I’ve been thinking a lot about tablets recently. My dad got an iPad recently and seems to absolutely love it. You can read about his thoughts on it on http://gordonsramblings.blogspot.com/. Now, he recently took it to a camp we were involved in, and used it for notes, timetables, etc and it got me thinking. In a paperless world, do we need tablets?
I love the idea of a paperless world. Anyone who knows me will recognise this. I hate paper so much. I look over at the other side of this room, and there is so much wasted space with loads of paper. But, do current computers really cut it? I don’t think so. I think, in a world with no papers, we need tablets/e-reader type devices. I’ve not totally decided what a device to completely get rid of paper would be, but it certanarily wouldn’t be an e-reader, an ipad or many other of the tablets that exist at this moment in time. It would have to have either a screen that is very very low powered, can be seen in bright sunlight, be nice on the eyes, and still be able to view videos and other colour, and fast-refreshing items (possibly like a colour e-ink screen that has a fast refresh rate), or a screen like a pixel qi screen. I have talked before about pixel qi screens which are used in devices such as the olpc XO laptop, and the Notion ink adam. But, as I said, I’m still not sure which would be best.
Then, of course, we come to the question of input devices, and whether typing on a virtual (or physical) keyboard, or using handwriting recognition, or just allowing freeform writing (so that its like paper) would be best. For the 2nd, we would need better algorithms and for the 3rd we would need nicer screens that would allow pressure sensitivity etc, but I don’t think these are that far off.
Obviously, there are many, many questions that there are during thinking about tablets etc, but the point of this article is to say that I think that we need tablet/e-reader/ipad-like devices to enter the paperless world (and also a change of attitude from some people…but that is a different story).
Just realised I hadn’t let my blog readers know that I am, in fact, away mostly from the internet for the greater part of 3 months. I came over to the Isle of Arran (on the west coast of Scotland) to help out at a campsite, on the 14th of June and will be here, give or take, until the end of August.
I will be at home at weekends, but that is for my saturday job and so won’t leave me much time to blog.
It is for those reasons that I have not been blogging for the past 5.5 weeks, and will continue to be reasonably absent. I will, however, try and write at least a few posts over the summer. I am currently working on one explaining exactly why I prefer the ideaology of open-source software, as a nice introduction to anyone wondering what it would actually do for them.
In the meantime, I am still tweeting and denting under the username “yamanickill” quite heavily, so feel free to follow me there.
Other than that, have a good summer/winter (depending on your hemisphere).
These words may seem like big words to some people. Hey, to me they are even large ones. So, I’ll very quickly explain both of them.
Federation
There are many definitions of this. The best one, IMHO, comes from dictionary.com – “a federated body formed by a number of nations, states, societies, unions, etc., each retaining control of its own internal affairs.” So, in terms of software (which is what i’m going to talk about today) means a bunch of programs (desktop or web etc) that all work together but can still be different internally.
Segregation
This one is more obvious. “The policy or practice of separating people of different races, classes, or ethnic groups, as in schools, housing, and public or commercial facilities, especially as a form of discrimination”. So, again in terms of software, this is when different programs that are similar are split up and don’t work together, and sometimes don’t even know that the others exist.
Well, why am I talking about these? Well, I’m thinking about things in terms of social networking services just now. Facebook is huge. Noone knows exactly, but its probably between 350 and 500 million people. Lets be honest, the biggest social network in the history of the internet. However, they are having a huge backlash just now on their privacy settings, and a number of people are leaving it. Now, obviously a few people leaving it won’t change it much, but what happens when those people leave facebook? What do they do? Where do they go?
This is the horrible situation we have just now. Web apps are mostly segregated. They don’t work together, infact sometimes they work AGAINST each other, actively seperating themselves. Facebook is facebook, twitter is twitter, etc etc.
