For x = 1 to y do.....exit loop

Its 4am, I haven't really slept well due to my cold, man flu or whatever you so choose to call it. The strategy of the curry and whiskey only partially worked where I should have gone for the vindaloo. However I concede that it will go in its own time.

I was thinking of what to write for my next blog article and I have a few ideas but this week is coming up to a special occasion. As of 29 March I will officially be unemployed for 6 months. Its amazing how quickly the time has flown and to think I have been looking for work for this amount of time. People I have spoken to who also left my last company have found work and some even had two jobs.
It is difficult to gauge why I haven't. I have revised my CV which in itself is an ongoing project to try and reflect who am I and what I can do. I even paid someone to make it look professional but with no luck. I have applied for many jobs and had a few interviews where the last one concluded I was technical this time but too senior (not age) for the position. It scares people when they see someone who was paid well taking a huge pay cut in order to get into a company. They start asking questions like why are you taking such a cut? Will you cope financially? Whilst they do have a right to ask these questions it makes you feel a numpty. When I apply for a job I do so because I want to, I can do it and am aware of the financials and risk that go with taking a lower paid job.

In my last interview the role would have subsquently led to taking over the position of the person who was interviewing me. So you are interviewing someone you like, know they can do the job, will eventually have my job to allow me to move on within the company and I am getting more experience for my dollar. However I think you are too experienced. So whilst I am getting more value for my money I am not going too select you due to this.

So now I have had experience of both scenarios where I was not technical and now I am too experienced. I do hope the next interview will be successful and I can join the ranks of employment again.

So you may be asking why for x = 1 to y do......

You may have seen the film groundhog day where the same day keeps repeating and Bill Murray uses this time to learn new things such as play the piano. If I was to categorise the film I would use a repeat until loop as he as to keep doing things until he gets the girl. A while do version of this film would be, he has the girl but he needs to keep her and not lose her. A for loop version would be, he has to repeat something several times such as, he has the girl but he will only for a finite time, hence the count.

Since being out of work each day could have been categorised as a for loop as I was expecting to only be out of work for a finite moment in time, However, coming up to 6 months this project is over running and is slowly becoming a repeat until. That is, repeat whatever I am doing until I find work.

During this repeat until loop I am slowly extending the code to include new strategies to the various sub routines I call for example:

Repeat

Goto procedure find work

Until

Where the procedure find work is now including things such as revising the cv to make it more specific to the role and looking at retraining. At some point I would like to make it a bit more OO based to ensure flexibility in the future to cater for more events.

Whilst been off I have found it necessary to be busy to ensure my mind is active and I am not slumming it. Because the situation may be a longer than anticipated I am gearing myself up for this so have decided to sell my house and car with a view to reducing any risk in the future. Whilst this might be painful it necessary to cut my losses now and get over it so I can move on. They are only things and these can be bought again.

It reminds me of my time when I moved to Holland as I was working out in the german business. In the august I had got rid of my house, car and belongings so I could move overseas. I had already met someone over there and was looking to settle down (finally). However what I was not anticipating was the company was going to be closed and I had a choice to either stay put or move back. To aid with my repatriation back to the UK a role was found for me where for three months until the final move I travelled between germany, holland and the uk to sort out my affairs. The moral of this story is I have been here before where everything material has gone but it can be bought again. To put it another way it also gives me a chance to upgrade all of my gadgets again!

So, in a few hours I am back signing on where the the same questions are being asked - how is your job search? The advisors whilst courteous cannot really help but are there should I need it. I have already looked into retraining where I am interested in either lecturing or gardening (some will laugh at the latter) and have spoken to a teacher friend of where to find information.

For some, this time is painful especially when you do not know when the loop will end. To others they cannot be bothered and some remain optimistic. I am in both camps. As Bill Murray, whilst the general format could be the same I am using this opportunity to use the time constructively and complete all of the things I should have done.

Fortran 77 was funny language a bit like BASIC and modula 2. It could not handles loops well and rather than exit a loop naturally it would just force an exit. Currently, I am hoping that this situation will end soon, if it doesn't I am preparing for the long haul; if it does I will be exiting using this construct of the exit loop as soons as the right opportunity shows itself.

