Just Uber

What on earth is the difference between ‘Funwall’ and ‘Superwall’, and why do I keep using Facebook when it’s so bloody dodgy in the first place?

Hi there,

This is not Chris, but Adam writing..

I am embarking on a small project to design and build a web-app using the Symfony MVC framework and thought it may be of some benefit to someone somewhere… I am not the Worlds best coder but thought it would be fun to have a go learning Symfony after buying the book. Any way, take a look at the wiki under projects, you will find one called symfony mvc developed website and tell me what you think . I will endeavor to update it weekly.

Thanks

Adam

“Just in case you’re confused and reading this from a feed. Adam is a blogless mate of mine who occasionally has to get ideas out of his head before it pops. As a humanitarian measure, I let him write stuff on my blog (heck, brains are hard to scrub off the walls). I’ve syndicated it under the Ubuntu feed as I thought readers of OSS/Ubuntu aggregators might find it interesting. What’s more, it’s an interesting real world problem that’s worthy of some ink (read pixels).” - Chris Out….

Ubuntu, as we all know is a great operating system. Its built on the solid foundations of Debian, it has a vibrant and helpful community and a multimillionaire astronaut as a sugar daddy. Things are good.

Ubuntu aims to be ‘the’ definitive Linux distribution for ‘the rest of us’. A distribution which doesn’t require you to have a computer science degree to get it up and running, a distribution for the average Joe.

Unfortunately however it isn’t quite ready yet…

Anyone who has installed an Ubuntu desktop system recently, can’t have failed to realise that Flash is broken, and it’s broken quite badly.

You see for licencing reasons, the nonfree flashplayer Ubuntu package doesn’t actually contain the Flash program itself. Instead, it simply downloads Flash from Adobe and installs it for you. After the nonfree flashplayer package has downloaded Flash, it makes sure that the md5 checksum works out properly to ensure you’re installing Flash rather than a virus or some dodgy malware.

Very sensible.

The problem is, that Adobe has released a new version of flashplayer, so when the Ubuntu nonfree flashplayer package downloads it, the md5 checksum doesn’t match and uh oh, it won’t install.

This is pretty bad, but the major, really unforgivable problem is that flashplayer has been broken for weeks now. Why is this? I’m a Gutsy user, and I notice that a replacement package has been made available, brought to the attention of the devs, but it still hasn’t found its way into the repo’s. Worryingly, this doesn’t just effect Gutsy. It effects all production releases of Ubuntu.

I’ve read comments at both Launchpad, and on the Ubuntu Forums, and there doesn’t seem to be any general sense of direction. I guess our strength is also our weakness. Too many cooks do indeed spoil the broth, and with no clear person in charge, there seems to be an endless cycle of discussion required in order to get anything done.

I do take on board the difficulties of sorting this out, but also, would suggest that the ‘powers that be’ recall Mr Average Joe (remember, the guy who Ubuntu is aimed at ?).

I’m sorry, and with the greatest of respect, when Joe points his browser at YouTube.com, gets prompted to install Flash, told that it’s installed but still finds YouTube.com isn’t working, he’s going to crack open his Windows recovery disk and walk away.

I really think that if Ubuntu wants to become mainstream, we can’t let things like this happen.

On a slightly more positive note however, I’d like to extend my hearty thanks to all of the Ubuntu contributers, developers, community and my fellow Ubunteros for all of the hard work that they have put into Ubuntu over the past year. Merry Christmas folks, and lets hope that this new year and Hardy bring us closer to fixing bug 1.

Happy Christmas

Chris

xxx

Eagle eyed Andy Lockran has noticed that the promised BBC iPlayer support for Linux has emerged. Although currently delivered using Flash, the quality isn’t all that bad and some effort seems to have been made to get it looking ‘right’.

Thanks for keeping your promises BBC. We appreciate it.

Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane….

I’m a great fan of zombie movies but this was pretty poor. Poor enough in fact for me to post about it even when I’ve nothing good to say.

Damn and blast you makers of this movie, what were you thinking!

Given the explosive arrival of Linux into the consumer desktop market, I thought it’d be interesting to check out the operating system at the heart of the best selling Walmart Linux PC. Let me introduce you to gOS. It’s built on top of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, but in choosing the lesser known Enlightenment DR 17 window manager the developers have taken a different route towards delivering this new distribution.

Although E-17 is pre-alpha software, it seems to run pretty reliably and responsively on my old PIII Dell Latitude laptop. The good performance is likely testament to the designer’s desire to develop a window manager that could deliver eye candy, without sacrificing performance. Given the snappy response of E-17 on my PC, I imagine it runs exceptionally well on the Walmart PC (especially compared to Win XP or Vista Basic).

