Joe's Jottings

A few days ago one of the pioneers of the home computer revolution of the 1970s died.  Ed Roberts, an MD in Georgia, died after a long battle with Pneumonia.  Back in the 1970s his company, MITS, moved from model rocket telemetry, to calculators, then to building the first ‘computer kit’ – the Altair 8800 – for which Bill Gates and Paul Allen provided a BASIC interpreter.  The Linux and Apple Fanbois amongst you may now know who to blame for Microsoft…

It’s debatable that without the Altair 8800 another home computer – in kit or ready built form – would have come along.  The Apple 2 followed behind theAltair, as did many other similar machines, but the Altair was first.

The Altair 8800 was basically a microprocessor chip with enough associated ‘gubbins’ to make it work – it could be chipped up to have 8k of memory – my laptop here has 4,000,000 k of memory – and could even handle a keyboard and eventually a video display – although when you got it out of the box (and after you’d soldered the thing together) it’[s user interface was a bank of toggle switches and some LEDs.

Yup – you programmed it, entered data and read the output in binary.  It was safe to say that in the mid 1970s, as far as computers were concerned, men were real men, women were real women, and real programmers did it in binary with a soldering iron tucked behind their ear. The fact that within 10 years of the Altair being launched teenagers were typing their own programs in to Spectrums, ZX-81s, BBC Micros, Apples and the rest is a monument to the excitement and speed of those early days of computing.

And, by golly, it was FUN! Even the act of getting your computer working in the first place was part of the game – you learnt to code in machine code from day one because either nothing else was available or you realised that in order to make anything useful happen with only a few HUNDRED bytes of memory you needed to right VERY ‘tight’ code.

I built my first computer in the mid-1970s – well, not so much a computer as a programmable calculator.  I took an electronic calcul;ator and wired up the keyboard to some circuitry of my own invention that mimicked keypresses.  Programming this beast involved changing the wiring in my circuit – running teh program involved pressing a button and after a few seconds the answer would appear.  I then got even smarter, and managed to work out how to introduce some decision making in to my gadget.  Fortunately, I blew the output of the calculator up soon afterwards – I say fortunately because I then found out about microprocessors and ended up building some simple computer circuits around 6800 and Z80 microprocessors, rather than carrying on with my rather ‘steampunk’ programmable calculator!

Ed Roberts’s machine wasn’t an option for me; my pocket money wouldn’t cover the postage from the US.  But the fact that people were doing this sort of thing was very exciting, and by the time I left university in 1982 I’d already spent time with ZX81s and Apple 2s, and had written my first article for the home computer press – a machine code monitor and loader program for the ZX81 in ‘Electronics and Computing Monthly’.  I was reading in the magazines about the developments of software from up and coming companies like Microsoft – even in those pre-PC days – and for a few years in the early 1980s the computing field in the UK was a mish-mash of different machines, kits, ready made stuff – and most people buying these machines bought them to program them.  How different to today.

I have to say that I’ve always thought that the fun went out of home computing when the PC came along, and when Microsoft and Apple stopped being ‘blokes in garages’ and started being real companies.

Ed Roberts – thank you for those fun packed years!

I’m a big user of search engines.  Despite my grumblings and pontifications on here about Google, I still use them the most because they’re still the best out there.  I hope that Bing – despite the daft name – will one day come to challenge Google, but until then, I just Google.  It’s been interesting recently to see Tweets start appearing in search results, and I’ve commented in this blog on the topic.  The most recent work being done by Google that they feel will improve the search experience for us all is explored in this piece from the BBC, and I’m particularly interested in the comments made about ‘Social Search’.

First of all, what is Social Search? 

My definition of a true Social Search tool is one that would give weight to a number of different aspects when searching.  These would include:

• The normal search criteria as entered in to any search engine that you care to use.
• Your location, intelligently applied to any searches that might be expected to have a geographical aspect to them.
• A weighting applied to favour the results based upon material that meets the criteria you’re searching on that may have been placed on the Internet by people or organisations within your personal or professional network.

