I just started using Jaiku after hearing about it on net@nite and it’s amazing. It’s even more addictive than I imagined it could be. I never used Twitter, it just kind of passed me by but for some reason I felt like trying Jaiku out and now I am addicted. It’s only been about 18 hours since I signed up and I already have 12 contacts and have posted like crazy on there all day. When I signed up someone said to me “welcome to Jaiku it’s like crack for the Internet” I thought they were joking but now I’m not so sure. I’ve added a Jaiku widget to the sidebar on the site so you can see my latest Jaiku.

I think they should call it Cyber Crack although this might not be the best image to promote for your site

Check Jaiku out if you haven’t seen it. I think like a lot of people I signed up and thought “this looks ok but what am I going to use it for, I bet I won’t do much on it”. This morning I posted what I was having for breakfast and got about 5 replies. WTF??? It then led into an Alan Partridge discussion with a guy I’d never met from Finland, thats the power of the Internet I suppose. It connects people.

Everyone thinks the Internet is just about computers but they miss the point, it’s really about people. Thats the beauty of it, thats what they coined the whole idea of Web 2.0 around. See you over on Jaiku peeps

www.jaiku.com

I just read this document, it’s supposed to be a leaked memo from Bill Gates submitted in the Iowa Antitrust case recently. It seems to be real, he is is talking about making stopping ACPI working with Linux and making it “Windows specific”. This could be some of the strongest evidence yet of Microsoft’s underhand tactics.

http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf

I’ve been a web developer for a few years now, some of the time professionally, sometimes as slave labour and others just for fun. I always like to try my hand at new technologies. I’ve tried all kinds down the years: ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, PHP, Perl CGI scripting… basically anything with a P in the name I’m there

I’ve been playing with Python a lot lately and I love it (note the P in the name again), I’ve been doing some work with a Python web framework called Django and it’s great I have no complaints, it’s quick easy to learn and I intend to use it for more projects. However, I’ve noticed that Ruby On Rails seems to be getting all the press at the moment and everywhere I go I’m confronted with people raving about it, so I thought it was time I gave it a go. Even though there’s no P in the name which is a worry.

I’ve installed everything I need and I even wrote a little bash script to do the setup for me on my Ubuntu boxes, I’ll release the script after some testing if people want to use it. I’ve got myself a shiny new Rails book and I’m ready to go.

The book I’ll be using (click the image)


I thought I’d document my efforts and give some tips and warnings along the way as I learn about it. So you’re all invited along for the ride, check your height against the chart first though lol

I received an email this morning about a petition to stop broadband companies calling their products unlimited when they’re not. It’s a subject close to my heart after my experiences with Tiscali lately.

I bought an “unlimited” broadband package from them last September and quickly realized I wasn’t getting what I’d paid for. How stupid of me to think that unlimited meant I could use it as much as a I wanted, apparently it doesn’t. I find that my service is totally limited, they block nearly all my ports for long periods everyday, about the only thing I can do is surf the web between 4pm and 11pm. It sucks. But because it was in the small print of my contract I’ve got to just accept it till the deal runs out. To top it all off the speed of the service is crap at peak times, I find just loading Gmail can make me long for the days of dial-up networking. That’s just insult added to injury.

So even though it’s too late for me, I’d like to think that by doing this I can maybe prevent other people from falling into the same trap. I’m so noble…. haha not Like that guy in every war film who always says “it’s to late for me save yourselves!!”


Anyway, if you feel like I do. Please sign this and show your support.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Unlimited-ADSL/

A quick look a some of the leaked Windows source code confirms all our suspicions about how seriously Microsoft take software quality. This article is very interesting. I’m sure a lot of the comments in this code were never meant to see the light of day. There’s no doubt that they have some talented people working over in Redmond, it’s just that they seem to be fighting to try and fix other peoples mistakes more than getting anything truly creative done.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795

I have to say this is only Windows 2000 code so it must have improved a lot since then you would think. It would be really interesting to see some Windows Vista code to work out what they spent 5 years doing, you definitely can’t tell by booting the system…. ouch

Here is the 2nd installment of my Linux story. When I left off last time I was up to about the end of 2004. So I’ll continue from there…

At the end of 2004 I was still experimenting with Linux but mainly using Windows XP as my main everyday desktop. Unfortunately at the beginning of December 2004 I became seriously ill and was really unable to do much at all for quite a few months. So we’ll skip over most of 2005. Nuff said

