...they were invisible.

Secret Diary of a Software Pirate

2011-07-26T19:57:00.001+01:00

“My name is James and I was a software pirate.”

I have been legal for five days now, it has been difficult but I have thrown out all the counterfeit software, wiped my drive clean and purged my life of the demons of illegally obtained applications. This is the story of my cleansing.

About five years ago I had my first brush with the Microsoft legal juggernaut when the Windows Genuine Advantage updates caught me with a counterfeit copy of Windows XP. In disgrace I was shunted to a Microsoft website where I was pleasantly but firmly presented the opportunity to right my wrongs and lay out some actual money on a genuine copy of XP. This particular shot across my bow caught my attention and I reached for my credit card. I must say though that it was not the fear of getting caught that caused me to lower my skull & crossbones and hand over my pieces of eight, it was more a sense of respect since the alerts were so polite in implying that I was most likely a victim of software counterfeiting; if only the real police were so understanding.

Some years down the line when Vista hit the shelves I knew I had to have it (despite the bad press), but I didn’t fancy going through the rigmarole of downloading potentially virus riddled cracked copies and then playing cat and mouse with the Windows Updates so I went straight for the plunge and bought the copy outright with a strong sense of satisfaction.

Unfortunately when Windows 7 came along I was not in the same position, you see my wife is pregnant with our first child so all spending on anything that is not directly baby related has been cut. Despite my efforts to convince my wife that a happy baby is one whose parents are running the latest version of Windows I was not appeased and the wonders of 7 were denied me.

Or were they?

For a good few months I was happily and legally running the public beta testing version of W7 on both my PC and laptop, but that could never last. I needed a version that I could run indefinitely, so one night I snapped and fell back into old habits. I pointed my browser towards the seedy underbelly of the internet where you can get hold of anything, ask no questions and I’ll tell no lies and so on. One dodgy 4gig download and an evening of guilt-ridden installation and I had a fully functioning copy of Windows 7 running smooth as silk on my PC, but could I live with myself?

Pangs of guilt would wake me in my sleep as the computer cried out from behind the closed office door, dirty from the illicit garments it was being forced to flaunt. Then came the day I had been dreading; the Royal Navy cannons were in range of my Jolly Roger once more.

“This copy of Windows is not genuine”

There I was, smoking gun and blood-stained fingers, I had fallen down into the very pits of computing hell and violated my PC and my laptop, and more importantly risked fines and prosecution which I could very much do without.

So with my head firmly in my hands I repented and removed the illicit software from my sullied machines, but what should I replace it with? Well I had two options, option one was to go back to my legal copy of Vista, and option two was look for a freely available legal alternative. In the end I took both options, installing Ubuntu onto my laptop and putting the PC back to Vista.

Once I had finished installing Vista I was left with another dilemma; you see I didn’t exactly own the copy of Office that I was using prior to installing the 2010 beta version, and I saw no value in reinstalling that since I knew I could never buy the full license once the evaluation period ended, so what could I use? I concluded that when I am using the computer at home I am not exactly an Excel or Word power-user; I create spreadsheets to organise the monthly outgoings and write the occasional pointless letter to supermarkets but I could certainly live without some of the more advanced features of Office so long as I could find something that would open and save Office files.

The answer was to be found while I was installing Ubuntu, you see it comes pre-packaged with OpenOffice, and without wanting to make this a long winded advertisement for said software suite, it is very good at replicating the basic and intermediate features of Office for the home user.

So now I have legally obtained Windows on my PC, legally free Ubuntu on my laptop, which is also now running a virtual copy of Windows XP which I legally purchased previously, and I also have legal open-source software alternatives to Office, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and all the other premium packages I thought I couldn’t live without. The funny thing is, some of these are better than their £800 premium alternatives.

“My name is James and I am clean.”

