Because it is Ada Lovelace day today, I wanted to talk about someone who not only inspired me, but also gently, subtly, profoundly shaped my direction in life. Such power is usually reserved for parents, teachers and police.
If they could, a fair number of my friends would jump at the chance to meet some of their old teachers again and say “sorry”. I certainly have a few of teachers that I owe an explanation, an apology or a thanks. I was especially lucky to have several star teachers (most people only seem to get one); those teachers that lift learning out of the everyday drudgery that is school and actually open your mind to the possibilities of education.
One of those teachers was Miss Keatch.
Miss Keatch taught mathematics because she loved mathematics.
Miss Keatch had memorized Pi to a ridiculous number of figures.
Miss Keatch gave out assignments for the year above you when you had finished the curriculum work.
Miss Keatch infected you with her own boundless enthusiasm for any and every aspect of mathematics.
While I was thinking about this post, I got in touch with a classmate from the good old days of Miss Keatch’s mathematics lessons. This classmate is the the person in your class who is not only very clever, but who works hard all the time, and always has neat handwriting, and always, ALWAYS hands in her homework. Every class seems to have a person like this, and I would dislike them if I did not admire them so much.
Me: Can you remember Miss Keatch, our maths teacher?
Classmate: Yes. I loved her. Best maths teacher ever.
Anyway, you get the idea. If it were not for Miss Keatch’s obvious passion for her subject, I am positive I wouldn’t have ended up with my awesome, fun, and technical job. She was, and probably still is, the best maths teacher ever.
Although I’ve been lucky enough to land a “mainly Linux” job, I do still occasionally cross paths with Windows machines.
Unfortunately, this time around I have hit a problem that I cannot solve. So, it’s off to google[1] to find a solution.
First Technet to read the documentation. There is a vast amount of documentation there, but they seem to deal with “normal” rather than “unusual” circumstances (at least with regards to my issue). I could post a question on the technet forums and wait for an answer. To increase the chances of a resolution, maybe post on another couple of forums just in case I have more luck there?
Both of my posts were answered fairly quickly, and both answers were almost identical. I was told to run a command that I had already run (and provided the result of in my original post) and pointed me to the technet article that I had already read.
And therein lies the problem. That’s possibly all anyone can do for me. There is a limit to how far you can go in supporting proprietary software. Ultimately, support for Windows is limited to the quality of Microsoft’s documentation, and if the documentation doesn’t fix your issue then… then… uhm… another unresolved thread.
So, what are my options? I can keep on trawling forums until I eventually come up with an answer, or give up because I’ve come across an obscure set of circumstances that no one else has come across.[2]
If I was dealing with an Ubuntu machine, this wouldn’t be a problem at all, but a learning exercise. The Ubuntu wiki article about the relevant package will often contain pertinent information. Failing that, a search on the Ubuntu forums will often yield solutions. But if I’m still stuck at this point I have further options. With Windows, notsomuch.
Has someone filed a bug about the issue? Launchpad and Gnome bugzilla, or KDE bug or whatever the local bugtracker for the project is.
I can pop into irc and ask a real person – with people like Popey for desktop stuff and Ng for all things server related helping out in #ubuntu-uk, you will usually get a definitively unofficial answer pretty quickly.
My point is, with an Ubuntu (and with any open source project) problem I can always find someone who knows a solution, knows someone who knows, or knows someone who can find out. Dig deep enough into the problem and you’ll find a solution. What is more, I could potentially talk to the author/packager/maintainer[3] about the issue and get a better picture of things from them. And, of course, I can read the source code and even fix it myself.
Which brings up another interesting point. Both of my windows-related forum posts were answered quite quickly, but by someone who merely read the thread’s subject, not the actual content. While I appreciate their effort and understand that they volunteer to help, neither of them felt it necessary to read my post. They looked at the subject and replied with a link to the documentation that would probably solve my issue. Probably, that is, if I hadn’t done any research myself and already exhausted all those options. I wouldn’t have gotten that on ubuntuforums, because there you are credited with a modicum of intelligence and self-motivation.
