For my day job I own and oper­ate BIG Images — a large for­mat print shop. I know this is unre­lated to Ubuntu and the main focus of this blog, but this is where I got my start writ­ing soft­ware and devel­oped an inter­est in open-source tech­nol­ogy. I just fin­ished my intro­duc­tory arti­cle for my series on the future of print­ing and imag­ing. This is the first in a series describ­ing the future of print­ing and what it means for print man­u­fac­tur­ers like BIG Images and the design­ers who cre­ate the artwork.

I just fin­ished my intro­duc­tory arti­cle for my series on the future of print­ing and imag­ing. This is the first in a seriese describ­ing the future of print­ing and what it means for print man­u­fac­tur­ers like BIG Images and the design­ers who cre­ate the art­work. Check it out here: http://www.big-images.com/blog/tradeshow/02/2009/the-future-of-imaging/

Hehe…almost as good as the but­tered toast cat array, here is the fly-powered model airplane.

Yes­ter­day Steve Balmer made an inter­est­ing claim that Linux is a big­ger com­peti­tor than Apple. I would not have guessed that, but his pretty graph illus­trates the proof.

Steve Balmer shows us that unli­censed Win­dows and Linux are their two biggest competitors

I read a great arti­cle on the fail­ings of mod­ern edu­ca­tion in this rapidly evolv­ing world. The author states

Web site devel­op­ment experts said in a recent sur­vey that col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties lag behind in using the lat­est in web design tech­nol­ogy and ignore foun­da­tional lessons that would pro­duce col­lege grad­u­ates ready for the rapidly chang­ing profession.

I can attest to this. Hav­ing recently grad­u­ated from higher edu­ca­tion (recently mean­ing within the past 5 years.) They teach to much about the tool in front of you and not enough about the method­ol­ogy behind why the tool works in the first place.

Do you have any sto­ries or insights as to how Ubuntu has made you more pro­duc­tive? Would you like to share your insights? I am look­ing for peo­ple who have thoughts that would help new­com­ers and sea­soned users alike. Any­thing that can help Ubuntu users become more pro­duc­tive. Whether its with the Ubuntu OS itself, or other soft­ware tools you run on Ubuntu. Inter­ested? Drop me a line at ubun­tupro­duc­tiv­ity [at] gmail [dot] com.

The only real require­ment is your post must be rel­e­vant to the Ubuntu com­mu­nity and this blog’s focus on pro­duc­tiv­ity. Some ideas are:

• Short­cuts
• Tips and tricks
• Resources
• Soft­ware tools
• Meth­ods and workflows

Just to be up front about it, there’s no money involved. I just do this for fun and edu­ca­tion. Your reward will be sim­i­lar, includ­ing the enjoy­ment of shar­ing your expe­ri­ence + a link to your blog/site/whatever you want.

I did not know this until recently — it is pos­si­ble to con­fig­ure the java engine used by Ubuntu by run­ning this command:

sudo update-alternatives –con­fig java

You will be asked to select from a list of avail­able java engines. Sim­ply type in the num­ber of your choice and hit enter.

Choos­ing the java engine on Ubuntu 8.10

Today I was using Google Docs and lament­ing that there is no qual­ity web-based code edit­ing tool. The pre­dictabil­ity that web-based tools bring to cross-platform work is amaz­ing. Code edit­ing would be much nicer with the same pro­duc­tive toolset on every platform.

Then I found Bespin.

While I have a lot of ques­tions about this tool/service (like how secure is it to store code in “the cloud”?) I have to admit I am very impressed with the ini­tial pre­view release and can hardly wait to try it on a real project. Some of the fea­tures that really intru­ige me are:

• Syn­tax highlighting
• Col­lab­o­ra­tive editing
• Open source code base
• A very nice dark color scheme
• Inno­v­a­tive and pro­duc­tive file browser
• True cross-platform per­for­mance and predictability
• Fast per­for­mance, even on a text file with 30,000+ lines of code

Give it a try at http://bespin.mozilla.com/.

Bespin, a Mozilla Labs code editor

I recently had a prob­lem with Ubuntu 8.10 where my Add/Remove… soft­ware win­dow was empty.

My empty Add/Remove… soft­ware list

Synap­tic and apt-get via the ter­mi­nal worked great, but Add/Remove… was bro­ken. A bit of search­ing turned up this lit­tle gem that did the trick of restor­ing the list. Just run these two com­mands in your terminal:

sudo apt-get remove gnome-app-install
sudo apt-get install gnome-app-install apturl ubufox ubuntu-desktop