UPDATE:

This is actually a repost of a blog I wrote and published last year, but the pictures were lost somehow so I found this copy on my trusty Windows Live Writer and recovered the images. In case you are wondering, I now own a fully licensing copy of Windows 7 and managed to get Office 2010 through a special license through work so I am well up to date (and still legal!).

In case you are interested in the story of how I came to get Windows 7, have a look at this Flickr album.

Oh dear… where have my pictures gone?

2011-06-08T22:36:00.001+01:00

So it seems all my images from my older blogs have vanished. This is likely to be something I have done wrong so I won’t go on about it. My apologies to my loyal followers, here is a token photo to keep things going around here.

To those who have noticed that this is one of my first blogs in over a year, I will be back….

My First Retro Photo of the Week

2011-06-07T15:50:00.002+01:00

For the first in my new series, here is a retro photo of the view from the balcony when we were on holiday in Scotland.

From Windows to Ubuntu – Part Three – Going Wireless

2010-03-11T21:02:00.001Z

In case you haven’t already read them then may I suggest starting with parts one and two of my journey from the shackles of Windows to the promise land of Linux and Ubuntu. To recap my old laptop is struggling to function with any recent version of Windows and rather than retire it completely I decided I should give Linux a try to see if it could breathe some life back into the old girl.

So far I have managed to get the latest version of Ubuntu downloaded and fully installed on the laptop all in a single night without too many problems. The only basic function I haven’t gotten to work yet is the wireless adapter; currently the laptop is plugged into the router which is far from ideal.

The reason I am devoting an entire entry to this one problem is because it highlights the potential issue that has caused me to have reservations about making the switch to Linux from something as safe as Windows. With Windows you can always be pretty confident that as long as your hardware was made in roughly the same decade as the version of Windows you are running there should be a driver just a quick trip to the manufacturer's website away. With Linux, there is no such certainty.

As far as my wireless adapter goes, thus far I have managed to establish that it is not recognised by Ubuntu and of course the HP website does not offer any Linux drivers, in fact the most up to date drivers it has are for XP.

Is this HP saying their laptop couldn’t handle anything beyond XP?

After extensive web research I establish that I need a utility called Ndiswrapper which as far as I can tell converts a Windows driver into a Linux compatible driver; very handy but not very 'new user’ friendly. The instructions suggest downloading the Windows drivers, installing ndiswrapper by copying out several lines of cryptic terminal code (into the terminal that it assumed I knew about) and then hoping that the even more cryptic output meant that this utility had installed. At least there was no UAC to deal with, that was pleasant.

Once I had ndiswrapper installed I moved onto extracting the drivers from the archive file that HP had given me. I double-click on the .exe file as I would in Windows, and I get this:

Now this to me looks like I’m trying to open an application file with the equivalent of WinZIP, but since I couldn’t find any way to tell it to run it as an executable, I was again stuck. Luckily I still have my trusty desktop PC running Windows, so I download the driver file onto that, run the .exe, extract the driver files and move them onto the laptop.

At this point it is becoming more obvious that I am not using Windows anymore. I didn’t expect it to be exactly like Windows, in fact I was hoping that it would be very different so that I get a new experience, but I guess there are certain underlying basics that I thought would be similar; sort of like when you get a different type of car, the pedals are always in the same place.

Anyway back the the story, I now have driver files on my laptop, ndisthingywhatsit installed and just a few more lines of nonsense to type into a terminal window and I should be ready and roaming. Indeed after some time and quite a bit of confusion and hair pulling I actually did get the drivers working, but I was left with the feeling that I really could have done that much easier in Windows and was starting to wonder if this was par for the course, after all I still have a printer, scanner and memory card reader to get working.

I think that means something is finished.

Based on this experience I get the impression that Linux and Ubuntu are pretty good at setting things up themselves, which means if doesn’t work instantly in Ubuntu then there is no easy way to set it up and it’s going to take an awful long time to get it going manually.

If you found this article because you have a similar problem then I seriously recommend these instructions. Just remember that when it asks you to type something and you don’t know where you are supposed to type it, you probably need the Terminal (Applications > Accessories).

