Darragh Ó Héiligh blog and accessibility guides

Yesterday, I decided to play around with a package called Tilda.  Tilda is a graphical console for the Gnome desktop.  It runs on KDE as well but its GTK based.  The main advantage it gives is more bells and whistles for people who like visual effects.  No, I’m not in to visual effects for obvious reasons however I was curious and I like the speed that it launches at

After installing it yesterday, I was very happy to see that Orca worked with it right away.  When I ran Tilda for the first time, I was given a configuration wizard screen.  Orca spoke all of the focusable objects as if they were made for each other.  In the terminal it’s self, flat review could be used to read the console as you would expect with any accessible application.  Only problem was that Orca didn’t automatically speak new text as it was written to the screen.

To try to rectify the situation, armed only with my Windows screen reader knowledge and my curiosity, I renamed the gnome-terminal.py file to tilda.py.  That didn’t do anything for me.  However, thinking back, I wonder if it didn’t do anything for me because I didn’t restart Orca first before trying tilda again.  My thinking behind this attempt was that Windows screen readers such as Jaws versions before 7 and Window Eyes used a script or macro type function that was more or less tied to the executable of the application.  For example, if notepad.exe was run, Jaws / Window eyes would run the settings / scripts for that file if it found a file named notepad.jsb or notepad.001.   This has changed in later versions of Jaws and Window eyes however I assumed that it was possible that the logic was similar in Orca.    That didn’t work though so I sent a brief email to the Orca discussion list asking for their suggestions. 

Rich Burridge, an Orca developer, took some time out of his busy day to help me.  With some research, he determined that Tilda actually used VTE (Virtual Terminal Emulator) This is also used by Gnome-Terminal and has a lot of accessibility support already.  This meant that it was probably fine to use the Gnome-terminal script as it would most likely behave the same.  Only one small change was required.  He suggested that I add a few short lines to my orca-customizations.py file.  Look at the end of this post for the specific code.
I want to take this opportunity to describe to you how Gnome accessibility differs from that provided by windows screen readers as in Windows, just copying this script from one application to another expecting it to behave the same would be completely unheard of.  Windows screen readers provide accessibility in windows. In Linux", it’s gnome that provides its own accessibility.  Orca takes advantage of this and provides output customized to ensure that users receive the information they need in a way they can understand.  That’s the short version.  Now for some description. 

In windows, if you are using a screen reader like Jaws and an instant messaging program like MSN for example, Jaws needs to monitor very high level behavior.  I.e, it needs to track changes to the interface, read text from the status bar, monitor the entire conversation history area and a lot more.  It does this to ensure you hear status updates, incoming messages, Contact information and of course, at times, it needs to keep track of your own actions so it can tell you where you are in any given window.  Most of this information is obtained by analyzing the interface.  Only a very small percentage of what Jaws gets from windows is obtained from information that the application or operating system gives it.  In other words, MSN does not communicate with Jaws to tell it that a new message has arrived.  Jaws determines this by watching for changes on the screen.

Gnome on the other hand is completely different.  It provides assistive software such as the Orca screen reader with information so that it can relay this to the user.  In the gnome messaging client, pidgin, Orca is informed when a new message is sent to the message history window.   It then has events determined by scripts to tell it what to do with this information.  So, it doesn’t matter how you have pidgin configured, it will still send this information to Orca which in turn will relay it to the user.  So, bringing it back to the terminal, it doesn’t matter that Gnome Terminal is completely different to Tilda.  Tilda uses different colors, different positioning and a lot of eye candy.  It really doesn’t matter though as it utilizes this VTE that provides the required accessibility information to Orca! 

I should also say here that although my description of the differences between how Windows and Gnome behaves should be accurate, I can’t say it with full certainty.  I’m not a developer and if you are really interested in the low level workings of the Gnome window manager and how it provides accessibility, I’d suggest you look into subscribing to the orca mailing list.

That’s all the background and descriptions out of the way.  If you’re interested in getting up and running with tilda and Orca, use the following instructions:

1. Go into a terminal.
   1. Press alt and F2 when in the Gnome desktop.
   2. Type gnome-terminal
   3. Press enter.
2. Install the tilda terminal.
   1. Type apt-get install tilda
   2. Press the enter key.  When prompted to confirm the package download and installation, type the letter y and again, press enter.
   3. Exit the terminal window.
3. Instruct orca to run the gnome-terminal.py script when you run tilda.
   1. Press alt f2 to start the run dialogue box.
   2. Type gedit then press enter.
   3. Paste the below code into the editor.

      
      import re
      import orca.settings
      from orca.orca_i18n import _
      orca.settings.setScriptMapping(re.compile(_('tilda')), "gnome-terminal")
      

   4. Save the document by pressing control and s.
   5. Exit gedit by pressing alt and f4.
4. Run the tilda terminal.
   1. Press alt f2 to start the run dialogue box.
   2. Type tilda and press enter.

You’re done.  You are now in the tilda configuration screen.  Configure the package to your own preferences then use the ok button to save your changes and start the tilda terminal.  This wizard will not be shown automatically again when you run tilda.  To bring up the wizard, type tilda –C in the launch application dialogue box accessible with Alt F2.

I think that should be clear enough.  Any problems or questions feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to get to them.

My thanks to Rich Burridge who so generously helped with this.  Without his help I'd probably be working at this still.

Firstly, there’s been an argument in the team behind me.  Two French fellas got a bit hot headed and hurled some abuce at each other.  So much so that three people had to step in and settle them down.  Amazing!  I’d have stepped in a lot sooner because it was obvious that it was going to happen.  It was a storm in a teacup really.  Hahahaha. Sorry, I was just looking for a good reason to say that. 

Second bit of randomness for this morning, Emma was going outside so I asked her to take my dog with her.  She obliged thankfully, to make things hard though, Freddie didn’t really want to go.  It’s the usual thing, don’t want to leave but he’s happy enough to go once I’m out of sight.  Today though he was that bit clingier.  She got half way down the office when Freddie bolted and ran back over to me!  I think the poor woman got a bit embarrassed.  A few people thought it was very funny.  Fair play to her though. 

She bought me up a coffee.  It’s the best coffee I’ve had in ages!  It’s fabulous!

