Simon Mott - All about me

Simon

“Nexus One – Web meets Phone”

by Simon

N1On Monday my shiny new Nexus One phone finally arrived!

The phone was ordered on 14th April but with all the recent disruptions to air traffic caused by the icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, delivery of my phone was delayed.

Overall I am really impressed with the phone. It’s a lot more zippy than my older G1 and looks one hell of a lot nicer too. The UI is pretty similar to the G1’s Android 1.6 but there are some significant differences. Most notably are the 2 extra home screens, giving the phone a total of 5 screens instead of 3. The AMOLED is sharp, bright and most importantly, larger which makes a nice change as it is a pleasure to look at. The phone is nicely weighted (not too heavy, not too light) and feels sturdy.

All this was expected though, given how long Android has been available on mobile devices and I think that Google and HTC have had ample time to perfect on the design. On the note of the design, one thing I (and probably many others) consider to be a flaw is the SDcard slot. You have to remove the battery to get at the card which is… not useful.

On the plus side however, I found the voice recognition very accurate with no training what so ever. I’ve spent a few hours crazily talking to my phone…

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me (when the contact form works) or simply ask Google to lend its wisdom.

Logical Volume Manager – LVM

by Simon

This page covers some of the basics of using LVM. Please ensure that you back up any important data on any had drive or partition you wish to use for LVM.

I take no responsibility for any data loss if you choose to use any of the commands on this page

Installation

For the purposes of this guide, I am using Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 and the package manager apt but this should work with any installation of LVM

Java Development

by Simon

Yesterday, I took my first official steps at attempting to learn Java. It has been on the back of my mind for a long time (since the days of Visual Basic 6) but I have just never settled into it; Yes, I’ve tinkered, but never anything serious.

Thanks to some of my long time friends I now have a place to develop my skills and a place to get assistance as and when I need it. Since early 2007 they have been on-off developing an alternate IRC client for Linux that happens to be cross platform with a wide selection of operating systems due to it being Java based. In my opinion their client has far surpassed any IRC client that I’ve ever come across. If you don’t agree, keep watching, you soon will!

The client can be located at DMDirc.com

The project has since moved to Github so check it out here

Happy New Year

by Simon

Happy new year.

This year has been full of interesting things for all of us and today is the start of yet another. I hope you’re all not too stuffed on turkey as it all goes back to normal Monday, wouldn’t want you falling down the stairs as you cant support yourself! There is lots to be done this year.

OpenSSH

by Simon

Here you will find some tips and tricks for OpenSSH that I found useful. Note that the instructions on this page do not cover all the capabilities of OpenSSH and I advise you to use these commands at your own risk.

SSH Aliases

If, like me, you have lots of servers and find it quite tedious to continually type “ssh admin@server1.co.uk” for all your servers, Aliases might be a god send!

To add an alias is really simple. Below is an example of an alias that shortens “ssh admin@server1.co.uk” to “ssh s1” (This can be further shortened with bash aliases which, at present, are not covered here).

Iggy Woes

by Simon

iggy_broken_leg-02.09.09I have a pet Iguana called Iggy. Its a female Green Iguana and over the weekend she broke her leg, badly. (See image to the right)

I was in Milton Keynes over the bank holiday weekend with the #MDBot Group (Quakenet). We arrived on Saturday at about midday and we left the next day in the afternoon. Milton Keynes is, on average about 2.5 to 3 hours away from me so leaving at 15:15 meant I wouldn’t get home till early evening.

When I eventually arrived home after having a relaxing 1.5 hour bus journey from Milton Keynes Central to Birmingham International, my pet Iguana did her usual routine of coming over to me to say hello which, in her world means she wants me to make a fuss of her and usually give her some food. After I had spent 5 or so minutes rubbing some dead skin off her back and prepairing some cress for her to munch on, I sat at my computer and proceeded to catch up on some of the TV shows I had missed over the weekend. After a short while I noticed Iggy was climbing down onto the floor (Which isnt unusual, she likes a good wander), as she walked around the side of the desk I saw her leg was the size of a rugby ball…

My Website

by Simon

Well, just in case you didn’t realize, this is my website. For the most part it is about myself or things I enjoy. I will use this site to host facts/statistics about me and also things that will, in the future, help me with things I may have forgotten (for example, config files, command arguments for things like iptables etc).

If you find any of these pages useful please feel free to link to them. If you are sad and have no life like me feel free to subscribe to my RSS Feed.

If you have any suggestions please feel free to pop them over to me via the contact form (when it works) or alternately via IRC in #agari on Quakenet.

Thats about it for introductions, more to come (soon I hope!)