Counting Down to Hardy Heron

The other day I upgraded to the Hardy Heron beta, and the experience - as expected - was mostly flawless.

I inititated the upgrade last thing at night and left it downloading. The next morning it was waiting for me to answer a question, which I did and then continued working while it proceeded in the background. It needed input from me a few times concerning configuration files, but for the most part no interaction was required. A while later it was complete and asked me to reboot. I did because it was a convenient time for me, but throughout the whole process I just carried on working with no problems at all.

I’ve no experience of upgrading (or even installing) OS X, but I know the same experience would be difficult to replicate on Microsoft Windows, especially when you consider that all my applications were upgraded at the same time as the Operating System.

Once Hardy is formally released - and I’ve got the opportunity - I plan to completely re-install this machine and wipe all traces of Microsoft Windows from it forever (Vista is still lurking around on here, wasting space along with a defunct recovery partition).

So if like me you’re waiting for the release of Hardy, add the counter to your website. Find the massively complicated installation instructions here.

WordPress 2.5 joy (and K2 woes)

Version 2.5 of WordPress has been released today, and I’ve upgrade this site accordingly.

The upgrade was pretty painless, apart from a weird bug that happens if you’re (like me) using the K2 theme. Everything works, except the admin dashboard. I’ve been meaning to develop my own theme anyway, so maybe this will be impetus I need to do so.

Thy will be done: m2wp.py is released

After dragging my heels for a bit, I’m finally getting around to releasing my code for generating WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) files from Mephisto database.

I agreed with Stuart that it should be released regardless of demand, but it really did need some cleaning up first!

So, without any further ado, pomp, or ceremony I give you m2wp.py!

…

Oh, you actually want to see the code?

bzr branch http://labs.schwuk.com/m2wp

* Why aren’t I using Launchpad? Because I seriously doubt there will be any further development of this. However if people want to submit patches, they are more than welcome to and I will publish them in my repository.

A couple of caveats:

Media Management Misery

I’m sure I’ll get some heat for this, but here goes…

Why is managing media so painful under Linux?

I have a significant amount of audio on my laptop, and a phone that is a fairly capable music player. However if I want to copy some of that audio to my phone, I have to resort to manually copying and arranging the files, as well as ensuring the tags are right (as the N95 relies on these). It’s an awkward, but manageable process that I don’t do so often.

Podcasts are a different story though. My phone is capable of downloading podcasts itself, but they are slow to download and awkward to manage. Copying podcasts from the laptop to the phone can be fraught with peril.

By contrast I had to reset my daughter’s iPod today after I tried to manage it under Linux.  The reset and re-population through iTunes was painless. I know it is because Apple control the software and hardware, but it can’t be that hard to get right can it?

Don’t even get me started on photos and movies…

Ubuntu UK Podcast

Some folks from the Ubuntu UK Local Community team have got together and made a podcast:

Ubuntu UK Podcast

Giving up on AWN, for now

I’ve shutdown AWN and reverted my GNOME desktop back to the usual top and bottom panels. Although AWN is great, and could well be the interface of the future, I guess I’m just too used to GNOME now.

I suspect GNOME Do is here to stay though.

Stop, thief!

I’ve been lucky. I’ve never really been a victim of theft, and when I have it has been for small amounts of money or insignificant items.

photo credit: nocklebeast

Now I have come across someone stealing the content from my site - and anyone else who is aggregated in Planet Ubuntu - and seeking to profit from this through the use of Google Adverts.

The culprit? http://linuxindex.com

I have sent an e-mail to the domain contact asking them to cease reproducing my content without permission immediately. I have also reported the policy violation to Google AdSense. I would urge anyone else on Planet Ubuntu to do the same.

Experimentation

A change is as good as a rest, or so they say. Well this week I’ve been making quite a few changes.

It started off with a post from Jorge about integrating Launchpad with GNOME Do. I’d been aware of GNOME Do for a while, but never got around to trying it. Well now I have, and I love it. I do have to keep reminding myself it’s there, but I’m getting used to it.

A quick side note - PPAs rock. Major props to Celso, Julian and Kiko for making them part of Launchpad. They make obtaining packages for new projects so much easier.

I can’t remember what prompted me to try it, but I’m now using the Avant Window Manager (also known as AWN). This combined with GNOME Do lets me have a minimalist desktop.

Following a discussion about Flock I’m now trying that out again (see here and here for my previous experiences with it). I’ll post some updated opinions in a few days, but at the moment I’m ambivalent. As always when playing with a new toy, this post has been written with Flock.

Finally I’m back on Jaiku again thanks to Jaiku Invites. I’m not quite sure why when I’m getting increasingly bored with social networks, but we’ll see what happens.

Another side note - my machine hung completely while I was originally writing this post. After the reboot both Firefox and Flock restored their sessions as I have become used to. I was also pleased to the see that Flock restored this post.

Blogged with Flock