Travel

Poland, 2004

I’ve never been the kind of person who just likes to sit on beaches, soaking up the rays. I always burn and I always think that I might be missing something, an amazing sight, some unusual food or a classic local beer.

Sometimes however, I think that I try to over-do things. My recent trip to Poland certainly had the potential. The plan was to fly to Warsaw, try to take in Gdansk, an obscure part of Russia called Kaliningrad that is surrounded by EU states and then nip into Lithuania for a swift look around Vilnius.

Not all went to plan, but we did put plenty of miles in! Most of the distance was covered on roads that had been completed (concentrating hard on the directions, we missed a diversion sign and ended up driving down a partially completed highway) and much was within the speed-limits. We got to the Kaliningrad border only to be told “No” by the border guard. Whether he meant we couldn’t go through or was just replying to the implicit question “Do you speak English?” we’re not sure. The hire car company thwarted our efforts to drive into Lithuania and the bus and train timetables conspired against us, so we never got to Vilnius either.

We did get to see Warsaw, Gdansk, Malbork, Suwalski, Bialystok and much more! I think you’ll agree that that is a lot of ground to cover in one long weekend!

One final note: some Polish words have characters I can’t find on this keyboard (or for use on the web). The main one is an “l” with a line through it, as in Bialystok. My apologies to Polish speakers; I did try to spell it all correctly!

Click the small pictures below for a full size version.

All pictures here have been taken on my EOS300D with the 18-55mm lens. Many of the outdoor pictures were taken using a polarising filter.

If the pictures have piqued your interest, there are a few resources that you might want to have a look out for:

Travel

Tuscany, Italy, 2004

1 Comment

I’ve been to Italy a few times over the years, but I’ve somehow managed to avoid Tuscany which is, perhaps, the most favoured of areas with photographers. This Easter I managed to correct that situation with a short walking holiday.

Starting in Pisa, we took a taxi to San Gimignano and walked to Colle di Val d’Elsa. From here we wandered along to Siena, stopping off at interesting looking places and sampling the local food and wine — it’d be rude not to! On the way back, we stopped in Pisa but managed to avoid taking amusing pictures of us propping up the leaning tower. (If only everyone else showed such restraint!)

Also see my older pictures in Milan and around Lake Garda.

All shots were taken with my EOS300 film camera — they would have been on digital, but I have a lot of unexposed film left! I’ve used Fuji Sensia II slide film and many of the out-door shots have been enhanced with a polarising filter.

If the pictures have piqued your interest, there are a few web Sites that you might want to visit:

  • The itinerary and hotels were all booked by a tour company. Still, the Insight Compact Guide to Tuscany (UK or US) was very useful for filling in some of the background information on the area.
Opinion

Bored of constant tweaking?

Introduction

This page is just a rant, a way for me to vent my anger. Don’t expect it to be fully rational or for it to make perfect sense. It could, even, be my excuse for buying new hardware; I do like my gadgets.

In fact, this piece is going to be an anti-Linux rant. If you’ve seen the rest of my website this may surprise you. I have, after all, been using Linux since 1994 when I installed Slackware from a knee-high pile of 3.5 inch floppy-discs. I spent a year writing “The Penguin Says“, a collection of Linux application reviews, I have the Oracle 8i Installation HOWTO in the Linux Documentation Project. I’m no fly-by-night, recent Linux convert.

So my rant really starts when I moved house near the end of last year. My flats topography means that the phone point (and, hence, ADSL router) is at the opposite side of the place to my spare room and desktop PC. The choice was to try to stretch an Ethernet cable from one side of the flat to the other or to add a wireless card to my computer. How hard could it be?

Tricky

Very hard, it turns out.

I picked a cheap WiFi card, which may have been a mistake, but it did have Open Source drivers written by the manufacturer. That, I thought, was a good sign.

In practise it kind of work sometimes and it does stutter at times. No fun when you’re trying to listen to music. In some sense, if it didn’t work at all I’d be less annoyed. But it nearly works and you can’t count on it.