In some respects Ubuntu is reminding me of Windows 3.1, mostly the dependency it seems to have on the command line in the same way DOS was always pulling the strings behind Windows’ icons. This may not be the best time to draw conclusions since I’m still pretty frustrated by the wireless experience, but at the moment I feel that the Ubuntu experience isn’t as slick as Windows, certainly not Windows 7 which is a beautiful operating system (from a non-programmer’s perspective at least). I get the impression that so much emphasis is put on allowing you to change every little detail to taste that you spend your entire time setting it up and getting nothing productive done.

Still, it’s early days. I shall now continue on with my next objective which was originally to find a replacement to my standard applications, but now I feel like I should not only replace the originals, but find something better.

More to come soon.

From Windows to Ubuntu – Part Two - Installation

2010-03-10T22:35:00.001Z

So, the decision has been made, I’m moving the laptop from Windows 7 to Ubuntu.

The beginning of Windows’ end!

The first clear and distinct advantage that any version of Linux offers over any version of Windows is that once the decision is made, you can get started on the installation that very evening, and crucially the credit card does not need to leave the wallet. Linux is Open Source which means it is built by a worldwide community and is available for all to use free of charge.

So that is certainly Ubuntu 1 – Windows 0.

So about 20 minutes has now gone by, I have downloaded the latest release of Ubuntu and burned it onto a CD (not a DVD like Windows requires) and I have checked my laptop for valuable files and moved them onto my PC. I am now ready to get installing.

Interestingly it gives you the option to run the system on your computer without actually installing, so if you are unsure before you commit then you can try it out. I did take this option but soon realised it was pointless since I was trying to establish whether it would improve performance of the laptop, clearly running it from the CD would not be a good indicator of that.

So I moved quickly onto installing for real. I opted not to take the option of keeping Windows in a dual-boot arrangement, instead choosing to completely wipe Windows from existence in order to maximise my limited hard drive resources, although as an afterthought I should have given the dual-boot option more consideration as I now think that it would have been a good test should I decide to set one up later on the desktop PC. Anyway, on with the installation…

Success!

So the first thing I noticed about the installation was how quick and painless it was, just a couple of easy questions and off it went, hopefully this is a sign of things to come. I also notice that upon installation not only do all the basic functions of the laptop appear to be working fine, including the trackpad, but I also have a full compliment of free applications ready and waiting. A quick glance through the ‘Applications’ menu and it seems I am covered for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations by Open Office, I have Gimp for graphics and a couple of image viewers and music & video players, an email client and of course my trusty Firefox is ready and waiting to serve up the Internet.

This all looks very promising, although I recall Microsoft getting into trouble for doing this very thing with Internet Explorer so they should be careful!

My first impressions are that despite the Brown & Orange colour scheme which I’m pretty sure I can change, this looks good. Simple, de-cluttered, and everything I need seems to be there.

Problem Number One!

It was only a matter of time before something cropped up that was less straight forward. I dive head-first into Firefox and get nothing, just an error that it isn’t connected.

“Ah yes” I remember, “wireless not yet set up”.

When I installed Windows 7 on the laptop it wasn’t able to detect the wireless adapter and I had to hunt around online to find the drivers to install manually. I guess I shouldn’t expect Ubuntu to have been any better at this, but it would have been another plus point on it’s side if it had.

So it’s come to this!

So out comes the network cable and off we go. The internet is up and running now that I am hard-wired, and to my surprise so is the home network as I can now see my main PC and all it’s shared folders. This took ages to get going on the Windows PC!

What happened next with setting up the wireless adapter is a whole other story to which I shall devote a separate entry. For now here are my first impressions:

It’s not as slick as Windows 7- they really did a good job getting 7 looking and feeling great, I don’t think Ubuntu is quite there yet.
While not as sharp looking as Windows the look and feel certainly looks to be much more adaptable, so with enough time I could get it looking and feeling better.
Copying files seems better than Windows. It bunches multiple copy activities together into a single window (see below) rather than filling the screen with little copy status windows, much more organised.

