Bizarrely, you can’t update from Intrepid to Jaunty with a simple apt-get dist-upgrade.
I don’t understand why, but you can’t — you simply get the report that no updates are available:
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
What you need to do instead is install the update tool, which is, as far as I can tell, in essence a bash script which does the exact same thing as the apt version above.
The Ubuntu upgrade page describe how to do this:
Install update-manager-core if it is not already installed:sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
Launch the upgrade tool: sudo do-release-upgrade
That’ll download the packages, extract them, and update the system.
I recommend using screen if you’re going to do this remotely: ssh in, hit screen to start a new instance of screen, then run the update script from there. That way you can get out of the instance if you need to (Ctrl+a, then d, to disconnect). Bizarrely, the instance will run in the background even if you end the screen instance — I had problems reconnecting to the session from a different computer, something about a tunnel remaining open till the process closed, but could reconnect via screen -R at the original (albeit remote) computer.
Today, I picked up this article which argues that open source desktop software sucks.
In actuality, it’s a pretty well written article basically arguing that incentive for usability is reducing support costs.
And since open source software has, for the most part, no support costs anyway (b/c they don’t provide that much support), there’s no incentive for improving the usability of desktop software.
He writes:
So, if faced between spending time on the elegance of the implementation, or the intuitiveness of the interface, companies will optimize for intuition; open-source projects, for elegance of implementation.
That’s worth thinking about. I’m not convinced he’s completely correct, but he argues Bryan (of LAS fame)’s major point better than Bryan does, namely that desktop software sucks because there’s no incentive to do the hard work to improve it.
At my local LUG meet I was shamed into admitting I’d never watched any of heathenX and Richard Querin’s screencasts about Inkscape.
So I gave it a go the other night. I watched this cool one about making a photo appear with 3D.
I decided I wasn’t going to learn anything if I didn’t do it myself, so I came up with this, not dissimilar image:
Pretty fun and surprisingly easy.
I’ve been thinking some recently about how I spend my time.
A few weeks ago, I has a short conversation with Brandon on Twitter, about calming our schedules down.
When I lived in Arkansas, I was busy almost every night. I didn’t work as hard when I was at work, but I had more on plate overall. Almost every night and every weekend was full of something, whether work or church related. Jenn and I rarely hung out with our friends — when we had some free time, we had to spend it with each other. It was the only time we had together.
When we moved to Illinois, I decided I simply wasn’t going to live like that. I just wasn’t going to do it. I have a few commitments, but only a few. And we have lots more spare time.
That’s on purpose — if community is important, you have to make and spend time with other people outside of programs. Saying no to possible commitments makes it possible to do that, something we never had in Arkansas.
Brandon was in process of simplifying his schedule, which I told him was a great choice for me.
But, I said, the trick is making sure you don’t waste the time you get back. Honestly, I feel like this has been one of my biggest problems with having such a free-er life: I spend a lot of time, particularly in the evenings churning through Google Reader, watching TV or playing around with Linux without learning anything.
My problem, I think, boils down to one of self-discipline and focus. By the time Jenn goes to bed around 11:00, I feel like my brain power is pretty much shot — I want to just take it easy. But that’s when I have the most time to myself. If I was doing right, I’d be using the time between 11:00 and whenever I was really sleepy (1:00? 2:30?) to create something, to learn something or to really challenge myself.
I offer myself the excuse that I just don’t have the energy. But really, I’m just being lazy. I think, if I put the work into it, I could train my brain to expect to really be challenged at night.
There’s a lot that I want to learn (to code, to do better web development) and to create (to write more, to be more creative musically). I just have to muster up the self-discipline to do it.
A few days ago, I had a short conversation with whoever is running the Opera Browser’s Twitter account. I don’t remember what prompted me, but I voiced my assumption about Opera: that the money was in mobile/embedded aps, and the desktop was just a loss leader.
