facti.net

Inkscape is a great little scalable vector graphics drawing tool.  This website has some very nice practical screencasts on how to take advantage of the many inkscape features to produce some good drawings and learn the more advanced features at the same time.  You might want to work through the examples in reverse order, as the more advanced examples are the later ones and it is inverse-sorted by date:

http://www.bestechvideos.com/tag/inkscape/

The eclipse metadata for a workspace is still a mess in eclipse 3.5.  Not only is the file naming and structure inconsistent (what's with all the hidden files within hidden files, while some are not hidden in a rather random way) but it mixes things that should be persisted (such as preferences, and launch options) with things that should not be persisted (such as history and cache files).  All of this makes it rather painful to try and version control a workspace efficiently so that one can use the important bits of a workspace in different machines with minimal fuss.  For example, if the .metadata is in your version control files, doing a status results in reams of files that one does not want to version control, but if it is outside the tree then settings and launch configurations don't get added and can be a real pain to reconfigure every time.

My current strategy for each workspace involves:

Looks like there is a small change in how name resolution is done in Ubuntu 9.10.   It looks like IPv6 DNS resolution is applied first now, when it is available, and a silent failover to the IPv4 entry occurs when it isn't. 

I noticed this effect when apache was running on the local machine.  Trying to access a Web server on a server that had an IPv6 record of ::1 (don't ask) but a proper IPv4 record.   In the current version of Ubuntu that results in the local Web server being accessed when it is available rather than the IPv4 one.  When it is not available it silently falls over to the IPv4 address.

For example, trying to access a website (http://facti.net for argument's sake;) on the internal network when apache was running on the laptop resulted in firefox connecting to the laptop rather than the Web server on facti.net.  However, if apache was shut down on the laptop then firefox would connect to the facti.net Web server. 

Tried out KDE 4.3.2 on the latest Ubuntu, and what occurs to me is "wow - that's bad".  After the 4.0 release fiasco I thought they could only go uphill, so I was quite disappointed with the latest version. KDE has really gone downhill from 3.5.x.  I think it should be seen as an example of how not to do things. It seems to have focused on eye candy at the expense of usability.

From a user perspective the ideal desktop should let you just get things done.  A good desktop should let you configure things whichever way you like and then be 'invisible'.  Unfortunately KDE does neither.  It now constantly gets in the way.  It hinders rather than facilitates:

• It is difficult to hunt through the menus to find the right application
• It is not intuitive to configure
• You cannot get rid of the foolish cashew without recompiling things

 Sad.  I cannot recommend the latest KDE.

Ubuntu 9.10 has come out and is getting installed on one of my systems.   So far the installation has gone well.  The new home encryption stuff is very nicely automated, at least when using the alternate CD.

Custom Steps

Install using Synaptic package manager

Make sure to use the "Mark packages by task" option in the Edit menu when applicable (e.g. if installing MythTV etc).  It will save a lot of time.