I Love You Mum, RIP

I’ve not blogged for a few months, as early in November my Mum was admitted into hospital. Having had numerous tests, including CT & MRI scans it was discovered she had multiple tumours (3) on the righthand hemisphere of her brain. Despite all these scans the primary source of cancer was never found.

An operation was scheduled to perform a biospy so as to determine whether said tumours were malignant or not. However 5 days later on the day of the operation a group of Doctors & Surgeons decided, almost at last minute, that the risks involved were too high and therefore entered my Mum into radio therapy treatment.

Unknown to me, this meant her having to be transferred to another local hospital for radiotherapy, however this was not relayed to me, and despite me being the immediate next of kin no one had the decency of informing me of this. It wasn’t till the following day during visiting hours that I found this out as she wasn’t in the ward I’d expected!

During my Mums short stay in hospital, I bore the brunt of some misdirected family tensions (of which the dynamics are complicated, nor am I prepared to blog about). Needless to say I have been on a fast roller coaster ride of emotions, and despite seeing my Mum at rest and having organised her funeral, clearing her home and attending to her financial affairs I still cannot believe she has left this mortal world.

I have a myraid of questions to be answered about my Mums condition from a number sources, but mostly from her GP who dismissed her numerous previous health complaints. I feel cheated and angry with the so called NHS “wellfare system”, as they showed no “wellfare” to my Mum whatsoever! I have initiated and entered into a complaints procedure not for financial gain but for answers.

Losing any member of ones family is tragic & upsetting, but losing ones Mum is the most heart renching to experinece, afterall if it wasn’t for our Mum’s none of us would be here. I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things, although some days I don’t feel too good and withdraw into myself and tend not to leave sanctuary of my home.

Mum, I love you, and you will always be in my thoughts and never forgotten. Rest In Peace.

Domain Name Humour :)

I spotted this blog on Top Posts from around WordPress.com with a list of amusing concatenated domains names (look closely). Heehee, made me chuckle.

http://gavilan1010.wordpress.com/2006/11/06/10-wrost-domain-names/

Fibonacci Javascript Function

A few years ago I was writing a web app to enter into the5k project competition. The rules of the competition was to create a functioning web app less than 5k (including external files). The app I decided to create was to generate a pattern based on a mathematical function (either the Lorenz attractor, or a spirograph) through DOM manipulation.

Whilst developing this app I created the following Javascript function that returns the nth number within the Fibonacci sequence, which I’ve recently contributed to a Wikipedia article.

function fibonacci(n)
{
var Phi=1.6180339887498948482;
var fibonacciNumber=0;
fibonacciNumber=Math.pow(Phi,n)/(Math.sqrt(5));
return Math.round(fibonacciNumber);
}

Here’s another method of calculating fibonacci(n)

function fibonacci(n)
{
var Phi=1.6180339887498948482;
var x=0;
var y=0;
var fibonacciNumber=0;
x=Math.pow(Phi,n);
y=Math.pow(-Phi,-n);
fib=(x-y)/Math.sqrt(5);
return Math.round(fibonacciNumber);
}

Example call of the above functions;

fibonacci(10)

returns the 10th number within the series which is 55.

These functions are only accurate to calculating the 70th number within the Fibonacci sequence, which is 190392490709135.

Aceeeeeed!

I was tinkering with the text-to-path & inset functions in Inkscape and created the following smiley and thought I would share it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. Derivative works are welcomed & encouraged.

Disclaimer – Any similarity or resembalance to characters past, present or future is purely coincidental

Woot! Blog Stats Reach 1K+

Yesterday the stats of my blog show it has reached the 1000+ mark (if only I had a £1.00 GBP for each visit), and within just over 30 days of starting it. I gotta admit I’m surprised that it has had as many visits.

So far the most popular post is the “Gnome-Screenshot & Beryl Screenshot Plugin” which I posted purely on a whim. A search on Google for the term “beryl screenshot” puts my post at numero uno (I guess it’s all down hill from now on).

I’m pleased that people have found it useful. If it has, please feel free to leave a comment and thanks for visiting

Chavs, Halloween & Bonfire Night

Yesterday evening (Halloween), I spotted a group of 15 youths in their mid teens parading down the street I live. As it’s close to Guy Fawkes/Bonfire Night (Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason & plot) these youths found it amusing and entertaining to throw banger fireworks at peoples property and even at passing motorists, along with the usual shouting and general loutish behavour that ensues.

Eventually they got closer and as sods law would have it, they decided to stop and congregate right outside of my property, and proceeded to bang on my windows. They even caused damage to an outside exhaust vent by shoving a live firework in it! With this I immediately contacted the police in a hope they would attend and put a stop to it, maybe even caution or arrest them.

