The fear of upgrading

I have a Samsung R55 running Ubuntu 9.04 and it's perfect. Everything works. WiFi, Bluetooth, suspend and hibernate. The only thing which doesn't work is playing VCDs but then that's only a decade old technology that even windows 95 can do. I'm sure when the kernel devs stop arguing over where it should go it'll get implemented eventually.

Canonical just released a new version of Ubuntu however I'm not so sure about upgrading. The news is gloomy, which I suspect is related to the fact that they only budgeted one week for the release candidate.

I tested it myself by installing it on another laptop I have. The login screen doesn't work when you use the return key after entering your password and I still haven't been able to figure out how to get empathy (the new instant messenger client) to login to facebook chat. Fixed this, delete haze.manager and it works.

So with all the issues is there any reason to upgrade? It's much better looking then the previous version that I have. It also looks like it's reading my precious VCDs I buy down the rental store (however I haven't completely tested this yet). I also tried it out in a VM at work on the Mac and it looks really good at high res.

Apart from that, nope. There's no reason to upgrade at all so I'm not going to bother.

things that annoy me about android

I have had the HTC G1 android phone for a few months now with unlimited network usage (as it should be used). There are quite a few things which really bug me.

First, at the time of writing this android v1.5 has no Unicode support so you can not text message or browse a non-English website, all you see is a bunch of square blocks. This is annoying since my provider keeps sending me Non-English messages about my service (I have repeatedly asked them not to). The solution to this problem is to hack the phone, but then that's not really a solution.

There is no PDF viewer which comes standard with the phone and although there are some available around places they all suck to the point of being unusable. Especially if your PDF is over 1 MB. Hopefully this will change in the future but right now there's not a solution that I've found readily available.

Ok, so picture this, you're reading a web page on the train to work. The train stops at your station so you need to pause what you're doing, go somewhere (maybe another train or taxi) then you want to go back to your reading. You can do that on the android however sometimes resuming reloads the web page you were halfway through reading. This is especially annoying for me because this situation comes up daily as I commute to work. Sometimes it just quits the browser if you lock the phone for too long.

I can understand the reasoning, "the user locked the phone so they're done using the app". That's great but if they're done using the app they would have quit the app first or gone back to the home screen before locking. Anything else ruins the user experience.

Apart from this sometimes I will notice my G1 freeze while it churns through some task. I don't know if that's because the G1 processor is slower compared to the newer android phones or if it is something I have installed so they get a free pass on that.

Leaving for Thailand (again)

Now that I have finished my university course I am leaving England again to live in Thailand and hopefully find a job... again. This time however it is to be permanent rather then as part of my university course so I hope you all wish me luck in finding a job.

I'm not really sure what I will end up doing. I enjoy making games because there is always some new kind of technique coming out that you can try, however most of my skills are in web development and I enjoy doing that too. Both have different challenges which flex the brain muscles. Whenever people ask me what area I want to work in specifically I'm really not sure how to answer.