Ubuntu ZA

While browsing Twitter yesterday, I came accros a Swype like keyboard for Android called TouchPal.  It is free in the Android Market and I installed it and started using it.

I was immediately impressed with how it works.  It seems much more accurate and responsive than Swype and I just prefer the overall interaction with it. I like the little switch on the space bar to switch Prediction on and off.  English is not my home language so prediction can be a real pain.  The only drawback at the moment is that I could not find a Afrikaans (my home language) language pack for it. 

It even has Voice input and recognition but I have not really tried this so not sure how good this works.

It is fairly customizable and lots of settings that you can set.  The defaults works just great.

For the time being this will be my preferred and default keyboard.  Here is a screenshot of me using it in Tweetdeck (my other favourite app at the moment)

My handset details:

Handset:  HTC Desire (yes the original from a couple of years back)

Android:  Version 2.2 (Rooted ROM .. just did not had the need to upgrade)

Give it a try, you will not be sorry

 

2012 have arrived very quietly in my household, not that I can say the same for the neighbourhood.  

I only have one wish for 2012 and that is that it is better than 2011.  It was a very tough 2011 and I do not want to have a year like that again.  

Wishing everyone a good and prosperous 2012, may all you dreams, goals and wished come true.

What a year, one that I do not want to have over.  This must have been the busiest year in my 31 year working live.  I have never work this hard with the accompanied stress levels that goes with it.

The year started off for me starting a job at Old Mutual for the first 6 months of the year.  It was one of the most interesting projects that I have managed with a great team of developers.  However for some reason Old Mutual decided to treat us contractors not to well and it was time to move on.

I returned to a company that I worked for in the early 2000′s called Fundamo.  Originally I was employed to become the Software Development Manager for one of the Business Units.  For some reason this position was then canned and I was offered the Project Manager position which I accepted.  I still do not agree with the decision that the Dev Manager position was canned. It is leaving a gap in the governance around Software Development and the proper management of the Development processes.

I am Project Manager for 5 countries in the Southern part of Africa.  During Novemeber I spend a couple of days in Uganda to visit and meet the people in Uganda.  I must stay that the past 6 months was very hard and is starting to take it’s toll on me.  I am extremely tired and the frustration levels are very high.  Not sure how long I will be able to keep this up.

On the family side.  My daughter completed her second year at varsity and moves on to 3rd year next year.  My son has one little subject to complete at the beginning of 2012 and if everything goes according to plan, he will obtain his Chemical Engineering degree in March 2012.  Now the struggle starts for him to find a job, so if anybody knows of Chemical Engineering jobs, then please let me know.

To each and everybody, may you have a joyeous holiday season and a great 2012.  For me, 2012 can only be better than 2011.

Yes, I know that Oneiric (11.10) is also released but I am only getting around to upgrading my Ubuntu boxes now.  I have 2 Ubuntu desktops and decided to ugrade one of them yesterday from Maverick to Natty.  And I was pleasantly surprised how smooth the upgrade went.  It is not a new machine, in fact it is a couple of years old and run Intel graphics.

I did run in a couple of small issues:

• After re-enabling 3rd party repositories and PPA’s, there was no Natty repository for XBMC.  After some Googling I found a solution to just use the Maverick repository.  A while ago I also bought a Samsung 32″ Full HD TV which I use as my monitor and the TV is also connected to my LAN.  I run a DLNA server (minidlna) on my Ubuntu Box and stream my media through minidlna to the Samsung TV so I do not really need XBMC anymore and decided to uninstall it.
• For NZB dowmloads I used Klibido as my download client but that is not in the Natty repositories anymore and not supported at all anymore.  I did some research and went for LottaNzb which uses SABnzbd as a backend.  After some configuration and testing, I now have a working solution for all my NZB downloads.

For the time being, I have stuck to Unity but the jury is still out on whether I like it.  It is starting to grow on me but it has only been a day.  However I have seen that my old box seem to be performing a bit better than when I ran Maverick so I might just stick around with Unity.

I will be running Narry for a couple of months before upgrading to Oneiric.

My other desktop is even older and run a very old nVidia graphics card so I think that upgrade to Natty will be a bit more challenging.  But that is a task for another day.

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