Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my old laptop circa 2005). Ubuntu is a Linux distribution which focuses on making a free operating system which is simple, easy to use, and a viable alternative to Windows + Office.

I'm impressed by the consistent high-quality of the the entire OS and the included programs. I have also been very impressed with the fast performance. It has breathed fresh life into the aging machine due to how well it performs. My computer starts up in about thirty seconds and is very responsive while using it.

As an example of high-quality of the OS, take Gnautilus, which is the file and folder browser, essentially the same thing as Explorer on Windows and Finder on OS X. Gnautilus has the GUI I want from a file browser. It's beautiful, quick, and laid out in a logical fashion, which makes the discoverability of features go up. (On a side note... As much as I thought Vista was a better OS than XP, Vista's Explorer interface killed me. Its poor layout and lack of obvious features killed me. (Thanks be to God that Explorer was fixed in Windows 7.)

Screenshot of Gnautilus:

I suspect a lot of the high quality feel of everything has to do with the community feedback that is a natural part of the open source model.

I'm also amazed at the great performance Ubuntu has exhibited. I'm running a beautiful GUI (thanks go Compiz Fusion, which kicks ass by the way), a simple text editor, Firefox, a music player, with a PDF open in the background. I'm only using 396.2 MiB of memory. On Windows 7 or OS X 10.6, I would easily be using around 1.2 GiB by now. Granted, memory is incredibly cheap right now, but there's no reason to excuse that kind of performance difference.

Anyways, I suspect the problems I experienced (a temporary problem with a wireless card driver) would be fixed if the desktop market-share of Linux would grow by five or ten percent which would be enough for hardware vendors to start taking them more seriously and releasing better quality drivers. I hope it grows; competition benefits everybody.

You can download your copy (for free) here if you are interested: http://www.ubuntu.com/

A screenshot of my Desktop:

A screenshot of OpenOffice Writer 3.1:

A screenshot of one (of the many) window management options. It functions the same as Exposé does in OS X.

Snow Leopard Has Some sort of Antivirus Software Built In

Interesting. This is a big change for Apple.

Well, this is int-er-est-ing: Early testers have come across what looks like a new antivirus function within Snow Leopard. Or to put it another way, Macs don't need antivirus! Wait.

The new feature behaves like a cross between a traditional antivirus tool and the "Are you sure you want to open this?" warnings already present in Leopard. I doubt it's doing any real-time heuristic scanning and it's definitely not running as a visible app in the OS, but if it's checking .PKG and .DMG files for malware before you run or mount them, well, that sounds an awful lot like what your average Symantec, AVG or Kapersky product is intended to do.

The first report came from the Intego blog, (they make Mac antivirus software) and it's been corroborated by Snow Leopard testers over at the MacRumors forums. We'll try to test this one out as best we can, but it's looking like Apple may have slipped this ever-so-slightly unflattering feature into their new OS under the radar.

Source

Reasons why I love Gmail

A Quick History and Summary

Back on April 1st 2004, when Gmail was originally released, news of the gigantic amount of e-mail storage space Gmail users would receive quickly caused Gmail to be widely talked about. When Gmail was first released as an invitation-only beta, it boasted a whopping 1 Gigabyte of storage space per user. This completely blew other free, web-based e-mail services out of the water. For comparison, Hotmail offered a paltry 2 Megabytes of storage at the time, meaning Gmail’s storage was 500 times as big.

Today, nearly four years later, storage is virtually a non-issue with all the major webmail players: Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Hotmail offers users 5 Gigabytes of storage initially, with the promise that as they come close to using that up, more will be allotted to them. Yahoo! offers unlimited storage to all its users. And Gmail has decided upon an ever-increasing method of storage. If you visit http://www.gmail.com/ you can watch the numbers increase. At the time of this writing, Gmail offers around 7.4 Gigabytes of storage.

So, now that storage has become a non-issue, it comes down to the features of the webmail service that I’m interested in and will, ultimately, cause me to pick one service over the other.

That being said, I’ve stuck with Gmail since it came out and have been consistently happy with the feature set and pace of its development. While I have been tempted to switch back to Hotmail (due to the absolutely beautiful Hotmail and Windows Live Mail integration, which I shall perhaps write about at a later time) I’ve ultimately stuck Gmail and have been very, very pleased with my choice.

I thought that blogging about my favorite Gmail features might make a nice, interesting post, and I hope that you agree. That being said, I’ll list my favorite features of Gmail.

 

Conversation View

My first favorite feature of Gmail is its unique Conversation View. Gmail intelligently keeps all the replies to an original e-mail together, making it much easier to see what was said previously. This is most useful when you are reading old e-mails.

 

Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts is the second feature of Gmail that I appreciate on a daily basis. I’m a keyboard nut in general and the ability to manage my e-mail without using my mouse is wonderful for me.

My most commonly used shortcuts:

• j/k – newer/older conversation
• x – select/deselect conversation
• # - delete the currently selected conversation
• l – open labels box
• Shift + u/I – mark selected message as unread/read
• g +i – go to the Inbox
• ? – display keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet

Tip: You must enable Keyboard shortcuts under Gmail’s Settings to use them, as they are disabled by default.

 

Filters + Labels

One of Gmail’s unique features is how it handles sorting old mail. While traditional e-mail solutions would have you place an e-mail in a specific folder to move it out of your Inbox, Gmail invented the concept of Archiving and Labels. When you are done reading an e-mail, you press “Archive” and it is removed from your Inbox and sent to your All Mail folder. If you want to categorize the message before Archiving it, you can “label” it with any label you create (e.g. Facebook, Netflix, or Personal). If you ever want to view all your mail that bears a certain label, you can click that label.

Where this gets powerful and exciting is when you combine it while Gmail’s Filters. Filters allow you to automatically perform an action (e.g. label, archive, delete, and more) upon a new message when it meets a given criteria.

I find it useful to automatically label oft-repeated messages. For example, when I subscribed to Netflix, I would have Gmail automatically label all Netflix emails accordingly. Instead of having to read, label, then archive each Netflix email I received, instead I only had to read and archive. In addition saving me the one step per email, it also gave me the peace of mind knowing that every single Netflix email was labeled correctly.

 

Mobile Access

Gmail has superb mobile access.

I use my second generation iPod Touch to check and manage my email on the go via wifi hotspots. In addition to email, I also sync my own personal Google Calendar as well as my wife’s Google Calendar to my iPod, but I’ll write on that at a later date.