As all of my hundreds of thousands of readers know, I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my girlfriend’s laptop. Aside from the confusingly random names they give Ubuntu releases, I have to say I’m extremely impressed. The basic idea is that if you want a server linux, go with Debian or Slackware…both are extremely stable, highly configurable, and FAST. Slackware is a bit more for advanced users than Debian (not a big deal if you know how to edit config files) and perhaps a tad faster, but both are well-oiled machines ready to handle anything you can throw at them.

If you want a desktop machine, check out Ubuntu. All the things I try expecting it not to work, it just works. For example, I was testing flash on it and the volume was too loud. Just for shits and giggles, I tried the volume buttons on the laptop. Holy shit, it works. Next, I’m installing printer drivers on the VirtualBox XP instance. Well guess what? I plugged in the printer thinking, well thank god I have windows installed because it will autodetect it. Instantly, I see a window popup in Ubuntu telling me that my printer has been installed and is ready for use. Now that’s service.

Now, all of this plug and chug computing surely comes at some sort of performance hit, but who the hell cares if it makes your life easier and you don’t have a production website running on that box that gets 1000 requests/s.

There is the issue of auto-updates. Sure you need to update buggy or hackable software…but ahem, why is it on there in the first place? The reason distros like slack and deb don’t need constant auto-updating is because they choose packages that have been known for a long time to be rock solid. I can’t say I agree with the “constant contact with the update server” methodology that windows instilled in all of us. That’s something you’d never use on a server. If something sucks or has security problems, you hand-update that package and test it a billion times with your software. Once again though, this is a desktop machine, not a server…and the auto update worked pretty damn well.

So while this review is short and sweet, so has my experience been with Ubuntu. Perhaps someday I’ll install it on one of my own laptops and take it for a whirl.

Ubuntu: two thumbs up for the new or casual desktop linux user. Not for server usage. I’m sure there are some servers that use it successfully, but none of mine ever will =).

From the time I first heard its name to this month, I’ve been a huge fan of the internet music service, Pandora. It let’s you set up radio stations around particular songs or bands and then plays you music it thinks you may like. Also, it’s a free service (nothing quite like free).

It’s not without its problems which, lately, have been completely turning me off. First of all, it seems that over time, the algorithm for guessing what kind of music is similar to your taste is getting worse and worse. Either that or I’m listening to the wrong kind of music. Also, once you tell it you like a song, you’d think it would use that song to find more similar songs…but no, it plays that song over and over day after day until you thumbs-down it or put it on the shelf for a month (after the month is up, it starts playing it incessantly again). The past few months, they did the inevitable, which is to start playing annoying ads inbetween songs, and turning off your radio after 15 minutes or so of playing time just so you have to go back onto the site and look at ads.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was this: they used to have it so that when you used up all your song skips on one station and they kept playing shit you hated (happens quite often), you could go to another station and click through a few songs. Not anymore, you get a total number of song skips for your account, no longer for each station. This means that if one of your stations starts to piss you off and you skip a bunch of songs, you cannot skip more songs in other stations. What does this mean?

It means that I turn off Pandora and listen to music I have on my computer. Why would I want to be forced to listen to shitty music on ALL my stations? I keep telling it: NO JIMMY BUFFET but it doesn’t fucking listen.

I’m not just writing to complain though! There is something a lot better than Pandora. I don’t think many people know that they do internet radio (or maybe I’m just really ignorant), but last.fm has internet radio that’s a lot better. You can listen to combinations of tags (a lot like beeets, but for music and not events), and adding a song by an artists plays songs that are actually similar to it (no more Jimmy Buffet when I want Simon and Garfunkel).

Good music, good interface, no audio ads (yet!), no obnoxiously-low limits on skipping…in fact I’ve never hit any limit for skipping songs. Check out last.fm. They kick Pandora’s ass.

So, being in the service industry, one has to keep track of time. In my case, when I’m programming, I have to keep track of how many hours something is taking, and be able to organize all of my tasks.

Coming from QuickBooks timer, I knew something better had to exist. I was getting ready to buckle down and build it in .NET if I had to. I searched for days to find something useful. I finally did.

ToDoList by Abstract Spoon has had everything I’ve needed so far. I can keep track of everything I’m doing in a hierarchical list (tasks and sub-tasks, or projects and tasks) and TIME everything. I can also add in comments for all items.

This keeps client invoicing accurate and simple. Plus, it’s free. Can’t fucking beat that.

I tried a few items that sort of did what I want, including a few web interfaces which I was weary of (my work is MY business), but ToDoList takes the cake.

Normally I wouldn’t sponsor something like this, but I think they did a really great job. It has a lot of features (like list sharing) I’ll hopefully never have to use, but it’s awesome.