Way back in May of 2003, when the internet was ugly and Web 2.0 didn’t exist yet, CompUSA had an online deal that caught my eye - a WinTV PVR-250 Hardware MPEG Encoder card for $99 after rebate. I had been debating the whole media center setup for a while and decided this was good time to make the leap. The state of media center software at the time was pretty shoddy – convergence was talked about, but rarely happened.
Posts
The Internet is a great place of open standards and open implementations that allows just about anyone to put together their own services. The plethora of programming languages that advertise themselves as being well suited for web development gives a developer a number of different swiss army knives to use in creating their new service. Even after we’ve picked a language, or just settled for the language that we’re most familiar with, there are more frameworks than you can shake a stick at.
I’ve been a Ubuntu user since before it was called Ubuntu, back in the days when the domain name was no-name-yet.com. It wasn’t a hard switch from Fedora Core, which at the time was Core 1 or Core 2. Ubuntu was like entering a magical world where stuff just worked. At the time I had an IBM ThinkPad A31 – it worked perfectly, wifi and all. Now, things weren’t quite as good as they are now, the magic of NetworkManager had not yet arrived, and DBUS was just a thought in j5’s mind.
When the iPhone was first released it was hailed as the “Jesus Phone”. The one phone that would surpass all other phones and bring a new era of non-suckiness to our personal communications. With the release of the iPhone App Store, it’s only gotten better. However, I believe in all the marketing about the iPhone 3G and it’s new features like GPS, they forgot one tiny fact out. It allows the user to time travel.
The Free Software Foundation has done some truly amazing things for computers. The creation of Emacs, GCC, most of the standard Linux utilities, and the genesis of the ideas that later created Open Source (although, Stallman despises it), are just a few of the important things they’ve done. They generally fight the good fight and make the computer world a better place to be.
However, over the past few years, something seems to have changed within the Free Software Foundation.
About two weeks ago I picked up a pair of iPhone 3G’s for me and Kristina. So far I’ve been really happy with them, well, aside from the fact that they’re more or less bricks under Linux. Not complete bricks, I can still download photos off of them, but aside from that they’re not much use. One of the more aggravating issues surrounding this is GNOME’s insistence on prompting me to download photos whenever I plug my phone in.
As far back as the middle of 2000 I’ve been using multiple monitors for my daily work routine (see this screenshot for some proof. That’s done with a couple of PCI voodoo cards and a built in RAGE AGP card). It’s probably one of the best decisions you can make regarding your work productivity, especially if you work on a laptop. I’m not the only one who thinks this either, Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.
Virtualization of desktop operating systems is pretty commonplace for users of Linux and Mac OS. Initial implementations of desktop virtualization, such as VMWare 1.0, had the guest operating system running in complete isolation. Interaction was done through a custom application or network applications. There was no support for sharing files, sharing a clipboard, or merging the windowing environments.
Since then, virtualization has come a very long way. With VMWare and a supported guest operating system, the clipboards are the same, the mouse isn’t locked to a window, and files are easily shared between operating system.
Dear [Liferea](http://liferea.sf.net/), I wish I could break this to you easier. I wish I could say, “It’s not you, it’s me.” I wish I could just do the college freshman breakup and say, “Hey, you’re a great feed reader, you do a good job. You’re probably the best on Linux, but I’m leaving Linux, so I can’t take you with me.” I wish I could make this easier, but I can’t.
This week was what is becoming my annual pilgrimage to Santa Clara, California for EclipseCon. Last year during the conference I took CalTrain from Mountain View to San Francisco to have dinner with Kenneth. It was there that I noted that NetworkManager unceremoniously crashed my laptop when it was exposed to the hundreds of networks visible on a mid-speed train barreling through the Valley.
This year I repeated the experiment and found that NetworkManager never crashed.