Not so long ago Windows 98 had it's 10th Birthday. PC-Pitstop, to celebrate this, ran a benchmark across the three major releases of Microsoft operating systems since the release of Windows 98, namely - 98, XP and Vista. The results weren't really all to surprising... or were they? What's not surprising is how Microsoft have stopped allowing manufacturers to supply OEM versions or any versions for that matter of Windows XP. Perhaps this is because the only way you can get children to eat vegetables is to give them no other choice? This particular vegetable is totally average.

http://techtalk.pcpitstop.com/2008/04/03/windows-98-turns-70-in-dog-years/

Recently whilst riding my bike to work, I pondered the correlation of a person in charge of hands-on IT technical issues and a doctor. The similarities are quite astounding, whilst I also don't want you to think that computers, just like humans, require a doctor. Well, they do in a way. It's all about diagnosis. On a daily basis I am faced with problems that arise within my company and I am the head in charge of diagnosing those problems and prescribing a solution, not much unlike a GP that sits behind a desk in a medical center. Cases walk in and out of the door and you assess them based on symptoms and then issue them with a prescription on how to correct the problem. IT technical is just the same. Though the analogy isn't completely accurate because the computers themselves don't walk in to your office to explain the symptoms, rather, a "close friend" of the PC troddles on over to tell you about the problems "one of his/her friends" is having.

My analogy isn't far from off when you also think about the "surgery" involved with IT. Much as the same way a doctor has to make split second decisions when operating on a live patient, an IT technician has to react similarly whilst working with servers that are also "live" in a different kind of way. Downtime doesn't equal death, but that depends on how angry the users of that server get.

Which is why I've decided that doctors would make good IT technicians and visa-versa. Both job types have exactly the same traits, swapping Latin for Bash script, I guess. They both work with diagnosing problems and prescribing solutions and they both work with "live" systems that require fast responses to continually developing and changing problems. Weighing up cutting off someones leg after it's going septic can quite loosely be similar to cutting your losses on a certain method to correct a server issue. It's those decisions that have to be made right then and there, and whilst people may think that most jobs out there have similar responsibilities... I think they're wrong. Until you're the sole person responsible for the smooth running of entire IT infrastructure, working on permanently live servers and software, or until you're a doctor standing over a patient as they go under anaestetic prior to surgery, you will never know how strong the correlation between those two job types really are.

I'm not going to become a doctor anytime soon, though I think because of the training I've had with diagnosing problems, I wouldn't be far off from a successful doctor. This new realisation has made me respect doctors more in a way, and I hope that feeling is mutual. The next time I meet a doctor we can stand in the corner of a LAN party together as equals and laugh at our position of equal oppurtunity.

 Image taken from Xkcd

Following on from installing Ubuntu 8.04 on my personal notebook, I did a fresh install of the beta release on one of my work PC's. I primarily wanted to check to see if there were any changes to the installer, default installation options etc. It was pretty much the same with very little changes, none of which I can even remember being notable. But there really didn't need to be - the installer is already pretty bullet proof. One thing that was more polished was the drive space allocations and partition manager. It was more user friendly and had a nice graphical feel to it rather than the heavily text based one before.

I thought I'd take a screenshot of my current desktop configuration and post it up here. Currently I'm running two 20" LCD's connected to an nVidia Quadro FX1500, Core 2 Duo 2.14Ghz CPU, TwinView, with compiz fully enabled, and noticeably on the screenshot, the desklets application - screenlets. What the screenshot doesn't really capture is the fact that the desktop cube that you can see in the background is all transparent and by holding CTRL + ALT and holding down the primary click on the mouse, it zooms out and lets me rotate it to whichever desktop I want. What's really awesome is how you can see the other desktops behind the one you're working on and how everything is mirrored and reflects realtime what the windows are showing. It's really great and screenlets is the first desklets app that I've found that is nicely rounded and appropriately, but not completely, stable. Check it out.

A day out in the park in Leamington Spa, about 20km south of Birmingham in the UK, lead to bike rides and the inevitable picnic. The sun came out for sometime that day and one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole experience was the fact that within my backpack for the duration of the ride, was my Eee PC, fully charged and pre-loaded with it's usual music flavours. We sat down to picnic, I took out the Eee, fired up Rhythmbox and started filling the air with some great music. It made me smile because of how I keep on telling people about it's portability. I decided to take some snap shots of the Eee in it's element... Sitting on top of a shoe to make sure that it didn't touch the wet ground, it gave us some chilled out tunes for the duration of our picnic and upon it's closure, it was folded up, placed in it's neoprene sleave and dropped in my backpack. Some random days I question whether I have a use for the Eee and if it was a good buy... other days like these... I don't.

