The Open Sourcerer » Personal Stuff

OT: Chillies 2012

Alan Lord — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:11:58 +0000

It’s that time again.

This evening (Saturday 21/01/2012) I have sowed 13 varieties of chillies, just over 50 seeds! I’m very excited about the prospects for the year ahead but have absolutely no idea what I will do if I have 50 plants to tend – they won’t all fit in our small greenhouse and we don’t have a conservatory… Suggestions welcome.

From the left there is “Black Naga” which I managed to grow last year and by the end of October the pods had ripened to a dark chocolate brown colour. They were hot too . Next is a Red Habanero – These seeds were a gift from my sister-in-law and I have no idea what they will be like but Habaneros are generally quite hot and a have lovely fruity flavour. Finally in this tray is Goat Horn which I also grew last year and they were an absolute delight! A lovely traditional torpedo shaped chilli with a great flavour. They aren’t blisteringly hot but a very, very nice chilli.

In this tray I have the famous “Dorset Naga” which has been a reliable variety over the last two seasons. Hope these seeds still germinate OK. Next is a Bhut Jolokia and to be honest I can’t remember where these seeds came from or if I have grown from this packet before, but there were only 5 seeds in the bag so they have all gone in the tray. Finally is another Habanero style called Congo Trinidad.

I have two varieties in this tray I also grew last year from the first time and liked them so much am growing again: Aji Crystal was quite prolific and produces big meaty chillies with a nice (but not insanely hot) kick. The Lemon Drop on the other side was also quite a good cropper and I loved the bright yellow chillies. These look great on the plate and taste yummy too – a slight citrus note. In the centre is a new variety for me this season – The Habanero 7 Pot. Called the 7 pot apparently as this is how many pots of stew one chilli will flavour! I’m really looking forward to getting these on my tongue!

Here are the “HOT Ones”… The Naga Viper held the hottest chilli world record in 2011 for a while at around 1.4million Scovilles! However within just a few days this Viper was beaten by the Trinidad Scorpion “Butch T” which was measured at just under 1.5million Scovilles. Also in this tray is a chilli called Portugal, which is a Jumbo Cayenne type. Not in the same league heat-wise as it’s 2 neighbours but I like a bit of variety.

And finally, I remember growing this one a few years ago and being pleasantly surprised so I thought I’d give it another go. It’s Italian seed with a description of Peperoncino piccante tondo calabrese. It’s a round chilli that is commonly used for stuffing or in salads. I recall it having a nice punch and the plants being excellent croppers.

I’ll provide updates through the year as, hopefully, the seeds germinate, plants grow and bear fruit.

Going dotty

Alan Bell — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:47:08 +0000

Back when the very nice Ubuntu font was initially being developed I did some testing of it using the fontforge application and some looking through the Unicode specification for blocks of characters that should be implemented. There is all sorts of character sets tucked away in the Unicode standard including Klingon and Braille. Sadly the Klingon wishlist has been parked with a status of wontfix but Braille is an interesting one. I was expecting a block of characters in alphabetical order somewhere, but it isn’t quite like that. The specification has all the dot patterns but quite how you type “this is in braille” and get “⠞⠓⠊⠎⠀⠊⠎⠀⠊⠝⠀⠃⠗⠁⠊⠇⠇⠑” is not defined in Unicode as there are a number of different mapping tables you can use to go from letters to dot patterns. So it would be great if the Ubuntu font had those glyphs, however they would be of limited practical use to most people who are interested in Braille. At this point I should clarify that I do know that Braille patterns on screen or printed flat on paper are as much use as a chocolate teapot, they have to be embossed to be read by the fingers. I am taking a broad interpretation of “people who are interested in Braille” and I am including in that someone who wants to make a simple sign that can be read in Braille perhaps using a bit of sheet metal and a centre punch and teachers wanting to get a class to make labels for their coat pegs with their names in Braille, that kind of thing. So for these use-cases and not for typesetting a book in Braille I have made as my first fontforge project a little font which has Braille dot patterns as the characters. This means you can type something in LibreOffice Writer (or word processor of your choosing) and change the font to see it in Braille. You can print it out and stick things on the dots, (if you want to do the centre punch thing do bear in mind that you need to punch through the back of the paper over the dots or you will make a sign that is mirrored and incomprehensible). So here it is, Libertus Braille, a Free font for simple educational uses of Braille.

