maniacmartin

Every year schools and colleges spend an exorbitant amount on license fees to foreign multinational companies such as Microsoft (one school quoted £60 000/year) for products such as Microsoft Word and Excel, despite the fact that open source software such as OpenOffice and Abiword exists which can be freely and legally downloaded by anyone.

Teaching solely proprietary software to children in schools from an early age gives many of them the impression that Microsoft software is the only way to get work done. Money that could be spent more wisely within education, and indeed all parts of the government, is being wasted on Microsoft’s shareholders.

If you feel the same way, vote here http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/teach-oss/

I believe that, in many cases, government departments and schools could go one step further by making their networks virtually free of proprietary software. Organizations such as the Cutter Project deploy cost-effective solutions for schools. The set-up is something like this:

A few powerful central servers running a free linux distribution such as Fedora, openSuse or Edubuntu are the powerhouse where everything essentially runs. Dell sell servers like this without Windows licenses. The PCs that the students sit at are Thin Clients - boxes that basically stream video, keyboard and mouse movements across the network to the servers. These boxes are cheap and about the size of a Freeview set top box. There are no fans, no noisy hard disks and a low power consumption - helping the environment and the school’s electricity bill.

A HP thin client

Schools could even use old computers that were previously retired or were donated by local businesses to act as thin clients too. Linux provides an unprecidented level of security and stability, and is easy to use. For the majority of users who do word processing, email and web-surfing, changing over is easy. Schools can legally give copies of all of their software to their students.

Many people say training and configuration are barriers to linux for schools, but I disagree. A mass roll-out backed by the government could mean simple instructions for a universal initial configuration to follow that work for all schools.

Indeed many schools have already seen the benefits of open source software and are reaping the benefits. The UK government’s school computing agency, Becta, has also said schools could save costs by switching

And it doesn’t stop at schools. Many companies and government organizations can save money from switching.

I have recently been quite active in http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/, the Online Petitions Site from 10 Downing Street. This is the first of many blog posts that explains my views on certain aspects of our country and why I have petitioned for or against certain things.

PSHE, PSE, Tutorials and Citizenship are a group of subjects that are compulsory to all secondary school students in the UK. When I was at school (upto last year), 2-3 hours per week were devoted to this collection of subjects, amounting to a whopping 12% of all teaching time.

This time was spent teaching the obvious. I know not to take drugs, so spare me 2 hours of time-wasting waffle. And no, I wasn’t planning on causing teenage pregancies either. Nor am I addicted to alcohol or cigarettes.

The vast majority of each year’s syllabus on these subjects repeats the previous years’ work, constantly covering the same cliche issues - drugs, sex, drugs, etc etc. Surely this is common sense today’s youth. My own experience shows that the type of people that take drugs, cause teenage pregnancies, etc etc scive these lessons anyway, so really they’re preaching to no-one. And I, for one, don’t think airing my personal issues to a class of secondary school students is a particularly wise idea.

I agree that PSE raises some valid points about the way society is driven, but the way it is taught in schools is totally timewasting, boring and pointless. Personal and moral issues cannot be taught by books. They need to be learnt through immersion and through good parenting.

What I really begrudge is that these pointless “subjects” are taking valuable teaching time away from other subjects, at a time when the government is being criticised for failures in education. What they really need is to scrap the self-evaluation, targets and red tape and get back to proper teaching.

At the end of the day, you can’t teach morals. They come from upbringing and our everyday exposures and influences everywhere.

If you share my view, vote at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/scrappshe/ Feedback comments welcome.

Quite a few times recently, Donov has managed to render thinky, an old IBM thinkpad, unable to login. At the KDM login screen, you type a username and password, and you get back to the login screen.

Investigations reveal that the cause of this is that running apt-get downloads .debs and leaves them in /var/cache/apt/archives . Thinky only has a 2GB hard drive, so it literally filled the whole partition before it errored out (not enough disk space). Thus, when anyone wants to log into KDE, there is no disk space to make any temporary files, so the login fails.

