Getting jiggy with stuff

I love open source stuff. Yup, just wish open-ness was the name of the game on every front. Imagine what a wonderful world it would be if societies were completely open. Ok, then again we'd have to deal with more frickin morons on a regular basis, but it's not like we're not plagued with them right now!

I got my Ubuntu box all hunky dory after a sleepless night of ./configure'ing and make-make test-make install'ing. My Ubuntu box is hella sweet, and even runs winbloze. Yup, you heard right. Actually I was pleasantly surprised today - after 2 days of beating my head against the wall getting Wine to work (for some reason it won't compile on amd64 due to some libc crapola that I've not had the patience to debug just yet) - to find that VMWare has released the Linux version FREE. As in Beer tho', not in speech. I suspect that there's some open source stuff in their latest offering, which is why they're doing this. Obviously I'm talking out of my ass, since I have not researched it - I should and will. Anyway, it's glorious to have, for the first time in my feeble existence, a Linux box as my primary, with Winbloze running inside it in a VM. It's so damn cool. Ok, the only cooler thing was to get my Powerbook (and Macbook which had to get returned but that's a painful story that has scarred me for life and my therapist is making way too much money off my trauma over that episode so it won't be repeated for some time). But it's so damn freaking cool that I have a wonderous Linux box, which acts so nice, and yet runs Windows inside it so I can do stupid things like learn my Italian and Mandarin since the language CDs with their interactive teaching tools are ONLY for windows. (Bastards)

I think I spent a grand total of 20 hours getting everything running just perfectly - my Acer Aspire E360 (hella el-cheapo box from TigerDirect.com) is now connected to my 24" Dell 2405FPW and rocks like I can't describe. Actually I had serious buyers remorse right after I got the puppy and tried to put Ubuntu on it since the ATI video card gave me hell in setup. Fortunately it turns out that ATI has Linux drivers (whoda thunk) and they work! So i've now got 24 warm and fuzzy inches of pure bliss lit up with some Ubuntu loving. The buyers remorse was really about not getting hte mini mac (I had a massive lapse of reason when I purchased the machine). But it's all well since I've still got my wife's Powerbook to play with (and she's getting understandably edgy about all the love I've been giving it). I had doubts about my being able to run the crummy little Windows apps that I occassionally need to on Ubuntu. VMWare, however, makes all that grief moot.

Just in case the above was not clear enough: Ubuntu rocks. And so does Ruby on Rails, which is my newest favourite web-dev language/framework. It's brilliant. I'm thinking of making it my love slave. More on that later.

I guess I should put something down about my latest epiphanies about travel and global situations. I think Jon Stewart is doing an excellent job of that and I don't really have anything deep to add to that at this present moment. One interesting item in recent news is the whole Bill-Gates-goes-off-to-do-the-humanitarian-thing thing. I guess I should throw in my 3.5 cents into the opinion pot. I really wonder if we'll now have global health through philanthropy working in the same vein as M$'s software strategy. I can just see the news in 5 years saying "Malaria almost cured, but cure requires humans reboot after 100 hours of activity. Reboot may cause death.". Ok I'm a cynic, just shoot me now.

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