Messing around with the Summarize service in OS X, I got the following result:
I like to think of it this way: Twitter is a bunch of friends sitting around a table, all shouting at the same time — and shouting mundanities at that.
Archive for the ‘Browsing’ Category
Interesting…
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Dear Lazyweb: Software for groups and organisations
Thursday, March 12th, 2009I’ve been involved with various organisations and charities over the past few years, and the two main problems they have all faced are:
- Lack of participation
- Dissemination of information
Whilst 1) can only truly be overcome by having the right people, both can be improved by collaboration – something which is tackled by many pieces of software.
A charitable organisation I run at the moment – an after school club at my children’s school – suffers from both these problems, and one way we are seeking to address them is by becoming a virtual or shudder egroup. Physical meetings will always be required, but things like distributing minutes, drafting and review of documents etc. are perfect candidates for solving online.
However the options on offer aren’t that great. Google Apps is the main one, but complete overkill for what we want which is a mailing list and document sharing/editing/review capabilities. Google Docs is perfect for the latter, but we don’t really want hosted e-mail, calendar, chat etc. I know you can turn them off, but the mailing list requirement still isn’t met. Even if I keep e-mail enabled, people don’t always want yet another e-mail address/account to worry about.
Personally I would just set up a wiki and mailing list and be done, but while this is perfect for a technical project e.g. software (that’s how Ubuntu got started), there are more problems:
- (Lack of) technical knowledge
- Administration
Of course there’s a learning curve to anything new. Google Docs gets rid of some of this by behaving in similar way to other applications, but it is still a new way of working. A wiki – although completely natural to me – will be completely alien to some if not all the other members. Compounding this problem is that I intend to step back from the organisation this autumn (after three years), and don’t really want to remain as sysadmin.
Having written all this, I’m now coming to the conclusion that for this particular problem sticking to the old way is the best solution, but I’m still interested if any decent (and hosted) solutions that help run groups exist, or if you help run a non-technical group (i.e. LUGs don’t count!), what do you use?
Fixed my Gwibber
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009Since I got back from UDS, Gwibber has been broken on my main machine. I knew it was something to do with WebKit, but I just didn’t get around to looking any further into it until today.
…and I didn’t have to look far – there’s a question and bug for exactly this problem, with a simple 2-step fix:
- Make sure you don’t have the WebKit Team PPA enabled
- Make sure you downgrade the
libwebkitpackage is version 1.0.1-2 (the default version in 8.10), not 1.0.1-4 (the WebKit Team version)
That’s it – restart Gwibber, and it should be working again.
bzr status schwuk
Saturday, September 13th, 2008Well it’s been a while I wrote here (if you ignore the Twitter spam 
) – in fact July was the last time I blogged in earnest – and a few things have changed, so I thought I’d talk about some of them.
First of all I’ve moved to the Distro QA team here at Canonical. This means that I’m now working directly on Ubuntu, and my work will be much more visible – both in the distribution and here on this blog. I’m working with a great team here within Canonical – Henrik, Leann, Brian, Steve, Ara, Pedro, and Marc – and the wider Ubuntu QA community, as well as the rest of the Distro team and of course the whole Ubuntu community. At the moment I’m focused on hardware testing, and you’ll be seeing a lot more attention given to testing in Ubuntu over the next few releases.
Apart from working I attended the “last” LugRadio Live – see you all again next year! – and had a great holiday in the South of France. I also spent a long weekend in the woods in Wales at the Bushcraft UK Bushmoot where I got the chance to meet Mors Kochanski who is an amazing, inspiring and above all friendly guy. The ‘moot itself was well worth the trip, just like LugRadio Live is, but meeting him made it absolutely worthwhile.
Last November I pondered moving to 64-bit. Last week after a few stability and performance problems (entirely self-inflicted) I decided to bite the bullet, wipe Vista from my hard drive forever (it came with the laptop, and I left it around “just in case” but it never really got used) and perform a fresh install. This was my first “real” install (if you ignore my testing work) since I first put Feisty on the laptop when I got it, and the install experience is really nice these days. Since I had the opportunity I decided to go with 64-bit, and I’m pleased to say that I’ve had zero problems with it. Flash is commonly criticised as being difficult under 64-bit, but it installed via the package in Synaptic and has worked since. If anything Firefox + Flash has been more reliable than it was under 32-bit.
In August I succumbed and got myself an iPhone 3G, even though I’m months away from the end of my current contract with my N95. So far I have been seriously impressed with it – browsing is excellent, and it is by far the best e-mail experience I’ve had on any mobile device to date. Oh, and it’s a decent phone too! I’ve not really encountered any of the performance/stability problems many others have complained about, except when I had it configured to sync OTA with Google via NeuvaSync when it would occasionally get a bit sluggish. That was with the 2.0.2 firmware, and I’ve not re-enabled OTA syncing since upgrading to 2.1 yesterday. This is my first iPod as well – the only other current iPod in the house belongs to Schwuklet #1, although Schwuklet #2 has put an order in with Santa Claus for a 4th generation Nano. The iPhone has increased my podcast consumption as well, which can only be a good thing.
That’s it for now, but I’m sure I’ll think of more things to post soon.
WordPress 2.5 joy (and K2 woes)
Saturday, March 29th, 2008Version 2.5 of WordPress has been released today, and I’ve upgrade this site accordingly.
The upgrade was pretty painless, apart from a weird bug that happens if you’re (like me) using the K2 theme. Everything works, except the admin dashboard. I’ve been meaning to develop my own theme anyway, so maybe this will be impetus I need to do so.
Stop, thief!
Thursday, March 6th, 2008I’ve been lucky. I’ve never really been a victim of theft, and when I have it has been for small amounts of money or insignificant items.
photo credit: nocklebeast
Now I have come across someone stealing the content from my site – and anyone else who is aggregated in Planet Ubuntu – and seeking to profit from this through the use of Google Adverts.
The culprit? http://linuxindex.com
I have sent an e-mail to the domain contact asking them to cease reproducing my content without permission immediately. I have also reported the policy violation to Google AdSense. I would urge anyone else on Planet Ubuntu to do the same.
Socially Ostracized?
Thursday, January 17th, 2008I stumbled across nugget of wisdom earlier today:
For many web workers, there’s email, and then there’s Gmail. You can use a different email client, but prepare to be mildly teased/socially ostracized
What?!? Are they serious?