To give an example – you do a search for restaurants.  The search engine makes a guess about your location based on previous searches, geocoding based on your IP address or, coming real soon, tagging provided with the search request specifying your location based on a GPS in the device that you’re using for the search.  The search engine then determines whether your ‘friends’ have done similar searches, whether they’ve done any reviews or blog posts about restaurants in the area, posted photos to Flickr, or are actually Tweeting FROM a restaurant as you search, whatever.  The results are then returned for you – and ideally would be tailored to your particular situation as understood by the search engine.

And this is roughly what the Google Social Search folks are looking at.

“….returns information posted by friends such as photos, blog posts and status updates on social networking sites.

It is currently only available in the US and will be coming to the rest of the world soon.

Maureen Heymans, technical lead at Google, said this kind of search means the information offered is personal to the user.

“When I’m looking for a restaurant, I’ll probably find a bunch of reviews from experts and it’s really useful information.

“But getting a review from a friend can be even better because I trust them and I know their tastes. Also I can contact them and ask for more information,” she said.

In future users’ social circles could provide them with the answers they seek, as long as individuals are prepared to make those connections public.”

Of course, the million (or multi-billion) dollar question is how far are people to go in terms of making their networks available to search engine companies in such a way that results can be cross referenced in this way.  Once upon a time I’d have said that folks wouldn’t, as they value their privacy, but today I’m not so sure.  Given that we have seen sites where people share details about credit card purchases, I’m not convinced that people value their privacy enough to not allow this sort of application to take off, at least amongst the ‘digital elites’.

Of course, hopefully it will be up to us whether we participate in using Social Search – I guess all of us who blog or Tweet will find our musings being used as ‘search fodder’ unless we opt out of making our contributions searchable.  Will I use Social Search?  If it’s at all possible to opt out, No.  And here’s why.

Because I doubt the results will be as relevant to me as Google and all the other potential providers of SOcial Search think they will be.  Let’s face it – these companies will not be doing it for nothing – some where along the way the ‘database of intentions’ will be being supplemented and modified based upon the searches carried out, and such information is a goldmine to marketers and advertisers.

But the relevance to me?  I’m yet to be convinced – and here’s why.

If I really want the opinions of my friends, family and occasional business contacts on what I eat, wear, watch or listen to then I’ll ask them directly.  Just because I know someone doesn’t mean that I share any similarity in viewpoint or preferences at all.  I have friends with very different interests – Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Agnostics  and Atheists, people from the political left and right, party animals and stay at homes…the differentiation goes on.  This is because I pick my friends based on what they’re like as people – not necessarily because they share interests or beliefs.  As it happens, I’m occasionally quietly offended by what some of my online friends say – but that’s life.  We don’t always have to agree or share the same beliefs.  

Therefore, the idea of biasing my search results based on what people I know search for, prefer or comment on is potentially useless.  If I wish to know what my friends think or say – I’ll talk to them, email them or read their tweets / blogs / whatever directly. 

I feel there’s also a serious risk of ’crystalisation’ of beliefs – a sort of friendship groupthink emerging.  Think of what it was like when you were 13 years old and spotty.  For many teenagers it matters to be ‘in with the in-crowd’; Social Search could contribute to the return of that sort of belief structure amongst peer groups.  By it’s nature, the people who will be ‘opinion leaders’ in your Social Search universe will be those friends who are most online and who share the most.  Their activities will hence bias the results returned in Social Search.  It might not be such a problem for them, though – people who have a high Social Search presence will undoubtedly come to the attention of advertisers and opinion formers who might wish to make use of that ‘reputation’.

One of the great advantages of good, old-fashioned, non-social search is taht you will occasionally be bowled a googly (pitched a curve ball for my transatlantic friends!) that might lead you off in to whole new areas of knowledge.  You may be prompted to try something new that NONE of your friends or colleagues have heard of.  Whilst these results will still be in the results, if they’re on the second page, how many of us will bother going there?  We’ll become fat and lazy and contented searchers.

So….I think I want to stay as an individual.  For now, I’ll happily turn my back on Social Search!

