May 2006 Archives

Shock Treatment has been released on DVD. If you're not aware of the significance of this event then you're not as big a Rocky Horror fan as you like to think you are.

There's also the obligatory collectors edition with stupid amounts of extra stuff.

Richard Dawkins' programme The Root of All Evil? generated 23 complaints to Ofcom. The latest Ofcom bulletin is published today and it deals with these complaints (the relevant section starts on page 10).

In summary, the complainants considered that the programme:

  1. showed a negative portrayal of religious beliefs and called religious faith “a virus”, and that this was both offensive and harmful;
  2. contained inflammatory comments, slanderous remarks and atheist propaganda, which resulted in possible incitement to religious hatred;
  3. allowed an “ill-informed” presenter to treat religion with “ridicule and scorn”, and misrepresented religious views, which - along with disingenuous editing - offered no opportunity for debate. As there was no balancing programme on the same service, this resulted in an approach to the religious matters being explored that was not responsible;
  4. allowed the presenter to air bigoted, intolerant, biased and anti-religious views;
  5. attempted to promote religious (i.e. atheist) views by stealth;
  6. generally contravened Ofcom’s rules on due impartiality and due accuracy; and
  7. focused on the behaviour and beliefs of “religious extremists”, with little reference to moderate/mainstream religious belief and practice, and that therefore this was misleading;

(I particularly like the description of Richard Dawkins as "ill-informed")

After considering the complaints carefully, Ofcom has decided that the programme was not in breach of its guidelines. This is, of course, a victory for rational thought over superstition.

(via MediaWatchWatch.org.uk)

Just catching up with some American TV shows that we recorded last weekend and stumbled across some seredipitous scheduling by Channel 4.

At 8pm last Sunday on E4, in ER a doctor called Debbie (Mary McCormack) was working at an IDP camp in Darfur with John Carter. At 9pm over on More 4[1] in the West Wing had Kate Harper (also played by Mary McCormack) telling CJ just how bad conditions were at IDP camps in Darfur.

[1] Actually More4+1 as Channel 4 are stupid enough to schedule the two shows against each other.

Desmond Dekker has died.

Altogether now...

Woh-oh... me ears are alight

(This entry is mostly about technical standards on the web - not, as it might seem at first, my dubious musical taste)

I'm a sucker for a pretty girl with a jangly guitar. And we all know that I'm a geek. So I was interested in the idea of Sandi Thom who supposedly[1] got her record deal after webcasting a series of gigs from her Tooting basement. But it was only this week, after seeing adverts for her first single on TV, that I decided to investigate further by visiting her web site.

All I saw when I got there was a flowery border and a message saying that I didn't have the right version of Flash installed. Now, I have Flash, but it's version 7 as that's the most recent version that's available for Linux. But Sandi's site required version 8. Well, I say "required" because that's the version that the Javascript was looking for, but I have no way of knowing whether or not they actually needed version 8 or whether that's just the default setting on the version checking program they are using.

Without the correct version of Flash the site is useless. They make no attempt to support people without Flash. Not even a contact address. I wasn't sure if they realised what a disappointing face they were presenting to Linux users so I emailed the webmaster. Only to get a bounce message saying that the domain didn't have a webmaster address. So I emailed the postmaster pointing out that their mail system is misconfigured. Only to get another bounce message saying that the domain didn't have a postmaster account either. So I looked up the technical contact for the domain and copied both of my messages to him. Haven't had a response yet.

It's great, of course, that the web makes it so easy to publish stuff to the whole world. But I just wish that a few more people would realise that the web is much easier to use when certain simple standards are followed. I assume that the Flash site was build by some web design agency. You'd hope that they would know enough to set up a web site that worked properly. But, of course, that's too much to ask for. Most people selling themselves as experts on the internet have no idea about the underlying standards and protocols.

Ok. Rant over. I expect I'll end up buying Sandi's album from Amazon.

Update: The one part of Sandi's site that I can reach without Flash is the forum. Which is all a bit scary as most of her fans seen to be illiterate teenage girls.

[1] I say "supposedly" as a story in today's Guardian throws some doubt on this.

Comment Spam

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The amount of comment spam this site gets has gone up by an order of magnitude or two in the last week or so. And it looks like I'm not the only one to be suffering.

The server is just about keeping up with the load, but it's probably just a matter of time before it all collapses in a broken heap (that's not why my blog was missing all day yesterday - that was me breaking stuff). If the site isn't as responsive as usual then I'm sorry, but I'm doing what I can.

