I fully agree with Steve Jobs about the problems with flash.
All of his points are correct but one of his points is very hypocritical.
- He complains about Flash being a proprietary technology when most of the apple platform is proprietary.
- He also complains about Adobe having complete control over the Flash platform, when apple themselves used their control over their products to block Flash coming to the iPhone OS platform.
The technology points are very correct Flash causes so many problems when browsing for me personally. Since I moved to AMD64 I have problems almost every time I browse sites that use Flash.
Adobe said that Flash is an open spec and that anyone can deploy it but it will never be as complete as Adobe’s own. If Flash is to survive the crossover to HTML5 they will need to make an open source version and allow community contribution to make it stable. Adobe said a few months ago (I cant remember the link) that the reason they cant open source it is because they have a H.264 decoder included in it. Just strip it out plain and simple.
I love some Adobe products like Flex, Dreamweaver and Photoshop. They are all fantastic programs but until Adobe get smart they wont survive without their main product. Plus I really hope they release the creative suite on Linux.
Hehehe “awesomeness” is a word I have to use less often its starting to lose its punch. Put simply Ubuntu 10.04 is the best release ive used of Ubuntu. When I was at the UDS I was thinking that its all about stability so there wouldnt be much surprises I was very very wrong.
With the new look of the desktop I think we can compete on every level with our rivals. The one thing that people always commented on when I showed them the desktop was the colour and both of the new colours are a lot better than the brown. I dont really care about what side the buttons are on I just love the new look.
Gbrainy and Gwibber are both welcome additions to the desktop and I love both. Gbrainy actually surprised me for such a young program how stable and cool it is. Gwibber’s new interface is a hell of a lot better than previous releases and the Me Menu makes it easy to post updates on the fly. F-Spot got a nice viewer mode and a nice little editor too which is very nice.
I dont have a clue about the server, cloud and netbook side of things (because I dont have any of them but if anyone wants to donate some machines to me id be grateful, specifically a netbook because I would love one id do a nice review if you want too 
) but im sure they are rocking.
This is my first release that I went the UDS and got to know all the people who make Ubuntu awesome. It was nice chatting with people about what they are doing and learning a lot. I cant go to the next UDS because of college but ill more than likely go to the 11.04 and rock that. My focus for the next Ubuntu release is going to be less QA and more desktop and quickly work since ill have lots and lots of dev time.
What im most looking forward to (and both may seem boring to some people) is the new font coming because the fonts are bad currently and Zeitgeist being integrated into the desktop because its full of awesomeness (damn I used it again bad Shane).
So anyway go download Lucid (if you havent already )
Posted in Ubuntu
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Tagged 10.04, lucid, Ubuntu
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Do standards hold us back? Its a good question to ask ourselves as
people who work with technology, should we be always looking to
innovate?
First of all are all standards bad and the answer is a big no. Doing
things in a centralized fashion is great for things like the dbus and gstreamer but what about for things
like OOXML
that was made an iso standard even though there is no completely
standard compliment implementation not even from Microsoft themselves.
Standards can be great but it really depends on who makes them.
Application developers who make services for the desktop like Zeitgeist
and Tracker innovate. They dont need to worry about communication
because they use the dbus to pass info and have a well documented way of
formatting the info passed. So innovative projects use standards but the
programs shouldnt push things like how Microsoft pushed OOXML, they
change things release on release and try to keep things stable and well
documented but it doesnt stop the innovation.
So the problem with standardization in software projects is exactly what
happened to OOXML. A bunch of people sat around a table and wrote a
document that was rejected as a standard then they made some changes and
it was accepted (quite ridiculously). While they should have been
already developing it (maybe not releasing it but working on it) because
developing it works out the kinks. There is lots of pages to the
standard but some of it will never see the light of day and why because
it wasnt developed in the correct manner. They should have developed the
standard in house then presented it as a standard.
How can you expect anyone else to develop a standards compliant
application if the developers of the standard cant even do it? How do
you expect to develop a standard without testing it? Whats wrong with
innovation as a means to develop a future standard?
You develop standards through innovation not by committee.
Well I only noticed it today but Quickly‘s tutorial is now available for translations. I ported it to docbook over a month or two and it is now on launchpad translations. So translators of the world help the developers using your language by translating Quickly. Theres a lot of text but its worth it
Ive done a little bit of the Irish translations but still a lot left to do.
I listen to lots of podcasts heres my listening list check them out if you want
Software freedom law show I learn a lot from this one.
Ubuntu UK podcast This is like my news show its nice to hear whats going on.
Shot of Jaq This is a nice one to get my blogger brain going and commenting about issues.
Linux Outlaws (ish their shows are way too long I get really bored halfway though most of the time)
Hacker Melody This is kinda new but I like it so far I started listening after popey mentioned it.
Here are some websites I like lwn arstechnica omg ubuntu planet ubuntu planet gnome
Posted in Me
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Tagged podcasts, websites
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I took the initiative today to write a better CV, I succeeded and its available online and in pdf format. I emailed anyone who had my old one and gave them the new one. So if you need Linux deployment in Ireland or have some development work on any platform (or you can think of something better for me to do) drop me an email. I could do with the work so feel free to make proposals ill take anything into consideration. Thanks to everyone who helped me out.
