Here is the solution to Emacs mastery (from someone who watches other people’s YouTube videos…):
Yet… More challenges:
Keys to overcoming challenges
#GNU books ordered. Satisfaction in this.
Let’s be clear from the outset: there’s no word that adequately defines MozFest. The Mozilla Festival is, simply, crazy. Perhaps it’s more kindly described as chaotic? Possibly. A loosely-coupled set of talks, discussion groups, workshops and hackathons, roughly organised into allocated floors, feed the strangely-complimenting hemispheres of work and relaxation.
Starting from the seeming calm of Ravensbourne’s smart entrance, you stroll in, unaware of the soon-experienced confusion. A bewildering and befuddling set of expectations and realisations come and go in rapid succession. From the very first thought – “ok, I’m signed in – what now?”, to the second – “perhaps I need to go upstairs?”, third – “or do I? there’s no obvious signage, just a load of small notices”…. and so on, descending quickly but briefly into self-doubt before emerging victorious from the uneasy, childlike dependency you have on others’ goodwill.
Volunteers in #MozHelp t-shirts, I’m looking at you. Thanks.
The opening evening started this year with the Science Fair, which featured – in my experience – a set of exciting hardware and software projects which were all in some way web-enabled, or web-connected, or web-controlled. Think Internet of Things, but built by enthusiasts, tinkerers and hackers – the way it should be.
“Open Hardware” projects, interactive story-telling, video games and robots being controlled by the orientation of the smartphone (by virtue of its gyroscopic capability).. the demonstration of genius and creativity is not even limited by the hardware available. If it didn’t already exist, it got designed and built.
As made clear from the opening keynotes on Saturday morning, MozFest is not a place for debate. Don’t think this as a bad thing. The intention is simply to help communicate ideas, as opposed to getting bogged down in the mire of detail. “Free” vs “Open”? Not here. The advice given was to use one’s ears much more than one’s mouth, and it’s sound advice – no pun intended. I have generally been considered a good listener, so I felt at home not having to “prove” anything by making a point. There was no point. 😉
Several themes were introduced in the keynote speeches which really resonated with the attendees – sorry, the participants of MozFest. That of online security and surveillance, more than two years after Edward Snowden’s revelations, was as prominent as ever. Participation was another key theme, and to me one of the most poignant ideas of the whole weekend. Participation was not encouraged or expected; it was simply threaded into the very fabric of one’s presence. You participated, to a lesser of greater degree. This was one of the most socially inclusive experiences I have ever known.
I cannot overstate how social inclusion at all levels permeated MozFest. From the smallest of teams – 2 individuals, to the largest groups I saw, people were constantly engaged in conversation, development – personal, social and technical, and – perhaps surprisingly – quiet reflection, too.
Quiet zones were available for those needing a little downtime. The cerebral intensity of the weekend is clearly felt.
The concept of the fire-side story appeared several times, reminding us that the web isn’t just a resource in and of itself, but rather a medium to convey information. Storytelling, one of the oldest methods of such conveyance, was a prescient theme. Represented through journalism, community and leadership, the scale of recognition (and a reminder) that the web is, primarily, a means to convey stories, took me somewhat aback. It’s inescpable logic, almost lost amidst the omnipresent noise of today’s social media.
Not only was MozFest a means to appreciate, understand and build upon the means to share information, it was also firmly invested in its future. Science and education were extremely well represented by group talks, workshops and forums.
In fact, the sheer number of topics on offer, and guaranteed clashing of events sure to interest you, simply went to prove one thing: the web is not just big, it’s bigger than you can imagine. How the event planners and coordinators of MozFest actually found a way to combine the multitude of themes and interests into “Spaces” and “Pathways” is a huge credit to the thought-leadership behind this event. By encouraging leadership, the Mozilla Foundaiton has shown itself to be a more-than-capable leader in as diverse a field as there can be.
