope asking me if this one would be ok.

A bit surprised, I put my vast knowledge of crustacean quality to use (ie. none) and decided that since it looked like a crab to me then yes, that crab would be fine. The crab was taken away, killed and cooked, then presented back to me smothered in chili sauce.

My boss, who is a vegetarian, was horrified. "How could you do that?", he asked. "Imagine if you knew who that was. That could be Fred!" Well, Fred looked like a reasonably tasty crab to me and so my answer would still have been the same. Even it if turned out to be George...

The point here is that it would have been hypocritical of me to refuse to eat the crab just because I'd once seen it alive. So my answer to your original question is "yes - I would still eat meat if I had to kill and butcher the meat myself".

Oh, just as an aside this lovely lady is a fully qualified butcher, though she works as an optician. She is also my fiancee and the mother of our child - being a butcher doesn't automatically make you a psychopath in the same way that answering yes to the 'peasant killing' question would do.

Cheers,
Ian

Interesting one this.

I was working in Singapore for a couple of weeks with my then boss, who I got on well with. We went out for a meal somewhere (I believe Boat Quay for those that know the place) and ordered Chili Crab. A few moments later, a waitress came out with a live crab on the end of a rope asking me if this one would be ok.

A bit surprised, I put my vast knowledge of crustacean quality to use (ie. none) and decided that since it looked like a crab to me then yes, that crab would be fine. The crab was taken away, killed and cooked, then presented back to me smothered in chili sauce.

My boss, who is a vegetarian, was horrified. "How could you do that?", he asked. "Imagine if you knew who that was. That could be Fred!" Well, Fred looked like a reasonably tasty crab to me and so my answer would still have been the same. Even it if turned out to be George...

The point here is that it would have been hypocritical of me to refuse to eat the crab just because I'd once seen it alive. So my answer to your original question is "yes - I would still eat meat if I had to kill and butcher the meat myself".

Oh, just as an aside this lovely lady is a fully qualified butcher, though she works as an optician. She is also my fiancee and the mother of our child - being a butcher doesn't automatically make you a psychopath in the same way that answering yes to the 'peasant killing' question would do.

Cheers,
Ian

For it is said in the Book of Tao that it is better to .org than .com.

Aaah, Grasshopper...

Cheers,
Ian

First off, I realise your post wasn't intended very seriously. Purely for the purpose of this reply however, I've decided to have a sense-of-humour bypass.

I'm a geek who finds, much to his surprise, that without seeming to do anything very much he's ended up with a fiancee, a baby daughter and a Tivo.

This is a good combination.

Without the Tivo, nothing would get watched in a comprehensible fashion. My daughter Sarah would see to that. As anyone who's been in my position knows, babies require an awful lot of both comfort and attention. Even when they're asleep, typically they're asleep on you, thus stranding you on the sofa in the sure and certain knowledge that if you try to move they'll wake up and start screaming at you.

So...

The Tivo is great. It allows me to watch programmes that otherwise would be interrupted, and it also builds up a store of things for me to watch during those sofa-as-desert-island moments.

Just make sure you leave the remote somewhere to hand...

Cheers,
Ian

First off, I realise your post wasn't intended very seriously. Purely for the purpose of this reply however, I've decided to have a sense-of-humour bypass.

I'm a geek who finds, much to his surprise, that without seeming to do anything very much he's ended up with a fiancee, a baby daughter and a Tivo.

This is a good combination.

Without the Tivo, nothing would get watched in a comprehensible fashion. My daughter Sarah would see to that. As anyone who's been in my position knows, babies require an awful lot of both comfort and attention. Even when they're asleep, typically they're asleep on you, thus stranding you on the sofa in the sure and certain knowledge that if you try to move they'll wake up and start screaming at you.

So...

The Tivo is great. It allows me to watch programmes that otherwise would be interrupted, and it also builds up a store of things for me to watch during those sofa-as-desert-island moments.

Just make sure you leave the remote somewhere to hand...

Cheers,
Ian

Forget WMA's - I don't see widespread take up of these anywhere. However, WMV is a big thing. The quality of those compared to the download size is very high.

I have a couple of videos on my site (http://www.eruvia.org) in MPG format to make sure everyone can see them. I'd rather use WMV however, because my testing showed that the quality/file size trade-off was better. I'd be pleased to see these under Linux.

Cheers,
Ian

My site (a very modest affair mainly there for permanent email) is run off a co-lo box. We run sixteen other sites, and the costs are way lower than for a hosting company. Plus you get your own box to play around with as you choose.

In my case, the break-even point was 8 sites. After that, we're saving money by running off a co-lo, not spending it.

Cheers,
Ian

Thanks a lot. We (Carolyn and I) are currently enjoying being new parents a lot.

Pictures of Sarah, for any that are interested, may be seen by going here and selecting Sarah's area from the left.

Cheers,
Ian