Rodent Regatta

Today a shipping carton arrived on my doorstep. Inside was a display carton like those you might find sitting on a retail counter. Inside the display carton were twenty (20) cardboard CD cases with two (2) CD’s in each one.

Clearly, there is money in all of this open source stuff somewhere.Made out of good materials and with nice-looking graphics, both the CD’s and the cardboard carriers were from Ubuntu or Canonical, LTD. I’m not a Linux user. I’ve never really had a notion that I’d replace my Windows laptop with anything other than a Macintosh. Yet, compelling graphics coupled with these twenty sets of open source software CD’s shipped unexpectedly to my desk make me curious.

These CD’s carry version 5.1 of the Unbuntu distro of Linux. The second CD in each package contains such things as Firefox, Open Office, Thunderbird, etc. Check it out here. I don’t know when I might need Linux, but this unexpected package and the sites that I’ve linked to make me curious. I’ll pay more attention to what Linux is doing and what Mark Shuttleworth is doing to promote it.

Back country flying presents a host of challenges. Operating conditions take a toll on aircraft that were designed for those situations. Yet, service intervals, mean time between failures and pilot flying styles alter even the most rugged aircraft’s ability to perform on a continuous basis.

You saw End of the Spear? You got a glimpse of one type of aviation need in the field of mission and humanitarian flight. Now comes word that the Quest Aircraft Company is preparing the next generation of airplanes designed for this work.

Take a look at the media gallery.

From a daydream several weeks ago to yesterday’s receipt of instructions providing my access to Joyent, things are changing. What things? What changes?

Joyent bought TextDrive. Now Joyent lists three products on their weblog. There are the “Joyent connector services. There are TextDrive’s hosting services. Then, there is the Strongspace service.

All three services are needed. They are needed by the small business, and they are needed by the freelancer providing any type of goods or services to a list of customers. The question is whether or not the small business and/or the freelancer can manage all of these features. If so, how? Let’s work an example…

Read on...

I’m visiting too many sites that expect me to make the switch now from reading to listening. There are problems with that. First, the behavior of Windows Media Player, RealPlayer and QuickTime on a Windows PC is highly variable from one PC to the next. Get them all together on a single machine and you’re simply begging to watch the turf wars as they fight it out for control of your PC. Take a look at that URL and imagine yourself trying to jot it down…Second, there remains a lot of variability from one day to the next in what passes for broadband in this country. [Hint: 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up isn’t broadband except in the marketing suites of America’s ISP’s.]

Finally, if you’ve got a well-behaved and properly-configured PC and your bandwidth is working just fine, you still lose something when a link-filled weblog entry becomes a podcast. For now, there are places where traditional entries and podcasts coexist very well. However, and strictly as an example, 43 Folders is also a shining example of a site where going all-podcast-all-the-time wouldn’t work. There is too much information there that is right-brained—you simply have to see it to fully grasp how you might use it. Take a look at that URL and imagine yourself trying to jot it down or type it in while listening to a podcast.

Meanwhile, back at the Rat Race—we’ll add podcasting here when 100Mbps up and down is the rule rather than the exception. By that time a podcast will be all-video-all-the-time complete with a clickable whiteboard showing the links as the podcaster talks. Then, I’m in.