Posted in Ubuntu
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Tagged Jobs, Me
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So im in college at the moment and I will be for the next two years (exams permitting) so this is what im hoping to be like then. The point to this post is to lay out a simple list of things I know I have to improve on to be a better person and laying out the goals for
- First and foremost ill be still using Ubuntu I dont foresee any major hurdles to this.
- Second to have 3 years of development behind me.
- To be at least an “official” contributing developer (I contribute here and there but nothing big yet, im just getting started!!).
- To have went to at least 2 more Ubuntu developer summits (Ive been to one and UDS-M is during my college exams but only one test actually falls that week so ill be remotely participating).
- To have applied to a job (Or to have one waiting for me) in some sort of free software company (Im hoping 2 will help me get this one).
- To get my Dad (and my sister maybe) to use Ubuntu (I got my Ma to use Ubuntu until her computer broke)
- To have contributed a lot to at least one program that people find useful (This ones a hard one)
- Complete my college course(software development, im 2 years in at the moment)
- Get a girlfriend (its a simple one but meeting women in college situations doesnt lead to much)
- Be silly when its appropriate and be serious when its appropriate (this is very complicated but its very merited).
- Take breaks from thinking (I think a lot, in fact way too much and half of it isnt of major importance. So I need to be a lot more focused)
- Learn how to play the harmonica and/or keyboard
- Communication: The main goal I want to deal with is my communication with people. I simply dont know how to talk with people well in person. I can communicate a lot better when im not talking face to face with people and its kinda obvious when people meet me that I dont feel comfortable talking at all really. Im a person who thinks a lot but cant deal with people and its always been a big problem for me. So when im in a room with people and not talking I get really nervous and make lots of small talk because in really uncomfortable. I also tend to say/do dumb things when uncomfortable too which I need to fix as well. I need to learn when to talk and when to interrupt because I tend to jump across people in discussions and that seems a little rude so I have to be a better listener in general.
So thats the main thing I want to change over the next 2 years in short to be cool. (I know im Irish so that lends a little coolness but I need to a lot cooler.) Oh and apologies if some of this post is a lot off topic for planet Ubuntu.
Any suggestions? (If you dont want to put them in the comments email me constructive feedback is always welcome in my book)
Posted in Ubuntu
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Tagged Future, Me, Ubuntu
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Zeitgeist is awesome and can already do some cool stuff. Here are some examples of stuff that it can do but if it gets support from the development community.
- Rhythmbox could make up a playlist of songs that you play most often or which songs you havent played.
- Totem could suggest the next movie in a series going by which you have already watched.
- Open Office could suggest what to work on going by what you normally work on at that time of the day.
- Empathy could remind you to audio call your Mother/Boss at the time of day you normally ring her.
- On your N900 your phone could automatically switch between work mode and home mode going by the time you work at and offer you the right contracts.
Zeitgeist can give Gnome/KDE/Maemo all of this right now. Think of a desktop that learns how you do things from the way you do things, the time you do things at and in which program you use them in. Zeitgeist is not just a logger it is your desktop/phone/netbook/smartbook/server but smarter.
Now the hard part is getting some attention we can do lots of cool stuff but we need some help from the development community to get data into Zeitgeist and get the data used in programs. You can push the relevent info to zeitgeist (the docs are here) so help out and make the desktop a little smarter. I promise its not hard and if you hit any bumps go to #zeitgeist on freenode and they can help you out. Oh and if you want to mess about with the code or try the new versions in trunk go here.
On the zeitgeist front have a look at Gnome activity journal. They have a really cool related activity thing now and some preview magic now. You can grab the version from the repo in lucid but its a little out of date and doesnt have the new coolness yet. If you want to mess about with the code or try the bleeding edge grab the trunk.
If you want some more reading they are making this this and this a reality(Ok the last one is a little bit far fetched but maybe…….?)
#Mild rant warning (You have been warned)
My favorite film is Blade Runner, interesting storyline murder mystery Sci-fi awesomeness. It had everything I like in a film. Ive been looking around for some good films recently and its weird. Dont get me wrong there have been some good ones but most of the interesting story lines have been played through in the past.
So that gets me to one of my pet peeves and that is remakes of films that were good so they are remade with the more up to date technologies and with different actors (Most of the time much worse than the first film). The big example of a bad remake of an old film was the most recent superman film. Very very bad.
Although I do like Smallville the re-imagining of Superman. TV for me is all about plot if the show loses interesting plot I stop watching simple as that. Heroes is an example of that, great for the first season and didnt have any really solid plot after then. 24 is one of my favorite shows (even though not many other people actually watch it anymore) because it always has a solid plot something always happens in every episode that pushes the show to be engaging.
So interesting plot lines are what I like and Sci-fi but Doctor Who goes right over my head. Dont ask me why ive looked at it a bit but it just doesnt speak to me. It seems to have a great story but id much prefer to be watching something like supernatural which is completely awesome. I dont know maybe my problem with Doctor Who is the whole time travel thing. My brain just works overtime trying to comprehend the paradoxes and complications that are caused by the doctor moving so regularly through time. What comes to mind for me when I hear “time lord” is someone who almost guards time and makes sure there is consistency but he seems to screw time up a lot.
Lol I think too much about TV 
