For a long while I worked within a large corporation with an essentially mandated Windows desktop. I learned to cope, by making use of cygwin, rxvt, ssh, etc. I imagine I'd have been a great deal less productive if I'd been forced to live within a DOS-like CMD shell all those years.

I've been working somewhere different now for more than two years and yet I still used Windows, and Cygwin even though Linux and even a Mac were supported options. Finally, this past weekend I installed Ubuntu 8.10. Despite being a long time Fedora (and previously RedHat) user, I decided to really force myself to try to learn the way of .deb and what people around me are calling the best desktop distribution around.

My first day wasn't great. Before running an update for everything installed FireFox wasn't basically unusable with around 3 seconds of delay between an action and a response. After the update, everything is much more responsive. So I've stopped working on that problem even though I suspect I need to tweak the Xorg configuration file to use the hardware driver for the integrated Intel chip in this laptop. The package manager for Ubuntu is confusing... although I have everything installed I clearly don't have truly everything. I can apt-get install flashplugin, or ruby, or any number of things the package manager doesn't show me in the GUI. The Ubuntu web pages assume that you know the name of a release, like Hardy Heron and how that relates to the version number when showing you the versions of packages for a particular distribution. I had to actually go to Wikipedia to learn about the history of Ubuntu versions in order to understand these things. Btw, if you're using your laptop with an external monitor and don't want the desktop to stretch across both and mirroring is stupid because you want the full resolution of your huge external monitor then you can disable the laptop monitor by choosing 'disable' as a resolution for the laptop monitor. Yes... clearly "disable" is a resolution. Sigh.

The second day I decided to tackle getting a few domains added to the generated /etc/resolv.conf file which is so helpfully generated automatically for you when you're using DHCP. Sadly, attempting to use the dhclient.conf to add these in has so far not worked for me and even worse still either while futzing with this file or looking at the network settings in the preferences GUI NetworkManager now no longer sets up a default route. So for the moment I've added one manually until I can spend more time disecting exactly how and why things are going wrong.

So, I've been increasingly worried that the attempts to prevent recession by reducing the prime lending rate were also counter to the need to reduce inflation. Back in June, consumer prices for the year were up 12% or so here in the US. I should cite my source, but that was months ago now. So a coworker of mine sent me this link to a piece with some rather dire predictions, http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/conrad/2008/0904.html. I then also went ahead and looked up stagflation on Wikipedia which had some more interesting information. I'm not convinced that government meddling is helpful here. And I don't see the government bailout as particularly helpful in preventing the same industry from making the same mistakes in the future.

We are about a decade into the fall of newspapers as a medium for communicating information. That's right, the current woes of the newspaper industry are the result of a vast disruptive technology, the Internet, and while publishers have seen this one coming for more than a decade they have largely been ineffective at transforming their business to take advantage of this change.

Newspapers continue to enjoy monopoly positions within their markets, and with historic returns of around 20%, it is no wonder that the wealthy enjoyed owning newspapers and reaping those returns on their investment. However, times have changed. Today newspapers deliver a stale product, like day old bread, that shows value only in areas where they provide more detailed local coverage than the local TV newscast. And advertising dollars have been shifting, especially from national advertisers, away from the newspapers and into new advertising vehicles made possible by the Internet.

So, as newspaper publishers actively manage the decline of their print business, which by the way still eeks out a profit around 6% they continue to struggle to figure out the business model that will allow them to be profitable at the same scale in this new age. Is good news really good business after all?

My belief is that newsrooms everywhere will shrink, and everyone whose job exists solely to support the print business should be preparing for the inevitable. Paper carriers, like the riders of the pony express will eventually be a thing of the past. If not because of the shift to delivery of the content electronically then perhaps due to the mundane rise in the costs of fuel. Instead of taking the whole pie for local advertising needs publishers will compete with others for just a piece of that pie. So revenues are going to decline, but so will expenses associated with the print business.

Additional pressures are coming to bear upon this industry right now, and not just cyclical pressures. The Internet enabled a small company to decimate the classifieds business many newspapers used to rely upon heavily for revenues. At this point, who hasn't at least browsed Craigslist? And however you look at it, the mortgage crisis, the rise in oil costs, and potentially even a recession all are taking their toll.

It is time for a rebirth in the publishing business. From the ashes of Tribune, McClatchy, and others will arise a new business model with some new players. That is an exicting prospect, and reason for hope.

Tags: newspapers

This was on WoW Insider, and pretty funny to me. :)

Video from Unconference

Tags: world of warcraft

Wow, thank goodness for Google. Today it helped me pretty quickly find that the problem I've been seeing with my ping times in tracert on Windows (4294967235 ms) is due to a small issue in the program where it can report this number when the ping time is less than 1ms and due to a counter issue for the AMD dual core system I now have. The fix is to install AMD Dual-Core Optimizer from AMD. Hopefully this will help in diagnosing my network problems a bit better by not having those bogus numbers in there.

Ha, this reading about strlen in gcc and x86 asm was interesting. Wonder if one needs to file a bug report on it or just blog about it? :)

I made it to Portland after a brief layover in Dallas. On the first flight there was one empty seat between myself and Steven, while the plane was otherwise packed due to the previous flight to Dallas having been cancelled. The second flight was of course packed and not terribly comfortable. Now I'm pretty tired because I'm still on east coast time internally and it's feeling like 2:30am to me. Missing Heather and the cats.

Tags: rails, railsconf
Current Mood: tired

I'll be visiting Portland, OR for the first time ever for RailsConf 2008 at the end of May. Sadly, my contacts in that area have all moved to other parts of the country. Anyone with suggestions for someone stuck near the convention center?

Tags: rails, railsconf

"Brian Jones, an Office program manager at Microsoft and the sole Microsoft employee on the Ecma Technical Committee, revealed the total number of comments that had been received in a blog posting this week."

The joy of having extremely common names means that I get to read about my other selves quite often while living in relative Internet obscurity. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone celebrating it today!

I wonder why they did that instead of this?