John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

My skills: 30 November 2005: I've just updated (after over a year) the mySkills page. Quite a lot's changed over the year.; At the top level there's been a shift. HTML is no longer the thing I spend most of my time doing, JavaScript has fallen, and Flash, not that I ever did much of that, has fallen away completely. Rising stars are things like Linux, networking, hardware, support, and procurement.; Partly this has been driven by my studying for the LPI Linux Administration exam ('junior' level, that word, so motivating). What I'm learning tends to get put into practice so those things start to creep up the chart.; The other thing is, and I'm happy to let this happen, I get driven by my clients needs and, once people know and trust you they come to you for all sorts of things .. "help, my computer's full of porn spam", and "I can't get email anymore". Most of the problems are avoidable but only if you know how to avoid them, so that's why I created the network management service so I can save small businesses money by providing a quality infrastructure without them having to think too much.; It's not really a big change in direction because I'm trained in networks, the Internet is just a network of networks after all. It's more the slow realisation that actually what's happening is that my clients aren't moving. When I started I imagined I'd need a turnover of clients, but what's happening is the clients I'm working on now have been with me for years and I still have a queue of potential new clients waiting for an extremely rare timeslot. I suppose my clients must trust me to do a good job.; So if the key thing is trust and the relationship, then it probably helps everyone if I take responsibility for the parts of their business in which I can contribute.; At the bottom of that page is Johnny's Bookshelf, an orgasmic collection of books I just want to sit close to and cuddle.
The Variants: 25 November 2005: Scarborough band The Variants have a new website. They seem like nice chappies. No, really, they turned up to the last meeting. I didn't get to speak with them, but they were involved and smiley and helpful and seemed pretty cool.
Narrowboat tales 5: 25 November 2005: In the early fifties the winters were so bad that snowdrifts just grew bigger, building up on the roads like glaciers, and buses travelled along like this and then like this . The council would send a man with a pickaxe and shovel who wouldn't be able to make any impact.; And yes, I have been playing with Inkscape.; prev - next
Gig Gear: 22 November 2005: Right, well I think my search is over for an appropriate outfit for the Christmas gig.; Apparently it's a scene from John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance (TCM 9pm Thursday this week).
Inkscape: 22 November 2005: Inkscape is a beautiful vector graphics drawing program that's free as in beer and open source. It uses the W3C standard SVG as its native format. That's a good thing.; Using Fedora Core 4, installation was just a matter of typing "yum install inkscape" at the shell prompt, although it took me two and a quarter hours of working through dependency hell with the rpm command, and failing on libgc.so.1, to discover that.; I wanted to test my LPI knowledge. I knew yum existed, but wanted to get down and dirty with the rpm system, just like the LPI teaches. I feared, too, that YUM would install stuff outside the RPM database and so not, in some vague way, be managed, and I thought installing YUM would be as difficult as installing anything else.; Nope, YUM was already installed in FC4, and RPM knows about my newly installed Inkscape. I've no idea whether the Red Hat Network application will keep my Inkscape up to date now, or whether it's limited to software closer to the core. It's Inkscape 0.42 so we'll see whether it changes.; All of which rather raises the question .. why learn all that rpm nonsense if it's been automated away? Do drivers of automatic cars have to know how to use a manual gearbox?; Right, so now I can get back to productive work.; Does this mean I can do the same with Scribus? There's a sliver of excitement within the cynical mood this episode has created.; Previous Linux
Ilscorp: 22 November 2005: I met a client the other day who showed me this solicitation (you can click the images to see them in more detail) from Ilsthorp.co.uk he'd received in the post. They'd obviously got his address when I registered his domain name. Maybe I should hide that address, maybe that's why that option is available.; Anyway, just in case you get one yourself or something similar, you can throw it away. Basically it's designed to look like an official invoice to do with your domain name but it's actually an offer to do a few ineffectual and/or unnecessary things to raise your profile in the search engines. In other words, it's designed to dupe the unwary and the unknowing.; I'm sure they would argue it isn't a scam, since it says quite clearly "This Internet Listing offer is provided to millions of websites worldwide to enhance their website exposure. THIS IS NOT A BILL. THIS IS A SOLICITATION. YOU ARE UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO PAY THE AMOUNT STATED UNLESS YOU ACCEPT THIS OFFER."; But most of the page space is given over to how to pay, and it's not entirely clear what they are offering to do, so you'd naturally think it's to do with your domain name registration. It says "WEBSITE ADDRESS LISTING INCLUDES: Domain name submission with 8 keywords / phrases to 20 MAJOR search engines. Initial search engine position and ranking report sent to you via email. Quarterly search engine position and ranking reports sent to you via email. Complete details are located on the internet at www.ilscorp.co.uk."; Looking at the FAQ on that site, I pretty much disagree with everything they say. You don't need to submit your website to the search engines so long as a website that is listed has a link to your site. Meta tags are mostly ignored nowadays by search engines. There aren't 20 major search engines.; Good search engine optimisation is so far from this it's difficult to find a metaphor .. imagine your friend's having a heart attack so you need someone to run for help and there are two people nearby, Johnny Vegas and Kelly Holmes. Well, Ilscorp is no Kelly Holmes.
