Just Uber

After hearing the news that Google had added IMAP to it’s Gmail service, I was somewhat surprised to find that my account didn’t seem to be set up for it.

After fiddling a little I discovered that Google’s IMAP service is language specific, and isn’t enabled on UK English based accounts.

Log on to your Gmail account. Click on Settings. In the General tab, change the ‘Google Mail display language’ option to ‘US English’.

After a refresh you should now see the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ option.

Have fun!

You may have read in the news that Microsoft has invested $240m (£117m) in social networking site Facebook.

Fear not freedom loving pals, as facebook runs on a Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP based infrastructure!

Indeed, despite the other major social networking site Myspace, running on a Windows Server 2003, SQL Server backend, MS still chooses facebook for its social networking investment.

So, you heard it here first folks. If you want to invest a few million quid of your own money in a venture, but are worried about a shaky infrastructure, follow Microsoft’s lead. Invest in Linux!

Getting into work early this morning, I decided to have a brief look at what’s going on in the world of IT. Despite feeling a bit fed up when I arrived, reading this excellent article on znet, written by Rupert Goodwin about his experiences of Gutsy really cheered me up!

Have a gander yourself. One particular comment by ‘ConceptJunkie’ about Microsoft’s new Vista campaign “100 reasons why everyone’s so speechless” made me laugh out loud.

“I looked. #23 is “Because it’s like a digital candy store.”

Puh-leeze. Bring up the Adept Manager in Ubuntu. Now _that’s_ a digital candy store. Over 20000 applications for doing almost anything you can imagine, and quite a few things you can’t. Running Vista is like being in a candy store that only sells black liquorice (I _hate_ black liquorice) at exorbitant prices. Oh, and you’re only allowed to eat the candy in the store. Plus each individual piece is really small and is wrapped in seven layers of cellophane, and the store won’t let you throw the wrappers away. You have to take them with you and throw them away at home. Plus they set off a grenade in the chocolate store across the street in the middle of the night and mugged the proprietors of the penny candy stand. Oh, and Microsoft are the ones behind the urban legend that red M&Ms cause cancer. That’s the kind of candy store Vista is.”

You heard it here first folks, Microsoft engages in urban candy terrorism….

Today we shall be playing with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and a dodgy bluetooth GPS gizmo bought for twenty odd quid on eBay….

First of all, note the extremely poor quality of the device and the way the power button sticks in when you press it too hard. Secondly, note the way that the ‘earth’ pin on the three pin socket adaptor snaps off in the wall. Hoorah for cheap electronics!

Right, on to the interesting bit. To start with, you’ll need to find the address of your new gizmo:

hcitool scan

You should get one or more device listings returned. Note the MAC address registered to your bluetooth GPS device.

00:11:67:80:xx:xx iNav GPS

Taking the address, you now need to create a serial port connection to your GPS device.

sdptool browse 00:11:67:80:xx:xx

Which then returns output describing your new shiny virtual serial port.

And then by editing this file.

sudo gedit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

And adding this text.

rfcomm4 {
bind yes;
device < YOUR GPS DEVICES MAC ADDRESS>;
channel 1;
comment “Serial Port”;
}

You artfully create a way to invoke your serial port quickly and painlessly by typing:

rfcomm connect 4

Well done. If you’ve got this far, your GPS device is now ‘theoretically’ connected to your computer. All you need to do now, is get some data from it. If you’re still having problems, visit this thread. Without it you wouldn’t be reading this..

You’ll need a gps daemon to talk to the device. Oh look, here’s one:

sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients

Now, You’ll get a prompt suggesting your reconfigure the gpsd service. That’s so it knows whether or not to start up automatically next time. This is entirely up to you…. You may or may want to give your system a reboot. I had to, you mightn’t.

Now, start gpsd

gpsd -n /dev/rfcomm4

And try the gpsd client to see if it’s working

xgps

Now, if everything is cool, you should get some output. If not, try the Ubuntu thread linked to above, or post a comment here.

When everything is running smoothly, getting your GPS going should simply be a case of running two commands:

rfcomm connect 4
gpsd -n /dev/rfcomm4

You might notice that Linux GPS software is a wee bit thin on the ground, but you can alway try gpsdrive from the Ubuntu repos, or gpsman. If you find any other decent stuff, please post here as I’d love to give it a go.

Welcome to Airstrip One, where the Ministry of Love has just issued a new law instructing phone companies to log every call and text made to and from any phone in the country.

Just to ensure that the information isn’t wasted, it is to be made available not only to the Police and Military, but to local authorities too.

In defence of of the decision, Glorious Minister for Security and Counter-terrorism Tony McNulty says that Councils will only be able to use the powers to “prevent and detect crime” and “not for the collection of taxes”.

Perhaps it isn’t the place of a mere prole like myself to point this out, but as not paying your taxes is a crime, collection of taxes will probably fall under the list of things that councils will use the data for, despite anything Comrade McNulty says.

Heil The Party!