It Lives!

Shortly (and coincidentally) after the previously mentioned upgrade to Ubuntu Lucid, my PC went into a sulk - shutting down and refusing to boot up again. Pressing the Power On button caused the fans to spin up for about a second before everything went dead.

Poking around the motherboard's power connector with a multimeter confirmed that the problem lay with the PSU. £45 got me a new unit from the local Maplin Electronics - 700W rather than the 580W of the original that came with the PC (best to be on the safe side :) Fitting was straightfoward and everything seems to be working swimmingly once more.

There's a certain satisfaction to be had from fixing something yourself...

Upgrading

I've upgraded my Ubuntu machine at home to Lucid without any major issues.

I like the new look and feel and would probably make the effort to get used to the new window button positioning, were it not for the fact that I have to use Fedora at work (plus Windows occasionally at work and at home).

Gwibber is a promising addition, although it isn't quite as robust as I would like; it took several attempts and a detailed examination of bug reports in Launchpad before I could successful add my Facebook account to it.

I've also discovered that screen lock no longer works properly after having upgraded from the open source fglrx graphics card driver to the proprietary version.

On the plus side, sound works better than it did before; I seem to have much better control over volume than was the case in Karmic.

United For Education

My photos from today's United For Education day of action are now on Flickr, as a set and as a slideshow:

Live train and tube maps

One of the nicest mashups I've seen shows approximately live maps for UK mainline trains and the London Underground.

I was particularly taken by a view of trains to and from Leeds (especially after checking the box to move trains at 10x normal speed).

Django 1.2 E-commerce

Packt Publishing have sent me a copy of Django 1.2 E-commerce to review. Looks interesting. I've got a number of Packt books and some of them (Learning JQuery, for example) have been really good. Hopefully this will be up to the same standard.

Chapter 2 is available as a free download, if you want to check it out for yourselves...

Dear None...

Got this via email after having registered for one of those discount cards.

It is interesting to speculate on the cause. If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that YouGov send these emails via a 'mail merge' application of some kind that merges on a name field in the customer database given to them by Costa. Perhaps this name field is blank in some cases, and the mail merge app fails to check this. (If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 'None' suggests an app written in Python :)

Regardless of the precise reasons for this error, we can say with certainty that it points to inadequate testing of the application. The developers have made assumptions about data completeness/validity that are not justified in reality. Testing with realistic data would have exposed those assumptions, prompting a simple modification to the code that substitutes a suitable default ('Valued Customer', for example) if no name is available.