Fitting the battle of life

I remember seeing quite a funny entry in a man page, but failing to recall what it was, I shall give you this instead:

$ cal 9 1752
September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1  2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

(1752 was the year Britain ‘lost’ twelve days to catch up with the rest of Europe…)

I won’t be around for the weekend – I’m up in Manchester debating from tonight til Sunday night, so I won’t be able to moderate comments until I get back (I’m not leaving it unmoderated – Askimet is good, but not perfect!).

Have a good weekend everyone!

Well, I wasn’t expecting that. I decided – because I’m sad and geeky like that – to check what OS each of the main parties in the UK (Tories, Labour and Lib Dems) is running their website on, using netcraft. The results are:

Tories – NetBSD/OpenBSD

Labour – Linux

Lib Dems -  Windows Server 2003

Turns out the party who claim to most stand up for people’s freedoms, that party that claims the moral highground on civil liberties and ID cards and so on is running the proprietary software…

[The Greens run Linux]

I’ve noticed in the past few days that downloading packages has become tiringly slow – down to about 40kB/s (on average, sometimes getting below 20). After making sure this wasn’t a problem with my broadband connection (nope – speedtest.net still reports ~4 meg) or wireless, I checked the apt mirror. There’s an option hidden away in System->Admin->Software Sources that lets you test over 200 mirrors for speed and select the best one, which turns out to be in Oxford. Speeds are back to what I’d expect, but two points remain to consider.

Firstly, why aren’t mirrors automatically checked periodically and silently (e.g. once a week before performing the daily check for updates) to ensure users are on the best one for them? Rather than have to delve through a couple of menus to find it, this process should surely be automated with a ‘Find and use the best server automatically’ option, with a ‘Manually select a server’ option that then lets you get into those menus for those who really want it. If there is already a mirror-picking application, it should just be used.

Second, does this mean Ubuntu’s getting – wait for it – too popular for Canonical to keep up with demand? I suppose the more reasoned explanation would be that Canonical’s archives are kept all in the same place, and with lots of Hardy updates that people are testing, demand is seasonally high. Still, it’s a bit of a nuisance considering that Ubuntu is a distro that pretty much relies on an always-on broadband connection.

Well, I’m not a programmer, and my system’s pretty stable so I don’t generally find bugs that I need to submit to launchpad at all. What can I give back to the community? Not a lot, you might think.

Do I even need to give anything back? I am, given my n00bness, nothing more than a consumer of Ubuntu as an OS, not a major player in its evolution. But then again, the whole point of Ubuntu is that I can be, if I’d like. I don’t have the knowledge to put ideas into action, but it’s not beyond my ability to suggest blueprints and so on.

Given my background as an English student (that is, student of English, as opposed to just a student hailing from England – which I am, but that’s beside the point), why not lend my hand to documentation and translation? I (should) have the skills necessary to write clear, concise documents, and I’ve got plenty of free time on my hands (I probably should be filling that time with reading, but hey, I’m an English student!).

So, I’ve signed up to the documentation team’s mailing list, and will – once my last essay this year is handed in, next week – say hello and get started.

Wow, that was quite something, made me feel all a little queasy inside. The desk was shaking – I thought it was my external hard drive playing up – and then I noticed the bed was shaking as well. Weird.

More info here:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008nyae.php

It was interesting to join the reaction in #ubuntu-uk – we were all talking about it, throwing in links to the above and to google maps pinpointing the epicentre well before BBC News 24 stood up and mentioned it, and before any real mention was made on the BBC news website. Now that’s community-driven news for you. [I was actually listening to lugradio when it happened...]

BBC news website is also reporting massive traffic from the UK, as is only to be expected: the highest I saw it was at 86% above normal, but then at 1am, I guess that’s only a few extra UK readers :)

Well, I’ve decided that when Hardy is released in April, I’ll wipe my Windows partition. I no longer need XP for anything – the two songs I’ve bought from the iTunes store are both on my iPod, and principle tells me not to care too much if I lose them in the future.

My /home will be backed up onto my external hard drive (it is already anyway), I’ll get a list of packages that I’ve got installed ready to batch-install them, and then I’ll switch over to Ubuntu completely. No more Windows on my laptop. It feels odd, thinking that. There’s just no reason to. It’s a liberating feeling.

I suppose I’ll have to save my theme to reinstall it on Hardy just the way I want it, but that’s no big deal.

The release of Ubuntu 8.04, an LTS release, is an apt time to make this decision, I feel. Just as the OS itself will be ‘hardened’, so too will my commitment to it. I guess it’s a bit like confirmation. It’s been baptised with the dual-boot, but now I’ll be making a real commitment.

In other news, I’ve received two Gutsy cds in the post from Ship-It, and already have given one out to a friend – she’s previously tried a 7.04 cd I gave her, but found her graphics card wouldn’t work even in the live cd safe graphics mode, but I remember an improvement in ATI support when I upgraded, so recommended she try the latest version.

The second one I shall use to install Ubuntu on a flatmate’s laptop. I’ve already checked the hardware on the live cd, and made sure his printer works with my own laptop (it’s an HP Photosmart C4280, works perfectly, unlike my Dell freebie). Today I got something resembling an affirmative answer from him. I’ll update on this when I can…

I’ve been playing around with avant-window-navigator today, after hearing bits and bobs about how cool it is. It’s basically a linux version of the Mac OSX dock, with some fancy customisable effects (you can choose how programs bounce around, whether it’s 3d or 2d, that kind of thing – the usual open-source ‘how you want it’ philosophy).

Unfortunately I’ve noticed two issues so far: firstly, and most annoyingly, some icons are rubbish. The Thunderbird and (to a lesser extent) Firefox icons in the shot above have bits of white around them, which looks a little silly (this is also something I’ve noticed about favicons in firefox with dark themes – it shows up more). Secondly, I’ve not worked out yet (though I’m 100% sure it’s possible) how to stop windows maximising past the upper edge of the dock – at the moment I can’t reach some buttons that get hidden behind it. I’m an idiot. Awn Manager ->  General: “Maximised windows don’t cover the bar”. One simple tick and my second ‘issue’ is resolved. That’ll teach me not to look through config options properly. Of course you can also set it to auto-hide behind maximised windows, which is probably preferable and doesn’t waste screen real-estate.

These issues aside, I think I’ll keep this experiment going for a little while and see how I do.

…is using a £20 note as a bookmark in a £5 paperback.

Well, I’ve pretty much got rid of the bog-standard brown colour scheme and fiddled with gtk themes until I’ve finally found something I’m not unhappy with. It’s the darkilouche theme with black-white icons. Unfortunately, some windows just don’t play along nicely:

[The wallpaper I found via digg - will try and get a link up if I remember!]

Maybe all will become better when I next restart – or just restart X. The only problem with that is, having a nice stable *nix system means I don’t do that very often, and like to leave things running!

[Update - nope, still problems after a restart. Seems this theme just doesn't play well with some apps, for whatever reason.]