Saturday, May 09, 2009

Carphone Warehouse, Tiscali and Pipex

Hmm.. well the big news today is that Carphone Warehouse are going to buy out Tiscali. Tiscali, as we know, recently bought out Pipex - which was my ISP.

Pipex was a very good company back when I joined - good reliable service, no problems.
Tiscali took over - still not terrible, but noticeable dropped connections, sometimes for an hour or more. Not generally, but it happened.

Now Carphone Warehouse is taking over.

Carphone Warehouse are, as you may know, one of the big three who have expressed their interest in Phorm - the much discussed outfit who are intending to profile the surfing of their partner ISPs and serve "contextual ads". Well, they won't be seeing my surfing habits - not that they are terribly exciting anyway! As soon as I get confirmation of the selling of Tiscali, I am off. I have opposed Phorm since day one and have no desire to be any part of their spamvertising thank you.

Doubtless the Phorm spies - who I know hunt the web for any negative postings - will eventually find this and waste ten minutes of their valuable time posting some response or other. Well, to those guys - you could save yourself a lot of bother, because this blog is pretty small fry compared to the huge amount of anti-phorm stuff out there!

Friday, May 08, 2009

Xorg

Purely because it is so damn frustrating, I am going to rant about xorg.conf today!

If you don't use Linux, you won't have a clue what this is, so worry not. For the rest of us, why on earth has xorg decided to make the configuration file so totally and utterly pointless?

When you edited the old xorg.conf files, you had a nice long list (OK, some of it perhaps not very useful) which allowed you to change the graphics card settings or monitor resolutions etc. Now, you just get "Configured Device" in the (much restricted) sections. Nothing to help with problems which new users are facing setting up their graphics for example.

Xorg bloggers claim this is in response to people stating it was too complex. Well, yes, it could be seen as complicated but for any vaguely experienced Linux user, it was always somewhere that you could discover the problems and fix them with judicious editing. Not now though!

One of the things about Linux is that you can delve into the workings - at your own level of comfort. If you didn't understand xorg.conf, you either left it well alone, asked a more experienced user or did some research on Google or wherever.

This "dumbed down" version is simply too "dumbed down" - fine if it works, useless if things don't! My old monitor for example is not recognised correctly - never has been. So I have always edited xorg.conf and set the h and v ref myself. Now, there is nothing. Luckily, I still have backups of my old xorg.conf and I overwrite the "new" useless version with one which actually does let me do things.

Whoever came up with this should seriously rethink. Yes, I can substitute my old settings, but if I am attempting to assist someone with a problem - perhaps on Launchpad for example - I am totally in the dark.

Pleae, please, sort it out and get the old version back!

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

All change!

Ages since I last used my Blog, so I thought I might try to keep it a little more up to date - but when I went to log in, all has changed!

It is supposed to support OpenID, but I haven't seen any option to use my openID as yet...

Ah well.

Health still poor - more heart attacks to add to the joy!

Anyway, I shall be updating more regularly from now on (hopefully!)