During my call to the police I was asked the usual questions, my name, address, date of birth, but then I was asked my employment status. What the hell has my employment status got to do with it!? Did the police arrive? No! All I got was just a statistical crime number 601.

I have a myriad of words I could use to describe these youths, all derogatory such as; plebs, louts, plonkers… and some which are far harsher and expletive – therefore unmentionable here. The one word that I can use to describe them is “Chavs” and YES, some of them was wearing tracksuits, burberry & bling which this stereotypical caricature is so apt.

BBC Digital Planet interview Mark Shuttleworth

I found this recent news article on BBC Technology News site entitled “Lift off“, which leads to the main article page entitled “Space tourist promotes open source”.

“…space tourist and open source evangelist Mark Shuttleworth talks about the developing world’s need for technology solutions.”

In my opinion the word “evangelist” should have been substituded to “advocate“. This is more appropriate when discussing promoting the ethos of Open Source Software, as the former conjures up images of, fanatical preaching zealots performing ritualistic acts.

There is also a podcast download available, of the entire BBC technology programme Digital Planet interview with Mark Shuttleworth (sorry – no direct URL as I don’t wanna be stepping on “Auntie’s” toes).

Whilst the interview offers no new news from Canonical or Ubuntu, it is well presented and touches on the importance of Open Source technology within education and developing economies.

Gnome-Screenshot & Beryl Screenshot Plugin

Taking screenshots in the Gnome desktop environment is as simple as pressing [Print Screen] key. If like me you use a Mac Mini USB keyboard (which doesn’t have such a key) you could mess around with keyboard mapping.

Alternatively within Gnome there is a screenshot app called “gnome-screenshot” found in Application > Accessories > Take Screenshot. I’ve placed a copy of this app on the lower panel (the camera icon) and assigned a 10 second delay to the launch properties. This gives me time to prepare for taking screenshots, especially useful for taking a shot of the 3D cube within Beryl.

If you use the XGL/Beryl environment there is a neat screenshot plugin which allows you to take a screenshot of a specific area through the combination of pressing the [Super] key & left clicking your mouse whilst high-lighting the area. You may need to edit the plugin properties within the Beryl Setting Manager to set your desired directory path such as /home/username/Desktop.

Here is an example of the selected area (minus mouse cursor) I choose to take a screenshot of within the Beryl environment.

After releasing the [Super] key and mouse button the screenshot of the area you selected should now be automatically saved in the directory you assigned.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

Days before the official release of Edgy Eft, Mark Shuttleworth has recently announced the name of the next development version of the Ubuntu distro family.

“With the final release of Ubuntu 6.10 approaching, and apparently set
to be spot on schedule October 26th, we’re starting to look beyond
it to Ubuntu 7.04, scheduled for release on 19 April 2007.

In the next cycle we’ll expand on the brand new infrastructure that has
landed in Edgy as well as branching out in some exciting new directions.
This combination of courage and restlessness is also found in a young deer
that sets out to explore a world that is new and exciting – seeing the
world through eyes unprejudiced by what has gone before.

In that spirit, the release will be be code named “The Feisty Fawn”.

The main themes for feature development in this release will be
improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end
server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies.
Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement
and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for
both users and developers.”

Judging by the specifications of next months development meeting, more emphasis seems to be placed on improving assistive technology & accessibility features such as; braille device support, screen magnification, and speech synthesis.

I have a friend, whom I’ve known for over 20 years (since we were knee high to grasshoppers), who will be very appreciative of such features. Hopefully the developers will get it right and liaise with people affected by sensory deprivation and make significant improvements of accessibility, which are surprisingly still very primitive within Linux & Open Source.

Bubble Bursting Beautified Desktop

A few days ago a friend of a friend was chatting to me about the “new” desktop environment and effects in the forthcoming release of Windows Vista. He was so enthused and excited by what he had seen in the beta release that I sat and listened.

Not wanting to burst his bubble I waited, during which my internal dialouge was impatiently running amock, and slowly a smug grin was gradually creeping across my face Once he’d finished, and with no immediate response from myself I booted up my Ubuntu Dapper installation running XGL & Beryl.

Needless to say he was blown away with what he saw and one could clearly hear his bubble burst, and then some! My silence was broken with the response “It’s all very well an having a beautified desktop, the question is does the underlying operating system have any substance to it?”.

Despite my efforts to explain the ethos, ethics and benefits of using Open Source he wasn’t prepared to deviate from his Microsoft centric life. More fool him and the other millions of hoards prepared to believe the marketing hype spun to line the corporate pockets, just to keep their operating systems up to date.