Archive for September, 2004

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I’m cursed

Friday, September 24th, 2004

I think I’m cursed. It seems that every time I buy a nice new laptop, something nasty happens to it.

A year ago I sold on my very first laptop and bought a nice new one. That summer, the caravan I was staying in while working away from home was burgled and my laptop was never recovered.
So I bought a new one. A few months later, that new laptop was maliciously damaged beyond repair. The insurance company kindly replaced it.
That laptop has, amazingly, survived until I wanted to upgrade. So this summer I bought a new Dell laptop. Then a few weeks ago that laptop failed and had to go back for repair and was collected by a courier (DHL). I thought no more about it until this week, when I have been receiving calls from Dell every day to ask whether the collection was made OK…… Today the conversation went like:

Dell: Did the driver leave any paperwork?
Me: Nope, he said there wasn’t any.
Dell: Was he in a marked DHL van?
Me: No, it was a plain white van.
Dell: Was he wearing a DHL uniform?
Me: Er… no.
Dell: Did he bring the correct packaging for the laptop?
Me: No… I had to put it in a box for him.
Dell: Right… I’d better call DHL.

It’s so bloody obvious now isn’t it? This guy obviously was the right courier, but had no intention of delivering the laptop back to the depot. So he drove away with my laptop in an unmarked box without any tracking barcodes or labels, leaving no paperwork behind…

When DHL confirm that my laptop is gone without a trace (which it almost certainly is) I think I’ll ask if Dell can replace it with a pen and paper… seems like a much safer option to me.

Why do these things always happen to me?

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A look at Gmail

Tuesday, September 21st, 2004

I stumbled across a post on Schwuk’s blog which links to a Gmail invite spooler. The idea is that people send Gmail invites to the site, and anyone who wants an invite submits their e-mail address and will eventually receive one. So I submitted mine and had an invite a few seconds later. Very cool!

So I’ve registed the address whatastatussymbol@gmail.com (come on spammers, bring it on. Give the filters a good test). I chose that address because I always find it amusing when people feel the need to brag about having a Gmail address, as if it makes them a genius or something…

So far I’ve had a play with it and I’m very impressed. Gmail is far from your average webmail service. Of course you’ve got all the usual features but also a stack of really useful extra things. For example, there’s an option to display a symbol by all your mail, to differentiate between mail actually sent to you and mailing list traffic. A small thing but very useful. It’s very fast as well – and I’m currently on a crap connection which gives me 5-10 Kbp/s. You can of course create message filters, but they do seem somewhat limited compared to the options Kmail gives me (but it’s not bad for a webmail client). The message threading is very nice as well. This is a relatively new feature in mail clients and it’s still not too common in webmail clients – I don’t know how I survived without it in the past.

As for the advertising, I can manage to cope with it. It doesn’t get in the way or annoy you and is always related to keywords found in the e-mail you’re reading, which (now this suprised me) can actually be useful…
One feature that I feel is missing is the ability to import external POP3 e-mail into your Gmail account. This would certainly allow me to make better use of Gmail. Also, there doesn’t seem to be the ability to create additional folders for storing e-mail. I’m on several mailing lists and it’d be nice to seperate them into different folders. Of course you can ‘label’ or ’star’ e-mail using the filters to see what’s what, but having stuff in seperate folders would make things much easier to manage.

Of course there are all the concerns about privacy…. I got the impression from stuff in the media that Gmail wouldn’t actually let you delete e-mail, but force you to store it to target nasty advertising at you and so on. This is of course, not true. Well, the advertising part is but the rest isn’t. You can delete e-mail, but Gmail “encourages” you to archive it, so that you can use Google’s search technology to search through it in the future (very useful) and of course so they can target their advertising better. My main concern is that Google will keep backup copies of e-mail – even if you delete them – which could be kept for “some time”. The privacy policy certainly makes interesting reading. They say that accounts are secure and safe from abuse by employees as well as from script kiddies. If this is true, then I think the privacy concerns are mostly small, especially when compared to that of certain other webmail providers.

