Well I tried Facebook for two months. It is very interesting, but ultimately an empty experience. Bah! Humbug!

I found out about Blubuntu - it’s a very elegant theme and well worth trying out. Just go

sudo aptitude install blubuntu-look

just upgraded to 8.04 - no major issues although sound doesn’t work yet but will look into it

human theme still hideous - although i’ve hit on a much more elegant one that doesn’t ship with ubuntu by default. just install gnome-background and industrialtango theme from the repositories. you get a nice clean ui and some pleasant backgrounds

I just found Strawberry Perl - which purports to be a 100% compatible version of Perl for Windows. I’ll give it a go, might be better than ActiveState Perl (I have found a number of issues with installing modules from CPAN with AS Perl)./

http://strawberryperl.com/

I have to use Windows XP at work, but luckily Perl happily via the ActiveState Perl distribution. They have a package manager called ppm that is really very good at downloading and installing Perl modules. There is a little bit of trickery if you are behind a proxy with the set up so here is what you need to do

First, open a Windows Shell

Next, set your proxy like so:

set http_proxy=http://user:password@proxy_server:port

Now you can see the areas that ppm stores Perl modules

ppm area list

If you want to install a Perl module, you first need to search for it in the ActiveState repository, like so

ppm search text::csv

This will return a list of packages matching the search string, from which you can select the right option, then install it as follows

ppm install text-csv

It also handles dependencies well.

There seems to be a lot of noise about Mono, Novell and Microsoft at the moment, and the suspected use of Mono as a virus with which to infect Free and Open Source activities and software.

There are lots of Mono based applications available in Ubuntu, for example, such as Tomboy, Banshee, F-Spot, and so on, and it is pretty obvious that Mono is a very productive development environment that generates useful applications quickly.

So if people don’t want to have Mono on their computers, developers will need to have a viable alternative that is equally productive. I think this should be Python personally, even though I’ve never coded in it.

Why Python? Well it should be a productive, object oriented, free, dynamic, high level language with a large community and commerical backing of some sort.

Perl is not the answer, while Ruby possibly is, C and C++ are not, and Java is definately not. That leaves Python.
It needs to have a really good IDE with lots of high productivity templates and wizards and the like and also lots of enterprise level functionality. It needs to have a large active community and be receptive to corporate It needs to be the developer’s tool of choice. Perhaps Canonical could fund the development of a fully open and free integrated toolset that leverages existing FOSS tools? The IDE and development framework should be shipped with Ubuntu and there should be lots of documentation on how to do things like create applications, etc. It should be easy to use, fast and efficient.

I should develop this further and put it into Brainstorm

This was posted as a comment - if anyone knows the answer please put it in a comment on this post.

David Rivkin said, on March 25th, 2008 at 9:46 am

Does anyone know what CMOS Image Sensor is used in this HP Pavilion series? I know the controller is the Sonix but I am not sure which CMOS Image Sensor is used and I really need to know and to get the datasheet for it.

Thank you,
David Rivkin, PhD

Whilst in Sydney over the weekend for a 40th I very cleverly managed to have my mobile phone fly out of my hand while attempting and drunkenly to hail a taxi. I went to go out into the very busy street to retrieve it, but was prevented from doing so; luckily is seems as the next second a car ran over my phone and crushed it into little pieces.

Using the new Gelatin theme and a nice grassy background with the Discovery icon set.