Mythbuntu - the media centre? "it does what it says on the tin"

The PC in my front room was originally a Windows Media Centre (MCE) PC from HP. A few years ago I upgraded the RAM to 2gb and dropped in a dual core processor. Hp insisted the machine could not be upgraded to a dual core and that I needed to purchase a new machine at £1000 plus. However I knew the motherboard would accept the x2 chip but the bios would not. After a bit of reading around I found a way to re-flash the bios, remove the HP fudge and put on the original BIOS upgrade to support dual core. I located a seller and bought the chip for £100. Chip arrived, it was installed and was recognised by the BIOS and then by Windows. Because I had altered my internal hardware I was on the phone late one night to M$ to get a new code to reactivate Windows. I have to admit since moving to Linux that I really am glad that I don't have to do the activation rubbish any more. In principle I can understand why they M$ went down this route but working in the enterprise it was such a pain having to phone up.

Anyway, this machine last year had removed and opensuse 11 installed. I decided I didn't like this on a desktop (its on my server) so I put on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) which has worked okay although I really wanted to make use of the DVR facility as I have a DVB (freeview) card in the machine. I tried MythTV which was installed via apt-get but it insisted on not working correctly with the DVB card. The remote did not work but the DVB card worked with other software such as kaffeine or ME-tv. So while I was troubleshooting I downloaded a mythbuntu 8.10 ISO - AMD x64 version to give this a go.

My troubleshooting was a waste of time, I burnt the ISO to CD, rebooted and reinstalled Mythbuntu over the top of my machine. I figured I could rebuild the original quickly if needed.

After some initial set up, it recognised my MCE remote control, the DVB card and works brilliantly. I can search the freeview EPG for keywords, genre or channel list. It will record, pause and rewind TV. It saved me £150 purchasing a decent DVR and will be useful for the nominal time I watch TV. Further I can add plugins for weather, stream music or view RSS feeds - something MCE could do but was very clunky.

My original MCE set up impressed me to bits, the way the menus worked, the EPG, being able to play music whilst watching a slide show. I extended the system to stream tv online, allow me to schedule programme recordings through the web and I automated a process to convert the recorded video to DIVX for offline viewing.

The thing I hated was the EPG was prone to crash out, you would then lose your channels which in turn would stop your recordings. It would crash out each time it updated and no matter what fixes I put in place to back up the EPG refresh the MCE services periodically it was a waste of time. I was looking to Vista but this had the same issues so I blew MCE and the idea out of the window.

However, it was a colleague of mine that introduced me to mythbuntu and it was only a year later (today) that I actually installed it. If I think of all of the lost time trying to fix MCE, through installing Mythbuntu would have saved these for more important things.

Its early days for Myth andI will post more as and when I use it of my experiences but initial impressions are "it does what it says on the tin"

MGF,Bugatti Veyron or Audi TT???

I was in Newcastle Under Lyme today and had parked up in preparation for my usual visit to the job centre to sign on.

In the car park there was a vehicle that had the colours of a bugatti veyron, a simiar shape to an audi tt but looks like it was sitting on an mgf chasis...

Here are the pics of the original vehicles against the pictures I took.

Bugatti Veyron

Audi TT

MGF

Netbook Woes and linux to the rescue

I recently had to send my EEE PC (904ha/xp) back to Asus to resolve an issue. Unlike other laptops I have had in the past there seem an issue with this machine in that the battery was never 100% charged. I read online about the issue and they all referred to contacting Asus for a swap out.

Although the laptop was on charge for over 48 hours constant, or it is was being used on the mains the led light for the power was always red/orange. On reading the manual it said that this colour indicated the battery was between 80-100% capacity. A solid green indicated 100% capacity.

After several emails to Asus it was agreed to send the unit back for repair. I prepped the machine for delivery by backing it up with Ghost as I didn't want to waste three days rebuilding it again. Wiped the hard drive clean and sent it back. Two days later it was returned...

The note inside from the engineer said LED lights displaying correctly, no OS on Hard drive so reinstalled OS.

This is where my confusion started...... I called Asus on a non 0870 number obtained through www.saynoto0870.com and got through to the wrong department. After conversation with an engineer he advised that the manual for the laptop had been rewritten and that the operation of the LED was correct. So the hassle of returning it was a wasted exercise.

This is when the fun started with the restore.....

Because I had 4 partitions - 1. Windows XP, 2. Ubunutu Boot, 3. EXT3 of Home and 4. of restore disk for windows xp.

