Recently, the BBCs well renowned Andrew Marr said stuff about amateur writers and people that post literally (literally literally) anything on the bountiful resource, the Internet.

I noticed this on Twitter, when something trends on the right side of the screen. Often it’s full of idiots believing that they’re opinion is well backed and cited, even through it’s obviously not. Things like current affairs, bad chart music, MPs, Justin Bieber and X-factor. From this sample of Twitter trends you can understand why the more intellectual discussions loose out.

It’s from here, the glorious Twitter trending topics, where I found the most recent hate for a guy involved with politics, Mr Marr.

I have to be honest here, I have the opinion that the Internet is less bountiful, more a giant, shit-filled spaghetti bowl of rambling, miss-information, spam, porn, bullshit and really bad marketing, propped up by a load of nut-jobs with either a free-and-open-truly-fucking-useless approach or money-money-money-money-kill-small-innocent-children-to-get-it approach. The subject of Andrew Marr being the latest turd in the giant toilet bowl that is the Internet.

He made the following comments, according to the beautiful Guardian web-site, who also sounded a bit angry about it (but they’re sticking up for the people, right?):

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and rating. They are very angry people.

Sounds about right to me.

My brothers machine is for mindless entertainment. There’s one in the garage that I use to record and mix demos for bands that I’m in. Sometimes I’ll build web-sites if I’ve got any personal work on, be it for cash or my own perverted projects. This machine only get’s updated once a year though, because I won’t use it during winter. There isn’t any heating in the garage and I live in England.

Here’s a little fact, I’ve named them after Pokémon. Not just because I’m sad or I have a compulsion to name inanimate objects, but because they need to be referenced as separate machines when I’m setting the network up. Okay, I’ll admit, it’s a pure geek indulgence. Please don’t judge me.

My brother’s machine took all of five-minutes to install, followed by about a month to configure. Without the exaggeration, that’s about 3 hours to install and two-days of back-and-forth headless-ness to get it to work the way I like it to be.

The garage machine was a different kettle of fish. On my brothers machine I install a desktop version of Ubuntu, because it’s a desktop computer. On the other one, a version called Ubuntu Studio, for reasons I won’t patronise you with. For a start my DVD disc didn’t work, so I tried to install the desktop version and upgrade. Stupidest decision ever. It took about a week of messing around for me to give up (I’m not even joking here). I’ll put a brief geek synopsis under the graphic explaining why.

I burnt another copy and it installed fine. I say fine, it wasn’t what I expected, because it was supposed to install a “real-time” version of Linux, not a “generic” version. Why do I need it to be real-time? Because I’m recording audio, and this has to happen first and fast when the computer does it’s thing. The machine isn’t allowed to mess around prioritising YouTube videos or Chris Moyles’ whining from Radio 1 on the BBC iPlayer. It needs to be focused on capturing and recording all the audio I pump into it without jittering and jolting, all because someone sent me a message on Facebook for example. So to sumarise, Linux generic: good for being kept entertained by The Sims; Linux real-time: good for recording without Facebook notification alerts ruining a take.

There’s a messy reason why the latest Lucid Lynx version of Ubuntu Studio doesn’t come in real-time. I’m not really sure what it is, but it’s something to with the release schedule of Ubuntu being out of sync with the guys that make the real-time kernel. Okay, this post has claimed too many geek points now…

So… I’ve spent a lot of time staring at a blue screen with a progress bar on it. Because it takes so long, I have to do things to keep me alive, like move away and eat and drink occasionally, and sometimes sleep. Occasionally I pop back to check on the progress. To call it tedious is being very kind. Words can’t express the joy when it all ends.

So onto the geek list. I encountered a lot of problems. There are always niggles and the like that I can easily live without fixing. The issues were problematic. They either got side-stepped or conquered.

1. I couldn’t upgrade the repos off of the DVD when I wanted to update Ubuntu with the ubuntustudio-desktop package. It wouldn’t happen. I ended up reluctantly downloading gigabytes of data I already had because it wanted to use the Internet.
2. The drivers did work (I’m using nVidia). The monitor didn’t. I assume this is a problem with the drivers or the kernel. Windows was kind enough to lend be a raw EDID file, and I pointed X.org at that instead, thanks to the help of this Ubuntu Forums thread. Worked nicely.
3. I still have to use Windows NDIS drivers and a tedious unnecessary tutorial demonstrating how to get my Broadcom wireless card working under the NDIS-wrapper. The tutorial is very good. Without it I don’t think I’d have ever gotten online with Ubuntu.
4. Once I’d downloaded and installed ubuntustudio-desktop, ubuntustudio-audio and linux-rt I couldn’t get any of my audio applications, like Ardour and JACK, working. They crashed the entire desktop. It was infuriating.
5. After wiping and starting again with another disc of Ubuntu Studio, I bricked it by trying to install the RT kernel. So I had to do it AGAIN!

