Shane from Distro of the Month posted an interesting comment about the different “flavours” of Linux.

Now, we at Distro of the Month have a vested interest in reminding people that there are more than just one or two distros. We ship a different one each and every month. It is important to remember that unlike Windows, Linux isn’t just a one manufacturer operating system. There are many different manufacturers out there with many different products. That’s why we are here. To introduce our subscribers to as many different products as possible. The idea is that the more Linux products that you try, the more you will learn Linux as a whole. And the more you learn Linux, the more you will like it.

And I must say I agree. As I said in a comment on his blog, one of the strengths of Linux is the variety of distros and how you can get them designed for all manner of purposes – including fully fledged ones taking up less than 50mb. That this variety is then all brought together under a common architecture really does make Linux stand out.

If you are not a linux convert already but are interested in trying it out you could do worse than checking out FrozenTech’s Live CD list at – http://www.livecdlist.com/. Live CD’s are versions of Linux that you can download (as an ISO file) burn to disk and then run from the CD (or DVD). They contain all the tools etc., that you would get with the OS but provide a way for you to try it out without risking any of your current data (and without messing about repartititioning hard disks etc).

One excellent use for LiveCDs is for system utility disks that you can use in the event of your windows installation going belly up.

For all its importance, biodiversity turns out to be another one of those ideas that humans can’t be trusted with.

As reported by the BBC, today (22 Jan 06) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4635330.stm there is about to be a massive cull of grey squirrels in the name of biodiversity. Grey squirrels are suddenly not just a threat to red squireels and tress but to hedgehogs. And they must be killed.

This seems to completely ignore the clear fact that the biggest threat to biodiversity is us – human beings. We brought the grey squirrels in the first place. There are very many ways to address the loss of red squirrels – including protecting the locations where indigenous creatures thrive; stopping turning their habitats into housing and road developments; or doing less poisoning of the countryside – all of which would be inconvenient for at least some of us. Killing grey squirrels is only inconvenient for them, and they don’t exactly have votes.

The killing approach represents a common “solution” to loss of diversity. Badgers swing from being a protected species to being “cullable” because they are allegedely killing hedgehogs (Guardian 21 Jan) or spreading TB. The survival of badgers is in itself a miracle but they are cute enough to have human supporters. Grey squirrels are also cute so they may have some chance. Uncute unfurry animals and insects and plants that don’t make good soft toys have very little chance.

Surely solutions to encouraging biodiversity – where it involves undoing human damage that has limited species numbers – must be more sophisticated than handing out death sentences.

Just to give people a heads up – there are some amazing photos of medieval british castles available at www.etrusia.co.uk. I honestly think that our cultural history is something we, in the UK, seem to neglect and are almost embarrased about. This should not be the case.

To steal a quote – why dont you take some time out and learn about the history of Britain 🙂

Sadly it seems the whale that spent the last few days sightseeing London has died on the way to the open seas.

You can read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4635874.stm

May I be the first to propose a minutes silence to mourn the passing of such a remarkable mammal.

Well, while we may not be as dedicated to the fine arts of Linux as some people we could mention, we at Why Dont You use Linux and can appreciate its strengths.

Now, as we exist in the real world and dont (yet – donations always welcome) have the handheld ebook reader of our dreams (see http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/01/14/portable-pdfs/ for more information) we also read computer magazines (and a lot of them). If you took a snapshot of the world based on these over the last month or so, you could easily be fooled into thinking that there was but one Linux and its name is Ubuntu.

Continue reading →

It’s no surpise to anyone that a diversity of life forms reflects the health of an environment. However, the message is often lost when set against human development goals.

In a New Scientist article on a 2005 Biodiversity Conference in Galway, the writer made the point that human health is adversely affected by loss of biodiversity. Organisms like the bilharzia-carrying snail have become a threat where increasing levels of human activity have led to a decrease in snail populations in Kenya, for example.

There is fuller discussion of the conference report available at http://www.sci-tech.co.uk/biodev.php

The best TV series ever was The Wire. (Series 1 was the best, 2 was OK but got better, 3 was better than 2 but not as good as the first series. ) It’s really funny as well as utterly engaging.
It’s a gansters vs cops series. The cops aren’t necessarily good and the gangsters aren’t necessarily bad though. The “wire” refers to various forms of electronic surveillance.
It’s accessible in the UK on an obscure Sky backup channel and is currently in series 2 here but you need to see series 1 first to get a taste for it..

There is not much to say beyond that, but I will provide some (gushing) reasons to justify my choice:

Standard tv reasons: The dialogue is almost always good and sometimes completely brilliant. Some of the characters are brilliant (eg Omar) Some of the acting is excellent. The soundtracks are good – series 1 has a basically hip hop soundtrack. There is lots of action and suspense. The visual aspect is often stunning. The central character starts off sympathetic (McNulty) but then gets increasingly flawed and irritating. The most sympathetic character is a gangster (di Angelo) who starts to stand up for himself and employ some moral sense but who gets killed because of it in series 2

More intellectual reasons: It looks at serious issues – class and race in US society, the priorities of law enforcement and the pressures on police; alternatives to the murderous state of inner-city neighbourhoods; common factors in the internal politics of gangs and police; the effect of economic change on traditional working class neighbourhoods and their institutions; the way people can be manipulated by community/family/group values, and so on.
It does this without ever pushing the issues down your throat and without ever being less than completely entertaining in the way of a standard cop series.
I think it’s the best tv series I’ve ever seen, although my standards are probably a bit dubious anyway.