Don’t get me wrong – I love Open Source software and have used some of it fairly widely in various development projects that I’ve done.   I’m also aware of the fact that people involved in the development and support of such software are typically volunteers, and on the odd occasion I have called upon people for support, I’ve always had good experiences.

I’ve also seen some absolute stinkers of ‘support’ given to other developers, in which the people who’re associated quite strongly with the softwrae have treated people in a rude, patronising and often offensive and abusive manner.  Now, in 20+ years of dealing with IT support people – including folks like Oracle, Microsoft. Borland (showing my age) and even Zortech and Nantucket (back in the deep past!!) I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve had this sort of treatment from big bad commercial software houses.  It’s unfortunate that I’ve seen dozens of examples of this poor customer service from Open Source suppliers in the last couple of years.

Because even if we don’t pay, we are customers – and some of the worst behaviour I’ve seen from companies where users are required to pay for a license when the software is sued in commercial situations.  It’s hardly encouraging, is it?  I know it can be frustrating to answer the same question several times a day, especially when the solution is well documented, but rudeness isn’t the way forward.  After all – it doesn’t exactly encourage people to use the product, or pay for a licence – rather than persevere or even volunteer a fix, folks are more likely to just go to the next similar product on the list.

Ultimately, it boils down to this; piss off enough potential customers and people like me will write articles like this but will name names and products.

So, here are a few hopefully helpful hints to people involved in regularly supporting products and libraries.

1. If it’s your job, you’re getting paid to do it.  If you’re a volunteer, you’ve chosen to do it.  In either case, if you don’t feel trained up enough in the interpersonal skill side of things, just be nice, and read around material on customer support.  If you don’t like it support, then rather than taking it out on customers, quit.  Because you’re unhappy is no reason to take it out on other people.
2. Remember that the person asking the daft question may hold your job (or the future of your product) in their hands.  You have no idea whether they’re working on a project for a small company or a large blue chip / Government department.  Your goal is surely to get widespread adoption – the best way to do this is to make folks happy.
3. Even if the fix IS documented in any number of places, be polite about it.  If it’s that common, then have it in your FAQs or as a ‘stock answer’.  The worst sort of response is ‘It should be obvious’.  Of course it’s obvious to you – you wrote it.  It isn’t obvious to other people.  This seems to be a particular problem with ‘bleeding edge’ developers who swallow the line that ‘the source code is the documentation’ – it may well be, but if you want your product or service to be adopted you need to get as many people as possible using it.
4. Don’t forget that if someone perseveres with your software, through buggy bits, they may be willing to help you fix it.  The chances of you getting a helper if you are rude to them is minimal.
5. If you get a lot of questions or confusion about the same issue, perhaps it’s time to update the FAQs or Wiki?  And don’t forget sample code – if you’re generating code libraries PLEASE provide lots of real-world examples.

And to all the nice support folks – thanks for all the help – it is appreciated!

There’s an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ in which Lisa sets out to determine whether a hamster or Bart is the more intelligent for a school science project.  She does this by applying electric shocks to the ‘subjects’ when they attempt to feed.  the hamster soon stops trying to eat the nuts that are attached to teh electrical wiring, while Bart just keeps on getting electric shocks whenever he tries to eat a slice of booby-trapped cake.

And so it seems with Facebook and privacy issues; no sooner than they navigate their way through one privacy crisis, then they end up with another problem of their own construction -this time involving a new plan to allow ‘trusted third party partners’ access to information about your Facebook account.  At the moment, when you go off to a site – like a game – that connects to Facebook via the ‘Facebook Connect’ application, you’re asked if you wish to give the site permission to access data from your Facebook account that the site needs to work.  This is usually the point at which I say ‘No’ and close the brwoser window, I should add.  The new arrangement will be that certain sites will be given special dispensation to bypass this process and use your Facebook ‘cookie’ on your PC to identify your Facebook account, then go off to Facebook and grab details about friends, etc. without you ever agreeing to it.

