Overheard on the radio as I was falling asleep

As I was dozing off last night, there was a commercial on the radio for a place in Worcester, Massachusetts called The Computer Hospital. The advert was describing how they can fix problems on any system. I was thinking to myself: “I bet they can’t help me figure out my recent Kmail crashiness” as I was entering dreamland. Then the next statement shook me completely awake:

The Computer Hospital is now offering Linux as an alternative OS to all our clients. Discover the fun of a hassle free OS no more viruses or spyware ever again. Tons of free applications for just about any task also run most of your favorite windows apps in a trouble free environment.

!!!!!

This is sooo cool! An actual radio advert offering Linux from a local computer shop! not local to me by about 232 air miles (or a 4.5 hours’ drive) , mind you, and the ad was on at at about 1AM. I am hoping they are aired more often and during more regular hours. The radio station is powerful enough to reach all the way up here to Maine, so there is the potential for a significant number of people in New England to hear about Linux.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!!

Community: Developers vs End-Users vs. Responsibility

A mini flame war last night on identi.ca between a bug reporter and a developer (not Ubuntu-related) kept popping into my mind throughout my day today. It was basically over the old “As a Developer I Code for ME” argument in response to a bug report.

Now, I am an end-user, and not a developer so this may seem like a bias. I don’t think so. Here’s why:

A user who reports bugs, responds to help requests, or reports bugs, or in any other method of helping improve the community is by their actions implicitly agreeing to become a de-facto member of that community. This often implies a certain conduct and set of responsibilities, such as we have here with the CoC.

Now, developers may or may not be coding for their own reasons, and each one of you have different itches to scratch. But by working on a project that is part of a larger group or community, you are also implicitly agreeing to be part of that group and therefore have certain responsibilities as well. This may mean that end-users are an integral part of the project’s ecosystem, whether you are doing things for yourself or not. That also often means that end-users shouldn’t be ignored or discounted unless they are being rude or mean.

Enough of my rant, now for some gratuitous pics of my ‘kids’

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speed? what’s it like?

I get jealous of the bandwidth speed that seems to be the norm now.

my results from speedtest.net look like this:

I have been using my local isp since I first got online, almost exactly 11 years ago.

Disclaimer: I do have access to faster cable and dsl, but choose to save money right now, but I may try out cable soon if I decide to trim my tv channel subscriptions down.

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As Kubuntu Jaunty arrives

I have moved my blog to wordpress (from blogger.com), mostly because it supports media uploading from external apps such as Bilbo Blogger.

and editing in Konqueror works too

Anyhow, as Kubuntu 9.04 is out, I too am feeling very good about this release. I am hearing good things in the forums and mailing lists, and I think this positive buzz is very infectious. KDE 4.2 is simply that good. I compare it to the quality and feature list that first appeared in 3.5.0, And that in only about a year.

The naysayers may scoff, but I don’t care,

KDE3 fans even have a remix now (many, many thanks to Timothy Pearson for all his hard work!)

It is hard to say what specifically sticks out in my mind right now as there are so many parts I like, but they are mostly the little things.

It all seems to fit together so well for me, and for once everything Just Works.

I find it amazing that this ancient Compaq Evo n610c and its’ 2.0 Pentuim M with only 1 gb of ram and equally meager 32mb Ati Radeon Mobility 7500 gpu can run Kwin effects quite nicely.

obligatory screenshot of my uber-l33t desktop, featuring some of my ‘kids’. Notice no Flavor-Flav-sized clocks

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What’s that smell?

Hello world!