Blogs

Just over two weeks ago, on 22 February, I made a terrifying change in lifestyle. Yes, terrifying. Absolutely. But at the same time, thrilling, fun, exciting, all that wrapped up together. I left my loud, noisy, poorly air conditioned lab where, for the past several years I'd worked alongside some great, amazing people, testing and debugging Linux, Xen, VMWare and other things on Enterprise class hardware and living life. I left all that so I could go to work for a company called Canonical. I'll say it right from the start, this is a dream job.

Of course, with any new position and company, there's a bit of settling in to be done, and then a honeymoon period. I can so so far that the honeymoon is not over. I've gotten settled in, and started working in earnest on a 'First Project'. That's mostly been research and a little bit of tinkering, but I've also kept myself busy doing ISO testing for the next LTS release of Ubuntu, 10.4 or Lucid Lynx. So what was it like starting out? read more »

Today is bittersweet. In about an hour, I'll be walking out the door at I.B.M. for the second time. This time, however, the story is different, because I am leaving on my own terms. The first time, I had worked here for 6 years, before losing my job to economic factors. My second stint at Big Blue was for a team performing hardware testing on systems still in development. I've been here since October, working hard, and now I'm leaving once more.

I've been hesitant to mention where I'm going, or why. It's a silly superstition I have about jinxing a good job before it starts. But I can probably talk now without angering Murphy, or having him unleash his LAWs on me. read more »

Netbooks are quickly gaining popularity among computer users the world over. Their small footprint, long battery life, cheap price and ease of use make them ideal for carrying around town, to and from school, at work and even during travel. Pretty much all major computer vendors now sell a netbook of some sort, from Dell to HP to Lenovo and many others, and they continue to gain a strong foothold in the portable computing world.

Netbooks are generally light weight, general purpose machines. They use smaller, slower processors (the Intel Atom seems to be the most popular, IMO), many use solid state drives instead of traditional spinning platters, and most definitely do not come with optical drives (CD/DVD drives). They usually ship with Windows XP (Just when Microsoft thought that they could kill off XP, here comes the netbook) and more and more, you can buy them pre-loaded with Linux. read more »

Earlier today I sent a brief, enigmatic message via Twitter that simply said "Holy crap... I got it..." and that was all. I didn't want to say anything more than that simple phrase until I got a second e-mail confirming certain things. Now that I have, I can say more about the "It" that I got... and no, Holly did NOT give me any diseases ;-)

It started out like this when my team lead came into the lab, "Mike, we need to have a chat. I've got good news and I've got bad news..."  read more »