The delightful N800 internet tablet connects to the internet over Wi-Fi or by Bluetooth through a mobile phone, but it’s not always easy to find the correct settings.

Open Control Panel, then Connectivity, then Connections, and set up a New connection. For Orange Pay As You Go, these are the settings to use:

Connection name: Orange Internet
Connection type: Packet data
Access point name: orangeinternet
Dial-up number: *99***1#
User name: (leave blank)
Password: (leave blank)
Prompt password at every login: (leave unselected)
Advanced settings: not needed

For O2 Pay As You Go, use these settings:

Connection name: O2 Payandgo
Connection type: Packet data
Access point name: payandgo.o2.co.uk
Dial-up number: *99***1#
User name: payandgo
Password: password
Prompt password at every login: (leave unselected)
Advanced settings: On the Proxies tab, click "Use proxy". Enter 193.113.200.195 and port 8080 for both the HTTP and HTTPS proxies.

O2 won’t work without the proxy setting, which is unfortunate because the proxy degrades Gmail’s usability.

On a standard O2 or Orange Pay As You Go tariff, costs will be very high (£3 or £4 per megabyte). For Orange, you can buy a daily internet bundle (40MB for £1). Buy the first one by calling 450; after that you can buy it with a text message. For O2, buy the monthly Web bolt-on (200MB for £7.50).

Both of these bundles seem to permit handheld internet browsing, but not the use of the phone as a modem to connect a laptop. The staff at my local O2 shop thought the N800 was OK, as did the staff at my local Orange shop (although they pointed me towards an old tariff that is no longer available). Neither of these bundles permits streaming video, web servers, etc.

Linux has taken its time to get established on the desktop, but over the past twelve months I’ve been seeing it all over the place.

My wireless router is Linux-based, and even admits as much on the packaging. My Nokia N800 internet tablet runs Linux too.

Wal-mart has been selling a budget PC that runs Linux, and Asus is offering the Eee-PC budget Linux laptop. The one-laptop-per-child project runs Linux too.

My kids often berate me for running a strange operating system which makes it hard for them to use the same software as their schoolfriends. They were as surprised as I was, on a ThomsonFly flight last year, to watch the seat-back entertainment system booting up and proudly announcing that it was running Red Hat Linux 9.

But what startled me even more than that was the February 2008 issue of MacFormat magazine. As usual, it includes a DVD. And what should be on the DVD but Fedora Linux! Here’s how they explain it:

Linux on your Mac? Yes please. Don’t fancy getting Leopard? Then why not try Fedora? It’s a free Linux-based OS that can be used in conjunction with Parallels Desktop for Mac (which is also available on the DVD).

Yep. Linux has arrived.

Recently, a bunch of former Google Answers Researchers launched Uclue, an affordable paid Q&A/Research service. It’s somewhat similar to what Google Answers was - you ask your question, set a price, and wait to see whether a researcher can supply your answer (you get a refund if they can’t).

We couldn’t have launched successfully without the enormous help received from the Uclue researchers, who worked hard on design, testing and marketing.

Even more striking, though, was the help we received from those not participating as Uclue researchers. Dozens took the time, unprompted, to submit detailed and helpful feedback about the operation of the site. We received many great suggestions, and are still only part-way through implementing them.

And it didn’t stop there. A software product manager provided some unsolicited but useful insight into aspects of our business model.

We got help with the visual aspects too. The base software package that we are customising, AskPert, uses a rather basic table-based layout:

A less-than-charitable Digg commenter took one look at this and asked whether we had employed “the CraigsList design team”! Another Digger with username soiq was more constructive, and designed us a new layout:

All he wanted, he said jokingly, was a year of Uclue membership in exchange for the PSD files.

We received another unprompted redesign too, this time from Philipp Lenssen (publisher of Google Blogoscoped):

And that’s the design we decided to use.

So, as the site and the service come together, it really is due not only to our work, but also to the work of others. Thanks everyone!

Here’s what happens when a low-traffic blog like this one is linked to from slashdot.org.

