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protecting children on linux
by Richard Bensley 29 Jun '07

29 Jun '07

Good afternoon everyone. The bane of my existence from working in IT are my co-workers. I am sure many of can relate to questions such as "Which broadband supplier shall I use?", or "My dell is full of shit, and spyware, and viruses after the kids downloaded MSN". So long as they have the original restore CD's I don't mind doing it for a small fee, outside of working hours. I have had several cases also where I have been recommending and installing Open Source goodies like Firefox, and OpenOffice, and of course the results are always good! At some point I want to try to and convince a co-worker to let me put something like Ubuntu on their machine. Whilst they wont need some bloated Anti Virus suite, said suites also contain tools to help protect their kids from the darker side of the Internet. What does Linux offer to help censor and protect children from what the Internet has to offer? Richard

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Re: [ALUG] UK VoIP Providers
by samwise 29 Jun '07

29 Jun '07

On 28/06/07, Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist(a)digimatic.co.uk> wrote: > Hey there Peter, did you mean to post this to the list ? Yes. *blush* On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 11:33 +0100, samwise wrote: > On 28/06/07, Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist(a)digimatic.co.uk> wrote: > > On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 10:36 +0100, Ben Francis wrote: > > > > > > > > I'm thinking of buying the Grandstream BT-101 from them for £45 > > > (http://www.sipgate.co.uk/voipshop/grandstream/grandstream_bt-101) but > > > until the expenses claim goes through I'll be playing with softphones. > > > > > Having tried both and despite it being circa £20 more I would still > > recommend the Aastra. > > I tried a Grandstream GXP-2000 out - the build quality of the PSU and > cable was particularly poor. The phone itself was alright. Biggest > problem with it that I found was that it wasn't possible to dial > alphanumeric SIP URIs without prior configuration from a PC. Which > was quite rubbish, I thought! Oh, and it wouldn't work with my usual > STUN server so I had to try another one ... > > If you can afford it, I've generally found the Linksys / Cisco gear to > be very feature-rich and well-built. Bit pricey, tho. > > Peter.

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UK VoIP Providers
by Ben Francis 28 Jun '07

28 Jun '07

Hi all, Does anyone have recommendations of UK based VoIP providers? I'm looking for a service with the following kinds of features: * Standards based (SIP) * A PSTN phone number pointing at my SIP account (preferably with a choosable area code) * Outward calls to PSTN at good rates (national, international and mobile) * Dynamic call forwarding (e.g. forward to my mobile at certain times or after a certain number of rings) * Voicemail (preferably with email alerts) I'm really very attracted to Vonage (http://vonage.com) but there's one thing that bothers me. If you want a "softphone" you have to pay for their proprietary service at extra cost and they don't support third party (i.e. open source) alternatives. This rules out using my own SIP client or installing an open source PBX (Asterisk) in the future. They say they're looking at opening up the service but they can't give a timescale. Thanks! Ben -- Ben Francis http://tola.me.uk

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Blender Tutorial
by Richard Bensley 28 Jun '07

28 Jun '07

Good Morning everyone, On the 14Th of July I will be holding an introductory course to the opensource 3D application, Blender. If you are interested then please respond here so I can get a good idea about the numbers and suitable locations (will be somewhere in Norwich). On the following Monday, the 16Th of July, I will be giving a brief rundown of the same session at the IPLUG meeting for those that can't make the trip to Norwich (providing Mr Bower's car is fixed :D ). Currently I am working on a 4 hour(ish) lesson plan. I will be giving a introduction to the basics of blender, an intro to polygon modelling, and finally some animation. After that I wouldn't mind showing off some fluids, dynamics, and particles, as well as showing off some of the sculpting, compositing, video editing, and painting tools. If there is anything you guys would like to learn about in Blender or in 3D in general I am open to suggestions as to what else you would like to achieve on that day. Other linux based CGI apps I am (reasonably) familiar with and able to answer some basic questions on include: Maya, Softimage, Nuke, Wings3D, Gimp, Houdini, and Shake. I am doing this first of all as a test. Depending on the success on the event both in my ability to teach, and people able to attend may mean I do a few more maybe at the UEA, but one step at a time! Cheers Richard