Installation

The driver comes in source format along with a utility to configure it. I’m running Fedora Core 1 which has a fairly heavily patched kernel, but luckily it still built with no errors. It picked the “standard” version of gcc rather than 3.2 (which you should use to build the kernel) but that was easily fixed. The configuration tool is also easily built if you have the Qt development libraries installed. It’s at this point that things go wrong.

On next boot, Fedora recognises the new network interface and generates a configuration file for eth1. Unfortunately the driver thinks of the device as ra0 so the OS just gets confused and fails to start the network.

Anyway, to cut a very long and boring story short(er), you need to define the WEP keys, network name and so-forth in the Qt GUI. It appears not to work anywhere else, even though Fedora comes with “standard” tools that should really do the job.

But even then the network doesn’t start when you boot. Instead you start the machine, let the initialisation fail, log into X, unload the device driver using the supplied script, load it in again and then start the Qt configuration tool. The network is now (usually) up and will work for two or three hours before causing a kernel panic.

Conclusion

I’m not really sure what I’m railing against here. It could be my new flat. It could be my old PC. It could be my cheap and cheerful WiFi card. Or its driver. Or the general standard of WiFi support in Linux. And perhaps it’s just because I’ve been spoiled with my iBook and its “just works” wireless networking.

I don’t have any solutions and I don’t really have the money for new kit, much as I’d like one of those G5’s!.

So I’m not sure if you got anything out of reading this, but I think I got something out of writing it! If you’re seeing the same frustrations — and if you have any solutions! — let me know on the discussion forums.

Opinion

GOTO — Software Superheroes

Introduction

This is a book that I bought and read some time ago. I posted a brief review on the discussion forms that used to grace this site with every intention of writing something more complete, but I never got around to doing it. Perhaps that’s because there’s not a lot else to say!

The good: there’s a lot of information in here, everything from the creation of FORTRAN and COBOL to Java and the Internet. It’s all discussed in a friendly, easy manner and rarely gets technical enough to scare off people without a computer science degree. The bad: despite the amount of research the author clearly put in, there’s not a lot new in here. It’s nice having it all in one place but it does, kind of, make the whole book unnecessary. The ugly: they really could have done with some more proof-reading. There are many typos and clumsy sentences that could easily have been improved with some light editing.

Passages such as this show both the good and bad aspects of the book:

“Make the reasonable assumption that … that 1000 lines of code have an average of 17 characters per line, or a total of 17000 characters. So the “lousy” code has 10 mistakes in 17000 keystrokes… that’s lousy for software… but is an extraordinary performance in most any other field of human endeavor.”

I think that this is a brilliant way of expressing the complexity of writing software to someone unfamiliar with the process. However, almost the entire book is written at this level of detail which makes it, very much, a “pop” book, one that anyone can read without getting bogged down in technical details. Personally I like the technical details (yes, sad I know) and miss them here.

Of course my liking of obscure technical details does make the book any less relevant. For someone with a less technical background this book would be a great way to find out more about the process and people beind just about all the software in use today.

The facts

Author: Steve Lohr

Cost: ?15

ISBN: 1-86197-243-1

Buy this book from Amazon.com or from Amazon.co.uk.

Opinion

SliMP3

Introduction

It took me over a year to decide to buy a SliMP3 player. I am not normally that indecisive but I just couldn’t figure out why it cost so much. I mean, what does it do? It streams MP3 music across an Ethernet network and connects to the phono sockets on your hi-fi system. How hard can that be? There must be something cheaper or better than the Slim Devices machine! It took me all that time to research the subject and come to the conclusion that there wasn’t. I still think it’s a lot of money for what it does, but I also still think that it’s pretty much unique.

Out of the box

The pictures show a small, black box with a bright florescent display on the front, but, still, it wasn’t exactly as I was expecting. It’s actually smaller than I thought it would be, not that this should be construed as a bad thing. Close up the smoked plastic front and the tiny box have an amateurish, home electronics project feel to them. It does look fine from a distance and the display is, as advertised, very bright, clear and a major selling point for the device as a whole.

SliMP3The package is rounded off by a fairly compact power adaptor and a decent remote control. The buttons are all big enough to press without having to be too careful and some of the important ones are colour coded. The cursor keys are laid out in a convenient and intuitive plus shape but some of the other buttons seem to be placed in the gaps rather than genuinely useful locations.