Of course, there will be the option available for us to Opt Out of this rather high-handed approach, and by reducing the amount of information that you make available in your profile with a privacy setting of ‘Everyone’ you’ll be able to restrict what data is presented anyway.  But it does appear that this, combined with the recent changes to default privacy settings that made ‘Everyone’ the standard (unless you change it), are pointing to an increasing interest form Facebook in working out ways of :

1. Using your facebook login and data as a ‘passport’ on to other affiliated sites.
2. Increasing the ‘stickiness’ of Facebook – not necessarily by keeping you on the Facebook site but by keeping information about your social activities with other Facebook users going back to the Facebook site.
3. Increasing the ‘reach’ of Facebook accounts to make them more valuable for monetising.

It’s inevitable that Facebook will want to start making some real money from the vast amounts of personal data acquired on their users; if they increase the number of ‘selected partners’ significantly then the amount of data that can be collected about behaviours of Facebook users will be vastly increased – perhaps it’s time to start remembering that you are soon going to be paying for Farmville and other such activities one way or another; it may not be a subscription, but your personal data might start showing up in all sorts of places.

You might have missed this.  I certainly did – but then again for the last week or two I’ve been running around like the proverbial ‘blue arsed fly’ trying to juggle a variety of personal, professional and voluntary responsibilities whilst avoiding cat-induced sleep deprivation.  Anyway…where were you when China appeared to ‘turn off’ access to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all over the world?

Because yes, it actually happened – from sometime on Wednesday traffic destined for the servers of these three social media giants was noticed to be going to servers based in the People’s Republic of China.   Technicians overseeing the world’s DNS systems (the ‘phone books’ of the Internet that tell servers and routers around the Internet where to send traffic to) noticed this, and eventually traced it back to a node on the DNS system in Sweden, that may have either been accidentally reconfigured or deliberately reconfigured by hackers.  Whatever the reason, it’s been an eye opener in principle, it means that any reasonably equipped government or terrorist organisation can subvert the whole routing system of the Internet – at least until the holes that allowed this to happen are secured.

The nature of the Internet is such that it has always been possible to do this sort of subversion; it’s just that the Net has never been important enough to be worth worrying about until recently.    The recent kerfuffle between Google, the Government of the PRC and the US Government has put the Internet firmly on the political stage – much more prominently than took place during the Iranian disturbances last summer.  (I’ll be commenting again on Google / PRC in the next few days, but here are my previous comments on that particular story)

It’s almost certain that this was an act either ordered or condoned by the government of the People’s Republic.  Their much vaunted ‘Green Dam’ is clearly capable of acting way beyond the borders of the PRC, especially if the remote control ‘exploits’ are used to take control of PCs running the program.  This would effectively give the PRC a massive cyberwarfare potential, with every PC legally installed in the PRC being capable of taking part in a botnet.

This action very much appears to be a shot across the international community’s bows; the PRC demonstrated their ability to break the Internet.  There are ways around this intrusion, of course, and steps will be taken to deal with it, but it does show that the gloves are off in what is increasingly a battle of wills between governments wishing to restrict what their citizens can read online and those that aren’t interested.  And I’m afraid that I have to include some democratic governments – like Australia – in that list.

The Internet is a political weapon; last Dceember I commented on how the rules of online civil unrest might be changing, as people on the receiving end of protest decided to do something about it – in that item it was Iran and Twitter.  It may well be that that was simply the beginning of ongoing efforts from repressive regimes to control the streets of cyberspace as well as the streets of their own cities.  What is important to realise is that the nature of the Internet – it’s flexibility, expandability, it’s ability to be used for things that the original creators had never even thought of – is at the root of the relative ease with which people can break it.

Unfortunately I expect the ‘powers that be’ to react to this sort of threat by using it as an excuse to tighten up various aspects of security and surveillance on the Net.  Expect legislation such as ACTA and The Digital Economy Bill to be tightened up in a ’9/11′ style response to this act of online retaliation.

I’m currently involved in developing a web application of moderate complexity using Ext to provide a ‘Web 2.0′ front end on a PHP/mySQL application.  We’ve endeavoured to make it work across a range of browsers – Firefox, IE, opera and Chrome.  And this is the blog article in which I vent my spleen about Chrome.

