Josh-Kerr.com

My boss recently purchased a Samsung Q1 for development purposes and he let me play around with it. My first though of the device was “great another ‘toy’ to pile on my desk.” I already have my laptop with extra monitor, iPod, personal phone, work phone (Sprint PPC6700), a box running subversion amongst other things, and another new work phone to test our product (Treo 700P). So now I have this Q1 to work with. It’s not a bad device after you play around with it but I don’t know if I’d buy one my self. read more »

Not I said the fly. I took my main box, the gaming box and threw Ubuntu on it. The only down side, it’s hard to play some of the games that I have. After all, games are the main reason why I have an Nvidia 6600GT. At the same time I know that my wife is not acustom to Linux and need to give her some familiarity (even though Ubuntu does a great job on it’s own.)

So I have two problems, I want to game and my wife still needs Windows. The gaming part will take care of itself via Wine or Cadega so I wasn’t too worreid about that. But for windows, I didn’t want to dual boot. Having dual booted in the past I know it can be a pain at times. Well, fire up VMWare and off we go. I now have a Windows XP VM running on my box just for my wife.  The best part is that I experienced no lag!  Running service packs on the Windows VM and playing some games on the host gave me no problems.  God I love virtualization.

Oh, and as for my wife.  To my surprise she was found everything in Ubuntu on her own.  I didn’t show her how to check her email, browse the web, or type a note.  It was so intuitive that she is off and running like a pro.  *Sniff*  That’s my wife.

I was listening to some of the podcasts that I listen too and I came accross this audio file.  Ever tried to cancel AOHell?  This poor guy did and recorded his cancelation phone call.  I know that a lot of places have paid workers to try to get you to keep a service by lowering the price, threating, getting you to second guess, etc but this was rediculous.  I’ve downloaded the audio file to my server if you’re interested.

I know that I’ve used this title for a post before but I just couldn’t resist using it again.  I found this video of someone that truly has too much time on their hands.  He creates the “perfect” perfect airplane in only 5 minutes.  Please note the sarcasm.

That’s the question that I submitted to Slashdot. In the poll I gave the following options:

• What the hell is Digg?
• I tried Digg but didn’t like it.
• I Digg every once and a while.
• I Digg like Slashdot.

I’m curious to see if my poll will be posted and if it is what the responses will be. IMHO Digg and Slashdot users are as different as night and day. Digg users seem to have a mob mentality and if you read their comments regarding the RIAA/MPAA or DRM/DMCA you’d swear that a 16 year old wrote it. On the flip side, Slashdot users have the tendancy to be “overwhelming Linux zealots” but at the same time their comments have logic. You know, something besides, “F* the RIAA” or “You’re so F*n stupid that your F*n ___ is F*n gay.”

Obviously these examples don’t apply to everyone on Digg or Slashdot and it’s just my observation. However if you spend time on these sites you’ll see what I mean.  Aside from the users I’ve noticed that Digg tends to post information sooner than Slashdot.  This is not always the case but I usually see an article in Digg before I see it on Slashdot.  Unfortunately a good majority of the Digg articles link to the submitters blog rather than the actual article.  This is something that Slashdot has done a very good job in minimizing.

So, which one do you use and why?

Google has announced Google Spreadsheets.  Like most of their online programs it starts out as beta and you must apply (enter an email) to get in.  I just got my confirmation email, loaded it up and OMG!!!  This thing if freaking awsome!  It does everything that the average Excel user needs.  Sorting, suming, counting, word wrap, highlighting, etc.  I dont’ see any ways to produce graphs (Web based people…) but this thing rocks.  I’ve uploaded a simple spreadsheet, played around with it, and downloaded it back to the computer.  No problems so far.  Now all we need is Google Writer (Word) and Google Presenter (Power Point) and we’re set.

We’ll, I’ve had Ubuntu 6.06 Drapper Drake running on my box for the last couple of days and all I can say is WOW! Now this is what Linux should be. It looks clean, it installs/upgrades clean, packages are easy to install/remove, and it just works. The documentation for Ubuntu is second only to Gentoo’s Wiki and there are a ton of people ready to help if you get stuck. It gets better too. I now have XGL up and running on my box, talk about eye candy. I know that Macs have had a lot of these features for a while now but this is just cool! In all honesty I think I might have just found the long lost Linux distrobution. You know, the one that works for me not works me.

Ubuntu has released Drapper, the next version of their Debian Linux based operating system.  I can’t say much about the newest version of Ubuntu as I’m in the process of upgrading however I can say that if Drapper is even half as innovated, supportive, and easy to use I’m going to love it.