grahambinns.com

I shouldn't be writing this now; I should be packing for Edinburgh, where I'm going to be going for the weekend. But I felt that it was my duty as a Canonical employee and moreover as an Ubuntu user to state the following:

Hardy rocks!

Now, okay, it's still in beta, which by necessity means that there are bugs to be worked out. So far I haven't come across anything major. Indeed, as I write this I can't think of anything that's happened that has really bugged me at all. The only thing that springs to mind is the occasional crashing, for no apparent reason, of the gnome-panel. It's irritating, but nothing to make me rend my garments and stamp my feet.

If I were forced to use a single word to describe Hardy it would be: slick. It runs fast, even on my ageing desktop machine, even with Compiz's desktop effects turned up to the max. It's slick as a greased - I was going to say weasel but I really should say heron, I suppose. The theme - if you don't like brown then change the fucking colour scheme and stop whining -  looks excellent; so much so that I've dropped my hitherto-favoured UbuntuStudio default dark theme. I adore the default Hardy wallpaper. I think, moreover, that it should be made into a t-shirt (and where t-shirts are concerned I know what would make a good one - you'll find out why I say this some time in May, I think). Anyone who can bring me a t-shirt designed from the wallpaper before I create one myself will get a prize (I have no idea what form this will take).

So consider this a ringing endorsement for the Hardy Heron, with the caveat that it's still in beta. Hopefully it will get better from here-on in. There were one or two places (Compiz, notably) in which Gutsy got worse for me once beta ended (i.e. it stopped working in those regards until I reinstalled).

As an aside, Neil Gaiman just posted this, which tickled me:

As a side note, running Windows Vista on the Panasonic w7 is making me really nostalgic for 1986. Whoever thought I'd get to type things then stare at a blank screen for a bit and one-by-one watch the letters appear? Cory and Mike's "Why Don't You Run Linux?" talks are staring to seem much more sensible.

Go towards the light, Neil...

Oh, and yes, I do know that I'm well behind with posting my three-hundred and sixty-odd days photos. I doubt I'll get chance to get any uploaded before I go away, but I promise I'll catch up when I come back. Hopefully Edinburgh will provide lots of photo-fodder, even if it is, as forecast, more than a bit damp. We shall see.

Anyway, in the meantime, go out, get Hardy, install it, enjoy. And if you find problems with it, report them at Launchpad so that the distro team can sort it out in time for release. You have been told.

I'm - to use an American expression - jonesing to install Ubuntu 8.04 (The Hardy Heron) Beta, which has just been released (massive props to the distro team for their typically herculean effort). And this time it's going to be a full install, not an upgrade.

See, when I upgraded to Gutsy during its Beta phase last September / October everything went pretty smoothly but quickly went down hill. Six months of trying to diagnose why Compiz won't work on my desktop machine when it used to work perfectly (my graphics card hasn't been blacklisted or anything, it just stopped and has never started again) has led me to believe that some of the hacks that I had to put in place to get everything to play nice under Feisty all that time ago had survived through the upgrade and had made Gutsy more than a bit twitchy.

So this time around I'm going to do a full install, which'll let me do other things that I've been after doing for a while, like swapping some partitions around to give me more space in /home and also encrypting them whilst I'm at it, as I've already done on my laptop. Hurrah.

But of course, it's not that simple. I'm so terribly tempted to do it now, download the Ubuntu Studio Beta ISO (I prefer Studio to plain Ubuntu because I make a lot of use of the audio editing goodies) and install tonight, but I do actually need a machine to work on next week, it being Launchpad release week and therefore a week in which I need to be available at all times.

However, the week after next is a less urgent week, so I might do some instally goodness then. Expect a report on the Heron shortly afterwards. 

As has by now been announced more-or-less left, right, center, top, bottom and everywhere else in the universe, Ubuntu Brainstorm went live today.

The idea behind Brainstorm is pretty simple and yet immensely powerful. It offers a place for Ubuntu users to post their ideas about how Ubuntu can be improved: new features, tweaks... just about anything can be listed on Brainstorm as a means of suggesting what you think can be improved about Ubuntu. Moreover, other users can vote for (or against) the ideas that have been posted.

The upshot is that the Ubuntu community, QA team and development teams have an excellent source of ideas for things-that-need-work. Obviously there have been Launchpad bug list to go off before now but the thing about bug lists is that the majority of the things on them are bugs; the feature ideas, if any, have been hard to find as a result.

Henrik Omma, who, I think, was the first to announce Brainstorm (being that it's his baby), demonstrated it to the Launchpad Bugs team when we were sprinting in London a few weeks back. It looked cool then, it looks cooler now with live data on it and already having seen a decent flow of users. I'm sure it's going to rock.

If you're a digg user you can digg the announcement of Brainstorm here.

January, friends. When resolutions are held (for a while at least), healthy food is eaten, chocolate lays about the place unbought and unwanted and when, naturally, our DSL connection degrades in a manner that can only be described as slovenly and untidy.

High winds wreak havoc on our connection speeds. I don't know yet if it's a temporary thing (the sync speed of my router has recovered from the paltry 192Kbps it showed this afternoon to a somewhat healthier 1.7Mbps) or if I'm going to have to go through the rigmarole of getting BT out to look at the line some time this week, necessitating downtime and, of course, stern warnings from the service provider that, should the fault prove to be with my equipment and not theirs, they will charge me something ridiculous like £70 per hour for the engineer (and of which, I'm sure, said engineer will see not one penny).

Looks like I'm going to be having a slow weekend then. Time to catch up on some reading. Or maybe even writing, perish the thought. 

It's almost ominously quiet in my office right now. Normally there'd be the low, rattling hum of my PC filling the room, masking all the little creaks and burps that the hot water tank, which sits, fenced off in a cupboard in the corner of this fairly tiny work space, makes all through the day and night. Normally I don't notice it. Normally, I have my PC for company.

But tonight there's no PC. That's because when I came home I discovered to my consternation that the office was filled with a smell of burning PCB. The power supply on my PC was overheating, smelling noxious and, I suspect, wasn't too far away from going BANG in spectacular fashion.

So, no PC until at least Thursday, which is when our local PC hardware shop will re-open for business.

There was a time when this would be a major ballache, but not any more. I don't have to worry about accessing my email - it's on Gmail these days and the web interface does just fine for my needs most of the time. I don't have to worry about internet access - my router and the wifi access point are working fine and dandy. I don't have to worry about accessing my data, photos, music - they're all backed up to an external hard several times a day, and I can always just plug that into the laptop to get at what I need. I don't need to worry about work (okay, I'm on holiday, but bear with me) because DVCSes like Bazaar mean that I can work remotely, pushing and pulling branches from Launchpad as needed.

It's only just struck me how disconnected, technologically, my life has become. And I don't mean that in the sense of not having a connection (though it's nearly new year so I'm expecting BT to royally screw me over any time in the next week and a half). I mean that, despite how much I rely on technology to get my work done, to keep in touch with people, to manage my memories and all the reset, I don't need to be tied to my desk to do any of it. Right now, I'm working without cables (we'll gloss over the ones that connect the wifi AP to the router or the router to the phone line or...). I can put my photos online, on Flickr or Picasa or a jillion other photo-management apps. I can keep in touch with people without having to fart-arse around with desktop email clients and suchlike.

But tomorrow, I think, the laptop's going to stay off. Because it's Christmas (this is a clumsy segue, I know, but it's late and I'm bleeding tired) and I'm going to spend the day with Sarah, eating far too much, watching too much TV and probably drinking more than I really ought.

Happy Christmas, folks. Have a good one.