I managed to get rid of the orange & brown but still a long way to go!

The laptop is much less noisy with Ubuntu as it was with Windows. Recently the backup fan has been running at full speed constantly, whereas now on Ubuntu it is pretty much quiet. The leads me to think that it is not having to work so hard, another plus for Ubuntu.
I don’t think this is as user friendly as Windows. Despite the helpful UI I still found myself having to look up reference documents online or draw upon my long unused DOS command knowledge.

So the basics of installation is now done, so far so good. Next step is to get it working fully, and that means getting the wireless working!

My thrilling story about getting the wireless working will be coming soon!

From Windows to Ubuntu – Part One – The Decision

2010-03-09T20:03:00.005Z

Alas, my poor laptop- 6 years is a lifetime for technology. As my trusty HP notebook struggles into it’s autumn years the signs of aging are becoming very apparent. The battery is now only good for temporary life-support while I move between rooms, the memory has been upgraded to the max, modern hard drives are incompatible and compatible drives cost more than a new laptop. Basically it has had all the plastic surgery that is reasonably possible and now it needs to take it easy if it wants to see another Christmas.

I tried upgrading it from Windows XP to the latest Windows 7 (Vista just refused to install claiming the laptop wouldn’t be able to manage) but even the latest and greatest Windows seems to be lagging and gives my poor old ‘top a 1.0 in the experience test.

So what else is there?

Well, some would have us believe that Linux is the way to breath new life into an old machine. Allegedly Linux based operating systems a much less resource intensive and will run much more comfortably than the clear market leader. I intend to find out!

To clarify before we begin, I have never used Linux, at least not intentionally. Nobody has ever been able to convince me that it is worth my time installing over Windows. I know people will say that it is much more customisable than Windows and can be adapted to do whatever I want, but what do I want to do that I can’t do in Windows? I spend a lot of time looking at photos, listen to music, I visit websites, write blogs, organise my finances on spreadsheets, even edit home movies from time to time, and all this happens really quite well even on Windows XP.

To me when somebody talks about how flexible and customisable something is, especially when we’re talking about software, all I think is that I’m going to be spending an entire weekend just trying to get it working. My trusty iPhone comes with absolutely no flexibility whatsoever, and because of that everyone I know can pick it up and use it straight away. Word is though, there is now a version of Linux that has all the flexibility of Linux but that can finally rival Windows at ease of use. They call this miracle: Ubuntu.

So, on to the mission at hand. Here are my objectives in this delightfully geeky exercise:

Install Ubuntu onto the laptop.
Get the basics working (keyboard, touchpad, sound, wireless, internet).
Find suitable (free) replacements for essential apps (Word, Excel, Outlook, iTunes, Picasa, Photoshop, VLC, Windows Movie Maker).
Look around for limitations- what can’t I do that I could do in Windows.
Find out what I can do on Ubuntu that I couldn’t do with Windows.
Establish (somehow) whether the laptop is actually working better than before.
Decide whether I like Ubuntu or want to go back to Windows XP.

I will leave the biggest test to last…. the Wife test. This is the ultimate test subject for a new operating system, the non-geek. My wife, like most wives and non-geeks, doesn’t like it when I change things on the computer. She hated when I switched from Vista to W7 because she had to get used to a slightly new way of doing things, so I know upfront that she will not be a willing test subject, and I wouldn’t want to know what would happen to me if I was doing this on our main desktop computer!

Anyway, I have some objectives to be getting along with.

Continue on to part two: Installation

Quick Plug: Blog on the Bog

2010-03-04T15:44:00.001Z

As you read this you are probably becoming aware that I am not a particularly frequent blogger. I tend to prefer the well thought out and interesting articles rather than bashing out random thought after random thought.

