Lately, I have thought a little on how public and private people would choose to be, on average, if they did not need worry about intruding on others.

Previously, most aspects of a person’s life— especially their day-to-day activities —were de facto private, as there was simply no way to expose them without significant intrusion upon others. The internet is becoming ubiquitous meaning this is no longer necessarily the case. Why? Because the internet provides a perfect asynchronous medium allowing new modes of communication.

My interest was caught by jdub

michael-rhodes-computer:~ mike
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
230 ruby
72 cd
26 ls
21 rake
15 gem
14 script/server
14 irb
12 ping
11 exit
10 sudo

I’m going to Seattle for two weeks, meaning posting will be sporadic, if at all. On the work side, I am attending the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media for three days, then holidaying with a university friend for a couple of weeks.

Yesterday I upgraded my system to Ubuntu Hardy Heron Beta. This went reasonably well— for a beta release —but I did have a couple of issues. I thought it may help someone else if I posted how I fixed the problems I found.

To set the scene, this was an upgrade from Gutsy to Hardy via Ubuntu’s built in update manager, run using:

$ update-manager -d

This took around forty minutes to complete¹. It was largely autonomous, but asked a couple of questions during the update which means you cannot leave it unattended.

I am kind of imagining a Twitter-like hub service of the future. Short, sharp, “what’s up in your world” messages: “you’ve a new email from Des”, “Jim’s just got some cool sofas” or “Jason invites you for a beer in Beijing”. Funnelling everything through a constrained service— Twitter allows you just 140 characters to make your point —means it would not be overwhelming. Just a tap on the shoulder, a polite note via text to your phone (or whatever the future’s short messaging service is). There’s no need to read your email now, but we just thought you’d like to know you have a couple waiting. Your buddy is having a barbeque like, right now, get some beers and head on over. Ubiquitous connectivity without being overpowering.