Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 32)

And then I ate my words...

<\sh> guys u know about the fridge?
<Burgundavia> \sh, yep. Long awaiting, not yet delivered
<\sh> Burgundavia: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/

Jdub, you rock!

Office "productivity" software and presentations

"The company[Microsoft] now holds more than 90 percent of the global market in office productivity software." from Boston.com

I have never seen someone less productive than with using MS Office/OpenOffice.org. This includes me, who has had the misfortune to have to try and use Impress twice in the last year, both times for talks I gave.

In other news, I would like to thanks the developers of Pointless for making my presentation on Ubuntu at my local LUG last night possible. It went well, despite a few X issues.

The Tyrany of Choice and Windows Vista

I read a great piece a number of years ago in the Globe and Mail about the tyrany of choice. It was referring to Starbucks, but I think it now also applies to Windows Vista.

Why do I say this? Well, Windows Vista will have not 2 but 7 (!!!!) different desktop versions. Paul Thurott (of the Window Super Site) has a great rundown. Now when you read the descriptions, they make a lot of sense, but without them...

I pity being an OEM or user of Vista. OEM's get hurt because they must choose which of the 7 versions to ship on their various offerings and woe be them if the fickle market chooses something else. Users get done because they get yet another confusing option to choose between when purchasing a new computer, already a daunting task for a non-techy person.

Anyway, work on the QuickTour is going well. Please note that the version you see there is not the completely current version, due to some screwy-ness in the doc build scripts.

Well, it appears that Canonical has decided that my work with Ubuntu has been good enough to warrant funding me to go Ubuntu Below Zero in Montreal at the end of October.

Dear Warren Woodford,

In this interview at Mad Penguin you claim that "We also know that we hit number one at DistroWatch last January, despite the fact that Ubuntu has been stacking the deck by directing traffic to Distro Watch." Well, the forums did follow our rise to #1 and certainly drove it towards that, but since then there has been nary a peep about our position. Hardly a concerted effort.

Also, please talk to Distrowatch themselves. I quote "Secondly, Ubuntu and Canonical have never, to our knowledge, advertised their Linux distribution on any web site. They certainly haven't sponsored DistroWatch in any way and the only reason that Ubuntu tops our popularity charts is through having thousands of satisfied customers and through good old-fashioned word of mouth." from this Distrowatch weekly and "Only one hit per IP address per day is counted." from Distrowatch stats.

So in future, we love your distro but please fact-check before you make claims like that.

Yours,

Corey Burger

Holy Batman Hotkeys

My desktop machine's keyboard has fancy extra buttons for power, sleep, mail, and a hotkey toggler that turns all of the numberpad into further hotkeys. I have never used these, not even while in Windows. Today while waiting for a download to finish, I randomly started to hit the buttons. Suddenly things started happening!

The power button launched the logout dialog, the mail button launched evolution and a whole series of the numpad-as-hotkeys worked. This included the volume up/down/mute, launching in the calculator, and the web home. Somewhat odd was that what is labelled WWW Search on my keyboard launches the Gnome search dialog.

Now, some didn't work, including some sleep, the browser controls (back, forward, refresh and stop) and the track forward/backward, pause and stop. There is also one labelled "Media Select" that I have no idea what it does.

Back online

With my new job at Booster Juice (because my current Ubuntu stuff doesn't pay the rent), laptop testing and the doc stuff, I have just kissed good bye to free time. Also, my birthday on the 18th (I am now the ripe old age of 23) meant that I only was able to install Colony 3 on my canonical-supplied laptop today. And hey, on top of that, my landlord's credit card maxed out, which caused my internet connection to go down for a few days.

Colony 3

It took 3 burnings to get a cd that installed, due to my cheapness. After I get it installed, I noticed that 2 things worked in Breezy that didn't in Hoary: The Mute function key and Hibernation (at least from the menu, lid close still doesn't do it).

Quick Tour

The doc team needs to finish writing by Sept 8. This date is rapidly approaching and with Jerome up to his ears in the Edubuntu stuff, I need help with the Quick Tour. Any writing that can be done would be great. The draft can be seen here.

If you build it, they will come...

21 already!

To one and all,

Let it be known that I have waved my great flaming sword of organization across the LaptopTestingTeam page on our much maligned wiki. Let it known henceforth that all members of said team are to create subpages with the following character:
Make + Model + Model # for their laptops, which organizes itself as so - LaptopTestingTeam/ToshibaTecraA5, as the great benefactors from that cloudy isle have seen fit to bequeath upon me.

Those of you who created pages before this edict shall find their sins relieved by means of redirect and renaming. Those who wish to beg at the great alter of all that is worth a shuttle should now seek this page.

Further, I offer salutations to those on the cloudy isle for finding this servant worthy of such gifts. I hope you will find it well placed.

Signed,

Corey Burger
His Lordly Self-appointed Wiki Janitor Poobah

Michael Lynn's Presentation

As \sh already blogged about, here is the presentation.

As part of MCSE training, we also did some Cisco IOS stuff. I must say that IOS is not a bad shell and their stuff is good. Somebody probably freaked in marketing (all evil things come from the marketing department) and thus we have me blogging about a security exploit that is already fixed and that I don't have the technical known-how what to do with anyways.