April 27th, 2008
Yesterday seemed like as good a time as any to actually do the upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop. A series of wireless card crashes got me fed up to the point that I had to do something.
The upgrade, via update manager, only had one hitch, when the wireless card bonked out in the middle of it. I suppose it adds appropriate insult to injury, given how often the iwl4965 crashed on my over the last couple of months. Resuming the upgrade on wired ethernet, and all was well.
The Good
Upgrade went flawlessly; fonts look even better; wireless seems better; ssh-askpass now seems to actually trigger on login; firefox 3b5 is fast; liferea is much faster
The Bad
Pidgin 2.4’s usability improvements are anything but; A few of my firefox plugins (delicious links, firebug) don’t work with firefox 3b5 yet (as such, my daily links won’t be on the blog until delicious gets fixed).
The Amusing
During installation some 3rd party packages were removed, including Lotus Notes. While I appreciate Ubuntu’s attempt to make my life better, I sorted of need that for work. 
I’m pulling from our internal repos now.
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April 26th, 2008
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April 25th, 2008
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April 24th, 2008
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solid post
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hmmm… perhaps if the format that used the old production facilities won, we wouldn’t have this issue.
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wow, some quite impressive security research out there. Plus, more reasons to not run windows.
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Hmm, coulton coming to NYC for a saturday show. May need to check that out.
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I didn’t hear this when it happened, but it a worthy lesson on how not to treat your customers.
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April 22nd, 2008
I think this definitely nails it. 
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April 22nd, 2008
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April 21st, 2008
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April 18th, 2008
Having been at a Web 2.0 conference for a chunk of the week, I figured I’d finally download an try Adobe AIR, as they announced a Linux version last week at the Linux Collaboration Summit. I am massively underwhelmed.
First off, only 1 of the top 6 air apps on their site actually run on the Linux build of AIR. That app, an rss reader, which is basically a clone of Liferea, but not noticeably better in any way.
Secondly, transparency doesn’t work. I installed the Screenboard app and the Ruler app, both of which we useless as they didn’t do alpha channel.
Thirdly, their AIR app installer makes a new Gnome application menu for Air Examples each time it installs an application. So I now have 3 Air Examples folders in my application menu, each with 1 application in them.
Finally, air fonts seem to be hard coded to something smaller than my desktop settings, with no clear way to scale them up. Any application framework that doesn’t respect my system font settings is pretty useless to me.
Hopefully a lot of these get fixed in the near future. The only thing that AIR seemed to do was a lot of animated menus, which are pretty, but not actually useful. Perhaps if the alpha layer stuff had worked, I’d be a bit more impressed, but without that all the demo apps seem pretty pointless right now. And the one app that I might actually care about, TwittAir, uses functions the Linux AIR runtime doesn’t have yet.
Popularity: 46% [?]
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April 18th, 2008
This comment on twitter from RichWhite, one of the leaders of EduSim:
@sdague - you realize you Opensim developers will be raised to “saint” status in the k-12 distance education field some day.
Man, what a great way to end a week.
Popularity: 47% [?]
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April 18th, 2008
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