Next, I have a friend sending me about one text every ten minutes coming up with new puns about sowing.  She’s got me in Stitches!  Hahahaha. Get it?  It’s all her fault.  Think she’s in a really weird mood today.  Well, either that, or she’s finally lost the plot.  She also left a message on my phone asking me to marry her.  She was only messing of course but she thought it was hilarious.  OH, some background, the twenty ninth of February, i.e, the day that only comes around every four years is traditionally the one day that women can propose to men.  I know another woman who is taking the piss out of her boyfriend acting like she’s leading up to a proposal tonight.  She’s doing it discretely enough not to be obvious but still obvious enough to keep him wondering.  Or, should that be worried!

Finally, there was one other piece of randomness that I wanted to share with you today but I can’t remember what it was.  Oh yes, that was a quick hello out to those people who know me and who read this blog but who are too chicken to comment!  To all you people I say: “You’re all cowards!” Go on, comment!  Make me know that I’m not just writing to my self.  To those of you who do respond, Thank you again.  You’re for ever enshrined in my DigitalDarragh hall of fame.

So ends the randomness for today.  Go in piece, to love and serve the DigitalDarragh.

I booked this morning off today.  I was supposed to meet a man from the Image Business centre at the house.  We had agreed that he’d connect up all the network points.   Unfortunately, it’s something I know how to do but not something I can do confidently as the cable colors are a bit of a show stopper.

I got the 8AM train from Connolly to Drogheda earlier.  When in Drogheda, I called to say that I was going to be ten minutes late only to hear that even though they were scheduled to come over at 9AM, in their diary, it was 2PM!  Conveniently, the woman I spoke to, Mary wasn’t in today so they had no way of clearing things up.

I decided to jump on the next train from Drogheda to Dublin and leave my keys with someone.  I’m just hoping that the taxi I’ve organized to pick them up and drop them over turns up and is able to get them.  I know the taxi driver well so I trust him but god knows what happens in Train stations.  I’ve asked the fella at the door to do me a favor by keeping them with him so I’m hopeful it will go smoothly.

It feels like things are finally starting to fall into place for us in the house.  On Tuesday, the electrician finished up.  He’s done a very good job I think.  Wiring seems to be first class and he’s even fitted a separate smaller fuse box to facilitate the editional requirements that we’re placing on the supply.  HE also fitted the CAT5 cable for me.  I’ve someone coming over tomorrow to take care of connecting all the boxes and the bridge between the patch panel and the router.  Oh, it’s going to be a hell of a set up again I’m finished.  In a nutshell, I’ve designated under the stairs as the coms closet.  There are ten network points throughout the house and their all converging in this small space.  These are going to be connected to a patch panel which will in turn feed them into a switch.  The switch will have two connections to the internet.   One to the server and one straight to the router.  The server has another network card and that will be connected into the router as well.  So, I’ll have the server set up more or less as it is at the moment.  Acting as a firewall, proxy, secondary router, DNS, antivirus, mail and web server, and possibly a network storage device. This will ensure that all home traffic is routed on a secure network and stuff that I’m testing like port tunneling and forwarding can go over the DMZ network while still having access to the Internet.  There are networks in all major rooms as well.  My computer room, Emma’s …… multi function room, and the living room.

Yesterday, I had an old friend of mine around who has his own building company.  He’s going to do a lot of touch up jobs that are needed to the place.  He’s also going to take care of insulating the attics and the outside walls as well as a lode of other little jobs that we need to do.

Today, two days earlier than I anticipated, Lenster windows came in and within four hours, they had replaced all the windows in the house!  Amazing stuff!  Three of them came in and got it done.  I’ve not been there yet but Emma got two hours off today to go home early to make sure she was there when she left and she seems impressed.

Next big thing is the heating.  Role on the 14th of March!  There’s light at the end of the tunnel!

You know, it's interesting,  I set up this blog origionally to talk about technology and all that kind of thing however it looks like a lot of my posts recently are about the house.  A friend ocmmented about this when I spoke to her on Tueaday evening however while looking at the referor history this morning, I was really surprised to see that most of my traffic is coming from people searching about home D I Y topics. 

Example:  one person searced a while ago about how to insulate a roof and was given my post where I spoke about insulating the roof of the extension.  the search page is shown below.  A few days ago, someone got to me when they searched about removing fire places, another got to me when searching for wall paper designs.  Really, it's facinating to see what drives traffic to your site.  So, to all you people looking for a DIY site, Welcome to DigitalDarragh!   Sorry, you'll not find much of interest here unless you find my rambling interesting and if you do,   I'm sorry.  Very sorry.

Of course, It's not all house related.  A lot of searches have focused on my Linux" on a pen drive, and in fact I've received quite a few private emails about this as well so I'm really happy to see my site is generating some interest around that and specifically accessibility.

OH, that search engine result is at: http://www.search.com/search?q=HOW+DO+I+INSULATE+A+PITCHED+SLATED+ROOF&nav=2.10.5.10

It's bad enough around here without the staff in the port tunnel going on strike for better working conditions!  Just give them what they want!  And you people in the tunnel!  Strike at a time that doesn't effect me trying to get home you horrible inconsiderate shower of people.

I've to be in Drogheda by a quarter past six at the latest.  With the strike, I'll be lucky if I get back by seven! 

Stupid roads...

By popular request, I made a few changes to the blog last night. 

Two readers asked for a link back to the home page when reading indevidual posts or categories.  I created that change last night. I also added a navigation section to the top right of most pages.  This will be added to all pages but there's a small bug I need to work out first. 

Ask and you shall recieve.

Public transport can be both very relaxing and very irritating!  Last night on the way from Dublin to Drogheda, I had a nice relaxing trip.  I got a seat reasonably quickly after getting onto the train and I listened to some fella on 98FM make a fool of callers until I lost coverage around Rush and Lusk station. The walk from the station to the house was nice too.  We got up there in great time and for the first time; the dog even found the gate for me! 

