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.

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.

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?

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 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

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.

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.

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