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Joys of running an experimental OS

I’ve raved plenty in the past about Ubuntu, but finally had ran into a downer.

About 2 weeks ago, I did my normal apt-get upgrades to make sure Ubuntu had the latest and greatest updates, and the nvidia drivers were updated, but the kernel source didn’t map to the nvidia drivers as they should. Upon my first reboot a few days later after a power outage, the X server puked all over and wouldn’t load, so I was dropped to a command line.

Edited the X server configuration, turned off the Nvidia drivers and just had the 2d drivers loaded, everything seemed ok, but it was kinda ugly. You get used to the prettiness of binary drivers after a while, especially screen savers.

Being the daring person I am, I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu Warty (stable) to Ubuntu Hoary, which will be released in April. Changed my apt sources list, apt-get, and voila – Hoary! Gnome 2.92, and a whole bunch of new updated applications. There were a few bugs, but nothing I couldn’t manage. The industrial theme was gone from gnome-themes-extras, mouse icons were old-school Gnome icons, not the pretty updated Ubuntu ones, and a few other things. A few days later, I apt-get update to patch to the latest, and reboot and the system pukes all over everything – can’t even get into the OS.

I swallowed hard, bit the bullet, and reformatted the drive. This time I used Hoary Array 4 to install, and was up and running. Installed Thunderbird instead of Evolution (different story there), and everything was very similar to how it was.

This morning I apt-get upgrade again, and rebooted accidentally (hit the power button instead of the CD-ROM open button, oops) and I get kernel panics.

Swearing in my head, I download the brand spanking new Hoary disc that came out one day after I downloaded the other, this one is an actual preview of the upcoming Hoary release, supposedly more stable than an actual testing release. The just released Gnome 2.10, a new background, bittorrent clients and other goodness. So far so good – it looks more polished than the last 2 test releases I had installed, the new system updater as a front-end to apt seperate from Synaptic works well.

Once again, I’m impressed. A few weeks to the actual stable release, let’s see if I can keep this one running this time.

Still slacking

Can you tell I’ve been busy at work? No blog updates, which I usually do first thing in the morning, I need to get better at doing them at night.

I still haven’t hacked at the blog, I’m waiting to see what the outcome of the current WordPress Theme Competition may yield as themes go.

I generally like the dark colors as it is now, but one column isn’t cutting it – I need to add back the second column for links and stuff. So I’ll wait a month before updating it again. So far, I’m very happy with WordPress 1.5. The developers did a helluva job with the latest version. After one hiccup, the spaminator is killing all the comment spam, the interface is awesome, and I really dig the Dashboard feature.

WoW – wow!

Looking through the referrer logs on silwenae.com last night, I was surprised to see all the hits I’ve received from Google.

Sure enough, I tested out the links, and searched a bit on Google, and then double checked this morning on a different browser and machine to make sure I’m not crazy.

Silwenae.com, home of our World of Warcraft guild, Apatheia, is currently the 10th search result on Google when you search for “WoW Guild”. Front page of Google, baby!

Searching for “wow screenshots” results in the number two and three spots on Google.

Impressive. Google page rankings in search results are based on the number of people who link to you – and considering the search results for “wow screenshots” only has Blizzard above my website, that’s damn impressive.

Who knew I’d ever run a popular website after all the hobbyist versions I’ve had over the years?

Volunteering at MPR

About two weeks ago I received an email from Minnesota Public Radio that their annual winter fund raising drive was coming up, and a link to fill out a volunteer form to help answer phones during the pledge drive.

I had already pledged money to MPR to support 89.3, The Current, before the station even launched, in support of what they were doing. (See my other posts on The Current.)

So I decided what the heck, and filled out a volunteer form for the second day of the pledge drive, which was last Friday. Chose an early shift (5:45 a.m. to 9 am – ick) so I could get there, and still get some time in the office. I woke up about 45 minutes earlier than normal, and hopped in the car to St. Paul, an area of town I rarely go to. Security guard lets me in, I go up to the 4th floor, and I’ve missed about 2 minutes of the 10 minute orientation on the script, filling out the pledge form, etc.