Although ghost had backed up everything the restore would not be straight forward as I needed to boot into ghost to restore partitions 2,3,4 then restore 1. However I needed to have partition 1. up and running to get partition 1. restored. Because there was no cd drive I couldn't boot a windows set up cd so "I was up a stream without a paddle"

On looking for a way to create a bootable windows partition on USB I came across a concept online of using a host linux OS with a VMWARE Windows session with direct access to the local hard drive. It would work with me booting into linux, running a vmware product which was a windows installation that would then have raw access to the local c drive in the machine. Because the vmware would use ISO files of the CD installations this would get around the issue of no cd drive.

I opted for easy peasy linux 1, on an 8gb memory card with Sun Virtual Box installed. I had to create a virtual hard disk raw file pointing to the local hard drive in the netbook. Albeit slow, I was able to restore the original parition 1 using a symantec livestate demo cd iso. Reinstall the original bootsector and MBR with a windows recovery session (again in virtualbox) to both remove GRUB and allow the original windows to boot.

Before booting back into the windows I recreated both ext3 linux partition (2 & 3) as blank areas. Booted into partition 1, restored partition 2,3 & 4 using the ghost. I then rebooted back into linux and ran the livestate cd to reinstall partition 1 again to ensure GRUB was installed.

Overall it took over one day and has been a success. Further I now also have a bootable memory card which can be used as a bootable USB stick. This will also allow to run a windows environment under VM (as long as the host PC is powerful enough) to run either Windows or Linux utilities.

AV and Spyware - Free or Commecial?

I was at a friends last night giving their PC a check over - I would call this more akin to a yearly car service. My friend asked the question I usually get - what security protection do you use?

Nowadays being a linux user I have AV installed but don't use it in realtime and either use the built in linux firewall or rely on my router's firewall. Due to the lack of linux based malware or viruses I am confident this will keep my machine clear but am still wary what I either download or click on. In time this may change as more people begin to use linux but now it is relatively secure. I mentioned this to my friend but did say on the two windows machines that I have I use freely available products such as Free AVG and spybot. Using these and being wary what is either being downloaded or clicked on are usually sufficient to catch most things.

My friend was running McAffee that was bundled with his broadband provider but costs per year. He was quite surprised to find that Spybot found something and then asked why did McAffee miss it? I explained this could either be that his AV doesn't know about it or is not set up to catch these items. I reiterated my first point that I do not see the point in paying for these products when there good products freely available.

When I was managing the IT within a business I have used enterprise products from Symantec, McAffee and Sophos - Whilst they all "sort of" worked there were many issues related to not downloading the updates to the machines correctly, sometimes stopping machines from working or the AV not working at all because one of the critical components had not started. I have previously written scripts or created bespoke systems to resolve some of these issues after becoming increasingly frustrated with the supplier not being able to give me a working resolution. I believe if there were free AV and spyware tools available for the enterprise which included deployment and management tools that these coupled with a managed locked down environment, that this should be sufficient to tackle most malware/virus threats.
However there isn't and of course the big companies have invested in their products so need to make their money back and continue to provide a service.

For the home user I have found my strategy of using the freely available tools and with a little education then this should be sufficient. I am not saying people should not purchase the commercial tools, but have found these tools put a false sense of security on people that they will magically resolve all issues when realistically people should manage their systems. It is a like having a car, you take it for an mot, you take for a service and then you usually look out for noises or other signs that the vehicle might not be working correctly. Again this is the same with a PC and people should look out for issues and seek professional guidance when they are unsure. My friend did this, we found something and now everything is okay.

What I really hate about the commercial tools is their over complexity and reliance on so many components in order to run. Whilst I know viruses/malware are becoming more clever, is it really necessary to make these tools more complex so that they can fall over more?

Spybot and Free AVG are examples of simple tools that just work and there is nothing complex. They cover the basics in security but it is a real shame that the commercially available security tools do not follow the principle keep it simple.

Facebook Part 2

You then need to convert your atom feed into an RSS one. I used feedburner then followed the below.

http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/creating-rss-feed-for-your-blogspot-blog/

Face Book

I have just followed this guide to see if I can add my blog updates to face book.

http://weblogs.about.com/od/socialnetworking/ht/AddBlogFacebook.htm

This is a test to see if it works