On arrival, I didn’t know what to expect. First-timers don’t. I had a vague incling that I would face a learning curve, adapting to the culture and activities of the event. Like a wandering spirit, I probably stared starry-eyed at the overwhelming number of quickly-scribbled “adverts”, pinned, taped and hung up everywhere, telling me about “this event” or “that workshop”. Even now, in reflection, I feel that the above post barely scratches the surface of the experience.
It’s sensory-overload, pure and simple. 🙂
MozFest is a journey. Physically, many people made long journeys to attend and participate. To those people, I am grateful – you have made my life richer by your efforts. But psychologically, emotionally and intellectually MozFest is so much more than the sum of its multitudinous parts: It’s an idea, a belief that together we can build something better for much time to come; build something to last that has intrinsic “goodness”. And we are not actually talking about the web. The conversation has evolved. The web might be the medium, but the story is now about us.
The question is, how do we nurture our most sublime nature, and be all we can?
I was so happy recently to unpack my brand new Motorola RAZR HD. It’s a lovely device. Wonderfully built, with a 4.7 inch 720p screen, replete with Gorilla Glass, and backed by a rubberized kevlar weave. The aluminium strip separating the two, running around the edge of the phone, provides a premium feel.
Or, at least, this is what I was led to believe from various reviews.
In reality, what you have is a beautiful brick – with good battery life. Android 4.1.2, the operating system shipped with the phone and modified by Google/Motorola Mobility, to ensure the phone is quite unusable, provides an amazing experience – if you connect up your Google account.
What happens if you don’t have a Google account, or if you’re unprepared to create one?
What happens is that the software on the phone may refuse to play nicely with other software you choose to install. Here are some examples of this obnoxiusness:
Android is an open source ecosystem that encourages vendors to produce lock-in experiences which are frustrating, dysfunctional and unintuitive.
And to think I was pro-android this time last week. I suppose I still have the t-shirt. The retailer will soon have the phone back, though.
bootnote
*CalDAV sync and CardDAV sync are both great pieces of software that fully get my support (and have done, in the financial sense). I use them here as examples of good apps which are potentially made almost impossible to use by the restrictions imposed by Android OEMs.
It takes a long time to ditch those applications with which you’re intimately familiar.
It starts, quite often, with your Office Suite. No, I’m not talking about desk and chair, but rather Microsoft Office. Excel is an excellent spreadsheet tool, there’s no doubt of that. But quite often, people like to work differently to the prescribed “norm”, and Libre Office allows just that. It’s not the only open source office suite, of course: there’s also KOffice, the Abiword/Gnumeric combiniation and so on.
Recently I’ve ditched other proprietary applications which I have worked with for years. Why? Well, for one I believe that switching applications is good, because it challenges you to think differently. You have to learn new ways of doing old things, and this can help you think of new, better things to do.
Secondly, you get no love with proprietary applications. Time and again, you pay your money and end up getting no support. So, really, what is the point? I’m not just talking about Microsoft, either; many proprietary software vendors are only able to make a profit by re-packaging open source software and selling access to it from within a proprietary system. Parallels, I’m thinking of you here.
The only way to beat companies is to not buy their products. It’s this simple. Here are the ways I have ditched proprietary software:
I’ve decided to go “old school” with some of my free time this year. For some time, I’ve had (in storage) an Amiga A4000T computer – the top spec with Cyberstorm PPC card, CyberVision graphics card, some SCSI disks, 128MB (remember when you could run an O/S in that??) and so on.
Although the Amiga was always designed to work with analogue video standards (NTSC / PAL), the prevalence of VGA monitors in the 1990s meant that the old “miggy” had to adapt. One of the great features of the CyberVision card was that it could redirect video from the integral AGA graphics chipset and display Workbench (or anything, it would seem) through the video card instead. This was no small feat of engineering and, in my opinion, is partly what made computing in the 1990s so interesting; ingenuity, innovation, invention.
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| Above, AmigaForever© screenshot showcasing OS 3.1. Left: The Amiga’s Kickstart, prompting for a boot disk. |
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 missing? libXext.so.6 can’t be found?
