Blackle. It's Google, only black.

The designers claim that having computer screens displaying lots of black rather than lots of white leads to lower energy consumption, and therefore created this black version of Google. Apparently, tests have shown that this may be true on CRT monitors, but not on LCDs, which now dominate across the world.

Well, regardless of all this, it's actually nice to have websites with dark backgrounds in my opinion. For the last year or so, I've been using a dark theme (white or off-white text on black or dark grey backgrounds) on my computer and it is much easier on my eyes. I suppose I should probably update this website along the same lines, actually.

I have to say though, that it is annoying how many applications and websites don't account for people who might have this kind of colour scheme set up on the OS or browser, and are built with fairly lazy style sheets. For example, on parts of Flickr, the CSS specifies dark grey text, but fails to specify a light background for the same areas. This means that it becomes unreadable. So, any web designer people reading this, please do bear in mind that people might be viewing your pages on systems with other colour schemes than the "high usability" ones defaulted to by most interface designers these days.

I have always wondered though, why, when on text consoles, we spent decades using white-on-black, when we're in a GUI, we default to black-on-white... Answers on a postcard!

Make your nominations here. Voting will begin on 1st November. Courtesy of the Birmingham: It's Not Shit guys.

I wasn't quite sure that I'd read this properly at first, but the University of Central England (UCE) has now become Birmingham City University. Shocking. I know that they've been looking at a name change for a while now, but it's now official, and this is what they chose. They've even got a blue logo and everything.

Right, the only thing left for us decent Brummies to do is to petition to get the University of Birmingham (my university) renamed to the Aston Villa University, with all associated claret and blue livery. Who's with me? (Okay, I suppose that Aston University has a headstart on that one, but that would be less fun for me...)

For a while now I've been faced with a problem which really should have had quite a simple solution in today's internet-enabled computing world: file synchronisation.

Like many people, I'm sure, I do a large amount of work on the desktop PC in my office. I also do increasingly more on my laptop. (In actual fact, I tend to do more on my laptop, but that's another story). I then have the problem of where my files are kept. Years ago, the answer would have been fairly straightforward: a floppy disk. As time moved on, perhaps a zip disk or USB pen-drive would have been used, but to be honest, I now have such a lot of data that I'd need an external hard drive to keep it all on, and that isn't always practical to carry around. Added to this, it wouldn't feel a very secure system to me, even if I did back it up regularly, and sometimes I'd like to be able to read the same file on more than one PC. Perhaps in this networked world I've grown to expect too much from my computer(s), perhaps not.

Email is something which has got the whole problem pretty well sorted. Probably the majority of people in the world now use webmail systems of one sort or another. Those, like me, who prefer to have a copy of the emails on their own systems often make use of the IMAP protocol to allow our mail clients to automatically synchronise between multiple locations. And IMAP has worked remarkably well for me for over ten years. KDE quite niftily also allows me to store my contacts and calendar in IMAP folders, so that they are too accessible from anywhere with internet access or a local copy. Great stuff.

So, why is it so difficult with files? I remember vaguely there being something called "My Briefcase" on an old version of Windows I used to use, but I never really needed to back then or spent any time getting to grips with it, but I've found nothing similar on any linux system, and I'm told the functionality has now disappeared from Windows too. (Perhaps it's been replaced with something else... I don't know.)

A few months back, looking around for a solution to my file synchronisation problem, I discovered rsync, a fairly old tool, developed for creating mirrors of things such as FTP servers. I played around for a while with rsync, and found it quite useful, but the main problem was that it was only really intended for uni-directional syncing. This is fine for backing up one computer to another, but when I often work on both, I need something which can deal with the fact that changes could have occurred on either machine.

I asked around on a few mailing lists, and it was suggested that I try Coda. Rather than being just a tool, Coda is a filesystem, a bit like NFS, but offering "disconnected operation for mobile computing" according to their website. Great, I thought, sounds just like IMAP, and what's more, it's been around since 1987. Unfortunately, Coda proved to me to be an enormous headache, and after quite a lot of wasted time, I still didn't have a functioning implementation of it (its configuration is most definitely not for the faint-hearted). It appears to me that the idea of Coda has been around since 1987, but in practice it is, again according to its website, merely "promising".

So, I was back to rsync. A few months ago, I settled on the use of a few hand-written and easily breakable shell scripts which called rsync to mirror my files in either direction at a time. The scripts relied on some flags, set by the scripts, to determine which machine had the 'current' copy of the files. In essence, I was able to check files in and out of the desktop machine (which was behaving like a server) to my laptop. It just relied on me knowing which one I was supposed to be working on! A lapse of memory on my part would unfortunately lead to the updates on the non-current machine being wiped at the next sync.