Of course, no spam comment ever gets published on this site. Most of them get caught by the junk filter and all the rest get held for moderation and, eventually, deleted. So the spammers are just wasting their time (and my CPU cycles).

I'm not usually a violent person, but spammers make me want to go out and break legs.

Does anyone have any suggestions for hardening a Movable Type installation?

Thanks to Blairwatch for pointing out a brilliant parliamentary speech[1] by David Cameron from the first PMQ following the recent council elections.

[...] we can see that the Prime Minister will not even address the fact that he is losing the support of his party. He lives in a world best summed up by the analysis given to him about his local election results by the No. 10 planning committee. The leaked report said that
"people were angry with Tony because they love him so much, and they are angry because they think he might go".

I think that that is what they call the view from the bunker.

Read the full speech at TheyWorkForYou.

[1] And how often do you get to say that about a Tory leader?

As I predicted a couple of weeks ago, the London Javascript Night has proved to be so popular that the original venue wasn't big enough and a new one has been found. The new details are on the web site, but it's the New Cavendish St site of Westminster University - the same place as the recent Amazon Web Services talk and last year's Web Frameworks Night.

I've been a bit busy this week, so I haven't mentioned the Amazon Web Services talk that I went to on Monday evening. Amazon Web Service Evangelist (cool job title) Jeff Barr talked for almost two hours about what Amazon are making available. It was all very interesting and I wish I had more time to investigate it in depth.

I had an idea for an application during the talk but then Jeff mentioned Wish List Buddy as an example. It doesn't do all that I was thinking of, but it's a start. Maybe I'll find time to work on my version at some point in the next few weeks.

Oh, and I loved the phrase "artificial artificial intelligence" to describe Amazon's Mechanical Turk service where you can use human input as part of your application.

Thanks to Jeff for giving the talk and Dean for organising it.

Da Vinci Dilemma

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Nice review of The Da Vinci Code on the BBC blog network.

Two categories of people will probably be disappointed by the film: those who have read the book and those who have been looking forward to the movie.

For all its flaws, the book is vastly better than the film. And I say that as one who felt sullied after reading the book, which is art history for those who've never been to an art gallery, theology for those who've never read the Bible, and literature for those who've rarely been to a library.

I'm undecided as to whether or not I'll go and see the film. On one hand, it's based on one of the worst books that I've ever read and nothing that I've seen about the film makes me think that the film will be any better. And I don't want to give any more money to that illiterate, Dan Brown. But on the other hand, I really feel that I should support something that annoys so many christians so much.

To be honest, I'm disappointed by the furore it has created. All of the ideas in it that annoy the christians have been circulating for hundreds of years. It's almost twenty-five years since they were first brought to public attention in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and I really can't believe that there's anyone who isn't aware of the theories given the amount of press that Brown's excreable volume has had over the last few years. So why are the christians so upset?

I think they're protesting too much. I know that most of the ideas in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail have long since been disproven, but the disproportionate response by the church makes me think that there's something in the book that they don't want people to think about too much.

Or perhaps they just realise that if people start looking at the bible with a more critical eye, then it'll soon become obvious how much of it is complete nonsense.

One of the important roles of the media (and one that unfortunately often gets forgotten) is to act as a public memory bank and to remind us of things that politicians would rather we forget. It's a role that Marina Hyde takes on with much relish in today's Guardian when she writes about the legacy of The Big Conversation.

Do you remember The Big Conversation? Not many people do, it seems. It was launched with much fanfare by the Labour government in November 2003. It was our chance to tell the government what we thought was important. Marina Hyde got a flash of memory when the government launched its new initiative Let's Talk yesterday and she decided to find out what happened to The Big Conversation. It was harder than you might expect.

"You mean Let's Talk," snapped the No 10 press officer. No, definitely The Big Conversation (never let it be said that bandying these idiotic monikers with a civil service machinery that once served Churchill and Attlee demeans us all). "What's The Big Conversation?" Well, I vaguely remember a splashy launch, consultation exercises in church halls, text voting (text voting!), a website ... possibly Kate Thornton. Happily, this proved enough of a madeleine to get me directed to Labour HQ, where a spokesman asserted that the exercise ran all the way up to the last election (much in the manner of someone claiming the continued existence of Jack Cunningham) and produced two conclusions reflected in the manifesto. One: people wished Labour's record on international development could be trumpeted louder and expanded upon. And two: they wanted more focus on primary care within the NHS.