David Thomas: 20 November 2005: We saw David Thomas and Two Pale Boys at The Shed last night.; I've known of him and Pere Ubu since adolescence. I've grooved to his tunes.; The reviews of the Two Pale Boys thing talk of funk and beats and rock and roll, but maybe because of the venue (candlelit tables) and every other song being apparently made up on the spot by one or the other 'boys' in turn, we got soundscapes. We were taken to another place, a place where Beefheart, P J Harvey and Tom Waits meet, but Thomas seems to have a smaller fanbase, so the show is more Pierce Turner. The only other band I've seen improvise every other song was Scritti Politti at Leeds Futurama.; We were in a melody-free zone. For that matter, besides a little trumpet breathing, we're in a rhythm free zone too. Keith Moliné's midi guitar (clearly a man who knows his stuff and now guitarrist in Pere Ubu) and Andy Diagram's trumpet are both hurled through a vortex of twisted effects, the technique generally being to play something, loop it, add another layer, loop that, and go from there. David Thomas gave the impression of letting the improvised music set the mood, wrestling to decide which lyrics to sing and then he'd rustle through his notes to find what he wanted.; For one song he couldn't find the lyrics he wanted. It didn't matter. With Thomas' delivery style, we couldn't hear them anyway. That's a pity. I think he said his father was an American literature professor, and Thomas' words are a crucial part of what's on show here. That's what irritates me about rap, for an artform so dependent on the lyrics, it seems weird that it's almost impossible to work out what's being sung (cue comic pisstake about me complaining about not being able to hear the words in modern music, at least punk had a tune, etc).; They played two sets, the second containing a few more organised pieces which I found I preferred. Do you remember the first time you heard the guitar sound at the start of U2's Zooropa? (I'll check this). It was a wholly new, fantastic guitar sound. You couldn't not buy the album after hearing just one chord of it. Keith Moliné came up with a gorgeous guitar sound for one song in the second set, giving the impression he had more to give. By this time, however, I was starting to find the trumpet tiring as a source sound, even though Diagram was being incredibly creative with it. His trumpet was mic'd up to a workbench of effects boxes. He blew air through it, he spoke and grunted through it to create rhythm loops, he played it, he even vocoded through the trumpet mic.; David Thomas is a huge, drinking, smoking, sweating, corpulent man with a persistent cough who can't quite raise the energy to stand up. I had the impression this might be his last show, that he might do an Eric Morecambe or Tommy Cooper right there. If he fell forward, I'd have been a goner too. Although I appreciate his contribution to the world, I didn't warm to him. If he fell backward, he would have been a beetle on its back, and I wonder if anyone would have helped him up.; He took his power and used it on stage. He controlled the songs with hand movements. He'd ask one of the 'boys' what they might do next, then reject their suggestions. He overtly drank Diagram's beer as if to say "I can do what I want", and then ordered another from the bar as if to say "but I take care of these people from my high position". Although he was poking fun at himself in this, he asked Diagram to come up with the next tune and then said "I'll sit here in judgment". Only towards the end of the last set did he raise a smile from his band. At one point he raised a laugh from Moliné by talking about whichever league Queens Park Rangers have found themselves in, but even then, he was effectively using information he was privy to as material.; It couldn't be that bad. The 'boys', after all, didn't have to be in the band. But then, Thomas has the power of uniqueness. If what you want to do is to expand the possibilities of the trumpet, where else are you going to go?; Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a miserable night. Thomas is funny. But the 'show' is well rehearsed, despite his protestations otherwise, and