Virtual PC is infamous for it’s inability to support Linux installations. There are always hacks required to get through the installation, but once installed your Linux machine should work fine.

So I wasn’t completely surprised when I ran into issues while trying to install the latest server version of Ubuntu 8.04. A quick Google search lead me to find out (via a comment left in a blog post) that to get the installation working you need to do the following:

• Boot off the CD (ISO) and then choose your language
• Press F6 on the next screen and you’ll see a long string of text near the bottom of the screen.
• Type the following before the trailing dashes: noapic nolapic vga=791
• Press enter and continue the installation.

So far so good.

And remember, that Ubuntu 8.04 is a LTS (long term support) version, which means that Ubuntu will provide support and updates for 5 years for the server version.

I’ve been following Ubuntu since it’s inception in 2005 with Warty Warthog which was labelled 4.10. Each year since then they’ve released two versions a year – one in April and one in October – and this is where the version number comes from. For example, the 8 in 8.04 is from the year 2008, and the 04 is the fourth month of the year.

Each release has been getting better, and especially the last version (7.10) which I thought was a definite contender. So Ubuntu 8.04 was released today and I’ve just finished ‘installing’ it and giving it a very quick test.

I put ‘installing’ in quotes, because if you’re running Windows, Ubuntu have created an impressive installation called Wubi. This allows you to install it on your Windows computer without having to make any changes to the disk partitions. They do this by creating a folder called Ubuntu on either your C or D drive and install all the necessary files in this folder. Then, with a simple modification to your boot options, when you first turn on your computer you can choose between Windows or Ubuntu. Here’s a screenshot of the Wubi installation manager:

Once Wubi finished installing, I rebooted choosing the newly added Ubuntu option. Ubuntu loaded up quickly and I was presented with a login box. I had already set up the first user account in the Wubi installation manager as you can see in the installation window above. After logging, I was impressed to see that my screen resolution was set to the correct size, sound was working, and a network icon in the top menu bar indicated that there were available wireless networks available. I selected my wireless network, enter the secure key and connected successfully.

Wow.

What just happened there isn’t possible with any other operating system on my notebook. Not Windows XP, Vista or any other flavour of Linux that I’ve tested. The key hardware was detected automatically and I didn’t have to install any additional drivers or software to get up and running. That’s impressive – and all that without needing to repartition or reformat my disks.

So once again I’ve been impressed with Ubuntu, but there was one major problem – and this was a show-stopper for me. Ubuntu have always prided themselves on providing the absolute latest software and sometimes on the bleeding edge too. So I wasn’t completely surprised that they included Firefox 3.0, but I also wasn’t happy as it’s still in beta and in my opinion still has a way to go before being complete. This becomes obvious when trying to install addons, even installing the Adobe Flash plugin through up an error after just browsing for a few minutes.

For me, my internet browser is the most important tool on my computer, and I absolutely need it to be as stable as possible. That’s why I never run beta versions of Firefox as my default browser. So I tried to install Firefox 2 by using the add/remove programs applet but I couldn’t find anything apart from the version that was installed.

I’m sure that I could have installed Firefox 2 by downloading it directly from Mozilla but it just annoyed me that they would think that a beta version of Firefox would be fine for the typical home user.

When Flickr announced their new video service that allows you to store your videos in-line with your photos, I thought it was time to start processing all the videos that we’ve taken of Elliot over the last 10 months and start posting them online.

Turns out that video editing and processing is a lot harder than I first expected.

The first thing I did was start up Windows Movie Maker on my Vista notebook, expecting it to be a complete breeze. Came across a showstopper pretty quickly – Windows Movie Maker doesn’t support the MPEG2 videos from our Sony Video Recorder. It’s not like it’s an uncommon format or anything, so it’s annoying that there’s no support built in. I also found out later that the MPEG4 videos from my Nokia N95 are also not supported by Movie Maker. Not impressed.

So I then started some research into video editing software – I was hoping to find a good freebie that would do the job, but was also willing to pay for something if needed. After much research and downloading, I finally was deciding between Sony Vegas Movie Studio, or Adobe Premiere Elements.

I preferred the interface of Vegas as it was quite advanced but also dead simple to use, so it makes you feel like a pro. The interface in Premiere Elements is also nice, but more in a pretty, child-like way.