Let's hope that Let's Talk is a bit more successful. And is remembered for longer. But I wouldn't hold out too much hope.

Apparently The Big Conversation web site now sells fireplaces. I can't confirm that as, for some reason, it's blocked by the firewall here.

The Sun's latest campaign is to get the Human Rights Act revoked. As usual with their important campaigns like this they had a phone-in poll last week. As usual the vast majority of Sun readers (well the ones who could be bothered to tear themselves away from page 3 and pick up the phone) agreed with the idea. As usual Sun readers were giving knee-jerk reactions without understanding the issues involved.

I really wish there was some way to get all Sun readers to read what Marcel Berlins has written on the subject today.

The Human Rights Act is increasingly being made a scapegoat for government incompetence, maladministration and badly drafted legislation. Take the case of Anthony Rice, the rapist who killed a woman nine months after being released on licence. From the report by the chief inspector of probation, it is clear that the fundamental mistake was letting Rice out of prison in the first place.

His release had nothing to do with the Human Rights Act, but with errors made - systematic and human - in furnishing the parole board with correct information about him. Once out, he was negligently supervised, also not the fault of the act. The inspector criticised the parole board for paying too much attention to Rice's human rights - to do with the conditions of his release - but this was not centrally relevant to the tragedy which followed. Yet the impression left by reports in much of the media, jumped on enthusiastically by commentators, was that the Human Rights Act was somehow responsible.

N91 Review

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There's a brief review of the N91 in today's Guardian, which reminds me to mention two small annoyances that I've found with it.

Firstly, although it supports video calls there is no camera on the front of the phone. This means that if you're making a video call then the other person can't see you. Unless you turn the phone over. At which point you can't see them. Not that I make many (any!) video calls, but it seems a bit of a stupid design decision.

Secondly, the battery life is a bit rubbish. I can still remember my old Nokia 6310i which would go for over a week without needing to be charged. I need to charge the N91 every 48 hours. I'm always forgetting this and end up spending an afternoon (like this afternoon) listening to the phone plaintively beeping at me every hour or so to remind me to recharge it.

TV is Not Real

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A nice reminder of how TV likes to slightly distort the truth.

As you're watching the final of The Apprentice tonight, ask yourself where the boardroom where people are fired is actually located.

The establishing shots are all of Canary Wharf, so you're obviously supposed to think that's where it is. But when the person who has been fired is shown leaving the building and getting into a taxi, that's filmed at Amstrad's headquarters, Brentwood House, which is in Brentwood.

But that's not the end of the deception. Apparently those shots were all filmed on the same day at the start of the series. The actual boardroom is in a film studio somewhere in West London.

Oh, and Alan Sugar is played by an actor.

I made that last bit up.

Update: I've just seen this on the BBC web site

The final face-off between 26-year-old Michelle Dewberry, a former checkout girl turned telecoms consultant, and 27-year-old sales manager Ruth Badger is expected to bring the series to a heated climax.

But the recent revelation in The Times that both women have been working for Sir Alan since September has seen the show criticised for its lack of realism.

The newspaper reported that their performances will be taken into account when Sir Alan makes his ultimate choice.

"His final decision is not based on the programme that people see," says Saira Khan [the woman who was runner-up last year].

"His final decision is based on [the fact that] these two people have been working with him for the six months."

Bah. Next they'll be telling me that Doctor Who isn't real.

Large corporations with broken web sites are, of course, still very common. But with the new version of their business web site, Orange are breaking all records.

The main symptom is that Firefox users can't click on any of the links. Clicks seem to just be ignored. Right-clicking on a link and selecting "open in new tab" still works, but that's not a fun way to navigate a web site. Discussions on the Orange mailing list indicate that it works in IE and Safari, but little else.

Trying to work out how the page works in order track down the problem is a nightmare. The site is created by some horrible looking Java servlet engine. And there are large numbers of interacting Javascript files.

Firefox, of course, is helpful in tracking down the problem. Actually, it's almost too helpful. Opening the Javascript console shows a huge number of errors. But clearing it and reloading the page shows that there's a Javascript function (called dcsLoadHref) which isn't getting defined. This function seems to be part of the click-tracking software that Orange are using and that this software is supplied by WebTrends. I can't tell if the WebTrends software is fundamentally broken or if it's just whoever implemented it on the Orange site who broke it.

