With some relief, I have just reached the last page of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I would love to say that I have finished but there is still a lot I think that I did not take in. Some of the relief comes from the fact that it has taken me quite some time to read this. This slowness is partly due to my reading speed and partly due to the content (There was also a small break of a year or so from reading it) There where pages in the book that I had to read two or three times over and then spend a while digesting while other chapters seemed to be more of a build up to a single point. I will not try to describe the book or review it as I don't think that I am quite up to that. All I will say is that you should read it and ask your own questions about the quality in your life.

The second reason for the relief is to finally get to find out about the three people involved in the book, the narrator and his son. For most of the book I was drawn in wanting to know more about them but only in the final few chapters did it all really start to fit into place. It has been a challenge at times to keep going but I did get very attached to the people and so reading about his philosophical ideas, while quite hard work, gave a very interesting insight.

I am going to ponder on this book for some time. Thanks Martin for lending me this fine read.

There is a Reunion for Colchester Royal grammar school boys of 1949 for those that may be interested. 60 years ago.

From a time when a boy was required to have 3 bath towels (Turkish), 12 handkerchiefs, and 2 pairs of stockings.

Just upping the chance of people finding it!

Please remember that Google search statistics are not a measure of the truth but how many people are writing about something on the web. Comparing the number of hits for "successful mergers" with "failed mergers" just proves at best that more people like writing about the number of failed mergers and does not give you a ratio of failures to successes. ( But I won't be expressing that to the person sitting next to me on the train.)

As I mentioned in my last post there is a lot of pressure at the moment to get Linux to boot up as fast as possible. This seems like such a simple task at the outset. Stop all the unneeded stuff from stating and do it all in parallel but it is not as simple as that.

The chaps that got the EEEPC to boot in five seconds did some mighty hacks to get to that stage. They created a custom kernel that also included patches to streamline the boot process. Starting the bear minimum that the EEEPC may need before starting X windows and then taking the user straight to the desktop, logged in and starting the screen saver so that the system could continue to settle in the background. I like their logic. They set a target of five seconds and pulled out all the stops to make it happen. Now there are some problems with this approach and these give a clue to the reason why the current boot process is so slow.

The current linux boot process can cope in nearly every situation. From a regular desktop that has it's disks on a local controller the type of which is not important as it will load the correct driver. To large servers with complex disk arrays and network services to start. It can boot if there are no local disks but the system is mounted over the network. After the inital boot it can load drivers for all your devices such as mouse, graphics card, networking or USB stapler. Then it starts up services that your systems needs to go about it's business be that something to manage the networking or notice when you plug in a USB drive, or your printing services.

I do like the flexibility that is gained from such a dynamic boot cycle but if you are trying to get to the desktop as fast as possible then it does tend to slow things down a little. It would be nice if there was a boot option for optimised or full boot. So for the most part it tries to speed up the boot cycle at every boot. When it is up and running and can know what devices it has then only load those and don't try and guess next time. If the ssh server is rarely used then why not delay it stating till the disks have gone quiet? Do we need to start networking right at the offset if there are no nfs mounts?All these little speed ups can be applied as the system learns what is best then if you have a problem you can hit the backout button or the full boot button to reset things if you have a new device.

There is a big push at the moment to get the boot time for Linux down to a reasonable level. I think that the aim for Ubuntu's next release is 21 seconds which will be good if they can do it but not as quick as the three or four that it takes my laptop to recover from suspend to RAM.

I have not really used suspend to RAM a lot before always preferring to suspend to disk to conserve as much battery as possible. That was until a couple of weeks ago when I left my laptop in suspend to RAM mode to go out, it does that automatically when I shut the lid, and then did not come back to it till the next day. I thought that I had left it on charge but it turns out I had switched off the 4-way with it plugged in. Fully expecting the battery to be as flat as a pancake I just checked the battery before turning the power back on. To my surprise it was fine, loads of juice left. From that moment on I don't think I have suspended to disk since. My uptime now stands at 7 days.

This is the way to do it. I just wish that the laptop makers would look at this as a viable alternative and do the work to make this happend without all the hacks that are required today. Another nice thing would be if they provided a deep sleep function where it could write the data to a bit of Flash memory or disk after it has got down to say 10% battery so that if the battery does go flat the next boot could be more like a hibernate to disk recovery. Another good function might be to be able to say after 12hrs on suspend to ram, push the contents to disk for hibernation and power off.

My only doubt is what are the implications of taking the laptop on my bike while suspended. So far all has been okay but that may be more luck than judgement. My understanding is that it is just keeping the RAM refreshing and everything else is shut off so in that respect it should be not much different to my phone.

So a big thank you to all the people who have made the suspend to RAM "Just Work"(TM) in Linux.