the funnies come from there, not from him tonight.; On the way to the venue, driving through the first frosty night of the season, along a country lane through six or seven York satellite villages, my g/f was on the lookout for nice places to live. She has in mind moving to a house with a garden where we can have a dog and I, for some inexplicable (or maybe, obvious) reason, can work in a Portakabin in the garden (I can't stand up straight in a Portakabin) and she was pleased to see villages with still functioning pubs.; The audience at The Shed, trawled from this well-off catchment area, didn't impress her. Early in our relationship I realised she has a cutoff. She needs to feel real and wouldn't feel comfortable in a village full of bank managers and management consultants (although we will both be consultants soon). This is partly why we are in Scarborough. I always felt I didn't have that limit.; But I've been trying to understand why I keep embarassing myself on my blog, either swearing or talking about slow wanks. I think it's the same reason I keep talking about the problems I feel need to be faced .. Chernobyl most recently .. and why I'm increasingly interested in politics.; What I've come to understand is that me and my partner do have the same limit. It's all about reality. Once you get into a village of professionals and Mercedes' you're no longer in touch with reality, you're living in a bubble. Your problems slowly become where to source the right lighting for your barn and how to find a good tax consultant and it's all so rarified, so willingly, selfishly blindfolded. Somehow, faced with that, I can't help thinking we are really animals, we have cocks and cunts and we fight with white phosophorus and somehow the paper thin walls of this charade are torn as demon reality breaks in.; So my baseness isn't because I can't help myself. I'm sure I would manage if I were invited to dinner with the Queen. But I can't play the charade because I would feel I was being paid to keep quiet while others move the levers of power against me. So that, I think, is why I "live quite so relentlessly in the real world" (although not in the same way Jeremy meant it). It's a choice I make, something I do to fend off comfort (God I hate that word).; So, at the end of the night, I queued for one or other of The Shed's urinal or cubical and after I'd taken my turn I washed my hands next to the last man waiting for what seemed like a long, silent, age until I pointed to the other sink (two sinks, one urinal, what am I supposed to think?) next to the urinal and said "maybe this situation is what that second sink is for". He recoiled from me in confusion and shock and a bluster of "oh no, I don't think that can be true" and I could hear his brain whirring "well it's got taps on it, maybe it's a bidet". It's a long way from here to the Rezillos.
Puritan: 19 November 2005: We just wandered into town to see Puritan play an earthquake benefit gig in town. It was rather low key as you can probably see (sorry it's so blurred), stuck in the entrance to the Balmoral Centre, next to the Edinburgh Woollen Mills shop and where the homeless people usually sit. Also, we only really caught the last couple of numbers, but it sounded really good, their energy came through despite the cold and those weeny speakers.; I was going to publicise their next gig but now I remember, I can't get their website to work, none of the buttons work for me (do they for you?).
Linux distributions: 18 November 2005: I can't help myself, I just created this to help me and others choose the right Linux distribution. Obviously it's a work in progress.
Life in the undergrowth: 16 November 2005: I've just seen the trailer for Life in the undergrowth, David Attenborough's latest wildlife program, and I'm completely excited. Incidentally, the music they used for it is inspired, I don't know what tune it is.; Insects fascinated me in my childhood and I still find them more inspiring than other wildlife (barring humans of course). Life of Birds had me gasping at what the team had achieved with their cameras. The Blue Planet creatures were truly amazing. Let's see what his penultimate show has in store.