I had to go back up to Dublin on the 6:55PM train though so I was only in Drogheda for an hour.  Obviously, because of this running around, I was slightly tired so I connected the Ipod and listened to some music.  My relaxation was cut short though with some fella getting onto the train in Balbriggan with a radio blaring music.  Now, this would be bad but what made things worse was the radio was tuned in badly.  The man obviously got frustrated by this as he started pounding the radio off the table in front of him.  That made the speakers start to vibrate so I had to sit there listening to crappy music with speakers vibrating and the station so far out of tune there was a hum braking through.  OH, on top of all that, he really smelled very badly.  He was three seats in front of me I think and the smell was almost over powering!  It was a cross between Vomit and BO!  I’m sorry for the description but really, it was torturous.  Every time he banged his radio off the table my poor dog nearly jumped out of his skin.  I think he sensed that I was a bit tense after the radio carrying smelly man got onto the train as he was a lot more alert than he normally is while sitting under the seat.  Usually he just curls up and has a snooze while I’m listening to music on the train.  Thank god for mints!  I had about six of them one after another to try to dull the smell in the carriage. It worked well too!  It made it less intolerable.

So, for all you public transport using people, Mints are the key to unclean people sitting near you on those hot mornings when the train is packed and as dry as gandy’s flip-flop.

As you probably noticed as soon as you got here, I've made a change to the blog. 

I liked the wordpress theme so this is a very close copy of that. 

This greatly enhances the accessibility of the site as well. And has not required any dirty hacks to make things work as expected with screen readers. 

Finding an ocr package for Linux" is actually quite difficult.  Sane seems to have one but it hasn't worked for me.  The road ahead looks good though.  Gnome 2.20 looks like it will have increased support for gnome-scan which in turn will have new support for gnome ocr.  That gnome-ocr package doesn't exist in the repositories for Ubuntu 7.10 though from what I can gather.  In saying that, I've just remembered that I don't actually have the community repositories enabled on this test PC> 

OCR for anyone who may not know stands for Optical Character Recognition.  It enables people to scan printed text into electronic format and read this text using a carot in a word processor / text editor.  Thus, it gives visually impaired people access to printed material that may not otherwise be available.

In Windows, the main OCR packages are OpenBook or Kurzweil.

In OpenSuSE, my quest to find an OCR package is even less successful.  However, more research is needed with that distribution as accessibility information is usually much harder to find however with YAST, it's easier to get things up and running as it really makes configuration a lot more straight forward.

Let's hope that's the end of the spam.

I've changed a few things so lets hope.

Sorry, that's all for now.  Short and sweet.

It's one thing talking about Linux", ranting and raving about how powerful and flexable it is, but it's another thing seeing it in action.  So, for that reason, towards the middle of last year, I created one review and two tutorials based in Linux" using Audio.  The first review was an introduction to Fedora 7, Open Office Evolution and Firefox.  Open Office is the default word processor for Gnome and KDE, Evolution is the Gnome email client and Firefox as many will know is a very popular web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation.  The second recording is a guide to installing Ubuntu 7.10 to help you get up and running with Linux".  The third and last recording for the moment is a guide to installing an accessible Linux" environment with speech and Braille giving you access to a powerful word processor, Email client and web browser as well as a whole host of entertainment and productivity applications.

Thanks to Orca, Speech is provided right from the start of the Ubuntu installation.  With Fedora, speech is provided in the text based installation via the Speakup console screen reader.  Thanks to these applications, users can follow exactly what my computer is doing via audio output.

These reviews and guides have been well excepted by the Linux" community.  Have a listen to them by going to www.digitaldarragh.com/linuxat.asp 

Your comments would be appreciated.  More recordings will be created soon and your feedback will ensure they are as effective and helpful as possible.

We have the house one month today.  The progress has been slow.  In fact, much less paced than I had anticipated however, the benefits should be very obvious when it's all finished.  Much more thought is going into each room than originally planned which inevitably means more money is required but that's just the joys of it I suppose.

The living room will possibly need to be dry walled on one side.  Both to make it easier for electrical wiring to be hidden and to make the room more insulated.  The electrician has already been there though so this is going to be another job that needs to be touched up when the dry wall has been installed. 

The fireplace in the kitchen will be removed.  That shouldn't be a huge job.  It's going to take some hard work but it's not going to cost a huge amount to do.  I'm also getting all the kitchen cabinets replaced.  Actually, the entire room will have gone through a complete redesign when it's all done.  The design won't be perfect but functionally and visibly it should be great.  That's under way at the moment.  Yesterday, I took the doors off the presses and removed the top presses.  I need to wait for a Plummer to come in before getting rid of the bottom presses as I need to disconnect the sink first.  I know that's as easy as squeezing both pipes together but believe me, if you saw the size of those pipes in there you'd wait for a Plummer too.  I have a feeling he'll have a better tool for doing it than I do.

In Emma's sowing room, which is the front room just off the kitchen, I'm going to get someone in with a cango hammer to bury some of the pipes that for some reason were left surface mounted after the first major job that was done in the house in the 70's.  Obviously, a Plummer is needed there too.

Up stairs, the computer room i.e, the box room is going to need some repair work done to the walls.  We've had a lot of rewiring done in the house.  Not really because it was needed but to modernize the whole place, install CAT5 network cable in most rooms and put in more television points etc one of the walls in that room was used as a main channel.  It shouldn't take much for that to be fixed up.  Plus, I already have a very cool desk custom made for exactly what I need in that room that will fit each wall like a glove.  Don't worry, for you sighted people, pictures will very likely be available when it's finished.

Nothing will be done to the spare room at the moment.  It will do as it is for a while.

In the master bedroom, nothing really needs to be done with the walls..... At the moment, the electrician may change that between today and tomorrow...... I'm putting down a laminit floor but that's really all that needs to be done in that room for the moment.

Then of course, I'm replacing seven doors internally so their all decent solid doors. 

There's a lot yet to do.  But we've also done a lot.  Although it doesn't feel it at all, we've set the wheels in motion to make the next month go a lot smoother than this one has. 

We've got the gas ready to be installed.  The installation date for that is the 14th of March.  The Electrician has been and should be finished by tomorrow afternoon, the Windows will be installed late this week and I've to write up a list of jobs that I want a builder to do this week such as insulate the attic in the extension.  Block up access points that have had to be made, repair small whole in the extension sealing that was made by the electrician, remove the fire place and a few other things that I can’t think of at the moment. He'll be kept busy.  Put it that way.  Oh, of course, we've also done a few cosmetic jobs like remove wall paper, take up carpets to allow access for the  electrician, purchase lights and light fittings, repair the garage door, and take the place a part by removing things like the kitchen, sowing room, and living room doors.

