I am informed one way to become a better writer is to write. Then write some more. And so on. This alarmed me, but not so much as it will alarm you when you discover what I have in store for you today.

Something which has been providing excitement chez Mike is our rather characterful heating system. The system is so old it was probably a little past it by the time I was born; it could charitably be described as temperamental. It provides two (theoretically) discrete services: “Heating” and “Hot Water”, controllable via a so-retro-it-would-hurt-if-it-were-not-actually-from-the-70s control device. In this context, “controllable” should be read as “often not controllable”.

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.