For the 20th birthday of the Linux kernel, Microsoft have made a video wishing Linux happy birthday.
My first reaction to this? That’s pretty nice, at the end of the day, there’s no reason we can’t be friends just because of a difference of opinion on the best way to develop an operating system. In fact, I’m surprised Microsoft was relaxed enough to let this out, good on them.
The top comment on the Slashdot post about the video?
It begins with, “I read this as a slight against Linux…” and goes on to say..
I think the general philosophy that has clearly been reiterated by the Linux community is there is absolutely no room for trust in Microsoft. They are a convicted monopolist and have called upon everyone to view Linux as a cancer. They continue to use their patents to extort payment from large and small with bogus insubstantiated claims against Linux. They are the company that uses embrace extend extinguish. This animation represents the same underhanded intentions.
No one can deny that as a part of Election 2011, online media has been playing a larger role in candidates campaigns. There are few serious candidates without a Facebook page, twitter account and website. Something that has baffled me however, has been Fine Gaels online strategy.
First stop is finegael2011.com, the official site of the 2011 Fine Gael election bid. Though recently, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it had been hacked, as on the front page there was a poorly coded flash game which seems to make fun of Irelands political figures, including Enda himself (link). Enda is the protagonist and his catchphrases, complete with dodgy Mayo accent, include : ”Tax that!” (to Labour candidates), “Cheapest bank bailout?” (to Brian Linehan) and my personal favourite, “It’s the economy stupid” to Gerry Adams. Bear in mind, Kenny spouts these when you kill other politicians by throwing Fine Gael logos at them.
This comes on the heels of the recent cringe worthy Valentines Day Fine Gael eCards that popped up on the site on February 14th. Create yours here. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when that one got approved.
Finally, and most egregiously, whomever manages the party’s Facebook page has been deleting posts related to the issue of gay marriage. Instead of coming out, if you’ll pardon the pun, with their official line and meeting questions head on they have fanned the flames of a controversy that the party scarcely needs at this important stage of the campaign.
It seems that Fine Gael has taken its first baby steps into the world of Internet canvassing, and with it has come eCards, flash games and censorship. Maybe next time around they’ll plan with a little more wisdom and try to use their online presence to engage with voters and invite some debate on policy and issues, instead of just on who can get the best score in their infuriating sidescrolling platformer.
Quick one here, something I find myself doing every time I install Ubuntu on a dual boot machine.
1. Create your mount point, sudo mkdir/media/windows
2. Add a line to /etc/fstab, the one below is for a Windows HDD, with the main partition being sda2 (you can work this out by graphically mounting the partition through nautilus and then running df -h)
Customer service, two words that when put together strike dread into people. It conjures images of interminable waiting and terrible automated phone systems. Heaven forbid if you have to send something back to be fixed. Have you your proof of purchase? Warranty? CCTV footage of you buying the product? Good, prepare to wait a few weeks for a repair, if we decide that it’s covered by the warranty and eventually get round to fixing it.
Today Ubuntu 10.10 was released, at 10:10am. Last night I prepared my laptop for a complete reinstall, I took a backup of everything important from both Ubuntu and Windows, and prepared GParted and Windows 7 CD’s.
This took a while, so it was late when I went to bed. That left me with a conundrum, I wanted to install Ubuntu as soon as it came out, but I also wanted to sleep… Hmm..
I’m a Bank of Ireland customer, and use their online banking extensively. And it pisses me off regularly.
To transfer money from one account to another, you have to set up a ‘benificary’ on the site. The procedure was as follows; Enter all the details, then wait about 4 days for a letter to arrive in the post with a code to enter online.
Waiting for the letter to arrive means it takes ages to set up an account which is infuriating. That’s why I was delighted to see they’ve changed the policy when I logged in today, now instead of sending the code in the post, they’ll text it to you. Finally, they’re catching up with other banks online services. Great, saves loads of time.
So, I put in my phone details to register for the service. Now, to confirm my registration, they’re going to.. send me a letter.
So that’s it, done and dusted, final year is finished and with it my 4 year college degree.
The inspiration for this post comes from reading a similar post by my friend and former CompSoc compatriot Nathan Shaughnessy. You can read his blog post here.
Basically, there’s a few things that were nice to have in mind in relation to your final year project, and this is to pass them along to others that may be going through the same process soon. Continue reading »
As I’m sure many of you are aware, today is the official release date for the new version of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx. The graphic to the right of this post idicates that the new release is “Coming Soon” where previously it counted down the days.
Basically the problem was with the migration assistant which helps carry over settings from already installed OSes. If the migration assistant found some material to carry over to Ubuntu, the GRUB menu would appear without entries for the other operating systems on the PC. For new users of Ubuntu, this would be a scary experience as they’d believe that their other OS was gone. There are a couple of easy fixes, but it was decided that the best fix was for the new version not to ship until this bug was fixed.
This means that the release has been delayed for a few hours, but will still happen at some point today (Apr 29th). By all accounts (watch http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1463554&page=1
for up to date info) we’re not too far off an official release, so get your torrent clients ready, and please seed generously.
Unless you’ve been completely off the grid in the last few days, you’ll have heard all about the iPhone 4G prototype that was left in a bar in Redwood City, California. The phone was found and subsequently sold to Gizmodo.com for $5,000. Gizmodo, a massive gadget news site, who’s posts frequently top 10,000 hits in a few hours, had to turn off their comment system because they were getting such a hammering.
The question that most people are asking is, is this the new iPhone?
I just installed the beta of the new Ubuntu release, 10.04. As I usually like to do, I opted for a clean install and then set about doing all the things I usually do after a clean install. This time, I decided to document exactly what these things are so that other people can get their systems up and running smoothly. Hit the more button to see these steps. Continue reading »
