General
Community Is More Then Just Numbers
Hopefully this gets me back into the whole blogging thing.
I have been meaning to write this for some time but oddly enough real world requires time and effort as well. We don’t often realise that Ubuntu success isn’t as much because it is a great distro but rather it is a great community.
Although this applies to most groups with in Ubuntu I would like to use this post to direct my thanks at Ubuntu-ZA. Over the last few weeks we have noticed an uptake in the number of users that pop into our irc channel #ubuntu-za or on the mailing list with issues we might have found simple or mundane but you guys have been there in full force to help out, educate, enlighten and enrich their lifes for the better.
One such case deserves special mention Kilos. He came into #ubuntu-za as a complete new user to Ubuntu. He was a Windows man before. He mentions on his blog one particular case where he was trying to mount a Floppy drive no one in #ubuntu-za had even used a floppy drive in years and yet for hours people offered help and guidance talking him through it.
I don’t want this to sound one sided on the contrary, Kilos has put far far more effort into learning then we as a team have given back. I just felt it was necessary to point this out for references. It truly amazes me how one can learn things if one puts the effort in.
Any how I am rambling I just feel it prudent to share his blog, to think that ubunu-za could have such an impact one some ones life amazes me.
Stellenbosch Ubuntu Hour
Today I was presently surprised to see a mail from Maia. She had set up and gotten started on Ubuntu-za’s first Ubuntu Hour!! Can some one say Awesome?
Of course when first reading her email I thought what no internet lets move it to the University Library, clearly not the point of Ubuntu hour which I was pointed out to by Anthony Hook so thanks 
Anthony I hope you don’t mind but I paraphrased same of your points and added them to the Wiki so that others don’t make the same mistake I did.
Blackberry Development on Linux
Dear Blackberry.
Would you please stop packaging your RIM development platform (That is written in java and runs perfectly well on Linux) in .exe format that does funky checks and api calls that fails to run in wine. Thanksbye.
On serious note I see many forum posts “Can I install this on Linux” to which all reply “No sorry you can’t” Ye you can install it on Linux but you can copy the installed files over to Linux go figure.
I would go into more details but seriously all you need is a windows box to install the files and copy them over
Also if you would like to install your applications using Linux. Take a look at barry-utils you will need at least 0.15 since bjavaloader was only included in this release. Debian has this version and there is a bug on launchpad requesting an update at least for lucid.
Gmails Label Improvements Broke BetterGmail2
Today Gmail released their improved label support. This update provided some very nice features like drag and drop emails into labels. and changing the order of your labels.
This change did how ever break BetterGmail2 a Firefox add-on. The most noticeable change was the break in the “Sub Labels“. Some of my labels only fit on the screen because the first bit is removed and then indented. Ie I have Mailing List/Ubuntu-za which now only displays Mailing List/Ubu which is rather annoying. The reason for this naming convention is Gmails Imap support does this.
but if you try to add subfolders in your mail client, they’ll become labels that look like this: Folder/Subfolder.
I hope there will be a release patch for this soon.
Best Alarm Clock Ever
I got a G1 a while ago. I have found the Alarm to be pretty lacking in the sense you can’t change the default Snooze time out from 10mins to any thing else. This is way to long I will have fallen fast asleep by the time the next one goes off and the first one wont have done any thing.
Luckily Android is open-source and some one modified the pre-installed alarm to create Alarming!.
This new-and-improved alarm functionality allows for a “Captcha on Dismiss” this sounds kinda scary but really it is amazing! Often I will press the dismiss button instead of snooze and over sleep this makes it much harder by having to press random buttons on the screen to deactivate the alarm. See the image one their home page.