Ubuntu

Ubuntu seems to be the Operating System of choice, that is spawning across Talis. Whilst it does have limitations with non open source integration (I'm moaning mostly about e-mail and AD integration with Evolution) I have found the experience and re-visit to be a good one.

I first became aware of Ubuntu at Talis around 3 years ago, when Matt Bird introduced me to this easy to use Linux distro, I subsequently replaced all my boxes to run Ubuntu and even completed my final year project with Ubuntu.

Unfortunately when I came back to Talis I was given an out of the box XP imaged desktop, and didn't think about Ubuntu until my recent move to a new team was given the green light.

It appears that there are three Operating System factions in Talis, and two I have the time of day for - that is XP and Ubuntu (hardy Heron), the third are the Macs (eww). Even worse than this, we could have Vista (ewww).

Synaptic, is my favourite tool of preference and searching in google for the word "cool" and "ubuntu" normally gives back some "must install" packages (fish being my favourite at the moment).

Today, with a single click I installed Kubuntu. Great? Not really was first impression. Perhaps I need a list, some reasons why I should move over from Gnome to KDE, annoyingly it changed my splash screen, but I have kept my preference to GDM!

I’m currently running Ubuntu in a virtual machine (Virtualbox) and when the guest tools are installed, and in full screen mode (on my second monitor) I have a wonderful hybrid system, that doesn’t steal my mouse or keyboard – I haven’t noticed any performance problems, in fact the VM could be the most powerful machine I have run Ubuntu with as I have a much overpowered laptop in anticipation for Vista (I’ve run Ubuntu on a laptop that didn’t even support ACPI – can’t think of the spec now – but it was well less than 1ghz and no more than 256Mb Ram).

I’m a long time posting, I feel that I have to be in the right mood to post – so perhaps I should use twitter?

Revival, not yet.

A widget it has got ...

A strange druken naivety turns people, especially students to cut open a guinness cab to find out what is that "thing" that rattles in the bottom of an empty can. This "thing" serves an essential purpose with a guinness by releasing a small amount of nitrogen to give you a perfect white head from a can.

"Great! Thanks for that bit of useless information" I hear you cry - but it does lead me into the widget I'm (hopefully) going to create.

Following my Talis theme - it's going to be a "you should read next" widget - you know - kinda similar to the Amazon "people who liked this also liked ..." Only I don't use Amazon.

The ingredients:
1x Keystone
1x OCLC XISBN
1x Talis Platform

Objective:
All I want is a single recommendation for the next book a person should read that is available at the library the user is a member.

Method:
So, if you've not had the idea already, or you can't see what I'm doing let me explain:
In principle - it's very simple - I take a _valid_ ISBN from a current loan, pass that to the XISBN service, then check the availability of the results (for that library) via the platform ...

Talis TDN and my blog revival

So, I asked myself - I have a blog and not really a productive one - the average blog readership is one, so again I feel like i'm talking to myself!

O'well - so what have I been upto - well I have a job at Talis (http://www.talis.com) and by far the most interesting entry point to the website is the TDN.

I'm no acomplished developer, with recently graduating (2.1 thanks for asking) in Computer Science SE, and my job title Support analyst - a job which i'm loving, but it also gives me a dev outlet - via the TDN.

Some interesting stuff they are doing at the moment is with "the platform" and "Keystone" of particular interest Project Cenote - which I found out was only C. 100 lines of code! WOW!

Intrigued, I found out more. Originally written in .Net with a few more loc, it was re-written in lightweight xslt in a matter of a week - consuming Amazon and the Talis platform - Munch!

So something so striking can be achieved in 100 loc? I endeavered to find out more. Xslt is something that I have neither been taught or realised was as powerful as it seems. I started by looking at a tutorial on Talis, swapping the crucial bits to see what happened - yes it broke, and then swapping the formatting - yes it looked poor -but I had learnt something!

I had a look at some tutorials but I'm more of a man that likes to experiment before knowing exactly how vunerable\bad my coding is - and trust me you learn quicker from mistakes than from tutorials.

I get the feeling i'm in the right place at the right time at the moment - so to all my reader(s) out there - watch this space! :)

Of great interest

A couple of things which are making my pulse racing at the moment,

Ubuntu (Dapper Drake) 6.06 has been released http://www.ubuntulinux.com,

and

Talis, a library systems provider in the UK have released their API, (31/05/06) http://www.talis.com/tdn I've already wrote a google spell check mash up!

Welcome to my blog

What I hope to post here is all things computer related, that have relevance to the web - think of it as a pigsty for all things computery on the web ... a "websty."