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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.

Wow.

Once again, I'm late in getting on a particular train of thought. That's not unusual, true, but I should have been slightly quicker about it this time round because a) it's something in which I'm really, really interested and b) one of my friends, whose blog I read, posted about it and I didn't actually pay that much attention until a lot of other people had jumped up and down, commenting on how fantastic this particular thing is.

So, in case you've been living under a particular sort of rock (i.e. the one that stops you finding out about new OSS projects, assuming you're interested in that ) here's the not-exactly-a-scoop.

You may have heard of a project called WriteRoom, a full-screen text editor for the Mac which costs, currently, $24.95. Now, I've been using a cross-platform WriteRoom clone, JDarkRoom, which is written in Java and is pretty much closed-source AFAICT, for quite a while. JDarkRoom has issues - beyond the two fairly major ones of being written in Java and been free as in beer but not as in speech (though that's not a reason not to use it). On Ubuntu it's pretty clunky, slow, and doesn't work at all unless you go and install the Sun JRE rather than using the one that ships with Ubuntu by default.

Anyway, as has been pointed out pretty much the OSS world over by now, there's now a Python (always dear to my heart) clone of WriteRoom, PyRoom. It seems to have found a lot of traction over the last week or so, because although it didn't work terribly well the first time that I tried it it's now perfectly useable - more so than JDarkRoom by far (I can't speak for WriteRoom, of course). It even does multi-buffer editing, which means that I can have this blog entry, and another one that I've been writing since Friday, open at the same time and happily switch between the two (this may sound like a really obvious feature, but you'd be surprised how much more efficient it makes me).

Now, don't get me wrong, I still love my vim, and there's no way in hell that I'll be using PyRoom for much besides blogging and writing for the forseeable future - why would I want to? But in terms of allowing me to actually concentrate on writing and stopping me from procrastinating it's fantastic, and it doesn't bug me in the same undefinable way as JDarkRoom does.

So give it a shot, if you're into that sort of thing. You can grab it from Launchpad http://launchpad.net/pyroom. I think you'll find it well worth it.

In other bloody annoying news, my Flickr import script appears to keep breaking my site somehow, to the point where I have to restart Apache to fix it. This is decidedly irksome.