Hello world :-)

• I worked in the corporate world as an I.T. developer (programmer, systems and business analyst, DBA, modeller, project manager, etc) for 20 years, until the turn of the century. I then took a break from making a living out of being a propellerhead, and tended to be more of an end-user of software packages. However I never stopped keeping up to date with software technologies, even if I spent most of my computer-time just browsing the web with Firefox, emailing, blogging, writing words and occasional invoices with openoffice, accounting and writing other occasional invoices with sql-ledger, and playing with content management systems (settling on Joomla).

• I first worked on unix systems in 1989. I worked for Oracle then as a DBA and Oracle often ran on Sun and HP etc unix machines.

• I have been a linux user since about 1997. I ran Redhat, until they stopped distributing a free version. I first installed Ubuntu (Warty) in 2005.

• For more info about me, try my 'Base' website.

2009 update ...

• I have been settled on Ubuntu for 2 or 3 years now on the five PCs I maintain for myself and family. In addition my main PC has Puppy and SystemRescueCd distros on it. I have just installed Ubuntu 9.04 on three of these machines, and the others will follow shortly. I run the latest standard production version of Ubuntu on my machines, and hack as little as possible, to minimise grief during dist-upgrades.

• My Current Machines

  • I built my current main PC in 2008, an AMD Athlon64 4400 CPU, 2GB RAM, Giga-byte motherboard, Nvidia chipset (VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 6100 nForce 405 (rev a2)).

  • My portable is a 2003 vintage Toshiba 1800 laptop running Xubuntu. I installed and often run an IceWM session because it is noticably quicker than xfce. It has a Trident display chip, and runs a PC card Minitar Cardbus MN54GCB-R wireless adapter if needed. Almost everything runs fine if a bit slowly on it. ('Shutdown' works, but 'reboot' does not.).

Soapbox

1. Documentation gripe

   I would like to see better more concise documentation with Ubuntu and for that matter in the linux and free software world in general. In early-mid 2006 I wrote the NetworkPrintingWithUbuntu page, and thought that if I got time I would like to have tidied up a lot of wiki pages around here. At the time I thought -

   • There is urgent need to get summary information/findings out of mail lists and into this wiki. I see wikis as potentially the best type of repository for quality information. However it is only as good or bad as the content, and there is a huge amount of poorly written (and even very badly spelt) stuff here. Even the grammar is pitiful in many places, and I have seen scores of instances where this leads to confusion and incorrect information being disseminated. Hmm, I just read about the WikiCleanupProposal. Great idea folks! Excuse me while I correct spelling on it "achieve : i before e, except after c".

   However, I found that many of the documentation team took offence to suggestions that the wiki was such a mess, so my suggestions about how to get control over this via such mechanisms as agreed rules, process, specific procedures, etc were badly received. Interestingly, I have found one or two others elsewhere that have the same opinion, so at least I know that I am not alone with this view. Moreover those others tend to also be older more experienced people who like me were involved in large corporate projects, and have seen the inevitable collapse of many projects over time that were not well managed (with hundreds of millions of dollars going down the drain each time).
2. Linux in the commercial/business world I would like to see better organised groups get together, be it user groups, or commercial enterprises, that would direct resources and energy into marketing linux and open-source into the most visible space in both the public and private sector marketplaces - the desktop. This is the realm where only proprietary commercial technologies roam, so Microsoft wins and open source misses out. I see no body, here in Australia at least, that is being remotely effective in promoting linux and open source in any significant way. Unfortunately the open-source world in general seems to be not interested, unwilling and unable to focus on communicating to the world beyond the open-source world.

   2009 update: I see a lot of comment lately that people have finally given up on predicting that "this year will be the year linux breaks into the desktop", and accepted that it's just too hard to turn the Microsoft juggernaut out of corporates. However the impact of the global economic malaise might yet force change on those enterprises wishing to survive by eliminating internal resource overheads and expenses, and perhaps some will follow the lead of some poorer countries who already have decided to save money by going the route of open-source. I live in hope.

CategoryHomepage