jonathan carter

If I were superstitious…

// July 28th, 2010 // 6 Comments » // Free Software, Jonathan

A few weeks ago I moved to Québec, Canada. Today I bought this car from a colleague at Révolution Linux, he doesn’t need it anymore since he’s moving to Montréal. He bough it just a few months ago from another colleague who moved to France.

It doesn’t have a CD player, instead, it has a tape deck, which plays analogue magnetic tapes. They’re horribly obsolete now but this was how I listened to music way back when I was a kid. Another college that lives down the street from me has a hi-fi with a CD player AND a tape deck. I was planning to go there to write the Offspring Smash album to tape, it’s one of my favourite driving albums and I never tire from it.

All the tapes from 2 owners back was still in the car. I decided to remove them when I got home this afternoon. The *first* tape I took out happened to be this one:

I was amazed and delighted! Then I removed the next tape:

It had “High voltage” written on it, which is very close to my IRC/Identica/Twitter nickname, “highvoltage”. If I were at all superstitious, I’d take it as a very good sign that this car will serve me very well!

If you can’t beat ‘em…

// July 14th, 2010 // 10 Comments » // Free Software

I generally get annoyed when people get all self-congratulatory and excited about ‘innovation’ that they have implemented in terms of UI and then it just ends up being a (somewhat cheap) copy of what Apple does in Mac OS X.

Last week, I thought I’d make my Ubuntu installation on my Mac Mini look and work as close to OS X as I could. The interesting part? I really liked it.

Today I made my laptop work pretty much the same.

Resistance is futile.

• The dock is provided by Docky, which is a really good dock implementation imho
• Global menu is provided by gnome-globalmenu (PPA)
• The Font is the new Ubuntu beta font which I think is awesome  (beta will be available publicly soon)
• Nautilus tweaks provided by Nautilus Elementry (PPA)

Welcome to new Ubuntu members from Debian!

// July 12th, 2010 // 4 Comments » // Free Software

Stefano Zacchiroli became the new Debian Project Leader earlier this year. In my opinion he’s doing quite good at delivering on his promises so far. In particular, I like how he’s reached out to Ubuntu as part of communicating better with Debian derivatives. In May he provided a talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit titled “Collaboration with Ubuntu (from a Debian point of view)” (video).

Not sure if this is as a direct result of Stefano’s efforts (and as pointed out in the comments, it isn’t), but the last week we gained 2 new Ubuntu members who have already been long-time Debian contributors. Both report that the process didn’t take too long:

• Raphaël Hertzog gained Ubuntu membership directly
• Gerfried Fuchs gained membership through MOTU

Raphaël is also involved with Utnubu, a collaboration layer between Debian and Ubuntu that’s currently being revived. Gerfried has been active in MOTU doing sync requests from Debian to Ubuntu as well as loads of bug triaging.

It’s great to see that there’s more links being formed between the two projects! Welcome again to our new members from Debian!

Canada!

// July 4th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // Free Software, Jonathan

After a long wait for my travel documents I finally arrived in Montréal, Canada on Friday afternoon!

Sherbrooke will be my new home from now on. I have lots to say but if I do that now this blog entry will never get finished, I’ll do some subsequent posts instead ;)

So far everyone I’ve met here have been super nice, I’ve met quite a few of my colleges at Revolution Linux over the weekend and tomorrow is my first day actually at the office (already had a tour yesterday :) ). It’s certainly taking some adjustment being here but I’ve already had Poutine and learned some important local words so I’m already on my way to becoming an official Québécois!

I’ve been more or less absent from everything the last two weeks, but that should also be better now. Have a good week!