This week was made more pleasant with the beta release of Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron, with the final release set for April 2008. There is a reasonable changes list, reasonable enough for me to start the upgrade on my notebook this morning. Whilst it is only a beta release, I don't mind sticking to the bleeding edge. It's not very often that I've had problems with beta releases and now with Ubuntu's incredibly easy upgrade steps, it's an absolute breeze. Upgrading from both 7.04 and 7.10 are fully supported, and if you're running an earlier version it's still possible to upgrade. What I love about Ubuntu's upgrade is the ease of use. After hearing about the upgrade this morning I went straight to the main upgrade page for it on the Ubuntu website and read the 5 steps necessary to upgrade from 7.10:

1. Press Alt-F2 and type update-manager --devel-release
2. Click the Check button to check for new updates.
3. A message will appear informing you of the availability of the new release.
4. Click Upgrade.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions.

It's that simple. It needs to download about 1.1Gb on my installation, which took around 40 minutes on my 4Mb cable line, and then it takes it further 45 minutes to install and upgrade all the new packages. Not even two hours later I'm greeted with a new version of Ubuntu, all shiny and neatly packaged as usual.

Whilst it's not totally necessary for me to upgrade to this newer version, there are some really neat new applications that they've introduced, like Transmission, which is the new default BitTorrent client for Ubuntu. Of course one of the most interesting and exciting changes is also the introduction of Gnome 2.22, using the new Nautilus with GVFS as a backend. One of the more obvious features that this has is more detailed information when copying/moving files within Nautilus - something that did always frustrate me, not having detailed information about file sizes being moved, time taken, speed etc. Considering Nautilus' uses for connecting over SSH or Samba, sometimes file transfers weren't as predictable as local ones and it often made me wonder whether I was getting as good a deal through Nautilus as I would have been getting through rsync on the command line. With these new features it will be far more easier to check that.

Another great new feature is PolicyKit which gives you even more control over allowing and disallowing certain administrative functions for the normal user. It now allows customizations for almost all administrative tasks, making it easier to allow certain things unchecked whilst others will always require authentication. Security policies in Ubuntu have always made me feel proud and safe to use it. This will make this even better.

Firefox 3 beta 4 is also now the default web browser, which brings about some interesting upgrades to the already powerful web browser. I haven't used it too much as yet, so I'm not too clued up on the more deeper changes but on the surface, it's definitely more themeable and fits in with the overall system theme far better. This is apparently due to the use of GTK2 form buttons and common dialogs.

Wubi is also a really cool new application for easy Windows installations of Ubuntu. Without having to commit to any partition changes or formal disk space allocations, you can install Ubuntu as a dual-boot to Windows from within the Windows environment. Can either be run from a CD or in stand-alone mode and gives Windows users a chance to test out Ubuntu in a more stable and set environment than the typical live CD flavours.

And that's just a few of the great new features in this new Ubuntu release. Now that the upgrade is finished on my notebook, I'll get stuck into it and let you know if there are any big problems that I encounter along the way, or any big changes that are worth noting.

Don't you find posts with pictures of good looking women in them usually get more attention? Same with videos these days... Check out the "Most watched" videos on YouTube and you'll see that they have a reasonably good looking woman/man as the thumbnail, even if they don't even feature in it. Well, this post may get the same reponses with this lady-luck but what will make it even more appealing is the little Eee PC that she's working on. An Eee PC on the beach? It's rugged, but not *that* rugged.

