Tried and failed to install Windows 2000 Pro on a 5 year old PIII today. It took me three hours (possibly more) to come to the conclusion that I was wasting my time. Installed the OS, it boots. Hangs on startup. Works when you go into VGA mode. OK, must be graphics drivers I thought. Did that. same problem. Added SP4 – BSOD and INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. Decided to stop wasting my minutes and went for XP again instead. I’d love to ditch Windows altogether and put Linux on there, problem is we need to be able to play Windows games as it’s for Matt.

So happy August. Can’t believe it’s gone so quickly this year. The last couple of days I’ve not really stopped thinking about how quickly attitudes in the world are changing. Some of it is fashionable, sure, but a lot of it isn’t.

I’m certainly becoming more and more aware of doing business with ethical companies. One that certainly isn’t (though they may argue against me) is Microsoft. I notice that they are planning on introducing a personal music player for Christmas called Zune. That’s fine in itself, but they’ve already admitted that they’ll be selling it as a loss leader for some considerable time before that side of the business breaks even. This is even the business model for the XBox. Introduced in 2001, I read that it will be 2007 before it starts to return profits on the investment Redmond put into it.

That is clearly insane, but once you get over that point, it’s strangely paradoxical that the man who started it off, Bill Gates, has his company trample all over any kind of competition (See Apple in this space, Linux increasingly in the computer business, Sony in the games console space) by using their massive corporate cash reserves, whilst donating billions to the poor via his foundation. I truly admire the guy for the latter (surely by now he must have stockpiled everything he wants out of life and is bored and wants to give it away), but I find it hard to stomach that his company pulls on big boots and stamps on smaller businesses whenever they feel like it.

Their response? We’re innovating. Say what? Innovating isn’t rehashing old ideas, or taking five years to slowly evolve a bloated desktop OS, or re-heating Office every few months with one extra feature (which no-one uses) for another £500. Or even buying up industry leading technologies, such as Visio and Great Plains, for example. Innovating my arse. The XBox was largely born because Office and Windows market penetration had reached saturation point and the business needed to diversify to keep the stockholders happy. Now they’ve seen Apple make waves with the iPod/iTunes model, they want a bit of that because it’s something they don’t already do. I do fear that by now there aren’t many people left for them to win over. I resisted the iPod for a long time, but in the end I realised that it was simple, stylish and intuitive (all apart from iTunes, which I think is the worst bit of software ever from a usability perspective).

Using Linux for your computing needs is ethical, because it’s all shared knowledge and power. No one person gets a massive benefit over the other. If you can make an improvement to software, you benefit and then you pass it back for the benefit of others. Totally transparent, no hidden agendas, everybody wins. Built to open standards, and you make sure every man + dog can plug into it later on.

Aside from those people, I believe on maintaining relationships with business suppliers and partners up until the point that they let you down one too many times after you’ve told them. I’ve had a reseller on the phone lately making all kinds of obviously bogus statements about our current Novell partner and basically trying to muscle in on our account. Naturally I told her to get stuffed. If we’re not happy in the current arrangement, we tell them. If we don’t get anywhere, then we move. It’s not like buying gas and electricity!

The world is changing and people are starting to think twice about who they spend their money with and why. Hopefully this will stick, and some ethics will bleed through to the people who matter, such as Tony Blair, who seems to be living inside a bubble. I’ve never felt so badly about the state of British politics since…I can’t remember. With this much material, it’s a shame Spitting Image never made a comeback. Making jokes about it is all we have left.

So let’s see, what’s going on in the world at the moment.

Well, Israel and Lebanon are bombing the shit out of each other. Hmm, it seems that the UK is nominally on the side of the Israelis in this conflict, by virtue of the fact we seem to be a pile on America’s bottom. We just do what they say, whatever and whenever. It makes us all look rather stupid. Mr Blair, you must be so proud.

Condoleeza Rice goes to the Middle East, ostensibly to peddle peace, which seems a trifle two faced when the US are shipping armaments out to Israel like they’re going out of fashion. Maybe she’s over there to drop off the invoices personally, you know, just to make sure the Israelis realise they’re on 30 days credit or something.

I can’t imagine the folks living in these areas thinking war is the way forward, no matter how much you hate the opposition. Who wins in war? As far as I can see, it’s fertile ground for construction companies, armaments companies and religious head bangers who think it’s all a good idea to kill someone on the grounds that the opposition follow someone else’s God. Come on, like it’s a franchise!

Away from the arguments you can’t win, I’ve had a delve into Michel Thomas’s Spanish course. Interesting! It’s very popular and you can see why. He’s basically showing you how a lot of English words are roughly the same in Spanish (and presumably any other latin based language) and how quickly you can start constructing crude sentences. Hopefully I’ll get time to persevere with it in the coming weeks.

Bueno!

I think you tend to forget when you are cooped up in a shady, air conditioned office all day just how hot it is currently in Manchester. Today it’s 28C and it really does take your breath away when you walk out of the front door and it hits you.

