technology

I just had to write a short post on my latest TV show addiction.

Top Gear. I recently acquired the first season and I’m hooked! A simply awesome car show produced by the BBC. Like your standard car show they include lots of coverage of the latest supercars and luxury vehicles, but they also tend to try insane stunts like jumping over rows of motorbikes in double-decker buses.

And its all done with that special kind of wit that only the British can pull off successfully.

Make sure you check your pockets for MP3 players before you do your laundry. They really don’t like the spin cycle.

Well, after spending a little time learning about it, last night I made the jump from Debian Sid (”unstable”) to Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is a Debian-based distribution that promises to focus more on desktop users by providing earlier releases of Gnome and other desktop applications.

Overall, the switch went fairly smoothly. I chose Ubuntu “Hoary Hedgehog” (its development branch), which is based on Debian “Unstable.” I switched my apt-get sources over to the Hoary repository, launched “apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade” and crashed on the couch to watch a movie. An hour or two later (after fixing one minor upgrade snag), it was done. With the exception of a few core packages left over from Debian and probably wayyyyyy too many config files, my laptop is an Ubuntu machine now.

Ubuntu is pretty nice. It feels a bit more “polished” than Debian, and now I’ve got Gnome 2.10, which is kind of snazzy. But there’s something I miss about Debian. Its kind of like when I traded in my old Jeep for a brand new 4Runner. Its slick and smooth and has lots of gadgets, but there’s something about the sharp edges on that old reliable you miss. Its like my laptop has lost that rock-solid Debian feel that made me feel like I could slam my machine repeatedly against the desk without doing damage. Time will tell how I finally feel about Ubuntu.

Update: I’m also very concerned with the overabundance of the color brown throughout all of their default themes. Muddy, ugly, painful to look at brown.

Update: There seems to be a fair amount of interest in how my experiment turned out. Well… it turned out badly. I wasn’t very happy with Ubuntu and I ended up reinstalling Debian. True, Ubuntu has newer versions of many packages than Debian has, but without that level of quality and reliability that Debian packages usually have. My machine lost that robust quality that Debian brought.

Mark Jen, the Google blogger who was just fired for blogging about his job, is a buddy of mine from high school and college:

Mark Jen, a blogger whose candid comments about life on the job at Google sparked controversy last month, has left the company. “Mark is no longer an employee at Google,” a Google representative said in response to an inquiry Tuesday. Efforts to reach Jen for comment were not immediately successful. Jen’s departure comes less than a month after he joined Google as part of a wave of new hires and began recording his impressions of his new employer, including criticisms, in his blog.

I’m talking to him about it now. Maybe I can help shed some light on the whole situation.

Update: Mark’s posted the whole story in an entry on his blog.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; But the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

• Thomas Jefferson