At the end of November last year I ended up in PC World at 6:30pm fiddling around with an Eee PC on display. It was white and the 2Gb "Surf" version (Most probably the version in the picture). I had spent the whole day looking at it on the web... "New worlds smallest notebook preinstalled with Linux". Who wouldn't read up about it? And in the following months the world would be reading a whole lot more about this little notebook. Now sold out in almost all suppliers across the UK, it's gone far beyond the expectations of their manufacturer, Asus. Of course now they're bringing out the 8Gb versions, bigger screen versions, and Windows preinstalled versions. Yes, it's true... Asus totally sold out on the Linux thing and decided to preinstall Windows XP on the larger versions. In Linux's defense, it was most probably used on the smaller original versions because of, amongst many other great reasons, it's sheer small size of installation and ease of use in the Xandros flavouring. It does bleaken me somewhat that now that they've got a market for them, they've come up with larger sizes and decided to now go along with the sheeps needs and give them the Windows option. It will be interesting to see which models sell more - the smaller cheaper ones, or the bigger more expensive ones. They must be careful not to lose sight of the main reason for it's high volume sales - price. £200 (end of last year) for a handheld-notebook hybrid. Not a notebook... in fact because I have both a notebook and an Eee PC, I can solidly say that they serve very different functions. Browsing the web on an Eee PC for hours is one of the more painful things you can do with a computer. It's temporary and throw-around usage is what makes it appealing.

Getting on to more technical things. Being a more "advanced" Linux user, I just got frustrated by the preinstalled Xandros operating system. If you're an average user, you'll love it. If you're used to doing more fancy things with Linux, it will make you keep saying things like "In Ubuntu I would just...". So, the first evening I had it I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on to it. There were tons of guides and such on the eeeuser wiki and other 3rd party sites. The installation was a breeze and within about two hours I was all tweaked and fully installed. Changed all the fonts, window borders, Firefox themes and a host of other things to make sure that I maximised the constrained space. Having a wifi router in our house made the Eee an unbeatable tool. Not only is the whole PC smaller than an A5 book, it's wifi capabilities make it the ideal "Coffee table PC". I have a media server that's connected to our TV to watch stuff off of and I set up the Eee so that I could just connect to the media server and tell it to play me something, all without having to get up from the couch. The portability of the Eee over a normal 15" or even 14" notebook is only understood when you own one. A few people have come up to me when they see the Eee and asked if it's worth spending a little more for a 14" notebook because "they're almost the same size". My usual response is, "Well, no." They are two different ball games... A 14" notebook will undoubtedly have moving parts (not for the new SSD versions though) which means that although it's "portable", it's always a risk. It will also come with a big hard drive that you'll end up filling up with family photos or something and then on the day you drop the notebook whilst transporting it around your busy day, you'll curse the fact that you lost all your photos on this "should be portable" device. The Eee's hard drive isn't nearly large enough for you to do these sorts of things, though you can store a good deal of things on it. It means that everything that I keep on my Eee is 100% disposable. This is where portability comes to fruition. Computer portability isn't just based on size and weight, it's also based on information storage these days.

Another part of my response is also to tell them to try compare portability when they see me throw my Eee in my backpack every afternoon after work and then cycle home. Try do that with a 14" notebook. You'll carefully put it in your specially designed backpack and, whilst feeling the now reasonably heavy notebook strapped to your back, you'll cycle home so carefully so as not to damage the notebook. I've never even contemplated bringing my 15" notebook to work if I'm cycling. I would rather just knock it off the desk every morning before work.

So Ubuntu was running nicely on the Eee and although the bootup time of a standard Ubuntu install on the Eee is around 1 minute, I decided to try out the widely acclaimed Xubuntu which would be lighter on space and more economical on services and boot up. Within a few days I realised why I would be reinstalling Ubuntu... not because Xubuntu isn't a great operating system, but rather because of all the features I was so used to in a Gnome environment. All the features that were non-existent for Linux three or four years ago have now become a part of my daily usage and Xubuntu just either didn't have them, or didn't have suitable replacements. One example being playing media files over network shares. It's do-able, of course, by samba mounting the share and then pointing to the local share. This always comes up when people say that it's missing from Xubuntu. "Oh, just open a terminal and...."

I'm a huge terminal user... in fact, in most situations I turn to terminal far quicker than GUI in Ubuntu. But for some things, like browsing around my 1Tb shares, I would rather prefer to just point and click at the network shares. Of course other factors to consider are things like making sure that your girlfriend is also able to do these things effortlessly and the things is... Ubuntu is that. Xubuntu has it's place - like on my actual media server - but not as a common desktop for an medium-advanced user.

If you fit that profile, then when you buy an Eee, install Ubuntu and don't bother with Xubuntu. The benefits don't outweigh the costs. And when you buy the Eee, don't be conned into thinking you need more than 512mb RAM or more than 4Gb of hard drive space. It's not a replacement for a standard notebook and never should be seen as one.