OT – The return of the Chillies

Alan Lord — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 19:25:08 +0000

It’s that time of year again and hopefully I will have a better year than last for my chilli crop.

I’m not really sure what went wrong but for some reason, after potting the germinated seedlings on, they grew a little bit and then just sort of stopped growing… They didn’t die, but just didn’t any bigger. So last year I didn’t really get a harvest at all.

Chilli Choices

Anyway. It’s a new year and I have several new varieties to try so today I have selected eight and set them off to germinate in the airing cupboard.

My choices for this year are (from top left clockwise): The Black Naga, The Dorset Naga, Goat Horn, Lemon Drop, Aji Crystal, Caribbean Red Hot, Naga Jolokia, Bangalore Tornado.

All of these are what most people would call very hot chillies. However the three Naga varieties should all be outrageously hot.

Seeds prepared for germination

I’ve used my usual method of germination which I find is fast and more reliable compared to more traditional techniques. I place a couple of sheets of unbleached, recycled toilet paper (clean of course) into the bottom of some plastic takeaway containers. I get the paper nice and wet with some luke-warm water then gently place the seeds on top of the damp paper. I can easily get two varieties in one box. Then I put the lid on (this helps to keep the moisture in the box and stop them drying out) and stick them in the airing cupboard. I find germination usually takes place within a week to 10 days and then as soon as they sprout I move the seedlings into small pots with decent potting compost. Here’s some I prepared earlier

Incidentally, I’ve recently discovered that a mate in my local pub also “likes it hot” and we have decided to hold a Naga eating challenge planned for later this year. We’ll probably try and record it and put it on Youtube.

SSH Sessions Timing Out?

Alan Lord — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 22:43:27 +0000

Now this might be common knowledge but it took me while searching and scratching about to find the right solution.

As many others do I’m sure, I use ssh terminal sessions a lot. I’ve often got half a dozen open at once either in separate terminals or in Terminator for example. Sometimes if I don’t update them for a reasonable length of time they simply lock up so that I have no response at all. I’ve not actually timed this issue but I expect it is happening somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes of inactivity.

After getting annoyed for the umpteenth time today I finally did some serious searching… I concluded that this lock-up is probably due to my broadband router. It wasn’t happening across the local LAN or when I was connecting from other locations so I already suspected my broadband service. I suspect that it’s a NAT cache timeout or something but that’s not really important.

Several howtos I found discussing various timeout problems suggested editing the ssh config file on the server. This is fine if you know which server(s) you will be connecting too all the time and of course if there don’t happen to be hundreds of them that you need to re-configure. But if you don’t know or do use many machines then that’s not an ideal solution at all.

I think this is though

If you haven’t already got one, make a file in your home ssh directory (on Ubuntu it is normally found in ~/.ssh):

touch ~/.ssh/config

Open it with your favourite editor and enter a line something like this:

ServerAliveInterval 120

Then save and close it. From my initial tests this seems to do the trick nicely.

According to the manual it:

Sets a timeout interval in seconds after which if no data has been received from the server, ssh(1) will send a message through the encrypted channel to request a response from the server. The default is 0, indicating that these messages will not be sent to the server, or 300 if the BatchMode option is set. This option applies to protocol version 2 only. ProtocolKeepAlives and SetupTimeOut are Debian-specific compatibility aliases for this option.

This is one of those things I should have done ages ago. I hope this help others who find their ssh sessions mysteriously hanging.

Ubuntu IRC Council

Alan Bell — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 23:07:37 +0000

Over the past few years I have become more involved in the Internet Relay Chat or IRC community around the Ubuntu project. IRC is a rather old technology dating back to 1988 and is still going strong as a platform for online collaboration. Just like Twitter the beauty is in the simplicity of the system, just plain text and simple fast messages and rooms for different subjects (think hashtags, but better). The Ubuntu project has rather a lot of rooms and thousands of active users at any one time and there is a team of operators keeping things in order and making it a spam free and productive place to work and collaborate. There is also a community governance team, the IRC Council which is the decision making and governance body for the Ubuntu channels. There has recently been a call for nominations to the council as some members have reached the end of their term and I am thrown my hat into the ring for this process. If you think I would make a good addition to the council it would be great if you could support me by adding a short testimonial to my wiki page. Thanks!