Nuclear power: 16 November 2005: I read a very interesting article in New Internationalist the other day .. ah, I was going to summarise it for you because I didn't think they published their stories online, but it's here.; The thrust is that global warming has given the dying nuclear industry a fillip large enough to cause a resurgence. We thought nuclear power was dead, but it's coming back and because some green leaders have come out recently in favour of nuclear power, greens have found themselves on the defensive.; The article explains why those green leaders came out in favour of nuclear and provides some very persuasive (and new (to me)) arguments against. For instance, we are running out of uranium fuel, and even if all electricity production is converted to nuclear, it will only affect 16% of our production of greenhouse gases, since that's the contribution of greenhouse gases from world electricity production.; That's before we tackle accidents and safety, what to do with the waste, and nuclear facilities' terrorist target potential. The article mentions that the Chernobyl reactor still contains its active fuel, sealed in a concrete and steel 'sarcophagus' that was never meant to be permanent. "Cracks have appeared, and radioactive seepage has been detected in groundwater." It's not expected to explode, but it could collapse, releasing radioactive dust to be spread by the wind. This is strangely compelling too once you reach the photographs.; So anyway, I thought it was a great article and I'm now ready for the next pub discussion and for the "but greens like nuclear" argument.
Printer: 11 November 2005: Wow. I expected a couple of hours of wrangling with //s and -~s to get my new Linux Fedora Core 4 system to print anything useful. Nope. I plugged the printer in (USB), pressed print, and it, err, printed. Yowser.
Wikipedia: 11 November 2005: I happened to check Wikipedia yesterday and it said Blair had lost the terror laws vote. I thought "no, surely not", I didn't think the vote was until the evening.; I actually thought someone had rather jumped the gun and I'd stumbled over a momentary opposition attempt to bend the news. I searched in Google News, ordered the results by date, and couldn't find confirmation. Then I ran it again. A couple of items appeared just 1 minute old, from tv companies.; Wikipedia was the first with the news. That's quite an achievement.
Stallman: 11 November 2005: I gave my talk on Richard Stallman and stimulated an excellent and inspiring discussion, after which I felt I had a clear vision.; Free software is growing in popularity. One of its ideas is that you should be able freely to distribute a copyrighted work. He cites the early success of Napster, the number of users, as evidence that the ability to copy and share musical works is so popular, that it has the status of a fundamental right that 'may not be taken away'.; Microsoft is developing Vista, but seems to be struggling. I've not studied it, but I understand one of its fundamental features, developed in collaboration with Intel, is Digital Rights Management, a system that will allow copyright owners to restrict our use of copyrighted works .. online books, music, images, video. For instance, they may restrict our use to one machine, or allow us to 'rent' works for a set time after which it will expire. Clearly copying these works, assuming the system doesn't get hacked and defeated, won't be copyable.; By the time Vista is released, slated for 2007, free software will have grown further. XP will be looking rather dated against OSX and future versions of Linux. Then Vista will arrive, containing new ways to limit what we do with our computer. DRM is a feature no user has requested, it's something being imposed on us by business, taking advantage of the near monopoly that Microsoft has.; I think people will reject it. I think that will be the pivot point when people will move more and more to free software and Microsoft will start to fall. All monopolies fall. Get ready for the ride.
Pattison's rule: 11 November 2005: We were at a party and ended up sat around a barn on bales of hay, when a woman started talking to us about her problems getting the right sort of lighting for her barn conversion. It was getting her down. She didn't want tasteless chandelier type lighting, but equally didn't want anything tinny. She simply couldn't find what she wanted. I suggested Christopher Wray (ooer, is that a retro website or just really bad?), but that was dismissed with something like "too flouncy". Pattison, being in theatre, connected her with a friend who knew all about theatre lighting and had a pile of supplier catalogues waist high.; We rather felt that she wasn't considering her audience, who by and large didn't have a cat in hell's chance of getting a barn to convert and so were secretly and communally of a mind that she was bloody lucky to have such problems to whittle about. We were too nice to say so, but Ali and I got up to go.; After we left, she apparently banged on in a similar vein for another half an hour, prompting Pattison to moan about her when I next saw him. I said I'd classed her as 'southern', but Pattison had her as 'middle class'. He has a rule, which I think is rather fun. He says "middle class people talk about things, what they've got, what they're going to get, what their houses are worth, what holidays they're going to go on. Working class people talk about people, who's married who, who's died, who's got what illness, who's pregnant." I rather prefer the latter.