Of course, just because I don't write a blog every day doesn't mean I don't have very random thoughts on a daily basis, so I have decided to commit some of those ideas to a parallel blog which I will endeavour to keep updated on a more regular basis with shorter and sweeter entries.

I do not expect the quality of content to be quite as high as you might expect from this blog, but expect to be entertained nonetheless. There is also the possiblity that a quickly scribbled idea can evolve into a fully blown blog over on this side of the web should the idea have merit.

So head on over to my 'Blog on the Bog' and see what's been running through my mind today.

Photo Gallery – That Poor Cat!

2010-02-24T19:01:00.001Z

Poor little Panther gets chased around the house by a lens whenever I feel the need to take photos but don’t want to leave the house, which is quite often!

Starting with my favourite.

The Challenge!

1960s Panther

As if having one camera pointed at her wasn’t bad enough!

Citizen Panther

Relaxing after a hard day’s running around.

This little collection is only the tip of the iceberg. Check back soon for more.

The Doodle Stick Adventures

2010-02-24T18:22:00.001Z

There are two types of people in this world; those who can create great works of artistic inspiration simply by moving a few pens and brushes around on a canvas, and then there are those who no matter what they are trying to draw always end up with the same collections of unrecognisable shapes in front of them. I am most definitely the latter.

The collection that follows is what happens when my complete lack of ability to draw clashes head to head with my gritty determination to draw something anyway.

Wonder what else I can’t do?

What's inside a TFT Monitor?

2010-02-24T17:52:00.002Z

UPDATE: It seems the photos have disappeared for some reason, so until I figure out how to get them back you can still see the photos on TechRepublic here.

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Have you ever wondered what’s inside a flat screen monitor? Well neither had I, but when my trusty 17″ TFT started acting up I decided that since it was already pretty much done for, I might as well have a little bit of entertainment pulling it apart and then seeing if I could put if back together again.

When I say it was playing up, it still worked, but the buttons on the front didn’t work so I couldn’t switch it off or adjust the display settings, which wouldn’t be such a problem if it wasn’t stuck on the lowest contrast setting! Basically I decided it was broken and old enough to be replaced, so I went out and treated myself to a shiny new widescreen monitor.

So below is a gallery of photos from the evening that I spent taking a monitor literally to pieces and then put it back together. My wife thought it was a waste of time, but she just doesn’t understand, it’s a guy thing. I would also just like to point out that when I put it back together again, not only did the screen still work, but so did the buttons on the front, I actually fixed it!

Before the carnage!

Stand removed... it took me 10 minutes to figure out that there was a screw as well as clips holding the stand in place!

Once the screws were removed, it still wasn't easy getting into the bezel.

Bezel now cracked open offering the first look inside.

The VGA port from the inside.

The internal speaker.

The inner workings split into 2 sections quite quickly, the controller section above and the TFT panel below, joined by a ribbon cable and some screws.

Here we have a side-on view of the TFT panel.

A mini screwdriver is required to persuade the panel to reveal more secrets.

Once inside we see that the majority of the panel is made up of this large backlight...

...which shines it's light through this thin translucent LCD which displays the images.

The LCD laid flat.

This is, I imagine, where all the power is handled- judging by the capacitors and the kettle-lead socket on the right. The audio line-in socket is also on this board (light blue) so there must also be controllers for that on there somewhere.

This little board controls the graphics interface with the PC.

Here we have the hollow front of the bezel...

...and here the full empty shell.

Here are all the internal components laid out.

Here it is back together some time later, minus a couple of screws as usual!

And it still works!!

So there we have it, hopefully something else I own will break and I will get the opportunity to see what made it tick.

Photo Gallery - Abstract Photography

2010-02-24T17:42:00.001Z

Showcasing my first attempt at abstract photography, most of these images were taken close to home here in Sheffield late 2009 or early 2010.

Here we have little Panther, all warm and cosy on her favourite chair by the Christmas tree.

The recent snow here in Sheffield provided some good opportunities for those brave enough to leave the house.

Still close to home in the recent snow.