The desktop presents the user with a Mac OS X style dock containing links to various applications - and interestingly - several web services. Google Apps, Email and Products appear alongside of Wikipedia, Facebook and others, offering one click access to the major players on the web.

If you’re anything like me, you’re likely to remove most of these web app links to make room for your own stuff. I think that placing website launchers in the dock may hint at the target audience of this operating system. Without a doubt gOS is aimed at the new PC user market and I can see how it’d be a pretty good answer to the ‘what do I do now?’ question that a new IT user may have.

A large Google search box is located in the top right corner of the desktop but looks pretty ugly and personally, I immediately wanted rid of it. (To get rid of it click Configuration > My Settings > Applications > Startup Applications and delete it from the list. To remove it from your current session without logging out Alt + right mouse click and select Kill.)

gOS ships with a pretty solid set of apps including Open Office, Gimp, Rhythmbox and Xine, just about everything the average new user is going to need. Unfortunately it seems to lack some of the settings and configuration tools (although I could perhaps install some gnome counterparts) that I’d expect to see in an Ubuntu distribution, and that a more advanced user might like to see.

To draw a line under this, gOS is a pretty good distribution. E-17 is neat (and to be fair, is the main difference between this and Ubuntu) and bundling it with a cheap PC opens up computing to people who may not previously been able to afford it. I’d like to see gOS in a cheap laptop like the asus eee, but I can’t help but feel it’s still a little rough around the edges.

If I wanted an operating system for a child, or for someone who’d never used a PC before, I’d be inclined to give gOS a try. For anything else, I’d probably stay with Ubuntu. Overall a great idea, and the beginnings of a better future for Linux on the desktop.

I have recently been on a ‘green’ crusade through the house. I have a media server running Windows XP and GBPVR as a Personal Video Recorder, for the last year i have left this on 24/7/365 without much thought. I did all the normal things, power reduction by switching off the disks and screen etc but it meant i could use something like LogMeIn.com for remote access from work via a web page.

It worked great…..

but the new regime means running the media machine in either standby or hibernate mode after 15mins of inactivity (the GBPVR software is great for waking the machine from standby/hibernate to record programs) which meant logmein didn’t work.
So….
UPDATED

Read the rest of this entry »

After hearing the news that Google had added IMAP to it’s Gmail service, I was somewhat surprised to find that my account didn’t seem to be set up for it.

After fiddling a little I discovered that Google’s IMAP service is language specific, and isn’t enabled on UK English based accounts.

Log on to your Gmail account. Click on Settings. In the General tab, change the ‘Google Mail display language’ option to ‘US English’.

After a refresh you should now see the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ option.

Have fun!

You may have read in the news that Microsoft has invested $240m (£117m) in social networking site Facebook.

Fear not freedom loving pals, as facebook runs on a Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP based infrastructure!

Indeed, despite the other major social networking site Myspace, running on a Windows Server 2003, SQL Server backend, MS still chooses facebook for its social networking investment.

So, you heard it here first folks. If you want to invest a few million quid of your own money in a venture, but are worried about a shaky infrastructure, follow Microsoft’s lead. Invest in Linux!

Getting into work early this morning, I decided to have a brief look at what’s going on in the world of IT. Despite feeling a bit fed up when I arrived, reading this excellent article on znet, written by Rupert Goodwin about his experiences of Gutsy really cheered me up!

Have a gander yourself. One particular comment by ‘ConceptJunkie’ about Microsoft’s new Vista campaign “100 reasons why everyone’s so speechless” made me laugh out loud.

“I looked. #23 is “Because it’s like a digital candy store.”

Puh-leeze. Bring up the Adept Manager in Ubuntu. Now _that’s_ a digital candy store. Over 20000 applications for doing almost anything you can imagine, and quite a few things you can’t. Running Vista is like being in a candy store that only sells black liquorice (I _hate_ black liquorice) at exorbitant prices. Oh, and you’re only allowed to eat the candy in the store. Plus each individual piece is really small and is wrapped in seven layers of cellophane, and the store won’t let you throw the wrappers away. You have to take them with you and throw them away at home. Plus they set off a grenade in the chocolate store across the street in the middle of the night and mugged the proprietors of the penny candy stand. Oh, and Microsoft are the ones behind the urban legend that red M&Ms cause cancer. That’s the kind of candy store Vista is.”

You heard it here first folks, Microsoft engages in urban candy terrorism….