Ubuntu and Back Again

Ubuntu has always proven a challenge for me. Its lack of corporate identity and perceived status as the bastard child of Debian has always kept it at arms length... but like coffee, new technology and good food, it seems to have an addictive quality that I just cannot stay away from.

Earlier this year I upgraded my system, and decided that I would make a fresh start with a system such as Fedora. Fedora has always held a place in my heart because its based on RedHat, a stable server operating system that has pretty much dominated the server market for many years.


I've used various distros in the past, but somehow last year found myself falling into the Ubuntu trap. I had been drugged by modern culture and popular thought.

Well Fedora was OK for most part; it lacked something I thought, but I was willing to pay the price to be away from that horrible "humanitarian" distro that is Ubuntu. I was free! OK, well sort of free... it turns out that if I wanted any kind of video support for my onboard ATI chip, I would need to downgrade the xOrg server included with Fedora, so that it was compatible with the ATI driver release. Turns out that both xOrg and ATI were to blame for this shambles, but nevertheless, it was just a minor inconvienience. Just a case of following a downgrade guide right? Right. Hours and hours later I had acomplished the downgrade, and was left running a less stable, somehow dirtied distro. Which I dealt with, for a couple of weeks. I then decided to continue my search elsewhere. I guess Fedora is like the John McCain of this world; great if you need stability and don't plan on changing too much,

Checking distrowatch.com, everyone's favorite comparison site, I decided to settle down with openSUSE. Why? Because it had the backing of Novell, a HUGE name in server technology again, and a nice, clean cut, corporate image. Turns out that after it lacked support for much of my hardware. Even my ethernet controller. After a couple of hours of ndiswrapping, I decided to call it a day.

I then sheepishly tried the new Ubuntu (8.04) on my spanky new hardware (after considering several other distribs). Flawless. Why are sometimes the things you hate the very things that you need? Like the gym or corporate sponsorship? Ubuntu recognised all of my new hardware, and gave me no trouble whatsoever as I customised it to heck and back. I guess Ubuntu is like the Barak Obama of this world; you know that you need him, you know that he has what it takes, you even know that he has the support he needs, but you just can't go all in.

Freedom of Spe.....

Oh dear. I seem to have been censored. By Google of all... entities. It seems as though my post below may have been a little incomplete... it turns out that Google Finance not only has a horrible approval process in place for Google Finance discussions, but it also censors them to an abhorrent degree.

My recent post was about the Bradford & Bingley share rights issue looming on Aug 7th. I submitted the following post in response to someone mildly commenting on B&Bs difficulties:

IMO, shareholders have literally one "right" at the moment and that is to do nothing until Monday, when the price could fluctuate enough to make a split reinvestment worthwhile... otherwise they would be wise to sit tight and ride out the storm. I blogged about this a couple of days ago as I had to talk myself through exactly which options I had as a shareholder.... did I say options? I guess that light could be the fire in which the larger banks are dancing around on which rests the cooking pot currently ready for a failed rights issue? Hmm...

Anything wrong with that? For my financial commentary, its mild at best. The response I received from Google was pretty terminal:

Oops, your post does not comply with our Community Guidelines, which can be found at http://www.google.com/googlefinance/communityguidelines.html Please take a few minutes to review these guidelines and try again.

"Oops" I seem to have encountered the error of trying to communicate my feelings and opinions directly? Can this be for real? If this really is the case, no wonder Google Finance discussions are a wasteland. People are simply shot on sight.

What Discussion?

What the heck is up with Google Finance's discussion feature? For a service that tags itself as industry leading, it sure is lacking in some basic features. Posts to the discussion forums attached to stocks have an hour delay for authorised members, and a 24 hour delay for your account to become "approved". Phew! Trading is a living discussion which beats on a second-to-second level, waiting an hour for a discussion to take place is well... redundant. This is evident as people are just not using the feature... a feature which if set up properly I'm sure would be thriving.

Also I'm wondering who controls the company data in GF... as it is usually outdated in terms of board membership and current financial releases, and the events data is painfully slow to update and sometimes completely lacking (the latest B&B corporate action deadline for example). I have the events from my portfolio attached to my Google calendar, and sometimes I think I just shouldn't bother at all!

As a final rant about GF, I have to talk about alerts. There is no alert system whatsoever! No SMS service or even email alert system... what is going on with that? If Google Calendar can SMS me about a meeting I've set up, why can't GF do the same to tell me that I need to dump a B&B lookalike?

On the plus side; I'm relly liking the fact that GF finally went live with NYSE data... now all we need is the LSE to go live and I'll be a happy guy.

Feeding the Knols?

I had a hard time coming up with that one! I've just learned about a new Blogger feature called Knol. Google defines a knol as a "unit of knowledge"; they certainly get points for creativity and new-ageism on that one.

So what are they? Knols are supposedly article based, so I'm guessing would look like a paper, essay, braindump, reference and such. The launch did not go unnoticed; The Daily Telegraph recently picked up on this project with the article: Google's 'knol' may challenge Wikipedia.

Challenge Wikipedia? You've got to admire news media for their never ending quest of sensationalism. I'm pretty certain that Google did not launch Knol with the intention of competing with WIkipedia in any way (I'm pretty sure they would just buy out the Wikimedia Foundation if they wanted to go down that route).

The basis is simple, its a closed system... not designed to be encyclopedic, but more journalistic... and I do see the attraction.

When I was considering my personal database deployment, I first considered using Blogger (and actually started to with Linux content) instead of the current wiki setup. I enjoyed the features provided by Blogger (especially the ease of posting), but was finally steered away because of the dirty editor and because it was more geared toward a blogged style of writing... if that even makes sense. Organising by date rather than content. Had Knol been around at that time... I may have reconsidered. So head on over to Google and read about Knol. You might even end up setting one up yourself.

Who's Life Bits?

Wow... I've just been reading about something MS Research have been working on for a while called MyLifeBits. Apparently Gordon Bell has been recording his life since the late 90s, and since 2003 has been wearing something he calls a SenseCam to take pictures automatically.

I've always been an advocate of digital life logging, or lifeblogging as it is now termed... I record a heck of a lot of data using either this blog or the UFBlue wiki and I also digitize all my paperwork, creating a more secure and much smaller filing system... but this is extreme. Bell apparently "has gone on to collect images of every Web page he has ever visited and television show he has watched. He has also recorded phone conversations, images and audio from conference sessions, and with his e-mail and instant messages".

It's something that interests me a great deal. Memory is an uncertainty in life. Remembering how converstaions went, who you met, which decisions you made... the good and the bad... are all important to me. Why take the risk of forgetting? With lifeblogging becoming ever more popular, made possible thanks to pioneers like Bell, we see more companies taking an interest. IBM announced Pensieve today, hailing it as software that "stores images, sounds, and text on everyday mobile devices, then allows the user extract them later on, to help them recall names, faces, conversations and events".

As I said... wow. Interestingly, Bell claims that he stores 1GB per month, which is less than I would have expected with pictures in tow. Also it turns out that Bill Gates wrote about lifeblogging in his 1996 book The Road Ahead. Where he claims that someday people will be able to record and recall everything they've ever heard or seen... this seems to be one of the cornerstones to the MyLifeBits project.