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Google Earth has had 3D building views for a while, but I didn’t realise how good the quality of the newer photorealistic buildings were until I decided to recreate one of my favourite skyline shots using Google Earth. At the thumbnail level, it’s hard to tell which is which. Gobsmackingly impressive stuff.

My blog software, WordPress, has been nagging me to upgrade it for a few days now. It’s normally an easy process: go to the website, download the tar archive, untar into a temporary directory, then cp -a the files into my blog’s Apache virtual host directory.

However, Aq noticed a slightly easier way: use Subversion. Now I can upgrade WordPress with a simple svn switch command, followed by a click on a database upgrade script. Much, much easier.

Today, I start my new job working as a Distributed NOC Engineer for Linden Lab, developers of Second Life. This is the crest of a hill I’ve been climbing since early March, when I was made redundant from my last job: I spent a few minutes converting my rich text CV to plain text and applying for a position that I knew I could do, but wasn’t sure I could get. Within a fortnight, and after two interviews — one of them “in-world”, i.e. inside Second Life — I was invited to Linden Lab’s offices in San Francisco for what turned out to be five interviews in one day.

Fast forward through a month of waiting, deliberating, and sheer willpower, and I was finally offered the position; another fortnight and everything was 99% sorted. The stress load I’ve been under has all but vanished. I’m so looking forward to this job it hurts, but in a good way!

After a couple of weeks orientation “in-world”, i.e. inside Second Life, I’m going back out to San Francisco to properly meet everyone I’ll be working with. Given what I’ve already heard about the environment, it should be fun!

And no, this doesn’t mean I can give you free land / free objects / free Linden dollars / fix your account / [insert any other item from a resident's wishlist], even if you bribe me well ask really nicely. Fixing the grid at 2am SLT if there’s problems, on the other hand, will probably be slap bang in the middle of my remit, but that doesn’t mean you can hassle me about it

Oh, Talk Like Yoda Day, today is. Talk like Yoda, you must! For today, anyway.

After Microsoft and Novell’s announcement that they are to start collaboration on tighter integration between Windows and (admittedly SuSE) Linux, there has been a lot of bollocks kicking around from people squealing “this will be bad“, “this will be really bad“, “oh no, it’s the end of the world as we know it“, and so on. $deity forbid two old-school rivals want to bury the hatchet and do something that’s in the best interests of both their customers.

It is good for Microsoft, as it gives them an “in” into both the FOSS community and corporate arenas, and it’s good for Novell, as it helps them solidify their role in the enterprise Linux market. An associated patent agreement, where Novell pay licensing fees Microsoft for specific patents, and Microsoft agree not to litigate on those patents, is just a cherry on the cake, although cynics may suggest that the patent part is the meat of the deal. I’m unconvinced. The patent deal is to keep shareholders happy; the collaboration deal is to keep customers happy. And isn’t that what FOSS operating in a corporate environment is all about?

Two sides to the same story: Linspire are releasing a freely-available, freely-distributable, community-led, Debian-based Linux distribution (sound familiar?) to be called Freespire. Linspire’s edge is that they will distribute non-free drivers, such as for nVidia or ATi graphics cards, as part of the core distribution, and not from optional repositories a la Ubuntu.

Jono Bacon, who is on the Leadership Board of Freespire, is genuinely excited about Open Source and distro diversity, and I’d trust his opinion to be as unbiased as possible. Meanwhile, Pamela Jones over at Groklaw is characterising Freespire as Satan’s Distro. Yes, binary non-free, non-open drivers are Bad. But think about the first thing a new user of Ubuntu does — and when I say user, I don’t mean an average Linux geek, I mean a Joe Bloggs user, a wants to read e-mail and buy stuff off Amazon user — is to look for ways to play their MP3 collection, or watch a DVD, or go to a website with Flash, or listen to BBC Real streams, or … You see my point? The Ubuntu forums are littered with requests to just Make Stuff Work™. This is undoubtedly the market Linspire is targetting, and it is a market.

Is Jono wrong to be associated with this distro? Is Pamela right to vilify it? I’ve no doubt that while Freespire is a noble effort by a company well steeped in commercialism, it’ll survive with a niche of its own; not a huge niche, but a cult following nonetheless. Ubuntu is a steamroller of a distro with a strong ethical community. Freespire just won’t have the momentum to keep up. I really don’t know what Pamela is worried about.

Note that this isn’t SquiggleOS, the original attempt to create a free version of Linspire which began under the same name. SquiggleOS has now been abandoned in favour of Freespire development. Also note that SquiggleOS lead Andrew Betts is a Leadership Board member too.

The Clan #lugradio Maps site has been updated with new download locations for the maps, and a shell script to assist Linux users (and Windows users running Cygwin I suppose) in keeping their clan maps up-to-date. The script defaults to downloading to ~/.etwolf/etmain, so if you’ve changed that from the default, make sure that is changed in the script too.

The script is based on a shell script written by #lugradioite nlindblad, and development continued by myself as a fork from niklas’ initial work. Others have implemented similar scripts in Python and Ruby, so YMMV This script is now the master script with the authoritative map locations, so if you’re developing alternatives please use the URLs in this script, and please also respect the fact I’m hosting these maps personally

After reading about Bill Gates’ inconsistent predictions for the future with regard to voice recognition, here’s further proof that Gates doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s talking about:

The other fascinating thing about this change is that it has, to some extent, fulfilled Bill Gates’s prediction of January 2004 that “Two years from now, spam will be solved“. He thought it would be done by instituting tiny charges per email, or by making an email sender solve a small cryptographic puzzle, or by using a simpler system that would automatically confirm the identity of the sender. Instead, ad-hoc filters, plus education, have done the job.

Actually, if you follow that link, he “pledged” to rid us all from spam in two years. Still waiting, Bill.

At last, someone at Google has realised something that I and others have known about for ages: it takes ages to install applications on Windows because everything is disparate and has its own installer.

On Ubuntu, I can fire up a simple Add Applications applet which allows me to browse a selection of apps of varying kinds, such as development tools, Internet utilities and browsers, games, and so on. On Windows, once the core operating system and freebie MS applets are installed, I have to seek out the stuff I want from many different places.

Google Pack will change that. It provides a simple install/uninstall one-window interface to Google and select third-party applications on the Windows platform. They are:

• Google Earth, Desktop, Toolbar, Picasa, Talk, and the new Video Player and Pack Screensaver;
• Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar, Norton AntiVirus 2005 Special Edition, Ad-aware SE, Trillian, Gallery Player HD, RealPlayer, and Adobe Reader.

That reads like an excellent line-up of useful apps to be installed on a brand-new machine. It’ll also auto-detect previously installed apps, so if you’ve already got the latest releases of Google Earth and Adobe Reader installed, it’ll mark them as up-to-date and leave them alone.

Genius, just genius. You have to ask why Microsoft didn’t do this years ago.

Microsoft WMF Patch — it’s live and available.

On these pages you will find many screen shots of various desktop computer Graphical User Interfaces and operating systems. Many different people have had different ideas of how a GUI should work and these screen shots show many of the more popular ones.

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