Well, this is where federation comes in. Let us take status.net into consideration. You can have any status.net instance (identica, or your own instance) and follow anyone on any other Ostatus federated web service. So, say twitter because Ostatus federated. this would mean that I could have 1 identi.ca account and follow anyone on identi.ca, twitter, twitarmy or any other status.net instance. And then, say facebook used Ostatus on their news feed? That would mean that I could have an identi.ca account (or twitter, facebook, or status.net account) and follow anyone on identica, twitter, facebook, or any other status.net instance. That is practically everyone on the internet, isn’t it.
So, the point of what I’m saying is that you could federate any part of a social network. This would mean that a new service (like diaspre) or an old service (like facebook or twitter) could implement these features as well, and then anyone could have 1 account on any of these services, and follow/be friends with anyone on any of these services. No more having 3/4 accounts on different services. Makes everything so much simpler and more open, and stops 1 service having a huge monopoly like facebook does just now.
Ok, so, after just 2 hours of playing around with my server, I upgraded it from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 (w00t for LTS) and migrated it away from apache to lighttpd. “Whats wrong with Apache?” I hear you ask. Well, my VPS is running on 512MB of ram, and with apache running, it was literally using over 256Mb of ram, and that caused the server to crash 3 times in the last 2 weeks. This, obviously, isn’t a good thing, so I decided to try lighttpd and it turns out that my server now has almost 240Mb of ram free. So, that is a saving of over 200Mb of ram. Fantastic.
“How can I move over to lighttpd?” I now hear you cry. Well, it was actually quite simple, and I plan to show you how I moved my WordPress install over to it.
**NOTE** This was written for Ubuntu 10.04, but should work in any other version of ubuntu, and should work for most other distros if you just use your respective package manager, and different places where the files are saved possibly
Well, lets go, first of all, make sure you are totally up to date with all your packages (sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade).
Install lighttpd
In Ubuntu this would be “sudo apt-get install lighttpd” – this will install lighttpd, created a default conf file and start lighttpd (however, if you currently have apache running, it will fail to start because apache is already binded to port 80).
Edit lighttpd.conf
In ubuntu, you can find this at “/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf”. If you have apache running on port 80 just now then find the line “server.port = 80″ and change it to something else (such as 81). You can keep it like this until you have all your configuration working, and access it at http://www.domain.com:81 to see if it works.
You can edit the root for your website on the line ‘server.document-root = “/var/www”‘ – just change this to wherever your website is saved.
Edit wordpress settings for permalinks
Lighttpd doesn’t work very well with wordpress’ permalinks because it goes for a 404 error. For this, you will have to do 2 things.
First, edit your 404.php file in your wordpress theme and add this to the top “< ?php header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found"); ?>“. This will make sure that proper 404 errors will still show up in search engines (which is kinda important).
Second, edit this line in your lighttpd.conf ‘#server.error-handler-404 = “/error-handler.php”‘ and turn that into ‘server.error-handler-404 = “/index.php”‘. If you have virtual hosts set up (and I’ll show you how to do that very soon) make sure you do that in the virtual host rather than the default one.
And that is it…
You now have a working wordpress install on lighttpd. If it all seems to work, change the port back to 80, stop apache, and restart lighttpd (sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart). There are obviously many more things you can get to do, such as virtual hosts (which I’m literally just about to tell you about), but you still can have a working install, so enjoy.
Virtual hosts
This is one bit of lighttpd that I really love, it is so much easier than apache. Ok, so get to a nice empty bit of you lighttpd file, (make sure it is before the bit at the end of the file that says it must be at the end of the file. Things will break…) and copy this into it:
Make sure you replace “domain\.co.uk” with your domain (make sure you leave the slash there though) and replace “/path/to/” to wherever your files are. Then restart lighttpd, and you are all sorted. Nice and easy. If you are using an ip address, or a subdomain instead, you don’t need the whole bit before the domain, and you can just have “sub.domain.com” or “192.168.2.1″.
I hope this tutorial has helped anyone free up some RAM on their webserver. If you have any suggestions for this tutorial, or any questions about something that has gone wrong, then please leave a comment I’ll include any corrections to my work (and credit you). Have fun with your lighttpd.