I recently [at the original time of writing] installed Fedora 11 [x86_64] on a test machine, to see how the development desktop build of my favourite Linux distribution is doing – and it’s very nice indeed.
I tried to install Zend Studio 5.5 and soon came across problems, which I found out related to not having 32-bit versions of Xorg and glibc installed. To remedy this, ensure you follow these steps:
su -c 'yum groupinstall Java'
su -c 'yum install glibc.i686 libXext.i586'
Once installed, I was able to fire up the Zend Development Environment:
/usr/local/Zend/ZendStudio-5.5.1/bin/ZDE
.. and it was running on the native (OpenJDK) 64-bit JAVA runtime! How’s that for progress!
The question I should have asked is this: which music do you listen to that evokes a calm, creative and logical state of mind? In other words, I needed to key-word the question to (a) elicit greater impact on the reader and (b) give the question more scope, more context.
The premise of the question is the science behind brainwaves. Apparently, alpha waves in the brain (those which occur at between 8-13Hz [cycles per second]) are the most conducive to creative AND logical thinking. It is commonly associated with a meditative state of mind, deeply relaxed, daydreaming, fantasizing and creatively visualising various scenarios.
This dispels some notion that left brain/right brain dominance exists. I can’t remember which is which, but it is said that the right hemisphere is more creative and the left, more logical/analytical. Or vice versa.
But this alpha wave state could, in fact, also support such dominance, if it allowed for the idea of submission of the dominant region during periods of relaxation. In other words, we will have one personality profile when active, busy, even stressed, and another profile when relaxed, calm, clear.
It follows, then, the people seeking to produce creative works – whether it be software code, writing, visual art or music, should always seek the best environment to create alpha brain waves. Music is just one component; meditation, light scents, lighting, physical comfort and staying hydrated also contribute, as does the avoidance of caffiene and alcohol.
But for me, most of all, it’s music. And quite often, that’s trance. 😉
The problem: you cannot boot a paravirtualised machine from a CD-ROM for the purposes of installing a virtual machine. You may also be on a wireless link set up by NetworkManager and WLAN0 isn’t a bridged interface.
Here’s the solution:
kernel = "/var/lib/xen/boot/vmlinuz"
ramdisk = "/var/lib/xen/boot/initrd.img"
The installer should then run through the rest of the motions and voila – a paravirtualized virtual machine installed from local CD/DVD-ROM.
When the installer has finished running, uncomment the pygrub line in the config file.
If you spot any errors with this process, please let me know so I can correct the procedure.
Happy Christmas! *<(:-##
I recently came across this slightly bizarre issue. I was trying to mount a NFS share from one server to another server, using very loose permissions (I was basically sharing a DVD to a machine which had no DVD-ROM drive).
So, what was happening? Well, basically nothing. On the NFS server (the machine with the DVD exported) I ran tcp dump to see what traffic was being received (the server was IP 192.168.10.200):
No output was displayed when I was trying to mount the share on the client. None at all. Well, almost none. The one bit of output that got me wondering was a broadcast packet which was received from the client.
10:14:45.651572 IP 192.168.10.1 > 192.168.10.255 arp who has 192.168.10.201 tell 192.168.10.1
The IP address 192.168.10.201 was a typo made by me the day before. I’d meant to type in .200 in my mount string. My incorrect mount command thus read:
# mount -t nfs 192.168.10.201:/mnt/share /mnt/dvd
It seemed strange that an incorrect mount command that I’d typed in yesterday (and then hit CTRL-C to)might still be working in the background.
Back to the client, I realised that perhaps the mount command worked in a queue/serial-like way. Therefore, each mount command would have to complete – either successfully or not, so long as it finally returned – before the next one was attempted. Checking out this theory, I investigated local processes:
Sure enough, there were lots of mount entries pointing to the wrong IP address. These were all my attempts to mount a non-existing server’s share to a local directory. Dumb mistake, eh. Still, CTRL-C didn’t cancel the mount request, which continued to run in the background.
The easiest solution was to reboot the server, but in situations where that’s not practical, killing the rogue processes should suffice.
