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Mostly OT: Kindle 3G
by Mark Rogers 18 Nov '10

18 Nov '10

There seem to be some Kindle fans here? £150 for the Kindle 3G seems like a good deal. I'm just looking for someone to persuade me to part with the cash! Any experiences with the "experimental" web browser? The relevant bit to this list: Any PC interaction I have with it will be from my Linux (Ubuntu) box. Any reason to have any concerns? I've never owned an eBook but I gigure something like Calibre should allow me to convert between ebook formats (the wife is concerned she'll buy an ebook from Waterstones that she can't use on it, for example; my concern is more about keeping her off MY Kindle in the first place!) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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tail and awk
by Barry Samuels 17 Nov '10

17 Nov '10

I'm running Debian Squeeze/Testing and have this in my /etc/rc.local: tail -f /var/log/syslog | awk '/kernel: sdb: sdb1/ {system("/bin/sleep 10; /sbin/hdparm -Y /dev/sdb")}' & Whenever I insert a hard drive caddy I want the disc to be put into sleep mode until it's required. The drive is used only once every 24 hours to backup and the drive is changed each day. However it doesn't work. If I remove a drive caddy and then replace it the relevant lines appear in syslog but the drive keeps spinning. If I stop the current tail/awk processes, remove and replace the caddy then run /etc/rc.local from the command line it does work and the drive stops spinning. I have now run out of expertise. Any suggestions please? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Re: [ALUG] Mostly OT: Kindle 3G
by mark fernandes (IFR) 17 Nov '10

17 Nov '10

Mark, I've made some comments about the Kindle browser on my blog (http://www.codingscience.blogspot.com/) I have successfully used it to access my work e-mail (Outlook Web Access) whilst on my travels. It is a bit like going back to Black and White TV (God that ages me!) but still quite usable (but roll on colour e-paper). My biggest problem is viewing scientific papers (usually only avail as PDFs) in 3 columns which is e-reader unfriendly. If anybody knows of a tool to reformat these to single column reliably, 'I'll be over the moon' as it is a bit of a deal-breaker for some of my colleagues. I say reliable - I tried tools like calibre and stanza (and a google code project whose name escapes me - I said I'm getting old) and get weird effects (Which I'm beginning to believe is down to quirks of PDF format when having multiple columns with diagrams and images (:-() rather than the programs). Anyway, back to original question - Browser is usable but I wouldn't use it as the 'weapon of choice'. Or put it another way don't try and use a hammer to put in a screw... :-) Hope that this helps, Mark

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 13 Nov '10

13 Nov '10

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back next week, Monday 15th November, at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://www.pjmcgintys.co.uk/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. We're usually to be found in the lowest section of the bar, near the library entrance to the pub. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. Hopefully, see some of you there! Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Reliable friendly hosting companies
by Mark Rogers 09 Nov '10

09 Nov '10

We currently use MemSet for most of our hosting requirements. We run Ubuntu virtual servers and have very few problems caused either by us or Memset. However, Memset don't provide out-of-hours emergency support except with fully managed servers (£40/month overhead, on a virtual server which might only be costing £10/month itself). This has occasionally caused problems in the past, with an upgrade taking place late on a Friday evening leaving the server inaccessible until after 9am Monday. It means we can't risk a major update out-of-hours in case of problems, but equally don't want to schedule downtime in office hours either. We prefer to run multiple virtual servers rather than having one "big" one - spreading the load but more importantly meaning that one outage it less likely to hit all customers or all services at the same time (much easier to manage!). At £40/mo for multiple servers this means paying around £3-4k just to be able to contact emergency support typically once per year when we have a problem that requires it. So, what are the current suggestions for hosts that other people can recommend with 24/7 support availability for those rare disasters? I know this type of thread crops up fairly often but recommendations change and I haven't seen the specific issue of out-of-hours support cropping up. Other than this I have no reason to wish to move away from Memset, but we have reached the stage of migrating several sites to new virtual servers and that can either be at Memset or elsewhere, so I need to consider the alternatives. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Tools for laying out images and text on web pages - suggestions wanted
by Chris G 06 Nov '10

06 Nov '10

Are there any good tools/utilities for easily laying out pictures and text on a web page? I want an easy way to put some images and text on a page with text beside pictures and/or more than one picture across the page. I know that HTML is fundamentally not really designed to do such a thing (because it creates content rather than layout) but in the real world it's a rather fundamental thing to want to do. While CSS is 'the right answer' it doesn't really fill the bill because I want to layout 'this particular bit of text I have written' in a specific position relative to 'this particular image'. I'm not after a generic two column or three column layout into which I can drop my text and images, I'm after saying "put this text top left next to this image top right then this text across the page, then this image on the left with this text to the right of it ....." etc. I guess the WYSIWYG way of doing it would be draggable boxes with configurable constraints such that you could say "this one must be next to this one". (... and yes I know WYSIWYG doesn't really fit the web because of different sized screens etc. but this is mostly for me to use so it doesn't have to work for everyone's screen and browser) Any suggestions? -- Chris Green

