This Saturday I popped to the laundrette to dry some stuff and I took my laptop with its newly installed Ubuntu 9.10 along to give me something to do. Now as it happen I’m in the middle of watching season 4 of Dexter (A show about a serial killer and self confessed monster), so I sit there with my headphones on, listening to this guys internal monologue as he goes about his day stalking another serial killer, ignoring the odd looks from my fellow patrons, only to realise when I get home that plugging in the headphones has not muted the internal speaker!

In case you’re interested you can switch on headphone detection using alsamixer.

 

I’m expecting to see my face up on the local neighbourhood watch board by the end of the week.

Its a pain that your Firefox settings don't follow you from PC to PC in the Labs, we know it is, but there is not much we can do about it, Sorry. There is however a work around!

Create a personal profile

1. Open the Windows Start menu. In the Start Search box in the bottom left, type  

     firefox.exe -ProfileManager

2. Click "Create Profile" then Next

3. Give the profile a name e.g "Ndrive Profile"

4. Click "Choose Folder", Navigate down to your N:\ and make a new folder called "FireFox Profile"

5. Make sure it says you files will be stored in "N:\FireFox Profile", Click Finish followed by Exit

Create a shortcut on the desktop

1.  Right click on the background, Navigate down to New->Shortcut

2. Paste in 

       "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -profile "N:\Firefox Profile"

3. Click Next, Name it "My Firefox", Click Finish

 

TaDa!! you now have a profile that will follow you around.

 

!ONE CAVEAT!   - If you leave firefox running on a computer and try to use the profile of a diffrent one, you will get an error saying that firefox is already running.

 

 

 

 

The latest version of Ubuntu was released on the 29th of Oct. So for those who fancy a less stressful OS experiance check out "Karmic Koala"

 

 

Which of the current TV adverts is more insufferable?

 

 

 

 

I don't know which is worse, that someone thought these would be a good way to promote the brand, or that other people must have agreed with them!

Thanks to our freinds at VMware and e-acadamy (and with a little magic from ITNG ) we can now offer a number of VMware tools such as Workstation, Fusion and vSphere to Students, Staff and Researchers (as long as you follow the Usage Guide lines). For more details see the wiki page ITNG:VMware_Academic_Program

People who are new to Reading may well have noticed just how many aeroplane fly over the campus. We seem to get one a minute at times. In the last few days it has been especially busy and I thought I would give some explanation why.

Heathrow is only about 20 miles away to our east and if you look at the map, you will see that the two main runways run east-west. Aeroplanes like to land and take off into the wind, so when the wind is coming from the east, the planes land from the west of the airport. On approach, they line up with the runway and use Instrumented Landing System (ILS) to guide them in. In fact, we are almost in direct line of the runways but it is the north runway which aeroplanes will land on if they are coming in from the west (this is due to the Cranford Agreement that prevents this runway being used for take offs). This lies on a line that passes a few miles north of campus, approx. over the village of Sonning. 

To make things even busier, incoming planes are often 'stacked' prior to arrival. There are four stacks around the airport, about 20 miles out at 10, 2 4 and 8 oclock. When it is their turn, air traffic control put the planes onto final approach where they must leave the stacks and then line up with the ILS. This is why you often see aeroplanes coming in first from the north and then from the south, banking hard to take a west to east line about 2-3 miles north of campus.

Over the past few days, the wind has been from the east. You can check for yourself the wind direction of Heathrow at http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/EGLL.html. Yesterday was quieter (although I doubt it was noticable due to the rain) as the wind was from the west - which is the prevailing direction. There is a preference for landing east-west as this abates takeoff noise over central London so westerly approaches only occur when the e-w vector exceeds 5kn.

You may have spotted the deliberate mistake in the welcome video. Our Community Server is now not a Moodle site but a wiki. We are using mediaWiki to be precise, hoping for some of the success of Wikipedia. Please feel free to make changes but obviously - be constructive.

I have spent the latter part of the day adding some of the content of the old server to the wiki. Others in ITNG have put on documentation about the bits they have been working on over the summer. We have a lot of nice services for you to explore this year but, as we are a University, you will find you need to go looking for much of it. That is until we can employ someone to write documentation full time (yea right!).

Gave the annual ITNG welcome video today in the Freshers Welcome. Hope those who saw it enjoyed it. More importantly, I hope you don't now think we are a bunch of bungling idiots who cannot even make a video. It was only a bit of fun.

If you missed it, it is on-line but beware - it is ~ 180MB.  

Each video seems good for about two years - so I expect we will do it again next year. That will be version 3.

A pictures of Wales (as promised)