That said, by this time a week on Friday, it’s nailed on to be freezing and blowing a gale, as that’s when the annual Beckett family trek takes us to Newquay with our tent. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

Cool things rediscovered #4 – Ten, by Pearl Jam!
😉

The diet has some slight damage around it’s footings today. The last couple of nights I’ve been going out of my way to eat as little as I think I can get away with, and only apples after 6pm. Today for lunch I’ve had a sandwich, but ah..also a rich chocolate brownie. It tasted like 2 stones on my beer belly and I hated myself for cracking.

Looks like a light tea then! I also need to make some personal changes. It occured to me in a moment of clarity last night that I’m in the middle of some relationship issues, and I need to make some hasty (and permanent) changes to make good.

Sho mo…

Went SLED10 release version last night, doesn’t look, feel or play differently than the RC3 I was using before. Had the usual problem of the machine crashing at the end of the main install (you know, the graphics and sound card bit). Hand cranked the NVidia drivers and re-write of Xorg.conf with Sax2 -c 1 after coming up in “failsafe” mode (aka Runlevel 3).

Restarted and all worked OK. I had to run the sound detection in YaST | Hardware | Sound, but that took seconds and worked flawlessly. After that, added four Xine RPMs to give me DVD playback. I don’t bother with XGL as it interferes with Xine too much. Mangles the control panel etc. Nevermind. I can live with it.

Now just putting all my junk back on, such as photos, tunes etc. At home, I must use Windows 0.5% of the time, and that’s only because of my Windows Mobile PDA.

Took some nice snaps of Manchester in the sunsheeeiiinnnneee on Wednesday, some of which made it to Flickr (almost out of quota for this month!).

Weather slightly cooler today, glad for something of a break!

Stupid acronym, great product. Ready to start putting it through it’s paces with students come October.

Once you sort the DVD playback issue, it’s got just about everything

You know, like :-

– Shrek 2 DVD

– “Get A Grip” by Aerosmith

– INXS Greatest Hits

I’m sure there is a whole lot more from my past waiting to be rediscovered (even if Shrek 2 is reasonably recent, it’s a lot better than the first).

The weather in Manchester has been oppressive, at least by the usual standards. It’s been high 20 something Celsius (sorry, don’t know what that is really in old money – 80F?) all week and I suspect even sun lovers are getting a little sick of the sweltering nights and sweaty days.

The aged A/C in the machine room at work is barely able to keep the equipment at a workable temperature. Maybe if it all trips off, we can go home! 😉

It’s still 24C now and it’s thundering it’s arse off. I find something quite liberating about being caught out in the rain on a sweaty night. It once happened in Wigan on a Saturday night out years ago – we got drenched in a flash shower in between pubs. We got into the John Bull and everyone stared at us like wet t-shirt contestants!

The finest pub in Wigan, and the holder of many fantastic memories.

So England are out of the World Cup. Perm any one of the following excuses as to why :-

– It was Rooney’s fault
– It was Erikkson’s fault
– It was Lampard’s fault
– The weather was too hot
– Crouch is rubbish
– We’re rubbish at penalties
– It was Ronaldo’s fault

All of which are utterly pointless. You get what you earn in life, and England just aren’t good enough, pure and simple. We’re all armchair pundits who become experts overnight, so my opinion is just as valid/invalid as the rest, but that’s life, get over it. At least drunk people didn’t smash up city centres again. Maybe we’re getting used to it now!

On a lighter note, I’ve read SLED10 ships on the 17th July, barring any major disaster with the public beta. I’ve installed it at home and work, and like it a lot. I’m becoming massively anti-Microsoft as every day passes. They are obviously still a very powerful company, but I detect a shift in attitudes now.

Users are wiser now than they have ever been, and are looking at what their alternatives are. I like Macs, but don’t like the price point. If I can have the software functionality on general purpose PCs, I’d be happy with that. Throw in Open Office for free, and I’m a happy camper. SLED10 does everything I want, and turning on XGL makes it a fun environment in which to work.

I’ve even got to the bottom of the Linux DVD player. Novell aren’t going to throw one in, but I can recommend Xine. Go to http://www.xinehq.de and download the RPM/deb for your system. I used the ones from the Brazilian maintainer.

Installs in minutes, no mind numbing compiling from source. I’m just not down with that at all, it has to pass the idiot test and install with a few clicks and no cryptic build errors. I’m thinking of writing a Cool Solution about it.

The end of a long but productive week. The ZENWorks workshop stuff we did went really well, I just hope we can keep the momentum going. It’s tough because folks are demoralised. We have good people but they’ve been messed about and it’s not fair. This blog has nothing to do with work, so I’m going to express the view.

We’re taking a look at the new GroupWise Mobile Server next week, we’re all cautiously excited (is that a bit odd?) as it will open a lot of new avenues for GW, which we’re hell bent on keeping. I just hope we can have more bodies so we can give more and better quality support for it.

Got SLED10 RC2.5 working finally at home. The NVidia driver thing was a really tough one, but one forum had a fix involving Sax2 re-writing the xorg.conf. Took minutes to solve, ironically. Still can’t register for updates. Apparently that bug is top of the list for both SLED and OpenSuse 10.1.

The weather is perking up too, and England are still in the World Cup. Toute le monde, Rodders!!