Yuck … just read an article over at ConsumerFocus about the crappy state of UK copyrght laws. Pretty depressing reading but basically our copyright laws are so out of date that fair use does not really apply in the UK.
The frustrating thing is I do not know how I can help in anyway.
Not really sure about twitter. Been playing with it for about two weeks now and can’t say it’s really impressed upon me how amazing it is. I have tried to shake things up, moved to tweetdeck on my Mac.
But at the end, it just seems twitter is full of just that, twitter. Yes, there are some good twitterers. Stephen Fry updates with some excellent news from his travels. Jon Favreau, not too many updates but he does update with pictures of cool props he has at home and his updates talk about Iron Man 2.
Yet twitter seems at best to be about sound bites. Blogs may be a lot of work for people to write, however it allows the reader a greater experience. And how do people follow hundreds, if not thousands of other twitterers ? I only follow about 20 people and get overloaded with updates. I will keep tweetdeck going, but frankly I am not sure I have the time to keep spending on twitter.
I’m going through a little spell where I’m doubting my techie background. As such I’ve decided to hack together a Unix box of sorts. Not wanting to go the whole “follow the crowd” route I decided not to install Linux, but something else. Haha !
First try was Solaris 10 x86. Actually not a bad little OS but Wireless didn’t work. Searching around I found a possible way of getting it to work by using some OpenSolaris drivers. I said possible as in fact it didn’t work. OK, maybe the onboard networking card can work instead. Now this was a bit of a bugger as it actually meant ripping up some floor boards and rigging up ethernet cabling between two routers (actually have a Time Capsule connected to the Linksys ADSL WIFI so I now have the Time Capsule upstairs in my study with the aforementioned ethernet cabling connecting it to the Linksys).
So, a couple of lifted floor boards and horrible cabling hacks later, the machine has an ethernet connection. Fire up the box, and woo hoo, nothing ! WTF ??? Guess what, Solaris 10 also doesn’t support this onboard ethernet card. Well, I was intending to go wired anyway, so at least all the antics with the floor boards weren’t for nothing.
So, still wanting to regain my techie credentials (apparently I’m not allowed to go into the cool parts of town without this) I decided upon FreeBSD.
Quite a while ago I was a developer, predominantly on Unix (C coder in fact, bet there aren’t that many of us anymore, bloody Java). My first Unix system was FreeBSD. Actually it was Linux, but I’m talking about 0.92 with no distro (Slackware didn’t come out till later that year) so I don’t think that counts.
Being rather fond of FreeBSD I went back to that. Oops.
Whilst it’s still very nice, for some reason the first install suffered from seemingly random kernel panics. Honest to God I don’t know why but it just didn’t seem very stable. Certainly not the way I remember it used to be. After a while I switched to an AMD 64 bit version of FreeBSD (I love AMD processors). That seemed to be more stable. No kernel panics. Got ports to setup X11 and Fluxbox (remember, trying to regain my techie cred here) and that worked fine. But occasionly X11 would spazz the hell out. Funny displays, random colours, VRAM corruption issues. Sod this.
So here I am with Linux again. OK, well I still wanted to be hard core so I went with Gentoo.
Laura’s laptop runs Vista, during all of the emerging I had to do, she asked me to sort out a problem she had with some Virii. Typical of Windows in my opinion, but there you are. Anyway, seems the anti virus had no problem stopping the virii, but couldn’t clean them up. Much time spent trying to remove the sodding things at which point I thought, let’s put Ubuntu on a memory stick and boot off that. See if she likes Ubuntu.
So there I am with Gentoo and I’ve just discovered that Ubuntu is pretty slick. The interface is gorgeous and far better laid out than Vista (how in the earth did Microsoft get this past product useablity testing). Setup was easy and Laura seems to be getting on nicely with it. I’ve been humming and arring (is that right ?) over whether to dump Gentoo and install Ubuntu, but it just seems that I’d be dumping my whole tech cred endeavours at this point. So whilst I’ll stick with Gentoo, I have to say that I’m impressed with Ubuntu. It’s finally gotten to the point where there’s a Linux distro that could actually be used by normal users from install to the grave. I honestly doubted anybody could ever do that with a Linux distro, but there you have it.
An interesting question as I resume blogging.
I have started by upgrading Word Press. Still don’t have OpenID working though. Also I should think about getting a favicon setup.