It’s 6 a.m., and the phones are slow. In the room they had set up with the phone bank, they had about 30-40 phones in mini-cubicles for those filling out the pledge forms by hand, and about a dozen PCs for those that wanted to enter the pledge information on-line instead of filling out a sheet of paper (guess which one I picked). On two of the 4 walls, they had projectors set up. One showed the different promotional giveaways for different pledge amounts, by station. The other showed phone bank statistics, including number of volunteers on the phone, number of volunteers available to take a call, pledges taken, amount pledged and the goal.

Phone calls were slow coming in, but picked up around 7:45. Turns out that the heaviest times for call-ins are during the top of the hour (when the DJ’s are making the strongest pitch) and during corporate matching times, which 7:30 to 8 was one of. I’m guessing I answered maybe 20 calls, but I was floored at the number of calls for 89.3. Now most of them were calling to support The Morning Show with Dale Connelly and Jim Ed Poole, and guessing from the voices, ages ranged all over.

I love 89.3, but I’m not into the Morning Show, yet. It’s almost too eclectic for me, and I’m not necessarily into all of the genres played, but I respect them for bringing all kinds of music to the radio. I’m ecstatic about the amount of support they received during the pledge drive though.

Overall, it was easy work, met some interesting people, and gave back to something I believe in. Giving money is one thing, but I’m glad I made the time investment. My wife has pledged to the news station on and off over the years, and when I mentioned I was going to volunteer, she mentioned it was something she always wished she had done. I was glad to do my part, as little as it was.

Week in Review: Broadcast Flag in Court

A topic near and dear to my heart, which I’ve covered before, is the FCC & the Broadcast Flag.

The American Library Assoc. was in court this week, challenging the FCC on the legality of the Broadcast Flag. The 3 judge panel, while questioning if the ALA even has the right to bring a legal challenge, hammered the FCC on the FCC’s ability to mandate this without legislation from Congress. We’ll know the court’s ruling in a few months.

You can also read a blog with detailed coverage as the blogger attends in court.

  • in General
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I've been slacking

I’ve been slacking, and there’s been so many things to write about this week as well (ALA vs the FCC, gaming, site updates, sports, MPR, I could go on).

I’ll try to get back in the swing of things, let’s see where we’ll start.

I love the Simpsons

Last night’s episode of the Simpsons was hilarious. After Bart single handedly ruins the tourism industry for Springfield, the city adopts gay marriage to fix the tourism problem. Homer quickly becomes a minister to profit from performing the marriage ceremonies.

At one point, the show flashes a URL on the screen, and sure enough, Fox & the Simpsons actually created a website: Springfield is for Gay Lovers of Marriage.

That, the subject matter of the show, combined with ripping on Fox for reality TV, had me rolling last night.

Even after all these years, the Simpsons keeps the laughs coming.

We the Media

I finished We the Media by Dan Gillmor last week on the flight to Atlanta.

It was a great book, and extremely topical at this time. Published last July, the book’s focus is grassroots journalism, through mainly, blogs. While the first third of the book is very high level, it’s a great starting point for folks who aren’t necessarily steeped in technology daily. The book shares some interesting history, just in the last few years, of how blogging and grassroots journalism can help hold Big Media accountable.

It also covered the ongoing fight around copyright, Big Media, with a focus on professional journalists and their role in the evolution of journalism.

Mr. Gillmor makes the point a few times that really sticks with me: most of the hundreds of thousands of blogs are too self-centered, nothing more than online journals. It’s those blogs that find a topic, and become experts through commentary, analysis, or news that really make a difference. And he’s right – those blogs I have bookmarked are exactly that, where my blog is nothing more than an online journal.

It was a very good book, easy to read, and the timing is definitely right. Mr. Gillmor has also released it under a Creative Commons license, so you are free to read it on the web without having to buy it in a bookstore. That’s putting your money where your mouth is.

Updated, again!

WordPress 1.5 is officially out, so it’s a good thing I I downloaded a nightly build a week ago to play with it. I’ve updated the site accordingly, and downloaded a few themes to play with as well.

I like the black, but spent two hours playing with the header graphic in GIMP, and didn’t really get anywhere. I’m going to leave the black theme up for now to see how I really feel about it. If I like it, I’m going to heavily modify it, including adding the links & meta back, probably adding a second column for that stuff, and seeing what I can do with the header graphic.