Oh, finally, never try to move an American style Fridge on your own.  It's not worth it.  I moved our fridge from the kitchen to the living room yesterday on my own through the hall and two door ways.  Of course, to ensure the bottom didn't get damaged while going over the door saddles it had to be lifted across.  Have you ever seen those American style fridges with the water dispenser on the front?  Their huge!  And a ton weight!  I'm telling ya, when you start to work on a house you realize what you’re capable of.  But even so, not something I'm going to do again.  When it's been moved back, I'm getting someone to help!

That's about all for the moment; I played at a session in Dundalk on Saturday night.  Emma used a coolpix to video parts of it as I was hoping to put it up on youtube but the quality given by that camera is not great at all so I'm going to have to try something else.

Nothing is happening at the moment on the technology front in my free time.  I'm just slightly too busy to start anything new.  In work, I finally figured out that LibATA problem on the Novell test PC and got the multi-boot working with OpenSuSE, Fedora, Mandriva and of course my favorite, Ubuntu 7.10.  Before I went home on Friday, I tested a very cool new firefox extension that's just been modified to work on Firefox 3 that displays HTML elements in a dialogue box just like Jaws and Window eyes does.  For example, users can now look at a list of links on the page so if on the website for www.linux.ie, I can easily skip to the home link by going to the list and arrowing to home.  Of course, everything is numbered so if I know the number associated with the home link on that page I can press that as well.  Same goes with form fields, frames, image map links, tables, lists, headings and other elements that I'm not listing here.  Only difference compared to this functionality in Windows is this is actually a Firefox extension and not something that the Orca screen reader bothers with at all.  So, the screen reader as it is supposed to be.  A layer that converts the interface to speech.  The application is then responsible for making its self accessibility.  This is as I've said before, the underlying principle behind Gnome and Orca.  It is also what makes it so powerful.

So, to finish, welcome to another week.  The last week in February 2008.  It's been an eventful, stressful and tiring month but there is certainly light at the end of the tunnel.

Now, I've to go spell check this...

Ah I hate comment spam.  I'm going to have to find a way of removing it.  For the last two days it's just gone beyond belief!  For the last week I've been receiving ping back spam.   That was new to me!  But I got round that and now I'm back to the old reliable comments from automated bots using gmail addresses with stupid links to stuff about Viagra!  Go! Away! I don't want it and my readers don't want it!  So, basically, leave it with me.  If you see anything in the comments of any post that doesn't look right, odds are that it's spam.  I'll look into a way of stopping this later.  I have an idea that's worked on other blogs before but I'll just need to think of a way of doing it on this type of set up.

Anyway, I'm writing very early and I really must go get ready for work. 

You know what infuriates me? More than anything else in the world!  Processes that are restrictive and applied to all parts of a particularly diverse company.  Imagine a typical company.  Everyone works toward the one goal.  That is usually to ensure that their customers are happy and the company continues to make money.  In Stream however, Things are very different.  Each team or department has two masters.  One, the most important is the client because without them the business wouldn’t exist.  Second is the company’s management.  They are the ones who think make the biggest impact in terms of our day to day operations however, they don’t.  As a service professional, but especially in roles above that level, it is very obvious who you need to answer to to keep things moving well.  Unfortunately, this is something that I believe the previous management of this company understood as they all worked their way up the chain to management positions.  From what I see, the current managers have come from other industries in a management level to here and therefore really don’t appreciate the day to day work that goes on in the site to keep clients happy.  I think that is probably why my current manager is quite good at his job.  He’s worked here at every level and has been a manager longer than anyone else on the site.  In saying that, he did something this morning that really pissed me off.

As people who know me will attest, I hate policies.  My main reason for this is explained above.  But, I’ve been burned by not following them so to keep my nose clean, I’m just going along with things at the moment so it looks like I’m being a good little employee.  However, if I’m going along with them, and as a result having to decrease the quality of my work as a result then I expect everyone else to be in the same position.  The point my previous manager made to me was, if a process needs to be changed, people in higher level management positions will not appreciate the importance of this change until it effects operations.  So, let things take a turn for the worst.  It will make them sit up and listen.  But, I don’t agree.  What’s the point in working to a poor standard if you know that a change in a process can make a huge difference to productivity or efficiency?  Why do something differently because someone in a different company and a totally different office says so just because he’s at a higher level.  If it is known by the people who it affects the most and a decent business reason can be given to back up the resistance then what’s the problem!  Why inflict a change that is going to have obvious negative impact if it can be avoided!  A perfect example is, in the Salesforce team, they use Gmail for testing certain parts of their connecter application.  However, a new I-T policy was adopted that blocked all access to webmail.  This meant of course that Salesforce was included in this restriction.  Business cases were made, appeals from the client were lodged but no flexibility could be found from I-T.  So, to test their connecter application, members of the Salesforce team need to go to another part of the office with unrestricted PC’s.  However, these are so slow; it takes the software too long to lode to be in any way efficient.  A job that should take five minutes now takes 45.

Someone from Novell once commented, often the people working in I-T forget that they are working for the company and not the other way around.  This is a particularly accurate statement I think.

Why am I writing about this this morning?  Well
Well, I had a meeting yesterday but I had no way of taking notes, presenting my ideas or generally interacting to the fullest extent possible.  Mainly because I had no laptop with me.  Could you see your self going to a meeting with no notes, no pen and paper no way of writing ideas, no way of showing a presentation?  That is the situation I am in every day here.  They are totally unable to except that I have different needs to most employees.  I have offered to bring in my own laptop, let the company reinstall Windows and all required software and even keep it here and subject it to regular monitoring.  Effectively making it under their control.  However, they wouldn’t even consider it!  Not Stream Property so not a viable solution.  I tried to get a grant so that Stream could buy the laptop them selves for my use but Fas wouldn’t bend to this as in their opinion a Laptop doesn’t constitute as assistive technology and therefore doesn’t fall under the scope of the Work Place Adaptation Grant.  That’s ok I suppose.  It was a bit of a long shot but worth a try.

So, I’ve been working as effectively as I can under the circumstances and I think things have gone ok so far.  However it places a lot of strain on me because I know I could do a lot better but because of my employer’s unwillingness to budge on policies, I am left working with a disability.  And no, I’m not referring to being blind as a disability.  In this instance, it’s their unwillingness to allow me to adapt to meet their expectations and targets that is disabling.

