Roughly a year ago, I wrote a piece called Ubuntu and Storage about my ideas for both upgrading to Ubuntu (from Windows, it is an upgrade) and setting up a better storage solution. I’m going to focus on the former part here.

It was probably a year and a bit ago, before Ubuntu really started kicking off, that Stuart Langridge recommended it to me. After a quick browse I was sold, and got the live CD. Problems quickly arose.

The biggest problem I had was the perennial problem for former Windows users: wireless networking. My wireless card just wouldn’t work, and no amount of ndiswrapper was fixing it. I did briefly consider writing a device driver, but I thought that if I don’t have time to keep this site as up-to-date as I’d like, then maybe that was a tad ambitious. Instead I got a new wireless card that had a manufacturers driver… which didn’t work. Bollocks.

That set me back a good few months. Sadly, in my old flat, the router was too far for a wired connection, and couldn’t be moved to a more convenient location. I got round this inconvenience by moving flat and using good ol’ ethernet. Sometimes we use a sledgehammer on a nut because it’s so much more satisfying than a nutcracker, or repeatedly smashing our head against the wall that is wireless support.

That gripe aside, it’s mostly good. Beryl is impressive (though mostly just eye candy), and package management is just amazing. Having absolutely everything on the system update automatically, safely and uniformly is just how it should work. The individual updaters on Windows seem positively prehistoric in comparison.

One last complaint though: why the hell does everyone love Amarok. It’s feature-rich, sure, but it looks and behaves like an absolute dog. Want to go randomly through your music collection? You don’t want collection, you want a playlist. The play/pause/forward controls? Tiny and relegated to the middle of the bottom edge. Have the designers never heard of Fitt’s Law? Though I used to be a big proponent of WinAmp, I prefer iTunes now and nothing on Linux comes close.

This is, according to WordPress, the 600th post I’ve made since I started Solitude way back in January 2003. A lot of time has passed, lot of changes, and lot of silly things said (as well as the odd gem). I did consider going back through the entire archive and pointing out all the places I disagree with myself, but I figure that could take a while.

No grand promises about posting more, or better, or anything like that; just a marker to say we’re still going.

Things have been quiet here for the last few months for a number of reasons: moving flat, getting internet back, changing jobs (within the same company), and a bunch of other reasons (some of which I’ll be mentioning soon).

One of the big reasons for a slowdown in the number of posts is that I’ve been unhappy with my current content management system, Finetto, for quite some time. It was designed with a fairly limited amount of functionality in mind, primarily to help out a friend who needed a CMS quickly. It was also one of the first big PHP projects I had undertaken, before I really understood the language, and while I was still quite fresh to real programming (I have been programming since I was about 8 but not in a consistent and structured way). The design quickly became messy as more features were required. I could go back and rewrite the whole thing, with some interesting ideas, or I could just enhance an existing product.

In the last month or so, I’ve taken the time to pull data out of the old CMS and migrate it to everyone’s favourite CMS, WordPress. I’ve been talking about doing this for a while, and one of my long stated goals for any such transition is that it would be functionally seamless for end users. Since I actually switched a few weeks ago and no-one seems to have noticed, I’ll call that one a success. As an aside, the recent feed problems were not related to the WP switch.

The switch itself was pretty painless. WP is easy to set-up, the design I used on the old CMS was easy enough to convert (using standards-based design helps), and the data was easy enough to migrate on the WP side. The only trick was actually pulling the data out of the old CMS. While it’s file-system based storage was exceptionally quick, it wasn’t the easiest to manipulate.

Expect some WP plugins to appear soon.

Apologies for any recent feed problems you’ve been experiencing. As part of an effort to try and consolidate all my feeds (about 6), I’ve decided to outsource the URL to something a bit more permanent, in the form of FeedBurner.

There was a rather silly problem with cyclical redirects, but it’s all sorted now. I advise that you change your subscription to the Solitude FeedBurner Feed, if your feed reader of choice has not already done so.

Yes, it’s massively late (March should be ready soon), but it’s time for the February Film Fight.

First up is an Academy Award winning performance by Forest Whitaker in the terribly titled The Last King of Scotland. The story of a young doctor who wants to see the world, and ends up becoming the personal physician of Ida Amin, the Ugandan dictator. As we see Amin rise to power, Whitaker masterfully portrays the paranoid, capricious nature of the General. A powerful and terrifying movie.

The much vaunted Babel ties together four disparate stories, transcending language barriers and racial backgrounds to show us how we’re all the same, or at least that’s the idea. In practice, the links between the stories are tenuous at best, the characters are in bad situations through every fault of their own, and very little can be done to reconcile their general idiocy with any saving graces. Despite the hype, this film is resolutely dull and the plot goes nowhere. The key point should have been a 10 minute short film; at nearly two and a half hours, it is terribly paced. Avoid.

Despite some misgivings about Leonardo Dicaprio’s accent, Blood Diamond is a surprisingly good movie. It’s the story of a man caught in the illicit diamond trade in Africa, and those who will do anything to exploit him to gain a precious gem. A very honest, and at times brutal, reflection on the insanity and greed of man. More great performances throughout make this well worth seeing.

I like Michel Gondry. His music videos are great, some of his movies have been genius but, sadly, The Science of Sleep is not. It includes his usual mix of oddball characters and usual visuals, which is just fine; we’re happy with visually interesting cinema. What does not work is when you have a lead character who wants to be a playful childish twenty something, but actually comes across as a creepy stalker type. Breaking and entering is not a sign of mental stability, folks. Building out from this guy, there’s nowhere you can really go. A sad mistake.

Since everyone has no doubt seen Hot Fuzz I’ll make this brief. Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Edgar Wright, ITV drama piss-takes, buddy cop films, and some fairly dark humour all brought together. Genius. Go see.

Finally, The Number 23 has Jim Carrey in serious mode. After he begins reading a novel he receives as a gift, he begins drawing parallels between his life and the main character, and the constant reappearance of the number 23 in both their lives. The first two acts deal with these coincidences while the final act takes a fairly take it or leave it twist. Not awful, but this film does take a few poor alleys of exploration.

Despite the near non-review, the winner this week is Hot Fuzz, though both Blood Diamond and The Last Kind of Scotland would have the weight to win in other weaker months.

P.S. March will appear when I can remember what I saw last month. I didn’t take notes which is making it trickier.