Every release day is exciting in one way or another. Lucid’s was no disappointment. April 29th, 2010 was my 8th Ubuntu release as the ubuntu.com webmaster. Counting testing releases, betas and RCs I’ve participated in about 50 releases.
There are many aspects related to a release. I can only talk about my own perspective, as it pertains to managing the website. Usually, a week or so before release we’ve got a pretty good idea of what the website will look like and people are viewing it on a testing server. Invariably there are last minute changes, and I do mean up to the last minute.
I often keep tabs open for items on my todo list. So I get very upset if I lose my tabs. Sometimes I have two computers running or I dual-boot between operating systems and the tabs open on one are different than the tabs open on another. Xmarks now supports keeping these synchronized! I’ve just enabled this feature so haven’t played with it extensively yet but I’m excited about its potential.
In case you haven’t used XMarks before, it also supports synchronizing book marks between browsers. It works for IE, Chrome, Safari and Firefox. On some of these browsers you can also synchronize your passwords. Give it a shot at http://www.xmarks.com/
You think I’m crazy, but yes, you can do it. The below instructions have been tested by me and worked flawlessly. I started out by doing a migration locally using a virtual environment and you should too.
In case you’re wondering why, basically, I have a server that does not have hardware virtualization support and I wanted to use Xen’s paravirtualization capabilities to manage virtual machines. Ubuntu server makes a great guest but it really prefers KVM over Xen and KVM, as far as I know, does not support machines like mine without the proper cpu instructions. Debian does have good support for Xen so I’m switching to it as my host (Dom0).
For a while I’ve been re-evaluating wordpress and have come to the conclusion that for common blogging tasks, it’s better than Drupal. It’s taken a while but I’ve migrated my site to back to WordPress (I’m using v3) from Drupal 5. It’s not perfect, but in the spirit of open source’s mantra, “release early, release often,” here it is. Expect to see some changes as I customize it and tweak it.
Today Apple is supposed to make a big announcement. I don’t know yet what that will be but many people think it’s related to a Tablet PC. Apple’s success in the iPhone and App Store business has reminded me of one of the web’s biggest mistakes and we seem on track to repeat it. I’m stunned because it really hasn’t been that long. How can we be doing it again so soon?
(as a follow-up to “How data affects wifi range“)
It’s also important to realize that if a country consumes more media on the Internet than it produces, the electrons will get shifted from the creating country to the consuming country.
Because electrons have a negative charge this will leave the creating country with a positive charge and the consuming country with a negative charge. In effect, “polarizing the nations.” This was actually discussed in ancient biblical prophecy and is a sign that the battle of Armageddon and the end of the world is near.
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 11:53 AM, David McLaughlin wrote:
> I’ve had much better luck with range by placing the router as high as
> possible within the house.
That’s because the newer wifi signals are actually slightly heavier than air so they fall down gradually after they’re broadcast. Kind of like the branches of a willow tree.
It’s that time where people make their predictions. I’ll chip in my 2 cents worth regarding technology changes in the future. The last decade, I think, can be described as the decade of the web. The next, in a word, will be mobile.
A wise person said back in the mid-90′s that people need to communicate and be entertained but they don’t need to compute. This is so true. A lot of people have a big fat computer in order to email their family, share pictures and chat with their friends on Facebook or twitter. Over the last three years we’ve started to be able to do this nearly as well, or in some ways even better, with a mobile phone. Some people will start to think that they don’t really need a PC at all.
Among the elite hacker community it is sometimes considered cool to have an unstyled website. I’m not certain what makes this cool, but I respect it none-the-less. However a few absolutely minimal styles can make your site easier to read. Here they are:
body {
font-family: sans-serif;
line-height: 130%;
font-size: 91%;
}
The latest craze is to write an iPhone app. I’ve been preaching for a while that mobile apps are the way of the future but I don’t like the idea of iPhone apps and here’s why.
First, I have to give credit to Apple. They’re brilliant, though I’m convinced the place they’re at now is exactly what they intended a few years back. If you work on the premise that any good capitalist company is bent on total market domination (not all companies are but it seems to fit Apple) then what they’re doing is right on track to achieving this goal.