Removing Grafitti

I think this is superb - Banksy has created art that is some of the best around.
From Flickr

Email becomes a dangerous distraction

The Sydney Morning Herald ran a story on the effects of email on a persons productivity and had this to say.

"In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before."

There is more to life than email - but I do wonder about all those Twitter and IM interuptions. :)

drthomasjackson.com
The related study, at least I think it's the one, is here

iNotes in Domino 8.5

I really like the idea of being able to work without relying on email.

To a large extent I rely on sametime and my mobile phone (a really dodgy old nokia - kudos points only for the antique value).

However for those times when you do need to access email - I thought this looked kind of cool.

Domino 8.5 beta 2

Interestingly I composed an email using Chrome and could see th received email in Lite and Ultralite mode - but not in Full mode. Then again it was in a win2003 vmware

Ubuntu 8.04 on my Thinkpad T60p (Part 6)

I already had Notes 8.5 beta 1 installed on Ubuntu 8.04 and wanted to upgrade to beta 2. As this is at beta stage there is apparently no upgrade from beta 1 to beta 2 so the first thing I did was backup my Notes data directory which was in /home/myname/lotus/notes/data.

Secondly I used Synaptic to remove “ibm-lotus-notes”.

Once this was successfully completed I closed Synaptic, opened a terminal window, and ran the following commands in this particular order...

sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_notes-8.5.i586.deb
sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_activities-8.5.i586.deb
sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_cae-8.5.i586.deb
sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_sametime-8.5.i586.deb
sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_symphony-8.5.i586.deb

I was then able to start Notes from the Applications menu - There was a license agreement to accept – otherwise straight in.

It is fast – really fast.

Thanks to Ray for the pointers.

Ubuntu - White Screen at Login

This white Screen in Compiz happened again after a kernel update - I really should pay more attention to what the updates were for - but life's more interesting than that.

As before the fix was simple and quick, it's just a pity it's needed at all.

A non-techie Linux user would have difficulty.

Olympic BSOD

Who would have thought that this would happen?

Via Gizmodo

I hope the server wasn't responsible for any high wire gymnastics.

Ubuntu 8.04 on my Thinkpad T60p (Part 5)

Today there was a kernel update for Ubuntu. After the update installed I continued to work for a few hours before shutting the laptop down even though the update recommended a restart for the changes to take effect.

Later I started the laptop to check something online - only to get the "White Screen" problem. The symptom is that I could login as normal however when the desktop loads you can only see a white cursor on a white background, luckily the cursor has a dark outline :). The Compiz "Cube" effect still works.

The online howto documents all seemed to go deep into the command line to reconfigure the X Windows system. Some advice given was to update the ATI drivers or reconfigure ATI via the "aticonfig" command.

Then I remembered the EnvyNG program that I used to install the ATI drivers in the first place. I logged in to Ubuntu and chose to use the "Gnome FailSafe" desktop. Actually the FailSafe Desktop was rather nice - basically my full desktop at full resolution without the funky Compiz effects. Then I ran the "EnvyNG" program and chose the option to "install the ATI driver".

After this had completed I rebooted and found the system safe and well - all fixed and the funky effects are back - even though I don't use the cube effect that much at all but life would be poorer without the wobbly windows.