Because, you see, there are some occasions when Chrome is an absolute bag of spanners that behaves in a manner that just beggars belief, and it worries me immensely.  If IE behaved in the same way that Chrome does under certain conditions then the Chrome / Google Fanbois would be lighting their torches and waving their pitchforks as they headed out towards Castle Microsoft.

Giving Chrome it’s due, Chrome renders CSS well against standards, and is frequently faster than Firefox and IE in terms of delivering pages; where it does seem to be lacking is in it’s sensible handling of JavaScript. The general impression I’ve had over recent days with Chrome and JavaScript is that it’s incredibly picky about how it handles JavaScript that is less than perfectly formed – hence the ‘Maiden Aunt’ jibe.  It requires everything to be very right and proper.  I understand that any browser should be expected to deal with properly structured script, but in recent years I’ve found that the major browsers tend to behave in a pretty similar manner when processing JavaScript and tend to vary in behaviour when rendering CSS – hence the fact the some sites look different in IE than they do in Firefox or Chrome.

But I’ve encountered some horrendous differences in the way in which Chrome on one side and Firefox/IE on the other handle JavaScript.  Chrome seems to be very ‘tight’ in it’s handling of two aspects in particular; white space and commented out code.  I hope that following comments might prove useful to anyone doing JavaScript development – particularly with libraries such as Ext.  Note that these issues don’t occur all teh time with Chrome, but have occurred often enough to give me problems.

Watch the White Space

Chrome seems particularly sensitive to white space in places where you wouldn’t expect it to be.  For example:

• Avoid spaces following closing braces ( } )at the end of a js source file.
• Avoid spaces around ‘=’ signs in assignments. 
• Avoid blank lines within array definitions – don’t put any blank lines after an opening ‘[‘ before data.

Watch the comment lines

The // construct used to make a line in to a comment line needs to be handled with care with Chrome.  Don’t include it in any object or array definitions – whilst it works OK in IE, it can cause major problems in Chrome.

Indications of problems

If you’re lucky you may get a straight forward JavaScript error – in this case you will at least have an idea of what’s what.  If you’re unlucky you may end up with either an apparent ‘locking up’ of Chrome or a 500 Internal Error message from your Web server.  The ‘lock up’ will frequently clear after a few minutes – the browser seems to be waiting for a timeout to take place.  When the errors do take place, I’ve found that the loading of pages featuring JavaScript errors is terminated – it can give the impression that a back end PHP or ASP.NET script has failed rather than client side script.

In summary, just be aware that Chrome may not be as well behaved as one would expect.

And that’s my whine for the day over!

This is an interesting little article about a new product from Mozilla Labs for Firefox - it allows you to grab tour personal contact data from various web services and sources, and then keep it in a repository from where you can decide exactly what to make available to OTHER web services and sites.   The data is stored and indexed locally – as @timoreilly tweeted – “I like the idea of a smarter client-side address book, so my social data doesn’t end up belonging to someone else. ”

And so do I.

I have a large contact list in Outlook on my PC which definitely goes nowhere near any online web service.  In a similar way, 95% of people I deal with on Facebook I deal with purely on Facebook; same with twitter and any Internet Forums I belong to.  If  Twitter and Facebook disappeared overnight, I’d lose access to quite a few contacts I have in those two ‘depositories’ of data, but some folks on there that I would DEFINITELY miss in the event of Social Networking meltdown I’ve got alternative means of contact for – usually e-mail addresses, occasionally phone numbers.  As for e-mail, I tend to use good old fashioned ‘Mail Client’ software – Outlook again, I’m afraid! – and rarely use web mail.

I guess the bottom line is that I don’t really trust any server outside of my direct control when it comes to storing my personal data.  I wouldn’t feel 100% safe with having all of my contacts lists on the servers of someone like Microsoft or Google for a couple of reasons:

• Your access to your contacts is gone if they have connectivity issues or a server goes.
• Your contacts are open to exploitation from hackers / spammers.
• Your contacts contribute to the ‘database of intentions’ - if your contacts have accounts with people like Google or Amazon using the email address in your list, it’s potentially possible for their interests to be used to target ‘social advertising’ at you when you use your email address to access a site.

