September 22, 2012
Ubuntu, I Am Not For Sale!
While I am interested in companies who are interested in hiring me for my services, today's news is of disappointment with one company: Canonical, the creators of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
Starting as of Ubuntu 12.10 Amazon ads will be inserted into local file searches. While this site, JRCharney.com does use Amazon to promote previous products I've used worthy of endorsement, it's one thing to see these ads on a website and see something that matches your interests, but it is another thing to embed these advertisements into Free Open Source Software.
Since my computer is kaput for probably the rest of the month (see previous post), it appears I won't be doing much involving making efforts to switch to another Linux distribution until (a) I find out it's OK to run the computer without a fan, especially since there is no heatpipe connected to it, (b) can replace the fan with one that doesn't make so much noise, (c) can replace the computer with something better (it's amazing how much computer you can get for about $200 these days), (d) can get a job that pays so I can replace the parts in my desktop. (You guys remember this site exists to show off my skills and doesn't mean I'm self employed, right?)
For everyone else who still has a computer and are using Ubuntu, there is something you can do to not be sold as a product for Canonical.
sudo dpkg --list | gawk '/lens|scope/{print $2}' | xargs sudo apt-get remove -y
You might want to check with the first two parts of that command (everything before the pipe next to xargs) to make sure that all the lens and scope packages are unity packages. I'm not real sure if scrapping all the Ubuntu Unity packages would be be a good idea just yet especially if there are things still using them. I'll let you know later.
Meanwhile, this weekend programming project involves learning Ruby. I would have to say it is far more interesting than learning Python, and I'm hoping to include more Ruby stuff in the next version of the new projects. Don't worry, Python will be there too.