Both seemed to do the same sorts of things, but Premiere Elements had better options for exporting videos, whereas the Sony software tried to trick you into using their own online service for uploading videos to the Internet.

But the Premiere Elements trial was super annoying because you couldn’t export videos without a huge banner overlaid on the video saying that it was produced by a trial version of the software. The Sony software had no such limitations, and I almost bought the Sony software for that reason alone.

But I went for Adobe’s Premiere Elements in the end because it was the only software that I could use to export my videos in widescreen format without the letterbox bars and without the videos looking stretched. (I also learned a lot about the differences between square pixels and PAL and NTFS sized videos along the way.)

I actually bought the Adobe Elements bundle which also includes Photoshop Elements as the interface looked the same as Premiere so I thought it would be easy to use.

Anyway, here’s the first video from Premiere Elements. I haven’t actually done any editing on it as I was just pleased enough that the size came out right. A nice feature about embedding videos from Flickr is that you can choose the size of the video when embedding.

In the first round of Britain’s Got Talent 2008, a 13 year old boy has wowed the crowds and is destined to be the next big star. Andrew Johnston has been bullied at school because of his singing, but his first, nervous performance says it all…

Flickr unveiled a new feature recently that enables you to search through your address books in various email systems to find contacts that are also on Flickr. If you’ve used one of the many social networking sites, you’ll realise that this isn’t a new feature – most other social networking sites allow you to search your address books to find friends that are on the same service.

The difference is that Flickr have implemented the feature correctly.

Most other sites ask you to enter the username and password that you use to log in to the various email systems, then once you submit the form, the system logs into your email account, and downloads all of your contacts through a process called ’screen-scraping’. What ’screen-scraping’ does isn’t really important, the important bit is that you’ve just trusted another web site with your email’s username and password. Most sites will include a message saying that your username and password won’t be saved and will only be used to grab your contact details. But what if they are lying…

Your password for your email system is probably your most important password that you have. If someone has your email password, then they can access any personal information that you have stored in your inbox and there’s a good chance that they will be able to get ANY of your other online passwords that they like. For example, if you forget your password for an online service, you can usually go to that site, and click on the reset password button. This will either send your password to your email account, or send you an email with instructions on how to reset it. Imagine if I had your email account password, and I logged on to your account and secretly set up a forwarding address for emails to get sent to an anonymous email account I had set up. You wouldn’t know that your emails are being forwarded without delving into your email system’s options and checking the setting manually. Then I could go to any online site that I thought you might use, and reset your password so that I could log on as you.

Even worse, is that if you have an email account with Google, Microsoft or Yahoo!, then your email passwords are linked to all the other services that you use with them. So your Yahoo!Mail password is also used for Flickr, and IM; your Gmail password is also used for Google Docs, Calendar; and your Windows Live ID is used with almost all of Microsoft’s online services.

So back to Flickr’s new feature, and how it’s been done correctly. Flickr gives you the option to search through your Yahoo!, Google, or Microsoft/Live contacts, but the difference is that Flickr don’t ask you for your email account password. Instead they use the various API’s that are available, which means that if you want to search through your Google contacts, you’re redirected to Google’s site where they handle the authentication, and then send back the contact information to Flickr. The same applies to Yahoo! and Microsoft – at no point does Flickr ask you for your password, you only need to supply your password to the site where you would normally log in to anyway.

So the point of this post is to not just congratulate Flickr on implementing this feature correctly, but also highlight to you how dangerous it can be to give out your email account password too freely.

I was upgrading to the latest version of Google Mobile Maps when my N95 rebooted itself. After starting up again, I would get the Nokia logo then nothing but a white screen. Removing the batter and SIM card didn’t help fix the issue either.

So after some Googling I found out how to reset your N95 back to the factory defaults while in a broken state. Turn on your N95 while holding the ‘3′, ‘*’, and ‘answer’ keys and it will go through the reset process and you’ll get back to the setup screen.

Hope this tip helps someone else searching for the solution.

Just noticed a little Easter egg in Google’s Docs application. When creating a new Document from within Google Docs, you’re given the option to create a "New airplane". Clicking on this opens a new Google Doc with the following image as a template. Enjoy.