There's also some browser detection code in there as the site wants to use ActiveX if you're running IE. I think it's trying to use it to display a Flash presentation, but I don't see why it can't use EMBED or OBJECT tags like most sites do.

All in all it's very broken and looks like a very amateur job. There has certainly been no testing of the site on anything other than IE and with IE market share falling, that's an incredibly stupid mistake to make.

It's worrying to think that even in 2006 there are still web design companies who buy into the Microsoft "one browser web" idea and even more worrying to think that there are big companies who will accept this view of the web.

Well, that's according to a survey that the Guardian reports on today. It's important to note that we're talking about people's perceptions here.

Britain is perceived as one of the most loutish countries in Europe, according to a new survey published today, just a month before the start of the World Cup in Germany.

The poll, taken in six European countries including the UK, found that 76% of respondents thought Britain had a "big or moderate problem" with antisocial behaviour - a higher percentage than for any of the other countries involved.

Despite riots in the country's suburbs in November, France was rated just behind the UK (75%), followed by Germany (61%), Italy (52%) and Spain (51%). The Netherlands (44%) were at the bottom of the list.

That's all very interesting. But I was gobsmacked when I came to the start of the next paragraph.

The survey, which was conducted by University College London's Jill Dando institute of crime...

Did you see that? The "Jill Dando institute of crime"! Of course it's good that there's an institute like this (according to their web site they play "a pivotal role in bringing together politicians, scientists, designers and those in the front line of fighting crime to examine patterns in crime, and to find practical methods to disrupt these patterns") but naming it after Jill Dando - that's like something that Chris Morris would come up with.

Dean Wilson is fast becoming known as the person who organises the best geek talks in London. He has previously arranged hugely successful nights for both GLLUG and london.pm. The web frameworks night that he organised last November is already legendary.

And he has another extravaganza on the way. Next Monday he has arranged for Jeff Barr of the Amazon Web Services group to give a talk at the New Cavendish St campus of Westminster University. Full details are on Dean's blog.

It looks like it'll be a great night. Hope to see you there.

The ex-Safety Elephant seems a little confused.

BBC News, 26th April:

Number 10 said Mr Clarke had offered to resign on Tuesday when the scandal was uncovered. In interviews, Mr Clarke said he had offered to quit on an earlier occasion as well.

Charles Clarke's statement - 5th May:

The prime minister, as is his right and responsibility, has made the judgement that my continued occupation of the post of home secretary is likely to stand in the way of the continued reforms which remain necessary and though I do not agree with that judgement, I entirely accept his right to make it.

So if Tony Blair was wrong to sack Clarke, that must also mean that Clarke was wrong to offer his resignation earlier. Or am I missing something?

Thanks to Smylers for pointing out the inconsistancy.

I'm sure that the Sultan's Elephant pool on Flickr will grow substantially over the next couple of days. I hope to go up and see it some time tomorrow.

The BBC is reporting that the Safety Elephant has lost the Home Secretary job in today's Cabinet reshuffle. John Reid will replace him.

Good job Gordon Brown gave Clarke his full backing earlier today.

What an excellent piece of news.

I've just spotted this article from Tuesday's Education Guardian which talks about the teaching of creationism in schools and concentrates on the visit to the UK of mad Australian creationist John Mackay. Of course, Richard Dawkins can always be relied on for a good quote:

"The spread of Peter Vardy's creationist beliefs into the academies run by the Emmanuel schools foundations is extremely worrying," says Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene. "In March 2002, Stephen Layfield - Emmanuel's head of science - delivered a lecture in which he openly listed ways creationist teachers should provide alternative biblical explanations for evolutionary data. This is a man charged with the responsibility of teaching our children and whose department received a star rating from Ofsted. "We cannot afford to take creationism lightly. It is not an amusing diversion, but a serious threat to scientific reason. People like Mackay thrive by drip-feeding misinformation. We need a much more open public debate, both in schools and elsewhere, so that his ideas can be seen for the rubbish they are."

And then today we have AC Grayling writing about religion and atheism. He includes a call to complately ban the teaching of religion from schools.