Back inside in the warm, here is my first attempt at creative water photography.

Clearly not in Sheffield anymore, this was taken in Wisconsin around Thanksgiving time, with a strikingly blue sky for that time of year.

Back in England again, this was taken in Leeds at Christmas.

So there was my first attempt at seeing the world from a different angle, no doubt there will be plenty more where that came from.

Comments and feedback always welcome!

What’s wrong with Fast Food?

2010-02-23T16:48:00.001Z

America certainly has a talent; making bad food very well. Think of the majority of the easy ways to get really great tasting but ridiculously unhealthy foods, and then think about where it was invented.

This is not a rant against America, I am very fond of America. This is also not a rant against Fast Food since it has always been there for me in some form or another at the right time and the right place when I've needed it most. In fact, this isn’t really a rant at all, it’s more a collection of observations that I have made about various fast food establishments on my travels.

McDonalds Encourages Drunk Driving

McDonalds is the big one, the ultimate bad guy, the one to beat. Anyone starting out against the fast food industry must begin with the golden arches. The McDonald brothers invented the production-line method of food preparation and Ray Kroc turned their idea into a global mega-corporation. Poor old Maccie’s gets hammered constantly with lawsuits spouting corporate responsibility, usually because someone put on weight from eating their food. Most of this is pretty much nonsense, people trying to make some money from their stupidity, everyone knows fast food is unhealthy, you make the choice whether to enjoy it despite that fact, and they are experts at being there at the moment you make that choice.

My problem, and the point of this topic, is the 24 hour drive-thru.

There is a McDonalds in a retail park a few miles from my house; during the day it is full to bursting point with shoppers scoffing burgers while discussing sofa fabrics and gift ideas. This I feel is perfectly normal. What I think is strange is that the very same branch proudly advertises that it is open 24 hours Thursday to Sunday.

To bring this into perspective, this retail park is not within walking distance of more than 50 houses, all the shops and facilities of the retail park, including the gym, are closed by 10pm, so who does this cater for?

How many sober people want to eat McDonalds at 4am?

The implication of the late night service being over a weekend is that it is for people who are out drinking and partying, but since very few people live within walking distance of the place, who can get there without driving? They certainly don’t deliver. It seems to me that the majority of the people who take advantage of these hours would be encouraged to take the chance and drive there, since the alternatives involve either walking miles or arranging for a taxi to take you there and back, and for some in an intoxicated state it doesn’t take much to justify a ‘short drive’.

As an interesting side-note to this, it seems Arizona police not only recognise this as a problem, they are using it as a form of entrapment to catch those who chose to take the drive in what has been cutely labelled ‘Operation: WULF’ (Would U Like Fries).

KFC is World Famous for Bad Service!

KFC is another American fast food restaurant that has gone global, and all over the world they are know for their slow service and lack of relevant social and language skills of the front of house staff. But why?!

England’s green and pleasant land.

I had a discussion with my wife about this the other day, I was asking why the Colonel and his elite troops at KFC HQ don’t try to address this, and she simply and quite rightly replied, “Why should they, people still eat there”.

Her answer is probably exactly why they don’t do it; because it’s probably cheaper for them to continue hiring people fresh from immigration rather than bother with any lengthy interview process, if it turns out a staff member really can’t tell the difference between a deep fryer and a mop bucket then there are plenty more where they came from.

KFC simply let their food compensate for all their other failings, and apparently it does, because every mealtime there is a constant row of at least 5 cars slowly burning petrol right outside the kitchen window, patiently skipping through radio stations and trying to communicate with someone who barely speaks their language through a hollow speaker box which almost doesn’t work.

The world’s dwindling oil reserves put to good use while engines idle at the drive-thru.

So we have established that in the fight between KFC and it’s competitors, KFC is doing fine despite the fact that people actually hate going there; but why would franchise owners or branch managers not want to make their branch stand out from the other branches by offering decent service?

Maybe I just don’t get it.