Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Frankly this picture sums up the first game of werewolf, which surprise surprise we didn't finish. Although to be fair we did get in some cracking games the next day in the lobby. A very good one where me and Gemma killed off the village in no time, and the other where it came down to 3 people and I could have saved the game for another round by healing myself. But instead I choose to heal who I trusted and I ended up healing the werewolf while I got killed off.
Everythings been great, but I sometimes noticed my laptop getting slow and sometimes hanging. I looked into it and it came down to two things. One Flash is still badly written for gnu/Linux and kills the browser if loading a large video or attempting to use the webcam. But this seems to only effect the browser environment, so sometimes I need to force kill firefox. Number two is Fuse/3g, which allows Unix operating systems to read and write ntfs formatted file systems. This was great at the start but I noticed Fuse will be eating all my CPU resources. So I put out a pled for somes software like Partition Magic which can convert a drive not just format. Some advice came back, but generally people said copy the whole drive somewhere then format it and put it back.
So today I did using a spare 100gig hard drive and the Ubuntu live CD. It all went to plan but a couple of points to remember! Chmod all the files to match nobody:nobody so later on you can access the files and change the mod to yourself. As default Fuse makes files on a ntfs disk root:root. This is fine till you move them to a ext3 disk and those permissions take affect for real. Also check the boot flag is assigned to the correct drive.
So now with NTFS gone, its goodbye Windows for good now.
One such example hit me when Katie Lips (what a lovely name for a lovely woman) demoed Treasuremytext. Now I've come across this site a couple of times actually though Katie but never really been that impressed. I've always had windows mobile phones, so copying text messages off is as simple as syncing with outlook, turning into notes or copying and pasting. But at BarCampLeeds2, I started thinking about all those people who use those phones which don't allow such things. For example is it possible to save a thread of conversation off a iphone? It maybe even possible but how easy is it? Well services like treasuremytext are part of the data accessiblity landscape, making your data portable.
This should really be the default state of most of the applications/services we use right? Taking something untangable into something tangable which you can maybe takeaway.
Right this moment I'm having trouble with Tesco online shopping. Me and Sarah use to use the same account and so the recommendations and previously bought shopping baskets are for a couple not a single guy. Ideally there would be some APML output and input, so I could remove items and adjust the preferences (geez think of shopping list as concepts instead of items of food) then feed it back into Tesco or one of the rivials who should be looking for my online business. Hey even, I could feed the APML into a broker/comparison site which would work out what my monthly average would be if I use another supermarket. And this is so all do able, even Tesco supply a download of there prices and other information weekly (they may even support a API by now).