Let us challenge religion to leave children alone until they are adults, whereupon they can be presented with the essentials of religion for mature consideration. For example: tell an averagely intelligent adult hitherto free of religious brainwashing that somewhere, invisibly, there is a being somewhat like us, with desires, interests, purposes, memories, and emotions of anger, love, vengefulness and jealousy, yet with the negation of such other of our failings as mortality, weakness, corporeality, visibility, limited knowledge and insight; and that this god magically impregnates a mortal woman, who then gives birth to a special being who performs various prodigious feats before departing for heaven. Take your pick of which version of this story to tell: let a King of Heaven impregnate - let's see - Danae or Io or Leda or the Virgin Mary (etc, etc) and let there be resulting heaven-destined progeny (Heracles, Castor and Pollux, Jesus, etc, etc) - or any of the other forms of exactly such tales in Babylonian, Egyptian and other mythologies - then ask which of them he wishes to believe. One can guarantee that such a person would say: none of them.

It's a nice idea, but unfortunately it doesn't stand a chance whilst the PM is a believer in an invisible sky pixie.

I'll just add that to the list of reasons why Blair must go.

Every vote for a Labour candidate in today's council elections will be interpreted (by the government at least) as a vote in support for Tony Blair, his policies and the way he runs the government.

Blair has been in a lot of trouble over the last couple of weeks. An announcement about his future can surely not be very far away. If you'd like to help him cling to office for as long as possible then you should vote Labour to support him.

If, on the other hand, you would like to do what you can to hasten his departure then you can't vote Labour. Vote for anyone else[1]. Spoil your paper. But don't vote Labour.

It's your choice.

[1] I'm assuming that anyone reading my blog will have the intelligence not to do anything stupid like voting BNP or UKIP.

A few small bits of progress with the phone.

  • I worked out what was wrong with the email settings. It really helps if you get the name of the outgoing mail server right
  • There's a test version of Symbian OggPlay ready for S60 V3. I've emailed them asking to be included in the test programme
  • The CTO of Shozu left a comment here yesterday saying that they working on a S60 V3 port

Perl and MVC

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I've written a short piece about Perl and MVC frameworks over at the O'Reilly Onlamp blog.

Marina Hyde takes her turn in having a pop at the Safety Elephant. And a very fine pop it is too.

As the member for Norwich, of course, one expects him to have a Partridgean grasp of irony, but perhaps also has to wonder from whom or what he is taking his lead. The answer, at time of going to press, is Tony Blair, whose statements we are required to accept as axiomatically true simply because they emanate from his lips. The examples are beyond numerous, but I've always thought there was a special epistemological two fingers to us all in his justification for the failure to discover any WMD whatsoever in Iraq: "I only know what I believe".

Polly Toynbee talks a lot of sense about the damage that Blair and his cabinet are doing to the prospective Labour Party vote in Thursday's council elections.

Awful, awful, awful," one minister said just in from the doorsteps. "I felt we were holding on last week and then it just collapsed. Prescott was the last straw." Another felt he had to apologise to local activists. "When I arrived at Labour headquarters in one city I had to say, 'I'm from the cabinet and I'm really, really sorry.' I felt ashamed in front of good people running a good council. They were on their eighth leaflet drop, proud of their council. What could I say to them?" A third minister said, "It was so utterly dreadful out there that it was pointless campaigning. How did we let this happen?" Some key London wards have asked cabinet ministers to stay away.

It's just a shame that she spoils it at the end by resurrecting the old "nosepegs" argument.

Emailers ask angrily how else they can express their fury. The answer again, I'm afraid, is that old nosepeg. Don't use good local Labour councillors to get your revenge on the PM. His MPs look determined to see him off this time, roughly if need be, should he be foolish enough not to go soon.

I would love to vote for my Labour candidates. I'm sure they'd make great councillors. But I know that every vote for a Labour candidate will be see (by Blair, at least) as a vote in support for him and his policies. And I can't risk that. It's too late now anyway, I've already voted by post (not for Labour).

Hopefully the complete collapse of the Labour vote on Thursday will be the last straw and Labour MPs will finally insist that Blair goes.

My new Nokia N91 arrived on the same day as my new laptop so I've been playing with it for a few days. Here are some first impressions.

It's a large phone. Far heavier than the k600i that it's replacing. But then, it does more so that's probably to be expected.

As a phone, it does all that you want it to. It supports all of the flashy ringtones that young people seem so enamoured of these days. Me, I like a phone that just rings.

