2011 — 16 June: Thursday
A (some might say) disgracefully late return to consciousness1 as the first cuppa is enjoyed. It's time to dial back the flux capacitor to early 1981 for my next photo of another expotition getting ready for the "off" from the Old Windsor hallway launchpad:
Yes, that's a fragment of my Letraset skills on display in the background. Here's the view from the other side of the glass, on a sunnier day in 1976 a few years before Peter entered our lives:
Admire the skilful kerning!
There are some unfunny...
... tales of I.T. woe in the comments to this article. Source and snippet:
8. My backup is paper
Dead tree backups lose their charm when a corrupted financials database is combined with reliance on a data storage medium requiring a meat-based search engine.
I think it's fair to say that David Pogue isn't too keen on Google's Chromebook. (Link.)
I've never regarded myself...
... as a good writer, despite 33 years being paid quite well to write all manner of weird stuff in a variety of situations and using various media. I realised, however, very early in my entirely self-taught "career", that what I've always found trivially easy to do is something that many people apparently find (and in too many cases demonstrate all too well) amazingly difficult. Not that that ever stopped them denigrating my work — an unendearing human characteristic.
I've long thought you can learn "good" writing but you cannot necessarily teach it. (Or, at least, I certainly cannot.) So I fully endorse the opening paragraph here — even the Zen koan.2 Apart from the use of a fancy verb I didn't know existed, of course.
Data driving
In my non-driving days of yore I never refused the chance to visit the End of the Hedge whenever Christa decided to shop there at M&S and Sainsbury's. She'd park between those stores and the (more interesting, to me) Currys and PCWorld. I've just driven the 15 miles or so round trip to pick up another 1TB SATA drive for my next round of Ubuntu experimentation. This, after I'd signally failed (after 15 minutes effort) to break into one of my Belkin external drive enclosures to the point of being able to extract and re-use the non-SATA 120GB Maxtor in it, before belatedly realising it was an ancient PATA IDE drive that wouldn't suit my HP MPC.
The ever lower cost of ever greater lumps of disk storage still bemuses me. When I bought a 20MB external drive from Novatech for my Amstrad CP/M Z80 system over quarter of a century ago it cost around £500, and seemed so large I partitioned it into four logical drives of 5MB each. Now I've just unpacked yet another 1TB drive with a 32MB cache at 10% of the price and potentially a 3Gbps data transfer rate. I shall fit it after my next cuppa, and then see what Ubuntu 11.04 looks like on the desktop. It will be interesting to see if the 3D hardware acceleration needed for the 'Unity' interface has enough "oomph" on the 2006 PC. If I see the Gnome desktop, the answer was "No".
The post-6 o'clock Linux news
Well, it seems the quantity of "oomph" available on my little nVidia graphics card3 is almost, but not quite, enough to support the Unity interface which (as it were) came and went. Several times. Particularly after trying the updated and proprietary driver. That being so, I decided I might as well have a go at the lighter-weight Xfce desktop used by Xubuntu but — despite its apparently-successful installation — the system still shows a markedly stubborn resistance to letting me do what the docs say I should be able to, and switch away from Ubuntu's Classic Gnome desktop (which is actually fine, of course... I'm just being awkward).
But everything installed very smoothly, the hardware was all recognised, and the whole installation process took about an hour, including whatever subset of that time was spent formatting the 1TB disk. A huge improvement on my experiences with earlier versions. What I saw of the Unity interface (before it decided I couldn't run it) looked quite pretty. Not sure it's worth a graphics card upgrade, however. As and when I finally decide on a PC for use long-term with Ubuntu Server I strongly suspect I will go for another DIY bare bones system. I've been delighted with Blackbeast but still have no intention of running my in-house Apache web server under Windows in any shape or form.