Well the first order of business for reviving this blog is to improve the blog engine itself a bit. I've not messed with this code in years, so it's a little frightening to delve back in. But it appears I've at least managed to add some useful features that might encourage more writing, to wit: I now have a "save draft" option so I don't have to choose between publishing something half-written and creating things offline and then forgetting where I saved them.
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So, yeah, my blog's been dead a while. I still do a lot of tinkering with stuff, in fact so much so that I don't have time to write about it.
As usual, I have a lot of stuff ALMOST THERE which I'd like to post, including an updated version of my browser kiosk setup, and a couple of thoughts and observations on the trials and tribulations many people have migrating from Windows to Linux.
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Having spent some time trying to help people in the Ubuntu server forum, I find that a lot of people fail to grasp what Ubuntu really is and how the various versions relate (particularly the server and desktop version). That's understandable given how other distributions or operating systems are packaged, so I'm going to explain it here:
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Well Intrepid Ibex is out, and if you're a fan of Ubuntu you are probably champing at the bit to get your hardy install(s) up to the next release. Unfortunately, you're going to be competing on bandwidth with millions of others who want to do the same thing.
A clean install of Kubuntu requires just over 1 GB of packages to upgrade from Hardy to Intrepid, and dragging that much data across the cloud is just painful, I don't care how fast your ISP is. It's especially painful if you happen to have an apt-mirror server on your own LAN with a full copy of the Intrepid repository.
With Debian, of course, upgrading is just a matter of changing to the next release in /etc/apt/sources.list and doing aptitude dist-upgrade. With Ubuntu, that doesn't work out so cleanly (though I can attest that it does work if you're willing to hack around on it a bit). You have to use the do-release-upgrade script instead.
So enough pointless rambling, how do we get do-release-upgrade to recognize our local apt-mirror server? Do read on...
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I'm pretty satisfied with my job, but who doesn't keep an eye on Monster.com for that "dream job" to come along? Well, I confess to it, and since pretty much nobody reads my blog these days I guess that's not likely to get me in trouble. Honestly, though, looking at job ads only makes me depressed.
Those of you who keep tabs on the job scene, have you ever noticed the sheer preponderance of "senior" positions being advertised out there? It seems like every time I do a search on programming, unix, or Linux, I get a host of "senior" positions available, e.g.:
While this isn't so odd in and of itself, the frightening thing is that these positions are not balanced out by any number of "Junior" positions whatsoever. You NEVER see advertised "Entry level Linux admin", "Intermediate Python Developer", or "Guy with a few years of Linux experience who could probably really shine with a little guidance from a 'Senior' Unix admin". It's always "Senior" this or that...
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