Being hit: 10 November 2005: Obviously beating your wife is a despicable thing and more power to the elbows of the people who campaigned to get it taken seriously.; But I only know one woman who has been hit, as it happens, by both of her husbands, and she is bloody infuriating.
Saddam pic: 9 November 2005: Isn't this an awesome picture of Saddam? I don't think people did things for him just because otherwise they might wake up one day with their knob nailed to the bedpost, I think the guy had huge charisma. In this picture, I think you can get a sense of what Saddam was like on the occasions he was nice. That's a great, close, interpersonal, loving look. Who could fail to be charmed? And if the guy giving that look had influence too, how many of us, what percentage of us, would have the strength to deny him?
Security: 9 November 2005: I haven't really followed the build up to tonights vote on the new anti-terrorism laws, but I did catch Blair at prime minister's question time last week and I disagreed with him.; What I think he said was "When you've got the [chief of police, head of MI5, whatever] saying they need these powers to protect us, we should give them what they need." Err, isn't parliament supposed to sit between us and a police state? Isn't parliament supposed to be the voice of the people? Isn't parliament supposed to consider the requests of the security forces which are always going to be for more powers (I'll bet there's never been a request from them for fewer powers) and balance them with considerations of civil liberties and freedom. Parliament is emphatically not supposed to simply sign off anything the security forces want.; It's not as if the security forces are infallible. Inevitably, inevitably innocent people will get locked up in Belmarsh for three months at least.; Where's our choice? The Tories would be even worse, they'd be baiting the security forces, trying to get them to come up with even more things they need. I can't bring myself to vote Kennedy. The Lib Dems, yes, but Kennedy just doesn't cut it. Green, I guess, is all one can do.
Size: 9 November 2005: Gah, praise the Lord I managed to sleep through last night. I still woke up at 1am, but this time it wasn't so bad and I went back to sleep. The cat didn't wake me either, so I slept through to the alarm. Today I have vigour again, good.; I can never remember my size and, thinking about what to wear at the Christmas gig, I've just placed an order for one of these and for the record, I'm a 41.5" chest, and the length thing for a t-shirt seems to be 29". That's probably most important for me, having a long body, so I've had to settle for a 44" chest to get that length.; I do have a list of groovy t-shirt ideas, I really must get my act together and set them up at Cafe Press because I really like what they do. You want examples? OK .. erm, I like Beefheart's "Everyone's coloured otherwise you wouldn't be able to see them".; There's "Fuck the bozos" from Twelve Monkeys.; I like lots of text ones too like "We ourselves have to lift the level of our community to a higher level ... make our own society beautiful so that we will be satisfied. ... We've got to change our minds about each other. We have to see each other with new eyes ... We have to come together with warmth.", Malcolm X.; "Our lives begin to end, the day we become silent about things that matter" Martin Luther King.; NaN; "Appalled by the mundane", Vivienne Westwood.; Told you it was good stuff. I get really excited about this. We can take over clothing, make our own, break out. In truth, I'd rather paint this stuff on to really bring clothing home rather than ask some American printing firm to do it for me, but, you know, it's better than Matalan.