A Good Pub Guide: The White Hart, Sherington

Alan Lord — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 22:07:50 +0000

The White Hart, Sherington

If you travel around the country on business it can be a very tiresome and soul-destroying experience. Especially when you end up having to stay in one of the bland, clinical, plastic and totally soulless hotels that the TV adverts would suggest are something altogether different. I’ve never liked these places and so I do try to find interesting, more characterful lodgings to stay that are not expensive. Often the best to look out for are Pubs with accommodation.

Earlier this week, we had a bit of a road trip on our hands… A day discussing OpenERP in Cambridge and the next day vtiger CRM consulting in Milton Keynes which is not too far away, so we needed somewhere to stay to avoid driving a 200+ mile round trip.

We found a real gem of place! A very attractive country pub with extremely pleasant rooms, very friendly service, fantastic food (the Mixed Grill was really, really excellent), good beer and entertaining and congenial locals too.

If you happen to be working around the Bedford, Milton Keynes, Newport Pagnell area and want somewhere to stay, I whole-heartedly recommend you check out The White Hart in Sherington.

The United Colours of Ubuntu

Alan Bell — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:26:57 +0000

The lovely new grown up and professional branding of Ubuntu is great, I love it. The new Ubuntu Community Orange is great, however what colour is it exactly? Well looking at the design toolkit the official colour is an RGB hex specification of #DD4814 or a CMYK specification of C0 M79 Y100 K0 or the Pantone colour 1665. So three different specifications, but they should all amount to the same thing surely? Well . . . no. If you put #DD4814 into Gimp or Inkscape or any Ubuntu app with a colour picker really, and then flip from RGB space to CMYK you will see that it corresponds to C0 M67 Y 91 K13. So is the design guide wrong? Well having discussed it with the design team they assure me that when actually printed on stuff C0 M79 Y100 K0 is absolutely the right colour to match the screen colour of #DD4814.

Now in an EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) file you can specify colours in several ways including the pantone colour. Here is a screenshot of various files from the design toolkit opened in Ubuntu. First a PNG specified in hex as #DD2814, then EPS files with the Ubuntu Orange colour specified as CMYK, RGB and as a Pantone colour.

Quite a spectacular range of colours really! So is Ubuntu getting this all wrong then? I asked someone who still has a Windows machine to try the same thing. . .

That is Adobe Illustrator showing the EPS files and Windows picture viewer for the png. So a different range of assorted colours from the same files! How about a Mac, designers use them, they must get it right!

Yet another collection of colours (not entirely sure of the order of the EPS files, but the .png is the one that opened in the browser).

So it seems that colour matching across images and operating systems is in a confusing and contradictory state of affairs. Personally I think Ubuntu gets it right, stuff generated in an Ubuntu app with #DD4814 can then be printed to a PDF and it is still #DD4814. PDFs produced by the designers seem to have the colours not quite right. This evening there is an Ubuntu Developer Summit session on colour theory and the Ubuntu palette https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/multimedia-design-n-science-of-colour where the plans for colour will be discussed. Should be an interesting session.

How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Alan Lord — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 13:18:26 +0000

sudo apt-get purge libmono* cli-common

The following packages will be REMOVED cli-common* gbrainy* libappindicator0.1-cil* libart2.0-cil* libgconf2.0-cil* libglade2.0-cil* libglib2.0-cil* libgmime2.4-cil* libgnome-vfs2.0-cil* libgnome2.24-cil* libgnomepanel2.24-cil* libgtk2.0-cil* liblaunchpad-integration1.0-cil* libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil* libmono-addins0.2-cil* libmono-cairo2.0-cil* libmono-corlib2.0-cil* libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil* libmono-management2.0-cil* libmono-posix2.0-cil* libmono-security2.0-cil* libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil* libmono-system2.0-cil* libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil* libndesk-dbus1.0-cil* mono-2.0-gac* mono-csharp-shell* mono-gac* mono-gmcs* mono-runtime* tomboy* 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 31 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx [Updated]

Alan Lord — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:30:41 +0000

Monogenea

Monogeneans are ectoparasites, meaning they live on the surface of their host’s body (as opposed to inside of it) and feed mainly on mucus and other detritus. To ensure they do not lose grip of their host, Monogeneans have very highly developed attachment appendages such as suction devices, pincers, hooks or spines. Most species require only one host to complete their life cycle and they are mostly hermaphroditic. Monogeneans are a type of Platyhelminthe (flatworm) and as such have only one “opening” where food is ingested and any waste is expelled.