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Does anyone else's Alt key do this - multiplier entry - can it be turned off?
by Chris G 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

While recently playing around with my keyboard and looking at ways to enter special characters I discovered that the Alt key (that's the one on the left, i.e. *not* the AltGr key) doesn't act as a modifier like the AltGr key but, in some cases, acts as a multiplier for the next character. I.e. if I enter Alt+<digit> the prompt changes to (arg: <digit>) and entering further Alt+<digit> keys adds to the value after arg:. Then on entering the next character it is repeated arg times. This is (for me anyway) a totally useless facility, I'd much rather the Alt key acts as a shift key (like the AltGr key) and gives special characters. I have some documentation that gives the standard/default characters generated by Alt and AltGr as follows (intermediate mail systems willing):- Unshifted Shifted Unshifted Shifted Key Alt AltGr Alt AltGr Key Alt AltGr Alt AltGr ` à | ¬ 1 ± ¹ ¡ ¡ A á æ Á Æ 2 ² ² ¢ S ó ß Ó § 3 ³ ³ £ £ D ä ð Ä Ð 4 ´ ¤ ¼ F æ Æ ª 5 µ ½ ¥ G ç Ç 6 ¶ ¾ Þ H è È 7 · ¦ J ê Ê 8 ¸ ª K ë Ë 9 ¹ ¨ ± L ì Ì 0 ° © ° ; » º - ß ¿ ' § À = ½ « # £ þ Q ñ Ñ \ Ü ü ¦ W ÷ × Z ú « Ú < E å Å X ø » Ø > R ò ¶ Ò ® C ã ¢ Ã © T ô Ô V ö Ö Y ù Ù ¥ B â Â U õ Õ N î n Î N I é É M í µ Í º O ï ø Ï Ø , ¬ ¼ × P ð þ Ð Þ . ® · ¾ ÷ [ Û û / ¯ ¿ ] Ý ý In all my terminal windows the above AltGr combinations work but none of the Alt ones do, I'd like the Alt ones as well. I could then type things like ¢ (cents) and ® (registered) without too much hassle. (The above ways of typing accented characters aren't so much use as they're not easy to remember and I use a Compose key to do them) -- Chris Green

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Why are these disks subtly different? Does it matter?
by Chris G 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

I have just added a second WD 1Tb disk to my desktop system for backups and such. It *looks* like the one that the system started with but it has some subtle differences and I wonder whether these are significant in any way. Firstly fdisk reports slightly different geometry:- Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xf24a2de7 Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 81 heads, 63 sectors/track, 382818 cylinders Units = cylinders of 5103 * 512 = 2612736 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x4e451e03 Secondly (and the one I have *slightly* more concern about) blkid reports as follows:- /dev/sdc1: UUID="c4ae6fbe-18b3-4af9-aed8-a442e0fb6893" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" /dev/sdb1: UUID="6976542f-0471-411e-8c0d-97492c3f49b5" TYPE="ext3" What does that SEC_TYPE="ext2" mean? I used mkfs.ext3 to create the file system on the disk with no explicit option. Presumably the other disk (/dev/sdb1) was partitioned and formatted when I installed xubuntu. -- Chris Green

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Where is this pseudo-wifi network coming from?
by Chris G 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

Our Dell Vostro V13 laptop keeps telling us that there's a WiFi network called dcuc160 which it successfully connects to, unfortunately it doesn't actually work. This network appears wherever we are, even in Belgium on our boat and at home where there aren't any neighbours in wireless range so I don't think it's any sort of real network. How can we get rid of it as it's a right pain. I've searched for dcuc160 on Google and got just one hit for "Duelund Coherent Audio CAST inductors homepage", not relevant! -- Chris Green

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eSata disk on Linux, are they normally hot-pluggable?
by Chris G 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

I have an external eSata disk drive that I want to use on my desktop machine occasionally. I have powered it up and connected it and absolutely nothing seems to happen. I've done a bit of Google'ing and there doesn't seem to be a very consistent result, I've found everyting from "doesn't work at all" to "works perfectly, just pops up when plugged in". I've searched for it specifically with Ubuntu 10.04 as that's what I'm using. Has anyone here had success (or otherwise) with hot-plugging eSata disks? I have had the disk working on another system but I can't remember whether that was hot-plugged or present at power up. I will try rebooting the dekstop with the eSata powered and connected to see if it works then but I really want to be able to hot-plug it. -- Chris Green

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