I’m now left with Ubuntu Studio Lucid Lynx, without a real-time kernel, quite bare and not configured because I haven’t had enough counseling to take another shot at it. I’ve read around about low-latency kernels and the like with the latest version of Linux that apparently work. I may give these a go. But when I see things like “incompatible with nVidia” or “compile from source” I start cutting my wrists with razor blades.

Well, I’ve spent all my money this month and all my close friends are away on holiday. I need this machine working because I’ve got some demos to finish for a band. All I have to do now is take a deep breath, start again and get on with it. Okay, here goes…

So there’s a few aims here. Firstly, to communicate events I want to share with the public. Honestly, this doesn’t cover a lot at the moment. Not because I don’t get out much, but because I’d rather not share! Or because I’m too lazy to write the stuff up. Secondly it’s for when I want to rant, assist or review. Say how I do things and share my opinions with the aim of helping others to make their own minds up, be it music or web-sites or something else vaguely interesting. But also it’s an SEO blog. This relates to search engines. Putting more content on my blog makes it rank higher because it attracts more people from a variety of fields. Simple!

As I can see at the minute there are a few issues making the above effective. I don’t have many followers! Now I’m getting a fair few hits from the Ubuntu comunity (where I participate occasionly) and a few folks from Facebooks and King Brick, but not much interaction. I can tell this blog gets looked at from the statistics.

But that isn’t one of my main aims! I wan’t an archive of my outings, put reviews up for a few geeks and musicians but mainly so I can reference them. I’m quite a self-centred person ;)

The SEO bit is working well. My only issue is having it on the King Brick domain. That means King Brick ranks in Google for things like Linux and Firefox.

What’s the plan Batman?

Potentially get a new domain. That requires effort and money so I probably won’t bother. Plus the band is the main thing I want to big up! Talking about geeking and web-design doesn’t relate at-all to my band, but it’s one of my fortes so I want it to! I want to set up a personal brand for my music and digital musings. It’s something to do right? :P

One way to counter all this is to split the categories up into almost seperate blogs. At the minute stuff bleeds into each other too much. So one article will explain about a wicked band I saw, the next about JSON and AJAX management and the next about how much I like the weather today.

So I’ll re-brand, re-skin and re-organise. That’s the plan! :)

I’ll let my profile on my family’s website introduce this one [warning: very outdated information can be found on this page - I'm talking about 6 years out here!].

John Christopher Nigel Gutteridge was born September 26 1988 5:30am. [...]. After a long debate by the family he was named John but informally called Jack.

My actual name is John. If I’m being formal, I’ll use John. So at work, my colleagues call me John for example. If I’m talking to my bank, registering something (you get the idea :P).

So let me set this straight, I’m called Jack but my actual name is John, right? My parents called me Jack, my family called me Jack, my friend called me Jack. Simple, right?

This used to prove very confusing to pupils in the same class as me back in the day. In Primary School it was okay, because I only had to explain the situation to one teacher a year. However, by Secondary School and into College I was having to explain myself to a tutor about once a week.

My fellow learners would be amazed and bewildered by this two-named freak :P

But it’s completely justified! All these morons thought I had some weird naming complex. Even the Wikipedia article on “Jack” agrees with me:

In English it is the diminutive form of the name John [...]

It was used back in the day (I’m talking around the Great War here) by a father called John calling his son John, but to avoid confusion would use the nickname Jack. Yeah?

So there! Get over it :P

Image source: BBC News Magazine – 7 questions on baby names

Before I would use Apache2 with mod_rewrite using a lengthy variation of this script:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET (.*).php HTTP
RewriteRule (.*).php$ $1 [R=301]
...

At the end I would hide server side files that I wouldn’t want accessible from the outside, such as templates and “spit out” scripts. The actual script I used would search for a PHP file with the requested name in it, and if it existed would spit it out else throwing up a 404.

I’ve thought of doing things differently this time around. I’m gonna do this – just use extensionless files. So for example, /httpdocs/home is now a PHP file that Apache will spit out to the user as HTML parsed from PHP. I just need to tell Apache this. The above code can be changed to this:

DefaultType application/x-httpd-php
...

I’d still need to hide some files but this approach means I don’t have to have as many files to catch the queries. I’ll have the content in the extensionless file with an include to the main script. That catches the content and brings in the templates.

On a different note

When I next get time I’m going to convert a Mac Mini into an Ubuntu server. I’m not sure if it’s PPC yet so it could be interesting. Currently I’m testing everything on the same machine I’m writing the stuff on, an old P4 Presario machine with Ubuntu Studio Jaunty on it, having no problems.