But, today, I hear that someone has broken one of the most important I-T policies there is!  They’ve been allowed by a manager to connect the test network to their corporate PC.  This test network is completely unrestricted and has huge security risks associated with it.  Although I would love to have this facility open to everyone, it’s not and that’s just the reality of it.  If I-T heard of this they’d most likely clamp down even further and restrict access to our test machines!  It is very important that we are seen to be cooperating with I-T.  We have a few requests in with them at the moment but if they see that we are not doing as they request they will just deny them without giving them due consideration. 

It feels like I’m been held at knife point and the problem is, people working for me really haven’t a clue!  I’m trying to help them out by getting better test machines but their not doing me any favors in return.  Not only will it affect my chances of upgrading their working environment it will probably start yet another argument between I-T and my self.  I really don’t want that hassle at the moment.  I’m tired of arguing with them.   I’ve enough to do.

Ok.  Really long rant over for the moment.
Any jobs going? I could do with a change I think.

I'm trying to do up the blog a bit at the moment.  I've added a few blogs to the blogrole and if I get time later on I want to clean up the style sheet that I'm using.  It's a bit  messy in places. 

Anything else you would like to see done while I'm at it? 

Oh,  another thing I have to do very soon is figure out why I've suddenly started getting comment and ping back spam.  It's fucken irritating!

I’ve been very busy today. 
From writing a new technical test for Novell, doing two phone interviews, having a meeting with a few of the managers on this site to doing a second interview and then hiring the successful person that has been the extent of my morning!  This afternoon I had to go over the floor plan for the new site then do a lot of little things for the house.  Most of which mint sitting on the phone for ages.  I had to call the gas company, Chorus, Oxygen, Eircom and then the company for the windows.

Slowly but surely I’m getting things done.  It would be so much easier if I didn’t have to work at the same time!  Oh, but the gas company will have the service installed by the 14th of March.  That’s another milestone.  Then the fitter will come in and install the radiators, boiler and pipe work.

That’s all for now I’m afraid; I’ve a few other things to do in the next hour so I better go. X

I was suppose to have my end of year review last week, but things got in the way so it was pushed back.  I had it today.   It wasn't bad. In fact, it was very good.  I'm happy with it.  As usual, the salary increase isn't anything to get too happy about but it's better than nothing.

What about you out there,  do you have similar performance review things?  I assume so.

Ah it's just fabulous.  Remember that tune I was talking about yesterday? I listened to it about three or four times in work.  Thanks to my wonderful brain, it is now learned.  I was walking back from the house this morning over to my parents house and it suddenly came to my fingers.  It's funny.  I regularly get tunes just popping into my head and my fingers start to play as if they were on the chanter of the pipes.  They don't need to move much.  they just hmmmm. I don't know how to describe it.  I suppose it's like someone who can sing humming a song to them selves after they hear it.  Anyway, I got to my parents house, grabbed an old whistle and started playing it.  Fortunately, it's exactly as it sounded on the recording I have so that's another one added to the list.  I'm looking forward to going somewhere to play it now in public.  With some guitar backing it will be cool.  Or, at least I hope it will.  Sometimes, these things just sound better on a CD than they do in person.

Anyway, that's all for the moment.  I'm in Drogheda this morning as I had to go over to the house to let the electrician in.  I've also given him a few more things to do.  Hopefully it won't cost much more extra on top of the quote he's already given me.

Oh, the kitchen plans have been drawn up.  We're moving along.  Slowly but surely.

I've heard a tune that's obviously in my reasonably large selection of music while playing random tracks on the Ipod and it's really got my attention but I don't know what it's called or even what group play it!  The instruments are fiddle, Banjo, accordian and guitar.  I suppose that's as good a starting point as I'm going to get! I love this tune.  It's a jig and it has a minor in the first part that just grabs you each time it's played.  Plus, the second part is stagnated.  it reminds me of going up stairs and turning half way up at a corner to go up the last three.  I know,  weird way of looking at a tune but that's just the image that comes into my head.

Oh, remember the tune I wrote last Monday?  I played it last Saturday.  To my relief, no one had ever heard it before so if I'm really lucky, it's not something that's just been sitting at the back of my mind screaming to be let free after I heard someone else play it and instead it is a tune that I've actually composed!

Unbelievable!  A customer called yesterday regarding an issue that I very quickly determined was due to a problem with the compatibility of an updated module for his network card in the latest version of OpenSuSE and the software on his router. 
So, we changed his MTU and all seemed to go ok.  He was still experiencing a few problems but nothing half as bad as before speaking to me.  I spent almost two hours on the phone with him trying to help him out but eventually, I had to admit to him that we weren't going to get any better but I made sure to give him instructions to try to fine tune his configuration further.

Today, he called back about five minutes ago complaining that I incorrectly understood the problem and in fact, the issue was solved by the upgrade of firmware on his router.  The call lasted just under five minutes.  In that time, he gave out to me without letting me speak much and at the end he just hung up.  Now, wait for it.

Today, he said the problem was actually with the router not the network card.  Yes, I said that this was very likely yesterday.  However, he did not want to facilitate that direction of research so at his request, I concentrated my efforts on his network card.

To combat the problem, I changed his MTU to 1500 and disabled IPV6 via /etc/modprobe.conf and /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.  Changing the mtu by the way is as simple as using the command ifconfig eth0 mtu 1500.  You can add that to your network script if it works. 

After this, the number of packets dropped decreased substantially but not to a level that either of us felt was the optimum possible for his configuration.

He then reported that with other routers the problem did not emerge.  Of course, that set off alarm bells so I reiterated my point regarding the linksys router that he was originally using.  But, no.  He wouldn't except it so the call ended there, leave him with some material to research for optimizing network traffic.

Today then he calls up telling me that the router wasn't the problem, just the firmware on the router.  Hmmmm. Hello, there basically one in the same.  If he was willing to let me troubleshoot things from the router side yesterday, we could have very quickly tried a new firmware to see if that solved the issue.  Instead, I spent two hours on a problem that officially isn't even supported!  In terms of the scope of support provided here, we are actually not responsible for supporting network issues above and beyond basic connectivity.  However, I encourage all the service professionals working for me on this team to try to do the same therefore I lead by example.

I don't mind helping people.  My job description doesn't even say I need to take customer queries by phone however I try to help out as much as time permits because I like to stay as hands on as I can but, when people like that just try to make life difficult I get pissed off.