To my accelerated time sense, it’s only a few years since everyone was supposed to bin their old motherboard because it wouldn’t support AGP graphics cards. AGP was the future of graphics cards, etc.

Now, if you want to upgrade your graphics card, you have to get PCI-E. So throw away your old AGP-supporting motherboard to get one that supports PCI-E. In which case you probably also have to throw away the CPU and RAM and upgrade them to match the motherboard specs.

I know that PC manufacturers have to stay in business and that planned obsolescence is how it’s done but- bah.

Richard Dawkins pro-rationalist TV programme on Channel 4 is pretty good. He interviewed some real headcases and a relatively inoffensive liberal C of E bishop. If I have a criticism it is that he laid into the bishop’s belief system with more enthusiasm than the evangelical US “pro-life and pro-murder of doctors” nutters. Still, he’s not a bad presenter. Dawkins actually seems much more normal than the standard tv scientist, as he would not cause comment in the street, unlike certain other tv scientists, chosen for their visual oddities to distract the viewer from possibly boring science, maybe.

I see from the BBC site that the government is still hoping for a vistory on this ludicrous issue and intends to overturn the Lords ruling, although the BBC reckons there will be a lot of opposition in the Commons

Thankfully, it seems that the house of lords has seen sense over the ID cards issue – more reporting available on the BBC site.

It is clearly ludicrous to treat “Intelligent design” as a serious theory of anything. It has no predictive nor explanatory power. It cannot be tested or falsified. Its only significance in scientific terms must be its role in the teaching of science. So its dissemination is an issue for social science (the history of ideas, the role of ideas as ideologies, the power relations involved in how it is being treated as a serious alternative to evolutionary science.) Even in religious terms it is impossible to see it as a genuine point of view. (Even the Catholic Church has recently dismissed it.) Continue reading →

The useability “guru” has turned his sights on search engines now:

Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

Read the full article – http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html

Quite an interesting article – Personally I think search engines (and things like del.icio.us, digg.com etc), while useful and interesting, do run the risk of “dumbing down” the web.

Popular sites get more hits / higher rankings and as a result get more visitors, which in turn generates more hits (more diggs, more tags etc). As people turn to “web 2.0” social networking to find sites, this has the definite risk of creating a situation where the less popular parts of the internet will turn into a no-mans-land with no visitors and no chance of getting itself out of the quagmire, because no one is “digg-ing” or taging or linking to the site. Its a shame really.

An additional, unwanted, side effect is the amount of effort some sites have to go to with SEO. A shame that so much time and effort is spent basically trying to trick people into visiting.

Well, after the mini rant over XAMPP I had a think. At the moment the set up here is: two machines running Windows XP, one Windows Server 2003, two with SuSE and Ubuntu – with a solaris machine any day now. Now, while XAMPP has been great in the past there is no real reason why I cant bite the bullet and remove all the webservers from all machines (there are lots of obscure ones running in the background – dont ask me why….) then actually install the servers I want, with the mods I want for the network as it is right now! Continue reading →

Now, everyone I know who designs web applications or online databases is a big fan of XAMPP and I am no exception. I think it is great. It has taken the old concept of PHPTriad (which was good in its day) and it allows people to download and install a simple bundle of Apache, PHP and MySQL. Fantastic.

For example, using their tool you can install the following on Windows with no effort at all:

Apache HTTPD 2.2.0, MySQL 5.0.18, PHP 5.1.1 + 4.4.1 pl1 + PEAR + Switch, MiniPerl 5.8.7, mod_ssl 2.0.55, Openssl 0.9.8a, PHPMyAdmin 2.7.0 pl1, XAMPP Control Panel 2.1, eAccelerator 0.9.4, Webalizer 2.01-10, Mercury Mail Transport System für Win32 und NetWare Systems v4.01a, FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.10a, SQLite 2.8.15, ADODB 4.65, Zend Optimizer 2.5.10a, XAMPP Security.

Over the last few months, I have been using the server environment XAMPP installs quite regularly and it always has been great. One thing I have never managed is to get the TOMCAT and COCOON addons working though. No idea why. Everytime I have tried it comes up with a complaint that I dont have Java, when I do have java.

Madness.

Anyway, today I decided it was time to do my disk housekeeping and clean out all the old files, uninstall all the useless junk a PC accumulates and so on. Part of this involved uninstalling the XAMPP set up I had and downloading / installing the new version (it now comes with Apache 2.2). I also figured this would be a good time to re-try TOMCAT / COCOON just to see.

Anyway, after getting rid of all my files I went to the XAMPP site and yes there is a new version of the basic package and the Perl add-on, but the rest (python, tomcat and cocoon) have all vanished – the links replaced by “Coming sson!” [sic].

Bah. I checked the file names and the old versions I had (eg 2.3.5 for python) are the same as the ones that are coming soon but no links. (Obviously I am stupid enough to have deleted my old copies BEFORE I checked to see if new ones were available.)

Well, what a load of ********.