This is late coming to me as news, but Charles Arthur of the Guardian posted this tweet a few days ago:

The Guardian is said to have the largest installation of Macs in Europe, although Windows computers still use MS Office, and Google Apps for your Enterprise is also used across the board, according to a discussion on the BBC Backstage mailing list.

Anyway, I couldn’t find much more reference to this in a quick Google search and this week’s Guardian Tech hasn’t been released yet, so I don’t know if they’ll be making reference to it there. Still, 1,000+ installs of OpenOffice must not only save the GMG a tidy sum in these difficult economic terms, but also shows just how far open-source technology has come, for such a large organisation to drop a well-supported MS product in favour of it. This, of course, follows large installs of Ubuntu in the French public sector and elsewhere – I sense, perhaps, a tide slowly turning.

[Update: I've found a couple more links on this, including one from March 2009 in the paper itself stating that "This paper is a recent convert to OpenOffice", although another that confirms the move to OpenOffice but quotes "Andy Beale, technology director of enterprise operations at GNM" as saying that "We’re promoting [Google Docs] as the primary productivity application“, which takes away some of the importance of the OpenOffice move.]

I’ve blogged before about boot-times and using bootchart to measure them, but back then I was impressed with a 30-second boot. Now, courtesy of the latest version of Ubuntu, 9.04, which is due to be released as a final version later this month, I have recorded a 19-second boot – an improvement of just over a third in less than two years (Gutsy, 7.10, to Jaunty, 9.04):

Bootchart for Jaunty, 7th April - click to enlarge

It’s not instant-on, but it’s an improvement nonetheless where prior experience of upgrades has been to expect more bloat and slower loading times. On four-year old hardware, no less. My ancient laptop has 512MB of RAM and a 1.83GHz, single-core processor, and yet manages to put at least Vista to shame.

So, here’s a big thank you to all Ubuntu developers, whether working for Canonical (or, indeed, upstream) or as part of the wider community. You rock my world.

It’s been too long since I messed about with geekery, but it’s revision time again, so my powers of procrastination have just received a massive boost from the gods of timewasting.

Anyway, long story short, I hang about on IRC from time to time. I used to a lot more than I do now, which I put down to a combination of having a girlfriend (not that she stops me, per se – I just have less time on my own!), and actually being busy and working. You’re most likely to find me in ##photography, but occasionally #ubuntu-uk too.

When I’m at college, I am usually unable to connect to IRC – the traffic seems to be blocked, which is interesting given that bittorrent traffic isn’t, for instance. I don’t know why it’s blocked and can’t be bothered to ask, but I have finally set up a way around it.

This involves port forwarding on my router – sending traffic on port 22 to my Ubuntu machine. From college I log into that machine via SSH, and then running irssi with screen. Easy, but required that tiny bit of setup that I couldn’t previously be bothered to engage in.

Go go gadget geekery. Just don’t tell my girlfriend I’m not revising.

[ps - it's always good to remember that Macs don't play by the rules. You can't Alt+number to change windows within irssi - it's Esc+number, instead. For more irssi/screen tips, check this fantastic article.]

Well, it’s that time in Ubuntu’s 6-month release cycle that I update my old laptop to the latest beta release, and that now is Jaunty – Ubuntu 9.04.

Everything that worked fine under Hardy (8.10) still works fine – indeed, I feel it’s all a bit speedier. The only bootchart I’ve generated so far gives a boot time of just over a minute, but I think that’s partly because it was trying to run a disk check as well. Resuming from hibernate, however, is lightning quick (although the first time it decided to fail to resume and booted normally, which wasn’t much of an issue as I had no work open).

The only problem I’ve had, which I would assume is because I’ve done a fresh install rather than an upgrade, is the performance of my Dell 720 Printer, which used to work flawlessly using Lexmark drivers originally intended for Red Hat. Now, however, following the same instructions I have before, there seems to be a problem, and by seems to be, I mean there is: I can’t print.

I know this is something to do with CUPS, but I have little time spare to look into it in much detail. My first final-year exam is later this month, and the last one almost a month later. It’s mostly annoying because there’s no support for the same printer on a Mac, which is my other laptop at the moment. Oh well – it might act as incentive for me to actually go to the library.

It’s free. It works on any platform (ok, well probably not any platform, but at least Linux, OS X and Windows) And it produces images better than Photoshop. What more could I possibly say?

A couple of great snow panoramas via Hugin from myself (below) and daubers.

Panorama from the top of Primrose Hill, 2/2/09

Saw this on Jono Bacon’s blog today; here follows my entry to this latest meme.

In the same period, he wrote a sequence of profoundly searching and abitious history plays – Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V - which together explore the death throes of feudal England and the birth of the modern nation-state ruled by a charismatic monarch. (from The Norton Shakespeare)

I guess it helps I’m meant to be reading Othello at the moment. The instructions:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. [Honestly, Shakespeare was indeed the closest. It's still closer than my laptop, actually.]

Just thought I’d hilight one of the Ubuntu Open Week sessions I attended yesterday, a very informative and useful talk from Tony Whitmore of the Ubuntu-UK Podcast on Media Production using Ubuntu. You can read the log here. It was a good overview of the apps you might need to produce video, photography and audio using open source – well worth a read if you have ten mins or any interest in multimedia.

When I checked Engadget’s OS poll earlier today, Linux was sitting at just 11.8%, but now it’s broken the 12% barrier. Of course, these stats are subject to change, but it’s surely a good sign, no? On a leading tech blog news review etc etc site, with a renowned Apple bias, Linux accounts for the preference of more than 12% of readers.

This would be the perfect time to test out WordPress’ new built-in poll feature, but I daren’t the embarassment of 3 votes being cast for the entirety of the future of the internet.

I’m all in favour of competition. I think competition is a very healthy to have. Let’s look at a case study, bank accounts.

• Different banks offer different current accounts.
• These may have different implementation of the same features – interest rates vary, all accounts offer some kind of card but it could be Maestro or Visa, and so on
• Some have features others don’t – online banking, for instance.

These differences help consumers choose between which bank they’ll use (and others, of course – is it in Iceland or Ireland?). However, whichever account they choose, they’ll still be able to do these things:

• Put money in and take money out from branches
• Use cash machines, regardless of who is running the ATM itself.
• Make payments to any other account, regardless of which bank that account is held by.

Now, I don’t think you’d find a product surviving very long if it didn’t let you take out money transferred to your account from a different bank. It would be laughed off the high street.

So why do we accept it from software?

Next Thursday is the release of Ubuntu 8.10, codenamed Intrepid Ibex, and there’ll be another London release party organised by the lovely folks at Canonical, details of which you can find here.

The cake was not a lie last year!

I’ll be going – second party in a row – and I hope to see you there too!

In the meantime, I’ve only ‘broken’ my Intrepid install once, and that was a problem with graphics that just required a quick switch of drivers. It’s all looking grand – roll on the release!