On Friday 30th November, the School of Computing plays host to the CompSoc Linux install fest - a chance for new users of Linux to get a copy of the operating system on their own machine so they can use it at home and further their learning and enjoyment of the OS.

The event takes place at 2pm and goes on until the School closes at just after 5pm. During that time we hope to offer a full range of opportunities for attendees.

• Have a Linux distribution of your choice installed on your machine
• Dual boot setup with Windows will be supported
• Talks on secure computing and Linux basics from staff and students
• Linux experts available to answer all your Linux orientated questions
• Demonstrations of a range of Linux and KDE/Gnome window manager features

There will of course be the usual trip to the pub after the event, and I’m hoping line up of things we are offering is going to persuade many people its worth coming along and giving Linux a try.

I’m proud to be doing my bit to spread the use of open source software and am looking forward to showing people that it really is easy to install and use Linux. Every since the day I first used Linux I’ve never looked back.

Recently I decided that it would be a good idea to not only keep a paper journal of my thoughts on my final year project and a BibTeX file of my academic reading but also to blog about my progress on the project. I find that writing things down by hand is all well and good but a lot of the things I read to do with the project are online (downloaded from the web of knowledge etc.) and it would be nice for people to comment on my findings when I make them.

I therefore present to all, Reading Roadsigns, the blog for my final year project which is all about researching and implementing a method of reading and recognising roadsigns in a static image. If you are interested in computer vision or are working on an object detection or recognition project, please add the blog feed to your RSS reader.

In a recent web browsing session I came across some superb blog posts from Ann Merrill on the Chornobyl exclusion zone and her visits to it. These postings served to remind me very much of the dangers we face in the use of nuclear technologies and how much respect they deserve from human beings when dealing with them.

As I looked through the images and read the descriptions I suddenly gained a very real feeling of what it would be like to wake up and walk outside a couple of weeks after all out nuclear war. Its really rather harrowing to say the least.

The following blog posts are most apt in detailing what it is like inside the zone and how the effects of the nuclear disaster are still very prevalent today.

• A Visit to the Exclusion Zone
• Chornobyl Travels
• Radiation Reconnaissance Mission in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone

I would like to thank Ann Merrill for sharing her experiences on these visits in such superb detail on her blog. This kind of writing is why blogs are so important. They open up areas and issues to people who would never have hoped to gain such a great insight into them. Those who listen to Radio 4 might be interested to know that Ann made an appearance on Woman’s Hour. You can listen to the program again via the link at the top..

It can’t have escaped the attentions of those that read my blog that I don’t like facebook being littered with applications. Not that I dislike the idea of an API or the ability for developers to interact with facebook but I simply preferred the API when external applications were kept as just that, external to facebook and only visible on an external URL, not on the pages and profiles of facebook its self. The “clean” look of facebook was what made it appealing to me.

Given that facebook refuse to make it possible for individuals to disable viewing the stupid applications some people decide to add to their profiles leaving frustrated users like myself in a hell resembling MySpace (note my comparison to a network I did not join due to the awful looking profiles), someone else has stepped into the breech and produced a solution.

Meet Facebook Fresh ™, a novel solution for all firefox users such that they never have to look at an application on facebook ever again. Screens will suddenly look as nice and neat as they did the day you joined the site. Refreshing? You bet.

On 5th November I headed out to the Hyde Park public bonfire and firework display with Heather. It was a really enjoyable evening and the heat from the fire made it almost feel like it was a summer day - I certainly didn’t need my full winter coat! It seems amazing that over a year has gone by since I was last at the display, but its still as good as I remember.

The smell of bonfires and the thick air that comes with firework smoke always remind me of growing up in St. Albans and the huge firework display laid on in Verulamium park every year. Its amazing how vivid a memory such smells can conjure up.

I decided to take my camera along and setting the ISO up high I tried to take some night time shots of the bonfire and the fireworks afterwards. I was rather impressed with the results considering I wasn’t taking all that much care with my photography (I was too busy watching things with the naked eye!) and have thusly shared them with the world in my gallery.

On Tuesday evening last week Jazz and Blues Leeds played host to Cherie Gears and her band at the mine bar in Leeds Union. Support was provided by a recently formed student jazz band, Eat More Fruit. The event was most certainly a success and enjoyed by all who attended and being the first major event put on solely by my society I feel rather proud of our achievement.

The event started off fairly slowly with a few people arriving at a time but shortly before the support band started up a fair number were drawn in by the superb jazz being played out by the DJ and the club filled up somewhat. Eat More Fruit, despite being a newly formed student band with a minimal amount of practice under their belt, put on a most enjoyable performance. I was put completely in the mood for a good night of jazz by their introduction and in fact realised how long it was since I had seen some live jazz performed. Their display of various pieces of fruit on stage for each of their musical numbers was a nice and amusing touch to the proceedings. I certainly wouldn’t hesitate in getting them to come along and play at future Jazz and Blues events.

Cherie Gears didn’t disappoint either and after a brief break between the bands while the stage setup was changed we were instantly delighted by refreshing jazz vocals and superb accompaniment from Cherie’s jazz band. Despite her brief time in the music business Cherie’s vocal sound is already right up there with some of the other female jazz singers on the scene and her vocal range and conviction with which she sings her pieces are superb. Recommendations are certainly the order of the day here and if you have the chance to catch Cherie and her band live then I’d certainly recommend getting s ticket. Its refreshing to know that this is the kind of talent coming from graduates at the Leeds University School of Music and I certainly look forward to hearing other musicians that go into the music scene after graduation.

Our next event major event sees Danny Gough’s nu York State play the mine bar on 27th November with support from a fantastic funk/rock band, “ape”, so do remember to keep the date free, book your tickets and stay tuned to our website and mailing list for regular updates! If you want to read a review of nu York State you can read one I wrote a while back but they have most certainly got better since then.

I’ve had many people contact me since I launched my Calendar plugin to wordpress.org asking if it is possible to change the day the week starts on from Monday to Sunday. Now obviously I’m aware that some people do start the week on Sunday, but I had never realised quite how many people this was until the use of my plugin became widespread and I must say I’m still really perplexed as to why.

The working week the whole world over is Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday being affectionately known as the “week end”. This being the case, how can Sunday be the start of the week on a calendar when it is one of the days that constitutes the week end? Surely it is a contradiction in terms? Visibly this would make the week end split up at opposite sides of the calendar.

Due to demand I will be allowing users of the next version of my Calendar to change the day the week starts on but in the mean time I’d very much like comments on why some might start the week on a Sunday. Any financial, economic, religious etc. reasons with online references to further explanations would particularly helpful.

Attendance in advanced graphics on Thursday was particularly poor, in fact a mere 16 students turned up. This may well be due to the fact that some had spent all night previously completing coursework, but really thats not much of an excuse. Advanced graphics at the school of computing is one of the hardest modules you can take in the third year and I wouldn’t want to be missing any lectures, certainly not on a whim anyway.

Its amazing how much you can miss in just one lecture. On the few occasions I have had to legitimately miss a lecture its taken me nearly twice the duration of the missed lecture to catch up on all the work and in a pressured environment like the third year of a degree course I can’t understand how anyone has the time to perform such a catch up. I’d like to suggest that the simply don’t, in which case more fool them come exam time when they’re scratching their heads.

On the plus side if not many people attend then those that do get more interaction with the lecturer when it comes to asking questions and such which is clearly beneficial. It was certainly true that on Thursday those who attended managed to get a lot of our questions answered. Perhaps I actually like there being less people in the room.