And that’s just from a link in a comment that I posted to Slashdot. A link from an article would surely melt my server…

I found Fedora Core 6 on a cover-DVD of Linux Magazine, which saved me having to download it using BitTorrent. The upgrade apparently went smoothly, although it surprised me that it took an hour and a half. I do have a lot of packages installed though.

On rebooting I was unable to bring up KDE. It displayed a message “Can’t load kde-base” then gave me a blank screen. No keys were responding except good old control-alt-backspace, which kills the X server.

I then brought up Gnome, from which I ran pup (the package updater) which downloaded and installed a whole load of upgrades. One more reboot and KDE worked just fine.

With this upgrade, I now have a rhythmbox bug that affects systems with more than one CD drive. If I try to play a CD in the first drive, rhythmbox detects it and offers for me to play it - but it won’t play if I click the Play button. If I eject the CD and put it into the second CD drive, the Play button works just fine. But if I start with the CD in the second drive, I need to move it to the first drive to play the tracks that were identified while it was in the second drive. At least I have a workaround until this bug is fixed.

Fonts have changed in Fedora Core 6. The default sans serif font is crisper and more readable than every, although I think the default serif font has slightly reduced readability.

A big plus is that most applications seem more responsive - in particular there is a big improvement with Firefox 1.5.0.8.

How do you set up a Free Software project? How do you license it, attract developers, keep the lines of communication open, decide contentious issues, maintain the repository, track bugs, make releases, support users, motivate developers and deal with troublemakers?

Karl Fogel describes all this and more in his book Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project. You can order it on paper from O’Reilly Media, or read it online in HTML, PDF or a number of other formats.

Karl draws extensively on his experience within the Subversion project, but he has experience with a wide range of other projects too. The book is very readable, and makes a lot of sense. I hope to apply many of the principles and practices described here to my own projects.

True to his beliefs, Karl has made this book available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. You can copy and distribute the book or derivative works, even commercially.

Stock photos are images that have been taken in anticipation that they will be useful in the future. When you need a photo of a juicy hamburger or a pink cat, you will find one on a stock photo site.

image by Gerla Brakkee

Stock photos used to be produced by professional photographers and licensed for tens or hundreds of dollars per use, but now there is a huge range of fantastic images on the web available to be used freely. Sometimes there are “strings attached” such as a restriction to noncommercial use, or the requirement that the photographer is credited.

When I need a stock photo for a web page I’m putting together, my first port of call is always Stock Xchng, where there are over 200,000 photos. Registration is free and has been without hassles or spam, but you do need to register in order to download full-size images.

Just type in your search terms and browse the resulting photos. The photographer chooses the terms and conditions. All images are free of cost, but some require attribution or written permission for use. I always use images that are completely unrestricted, but I always credit the photographer anyway, and send them the URL. That way, if some future maintainer of the web page removes the attribution they are not in breach of the photographer’s conditions.

Many stock photos are produced for commercial purposes, and can be rather bland (see “Ten Top Stock Photography Cliches“), but there are lots of fresh ideas at Stock Xchng.

And I even contributed a few of my own photos to the site.

After upgrading to Fedora Core 5, the mplayer media player works fine but displays a message “Failed to open ~/.mplayer/default.sub”.

A posting by ndhskp suggested to create an empty default.sub file, and that indeed got rid of the error message. Somehow, I think mplayer should have worked out how to resolve this itself.

Another WordPress upgrade, and it seems to have gone smoothly.

One of my sites uses a modified version of the WordPress files that control user registration, in order to allow AdSense details to be entered. I had to remember to reapply the patch to the new versions of those files.

The new version is said to contain bug fixes, security patches and minor performance enhancements. I haven’t noticed any user-visible changes.

I decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 4 to 5. After downloading the ISO and burning it to DVD, I made a full backup and booted the DVD to upgrade.

Most of the upgrade went fairly smoothly. The only real nuisance was that Fedora Core 5 includes version 8.1.3 of the PostgresQL databse, which can’t read the database format used by PostgreSQL 8.0.7 in Fedora Core 4.

The Fedora release notes do mention this, although they can be interpreted to imply that you can convert your data after you upgrade. This isn’t the case, so I installed PostgresQL 8.0.7 from source, exported the data, reinstalled 8.1.3 and imported the data.

That sorted everything out.