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I have just seen this photo which is being used to encourage support for the Royal British Legion (RBL) during this year’s appeal. The story behind the image, as I understand it, is that the lady shown there, Tina Thompson, lost her husband while he was on his way to a base in Cyprus. The red figure is the new “poppy man” - a man made of wire and poppies (which, to me, indicated the support given by the RBL, and by those who have bought poppies). The RBL helped Ms Thompson to keep going after her husband’s death, and to support her son. To me, this photo is incredibly emotive, showing what the RBL is really about.

Whatever you or I think of the conflicts we take part in as a nation, real people and real families in this country are affected, and need support. I’d really urge you (if you haven’t done so already) to make a donation, however small, and get a poppy to advertise the cause.

Thanks.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s latest fundraiser has gone off to a flying start, despite the usual teething problems (namely a rather garish site-notice greeting users on every page).

A (probably unforeseen) consequence of WMF’s popularity is that a video of the Foundation’s founder, Jimbo Wales,  started to fail to stream fully.  The good news?  I’ve put a copy of it on Youtube - enjoy, and try not to be scared by the eyes (and, if you can, donate :)).

Ubuntu Gutsy was released this week, and I have to say that it’s an excellent release. Some nice (and important) things:

• Wireless works immediately on my Dell Inspiron 1501, after enabling it in restricted-drivers. A great change from feisty where I had to mess around with manually installing firmware.
• ATI graphics card support from the beginning. This is something I’m very happy about, seeing as I could never get the ATI (proprietary :\) drivers to work in Feisty. I was pleasantly amazed when I had a working xserver with the drivers in gutsy.
• Desktop effects - beautiful compiz and wobbly windows!
• Tons more.

One thing that I’ve really noticed around this release is the remarkable openness and friendliness of the Ubuntu community. Everyone’s so keen to help others to get involved, and to help further the goals of the project. The great thing is that there are dozens of regions for people to get involved in as a “specialty” (marketing, translations, packaging…), yet everyone as a whole gels together, and you don’t see the massive rifts and flaming that might be commonplace on other projects.

An example of this diverse community is that involvement of some Ubunteros in an online game called “TribalWars“, where the aim is to look after a village of your own and take it to greatness (wiki). Anyway, an Ubuntu tribe has been formed - “UBU”. Join!

After a couple of years of hosting my websites on a cheap, but slow host, I’vefinally taken the leap and moved to Dreamhost, and things certainly seem to be going well. This change has given me “an excuse” to start blogging again - we’ll see if I can keep it up this time! This blog will probably focus largely on Ubuntu or Wikimedia stuff, with a little bit about my “real life” occasionally, when I remember.

So, here we go: I’ve recently upgraded two of my systems (one laptop, one desktop) to Ubuntu Gutsy, which, according to the counter on the right hand side of this page, is due out in 15 days (18 October). I opted to perform clean installs on both systems - this wasn’t by choice on the laptop, due to it running out of power half way through the in-place upgrade :(. Anyway, I get the feeling that this lead to something of a “silver lining” moment, as the system seems to be running much better than its former Feisty counterpart. The issue is that I’m running i386 Ubuntu on an AMD64 laptop. Under Feisty, this required a long string of alphabet soup to be used by grub in order to allow the system to boot at all. Unfortunately, this broke all battery monitoring stuff, and all ACPI functions. In Gutsy, however, *no* extra boot parameters were required! Yay!

So far, I’ve neglected to mention the most noticeable change with Gutsy, compared to Feisty… I am, of course, thinking of the use of compwiz by default. So, this basically prettifies Gnome, with the least of fuss - a great change from Feisty, where I gave up trying to get visual effects working well.

Surprisingly for a beta version, I’ve not come across any notable bugs, and this release is definitely a vast improvement over Feisty. Roll on October 18th!

PS: I’m desperately looking for a good theme for this blog - any suggestions would be great.