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kubuntu apt-get not installed
by elc 27 Jun '07

27 Jun '07

No - still unable to gain entry. I'm now about to do major surgery, overinstall or re-install, since I have nothing to lose. However, many thanks for trying to resolve my probs. ps Is there a linux equivalent of Thunderbird Portable ? elc Ten wrote > Hi - did you get your issues sorted? > > My thinking was that your problem might be related to several flavours of > weirdness with ubuntu upgrades - where you can get either a munged fstab > through the upgrade conversion or a strange problem with the system trying to > use the wrong root partition after a kernel upgrade. > > Hope you did, anyway. > > Cheers.

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Re: [ALUG] IPLUG meetings
by samwise 26 Jun '07

26 Jun '07

> So, now there are 3 facebook groups for ALUG. I don't get to say this > very often, so excuse me: UTFS! Gah, I did! I searched the mailing list archives and the wiki for a mention of Facebook and then Facebook for "anglian linux user group" and got nothing! *sigh* Are there any other ALUG things out there being played with we might want to get in on? > http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2352779871 > http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 > > Feel free to merge yours with either of those ;) I've closed mine now... are we going to standardise on one of these two? I have no idea which one came first and they both seem to have around the same number of members, tho the first one is the only one publically searchable ... Peter.

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style syntax
by Nick Atkins 26 Jun '07

26 Jun '07

Would anyone be able to tell me why the following in-line style code does not work on IE6 or IE7? - the link colours do not render properly. It works fine on firefox and netscape7 and half works on safari. <HTML> <style type="text/css"> a:link, a:visited {color : white} a:hover {color : red} </style> <a href="http://cloudesley.org" > <img src="/images/cloudesley.org.png"> </a> </HTML> The result can be viewed here: http://cloudesley.org/new.html Many thanks. -- Nick Atkins

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User group meeting last night
by Ruth Bygrave 24 Jun '07

