GNU/Miscellany

Even though it’s hard to set aside the urgent need for a backup plan, I dabbled a bit in Ubuntu tonight. One thing I had to do was set up an alias for ls -l. Having used HP-UX at work for years, my fingers want to type ll to get a “long” dir listing.

Searching for [ubuntu shell alias] found me a nice straight-forward explanation of how to set up aliases. I used to know a command in HP-UX for forcing your profile to reload (or your environment, or something like that — I’m afraid I’m going to be butchering a lot of technical concepts in this blog) and figured there must be something similar here. The ArsGeek page showed me that it is source .bashrc in this case.

I considered what to do with this information. I’ve kept notes on things like this for years in the Palm Desktop program (a nice little PIM but I have a rant about it that may find its way here someday…) and then in a Visual Basic program I wrote called NotablePIM (a coworker helpfully calls it the “not able” program). Now that I’m trying to jump off the Windows ship, I’ll need something new. I don’t know if I have the ambition to write a Java NotablePIM using the “open” file format I devised.

Google Labs Strikes Again

One possibility is Google Notebook. I just found out about this the other day in the comments over at Matt Cutts blog. I made a public notebook and added my alias note there. It’s a pretty cool service but I’ll have to think about if I’m going to use it. I’d be giving up control of my notes, which is kind of the situation I was in with the Palm Desktop and why I wanted to write my own PIM. On the other hand, the notes would always be available from any computer on the net. On the gripping hand, the Internet would have to be be available whenever I needed them. But if the Internet is down, there are a lot of other traumatic withdrawal issues to deal with. This and more is going on in my active internal debate.

Of course, the really cool thing is you get to use Google’s excellent search capabilities to search your notes. That along with being available on the net is enticing. I’ve thought about posting random technical notes on movingtofreedom.org, but that just doesn’t seem right. With any luck they’ll make an API available to automatically make backups of the notes so I can keep current backups and some measure of control for later porting if necessary.

Oh! Another cool thing. There are extensions for both Firefox and Internet Explorer to give you quicker access to your notebooks.

Other news

I have this P3 IBM Thinkpad sitting around. On the Move Status page (which I desperately need to update or get rid of), I mention that it is running Windows 2000. This weekend I downloaded Ubuntu 6.10 and made a “live” disk to try booting it up, and again I’m amazed at how nicely it works. It came right up on the laptop.

So then I went ahead and tried installing it so that I could dual boot for now. Install was also great. It got hung up on the first try, maybe because I tried syncing with an Internet time server when I was offline. Started over and had better luck the second try.

Very seamless and brainless. I was curious about how it would handle the partitioning. I didn’t have anything on there to worry about losing so just let it go ahead. I assumed it could resize a partition with data in it since that was an option, but was mildly surprised at how easily this was handled. At the same time I could see that the installer trusts the user to know something since it offered to wipe out all existing data without accompanying warnings and flashing lights.

And now I have an Ubuntu-powered laptop to go with my Ubuntu-powered chainsaw. I just get such a kick out of it that this is free as in beer and speech.

Java

Next up is to get going on some Java education and development. I see that both Ubuntu and Fedora come with GNU java, which is nice to see. I wonder what will happen with that project now that Sun has freed the “official” version? I went on to Sun’s Java site and although I think Java 5 is supposed to be available under the GPL now, the download shows some other license. A minor point; I still downloaded it and now have to figure out how to handle the .bin file. But that and more Java tales will have to wait for another time…