Waggle Dance

Hi, my name is Chris.

I am Ubuntu update-manager addict.

I began innocently enough, sometime back in Febuary, I ran ‘update-manager -d‘ to get a peek at Unbuntu Hardy Heron. Since that time I have been unable to resist the little orange “Updates Available” icon. Checking two or three times a day for improved progams, bug fixes, and new features. Swearing off updates after each bad dependency problem, only to run update again in hopes it will get fixed this time.

My family is tired of the home PCs being tied up running update-manager all the time and I’m not getting much done on my laptop while it’s burning up bandwidth updating the repository indexes. It’s time for an intervention.

I know I can’t break this habit alone, so I’m thinking of starting a 12 step program. I know there are others out there with the same problem so maybe a support group will help, all we have to do is: (more…)

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I have been looking for a way to limit the amount of time my kids spend on the computer. After toying with a couple of different things like timeoutd and pam_time, I decided to hack together something to meet my needs: (more…)

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My family uses open source software almost exclusively. Everyone from the toddlers to the teen to the Mrs. have what they need to play games, chat with friends, manager emails, surf the web, keep busy schedules straight, do homeschooling, and pretty much anything they may want to do. (more…)

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Microsoft doesn’t really hate software pirates… when they might count toward market share for their latest Internet Explorer release. In the face of slipping numbers, Microsoft has reversed thier earlier requirement that users have a legal copy of Microsoft Windows XP or greater in order to download and install Internet Explorer 7. M$ has done their best stem the defection of users to the more secure and more standards compliant Firefox browser, but failed to prevent it’s steady climb in market share to 15% among average users, as high as 35% among some segments, such as the tech savvy and non-US users.

It seems a little desperate to me to rail against software pirates, spend millions hunting them down across the globe, then turn a blind it to them when it suits them. While I often convince people to make the switch to Firefox on it’s technical merits, I find it hard to understand why people continue to use products from a company with such a complete lack of moral and ethical backbone.

All I can say is:

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After searching for a suitable worship slide system for our church, I decided to write my own using the S5 presentation software and Ruby on Rails. Check it out at the OpenWorship project site. It’s still early, but I can build a presentation (using rails scaffolding) and display it, so thats a start.

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