With a dedicated machine I could use another PC in the house, say a Windows one, SSH in and do my thing. I’ll be keeping things consistent. An actual testing server has many more advantages.

I’m busy with my band at the minute. Should really blog more about gigs and bands. Ah well, maybe soon ;-)

I’ve never had a problem with Windows at all and I absolutley love it, but I’m really taken by the ideas behind Linux. If I can also legally run an OS and a DAW for free how could I not? Another factor is the element of control. At first the thought of building an OS from various components seemed bollocks to me but after adding bits on and taking bits off it gives a sense of control you just can’t get in Windows.

A while back I tried out openSUSE 10.3 with KDE and Debian Etch with GNOME and wanted to fall in love so badly. I found the compatability a big problem as drivers very rarley “just worked”. I had to give up because I couldn’t get it to connect to the Internet without lugging my PC upstairs and plugging it into the router and sound and graphics just weren’t working.

This time around I had an idea of what I wanted an OS to do – music recording and production and web design. I had a more educated surf around and through my good mate Joe Barker was encouraged to use Ubuntu. This was around the time that Jaunty, versions 9.04 was about to make a release.

I’ve always had reservations about Ubuntu. Isn’t it just Debian for children? It’s always come across and whiney and too easy to use. But now with my previous Linux experience I knew this couldn’t be :-P

So I tested Jaunty in VirtualBox, got all impressed and decided I was gonna do it. Another quick surf around brought me to Ubuntu Studio. The distribution looked ideal for my wants. I got as far as 800×600 with no wireless. I persisted.

Within a week I had my wireless working and resolution back. The resolution looked at the monitors EDID and I was using an old LCD TV that reported it’s native was 800×600. In Windows it’s just a matter of un-ticking “Hide modes that this monitor cannot display” and I tried hard to get the same thing here. It didn’t happen so I found a 1280×1024 TFT lying around. The Nvidia graphics driver wasn’t working and I tried hard again to fix it with no sucess.

My first thoughts are this – man it’s ugly! I have to dedicate a good proportion of my life to getting it working and it looks like this? :-? It’s free so I shouldn’t expect professional artwork or a consistent GUI. It does not compare asthetically or ergenomically to Windows in the slightest. The fonts are hideous beyond words.

One thing has to be said though – the community support is beyond emense. It’s honestly breath-taking. I’m able to diagnose my problems sometimes down to the exact detail using Google. The Ubuntu forums is full of litterally thousands of enthusiasts helping each other out. Ubuntu has a lot to boast about here and it’s inspired me to keep going.

I’ve persisted since and here’s a list of issues I’ve solved:

• Understanding NDIS wireless connection
• Coming to terms with EDID
• Making the fonts look a lot better
• Working with websites
• Recording and mastering
• Getting nVidia drivers working

I’m glad I’ve persisted. Now that everything works I couldn’t be happier. Compiz makes me smile a lot. I’m happily running it day to day without much to gripe about. It does what I wanted. I’ve even contributed back to the community :-)

I can’t recommend Linux if you’re not tech savvy or not looking to put a lot of effort into getting things working. It’s made me appreciate Windows a hell of a lot more. If you want astonishing results for relativley small effort and you know your PHP from your KDE then you should be using Linux today. Damn it’s so good.

Reasons for doing so? Er, fancied a change really (yeah, bored). I want to be able to control every pixel of output, and I can’t be arsed to hack Blogger to do so when I can just hack WordPress with greater ease. It’s easier to control because I can dig and hack every line of PHP until I get what I want. Okay I admit it hasn’t been easy. The way WordPress manages URLs is beyond me. But overall I can control all of the front-end output and use this beautiful back-end. What more does a man need?

I’m fully aware I can control the domain or URL where Blogger sits. I’ve done it before with my band’s blog. That wasn’t my only reason for moving, even though changing URLs are a good reason not to. Now I’m gonna have to redirect everything. Oh joy!

So reset your bookmarks. The new address is http://www.kingbrick.co.uk/madnessjack/ but it’s probably not ready yet! (As of April 3 it’s looking pretty bare…)

As you may notice, it’s on my band’s site. I’m not paying extra for a domain name. I can’t be arsed to sort out how to share the hosting across it either. I’m sure it’s not hard. Sure, if (or probably when) I set up my own domain, I’ll probably move it over again. We’ll see…

And as for technology and using my own server etc I really couldn’t care. 34sp.com do a great job of hosting LAMP websites. One day when I’m so bored and lonely then I might just go ahead and set one up, or hire one out, or VPS or whatever. For the moment, it’s not an issue. I don’t care for my own server.

If by now you’re still reading this on Blogger be sure to check out the new address, because this one’s gonna be gathering dust!