This is without starting to worry about the issues surrounding storing my content on other people’s servers.  No, I’m much happier to keep my central list of contacts on my PC.  I can back it up, it’s always there when I have access to my PC, if I want to put it on another machine it’s just a case of copying it over.

The Mozilla application looks useful in terms of getting backups of such data – which is great – but I’m still going to be terribly inefficient and keep my contacts where I know what’s happening to ‘em!

This post is based on some comments I made on another blog recently – dealing with the question of whether using Social media turns us in to rude bumpkins.  Whilst it’s true that the decision to participate or not in all this Tweeting and Facebooking is in our own hands, the amount of general rudeness that this sort of all pervasive social media generates is astonishing.  I appreciate that I come from an older generation who had very different ideas of what behaviours are acceptable, so I hope you’ll pardon me if I appear to be something of a dinosaur!

Here are a  couple of ‘old style’ rules of thumb that I was taught years ago about the etiquette of using technology that I still use today.

• If you have a visitor, hold the phone calls.  If a call gets through, ask briefly if it’s important, as you have a guest.  Then if it proves not to be important, arrange to call the caller back later.  If you’re responsible for your own calls, let an answering machine take it. 
• If you are in a conversation on the phone, don’t multi-task and email at the same time.  No matter how good you think you are at multi-tasking, the person on the other end of the phone will know you’re doing something else.
• If someone asks you for the contact details of a third party, then contact the third party first and ask, or mail that person on behalf of the person asking with THEIR details.  Don’t give the personal details of someone else away without asking.

Social Media users often breach the equivalents of these old style social guidelines.  We Tweet when talking to people, share personal information like locations and photographs of third parties with people who may be total strangers.  We forget that the people we’re WITH are more important than the often relatively anonymous folks in our extended electronic network.  I have to say that I find it strange to be sitting in the pub with people and have half the group tweeting or Facebooking – it’s a habit that I’ve started acquiring a little as well.  I find it equally weird to be in courses or seminars – or presentations – and find people Tweeting – even if they’re encouraged to do so!  I just find it hard to believe that people can be paying attention to what’s being said whilst using social media.

I have to wonder how much of the use of Social Media by some people is akin to the mobile phone using buffoon portrayed by comedia Dom Jolly in which a guy is bustling along holding a gigantic mobile phone and is yelling in to it – it’s an ego-prop rather than a communications tool. 

Do you REALLY need the world and their dog to know you’re arriving at your hotel?  Or is it all about ego?

Since the recent case in which a teenage girl was groomed and murdered by a paedophile via the Facebook site, there has been a lot of pressure from the UK Government for Facebook to put a ‘Panic Button’ style link on the site – a move supported by the CEOP organisation.  Facebook have commented that they have no objection in principle to making it easier to report abuse on the site, but that they feel that the CEOP supported option is not necessarily the best way.

Facebook are far from perfect in the way that they treat their users; I think all of us who use the site would have our own grumbles about privacy and the attitude of Facebook as a whole towards individual users now that they’ve got big.  But to be honest I think I would rather central Government stayed out of issues like this – especially New Labour, who seem to have spent the last decade dismantling our civil liberties bit by bit.  For a previous broader comment on this issue, I direct you to this item from a year ago, in which author Phillip Pullman commented on the behaviour of New Labour.

Since then we’ve had the Digital Economy Bill – even without the Lib Dem Peers’ Amendments it was a pretty poor piece of legislation.  With the amendments it offers a wonderful means of stifling debate by simply shutting down access to any site that breaches copyright.  Under the Bill, as it stands, and if it were strictly applied, YouTube could be blocked to UK ISPs because of material that breaches copyright. 