As it turns out, since they’re public company, Opera’s financial data is publicly available. And almost a quarter of their business in their desktop browser. Here’s the breakdown from the 2008 report:
- 18.47M in desktop
- 78.93M total
- 23% is desktop (other 78% is other: mobile, embedded, etc)
That REALLY surprised me — I didn’t figure they were making any money at all on the desktop (and I’m still not completely sure HOW they’re doing it).
And despite the fact that it’s not open source, I still think Opera is a great browser. I’d love to see them open the code, but until then, I still wish them a lot of success.
Here’s a really interesting article about online communities and how it can affect church structure.
He argues that our past church strutures have been built around the limitations imposed by our media (in the plural sense of ‘medium’, not in the TV/newspapers sense), that formerly, a Masters in Theology meant you were one of a few with access to both scholarship and education. But as online communities grow and more and more information (scholarship?) becomes available online, that Masters means less and less.
He writes:
Which brings us back to the online thing. The open, flat, collaborative, fluid dynamic that marks out online culture is a place that problematises a lot of the assumptions that feed the church as answer to scarce resources model. Put simply, we no longer need that kind of church or the denominational structures that were built to support it. If anything, that kind of church is becoming more an more repulsive to people of my generation and will be totally alien to digital natives.
I’m not convinced I agree with his conclusions. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what his conclusions are — he’s primarily just exploring the ideas.
Still, this idea of church structure being analogous to economics (read the article — that’s his argument) with similar consequences for out-dated models like record labels and newspapers is really interesting to me, whether or not the two line up perfectly.
Recently I recieved this picture in an email from a friend.
I’ve got to say, I totally agree. I feel the same way about that stupid printing press technology, too.
It’s enabled so much crap — if only we hadn’t embraced the printing press, only the really smart people would be writing stuff in the first place.
Stupid democratization of communication.
I saw an article today talking about Firefox 3.5. The said:
[Firefox 3.5 RC1 has] Support for new web technologies, such as HTML5 video and audio elements, JavaScript query selectors and downloadable fonts, have also been added.
Ok, that’s awesome. I’m pumped about HTML5, if it means we can start to wean the web off Flash. It’s not that I hate Flash (although I do), it’s just the fact that depending on a single, for-profit company for something as vital to the web as complex animation and video delivery seems like a really bad idea for the future.
I don’t know what Javascript query selectors are, but downloadable fonts, or rather embeddable fonts, is an awesome feature that the web needed a long time ago. Very cool stuff — good job FF devs!
I’ve mentioned before that my fascination with open source springs, primarily, out of my frustration with standard American business practice, with capitalism in general, which seeks to control the distribution of goods as much as possible in order to make as much money as possible.
Free software, on the other hand, provides a very different way of thinking about making money, namely relinquishing that control of distribution, which in turn, makes free software a disruptive force. That disruption creates an illustration, I’ve argued, albeit neither directly nor purposefully, of Kingdom economics or to put it more plainly, of grace.
The problem with that argument, though, is that free software is predicated one of the same principles as laissez-faire capitalism, namely of freedom. In fact, this ‘let the market decide’ approach contributes a lot to the quality of the best open source projects — good projects succeed and poor project falter because the market recognizes the good from the bad. If a project is forked, the fork succeeds if it’s better than the original.If it’s not, it falters and dies for lack of support.
So there’s this really strange, and I think fascinating, tension here between grace and compeition, between capitalism and distributed socialism, where the two are substantially less seperable than you first believe.
Which is, I think, why I find the whole idea really interesting. Instead of falling into one of two well established categories, free software integrates the two in a new and imaginative way. I can only hope that it’s imaginative enough to inspire people to imagine whole new economic models.
Jnthn has a really cool, brief post today on his blog about why Twitter is like the church, namely that,
Studies by Harvard & Nielsen suggest that Twitter has been better at signing up users than keeping them…The question is: what are we doing in the church to keep those people in the church, helping them become disciples of Christ?
It’s a quick fast read and worth thinking about.