It runs the Symbian OS and the Nokia S60 platform on top of that (I think that's a bit like running Gnome on Linux). Apparently it's the first phone that runs the S60 version 3.0 and that's causing me a few problems as this is incompatible with older versions and many applications are not yet available for this version. I've already discovered that the BBC Doctor Who Tardisodes won't work on it (a minor irritation) and that there's not a compatible version of Shozu yet (a major irritation). I suppose that's just a problem that early adopters need to get used to :-)

One thing I really like is the wireless network support. I now don't need to waste my monthly GPRS bytes when reading email or checking the BBC news. I can just look for a convenient open wireless network. As an aside, this makes the phone a useful device for finding wireless networks. At one point last week I was standing in the middle of the Barbican Estate and could see about a dozen wireless networks.

The screen is a lot bigger than the k600. This makes reading email a lot easier. I've successfully set up my email account for reading, but I seem to have made some error when configuring it to send mail. I need to investigate that further over the next few days.

The camera is also better quality than on the k600. You can see a sample photo here. There would be more but until I can get either Shozu installed or email working, it's a bit of a trial getting the photos uploaded.

Of course, the main selling point of the N91 is its support for playing music. And that's why I probably wouldn't have chosen this phone for myself. I already have a 40Gb iRiver. I don't really need another device that only has 4Gb of storage that doesn't play Ogg Vorbis files. Of course there's probably an Ogg player for Symbian, but it probably hasn't been ported to S60 version 3 yet. Once I find that, I'll probably be happy to use the N91 for those times when I only need a limited selection of music. Having said that, the sample music and video (there's apparently over an hour of Live 8 video included on the phone) demonstrates that playback quality is very high.

The big "nice to have" for me would be to have the phone interfacing nicely with my Linux computers. Of course the PC integration software that comes with the phone is all for Windows - so I'm largely on my own here. I've managed to transfer files from the phone to the computer over Bluetooth, but I failed when trying to mount the phone as an external USB mass storage device as Linux couldn't detect the type of filesystem.

My ultimate goal would be to have the phone and PC automatically synchronise my calendar, contacts, to do list and notes whenever they are in Bluetooth range. They both support SyncML so that sounds like an achievable task.

But all in all, it's a nice phone and I'm enjoying experimenting with it.

I've now had the Philips X51 for a few days now, so it's time for an update.

It's a nice little laptop. About the same size as my previous one. Perhaps a bit larger and certainly a bit heavier, but that's because it doesn't come with a basestation so the CD/DVD drive is included in the main body.

The keyboard seems a bit strange. That's probably just because the keys are in slightly different places to what I'm used to. In particular, the right-hand shift key is taking some getting used to.

It came with Windows XP installed. There's a built-in Centrino so when I booted it up, it found my wireless network and I was on the net within seconds. Of course the first job was to download all of the Windows patches that had been released since the operating system had been installed. That took some time.

I didn't spend very long in XP though as a computer only becomes truely useful when it has Linux installed on it. So that became the most important task. And the first job their was to reduce the size of the Windows partition so that there was space to install Linux. I was slightly disappointed to find that the installer for my prefered Linux distribution (Fedora) didn't include a partition editor, but I found a magazine disk that contained a live distro which included qparted and that made it simple to reduce the XP partition from 50Gb to 10Gb. A quick reboot to ensure that XP still worked and I went back to installing Fedora.

One nice measure of how much quicker this laptop is than my previous one is the time it took to install Fedora. On my old laptop it look over four hours. This one did it in less than an hour.

The first major problem was discovering that although the Centrino was recognised, it didn't work. Putting my old wireless card into the PCMCIA slot soon got me connected to the internet though. A quick bit of Googling revealed that the firmware for the chip isn't included with Fedora as it is proprietary. It didn't take long to find RPMs of the firmware (I used the versions from ATrpms but I see that Livna has them too).

At this point it looked like it was going to be too easy. But then I started to look at the power management features. My old laptop was old enough to support APM (which is a bit limited in functionality) but this one has ACPI. This has far better functionality. In particular, it supports suspending the computer when the laptop is closed. I was using this for a couple of days before I realised that the fan was still working in this mode. It turned out that the default action for closing the laptop is to just blank the screen rather than to suspend the computer. I was able to change it so that the computer suspended itself when it was closed, but then I discovered that it won't come out of that state. I always seem to end up rebooting it - which isn't very useful.

So that's where I am at the moment. The laptop is great and it runs all the software I want far more quickly than my previous one, but I need to work out how to get it to suspend and unsuspend successfully.

More updates as I work it all out.

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