OK, that’s enough of a biology lesson. If you are reading this then you probably know why you are here already.

To remove Mono from your shiny new desktop installation of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx enter the following command (after taking the usual precautions like backups of your data etc):

sudo apt-get purge libmono* libgdiplus cli-common libglitz-glx1 libglitz1

[UPDATE: Many thanks to Directhex who pointed out my error regarding the need to remove libsqlite0. I've removed it from the command above. He also requested (you can see in his comment below), that I mention that the mononono package is no longer particularly effective at preventing Mono from being installed. Thanks for the prompt Jo, I was going to but I just forgot.]

This is almost the same one as used for the Karmic Koala release (9.10), and for me the result of the above command was as follows:

The following packages will be REMOVED cli-common* f-spot* gbrainy* libart2.0-cil* libflickrnet2.2-cil* libgconf2.0-cil* libgdiplus* libglade2.0-cil* libglib2.0-cil* libglitz-glx1* libglitz1* libgmime2.4-cil* libgnome-keyring1.0-cil* libgnome-vfs2.0-cil* libgnome2.24-cil* libgnomepanel2.24-cil* libgtk2.0-cil* liblaunchpad-integration1.0-cil* libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil* libmono-addins0.2-cil* libmono-cairo2.0-cil* libmono-corlib2.0-cil* libmono-data-tds2.0-cil* libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil* libmono-posix2.0-cil* libmono-security2.0-cil* libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil* libmono-sqlite2.0-cil* libmono-system-data2.0-cil* libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil* libmono-system-web2.0-cil* libmono-system2.0-cil* libmono2.0-cil* libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil* libndesk-dbus1.0-cil* libnunit2.4-cil* mono-2.0-gac* mono-gac* mono-runtime* tomboy* 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 40 to remove and 0 not upgraded. After this operation, 49.8MB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

I chose to accept this and proceeded. Of course YMMV so please check carefully before hitting that enter key. The purge switch of this command removes any configuration files as well as the packages themselves.

Compared to Ubuntu 9.10, in 10.04 there appears to be just one new Mono dependant application called gbrainy (in the Games menu) which is described thus: “a platform to train memory, arithmetical and logical capabilities with many sorts of different exercises of different difficulty levels”.

Unfortunately it appears as though the “training” objective of gbrainy might not be realised…

Over the last year or so, the BBC have carried out an experiment which examined “brain trainer” games. Subsequent analysis of the data found that these brain trainers are an empty promise as reported here in The Guardian:

Practising brain-training games will improve your performance on brain-training games, but that effect will not transfer to other aspects of brain function. They will not make you brainier, so you may as well just pootle around on the internet.

It seems that not much grey matter will be lost by removing the gbrainy package then

Gnote and Getting Things Gnome

The other applications expunged by removing Mono from the default Desktop installation are the same as last year: F-Spot and Tomboy.

For a very similar alternative to Tomboy try Gnote, and as I like task-related management too I also recommend the excellent GTG [Getting Things Gnome] application. To install these two simply type: sudo apt-get install gnote gtg.

The alternative for F-Spot I usually use is a combination of gthumb and Gimp, the latter of which has been removed from the default Lucid desktop install to make space for other things. Both of these applications can be easily installed by a simple sudo apt-get install gthumb gimp command. However there is now a new kid on the block which looks quite exciting called shotwell. Shotwell will be the default camera/image app in the forthcoming Fedora 13 distribution replacing gthumb (as it has no dependencies on Mono in the default desktop installation). It is also, I was pleased to discover, available in the main Lucid repository so can be installed using either the command line: sudo apt-get install shotwell or you can use the very easy and graphically attractive Ubuntu Software Centre (as you can for the other applications listed above also). This is how Fedora describe Shotwell in the preliminary release notes:

Shotwell is an open source photo organizer designed for the GNOME desktop environment and has replaced Gthumb by default in Fedora 13. It supports the following features:

import photos from any digital camera supported by gPhoto

automatically organize events containing photos taken at the same time

use tags to organize your photo collection

edit non-destructively when altering photos, without ruining originals or using disk space for each copy

publish photos to Facebook, Flickr or Picasa

one-click auto-enhancement

rotate, mirror, and crop photos

reduce red-eye and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of your photos

edit any photo, even if it’s not imported to the Shotwell library

I haven’t used Shotwell yet but it sounds like a good one to try out.