Cold: 8 November 2005: Pah! I've had the weirdest cold. Maybe tonsillitis. Dunno, but it felt for most of last week like I'd swallowed a peanut and it was stuck in my throat. Now it's turned into a cough, like at the end of a cold. I always get a cough that can last maybe a couple of weeks, yet I've never smoked.; Anyway, it's waking me up in a coughing fit around 1am every morning, for the last three mornings actually. So I get out of bed to save disturbing Ali and come into the office. I've had a couple of hours sleep so I'm not tired, so I start messing about on the computer. I can't start proper work, too groggy, but I can do some stuff like image processing or clearing the spam from my in-tray. Three or four hours later it's 5am and I'm 2 hours off my alarm clock and 1 hour off the time the cat will wake up and start walking over my head because she's bored.; Day one of that was ok, day two was surprisingly ok, but this morning, I crashed and went back to bed till lunchtime. I feel better now, if a little bozzeyed.; So how do people with kiddies cope?; I always had the feeling that I'd want to co-operate fairly closely with other families around so that we got space to ourselves. For instance, if you're feeding one set of kids, you might as well feed four, or six while the other parents get space.; I feel like if I were a single parent in a densely populated area, I'd want to club together with say ten other parents to share the daytime care. That way I could get some space, train up, sleep, take a coffee with a friend, whatever. There must be a reason why we don't hear of that happening, it can't be that people don't think of it. Anyway, I'm not, so it's just the musings of a comfortable person about how they'd act if their life was difficult, without ever having experienced it. I'll shut up and work now shall I?
Splat!: 6 November 2005: I've started this, the story of Splat!, a band I was in in the early eighties.
Ikea: 4 November 2005: We went to Leeds' Ikea yesterday. What a bleak prospect that was. We swore we'd never go again, but Ali needed a corner office desk and lamp and that seemed the most likely place. We managed to get there at about 7pm yesterday (a Thursday).; We went to the loo at the entrance, and I swear to you there was a noose hanging from the ceiling in there (well, OK it was a good loop of rope without the necessary knot, but it looked pretty tempting to me).; First of all, the place was filthy and the products were mostly broken. We tried about five tables in the canteen before we found one we could sit at without getting stuck to. One lamp I was looking at, the aluminium tubing it was made from was not just dirty, it was filthy filthy, rolls of filth if you scrape it with your fingernail filthy. The drawer in a rolltop desk had just broken and was left like that. Many knobs and handles had fallen off. One bedside cabinet had a cupboard door that had no inner stop so the door could never really settle into place .. I've no idea whether it was supposed to be like that or not. None of the office chairs' wheels turned because they were so clagged up with dust.; We wanted some clip lights to clip to a bedhead for reading, but, as my partner said "you don't really want them to be £1.99 do you?" Cheap, flimsy, horrible.; They've changed the system for getting your goods. Only one desk actually fitted in our space, and then we realised .. they may not actually have it in stock. I read the 'how to buy' instructions and didn't understand them. You had to go to a sales desk. We were right next to an information point. Were they the same? I'd have said not and walked out never having found one, but Ali pressed on. Our desk was a big item, big items are in a different building. The assistant would place our order, we pay for it at the checkout, then we drive around to the Eternal Warehouse where our item is waiting for us.; I thought that would replace the method where you have to get your car and drive to the collection point near the checkout because they won't let you out with your trolley, but no, there's that too. So there's queueing at the canteen, queueing at the checkout, the pickup point, and then they've introduced the Eternal Warehouse which seems to be based on that other major soul-sucking experience, Argos.; They haven't got your stuff ready at all. They don't do anything about it until you arrive, so you sit with another twenty people in a fluorescent humbox with spartan benches waiting for something to happen. I read the wall posters about delivery. One showed a map with increasingly large and differently coloured radiuses from the shop. Interestingly, it reached Scarborough. Good. The other poster showed a grid of prices with columns labelled A-D, and two rows, one for orders above £750 (I think), and one for those under that value. There was no link. Does A = red? Does anyone here actually think about the user experience? A bloke announced "White?" "What colour are we?" I asked Ali. "No, that's his surname" she said.; So, having put all our small things in the car at the pickup area, along with all our other shopping, the only thing to do was to put the biggest, heaviest thing on top. Good thinking.; Ali has a theory. We are all born with a full soul, but each time we go to Ikea, a part of our soul is taken from us. When you get to the pearly gates, they check you still have enough soul left to be let through. We don't know what the threshold is until we get there. Our neighbour's never been to Ikea. He's the lucky one.