Edward Andrew Robinson

Hot off the press, get yours now at the Ubuntu store. Congratulations to everyone on the release of the Karmic Koala (late I know but I wanted to wait till I got my shirt)! And here is a picture of me modeling my Ubuntu shirts (and I know I look grumpy I was focusing on my new camera and tripod to keep the backgrounds aligned)

Left (Jaunty Jackalope) Middle (Karmic Koala) Right (Hardy Heron)

Looking forward to the Lucid Lynx. You can also check out all the Ubuntu code names here!

Well yet another meem on planet ubuntu, and so without further ado:

earobinson@MinusOne:/media/data/personal/hackergotchi$ vrms
Non-free packages installed on MinusOne

fglrx-modaliases          Identifiers supported by the ATI graphics driver
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.28 modules helper script
linux-restricted-modules- Restricted Linux modules for generic kernels
nvidia-173-modaliases     Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-180-kernel-source  NVIDIA binary kernel module source
nvidia-180-libvdpau       Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix
nvidia-180-modaliases     Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-71-modaliases      Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-96-modaliases      Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-glx-180            NVIDIA binary Xorg driver
opera                     The Opera Web Browser
picasa                    Image management application from Google
sun-java6-bin             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-jre             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
tangerine-icon-theme      Tangerine Icon theme
unrar                     Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version)
Reason: Modifications problematic

Contrib packages installed on MinusOne

flashplugin-installer     Adobe Flash Player plugin installer
flashplugin-nonfree       Adobe Flash Player plugin installer (transitional pack
nvidia-common             Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers
nvidia-settings           Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
ttf-mscorefonts-installer Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts

16 non-free packages, 0.9% of 1712 installed packages.
5 contrib packages, 0.3% of 1712 installed packages.

Post yours!

I love lists, and I love open source software. Whats more I find that I am using more and more open source websites in my daily life. Without further ado here are 8 open source websites I use:

and two that I don’t:

Update: I just realized I also use tr.im as my url shortener and they will be going open source.

<rant>Yesterday Bell, my super fast ISP, started to redirect unfound urls to their own website (www.domainnotfound.ca). I have been very happy with Bell for the last few years and have been thinking of moving my cellphone subscription to them as soon as they support the android.

To Bell’s credit they do offer a way for you to opt out of the service however when you opt out instead of returning a DNS error they you get a blank page, not very useful for me. I have a habit of typing anything I am looking for into the address bar and then letting google take over. This works very well for me if I want to visit reddit I type reddit and google seems to figure out that I want to visit reddit. If instead I type “reddit bell dns hijacking” google still seems to figure out that they do not know what I am looking for and so they take me to a search results page. This is how I brows the Internet, I do everything from the Awesome Bar (the bar in Firefox that you type your url into). And yesterday Bell broke that.

NoRedirect (Firefox Extension Link) to the rescue!

NoRedirect lets the user take control of HTTP redirects. It can be used to interdict an ISP’s DNS search redirection hijacks, preview/screen “shortened” URLs (e.g., TinyURL), stop the annoying redirection of “smart” error pages, etc. — Source

This lets me set any url mattching the following regular expression http://www\.domainnotfound\.ca/* to be interpreted by Firefox as a DNS error giving me back my Awesome Bar and my ability to type anything I want into it and have google do all of the work!

I think this is an exteremly evil move by Bell and I am quite disappointed. at least Firefox + NoRedirect has saved the way I brows my internets. But this is another step by our ISP’s to erode our digital freedoms and net neutrality and another reason to move to TekSavvy. I should not have to resort to a software solution to preserve how I browse the Internet!</rant>

Since everyone else is doing it.

In keeping with tradition the ubuntu store (well canonical store) has released a Limited Edition Jaunty Jackalope T-shirt to celebrate the release of ubunut 9.04.

Get yours now (I have and they went really fast last time), and congratulations to everyone who made Jaunty Jackalope a success!

Dictionary.com defines a form as:

a document with blank spaces to be filled in with particulars before it is executed: a tax form.  — source

and a forum as:

an assembly, meeting place, television program, etc., for the discussion of questions of public interest. — source

Ok well I cherry picked the definitions that best suited my purposes, but anyway, I have been using both of these words is a lot of code lately and I admit the words have lost all meaning to me. In speech this is called semantic satiation, where intense repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener. So what is this called when you code? Dose it happen to anyone else? I know that for me the words “form” and “forum” have lost all meaning and look completely spelt wrong now. I think its even worse that the words are so similar prompting me to write this post, however this happens to me even with one word if I use it to much in code.

Thoughts?

With all the posts on planet ubuntu lately about twitter it got me thinking about my micro-blogging habits and how I update my online status in general. I started using twitter about a year ago, and since then I have become quite the huge micro-blogger. However a while ago I stopped thinking about it as twittering or identi.caing (?) and started thinking about it as updating my online status.

To understand why let me tell you what happens when I make a tweet (I think twitter has won the terminology war). When I want to tweet something I open up gwibber (thank Jono)and fire off my update, gwibber then updates my pidgin (MSN and Google Talk) status as well as my identi.ca account (If I am not at home I go directly to identi.ca). Identi.ca then  updates my twitter account that then posts the updated to my website, and my facebook.

From Public

What I really like about this setup is that all of these services have the built in ability to update each other. I know I could also use something like ping.fm to do the job but currently I have no need, just by updating one account I can update all my online profiles status.

So what’s your tweet flow like?

Also add me on Identi.ca, Twitter, or anything else!

earobinson.org went down for a bit tonight but it is now back up. Please let me know if you find any problems.

A lot of this post could also be applied to the Ubuntu Brainstorm but since I use reddit (an open source social news site)  a lot more I will make this post about reddit, yet it could apply to any voting site.

I use mainly reddit, and google reader to get my news online. Google reader is great letting me subscribe to sites I am interested in. Reddit is great letting me see what other people think is cool and find new sites that way. In order to decide what topics to show reddit lets users vote up or down a link and the displays the top links on the front page.

reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web — personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you’ll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is submitted and voted on by users like you.
– http://www.reddit.com/help/

I love the up or down vote system. It is much better than the star system for me (looking through my rhythmbox library most songs have either 4, 5, or zero (unrated) stars) and the up down system seems to work a lot better for me. However looking at just my liked, or disliked votes does not tell the whole story. I have 1000’s of liked votes but less than 50 disliked votes in the 2 years I have used reddit. Looking at a screenshot of my reddit homepage tells an even better story.

Looking at the above screenshot you can clear see that today I have clicked on 15 links but only liked 2 one of which I did not even click on. I feel that this is an important metric that reddit is missing from its stats, looking at the comments of a posted article tells you how many up and down votes an article has got. Maybe at least to start tracking and telling us how many clicks an article got is a good start. Why, well because if you have two sites one has 100 up votes and 100 clicks VS one with 100 up votes and 1000 clicks that info tells you something about the article. What this tells us yet I am not sure but maybe one is a niche article that a small community of people really care about as to read the article and up vote it (for example a colour blind patch for fluxbox, and yes I don’t even know what that would be), but maybe the latter is the release of the next version of ubuntu. I feel that this information could make reddit even better and as an added bonus for those of us who use reddit on more than one computer reddit could keep track of our clicked links for us.

Edit: This has been submitted to reddit. Please up vote it.