Part of the problem with New Labour is their amazing ability to put together piss-poor legislation on a ‘knee jerk’ basis.  A lone gun nut leads to a total handgun ban – which doesn’t affect criminals as they tend to disobey the law anyway.   Despite massive increases in the legislation aimed at child protection, the very basic laws that were there all along fail to be implemented and children keep getting killed.  And there are many more examples.  One interpretation of this repeated series of cock-ups is that they’re just incompetent; my own interpretation is that New Labour are just incredibly keen on reducing our civil liberties as much as they can to have a nicely compliant and obedient citizenry.

The issue for me here is not just the Facebook reporting mechanism; I’m afraid I regard that as something of a ‘thin end of the wedge’, by which Government could influence and impact the policies of web sites not even based in Britain.  It’s not far from that sort of thing to the  censorship policies adopted by China and, more recently, but to a lesser degree, Australia.  Protesting about this sort of Government activity, which initially starts with child protection, is a little bit like trying to answer the question ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ in a way that doesn’t make you guilty.  But given this Governments record on civil liberties I’m afraid I do not and cannot trust them. 

As  Rousseau said “Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost. ”

And we’re losing it bit by bit.

Many, many moons ago, and I mean in the last century, I had a version of Linux running on one of my PCs, and lo, it was good.  If you liked command lines and stuff like that, as the PC concerned wasn’t really up to running X-Windows and such.  But hey, not a problem; I was only wanting to run it as a development web server and after a little faffing around I had it neatly wired to my router and that was that.

Somewhere in the early 21st Century – OK, 2004 - we bit the bullet and went Wifi here at The Towers.  Once we had the Windows machines running on that network, I started toying with WiFi for the Linux boxes but couldn’t find a distro that did it ‘out of the box’.  As an experiment I did try and get whatever version of Ubuntu was kicking around in about 2006 working with a USB WiFi Dongle, but once I got on to the part of the instructions that involved downloading all sorts of arcane bits of software from around the Internet, then compiling wrappers, installing Windows drivers on Linux machines and all sorts of other tomfoolery I decided to quit.  Oh, and after I’d spent a couple of evenings at it with no results.  

The general impression I got from people ‘in the know’ was that:

1. It is easy if you follow the instructions.
2. Linux is OK – it’s my WiFi dongle that was wrong.
3. Future versions of Ubuntu will deal with these dongles.

Well, so be it.  But at the time I didn’t find (1) easy, (2) seemed a bit dumb when the dongle worked happily on 3 versions of Windows and (3) – well, I can be patient.

In 2008 my then laptop had a couple of accidents involving a cup of tea and a crashed hard disc, and it was replaced with a nice new machine, and today I decided that the old laptop should be dug out and Linuxed – and because I’ve had previous experience with Ubuntu, I decided to grab a CD Image of Ubuntu and re-partition and re-format the hard disc of the laptop with Ubuntu 9.10.  The installation went fine – I soon had a laptop running Ubuntu, and was pleased to see that it automatically detected my USB WiFi dongle AND also spotted a couple of local WiFi networks….shame neither of them were mine.

I attempted to attach to my home network directly by specifying the name; I selected the correct security protocol and entered the key; nothing.  Nada.  Not a peep.  Just kept asking me for my security key settings again.  In other words, it wasn’t connecting to my home network.  Which is a shame, because we have XP machines, Vista machines, Windows NT, Windows ME, a Blackberry and a Wii that all happily connect to the WiFi network at Pritchard Towers. 

I guess I’ll take another look at it soon; using a wired connection isn’t really on due to where the router is in the house, so WiFi is necessary.  Fortunately I’m not reliant on this machine as my main PC around the house, but it’s a sad repetition of the last time I decided to install a Linux on one of my machines to use as a ‘Client’ Operating System rather than as a server.  It doesn’t bloody work!  I appreciate that the Linux Fanbois will tell me all sorts of things I can do to make it work, but to be honest that misses the point.  Take a look at teh graph below (from Wikipedia)

Linux provides a little over 1% of the total number of Client Web Browsers detected by web sites.  The fun and games I’m having probably explains why.  For all the hype and fuss about Linux finally coming of age as a desktop replacement for Windows, it is just not going to happen as long as you can’t get the damn thing to connect to a bog standard WiFi network out of the box.

Come on fellows, I want to play; meet me half way.