Installing Ubuntu Linux in a Microsoft VirtualPC virtual machine. And some other things besides.

For my own future reference as much as anything, I had to:

* install in safe graphics mode so that the display was viewable during install

* reduce the colour depth to 16 bit (booting in recovery mode and running “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg”)

* add the parameter “i8042.noloop” to the kernel command in the file /boot/grub/menu.lst so the mouse can work

* log in as root and run “dhclient” to pick up an IP address from my wireless router

* (update) added “snd-sb16″ to the file /etc/modules, to enable sound

There - so easy my granny could do it :-) I then downloaded all the patches (180Mb of them) to be up to date.

First impression - not too shabby! I’m running 2Gb of RAM, so I’ve allocated 500 Meg to Ubuntu and its running fine. Nice, clean interface as well - and plenty of games!

Due to a sequence of circumstances I have ended up reading four books in parallel. At first glance they are unconnected:

Derren Brown - Tricks of the Mind

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

M. Scott Peck - The Road Less Travelled and Beyond

Christopher Booker - The Seven Basic Plots

At first glance these were totally unconnected, apart from being non-fiction and vaguely esoteric that is. Delve a little deeper and two are people wanting to debunk myths, one is explaining their roots and the other is exploring that part of the human psyche that needs them. Derren was a staunch Christian who is now keen to reveal all things “magical” as mere (though still clever) trickery, Richard is keen to state that magic is how we see things we don’t understand, and Scott thinks we could all do with a bit more of it. Christopher won’t be the last to point out how we love certain types of stories, but whether they fulfil a purely human or a spiritual need is a moot point. I’ll let you know in, ooh, about 3,000 pages!

How did I end up reading them all at once? Who knows, perhaps it was meant

Go on, you know you want to! All in a good cause too

As I sit and listen to Prince’s new album (included as a cover disk on yesterday’s Sunday Mail), I’m forced to ask myself about this “industry first”. While the man previously known as the man with no name may have stolen a march with the act, he’s not the first to have achieved the outcome.

Prince reputedly received a million-dollar sum for allowing his latest release to be issued in this way. Now, given that producing an album costs hundreds of thousands, in essence he will have been able to cover his recording costs. I might be assuming too much here but the single, most important benefit is artistic freedom.

Marillion went down a similar track when they invited their fans to pre-order an album before it was written, but while they may have been first with the Internet marketing idea, again, they are unlikely to be the first band to release themselves from the shackles of a contract by finding money outside the recording biz. No doubt, as well, there will be other initiatives.

What both of these examples share is that the artists have minimised sales risk with a non-refundable advance. In neither case is artistic integrity compromised, and both rely on thinking about the bigger picture of sales and marketing to ensure that they’re doing more than covering the costs.

There will be other ways of doing this - no doubt in ten years’ time we will look back on “firsts” of albums being paid for through government funding, bank loans, lottery wins and Google ads. What with Myspace as the incubator, and with artists understanding they stand to be just as successful (and potentially better off) without major label backing, it becomes less and less clear exactly how the music industry is going to retain any position it has left.

P.S. The album’s pretty good as well!

At the Cotswold Show I was invited to compare a recent beer purchase of George Gale’s Summer Breeze, with one of our local brews - Three-Eight from the Cotswold Brewing Co. Both are 3.8% alcohol, and both include Saaz hops - but the major difference perhaps is that one - the Cotswold - is a lager, while the other is an ale.

And the verdict is - they’re both jolly good. While the Summer Breeze is a fine beer however, the Three-Eight has the advantage of combining the coolness associated with a lager, with a hint of the rounded charm of an ale. This may be down to the ingredients, to be honest I have absolutely no idea but if I were to choose between the two on a summer’s day I would probably go for the Cotswold.

I might tell a different story later on, as the balm of the day took on the slight chill of the evening I might be glad of the warmer character of the Summer Breeze. For now, however, it is the Cotswold Three-Eight that has my vote.

“Interesting” question whether ARmageddon’s pro-Gartner, or is anti-Gartner? I wonder if this whole line of thinking is missing the point. I mean, I know I’d rather have a bigger slice of all that subscription funding, they are the 800-pound gorilla after all - but is it so wrong to think, or indeed say, that Gartner might do at least some good things? I’ve seen a few magic quadrants in my time, and some of them are pretty well thought out, solid pieces of analysis that raise a bunch of seriously important questions that end-user organisations should be asking.

Of course, that doesn’t mean everything they do is going to hit the target - and of course therefore, they should be subject to scrutiny - just like the rest of us. It’s also been written that some vendors feel they have to pay Gartner’s fees before they’ll ever see themselves represented in the quadrants - rightly or wrongly - I know Gartner hotly contests this! It may even be that Gartner’s product-oriented model is itself based on an industry as it was ten years ago, and not how it will be in the future - but that’s an industry-wide issue, and it doesn’t prevent Gartner analysts from being insightful in their own domains.

Meanwhile, we believe we have a whole bunch of differentiators that make us a pretty attractive alternative - always happy to share these! But perhaps its just too easy to bash Gartner because its Gartner, which equates to opinion, not analysis. The only people who can really decide whether or not Gartner is adding value are their enterprise customers, and that’s not a revenue stream I see drying up any time soon.

If faced with a mixer shower that needs to be operated using the bath taps, first turn on the hot. Then, add the cold until it arrives at a suitable temperature. Then pull the knob to send the water to the shower head - and hey presto! A perfectly regulated shower.

Brought to you from the Horse Guards Parade, London. Grand but a tiny bit shabby, with a nice view of the Eye.

… was yesterday, when I ran over an already dead hedgehog. With a lawnmower.

I should probably delete this post as soon as I type it, but equally, I probably won’t. Following a recommendation from goodman Governor, I thought I’d give Live Writer a try. Not bad so far - I hear Adobe has a competing blog posting tool, but there’s one major difference - this one is free!

Oh, and one of our chickens died yesterday.

Well I’ve just upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress. I won’t bore you (i.e. I can’t be bothered to list out) the entire blow by blow account but here’s the lessons learned:

- Check your ISP can support it - in particular MySQL 4.0 and above - there was a helpful message at the end of the installation process to this effect, at which point I found I didn’t have it. Which brings me to:
- Absolutely, definitely, completely do make sure you back things up first! Take an FTP dump of the Wordpress tree, plus a MySQL export, that should be enough. To be sure you can revert to the previous version…
- Possibly test the restore process before committing, I had the rather alarming message to the effect that MySQL could only re-import export files less than 2 Meg in size. Phew - mine was.
- When upgrading, follow the instructions how to copy the directory tree. Don’t do what I did and overwrite the wrong bits (refer back to “make sure you back things up” )

That’s probably it - apart from a few hiccups the whole process was remarkably smooth. I’d like to tip my hat to the folks at Easily who were both highly responsive in tech support (thanks Francois!) and who did the upgrade when they said they would.

There, you never know I might even start posting again!

P.S. Just noticed I’m getting an SQL error in my links listing - oh well, I’d better sort that as well.