Just to let you know I’ll be doing some work on my VPS today. We have had 2 instances in the past 2 weeks where apache or mysql have killed my server, so I’m going to spend today replacing both of them. Woop! Thats just to let you know what happens
As many of you will know, Ubuntu 10.04 was released 2 months ago, and the Ubuntu Developer Summit is currently underway.
There are loads of cool new features in development for 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) and I thought I would put my 10 ideas that I’d like to happen in the next version. (And, unlike my blog’s name, that 10 is in base ten).
Note: to all those people who use kubuntu, or xubuntu etc…I am currently only talking about Ubuntu because that is what I use. Read More »
Some of you may know what Blender is. It is an open source 3d modelling application which is starting to be used by professional film creators. The Blender foundation have created a film called Big Buck Bunny and a game called Yo Frankie!. They are both completely open creations. You can download all of the character models, and the whole film in its origional film for free, and change it how you like it. Now, however, they are creating their new film, and here is the trailer for it…
Just thought I would let you know that there have been a few changes to my blog over the past week. First of all, you will notice at the bottom of every article there is now a star rating. This is meant for people to rate what they think about my writing/reviews etc. Not about whether you agree with me, necessarily, but about whether you think it is a good article. I know that a lot of people don’t tend to comment on my blog, but if you are reading it you might be more willing to click a star. Please take the 2 seconds to do this as I like to know if I can improve at all.
The other thing is beside every comment there is a thumb up/thumb down button. This is to encourage conversation on my blog, as conversation is an important thing on any site. If people like your comments, they will vote them up. And the best votes float to the top of the pile (or at least they should do…). So, please continue to read my blog, but I’d love you to take part in commenting and talking about the subjects. I am thinking currently of making it easier for people reading the RSS feeds from my website to comment, or to rate articles and comments. Currently it isn’t possible for this, and that is something I would love to change, as you shouldn’t have to come to my site to do these things. You do have to currently, however.
There are a few architectural things within my site that have changed that should make it a bit faster and easier to find. You may not notice this at first, but it will get better.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy these changes, and I think I’ve set a new record for the amount of time I’ve had the same theme I like this one…
Use Ubuntu? Or any other Linux/open source operating system? Or just want to find out what it is all about? Bored of the election? Want to vote and then run away from it all?
Come and celebrate the release of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) at Strathclyde University’s Union Lounge.
We will be having social time, demonstrations of the 4 official Ubuntu derivatives (including the brand new lubuntu), cds for you to take away, and there is a bar onsite so you can buy some beer or whatever you want to drink.
There is a map in this post, so if you don’t know where the Strathclyde Union is, have a look (if you are reading this is a feed reader, you may have to view the full post. Anyway, enough talk, here are the details, we hope to see you there.
Where? – The Lounge, level 5, Strathclyde University’s Union
90 John Street, Glasgow, G1 1JH
When? – Thursday 6th May from 18:00 to 22:00 (come for all or any of it, pop in at any time).
So, its about time for my 6-monthly Ubuntu Review. I am writing this while waiting for the official release of Ubuntu. I hope I get this finished before it is released…it could be anywhere between now and midnight in the samoa islands (I think thats the last place that gets the time). My Ubuntu reviews always seem to be very popular for some reason, so I decided to make sure it’s done as soon as possible this time. I’ll get it written before lunch time. Anyway, I’ll stop blabbing…
Obviously this is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, so there won’t be a huge number of changes in functionality, as the idea of LTS is to have a rock-solid stable release that can be used. I will also only be focusing on Ubuntu (not Kubuntu, Xubuntu or Lubuntu). I may do a review of them later, but as I don’t use them primarily, I don’t know them as well.
I have been using Lucid since alpha 1, and have seen it grow from a Koala into the fully fledged Lynx. (Yeah, ok, that sentence meant nothing…) Read More »
I’ll include any corrections to my work (and credit you). Have fun with your lighttpd.
I like this one…
