Robert Small, The blog thereof.

Current configuration

AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ (2.6GHz).

ASUS M2N-CM DVI motherboard - nVidia nForce 630a chipset.

2GB RAM 800 (one module).

Seagate 360GB.

nVidia GeForce 7025 on board graphics - 256MB.

19 inch widescreen.

nVidia MCP67 High Definition Audio.

Two DVD drives, RW, dual layer, lightscribe.

Front panel with various card readers, eSATA, USB, Firewire.

All this is inside a very nice looking A+ case which is designed to look like a piece of Hi-Fi.

Debian GNU/Linux with 20GB for the OS, 20GB for another copy of Linux, and 16GB swap.

Upgrade plans

Another 2GB module.

External graphics - I have one card but I don’t trust it for general use (second hand freebe).

Upgrading the motherboard to take 8GB.

The RAM to fit the 8GB.

Other plans

Dual screen set up.

Putting (both) screens onto screen booms/swing stands for easier use.

Kind regards, Robert.

I believe the following two URL’s are exactly the same bug as I’ve experienced.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/121413
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-mozillateam-bugs/2007-June/016597.html

Symptoms: Eclipse completely dies on you when you open a web browser or one is opened for you. It also happens if you go to the web browser settings page.

Failed possible solutions: Recompiling everything. It looked like a weird linking problem to me so I went for the traditional response, recompile. This wasted a lot of CPU time but gained me nothing.

Solution: Surprisingly I’ve yet to see this anywhere else on the Internet. The problem seems to be somewhere within the ~/.mozilla/eclipse/ directory, if you remove it completely then it’s replaced and everything starts working fine again. I haven’t gone deeper into it to find out what’s actually causing this or if there’s a better solution. However, I don’t think I missed anything in that directory and Eclipse is working perfectly again.

Conclusion

I know this set me back a few hours in work figuring it out, I know that there are a lot of Eclipse developers out there who may benefit from this as well.

This must be quite a complex bug as nobody on IRC seemed to know what to do. Hopefully this guide will help other people with problems.

Comments welcome.

Kind regards, Robert.

It would logically follow that if I’ve had this problem others must also have had it or be having it on a regular basis now. Unfortunately I don’t know how to trigger the problem and so I’m unable to provide you with a picture.

Versions: Caught in 1.3.4 and 1.3.5, haven’t tested anything else.

Symptoms: CPU usage climbs to 100% and when you click ‘export’ or ’save as’ you get a standard export/save dialog box but without a path or any files/directories shown. It refuses to let you search or manually input a path.

Possible related problem: I had this problem last immediately after the same project had got stuck while loading the audio into the memory. The issues might be related but I can’t see any reason to suspect that myself.

Solution: It’s not that hard but it took me a little while to work it out. Make a small edit and save, this seems to work every time. If it doesn’t then save and restart Audacity.

What doesn’t work: I tried all the normal tricks.

• # killall audacity
• # killall -9 audacity
• Moving the files around
• Renaming them
• Manually comparing the .aup with other .aup’s and trying to fix.

Diagnosis: Bug, probably a stomach one. I honestly can’t see where the problem is, I’ve tried looking for it but don’t have the time to do full strace’s and all the rest of that fun stuff. Let’s hope the audacity team manage to find it and fix it. After all, Audacity is a brilliant tool even if it does lack a few things.

Kind regards, Robert.

I’m going to pass on a few things I’ve learnt over the years. I can hardly call myself a veteran contractor but I’ve certainly done quite a bit of it. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve accidentally done absolutely the right thing and then only realised afterwards how right what I’d done was.

Communicate

When working for someone you absolutely definitely must talk to them. Talk before you get the contract, talk while you’re working, talk when you’re finished. Many coders are the ’strong and silent’ type, this may work in bars but it doesn’t work on the Internet. People want to know what you’re doing, they want to be able to discuss aspects of the work, they like to feel that they’re paying someone who listens to them. I recently worked for one person in a situation where we exchanged just over a hundred emails before the funds even went into escrow, but this was good because we now both know exactly what is wanted and needed. Remember that it’s their money, they have a right to feel that it’s going to be well spent.

If you communicate well with people it often leads to follow-up jobs and good ratings on contract sites.

Be Positive

Use `I’m sure I can` instead of `I think I may`. Never lie. If you think you can’t do something admit it, but try to be positive. Make some friends who you can turn to and ask questions, if you’re contacted via email or a website then it’s rare you’ll have a time deadline which is shorter than the time you can ask someone in. IRC is an excellent resource for this, but don’t forget to google it.

Your time and experience are worth money

This is one that I have real problems with myself. I hate charging 70USD for something that’s maybe twenty minutes work for me. What you have to remember is that you’re giving them a bargain, they’re paying 70USD to have the work done in practically no time at all; if they didn’t pay you then they’d have to learn themselves, that could take year and hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get to your standard. They’re paying for you to learn (retrospectively) and for you to be as brilliant as you are.

Remember, your time and knowledge is worth what they’ll pay. If you think it isn’t then there’s always someone else willing to do it for more. If they come back to you then they obviously feel that they’ve had a good and worthwhile deal.

