I use linux at work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yay!!!! That's right I now use Linux as part of my daily work. I found there were some issues that were easier to sort out using Linux then trying to do the same thing using windows (sometimes you just can't beat bash). So yesterday I grabbed VMware server and installed an Ubuntu 8.04 Beta VM. Works great. I still in the process of configuring things the way I want them, but so far I very happy with the results. Next step is to get Evolution talking to Exchange.

Yay for Ubuntu Hardy

Upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 Alpha 6. I'd been having trouble video drivers in Gutsy for a while, they'd break, I'd edit xorg.conf to fix them and within a couple of days they'd break again, plus no matter what I did with gutsy I couldn't seem to get desktop effects to work. So this morning I got fed up and upgraded to Hardy. Yay, after a minimum of poking the Intel video drivers are finally working properly and desktop effects are working wonderfully. Next job will be to fiddle with Wifi and Webcam. Wifi looks to be an easier task on Hardy then it was on Gutsy too, Hardy is at least detecting the Atheros wireless chipset, even if no wireless options are appearing in Network Manager. In the meantime I'll continue to get by using my Netgear USB wifi adapter, which detects and runs just fine :) I haven't even poked webcam yet, but, one project at a time I guess.

Long time no post

Well it's been a long time since I last posted here and a lot has changed in that time. Most of the changes have been personal, my wife and I separated and our divorce is pending. I've fallen in love with a wonderful girl named Julia and we are planning our future together, last night we discussed buying a condo together once my divorce is finalized. I've also changed jobs, I'm no longer working in call center hell and am now very happily working for a small software company as part of a 2 man technical support team. I'm still using and advocating free software every chance I get and I've been thrilled to see the growth of free software over the past couple of years. It seems everywhere you look these day's people are turning to free software, at work CVS and SVN are essential to our development processes. Even my parents are waiting with excitement for the new Ubuntu LTS release so they can play with the new toys I've had on my PC for awhile.
Speaking of my PC I've just acquired a shine new Toshiba laptop, now free of Vista and happily running Ubuntu. There have been a few frustrations with the new lappy, but I'll be covering that in greater detail in an upcoming review. In the meantime gentle readers it's great to be back.

Delays, delays, delays…

September 28th, 2006

Well, so much for releasing the first episode of our podcast early last week, issues with audio, issues with the website and the fact that none of us has ever done this before caused the first episode we record to be sent to the scrap heap due to white noise and blanks spots in some segment, after some experimentation we seem to have resolved our issues and we will be recording again this weekend. In the meantime Jason, our web guru, has put together a very cool looking website. Jason is a really talented web developer/programmer and is currently looking for work, if you need some cool Ajaxy web stuff done contact him at jason at fenix dot ca. If things work out as planned we should have an episode online Tuesday or Wednesday, check it out.

Putting together a podcast

Well for those who don’t already know, which is pretty much everyone who reads this, I’ve been putting together a Free Software oriented podcast. It’s been a long process 2 of the 4 guys I originally asked have already opted out due to time constraints, took ages trying to figure out how to record multiple mikes, spent a long night trekking around downtown Toronto looking for an open music store to buy a mixing board that cost far to much. But it all seems to be coming together, this weekend we are recording our first show. There’s still a long way way to go, our website is still being designed and may not be ready by the release of our first show and there’s still a lot to do. There are somethings of that we would like to ask the community t help us with, segment ideas, we need your ideas for the show, in particular if your working on a cool Free Software project and you want to come on the show for an interview about your project, we need mirrors for the show, and most importantly we need listeners. So if you are have ideas for the show, are interested in being interviewed or want to be a show mirror leave a comment on my blog or email us at radiofreesoftware at gmail dot com. As for folks who just want to listen to a show about FLOSS watch this space for our release annoucement early next week. Oh and one more thing at this point we’re working with a three man crew, one short, one bearded and one ginger so if anyone knows a bald Windows monkey in the Toronto area please get in touch, thanks.

Reprieves, Successes and disappointments

Reprieve, with the death of my laptop I was left without the tool I use for most of my tech projects, including my blog and many other advocacy activities and open source activities. The main reason the loss was so crippling is that much of the spare time I find to work on such things is during my daily commute, 2 hours a day on the subway is a great time to work on such projects. The other reason the loss of the laptop was so annoying was that my laptop has for sometime also been my music player, so I've been faced with sitting in abject silence each day during my commute. Thanks to the astounding generosity of my parents I have been granted a reprieve in the form of the lone of their laptop, a barely use IBM R31.

Not only is this a reprieve it represents one of the advocacy successes I am most proud of, one of the conditions of the lone is that the laptop should be returned running Linux, and specifically a Gnome based distro upon its return. This decision reached after consultation with my dad, a former computer consultant for the board of education and adult education specialist, about how we could make the computer less threatening to my mom, who is in her 60s and the very definition of a computer n00b. After examining a number of desktop options, Windows, KDE, XFCE, Symphony OS, and of course Gnome we came to the conclusion that Ubuntu with Gnome was probably the best option for someone completely new to computing, Good work Gnome and Ubuntu boys!

Another recent success came at work, a co-worker and friend asked if I knew a way a group of guys he's working to set up a game development start up with could share documents over the Internet, I mentioned a couple of options including Novell iFolder (the solution he ended up picking). He then started asking why I was such a advocate for Free software, I explained about the 4 freedoms and how you should be free t run software anyway you want, how you should be able to learn how the software works by looking at the code, how you should be able to modify the software to fulfil your needs and how you should be free to share the software by distributing it, he got very excited by these ideals and I have been receiving regular reports on his explorations of Free software ever since, I think we may have a convert.

As for disappointments I guess the big one is that I won't be able to make it to Lugradio Live once again this year. None the less I want to take this opportunity to pimp this great event to the world, if you are anywhere near the UK get your ass to Wolverhampton this weekend, LRL 2006 sounds like it will be the FLOSS event of the year. Also if you are planning to attend LRL and are experiencing issues due to the impending UK rail strike check out the car pool page on the Lugradio Wiki.

Another disappointment is that the next Lugradio broadcast will be the last one of the season, it will be a long boring summer in their absence, thank god that Reverend Teds fantastic Novell Open Audio will be providing some cool listening materials over the summer.

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Tragic Loss

I regret to report the untimely death of my laptop, my IBM t23 has gone to laptop heaven, the video cable between the base and the monitor has broken inside the hing. After consulting with a team of top nerds it was decide that there was no surgery that could save the patient. You will be missed faithful friend.

Bono is a knob end

Some people may have wondered why I haven’t blogged about the new Defective By Design plan to petition former musician and left wing political thingy, Bono, to join the fight against digital restriction management. This is one campaign I will be sitting out, though I still believe the fight against DRM is an important part of the effort to create a truly free world culture and vital to the Free Software movement specifically and I will support defective by designs efforts in the future. I have two reasons for not supporting this petition, firstly Bono was long ago yesterdays man in the music industry and his left wing political views make him an inappropriate representative in either Washington or Ottawa these days. The other reason I won’t be petitiioning Bono is that the man is a knob end, if the mere fact that this foreigner would come to Canada and try to tell Canadians how to vote wasn’t offensive enough, his smarmy self serving speech at the Liberal leadership Conference a few years ago would have stripped away any lingering respect I might have had for the man. Twat