I've had an on-again off-again relationship with linux.  It's always been an attractive mistress to my usual windows habit, but in the long run I always drop it because of it's needy and demanding nature in favour of the usability and ease of use that windows provides.  You may be scoffing at that statement, but when was the last time you needed to do something in windows that could only be accomplished at the command line?

Well, with news that a new beta of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron was out I decided to give it a try.  They have a slick "inside windows install" that lets you do an almost complete install of Ubuntu inside an NTFS partition!  What it does is create a virtual disk inside a single file, very similar to how a virtual machine works, except that you actually do have to boot in to it, it's not virtual.

Once in Ubuntu, things are getting a lot better.  One of my biggest pain points in the past has been wireless networking.  In previous versions headway was made, but it never quite made it the last mile.  Well with Hardy Heron they finally got WPA integrated and automated right out of the box, and it just works.  Granted you could get it working in previous versions as well, but it was painful.

I don't want to dual boot my system, but I still want to run windows apps as well without fighting with wine for every new app.  Recently a colleague at work started running a mac with VMWare fusion which seamlessly lays a virtual machine OS overtop of your existing host OS.  I thought something like this must exist that works in Ubuntu, and I was right.

If you're running Ubuntu, I strongly urge you to check out VirtualBox.  It's an open source virtual server managed by Sun.  It's a simple install that you can do right through the package manager, and creating a new VM is easy.  It has some pretty advanced features like point in time snapshots of the vm that are taken with the vm online, but most importantly seamless integration.  I installed XP on my virtual machine to save memory (i tried vista as well and it still ran great in a vm, but I wanted as little memory usage as possible). 

So this is what it looks like using seamless integration:
 

Notice the Gnome menu at the top of the screen, and the windows taskbar at the bottom, with a desktop showing the Ubuntu system monitor, flickr uploadr (windows only app), office 2k3 installation, and pidgin.

There are still a few nags that i'm working out.  My WD Passport usb drive isn't being picked up in the VM yet and i haven't figured out why (it's not very high on the priority list right now).  To work around the problem I created a share to the /media/ folder in Ubuntu and have a drive mapped to that share in the vm, so I can still access files on external media through that, it's just not as normal an experience as having it picked up on the fly.  CD-ROM usage has also been hit and miss.  It took me about 10 tries to actually get office installed because the cdrom would randomly just stop reading from the disk.  It would hit about 50% of the install and then just stop spinning and the install would crap out saying it couldn't find file X.  I still haven't figured out what the issue there was, a bit of cursing and a couple reboots and I managed to get it to finish the install.

So far the novelty is still there and i'm enjoying it.  As long as I can get a few of the VM nags worked out, it looks like a winning combination.

is depth.  You don't build a good team on the shoulders of one person.  You build it on the shoulders of many good people. 

Luckily my wife and I make a good team.  My wife and I are in the middle or finishing our basement and I came down with a nasty cold that took me out of commission for 3 days so far, but my wife just keeps on workin, even by herself.  I usually do most of the construction work but when the need arises she steps right up to the plate.  I had to show her how to work the saw but she's a quick learner so 1 demo and she was off to the races.

Hard not to be proud of seeing your wife working with power tools :)

I'm sure everybody likes it when people comment on their blog posts, if for nothing else than to let you know that you are not simply writing in to an abyss.  However, what starts out as a pleasant reminder that your words are not being wasted can quickly turn in to a stinking sewage system of what you would normally expect to be in a sewage system...

When a blog is not wide spread, it seems to attract comments primarily from a small community of people, usually quite a few of the commenter's are familiar with each other.  These people often add relevant and intelligent comments which can often spark more conversations and further blog posts by the owner.  The odd new person will drop by and because of the tone of existing comments things usually progress in a civil manner.

As more and more new people start frequenting the blog, eventually it hits a critical mass where civility seams not to be possible.  Undoubtedly a number of people will frequently comment in a belligerent manner, calling names, putting people down, making baseless arguments about anything they can think of.  The worst part is that these people will just not leave, because apparently their purpose is not to engage in conversation or discussion, it is merely to spew filth and ruin what would otherwise be a constructive conversation.

What is even more astounding is that some of these people seem to actually be quite intelligent.  I was recently reading a post on www.smalldeadanimals.com (primarily a political discussion blog) and was quite turned off by the commenter's lack of respect for each other.  Many people had intelligent arguments to make, but were apparently unable to make them without throwing in a dash of name calling and a pinch of insults.  It got to the point where I just quit reading, from now on I'll stick to only reading the articles in my feed reader and ignore the comments, which is a shame.

SO, what do you do about this problem?  Well you could disable anonymous comments, but this isn't really a solution.  Only a portion of these people are actually scared of their identity being known, the rest of them will just say what they want to say, and they don't care if you know who they are.

You could moderate comments, but once again not a viable solution, if you have a popular blog you surely don't have time to moderate all the comments.

Or you could disable comments all together.  Yes this IS a viable option, but in my opinion not a particularly attractive one.  Instead of healing the wound we have simply cut off the whole arm. 

I personally have no experience with this myself as I don't expect to ever have a blog popular enough to worry about it, although it's a problem I would happily deal with <g>.  My personal feeling on it is that the only way for your blog commenting "community" to avoid this affliction is through strong self policing.  If you have a strong group of good commenter's who won't put up with poor manners then you might have a chance.  I think if everybody just pretended they didn't exist that would also help fix the problem (although not likely that everybody will be able to help themselves).  I'm the oldest of 3 siblings and I know all the tricks to getting a reaction, because a reaction is what it's all about.  No reaction, no fun. 

As the notorious B.I.G. said "Mo money, mo problems", true for many things besides money.