Setting it up was a doddle. The Perl-based software installed on my iBook with no trouble and on Linux with a well documented change (RedHat misses out an important Perl module in its default install). I have not tried the Windows installer, but the same, simple process apparently works.

With the server software installed, you fire up a web-browser, type in “http://localhost:9000” and point the server at your music collection. That’s pretty much it!

The hardware is, if anything, even simpler to set up. You plug the SliMP3 into a handy Ethernet port, add mains power and connect it to the phono ports on your stereo. When switched on it, by default, goes out to a DHCP server to get its IP address and then by some mysterious broadcast method (I’m guessing) finds your local music server.

That’s a long way of saying that I just plugged the hardware in and it worked first time.

In use

I’m no hi-fi expert. If you want to know whether the SliMP3 is the last word in digital audio I’m afraid I can’t help you. What I can say is that, to my ear, the sound is clear and sharp and any problems I’ve experienced have generally been because of the source MP3 rather than the hardware.

I have nearly 4000 songs encoded currently — a number that’s gradually increasing as I rip more and more of my CD’s — mostly converted using iTunes at 160bps. At this level the interface is still very usable, especially if you know what you’re looking for. For browsing you begin to see the beauty of the iPod’s scroll wheel, but the SliMP3 also has its web interface for when you’re feeling indecisive.

I have had a few problems with music skipping or stopping entirely, but this has almost always been when using my Linux box. That machine is not exactly state of the art any more and the wireless networking is still very flaky so I suspect that these problems are nothing to do with the SliMP3. However, I mention it here just to point out that you do need a reliable network and a reasonable machine for the job.

Conclusion

After using it quite heavily for a couple of months now, I think my initial impressions were not far off the mark. I think it’s a very impressive, easy to use and well thought out machine. It sounds good and the screen means its usable anywhere in the same room. Most of the competition force you to switch on your TV to edit playlists so I consider this to be very important.

On the other hand, I still think it’s expensive for what it is. The bottom level iPod costs just slightly more but that comes with a 15GB hard-disk!

Overall, I still believe that the SliMP3 is the best product of its type currently available. If you listen to a lot of MP3’s and are sick of headphone or small, powered speakers this is the machine for you.

Addendum: Since I wrote this article, in fact just months after buying the hardware, Slimdevices upgraded the SliMP3 and renamed it the Squeezebox. From what I can tell looking at the pictures, the main difference is a newer (more professional looking) case and wireless networking as well as Ethernet. Of course, all this is currently available at less than I paid for my old model! Such is progress with anything computer related…

Travel

Miscellaneous Pictures, 2003

Like most people I take the majority of my pictures while on holiday. But that’s not the only time. Here you’ll find some odds and ends, places I’ve been where I was only there for a short time or where there are only a few reasonable ones!

The first batch are from my month-long stint at my companies Malta office (actually at the tail-end of 2002). There would have been more pictures, but it rained for much of the time I was there! Not encouraging weather for sight-seeing!

Next are pictures from closer to home. One from a friends wedding in sleepy Southwold, the next few from my “flight” on the London Eye, then a couple from Norfolk and the last two of the UK are in the Peak District. The last few are from my time in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Click the small pictures below for a full size version.

The bay near St Julians Looking over Valetta View of Malta from Mdina This tower is visible almost anywhere on the whole isla
Beach huts in Southwold, Suffolk London Eye pod View of Charing Cross from the London Eye View from the London Eye
View from the London Eye View of the London Eye Near Burnham Deepdale, Norfolk Seals on the Norfolk coast
The Peak District near Edale The Peak District near Edale Charlotte at dusk Charlotee from just out of the centre
Charlotte sky-scrapers Charlotte sky-scrapers A park in uptown Charlotte Classy Christmas Decorations

The last few pictures (the colour ones of Charlotte) are taken on my D300. All the others here have been taken on my EOS300 using Fuji Sensia II ISO100 film.

Photography, opinions and other random ramblings by Stephen Darlington