Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

So Apple finally announced the iPhone du jour yesterday. Am I the only one out there who feels slightly underwhelmed? Okay - these are the features most prominently displayed on the Apple website: Faster processer - nice, but I never felt my 3GS was cripplingly slow. Meh. Better camera - nice, but it's still a camera in a phone, with all the limitations that come with that. Slightly more compelling but still - meh. Siri - voice commands. I tried Siri before Apple bought it and never found it all that useful. A gimmick. Note to Apple: I'm saying "meh," now - is there a command for that? iOS5 - this is actually the most interesting thing being trumpeted as part of the new phone. Oh wait - I can get it as a free upgrade to my current phone in a few days. More on that below. iCloud - sounds like this is an iOS5 thing. See above comment. So I'm not seeing any reason to rush right out and replace my old 3GS. The biggest complaint I have with it is that battery...

Despite the vague sense of dis-ease that accompanied my Kubuntu upgrade from Hardy Heron (8.04) to Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), I had, after my earlier struggles with the death of Kaudiocreator and general crapping up of Adept, finally gotten to the point where the system was behaving more or less as I expected. All was right in the land of the penguin. Until 3 days ago. A while ago, a co-worker had turned me on to the virtues of CVS -- Concurrent Versions System, a revision control system . I now use it for a variety of things: several writing projects and websites. I know it sounds dorky, but I swear it's not. I went to update the local CVS repository on one of the several XP boxes scattered around the house. I use Tortoise CVS, where the sound of breaking glass means a bad thing has happened. It sounded like I fell through a freaking window. The CVS server on the upgraded Kubuntu box is now busted to all bloody hell. The files in the repository are all apparently safe and sound but...

Finally got up the nerve to upgrade my Kubuntu version of Ubuntu 8.04 ( Hardy Heron ) to 9.04 ( Jaunty Jackalope ). When 8.04/Hardy Heron launched, you could install it with either KDE 4 or KDE 3.5. At the time 8.04 was released, KDE 4 was (in the opinion of some) not quite ready for PrimeTime. I did an install of KDE 4 and decided to go back to 3.5. Since then, I've put off doing any upgrades. When Jaunty Jackalope was released, I read the reviews and didn't see anything that made it an extremely compelling upgrade: faster booting (I never thought it was all that slow), a new packages manager (I liked Adept), and other improvements that didn't seem all that compelling. Still, my curiosity got the best of me. At last I mustered my courage. If you are using Ubuntu or one of its derivatives you know this: you pretty much need to have broadband to take advantage of the myriad package management features. Now that that fact is out of the way... Upgrading is fairly simply, a...

The latest Linux Ubuntu release from Canonical, 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) , is now loosed on the internets. I'm running Kubuntu (KDE) 8.04 (Hardy Heron) right now on my main desktop computer and love it. I'm trying to decide: upgrade? The Jackalope promises faster boot times, a new package management system, an updated kernel, and KDE 4. The upgrade will probably take an hour and be relatively painless, unlike the agony soon to be experienced by all those poor chumps out there waiting to upgrade Windows 7 beta to the Release Candidate. Decisions, decisions. If none of this makes a lick of sense, don't worry: tomorrow I'll be writing about my garden.