Big Friendly

You know you’re a geek when you can identify with this:

I take great pleasure in checking my server’s uptime. Not same amount of pleasure Tiger Woods gets out of his “uptime” I bet.

As of today (25/02/2010) it’s sitting at 202 days.

Ubuntu 9.10 is out in 6 days. I’ve got my Google Wave account. Windows 7 was released yesterday (I’ve been using the RTM version for a few months now though). WordPress 2.8.5 is out. ActiveCollab needs upgrading. ISPConfig 3.0.1.6 is out. The list just goes on and on and on.

Man, all this to learn, do, poke, play, test, upgrade and think about. And non of it makes me any money, when did being busy become so unproductive?

This weekend is gearing up to be a humdinger. All kinds of geek fun to be had by me. List of things that I will be doing this weekend are:

• Installing WordPress 2.8.4 on all the sites that I manage.
• Playing with Windows 7 on my desktop.
• Install Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop to dual boot with Vista.  (Done. Now to customise. Next weekend)
• Play me some Company of Heroes. (Done, but by no means dusted)
• Watching the the final Ashes test.
• Watching the Curry Cup and Tri-Nations rugby (All Blacks have won. Great game, but Aus should have won to make things easier for us)
• Finalising the FormFunction server at Hetzner DE.
• Spending time with Habibti
• Visiting the best people on the world (maybe).
• Watching District 9 (Seems I have to wait another week for this)
• Launching a large project and starting a new one for my current employer.
• Planning life after next Tuesday.
• Plan what’s next for this site.

The good news is that most, if not all, of this starts now. My time couldn’t more full if I tried.

Seems the only real thing I’m using this space for the last while is to test out new releases of WordPress in a live environment and to write a bit about it. This post is no different. I’ve just installed “WordPress 2.8 Release Candidate 1” here to have a look at it and to play. Playing is yet to happen as I don’t have the time right now, but everything seems to be working.

Once final release is available I’ll install, test and decide whether I must upgrade all the sites that I have running off WordPress.

Cursory glance at admin interface impressed me. I will post more at a later stage.

If you’re interested in WordPress 2.8 RC1 then have a look here for your own copy. Final will be released on Wednesday the 10th so wait a few days before you upgrade, or ask your service provider to do it for you. You/they will have to make sure all the plugins you are using work in 2.8 and also that your Theme works the way it should.

I’m a sucker for bleeding edge technology.

“Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.”
— John Maeda

It’s been a month of Vista Home Premium and on the whole I must admit to being happy. I’ve found it to be stable and generally fun to use. I’ve installed all drivers (both 64-bit and 32-bit) and software and for me it has been a step up from XP. I’ve even done some eye candy and am happy with my working environment.

I run Ubuntu on both my servers and used to use it as a Desktop about 3 versions ago. I just found the dual booting way to laborious. Once I can run Dreamweaver CS3 on Linux I will make a permanent switch, but I wanted to play around with Ubuntu 8.04.1 64—bit just to see how my hardware coped. So I decided to try it again after I read about Wubi. I had downloaded the ISO a few weeks ago before deciding to go with Vista to test it out, but never got that far. I made sure I had Wubi and the Ubuntu ISO in the same folder and ran Wubi. I had a fully functioning desktop in under 30 minutes. Ubuntu even found all my hardware, I had to run a network cable while the propriety wireless network card drivers downloaded. It was found and just had to click Activate and 3 minutes later I could put the cable away. The only minor problem I had was the drivers for my GeForce 9600GT video card, but 10 minutes on the Ubuntu Forum and I knew which packages I needed to download via Synaptic. So now I once again dual boot. Ubuntu was much easier to get to this point.

I’ll leave the lolcats till a later date.