On Sunday night, the SD card in my phone became corrupt when I plugged it in to my PC (I don’t know why) – but that’s a story for another day. It was when I was fixing it that I realised about how Windows, in the past 5 or 6 years, has moved gradually into a truly consumer-space operating system.

What do I mean by this?

Well think back to the days of Windows XP. It really was the do-it-all operating system – developers could get right down into the system internals and hack around as they pleased with their apps, and you could get a lot of applications which bypassed OS components to perform functionality for you; in this case, formatting bad memory cards.

After months of struggling, hard toil, and generally getting pretty annoyed at Unfuddle, I’ve finally found the one and only way to get Subversion to run at a respectable and somewhat useful speed.

In other news, today I’ve installed and configured Subversion and Memcache and properly setup MySQL on the box labelled “Subversion Server” (it doesn’t do just that), which I think is quite an achievement considering my practically non-existent sysadmin skills.

So, over the weekend (I did a lot of tinkering ) I downloaded and installed the latest flavour of the Ubuntu operating system, Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Installation was a breeze, it was simple for me as I just overwrote everything on the hard drive. The installation has been simplified slightly, making it a bit easier to do and some improved functionality like the location map being a bit more intelligent.

So, I booted it up, and entered quite possibly the fastest thing I have ever seen running on this machine. It’s a Dell Inspiron, at least 3 generations and 4 years old, so it doesn’t usually perform that well. This, however, runs like it’s on fire. Simple tasks and general apps are so quick to load, and the new Firefox 3 beta goes like there’s nothing left to do.

My other favourite features are the rather nice new background, but more importantly nice features like it using the full resolution of my external monitor (where Feisty used to run a 20″, 1600×1050 monitor at 1024×768 ) and the all-improved password facilities – instead of having to enter the root password to access a dialog box with only one restricted function, you can access the whole box and then just “unlock” those functions to enter your password and continue.

All in all, Hardy Heron is a great long term support system, and I’m sure any minor bugs will be worked out in coming updates. I’m looking forward to 8.10, more features, and increased usability for newbies so that Ubuntu can spread itself to computer users everywhere.

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… No seriously. Back in October 2003 I did my work experience at BT Adastral Park in Martlesham. I got the best deal out of the three Year 10 students, because I was placed with some people I knew and got to build a website about the internet – one student was a typical intern and the other wasn’t too fond of his group after “they went wild when their system failed with a code 1 error – this didn’t happen to them very often”.

Anyway, while I was in the office quietly learning how to do form submissions with Perl (ahh back in the day), one of the guys who worked in the office came in with a small linux box he was going to put to some use doing something (apologies for the ambiguity, don’t want to spoil anything!). On this linux box (when you plugged it into a monitor – it was quite small after all) it had a system monitor that comprised of a fish tank with seaweed, fish, bubbles and everything. The water level indicated RAM usage, fish swimming right / left indicated network traffic in / out, bubbles were processor usage. As a bonus, there was a rubber duck bobbing on the surface – this didn’t do anything productive.

Since that day I’ve been trying to find a monitor of equal calibre for my computer, be it Windows or Linux, and my results so far make the conclusion of this story a negative one – I have found a system monitor which sits on the Ubuntu dock which is similiar, but alas no rubber duck or fish or seaweed. A similiar package which is meant to do as it was described seemed to be great until it was run, and it turned out it had an inherant distaste for Compiz Fusion, and I’m not giving up wobbly windows for anything!

If anyone happens to know a great system monitor as described above (not the Ubuntu package bubblefishymon, that’s the one that doesn’t work) then now would be a really great time to let me know where it is!