A quick fix is to add the following lines to /etc/rc.local, to clear apt’s cache on boot-up
rm -rf /var/cache/apt/*
mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives
mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives/partial

Edward Lyon of SCS Technology Solutions has kindly offered to donate a bigger hard drive to thinky to prevent this problem happenning in the future.

Today my new phone arrived. It’s a classic Nokia 3330 off ebay at the low price of £13 delivered. It isn’t new, but looks like its never been used.

This is to replace my T-Mobile MDA III, which got very grubby at ManiacLAN 5. The MDA had previously survived a dunking, and I was a little generous with the water whilst cleaning it, but didn’t worry much because I (wrongly) assumed that it’d dry out and be back to its old self. But it never did.

It’s not the worst loss in the world. It was quite battered, and crashed randomly when I tried to answer calls. Also, since my switch to open-source software last October, I have been unable to sync my contacts on the XDA with my computer, which kinda defeats the object of it really. If I ever need this feature in the future, I will buy a Palm Treo 680, which syncs with Linux much easier (especially Kontact). Another XDA feature that will not be missed is the camera, since I have recently treated myself to a Canon IXUS 850 IS.

I wanted to enable a PIN on my Nokia 3330, but it seems this was very stupid, because I didn’t know the current PIN of the SIM card, and ended up locking it. Luckily, there’s a red phone box on Broad Street, where I could ring Orange to get them to give me a PUK number to unlock the SIM. Nevertheless, lets say I’ve since reversed my decision to have a PIN. 3 guesses by a Donov trying to get into your phone will lock it up again. They could’ve made the number of guesses before lock-out a little higher!

Being an online person, I didn’t have any change for the phone box to call Orange, but luckily BT saw that, being a tourist trap, Broad Street phone box would benefit from being about to accept Debit/Credit cards. Well sort of. It rejected my HSBC maestro card, and it took 3 attempts “Insert Card” “Remove Card” “Insert Card” etc with my mastercard before it took it and I could make my call. It would’ve been handy to see on-screen how much the call was costing me, but at least it worked. And it didn’t need a ChipnPin or a signature lol.

A few things that strike me about the Nokia against the XDA:
1. It’s small. It fits in your pocket and doesn’t weigh you down.
2. You can dial numbers easier as it has a proper numeric keypad.
3. There’s no stylus to break/lose or delicate screen to scratch.
4. You can be ~(as cool as Mike Spivey).
5. The audio quality isn’t as great as the XDA unfortunetly
6. It actually gets a decent phone signal in most places like my room.

Hi all.

Today I booked a summer holiday for Donov and me!
We are going to Tallinn, capital of Estonia, partly because Donov wants to meet some people he plays an online game called EVE with, partly because of the cheap economy and interesting culture and because it’s unexpected! (Well until I’ve made the announcement it was).

We plan to depart in the early hours of Wednesday, 11th July 2007 and fly with easyJet from Stansted Airport. Only now do I learn that this is the exact date that the rest of the family are returning from Ibiza. Charles doesn’t want Fraser (the dog) to be left alone for 12 hours, so he will have to go into kennels on the sole night of Tuesday, 10th July 2007.

We will stay in Tallinn for exactly 1 week, coming back on Wednesday, 18th July 2007. One thing I have learnt about Estonia is it has an extraordinarily high amount of free wifi coverage all over the whole country, so we can update this blog throughout the holiday using my Kubuntu laptop, now that I have installed the new Broadcom 43xx drivers for Linux (which, incidentally, still refuses to work in Green’s Cafe.)

Are you a customer of SingTel?
Have you noticed that downloads from websites hosted outside of Singapore do not come anywhere near to your line speed?

It’s a little known fact that SingTel caps each connection to a foreign IP at ridiculously low speeds. Luckily though, there is a sneaky shortcut to get the speeds you were advertised and promised.

Go to to Speedbit and download DAP. This will make 4 concurrent connections for your download, making your download 4x as fast