Another Kubuntu screenshot-fest

Amarok pictured here is the out of the box music player in Kubuntu and just another reason why Kubuntu lords it over your puny-assed little OS.

Mmm.. let me see - you want song lyrics? Click. Artist or band info (sourced from Wikipedia)? Click. A summary of all the albums you have by a given artist and which songs you listen to most often? Click. Want to grab missing album art? Click. Download track info to supplement your crappy ID3 tags on your mp3 collection because you're a pirate and BitTorrent rocks? Click!

The wonders of open source eh?

More Zune rants

I've already blogged about most of these points here, but the author of this article, "Avoid the loony Zune" makes some good points about Microsoft and its dealings with the wider music industry.

There are far more positive reviews at the Zune scene's Zune Owner Reviews page, and I guess this helps to balance all the bad press Zune has been getting since release.

Despite reading 100 "good reviews", I still find it hard to look past the DRM, lack of podcast support, next to useless WiFi and the Zune points system for buying tracks. The sad thing is, Microsoft's famous marketing prowess will probably convince most users that these things aren't important.

Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

Educate yourself about the recent Novell and Microsoft agreement, and then decide if you want to sign the protest against it (written by Bruce Perens). I did.

IE and Kubuntu are go!

I was having a discussion with a web developer friend of mine the other day about Kubuntu. He made the very valid point that he still needs a windows install around to do thorough testing of IE browser support on a windows box.

Well I have IE 5.5 and 6.0 running on Kubuntu (and no I'm not using VMWare). I found a very nifty little script in my blog reading this morning which installs IE 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 for you (you can choose which versions you want). The magic all happens with IEs4Linux (also check out his blog - looks like IE7 support is there too - maybe this will convince me to finally install IE7). It installs with a minimum of fuss and hassle. In fact with ADSL2+ the install is lightning fast.

The only requirement is that you have Wine installed and cabextract (a program to extract Microsoft Cabinet files). Using Adept Manager I had these installed in minutes. Following the Kubuntu instructions on the IEs4Linux was incredibly straightfoward. Within minutes I had two fancy looking IE icons on my desktop (an upside down IE logo in what looks like a cocktail glass), and I was ready to go.

I have a screenshot of IE 5.5, IE 6.0 and Firefox running behind it. No hacks, no pain. It Just Works. Very impressive. Just to prove that it really is IE I've loaded up Bento's blog Waffle which proudly gives IE the middle finger. You can see what I mean in the screenshot :)

So while it's not IE on Windows, it's about as close as you'll get whilst running a Linux distro. I say give it a whirl :)

Elitist mumbo jumbo

I stumbled across this article today. Reminds me of someone who recently bought a mac to do Rails development on, but wasn't particularly happy a few days after buying it.

Anyone who swears by a particular platform to do development for a particular web framework needs their head checked. And as far as David Hansson's comments? Mere elitist hype-generating mumbo jumbo.

At least this guy backs up his claims.

Working for the man? I don't think so!

This was a pleasurable read. Another poignant article considering yesterday was my last day at Insane Asylum Group (you all know the acronym). I'm officially unemployed. First time in almost 7 years. What the fuck. It's awesome.

10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job

GUI koans and The Art of Unix Programming

I've been reading a chapter of 'The Art of Unix Programming' by ESR every morning before work lately. I was also having drinks with a few guys who organised and spoke at World Usability Day yesterday at the State Library in Sydney. Anyway, reading this koan this morning seemed particularly poignant and funny :) Enjoy!

Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface

One evening, Master Foo and Nubi attended a gathering of programmers who had met to learn from each other. One of the programmers asked Nubi to what school he and his master belonged. Upon being told they were followers of the Great Way of Unix, the programmer grew scornful.

“The command-line tools of Unix are crude and backward”, he scoffed. “Modern, properly designed operating systems do everything through a graphical user interface”.

Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.

“I don't understand you!” said the programmer.

Master Foo remained silent, and pointed at an image of the Buddha. Then he pointed at a window.

“What are you trying to tell me?” asked the programmer.

Master Foo pointed at the programmer's head. Then he pointed at a rock.

“Why can't you make yourself clear?” demanded the programmer.