Suit your language to your client

If you wanted your car repaired and the mechanic first went into lengthy explanation as to what was wrong and what you’d have to do to make sure it didn’t happen again you wouldn’t mind much, on one condition. Presuming you don’t know anything about mechanics you don’t want to be told a lot of seemingly interesting stuff that makes absolutely no sense because he’s used words like ‘drive-shaft’ and ‘piston control’. What you want to know is that you shouldn’t turn right too sharply because the car is getting a bit old.

Apply this to your clients. If they know what you’re talking about you can give them some details, never but never make them feel stupid or try to show off. Never patronise, chances are if they own a multi-million dollar website they’ve heard the word script before and don’t need to be told that it’s ‘a part of the page that makes it work’. Keep a little bit of mysticism about your work, `script` has quite a technical air to it.

Don’t cook the goose

I’m guilty of this. It could be called over-communication, but cooking the goose sounds better to me. Never tell your employer how you’re going to fix something before they employ you. ‘I’m just going to edit this file to make this value correct so that it no longer causes your this problem.’ Google is as much their friend as yours, it’ll tell them all they need to know and all you need them not to know. They end up paying nothing for your expertise and doing their work themselves. Try to keep the balance between informing and losing.

In conclusion

These are the best tips that come to mind, there are certainly many more things that I’ve learnt and I would expect many more things to learn. Please feel free to comment here and add to my advice.

Contract work has it’s ups and downs, being your own boss is great as long as you know you’re definitely going to have work. At this point in time I’m not really having many problems getting contracts, but I can remember the days when I bid on a hundred and sometimes got one. I had to learn the hard way, please learn from my mistakes instead of your own.

Kind regards, Robert.

I think most people who’ve been following the iPlayer in any depth have noticed that it’s not really delivering. It has some good sides, but there are a fair few things that I’d like to take issue with.

I would not say it’s been a complete waste of money, it hasn’t. It provides videos to anyone within a certain part of the desktop market’s spectrum. So, what’s bad about it? Primarily, you may not download the videos if you’re on anything other than Windows. Isn’t this government backing of a monopoly? Annoyingly the online viewing is only available for 6 days, and even if you do find that old XP disk you’ll only be able to keep the videos for 30 days. So much for asking your neighbours to download a year’s worth of East Enders for you while you’re off on that gap year in Tibet.

So, if you use Linux and you’re away from a computer for more than 7 days, tough.

It does provide some good quality video, the screen shot above shows a similar quality to what you’ll generally get. How much of a good thing is this though? If we dub this ‘high definition’, where’s the standard definition or low definition version for those of us on slower and more expensive connections?

Whatever codec they’re using (I haven’t researched, maybe someone can fill me in) seems to be quite high on the bandwidth usage. They also don’t seem to be using the standard method of scaling videos; normally videos will scale nicely to full screen on any of my computers (on youtube and the like), iPlayer doesn’t. I get skips, jumps, hops and judders if I try to full screen it. I’ve tested it on this machine (1.7GHz, 1GB), my other laptop (1.6GHz, 2GB), and my dad’s media machine (2x 2.6GHz, 2GB). All had problems.

It also has a habit of killing itself out of the blue. This generally manifests itself in one of several ways:

• ‘There has been a problem playing this video…’ This tends to happen when you walk away for a while and then come back.
• ‘Undefined undefined undefined’ This has only ever happened once, but I presume heavier users get it more often.
• The jitters. This is when suddenly everything goes jittery, something like a deliberate echo 0.5s after and at the same volume.
• The express joo-jars. An apt nickname for when it goes into super fast mode and does something weird with the sound.

In general it behaves, but I’ve noticed a few other distinct problems:

• Incomplete uploads. An absolute curse, generally it will finish just before the bit which finalises the whole program.
• Time delay. For some reason they seem to forget to upload half the days programs for a while, perfectly OK until you want to watch one which is missing.

All in all though, it’s not all bad. I’ll try a comparison with a competitor, ITV’s catchup.

Downloads: [BBC] Yes, only Windows and for 30 days. [ITV] No, or invisible.

Video quality: High, sharp and generally smooth. Nasty.

Adverts: None, just a channel trailer at the beginning. Lots.

Requirements: Flash and a browser. Internet Explorer, a ‘patched’ Windows Media Player, ActiveX.

Speed: Fast. Slow to start with then seems to be buffered and OK.

Watching live: No known mechanism. Possible, reasonable quality.

At the end of the day, does it let me watch Dr Who? Yes, therefore it can’t be all bad.

Kind regards, Robert.

http://www.robertsmall.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Chute_Stick#The_Software

Just a quick blog to say that I’ve added a few things to Chute Stick. I’ll thin down the number of packages as soon as possible, but we’re still well within the 1GB memory stick so I can spend time doing that later.

