Category: Journal

Ubuntu switcher

[Ubuntu](http://www.ubuntu.com/) Feisty Fawn came out last week and I finally decided to pick up another harddrive (they’re cheap, after all) and dual boot Ubuntu.

I’ve been pondering the switch for a while. I have to use Windows all day at work, and I’ve never been overly fond of it. Sure, it’s not quite as offensive as it once was, but my nonconformist tendencies kinda force me to look for alternatives wherever possible.

I bought my first PC in 1999 (I’d owned and used [Amigas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga) all through high school and university. I had to give it up in the end because, honestly, a 7 year old computer just isn’t useful no matter what sort of computer it is). When I got it, I’d fully intended to run Linux as my main operating system. Maybe I’d dual-boot Windows 98 for games or something, but I had no intention of staying there.

That didn’t last very long. Desktop Linux wasn’t anywhere near ready for prime time. It was just painful.

But here I am, 8 years later, trying it again.

I’ll switch to bullet mode to talk about specifics.

* I’ve got the pptp client connecting to work. I had to flip the “Refuse EAP” switch in the settings because the debug log said the connection errors I was getting happened right after an EAP request. Huhn. I have no idea what that means either.
* So I can log into work and log into my desktop with the default remote desktop client. Hurray, I can do work stuff.
* I miss [foobar2000](http://www.foobar2000.org/) already. I haven’t exactly settled on a music player, but my favourite so far is [Muine](http://muine.gooeylinux.org/).
* OpenOffice Spreadsheet kinda sucks. The graphing is pretty primitive. Gnumeric is quite a bit better, but it crashes when it tries to import my diet-related Excel spreadsheets. I’m thinking about writing something to accomplish the same task with Python, GTK and sqlite. That could be fun.
* Gaim isn’t Trillian, but I guess it works all right.
* I actually got my Dell 1110 printer sort of working. I was kinda annoyed after I got the thing that it was so resolutely Windows only. I hope Dell starts thinking about Linux drivers. They’re going to be selling Ubuntu machines, so getting their hardware to work with them would only seem sensible.
* In some cases, hardware support is actually better than Windows. Probably because hardware manufacturers are shitty software developers. So having actual coders have a crack at the hardware yields better results. Sometimes. Except when shit doesn’t work. Like my Linksys USB wifi adapter.
* I still hate The Gimp. At some point I’m going to want to edit images and I’m going to be forced to use it. I’m not looking forward to that day.

My poor tree

The tree in front of my house (a [Norway Maple](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway_Maple), I discovered today) is not a happy tree.

It had tar spots on the leaves last year, worse than the year before. Some of the bark started falling off over the winter. I noticed a woodpecker having at it in the early spring (I have pictures I should post…). Yesterday evening I noticed a whole bunch of little black caterpillars going at the wood beneath some of bark splitting wounds (again, pictures… I need to bring in a card reader). All in all, I’m pretty concerned for the health of my tree.

Norway maples aren’t native and are considered invasive further south. But it’s nice and shades the yard and front window in the summer and gives me privacy. So it’d be a shame to lose it.

It’s a foot from the road, though, so I suspected it might be a [city tree](http://www.waterloo.ca/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=363). So I called up the city this morning and they’re going to have someone come look at it. I guess we’ll see what happens from there.

At-Work Productivity: IM

I’ve been reading [Lifehacker](http://www.lifehacker/) for a while now, and, up till now, have been bombarded with productivity tips and tricks that have been more or less useless since I haven’t been working on anything I’ve been the slightest bit interested in.

That’s changed, though. I’m now working on stuff I’ve been itching to work on for about two years. So all the stuff I’ve been digesting about how to be an awesome software developer starts to have relevance. But it also means I have an awful lot of bad habits to break.

The first bad habit is probably instant messenger. [Lifehacker has some IM tips](http://lifehacker.com/software/interruption-management/im-survival-tips–productivity-and-instant-messenger-255402.php) that I’m going to try to follow.

I hope people don’t take it personally if I ignore them on IM. I’m going to start making use of status messages and invisibility. My default mode is still going to be online, but if I’m working on stuff, my status will say that. I turn notifications off and I’m going to ignore whatever comes in until the next break time.

I like IM a lot. We use it as a communication tool in the office. You can get quick feedback from people without having to compose emails, but it’s still relatively asynchronous–you don’t have to connect and stay connected with people like on the phone.

IM is good. I don’t want to get rid of it. But it can be a real distraction. Not that I can’t use a distraction sometimes, but I do kinda need to get work done. So I’ve got to be a bit smarter about how I use it.

Macra!

[![Macra!](http://flyingsquirrel.ca/junk/macra.jpg)](http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/photonovels/macra/)

(Wow, what a jumbled mess of an episode. But I admit it had its moments. Russel T Davies is like that…)