Charles' Tech Talk

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For the past several years I've used the Gnome desktop environment on Linux. Unlike Windows, Linux has several desktop environments that can be switched between quite easily using any login manager. In the distant past I have used WindowMaker, Enlightenment, IceWM, and KDE. Of all these desktop environments I was perhaps most actively involved with WindowMaker and IceWM.

A screen shot from an upgrade of Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04.

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I ranted a little yesterday about the bugs in Ubuntu 9.10 caused by the introduction of GDM2. It looks like Canonical is aware of those bugs, but they're a low priority that likely won't get fixed for the next "Long Term Service" (LTS) release of Ubuntu. With Mark Shuttleworth stepping down as CEO, I'm starting to think this almost mirrors when Bill Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, the company took a nose dive and put out junk.

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A couple of sources, Ars Technica and the more thorough Web Upd8 are reporting on Ubuntu's new theme. The Ars article seems to buy the "we assembled a team of artists" line, while the Web Upd8 article is critical of the new theme, basically saying it's a rip off of Mac OS X.

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One of the reasons I love Linux is not having to worry too much about security threats from viruses and malware. While there are malicious programs that run on Linux, we rarely see systems infected like we do on Windows systems. Some of the malware on Windows is downright nasty! XP Internet Security 2010, pictured above, is an example of a moderately nasty piece of malware. It pretends to be an antivirus program, but is in fact malware.

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This evening I was looking through some of the videos of one of my favourite youtube celebrities, Ray William Johnson, when I came across a video that required me to sign in to view the content because of "questionable" content. Ray isn't exactly the most politically correct person, and his comments sometimes run a razor thin edge between funny and insulting, but I think he's got moxie (and I'm not talking about the soft drink).

At the Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group meeting a couple of nights ago one of the group members brought up a very valid point about "contributing back to the Drupal community" that I think extends to a lot of other communities. What he said went something like:

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It's with a bit of disappointment that I announce the Yahoo/Microsoft advertising/search deal appears to be a done deal. I really shouldn't be disappointed, I haven't really used Yahoo for years, early year 2000-ish roughly. When I thought about why the answer is quite simple - Yahoo went all portal-ish and left simplicity behind.

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Working in a computer refurbishing environment I get a lot of opportunity to test equipment. One of the nice surprises came a few weeks ago when someone bought a Micro Innovations IC435C web cam from a local bargain store and brought it into our shop. The client wanted us to install the drivers for the camera in their Windows machine. We did the installation and also popped it into our Ubuntu Linux machine.

Ubuntu normally doesn't have any web camera applications installed so I installed Cheese:

sudo apt-get install cheese


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