Have they nothing better to do with their time?????????

I remember hearing from my father a lot while I was growing up that "The Customer is Always Right".  He's not a sales man but he could sell sand to the arabs.  One thing you learn very quickly in this business, customers are always wrong and if they think their right, their even more wrong!

Christ I’m on a role today.

Read down there a bit, there are another three posts below this one.  I think I just have a lot to say today.  I’m in a bullshitting mood!  Sorry to my easily offended visitors.

Actually, before I go any further, I have to say thank you again to Abby, the most regular contributor of really cool comments to these posts.   I hope she doesn’t mind me posting the address to her own new blog but, if she does I’ll pull it down.  www.myspace.com/abbynalice

Right.  I’m going to shut up now.  I’ve posted far too much today.  Oh and I had to talk to a customer about a system he’s trying to set up with four network cards.  Why would someone need that many network cards?

There’s a problem.  One of those, scratch your head until it hurts kind of problems.

With the latest version of LibATA in OpenSuSE 10.3, all storage devices regardless of how their connected will be shown as /dev/sdx so, if you have a hard disk connected via IDE, that disk is now going to be seen as SDA instead of HDA this isn’t a big problem.  OpenSuSE just behaves as normal.  We’ve seen a few annoying little bugs when 10.3 came out first but nothing major and most bugs have been fixed at this stage.  Problem is, the Test PC given to us by Novell has one 20GB IDE hard disk and two 250GB drives connected via SDA.  So, OpenSuSE sees the first Sata drive as being SDA, the second Sata drive as SDB and finally the hard disk as SDC.  Again, no problems there, the installation on that machine went flawlessly!  Problem is, when you go to install other distributions like Mandriva, Fedora or Ubuntu who are using an older version of LibATA.  They all see HDA first as being the primary drive.  Remember, that is the 20GB disk that OpenSuSE sees as SDC!  So, Ubuntu etc copies the master boot record along with Grub to the 20GB IDE disk.  That means though that the system isn’t booting that disk.  In the bios and the cables etc, the Sata drives should be booted first.  So, obviously what do we do, we make the installation use the Sata disk instead of the IDE one.  For some reason though, the stupid system seems to get stuck in an infinite loop.  Someone behind me commented a while ago that the word grub is flashing across the screen and has done for over an hour!  I forgot to look in on the installation in a good while so it’s been doing nothing but sitting there!  Looks like I have some work to do this afternoon.  I would love to get my hands on a change log for this version of LibATA that OpenSuSE is using.

Oh, finally, my parent’s computer that I built about a year ago for them doesn’t boot from USB!  How crap is that!  I thought that I’d be able to take a look at some email etc during the weekend using my accessible pen drive installation of Ubuntu but, no.  for a very weird reason, the motherboard doesn’t have this functionality.  I wouldn’t mind but it was actually a new motherboard.   They got lucky when I built that machine for them.  I was originally going to build it for them out of spare parts but the processor that I was going to use was damaged so I had to buy them a new one.  That wouldn’t fit into the old mother board so I had to buy that too!  So, I went all out then and bought them a gig of RAM, a new hard disk and DVD writer. 

It’s used now for playing solatar.   Oh it’s rewarding when a reasonably powerful computer like that is used to the best of it’s abilities isn’t it?x

Warning, this post is not for people who get offended by bad language. 

Picking lights is not something you can do easily!  Oh no! It’s something that takes great care and consideration.

• Will the lights be bright enough?
• Will the light fittings fit in with the feeling of the rest of the room?
• Are they suitable for the installation of a dimmer switch?<
• >If spot lights, do they take energy saving bulbs?  If not, what is the implication of this? <
• >How long from the sealing do they hang?

To all these questions I say, I don’t give a fuck! I’m blind!  Give me a room of darkness!  It’s a hell of a lot bloody cheaper! I don’t care if they look like suspended drops of water.  We’ve enough water outside; we live in a country that seems to have rain every second of the year.  For anyone crazy enough to be interested, that’s 31536000 seconds of rain each year.  That’s a lot isn’t it?  So, why the hell would you want more water in side! Or, what about those lights with little glass things that make noise when anyone walks into the room!  Their kind of different and nice the first five or six times but after that, they just get fucken annoying!

Know how much lights are going to cost just for the living room, hall, kitchen and bathroom?  Over Three! Hundred! Euro!  Well, in fairness, that’s also including a sensor light for outside to point toward the driveway.  There are no lights on our side of the street which is great but it’s probably a good idea at least for the sighted people out there to stick in a sensor light that activates when people come close to the house.  I was also thinking of getting a cool wireless camera kit that I saw yesterday for €170 but I kind of talked my self out of it for the moment.  I’m kind of kicking my self that I didn’t get it though as I could get the electrician to wire it in for me and that would be that job done and taken care of.

Rockbox is a bit of a fecker at times.  I had it installed on a 5th Gen Ipod before Christmas but it was very unreliable.  It would just decide to stop talking… So, I got rid of it a week ago and went back to the standard Ipod firmware along with the horribly inaccessible Itunes software.

Ok Ok Ok, so it’s my fault really, I uninstalled Rockbox using lets say, less than conventional methods.  I just removed the directories along with the .rockbox.hex file and didn’t actually remove the master boot record.  Of course, that was doomed to fail right from the start but as luck would have it, it’s worked great for over a week like that.  That is, until today.  For some reason, it just decided to stop.  It cried that it couldn’t find Rockbox. So, I had to find out how to duel boot it with the original Apple firmware with the end result of removing the rockbox boot loader ***The Right way!***

It worked though; I’m back up and running listening to lodes of weird and wonderful music again. 

I tried to boot from USB on an IMAC this morning.  It gave out that it didn't support legacy boot loaders!  What kind of crap is that!  Ok, I've some research to do on this.  Actually, OpenSuSE 11 Factory Alfa 2 is having problems with the PPC platform so I might follow their developments to see what I can learn.

Oh, then, to make things worse, I disconnected the pen drive without unmounting it and the stupid thing didn't boot!  Another process had to be followed then to unmount the drive before the system would start.

Interestingly, it's using a very graphical boot manager.  Macs are UNIX based aren't they?  I wonder if their using some kind of Apple specific boot manager or if it's a modified one from some open source project.