Master Foo frowned thoughtfully, tapped the the programmer twice on the nose, and dropped him in a nearby trashcan.

As the programmer was attempting to extricate himself from the garbage, the dog wandered over and piddled on him.

At that moment, the programmer achieved enlightenment.

Quoted from: Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface

Kubuntu - Oh What a Feeling :D

Ok - so I'm typing this post from my newly installed Kubuntu (which is pretty much just Ubuntu with KDE as the default window manager). It's very very nice.

I'm just copying across my mp3s from my USB external hard disk and we'll be good to go. I have Gaim installed and configured (which I was using on Windows anyway - it wees all over MSN and Trillian (which is just plain ugly)). Kubuntu pre-installs OpenOffice which I was also using on my Windows XP box, and I have Firefox 2.0 up and running.

It's been about 9 years since I ran Linux exclusively on my desktop at home, and that only lasted about 18 months. Boy o boy has Linux come a long way. I haven't had to go hunting around for my XConfig file. I haven't spent days looking for an obscure X server driver. Everything Just Works. In fact, it's interesting to note that I've installed and configured Kubuntu to my tastes faster than it normally takes to download, configure and install Cygwin (a tool that any serious programmer familiar with *nixs would usually install on their Windows boxen).

Ah, I love it. Let me see, I have Adept which appears to be a kickarse GUI interface to the powerful apt-get packaging system we've all been envious of from Debian. I have an audio player already installed (mp3s work with barely any fuss). I have CD and DVD burning software, a powerful media player in Kaffeine. I have an RSS reader pre-installed. I have Bluetooth chat (!), a bittorrent client, an IRC client, a PDF reader out of the box, Konqueror - a kick arse web browser (arguably better than Firefox in some sense - just ask Apple - Safari heart KHTML and all that). I have all that Linux brings to the development table (Windows has nothing on Linux - and no I'm not convinced that Powershell will make much of a difference), and all of this is wrapped up in a really quite beautiful GUI (I rate it way higher than XP or other MS derivatives - Mac OS X still rocks - though Ubuntu is definitely up there).

For those who want to take a peek you can click on the smaller image below for a full res screenshot of what Kubuntu looks like on my desktop (1280x1024). Even the process of taking this image was effortless. Hitting printscreen on your keyboard automatically brings up a snapshot program which wants to save your desktop as a PNG for you. Excellent :)



I'll get to know Kubuntu better over the next week or so and post some more, so stay tuned :)

One last point. People who are interested in Linux, or Free Software in general (there is a convincingly philosophical argument behind this) should definitely check Ubuntu out. You can download it here. Give it a go. If you're a developer and you're happy to put the time in I can't imagine you'd fail to be impressed.

The Saints are coming

Saw U2 last night at Sydney's Telstra Dome. I've never been a huge U2 fan, but holy crap. Bono and especially The Edge - WOW. The effect of Edge's guitar riffs on the crowd is inexplicable. You have to experience it to understand I think - spine shattering, goose-bump inducing beauty. I'm still processing the whole thing, but I was wholey and entirely impressed. Incredible entertainers.

Oh - and they played this song. The whole thing was incredible.

XP to Kubuntu

I'm going to switch from Windows XP to Kubuntu on my desktop at home.

I'll post rants about it in the coming weeks :)

Mo-tee-vay-shon-al

Three stories from my life by Steve Jobs.

And another interesting/motivational article I stumbled across recently How to make something amazing, right now.

Just start doing it. Whatever it is. Yeah ok.

Pretty nifty touch driven UI

I obviously have more time on my hands these days :) I've spent the whole weekend doing *nothing* so far. A very welcome change from writing Ruby on Rails apps for uni and writing 20 page project management progress reports.

This is really interesting. I love how flexible this interface is. I'd agree that it's incredibly intuitive¹. Anyone who reads digg.com might have already seen this. Pretty nifty touch driven UI. Have a look. This gets me a bit excited about technology :)

¹ This begs the question though, 'what does intuitive mean for different audiences?'. I'm definitely going to have to do HCI next session at uni.

Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud

Saw this on reddit.com this morning. Pretty interesting imo. Check out the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud from "1776-01-15: Foundation of Government" to "2006-01-31: State of the Union Address". Play with the slider. Groovy.