I’ve added all versions of Skype. Skype provides a reasonably secure method of getting a message to someone; it also permeates firewalls better than most viruses. I added 7zip as it seems to be a good free alternative to WinZip, the 7zip compression itself is remarkable. In some of my experiments with it I’ve experienced almost 50% smaller files than standard zip (using `zip -9`). Because of this excellent compression I’ve included a copy of p7zip (the *nix port). CamStudio may seem like a strange choice, but it does offer a way for you to quickly record a video of how to do something, this could be essential if you’re unable to tutor someone face to face but need them to (for example) administer a box for you. I’ve debated if a Linux desktop recorder is needed, but if you have ssh you can probably do most administration through that.

Well, that’s all so far, I’m snowed under with work at the moment so I was just popping this through. Most of the additions have been related to things I’ve needed for work over the last few days. I will be blogging about some other things (mostly work related) soon, when I escape anyway!

Kind regards, Robert.

http://www.robertsmall.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Chute_Stick#The_Software

or,

Why I think the lottery and X-Factor like TV shows are bad.

Society owes you little. It does not owe you fame and fortune, that’s something you may well owe yourself to earn, but it’s not something that society owes you. Relatively recently it has become the fashionable thing to want to magically become rich and sometimes famous.Life is not a lottery, even ‘ideal’ jobs like ‘network marketing’ require you to work hard and learn your trade before you have any chance of making much money. However it seems we’ve become enchanted with the vision of instant ‘celebrity in a bag’; hard earned success gained from talent and energy has been replaced by flash success based on luck and the opinions of a couple of judges.

Not only do we want to chose our celebrities by the proxy of talent show hosts, we want to chose our rich by the proxy of lottery cards. There have always been ‘lucky’ people who gained riches through inheritance and had no idea how to use them. Today it seems to be something we desire, to get something without working or otherwise ‘earning’ it. Personally I dislike gaining anything by raffle or lottery, I was brought up to believe that success had to be earned and not won.

I feel this way of thinking could be part of the reason why we have such a ’sue, sue, sue’ culture. People are always looking for ’something from nothing’.

I may be wrong, tell me how you feel.

Kind regards, Robert.

My lunch today was not amazingly notable, but I’d like to tell you about it anyway. Mainly because of the stuffed peppers, it was one of my first attempts at ‘art’ in the form of food. The red is a stuffed pepper, feta and olives. Not amazingly exciting to look at, but more presentation than normal and very tasty! Do please provide your ideas for similar takes on this, I’d love to know if there’s a traditional dish of a similar type.

Kind regards, Robert.

‘Doesn’t have a point of view,
Knows not where he’s going to,
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere Man, please listen,
You don’t know what you’re missing,
Nowhere Man, the world is at your command.’

People interest me, quite a lot in fact. I often hear people give a vague allegiance to a political party, but when I try to find out how many of the core values they share it’s often surprisingly fewer than one might hope. All too often it seems that people have one view and a different political support, believing in freedom and positive action against environmental crime. It’s true that we create not only our own future but the future of our children and their children. Surely then we should think more before we idly act or fail to act.

I believe that it’s the duty of every world citizen - and you are a citizen of the world, like it or not - to strongly consider and debate world issues. Our thoughts may well pave the future of our own lives and those of billions of others.

I challenge you to never vote for a political party because your parents did or because your friends do, I challenge you to be your own person and make your own choices. It’ll surprise you how something you do can change things so far from you. A Kabbalist described it to me like a stone thrown into a pool of water, although the stone may be small the ripples still reach a surprising distance. In the same way your hurried attempt to cut queues at a set of lights might spoil someone’s day in another country. Think, if such a small thing can do something so big, what can a big thing like a vote do?

Even your choice of car could change many people’s lives. A small energy efficient car will produce less pollution; and if you believe in global climate change or not, this is a good thing. A larger car may protect you better in an accident but heavily increases the chance of you injuring or killing someone else.

I think the moral I’d take from this is to think before you act, always. Don’t be a nowhere man.

Kind regards, Robert.

I’ve been ill. I hate being ill, especially when you can’t even get out of bed most days. I hate the fatigue after the illness. In general, I dislike being ill and all that goes with it. I had tonsillitis as a part of glandular fever.

Well, that’s that, I’m at least partially well now. The unfortunate fact is that I seem to be one of the few people who get a post-illness fatigue from glandular fever, either that or I’m just lazier than normal.

I’ve recently become involved in yet another business. It’s certainly very comfortable and they provide good training, nice perks and a very reasonable wage. They also are open to new people so get in contact with me if you’re interested.

In general I’m getting by in life, my next trip to the States is being planned. I could use some advice there, especially on an inexpensive way to get to Amsterdam airport from Norwich. I love swimming, but not in that cold conditions! One of the annoying sides of my local airport is that it doesn’t seem to provide many flights to anywhere, and those it does are rather expensive. To annoy me more I find the website for it is both badly designed and dysfunctional.

For those of you who know what ‘Project X’ or ‘That Project’ is, it’s now named ‘Footman’ and is coming on reasonably well. In fact I hope to have a working demo soon for internal testing.

V8d Org IRC will be moving to InspIRCd from UnrealIRCd. This move will take place over a set time (probably a day) which is yet to be confirmed. We will attempt to prevent any disruption, but some will be inevitable.

I think this should get everyone up to date with my life; if you have any questions, do comment.

Kind regards, Robert.