This week, thanks to my friend Edd, I have discovered something which I'm hoping will be the end to my woes: Unison. Unison appears to be a kind of hybrid of rsync and CVS, and claims to allow updates to take place on either machine (providing that they're not on the same file), and then merged together. It's free software, in the Ubuntu repositories and even has a nice little GTK+ GUI as well as a command line interface. So, I'm suspending use of my rsync scripts for a bit, have backed up my files, and will give Unison a whirl. So far, it seems very easy to use. Though frankly, why this kind of functionality isn't completely standard by now, I don't know.

As any regular reader of this blog will know, I'm an every day KDE user. After a history of using SuSE and Gentoo, my Linux distribution of choice for the past year or so has been Kubuntu, the KDE flavour of Ubuntu. Well, after a few discussions at this month's Birmingham Linux User Group meeting, which coincided with the new release of the Ubuntu family, the Gutsy Gibbon, and having spent quite a bit of the evening strongly advocating KDE, I've now decided to give GNOME a try.

For those not up on the particulars of modern Linux-based desktops, GNOME and KDE represent two quite different approaches to a fully fledged desktop system. The UNIX world has always been modular, and though the graphical windowing system itself is provided by X Windows, much of the look and feel is provided by the particular window manager or desktop environment you choose. The two most fully featured and mature desktop environments are KDE and GNOME.

A bit of history is probably in order here. Many people moving over to GNU/Linux based systems spend a while wondering why there are several different options, and why the community doesn't just pool its effort into one really good system. There are many reasons why that doesn't always happen in open source development, but the KDE/GNOME case is particularly interesting.

KDE was begun by Matthias Ettrich in 1996, in an attempt to create a consistent and easy to use desktop environment for UNIX systems. It was immediately a very popular project and gained developers fast, the software progressing quickly. However, many in the free software world (including myself) had concerns about KDE, since it was based on the proprietary QT widget libraries, owned and developed by the Norwegian company Trolltech. Of course, the GPL does not allow free software to be linked with proprietary software, and hence the GNU project could not support KDE. Debian subsequently dropped the system from its distribution.

A number of responses came about from this move. Listed in no particular order, the first was an attempt to create an alternative, free version of QT, called Harmony. Secondly, many keen KDE people created the KDE Free QT movement, an attempt to persuade Trolltech to relicense QT under a free licence, and subsequently to guarantee its availability should Trolltech disappear or abandon QT. Thirdly, the GNOME project was founded; an attempt to create an alternative desktop environment from scratch, free from any involvement with proprietary code or reliance on commercial developers.

Those who know where I stand on free software would expect that I would have been a supporter of GNOME from the start, and back then they'd have been right. I was doing my undergraduate degree at the time, and the university computers included both GNOME and KDE. So, I used this early version of GNOME for a while on both them any my own PC.

GNOME has always felt different to use than KDE; a bit like the difference between AmigaOS and Windows 3.0, both of which I'd been used to switching between previously, so after a year or so of using KDE, GNOME took a bit of getting used to. My initial reactions were quite positive; it looked good and was quite fast, though much of its functionality appeared to exist in framework documents rather than the software I could see on my screen. Still, it allowed me to achieve a consistent look to the desktop (something previously lacking on Linux really) and the look was highly configurable. It looked better than KDE.

However, over the next couple of years, to me, GNOME stagnated. KDE, on the other hand, came on leaps and bounds. KDE's file manager (kfm back then) and subsequently its lightweight web browser (konqueror) appeared technically superior to Netscape Navigator, which the GNOME systems hadn't been able to supplant. But by far the best feature of KDE back then was the interoperability of the applications. Items could be dragged and dropped between virtually any application, and they would know what to do with them. Even the early implementations of what is now known as 'kparts' technology allowed programs to be run inside others when Microsoft Office was still struggling to achieve this properly.

Then in 2000, the freedom issue seemed to disappear. Trolltech released QT under the GPL, resolving the issues about distributing modified code, which their own QPL created. By this point, an agreement was also firmly in place with KDE to ensure that if Trolltech folded or abandoned QT, then the code would be released under a BSD style licence.

By this time, both GNOME and KDE were progressing very quickly, though KDE remained consistently a year or two ahead of GNOME in terms of features and stability. Since the new millennium, both systems have been very usable, though each retaining a distinct look and feel. At this point I was already very comfortable with KDE and its ever expanding suite of programs. I found GNOME a bit like KDE before I'd upgraded it. Added to that, GNOME lacked (perhaps still does) a uniform way of doing various tasks (such as right clicking on a menu bar to configure it). Its file dialogs were chunky, and it just didn't have as many features as KDE. I stuck with KDE.