All things considered, I like Gmail. For a webmail client it’s bloody good and leaves the others miles behind. Why, oh why, didn’t I get myself a slice of the Google IPO pie……

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Chaos at the Commons

Friday, September 17th, 2004

It’s been plastered all over the news recently, so I just have to comment on it. It’s been both amusing and concerning to see the amount of media sensationalism surrounding the reporting of the events.

Firstly, as I understand it, the whole hunting debate at the moment is not about banning hunting outright, but about banning hunting with dogs. When someone hunts a fox with dogs they are not “controlling a pest” or doing anything other than playing a sport. As for the “it’s providing jobs and income” argument, I have to say that that’s rubbish too. The importation of illegal drugs provides jobs and income, so should we allow that too?
Hunting with dogs is cruel and unnecessary. It puts the foxes under an incredible amount of stress – so much that even if they escape the dogs, they will almost always die from stress anyway.
If the current legislation gets through, people will still be able to hunt foxes with guns (which really is a quick and relatively stress free way of controlling a pest) – this is something the media (and pro-hunt supporters) have completely neglected to mention.

Now onto the invasion of the Commons. Obviously the fact that it could happen is very worrying and something needs to be done NOW. But I do not believe the responsibility for Commons security should be taken away from the Commons. The Commons is a special place, and filling it with armed police is not a good idea.
It was interesting to read a post by Richard Allan, MP for Sheffield Hallam (whose blog I read regularly, despite being of a different political orientation) to see how it feels from the inside.
He says:

The civil war of the mid seventeenth century was triggered by the King violating the Commons chamber. Since then, this has been seen as a special place that no outside force should enter. It is one of the cornerstones of our democracy that MPs can debate and vote openly in that space. I think this principle is worth preserving.

Quite right. I just hope whoever has to make the decision about the future of Commons security remembers this.

On a lighter note, I wonder if the “men in tights”, as they have been branded by the media, are actually allowed to use their swords? I don’t think many people would argue with a man with a sword – even an “antiquated” sword…

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Technical Support

Tuesday, September 14th, 2004

Despite me being rather annoyed at the postage cost for buying a Dell laptop, I decided to go ahead anyway and get one, a Dell Inspiron 5150. Of course the first thing I did was to install Debian on it.

Anyway, the other day the sound hardware failed. By failed, I mean it’s not even listed in ‘lspci’ anymore. Obviously a hardware fault, right? So I e-mail Dell technical support. Their response basically translates into “install Windows or we’re not going to give you any help whatsoever”. I’m not sure it’s legal for them to refuse to honour the warranty just because I’m not using the OS they supplied…. and I personally don’t see how installing Windows is going to cure a hardware fault anyway, but whatever. So I do this and of course, as it’s a hardware fault, the result is the same.

So now I’m going to have to endure lots of stupid “make sure the volume is turned up” instructions until I finally go insane and give up. The only problem with that is that I’m going back to Uni on Saturday, so I need a working laptop by then or I’m screwed.

I normally buy cheap laptops and have never had any problem with them. Certainly never had a major part of the system just fail – and my Dell is only 3 months old. Actually I’m generally unhappy with the laptop anyway. No floppy drive, no serial port, no infrared, no PS/2 ports and it’s quite thick too. So by paying a little extra for a well-known brand, I’ve got an inferior product and crap technical support.

But I’ve learnt my lesson: I’ll be going back to my usual supplier of QUALITY laptops next time, who have a decent technical support department only a phone call away and are happy to provide laptops without an operating system for us Linux users.

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Buy Micro Mart!

Thursday, September 2nd, 2004

Yes I know. I’m very sorry for shamelessly pimping Micro Mart every time they publish one of my articles – but I don’t write very often so every article is worth pimping ;-)

In this week’s Micro Mart is my comparison of 5 Linux distributions: Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros and TurboLinux. The article focuses on which of those distros is best for a Linux newbie.

Out today, only £1.80.

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Posted in linux | 2 Comments »

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