Instead of spending the last few days learning about the ins and outs of something new, I’ve spent it going around in circles and have no greater knowledge now of the underlying problem than I did last friday.
[1]Actually, I used Bing for the second time ever in case it returned more pertinent
Microsoft information
[2]Or, take off and nuke the entire site from orbit
[3]Better to look for the Debian packager here
Tags: Ubuntu
I was messing around with my network settings yesterday in order to talk to a piece of medical equipment but when I came into work this morning, network manager had stopped managing the network adaptor.
There was a network manager update for Karmic yesterday that might have caused this, but it was probably me messing about.
The fix is easy enough though
sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf
Change “managed=false” to “managed=true”
Restart
Solution from Launchpad
Tags: Ubuntu
Dear Australia Post
I’m sorry no one was in receive our parcel last week. You thoughtfully left a card with information on how to pick it up from your parcel depot, complete with a little map.
Small map to find the local AU parcel depot
Which caused me no little confusion. In Melbourne, there are several streets with the same name. So when I see a map with a Chapel street running left to right, I think it runs from East to West.
Melbourne is not Middle Earth.
I am not a dwarf.
May I request a future redesign of your cards with standard mapping practices in mind (north goes at the top) for us poor people who haven’t lived here long and think there might be two Chapel Streets.
Cheers.
Stoo
Tags: Bad design, Melbourne
Every now and then you come across a website that kinda missed the whole standards/accessibility/should be available for everyone bandwagon.
Dialogue box demanding you have a particular resolution to view the website
This isn’t a recommendation, remember. It is a [em]demand[/em]. Visiting the site with a screen resolution of anything other than 1024×768 results in this message, and then you are sent packing back to google.com.
I’m off to email their web designer and ask for an update.
—UPDATE—
I checked back on this website today (Oct 09) and found that it had undergone a complete rewrite using Drupal. Standards compliant, easy to use & pretty. I’ll need to find something else to be a grumpy old man about.
Tags: Bad design, Interfaces, Web
One thing I’ve loved since Ubuntu 7.10 is the gnome weather applet built into the clock. Not only do you get a quick idea of the weather at your home location, but I also have the times and weathers of a couple of other places of interest (Aberdeen in Scotland and Alice Springs)
Today the weather icon showed something I was used to seeing in Aberdeen all the time: the mist icon. Doesn’t get misty here though, so I hovered the mouse over it to find:
Australian mist = smoke
Smoke billows from the Churchill bushfire in the Gippsland region of Victoria. (User submitted via ABC Contribute: whatthe41)
It’s difficult for a scottish lad to comprehend the scale of destruction here. 450,000 hectares of land burned. Death toll hits 180. And there is more to come.
Evan Davie has put together a map to track the fires.
Living fairly close to the centre of Melbourne, we’ve been well out of the calamity that has struck the surrounding countryside. Looking at that map above, I can see the ring of red dots that circle the north and east of the city, But here on Saturday the fires were only noticeable in the red skyline on all sides, the smoke in the distance and the feeling of Armageddon. This was maybe also due to the heat, which was extreme, but when you stepped outside into it, the world seemed to be coming to an end.
Photo taken in Mc Donald Street Morwell at 4:20pm 07-02-2009 (curtesy of ABC, taken by topcats)
I sent a text to my mum last night along the lines of “Guess where I am!”. But then he came back on stage again and I didn’t see her reply.
Leonard Cohen in concert 2008 (courtesy of wikipedia)
Yes, Gin & I saw Leonard Cohen live last night at Rod Laver arena (where the Australian open was, by the way). I wasn’t quite sure what to expect; after all, the guy is now 74. What I wasn’t expecting was to be blown away.
He was magnificent.
In incredible voice, backed by a superb band and up alongside Sharon Robinson (10 New Songs, Everybody Knows, Waiting for the Miracle etc) and seeming to have a brilliant time, he skipped onto the stage and gave a marathon 3 hour set.
And at 74, he still has women screaming their love for him.
Our application got accepted! We move into the new place this weekend, and I’ll try and take some photos. It’s not going to look like much, but it’s our own place which is the main thing.
Tags: Place to live
