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It is now 2010, and for those living in the UK it is also an election year.

Both Labour and Tory seem to be indistinguishable at this point, making the choice at the ballet paper a choice of which way you want to be screwed. It seems clear that both Tory and Labour seem to want to lock us into an authoritarian statist and high tax agenda for another 5 years at least.

David Cameron is so sure of his position that instead of engaging on issues or attacking Gordon Brown on his  policy failures (of which there are many) that he resorts to childish name-calling rather than entering into a real debate.

The Tories started making some good noises early in the campaign about individual liberty and transparency, and they have pledged to scrap the ID card. However, they intend to continue Labour’s authoritarian policies and (among many other things) plan to scrap the human rights act and further centralise powers into the executive.

Labour’s record on the other hand is well known – did ok in the first term, but chronic overspending on insane projects has left us with a shattered economy which tax payers are going to be working hard to repair for years to come (and there’s the small matter of that pesky illegal war).

With (politically inclined) voters crying out for an alternative, and while we still have a system of party politics, my question is simple – where on earth are the Liberal Democrats and what do they stand for?

[audio:http://boos.audioboo.fm/attachments/366629/Recording.mp3]

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This Christmas I finally bit the bullet and treated myself to a shiny XBox 360. Ostensibly this was so that I could experiment with console development, but mostly I have used it to play Gears of War.

In a slight departure from what I usually talk about, I thought I’d quickly jot down how I got the wireless controller to work with my Ubuntu XBMC media PC.

The wireless controller provides a slightly more usable remote than my iPhone (which must first be unlocked making quick pauses impossible) or rather flaky wireless keyboard, so hopefully this will be useful to someone.

Getting started

My media PC currently runs Ubuntu Karmic with XBMC. To begin with you will need to install the XBox kernel driver (already installed on Karmic).

Most importantly however, you will need to get yourself a XBox wireless gaming receiver for Windows – which I got included with my second controller. Xbox controllers do not use standard bluetooth, so you can’t just pair in the normal way using your existing hardware.

This howto has some more info…

Configuring XBMC

Assuming you have your module installed and controller paired you will need to tell XBMC about it by configuring a keyfile:

  1. I used this keyfile as a starting point. Download and save it as ~/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps/Keymap.xml (note case).
  2. Find out what your computer thinks the controller is by looking at the output from: cat /proc/bus/input/devices – you want a "Name" that says something like "Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver"
  3. Replace all occurrences of "Microsoft Xbox Controller S" with this value.

At this point if you start XBMC it should respond to the controller. If you are lucky this is all you will have to do, however for me I had to mess around with the key bindings a bit since the example keymap file didn’t match my controller exactly.

If this happens to you there’s not much I can suggest other than to bind one key at a time, restart XBMC and see what button that maps to then repeat until all your keys are mapped. I’m sure there must be an easier way that I’ve overlooked, feel free to comment below!

For what it’s worth, here is my modified (but somewhat incomplete) key file which has largely sensible bindings. Hack away to get it working how you like.

» Modified Keymap

Image “XBMC” by Miskan

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This story appeared in the BBC a few days ago, but so far I haven’t had a chance to comment. Basically, the government is going to make the Royal Mail postcode database available for free to those who want it, with the Ordinance survey database to follow.

This is a surprising glimmer of light in an otherwise rather bleak legislative and business landscape, and the mention that the ordinance survey data might follow is also good. A victory for the data freedom community certainly.

Details on exactly how the data is to be made available is somewhat thin on the ground. We tax payers have paid for its development, so it is my hope is that the data will be made public domain and available to all without usage restrictions. A situation where it is small f free – free for non-commercial use for example will be less useful.

Nevertheless, this is encouraging and definitely a step or two in the right direction.