All that said, I love the look of the Imacs.  If one person gets back to me saying, how can you love the look of it, your blind, I'll go over there and set my dog on you.  He's hungry and vicious!  No, honestly, he is!  For some reason, people never believe that.  Anyway, where was I? Yeah, IMacs They look cool and I like the possibility of running outspoken, the OSX screen reader, changing to Vista and possibly installing Ubuntu or OpenSuSE.  I'd probably only use it for a week until I got sick of the small Mac keyboard but it would be an entertaining week and isn't that worth it?  x

One of the main barriers to the uptake of Linux" in the visually impaired community from what I have gathered is the lack of confidence that they can learn about this different operating system and a fear that installing it could invalidate or damage a working Windows installation.  So, how do we get around this?  Simple! Install the Linux" distribution onto a removable drive that can be plugged in and removed at will causing absolutely no effect to the computer.

That’s what I have been working on for the last while.  My distribution of choice was and probably will be for a long time, Ubuntu 7.10.  The removable hardware is a USB miniature pen drive that has a total capacity of 1.99GB.

The idea of this is that it is usable right out of the box so, someone who receives a pen drive with Linux" already installed should be able to plug it in, turn on the computer and obviously if the computer is already configured to boot from USB, it will start Linux" and begin talking thanks to the very powerful and flexible Orca screen reader.  Of course, accessibility doesn’t end there.  We also need an instant messaging client, a word processor and a web browser,  so all updates should be applied, Orca should be updated using the stable SVN branch for Gnome-2-20 and the nightly build of firefox should be installed.  With these changes and the existing installation of Pidgin messenger and open Office, users will have a fully functional operating system that will meet the needs of most people.  Hay, if it doesn’t work, just get an internet connection and install the software that you need. It’s really that easy.

If you look back at one of my previous posts, you’ll actually notice that I worked on this idea without much success a few weeks ago but for some reason, things just clicked into place easily yesterday.

So, if you want a USB pen drive with Ubuntu 7.10 and an accessible and productive suite of applications to go along with it, get in touch!  I’m not going to charge anything for the installation and configuration of this.  The only charge is the pen drive and if you have a 2GB drive that you want to use, then, it’s the cheapest accessible operating system you’re ever going to find.  It’s free!

Any of you doing anything for Valentines Day?

I’m doing nothing.  I’m going to be a heartless fecker and moan about how it’s become commercialized and I don’t want to support the materialistic values they’ve placed on what should be a day of reflection and thanks.

Then I’m going to call the undertaker to warn him of my arrival on Friday morning.

Good morning all,

Sorry I’ve been quiet lately.  Blogging just doesn’t seem to be part of my daily routine any more! It’s terrible.  I’m trying to get back into the habit of it but it’s not going well.  All that said though, here are a few things that I’ve been doing, thinking about, working on etc.

Firstly, my knee was causing a lot of pain last week so on Thursday and Friday I worked from home.  It was a necessary evil and I’m very lucky my employer was able to be that flexible.  Although I was at home, I was just as busy as if I was in the office and actually with a lot less distractions, I got a lot more done!  I wish they’d bring a work from home option in this place.  It would make this type of work a lot more tolerable at times.

While I was at home, I worked on a script to automate many of the troubleshooting steps the engineers working on the Novell team need to walk customers through on a day to day basis.  It will hopefully cut out a lot of time for each case they need to deal with.  It will also cut out any user error on both sides which is always a good thing.   I’m writing the script with the dialogue package as the user interface.  The back end is simple, it’s just giving the installed system standard commands but making the menu system in dialogue is just a pain!  I’ve something wrong in my syntax and I’m at a bit of a dead end.  But, with some work I’ll get there eventually.  Unfortunately, my test PC is undergoing a lot of ……. Testing at the moment, I’m trying a few distributions out so the scripting will just have to wait.

Speaking of distributions I’m trying out, the first one is Mandriva 2008.  Of course, the installer is completely inaccessible so I got someone in work to take care of that part for me.   After the installation though, I tried to get Orca running but although it launched, I got no speech output.  With a bit of digging around, I noticed that the default synthesizer was set to espeak.  Out of curiosity, I installed Festival and changed the default synthesizer from Espeak and all works.  I’ve not really had time to find out why ESpeak isn’t working but I’ll look into it shortly.    For now, Gnome looks clean, fast and there are no hardware issues as a result of installing Mandriva.  I think I’ll use it for the remainder of today and move onto another distribution tomorrow.  In the mean time though, I’m hoping to test firefox, Open Office and Pidgin as they are the tools that should work easily enough with Orca no matter what distribution it’s on.  The person who read the screen during the installation also wants to try Compiz for 3D graphics so I’ll probably do some messing around with that as well.

One interesting finding was that Mandriva is still using the old lib-ata module so it still differentiates between IDE and Sata controllers.  Ide is still seen as had and Sata is still seen as SDA for example.  That meant that installing Mandriva side by side with OpenSuSE caused problems with Grub.  Nothing that couldn’t be fixed of course but it’s starting to be a common problem.  Ubuntu had the same issue.

Aside from the technical stuff, I did some more work on the house recently.  I stripped all the walls in the living room and pulled up the carpets in two of the up stairs rooms.  Pulling up the carpets is in preparation of the electrician and Plummer coming around to work in a week or two.  So, I’m getting to the end of the work I can do to the house before the major jobs are done so at least things will start to slow down for a while.  I’d say after I get some of the remaining paper off the kitchen this weekend and pull up the carpet in the living room, I’ll have about two weeks of nothing to do.  Hopefully though, after the windows have been replaced, the wiring enhanced to meet our needs and the gas installed, we can start decorating.  That is going to be an arduous task all on its own though.  There’s going to be a lot of difficult work to do!

Oh, last week I was also contacted by a friend I haven’t heard from in ages!  I’m sure she’ll see this in her feed reader when I post it so "Hello there stranger! Hope all is well in the land of the crazed".

Finally, last night, would you believe it, I composed a tune!  I don’t know how or why, but it came to me just out of the blue.  It’s a jig and I’ve called it “Scraping walls”.  I’ll have to record it and post it at some stage.

That’s all folks…

As well as digitaldarragh.com, this website can now also be found at www.darraghoheiligh.ie Don't worry, the site will still be exactly the same.  I'm just increasing it's footprint slightly by copying it across a few descriptive domains.  This is one of a number of key changes I will be making to the site over the next few weeks and months.