Our story resumes in November 2005 when I finally got the Linux bug again. I hadn’t touched my Mandrake installation for months but it was still there happily waiting for me. I got a copy of Mandriva 2006 and spent most of Xmas eve 2005 playing with it

I used Mandriva 2006 in conjunction with XP happily for a few months but it never fully did what I wanted. I couldn’t really jump to it permanently, no matter how much I wanted to. I tried out Fedora Core 5 as an alternative and had a nightmare with that. It’s a nice system don’t get me wrong but I found installing things like NTFS drivers, video codecs and pretty much everything else I needed a real pain. I know you can use RPM’s on Fedora and I searched like mad for decent RPM’s without much luck. It just seemed it wasn’t really ready for what I wanted to do.

I was pretty despondent at this point. I thought maybe Linux wasn’t ready to be my full-time desktop. It was nice to play with from a geek point of view but not a real day-to-day option for me.

I carried on like this for a few months then towards the autumn of 2006 I upgraded to Mandiva 2007 which was a nice improvement. I found I was booting it more than Windows and I took the plunge and joined the Mandriva Club. It was a one off £80 payment for a year, which seemed a good idea at the time. Big mistake, I never really got anything from them, there was no decent forum or support structure that I could see. I’m not slagging off the Mandriva Club here, I’m sure they do good work, I just found I didn’t get a lot from them. My subscription is actually still active, I think it runs till August this year.

At this point I thought, this is ok but there must be something better. I’d never really tried Debian and didn’t know much about it but read a lot of good things. I’d never heard of Ubuntu either, I don’t know how I managed to let the Ubuntu phenomenon pass me by, but I did. So in October/November 2006 Ubuntu released version 6.10 Edgy Eft and I decided it was time I sampled life away from Red Hat based distributions. I installed Ubuntu Edgy and I was totally blown away by it, so much so I don’t think I booted Windows for well over a month, I didn’t need to anymore. I found that installing software and managing updates was so simple with apt-get and synaptic. That has to be the real killer thing about Ubuntu/Debian for me. It just works, there is great community support and you can really participate in it. Other distro’s have their forums and chat rooms but for me the Ubuntu community is a massive factor, the community is the basis for the distribution not vice versa as it is in some cases. After a couple of months using Ubuntu Edgy I was so happy with it that I removed my Windows XP partition and just reclaimed the disk space. It’s feels great. It’s been a good few months now and I don’t miss Windows at all.

I have to make a confession here. While I don’t have Windows on my hard disk as such I do have a Windows XP virtual machine I keep just in case. I have booted it 2 or 3 times since dumping my Windows partition to maintain some old .NET projects in Visual Studio. You may think this is a double standard but I disagree. The difference is that I can run it in a window on my Gnome desktop and still listen to my music with Rythmbox at the same time. I am basically just using Visual Studio as an application like I do with Firefox or anything else. In fact it’s not even that in terms of usage, I use Firefox compulsively, I run Visual Studio once or twice a month

I‘m really happy with Ubuntu, I recommend it to everyone I meet these days and probably bore them to death. I feel like I’ve finally seen the light, I took the blue pill and saw how deep the Microsoft rabbit hole really goes. I reckon at least 90% of people using Windows today could do everything they need to with Ubuntu. Let’s face it what do most people really do on their computers? Web surfing, Email, basic office stuff, maybe edit the odd picture, download & listen to music, watch videos. All of this stuff Ubuntu takes in it’s stride with things like Firefox, Evolution, Rhythmbox, Totem, OpenOffice and much much more. What’s more the Ubuntu Forum gives me far more support than I’ve ever had, with Windows or anything else. I love the sharing of knowledge and experience it gives and these days I can mostly answer questions and help others out. It feels good. After 6 months of Ubuntu goodness I can finally say I did it, I migrated to Linux. “I finally did it ma, I’m a contender”

My Edgy desktop as I spin the 3D Cube (Click to enlarge)


FOOTNOTE: I can’t wait to get Feisty Fawn when it comes out in a couple of weeks, I’ve been playing with the alpha and beta versions and it’s gonna be great. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu, you don’t know what you’re missing, get the Live CDs and try it, your PC will thank you. http://www.ubuntu.com/