The choice of desktop system by the main Linux distributions at this time was fairly evenly split. Many had no obvious bias, whilst Redhat used GNOME, SuSE favoured KDE, and both contributed heavily towards the development of their respective desktops. Debian now included KDE again, and a host of other systems lay on each side.

Then, in 2003 Novell bought SuSE, and subsequently also brought in GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza and his company Ximian, who were responsible for a large chunk of GNOME development. It was no great surprise, therefore, when Novell's SUSE (note the large 'U') announced that GNOME would be the preferred desktop for their Linux distributions, with which they hoped to compete with Redhat in the enterprise market. Luckily, SUSE still do contribute towards KDE, though the announcement did send ripples across the KDE world. Controversially, Miguel has now led the charge on Microsoft compatibility through the Mono project, and despite the guy having done great work on pushing open file formats in recent years, I've heard frequent criticisms of his style of "starting" projects, only to leave others to pick up the pieces and make the thing work.

Arguably the most popular desktop Linux-based system today is Ubuntu, itself a remodelling of that stalwart of the Linux world, Debian (rather excellently named after its founders, Deb and Ian). Ubuntu however, was also firmly behind GNOME, and despite the fact that KDE and XFCE based flavours of the distribution were later released, the lion's share of development and use remains focussed on GNOME. With all this extra focus, surely GNOME has now caught up.

Given the number of distributions now preferring GNOME, its no surprise that its user share has also increased. A hunch tells me that more people at my Linux User Group use GNOME than KDE, and this month we were treated to a demo of GNOME-based Ubuntu's latest features. It looked good. Ubuntu, being primarily developed for GNOME, tends to be slightly quicker off the mark with new functionality for the GNOME flavour than the KDE one, but how much? So, as someone who has now used KDE since version 1.0, and only dabbled with GNOME occasionally, perhaps it is time for me to take a closer look.

So, my "project", if you will, is to spend a month using GNOME rather than KDE on my home PC. I've installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon from a fresh install, and there isn't a KDE application in sight. I'm going to attempt to get to know the GNOME way of doing things. I aim to compare GNOME and its applications' approach with the good KDE functionality I know I like. I also hope to discover some new stuff too.

In a month's time, I will write about my experiences, and whether it's tempted me to make a more permanent switch.

After all, KDE and GNOME (contrary to many mailing list debates) are not enemies, just rival siblings, willing each other to do well. And it's good to get to know your friends better, right?

This is genius, just try it:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

I was just about to blog about this, when I realised that my friend Zeth has already done a fantastic job of summing up the recent changes to university policy in this post. Thanks to the joys of the Creative Commons Licence, I can make his comments available here...

Thanks, Zeth. Though I'm really not surprised. I'm not quite sure what exactly the problem is, which they are attempting to solve with this new policy, but presumably it has something to do with the odd person who came to campus and made them feel a little uncomfortable. However, Albert Einstein quite famously said that for every problem there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong, and I'm convinced that is what's going on here.

Similarly, I've also recently become involved in the Young Greens, an environmental group on campus, affiliated to the Green Party. One of our planned activities for the early part of this semester was to have a stall on campus, handing out some free food as a bit of a gimmick, along with fliers about some upcoming events. However, even to carry out this innocuous activity and even though we are all students, required three week's notice. We were also handed regulations requiring the brand names of all food on the stall to be submitted to the university authorities, along with written recipes. We were also prohibited from using any nuts or eggs. Now, I have a bit of experience of the relationship between university administrations and students, and rather than based on anything useful, this appears to me to be nothing more than an attempt at disincentivising students from carrying out such activities.

But, as a previous senior university colleague of mine frequently used to remind those with whom he came in contact, universities in the 21st century are businesses. I'm extrapolating now, but as such, mustn't any activity which might potentially have a negative impact on the efficiency of the multinational-company's-graduate-training-programme-participant-production-machine be discouraged, shut down or banned? Operating within its current market environment (the inevitable outcome of the sadly unstoppable move towards ever increasing tuition fees in higher education - the issue which first motivated me to get involved in politics by the way), can anything else be expected of universities? University administrations are, I would argue, caught between the rock of failure (and therefore replacement of the management) and the hardplace of their current approach.

The answer? More to come later I guess from me on that, but a refocus on the role of education in today's society at the very least...