Turns out the problem only happens when you have a background image. (Thanks to cafuego on #ubuntu for that one)
January 2006 Archives
...so, this is my first post from GNU/Linux. I'm using an app called 'Blog Entry Poster' - it comes with GNOME. Today, I backed up all my stuff to my external hard disk, formatted my hard disk and installed Ubuntu - Dapper Drake (oh, how I dislike the silly naming of Ubuntu releases) which is the bleeding edge version.
Things are pretty good. I have sound (via my Griffin iMic) and graphics in X Windows that are almost perfect - all this from my first day on a beta OS release! At the rate packages are being upgraded for Dapper, I am certain these will be fixed soon.
Some observations so far:-
Burning a CD. This is a lot easier in GNOME than in anything else I've used. Pop the CD in, it comes up asking you what kind of CD you want to burn, if any.. I burnt a data CD, quickly and easily and it just worked. First time.
So, I'm switching to GNU/Linux. This is my initial post.
I'm really looking forward to it. I've already decided that I need to do it all out - nothing non-free, and I will use free formats in the future too, so in future, if you're sending me music, please send it in Ogg Vorbis format, and if you're going to send me a Microsoft Word document - thanks, but.. I'd rather you didn't.
On his blog, Ivan Krstic talks about the fact that Ruby is making headway on the web, in a way that Python never managed.
...if you're writing a Python web framework that will out-rail Rails, please give up now.
As someone who wrestled with Zope for some time, I share this sentiment. I am now about 9000% more productive with TextMate and Rails. I'm even able to pick up Ruby quicker than I picked up Python.
Case in point - yesterday, Shaun and I were fiddling with SQLUserFolder, trying to get it to write an encrypted password to the database - the product (Zope plugins are called products), wasn't working, instead writing some non, SHA crap to the database.
My resulting Ruby program:-
require 'digest/sha1'
print Digest::SHA1.hexdigest("hello world") + "\n"
Compare this to my resulting PHP and Python programs:-
<? echo sha1("hello world") . "\n"; ?>
import sha
print sha.new("hello world").hexdigest()
All three scripts are largely the same - so, what is it that makes Python for the web so bad, when compared to Ruby? It's surely not the language?
TextDrive Weblog has some useful information on running Rails in a production environment.
I've been hacking on this to-do list app written in Rails. It's a good example of the kind of thing I can start doing with Rails, I hope to have some better things to show off in a few days.
Also, I'm on Wordpress now. Just need to get caching working.
Boing Boing: iTunes update spies on your listening and sends it to Apple?
A new version of Apple's iTunes for Mac appears to communicate information about every song you play to Apple, and it's not clear if there's any way to turn this off, nor what Apple's privacy policy is on this information.
UPDATE: Apparently they're not storing it. Privacy Policy update required...
How to avoid the UK glasses rip-off:
1. Get an eye test at a high street optician
2. Buy online, using your prescription
3. Receive your glasses
Update: Had my eye test today. Awaiting my glasses. Kev ordered his, too.
Requires Flash and a high tolerance to flashing crap (also courtesy of Ruairi - A wiki of animutation, if you're into this kind of crap. I am!)
Includes such classics as the Jaguar, and the Intellivision keyboard.
Story - I think we've all been there. Well, those of us from Norwich (basically Mark)
It's going to be an exciting new year. The news, though it's not live on the site yet, is that CNUK is going to take on another task. We're going to do free software and free culture now. This is not much of a surprise - we've built the whole operation on free software. Plone, our content management system and Debian GNU/Linux, our operating system. We're going to be pushing some great aspects of free software, not just for culture, but also in a more general sense.
Free software is an important aspect of a free culture. Software is as important to the social change as culture - afterall, you can't be free if you can't read a free book freely!
I've been busy lately, learning Ruby on Rails (I'm still learning) and future projects might well use it. If I can figure out FTP or HTTP uploading with Rails, RemixAnywhere will be a great application for starters. And of course, public subversion and everything GPL licensed.
Local groups are another important aspect, and we'll be putting some considerable effort into this area, too.
It should be fun.