This is a feature that I along with hundreds of Window Eyes users have been waiting for years!

GW-Micro have announced recently that Window Eyes 7 will expose something like an API or object model that can be accessed by COM Automation.  Basically this means that you can use your favorite development language to write object orientated scripts for Window Eyes as long as the language or technology you use supports Com Automation.  That means you can use VB, .net, Perl Java and a lot more to make Window eyes dance to your tune just like you can with Jaws.  The up side though that gives Window Eyes a huge benefit over Jaws is that Jaws uses a proprietary scripting language that you need to learn Where as Window Eyes.  allows you to interface with it's object model using standard development environments.

So, less talking.  Really, you'll learn a lot more about this at the gw website over at http://www.gwmicro.com/News_&_Events/Latest_News/?newsNo=87

For such a complex system, iptables is a really stupid package. After every reboot it looks like it deletes the rules! Why! It took me so long to get those rules the way I wanted and after a reboot the stupid things don't exist any more!

so, here goes. Here is a sample script that I've just made to recreate my rules at boot up. Obviously, you'll have to chmod this to make it writeable. At minimum it should be 777 but you should probably make accessible and writable by the user that needs to run IPTables and not by every user on the system. If you are curious, google running daemons in chroot.

#!/bin/sh
# squid server IP
SQUID_SERVER="192.168.2.5"
# Interface connected to Internet
INTERNET="eth1"
# Interface connected to LAN
LAN_IN="eth1"
# Squid port
SQUID_PORT="3128"

# DO NOT MODIFY BELOW
# Clean old firewall
iptables -F
iptables -X
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t nat -X
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -t mangle -X
# Load IPTABLES modules for NAT and IP conntrack support
modprobe ip_conntrack
modprobe ip_conntrack_ftp
# For win xp ftp client
#modprobe ip_nat_ftp
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
# Unlimited access to loop back
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -o lo -j ACCEPT
# set this system as a router for Rest of LAN
iptables --table nat --append POSTROUTING --out-interface $INTERNET -j MASQUERADE
iptables --append FORWARD --in-interface $LAN_IN -j ACCEPT
# unlimited access to LAN
iptables -A INPUT -i $LAN_IN -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -o $LAN_IN -j ACCEPT
# Setup main routing rules.
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -i eth1 -s $i 192.168.2.0/24 --dport 80 -d ! 192.168.2.5 -j FDNAT --to 192.168.2.5:3128

Is that useful? If so, I'll post other solutions that I come across.

Sorry about the title.  It was more interesting than something boring like: summary or the week just past.  I hate that kind of thing.

I didn’t blog on Friday!  I don’t know why either.  It wasn’t like I was exceptionally busy or anything like that, I just didn’t really get around to it.  Laziness I suppose.  That’s the only reason. Remember I blogged about falling last Tuesday?  Well, the result was that I badly hurt my knee.  So, I worked from Home on Thursday and Friday.   I got quite a lot done actually.  It was very nice to work from the comfort of home.  I’d love the opportunity to do it more often.  I might try to talk to my manager about it at some stage this week. 

You know it’s very hard to use a guide dog and a crutch at the same time?  The poor dog is use to me practically running everywhere.  He’s really taking some time to get use to the fact that I’m limping along, slowly, with a crutch in the other hand keeping the weight off my left knee!  He’s doing very well though considering everything. 

I didn’t really blog about it last week because I had hoped to save it until having the video footage but I did about six gigs the week before last as I think I listed in one of my earlier posts.  The big one though, on the Saturday night was captured by Emma on Video using my sister’s video recorder.  Problem is, we can’t find the cable to connect it so I have nothing to show you yet.

I know this post is a bit random but my heads all over the place today.  I’m tired and I really just want to go to sleep!  This weekend, like every weekend coming up over the next two months, was spent working on the house.  Emma and I worked on one room for two days pealing and chipping off a surface that feels very lumpy.  It’s called woodchip and it’s almost impossible to get it off!  I’d say it easily took the two of us twelve hours to get it all down off the walls.  We knew it was going to take a long time before doing it and a lot of people had warned us that it was going to be a very cumbersome job so at least we were prepared.  Funny, we did another room with ordinary paper in less than a half an hour afterward.  Compared to the woodchip, the paper came off just by touching it!  Thank god for steamers though.  Without it we would still be chipping away at that first room.  That woodchip is in the hall and stairs walls though so we’ve still got a lot of it to remove.  We’ll probably leave it for a few months though.  The hall isn’t a room we really need to be too concerned about at the moment.  We’ve a lot of other things to do before that.  I must say, getting up and down off ladders and leaning to the side when you have a very dodgy knee?  Not an easy task at all.  I’ve been told to get it sorted but I’ve a feeling it will sort it’s self out after a few more days.

So, what else is left to do in the house?  Well, this is a reasonably comprehensive list. 

Electrician is coming to put more sockets into the living room.  There’s only one double socket in there at the moment.  We’re getting that removed and getting six new ones put in  We’re also getting about four or five double sockets into a room that Emma is going to use for sowing etc.  I have a lot of sockets going into the room that I’m using for technology and I’m also going to get some network cable run from a central point in the house over to other rooms so I don’t need to depend on wireless connections all the time. 
We’re also getting double-glazed windows installed. Fortunately, I have the quotation for that already so I’ll probably get that done soon enough.  We’re getting the front of the house done in a wooden finish and the back will be done in the standard white. 
We’re waiting on two companies to get back to us with quotations for the gas installation.  We have oil at the moment but we’re getting it switched over.  We’re also buying two radiators for up stairs and two for down. 
Aside from those big jobs, I also have to insulate the roofs in the extension and the roof up stairs as well.  Oh, and there’s a wall that is letting out the heat at the back of the living room so I’m going to blob on some insulation onto that as well. 

One that’s all done, we can look at the interior of the house.  I’d like to replace the internal doors, redecorate the entire thing and just make it as livable as possible.  It will probably take some time then before getting all the rooms up to the standard that we want them to be.

Don’t get me wrong.  From the picture I’ve just painted there, it sounds like the house is a run down old shack.  It’s not by any stretch.  We just have very definitive specifications as how we want it to look and feel.  That involves doing quite a lot of work.  The up side though will be that it is a very comfortable and extendable property that really stands the trial of time.