There you have it and hopefully that will be it for another 6 months on this subject.

Planet Saving Software for Linux now released!

Alan Lord — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 07:42:43 +0000

The Granola Gui on Ubuntu 9.10

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’ve been keen to try and help the folks at Miserware to get their Linux energy saving software (it’s also available for Windows for those who haven’t seen the light yet) tested on lots of PCs.

This morning I had an email telling me they’ve completed their testing and have now hit final release. They’ve also changed the name of the software from Micromiser to Granola:

Happy Earth Day!

The MiserWare team is proud to announce that MicroMiser Beta is out of beta and now called Granola! Why the name change? We feel like the name Granola more accurately captures our goal of making a serious impact on the planet through the reduction of wasted energy. Along with the name change, we are also rolling out a new website that allows us to increase awareness and attract new users to Granola. Check out the new site at http://grano.la/

There are over a billion personal computers in the world. Together, they consume hundreds of billions of kilowatt hours annually. If each of these computers ran Granola and reduced their power consumption by even 10%, it would be like taking 7 million cars off the road. Or planting 900 million trees. Or turning off 65 coal power plants.

The first step to protecting the Earth starts with individuals decreasing their own environmental impact and encouraging those close to them to do the same. Running Granola yourself is a great first step, but really making an impact requires the users of Granola to encourage their friends and family to also use the software. For every new computer that runs Granola, we are one step closer to the vision of Granola on every system worldwide.

For Linux PCs:

If you’re already running MicroMiser Beta and using the MiserWare Software Repository, Granola will automatically replace MicroMiser Beta the next time you check for your software updates. Otherwise, please visit the Granola download page at http://grano.la/help/ This release of Granola also includes support for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Also, due to popular demand we have created a GUI for Linux, supported on FC11+ and Ubuntu 9.04+! Find instructions and information about the new GUI at http://grano.la/help/install.php#gui

For Windows PCs:

Granola for Microsoft Windows includes automatic updates to keep Granola on your PC up to date with the latest version. If you are already running MicroMiser Beta, there is no need to uninstall. Simply download the installer from http://grano.la/help/ and Granola will replace MicroMiser Beta.

Regards,

The MiserWare Team

—
Change Log

* Added Windows automatic updates.
* Added a Linux GUI.
* Improved Windows installer.
* Re-branded MicroMiser as Granola.
* Remove Debian 4.0 Etch and add Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid.
* Added CumulateReportFile option to granola.conf.
* Re-factored the Windows GUI to centralize all of the style data (colours and fonts so far).
* Added persistent reporting to MicroMiser.
* Added failure resilience to the update downloading code.
* Updated the Python for the updater. Added code in MicroMiser Application to gracefully handle update failures.
* Updated get_updates to check for an MSI and download updated versions if available.
* Fixed a bug where we do not chown or chmod the var lib MiserWare directory and can be left not being able to write to our own directory.

As they say, even if the energy savings on individual computers are relatively small, the cumulative effect across millions of machines will be significant. I’ve had this software running on many different machines around our home and on laptops & netbooks with no noticeable impact on performance. Please try it out and tell your friends and family.

I updated my Ubuntu Karmic desktop install this morning and noticed one small problem with the instructions on their website. For me I had to explicitly install the gui with sudo apt-get install granola-gui. I’ve emailed them about it.

The software is free for personal use, but I should point out that most of it is not Free (as in Open Source). There are some interesting words on their Wiki page about what is free and what isn’t and what they (Miserware) are all about:

Why are you giving Granola away for free?
We care about the environment and we are proud of the ability of our software to make computers more energy efficient. We also like when our laptops last longer and our servers cost less to operate. We want everyone to be able to use our software on their personal machines. So, early on we decided that in addition to creating enterprise power management software, we would also create a commercial-grade consumer version, Granola. Granola is free for your personal use and we have no intention of charging for it anytime soon.

We also need to create a thriving business so we can make computers even more energy efficient (trust us, we’ve got lots of other cool stuff on the drawing board). We are a small startup working out of a basement, and we provide Granola for free with the intent of helping to clean up the world. If you would like to donate to help us continue to provide Granola for free, we would welcome the funds. If you work for a company that you think would benefit from MiserWare software, we would love for you to refer them to us.

I think it is important that this kind of product is encouraged. In my opinion every little bit we can do to reduce our energy consumption is a Good Thing…