I have just uploaded a new version of the UK train timetable Ubiquity script that I wrote. This one has station suggestion and uses the datejs library to parse the dates. Just for those leaving from Marks Tey I have added a "to" separator for the stations and an "at" for the time.

Sugar by choffee on Zooomr
Small Cones by choffee on Zooomr
Nokia N800 by choffee on Zooomr
N800 eye. by choffee on Zooomr
N800 Spots by choffee on Zooomr

I had a go with the extension tube on my camera the other day and these are the results. No great masterpieces but quite interesting. There where a lot of misses to go with even this lot but I am getting used to the tiny depth of field and manual focus combo.

Time for an upgrade. I have been using the Nokia 6120c as my main phone now for nearly a year and it has been a mixed blessing. The camera is useless, the memory is limited, the speaker turns off at random points and you have to reboot to get it back, it gets confused and won't make a data connection on times. On the good side it is running S60 which is a pretty nice OS. It may look a little dated next to an iPhone but I quite like it.

I have been looking at reviews of all the new phones that have been coming out and I think that the N85 is one of Nokia's best so far. I can't wait to see how the N97 turns out but for now the N85 is the one to get.

So I brought a N82.

A couple of reasons drew me that way. The first was cost. You can get a N82 for less than £170 on ebay while the N85 is still over £300. The second and this was the main one for me, it has a Xeon flash. I have been really annoyed with the 6120c camera for some time now so I think that I wanted the best camera I could on the next phone.

I decided some time ago that I would get another S60 phone as I really like the OS and the community that it has. Nokia are doing great things with their beta labs and most mobile applications that create.

Right now I have the following running and in RAM with still 40Mb free.

All that and I still have 50Mb of RAM free for things like the light saber that is controlled by the way you move the phone, tetris, frozen bubble with phone movement support, twitter apps if you don't like fring to handle that and many other apps that I have not mentioned here.

It's got GPS built in and it pretty quick taking only a few seconds to pick up a signal and 10 or so to get a fix. I would imagine this would be a little slower if you don't have internet access for it to get the A-GPS info. I had some fun with Nokia maps the other day which is pretty good for giving driving directions. I like the fact that I can use Google Maps and it's mega powerful local search to find somewhere, save that as a favorite in google maps then load Nokia maps and have it available to navigate to. I probably won't pay Nokia for Driving directions when my trial runs out in three months but I shall try to use it as much as possible until then.

The N82 does have some bad points. I think that I have mentioned before that I don't like the headphones at the top because as you get the phone out of your pocket or bag it is always up the wrong way. It does have the same charger as other modern Nokia phones but the USB connector is some crappy micro version that is just a tiny little bit smaller than the ones that everybody else uses. Why would they do that? The 3G reception is still a bit flakey but I think that is a general problem with three in some areas as the change over to 2G is slow and drawn out. This is probably not helped by my office being clad in metal and having generally poor phone reception.

Generally it all works better on the N82 than the 6120c. A lot of the little niggles are gone. I can mount it as USB drive and manage music and podcasts without having to shutdown the whole phone. I can install loads of apps in the main memory without running out of space. I can run a lot of those apps at one time and not struggle for memory.

There is loads more to talk about but for now I will leave it there. There are loads of other reviews of this phone on the web so I won't add to that noise a great deal. I may post some more on the apps that I like. Nokia is struggling to get an app store in the same way the iPhone does but there are some really good apps out there. You just have to look for them.

Did I mention that it can make phone calls as well?

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Playing with my new macro extension tube for my camera ( some photos to upload as soon as I get some time!), I have had to focus manually as there is no controls passed through to the lens. In the end I have found it easiest to set the focus to infinity and adjust either the zoom or the position on the object to get the best focus. What it has shown me is that the viewfinder is quite small, which I had not had a problem with up till now, and also it it quite difficult to focus.

Back in the day my old Pentax film camera had a manual focus and to help with that it had a bit in the middle of the viewfinder that split the image slightly so that you could tell that if the image was lined up correctly it was also in focus. Really simple and quick to get the correct focus.

I am also getting used to how much my tripod flexes when I have adjusted it to the right place. With the weight of the 70-200mm lens and the extender the end of the lens drops by just a little after I have set it using the tripod and when you take into account this is macro that can make quite a difference. It's quite a skill to set the tripod a little higher and let the lens fall to the correct place but I am getting better. That and moving the subject can be simpler!

It is funny how quickly you get used to the extra features offered by git. I have just made a change, while on the train, to a set of source code that is held in subversion. It's only a small change but I want to record it with a description and move on now to do something else. With git I would just do that but with subversion I have to wait till I can get access to the server again to make that commit. Allowing you to make small distinct changes to your code and commit that and then only when you have a full set of changes ready push those upstream is a real advantage in git. I have got quite used to thinking about my changes as a set of patches rather than changes to some master repository. Time to do some more reading into git-svn.