Warning: this one's a tech post.
I like Windows XP. Well, maybe not like but I use it every day and it gets the job done. It's not the prettiest, but it's solid and works fine for me. We have a Mac at home and it's great, and if someone wants to give me a MacBook Air I will be most pleased. But still, 90% of my computer time, I'm on XP.
My day job likes XP, too. Or at least we have a policy of not installing Vista on any machine. So far, nobody has seen a feature in Vista that we really need for getting things done.
I know it's been coming for a while now but still, to read that Microsoft will stop selling XP left me just a little sad. I really can't see Vista in my future. So a few days ago I started playing with Ubuntu.
And I liked it.
And I started wondering if I could use Ubuntu for nearly everything.
This is a bit of a blind spot for me. Although I've written software for many a year now, I've mostly stuck with Windows. Even when I was writing Java code that would end up on Unix servers, all my development has been on Windows machines.
So I repartitioned the laptop and set up an 8GB partition for Ubuntu. I'm keeping my data on the NTFS partition for now and I can always boot back into XP, but the plan is to try and use nothing but Ubuntu for general tasks for a few weeks and see what happens. So far Ubuntu seems a lot faster than XP, but that could just be the new toy effect. I'll post updates as I go, pointing out what works and what doesn't.
D1sc0r0b0t. Ones. Also zeros.
Showing posts with label my inner geek can beat up your inner geek or he would if he wasn't sitting under a tree reading a book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label my inner geek can beat up your inner geek or he would if he wasn't sitting under a tree reading a book. Show all posts
26 Jun 2008
21 Jun 2008
Podcasts! Lots of 'em!
I listen to a lot of podcasts. Seriously.
I've bored you before about how brilliant Starship Sofa is (and helping Tony out with it doesn't make be biased at all) and I assume you're all listening to Spider Robinson's excellent show. So here's some other stuff that's been going through the headphones lately.
Gore Vidal is still mad as hell on the BBC4 Front Row podcast. Also contains a review of the new Sebastian Faulks-penned James Bond novel.
From Ted Talks, Deborah Gordon on how do ants know what to do?. This is probably one of the most intriguing podcasts I've listened to all year and now I can't stop drawing parallels between ant colonies and computer networks and keep bugging people about communicating in aggregate. Every science fiction author needs to listen to this one now!
From Dot Net Rocks, Jeffrey Richter on the Direction of Hardware and John Lam on Iron Ruby
From Hanselminutes, Website Scaling War Stories with Richard Campbell
And finally, the Dungeons and Dragons podcast. I haven't played D&D for years and I'm not likely to in the future. But I really like the discussions about the changes to the 4th edition rules and the difficulties in designing a gaming system. I can relate to the challenges these guys face - it's exactly the same as software development. Yes, I listen to a podcast about a game I don't play not for the game but for the architectural challenges. Yes, I'm that much of a geek
And now, just because The National have been strangely absent from this blog for months, an oldie but a goodie. I discovered The National at the same time as I first read Raymond Carver. That sort of thing is going to have implications.
I've bored you before about how brilliant Starship Sofa is (and helping Tony out with it doesn't make be biased at all) and I assume you're all listening to Spider Robinson's excellent show. So here's some other stuff that's been going through the headphones lately.
Gore Vidal is still mad as hell on the BBC4 Front Row podcast. Also contains a review of the new Sebastian Faulks-penned James Bond novel.
From Ted Talks, Deborah Gordon on how do ants know what to do?. This is probably one of the most intriguing podcasts I've listened to all year and now I can't stop drawing parallels between ant colonies and computer networks and keep bugging people about communicating in aggregate. Every science fiction author needs to listen to this one now!
From Dot Net Rocks, Jeffrey Richter on the Direction of Hardware and John Lam on Iron Ruby
From Hanselminutes, Website Scaling War Stories with Richard Campbell
And finally, the Dungeons and Dragons podcast. I haven't played D&D for years and I'm not likely to in the future. But I really like the discussions about the changes to the 4th edition rules and the difficulties in designing a gaming system. I can relate to the challenges these guys face - it's exactly the same as software development. Yes, I listen to a podcast about a game I don't play not for the game but for the architectural challenges. Yes, I'm that much of a geek
And now, just because The National have been strangely absent from this blog for months, an oldie but a goodie. I discovered The National at the same time as I first read Raymond Carver. That sort of thing is going to have implications.
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