Recently in Grumblings Category

I've been using Ubuntu for a few years now and quite like it. And when I saw they had released 10.04 I was excited to upgrade. The last two releases I did an upgrade-in-place with their upgrade tool and I didn't run into any major problems. So I did the same thing for this release. But that's where this story begins.

First I noticed that I was getting warnings and errors related to my X.org config. This was very alarming since I've never seen that before and I don't run any thing unusual in my x.org config. I tried a few different things to address it but could never really solve the problem. Then I noticed that rhythmbox was always crashing on me. Like all the time. Oh and my startup applications would never start up as they were supposed to. And compiz wouldn't work due to complaints about in correct driver even though I did install the correct one.

So after complaining about it for a week to my coworkers they suggested that I back up all my important stuff and then do a fresh install. Complety wipe it and install from scratch with 10.04. So I bought an external hard drive (500G) and did that. The fresh install was soooo easy and quick. I then carefully restored data back to my home folder. If you are doing this be careful not to copy back .gnome2 or .gvfs or anything .g* or at least be very cautious in doing so. Those could break things on an upgrade like this.

Conclusion- the fresh install worked beatifully. Ubuntu 10.04 works great and i'm not seeing any of the problems I had earlier. In fact it also fixed a completely separate issue I was having with my wireless card. So I'm definately still an Ubuntu fan.

I've found that is it hard to keep up your blog if you don't keep up your blog.  Sounds silly when I write it out like that, but it's true.  If you don't make time for something, then it probably won't happen on its own.  Enough said. 

It has been far too long since my last post, so... here's one now.  I recently had a new baby boy.  That has  been really cool, but my 2 year old daughter has been more difficult, at least when it comes to sleeping.

Sleep is an interesting thing.  For some people it is an absolute necessity for basic functioning from day to day.  For others it is just a nice-to-have optional sort of thing.  However, when you go for long periods of little-to-no sleep, anyone will feel the effects.

I'm trying my best to keep my lack of sleep from affecting my day to day behavior and general happiness, but it's hard.  One of the main things that helps is good food and a good shower.

So this will probably be a first in a series of posts related to software design patterns and all my inner strugglings regarding what is hype and what is real.  There are probably lot of other people out there that may have similar strugglings, and more than likely there are some out there that are blissfully unaware of the concerns.  So what am I talking about?  Well let's start where I started a while ago, with ORMs.

ORMs (Object Relational Mappers) are a basically a way to have a OO layer between your application code and your RMDBS.  There are some basic "features" of an ORM, but not all ORMs support all of these.  In any case here is a list of common features:

1. OO interface to tables, rows, functions, etc, in your database.  So you can use native application code and OOP to interact with your data.
2. A more elegant/simpler API to interact with your database.  Many ORMs use some other database API under the hood, but add routines and interfaces (or simplifies calls) that the normal API lacks.
3. Object (data object) persistence.  So that you can create an instance of some data you are modeling and then be able to store that object and revive it later with state preserved.
4. Abstract the interaction between your application code and your database such that in the future if/when you need to move to a different database you application code will require as little change as possible.  Ultimately, changing databases should be a matter of configuration files, or perhaps even less work.  And your app code wouldn't even know the difference between Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, or something else.

So a while ago at my work, "they" decided to move away from Zimbra and go with Microsoft Exchange.  The main points that made them want to switch were: 1) the calendaring/booking conference rooms/scheduling/sharing calendars didn't work very well in Zimbra and is "known to work in Exchange", and 2) email and calendaring for a large organization just needs to work.  Now- I must admit that this is my take on what has been going on, and I may be wrong here.  But, with that- my experience with Exchange has really sucked.  The points for moving to exchange are one-sided.

Exchange doesn't work well with free software.  Exchange is designed to work with Outlook, and no other client is even considered important.  They do claim to have IMAP support for other email clients, but Microsoft's IMAP seems to be unstable.  It continually has problems freezing up.  About 3-5 times per day the IMAP service on the Exchange server hangs and needs to be restarted!  Lame!  And so all Thunderbird users are stuck playing this "is my email working now?" game all the time.

The other thing is calendaring only works with Outlook clients.  Exchange doesn't support iCal/WebDAV or any other open standard.  So for calendaring we pretty much are forced to use the web interface for Exchange.  And the web interface for Exchange has two versions- a full featured one that only works on IE, and then a crippled one that is served to all other browsers.  LAME again!  So all the "features" of switching to Exchange are really only features for Windows users who use Outlook and IE.  If you use anything else, then your email and calendaring just got a whole lot worse!!

Zimbra did have some known bugs in their calendaring, especially in booking conference rooms for meetings.  However, I believe the folks at Zimbra have been working on that for their next release.  Email never was a problem with Zimbra for any user that I could tell- Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever.

But I'm not bitter.... yet.