24 Jun '07

Alas, I didn't find what I was really looking for (very beginner hobbyist scripter to talk to about where to start)...but I enjoyed it hugely anyway, until the conversation at the end reminded me that scripting is really the province of Real Developers and Not Idiots Like Me...cause I didn't understand half of it! [long boring bit about why I want to try it anyway] My approach for why I want to dip a cautious toe into scripting is that what put me off Windows was that there was an infinite amount of choice in software but it was so commercially-driven that if what you wanted to do wasn't commercial it wouldn't exist. The Windows approach is, if you want to do something that isn't there out of the box, buy something. So what you eventually end up with is infinite numbers of programs that do the same as the other programs. You end up with a range of choice that is five million fishknives when you opened the drawer for a soup spoon. I doubt I could become a big professional developer doing big things, ever. I could see myself one day (in five years' or so's time, if I'm lucky) doing tiny back- bedroom projects as shareware or open-source, that started out as what I felt frustrated by not having on my computer -- and gain small amounts of money and big amounts of fun! My problem is that I feel very wary of talking to Professional Developers For Whom It Is Their Day Job. Not that they'd be at all unfriendly, but what would they gain from talking to Dumb Script Kiddie Who Iz A Idiot, as opposed to what I would gain, which is education and which I have the uneasy feeling I should actually be paying for (except that whenever I look up IT training I see big commercial operations that charge £700 for a week's training... which isn't really what I'm looking for). And I know Adrian's approach is that computer science courses at school (what I'd probably get if I looked at adult-ed, except the adult-ed courses aren't up yet at Suffolk College?) are generally rubbish at teaching people to program, and he's much brighter than I am. And I know my past is littered with failed attempts to learn simple programming (C++, VB, Delphi, XSLT...), which lasted until I tripped over Applescript when I switched, downloaded a bunch of free scripts, and managed to get over the mental block that there was nothing I wanted to *do* that I could find out how to do in real programming. So I'm at the point where I want to take a bit of a step back from clipping Mac apps together and come back to it later, and start more from-the-ground- up. But I don't want to bother Real Professional Developers because, they have coding at their day job and almost certainly don't want to give me a free education in their spare time (I get the feeling poor Adrian doesn't, especially since his spare-time recreation is currently rock-climbing and coding is his Work). And I certainly couldn't pay for an expensive education, especially the hundreds-of- pounds one!) So I'll go back to doing scripting on my own, reading books and posting snippets of bad code on the internet... (Incidentally, if anybody wants to read my silly personal-reactions- to-starting-scripting blog, it's at macrubyist.livejournal.com but so far it has about 4 readers. Am uneasily beginning to wonder if I'm not *quite* as chatty & entertaining as I think I am. And I have a bit of a problem with being *too* chatty and discursive, viz this note) [end boring bit about me, sorry, was a bit of a vent there but I just feel so *isolated* sometimes!] OTOH, the general idea that I could use the local Mac user groups for my consumer/user chatting and questions (about Mac-specific apps) and ALUG for geek-fu social chatting, validation that using Unix isn't actually Completely Insane, and learning about the open-source end of Darwin, sounds like it would work marvellously. And if anybody could help me sort out my Samba mixed-network problem that all Mac users look blankly at and say But It Just Works (even if it involves Pain & use of CUPS), that would be cool, although suspect that will have to wait until the About Mixed Networks meeting. Suspect am out on a limb a bit -- may be the only person in the entire universe who's too geeky to be *quite* a Mac-consumer and too dumb to be *quite* a winux lizard :-) But thanks for listening, anyway. I promise I'll start to shut up now, but suspect needed to vent after having nobody to talk to F2F about what I was thinking about for the last six months (as in, Adrian doesn't want to talk about Evil Devil-Languages, and has seen me fail a bunch of times at learning programming anyway, none of my friends do this stuff, and I've never found any hobbyist programmers at the same Dumb But Finally Actually Enthusiastic stage I'm at now...) R

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Re: [ALUG] IPLUG meetings
by samwise 23 Jun '07

23 Jun '07

On 22/06/07, Yvonne Everett <ye103910(a)googlemail.com> wrote: > Hi > > I see from the meeting notes for monday of last week that the homework > was to do 3 things. The 2nd item however (spend a day without using > the top five search engines) has me wondering what the top five are? > I can think of google, yahoo, altavista.... Who are the others? > > Von Ahh, my bad - should probably have specified that: Google, Yahoo!, MSN / Windows Live, Ask or AOL are the biggest five search engines (tho we're being kind including AOL on there ... :) I've updated the meeting notes entry too, with a link to the top 100 alternative search engines list for this month too, if you want to experiment! http://altsearchengines.com/2007/06/06/the-top-100-alternative-search-engin… Peter.

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Idle question about keyboard bindings
by Ruth Bygrave 21 Jun '07

21 Jun '07

One of the things that drives me insane about OS X is that I actually had to download a tiny home-made hack to get the keyboard layout I was used to (" on shift-2, @ next to ;, # next to return). Apple's idea of a British keyboard is: £ on shift 3, but all the others of those keys in what I think of as 'American' places. Adrian and I both instantly thought this was to do with Apple having such an identity as a Californian company it's too arrogant to get its localisations right. I whinged about this at the local Mac user group, and they all said it was the normal British keyboard layout. Is this because: a) the Mac users are not touch-typists. b) the Mac users grew up to use computers on the Mac platform, so they assume the Apple way is the normal way (my 'Apple imperialism' argument) or c) Adrian and I both spent 20 years on MS platforms before I switched to Mac, and the Mac users are right (their 'MS imperialism' argument). If any of you can remember the layout for typewriters before the IBM PC came along, it might settle the question, but also some of you are touch-typists and you're not using a MS platform, so that's another way of thinking about it. Who's right? Regards, R

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