Alison Young

First impressions

The upgrade took place the evening Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 was released. The upgrade took a long time primarily as the result of a slow internet connection. Total download size came to 830Mb of packages. Majority of the installation occurred while I slept, stopping only to ask me about modified configuration files and completed pretty quickly after. Following a  reboot, I found in the tradition of Ubuntu upgrades all my settings had been remembered; such as what applications were open, tabs open in FireFox and desktop effects.

Below are my very first impressions from the hours immediately following the upgrade, symbols indicating what I didn’t like, was uncertain about and liked.
- much, much longer boot time
- weak stability, crashed twice in a matter of hours after upgrade.
- current graphics card insufficient for advanced desktop effects.
~ FireFox 3 beta – url bar bulky, some beloved extensions aren’t supported,
+ better management of system resources, CPU less busy.
+ power management when using battery seems better – need to do more testing.
+ normal desktop effects more stable.

A month later

After a few minor updates the system has stablised considerably and I haven’t experienced any further crashes akin to the first few immediately following upgrade. I’ve discovered some very useful browser extensions which have somewhat replaced ones not yet supported by FF3.

Discovered that there are difficulties getting sound to work everywhere; I must choose whether to use sound in a browser or everywhere else. This is an ongoing annoyance which is somewhat circumvented by using Miro to watch youtube videos and downloading pod and vodcasts instead of streaming from websites. While not dissimilar to how I’d usually deal with such media, the limitations have changed my behaviour somewhat. I’m also required to restart X when I have to watch or listen to something in my broswer in order to be able to have sound in VLC, Miro or Rhythmbox after. Need to seek assistance with getting the sound problems fixed. I suspect if I change my audio server settings I can recify this problem. PulseAudio installation and configuration may demand a separate blog post.

Overall I’d have to say I’m reasonably content with Hardy, some of the limitations I’m experiencing are a result of my mildly dated hardware and not the operating system. I’ve also discovered applications that are equivalent to those enjoyed by my fellow Windows and Mac user friends. Expect a joyous update when I solve the current audio frustrations.

Today I decided to officially close my old Wordpress blog and announce this site everywhere. Mostly that means pimping it on Twitter where most people who read my blog will find it. Adjust your readers and bookmarks accordingly. I’m still fine-tuning a few things but in general we’re ready to roll.

All the posts from my old blog with comments have been imported across but all new updates will go here. Welcome aboard and I will be writing more regularly I promise!

If you’d like to be added to my blogroll then just let me know. Alternatively if you’d like me to remove or update your information then same goes. Enjoy new layout, I’ve put a lot of work into transforming the generic Kubrick WP Theme into the theme I’d been wanting for my site. If something breaks or doesn’t do what it should please let me know.

This is just a quick post to make the transition all official. Such a small and otherwise unremarkable post as this is actually the first post I’m making from http://alison-young.com which is exciting for me.

For the meantime you’ll be seeing the WP Classic theme while I get things finetuned in the Ali theme. I’d prefer to have a potentially aesthetically unpleasing theme that’s complete over my aesthetically pleasing but fragmented theme. Please be patient, I’m working quite hard on this currently and using a combination of current self-taught and years ago university-taught skills to get things done. This may not be the most efficient method but certainly the most educational and interesting.

Update: following a couple more hours at tweaking the CSS I’m more satisfied with how things look now overall. Still puzzling over why the header seems to be approximately 2px to the right of everything else and also wish to adjust content order in right column in addition to applying text colour scheme from plan. To keep things rolling I’m switching focus from format to content for a while to give my mind a break after a day of deciphering and interpreting CSS.