I find these objectionable though – they appear to be WordPress and I guess are using a plugin to pull feeds in and publish as articles. They’re not as bad as flat out plagiarism – which I’ve experienced. Mind you even that isn’t the worst, I once wrote a howto which was CC licensed and I realised it had been ripped off when someone posted a comment on it suggesting (quite strongly) that I had taken it from the thief!

So it occurs to me that maybe this is a WordPress thing. Then again maybe not. Like so many of us I get stuck in my ways and WordPress is like a pair of comfy shoes. Maybe I should try a new platform, so I wondered what was popular out there in Ubuntu-land.

I’ve tried Drupal (I don’t like it, sorry Emma), Serendipity and Pixie (I quite liked that but baulked at the theming system). Mind you I also have quite a lot of time to myself over the next four months, maybe I should roll my own, I’ve hacked around in PHP but have never developed a large project using it.

So let me know, suggestions on a postcard. Maybe just a comment here will suffice.

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Basically it’s like spot the difference, see how many things you can spot that are wrong with it and post them here.

Here is the post in question and it is a cracker. I can think of several things that are wrong with it but see what you can come up with. Here’s a starting hint – man visudo.

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I don’t advocate copyright infringement but I do fair use.  I am regularly away from home and take a hard drive with me on which I want to have copies of DVD, rather than carry around lots of DVD.  I would have thought that a fairly simple interface was required for this.

Fortunately, Lifehacker pointed the right direction with bitRipper.

bitRipper's main interface

See, there’s nothing too complicated here – pick the track (which granted can be an art form on some DVD), choose output and start ripping.  Of course, the options are there and it uses any available codecs.

Ripping

See now that’s better.  I have used Handbrake but with mixed results and it seems top easy to click the wrong box and after sitting for an hour find that the file is, for example, soundless.  VLC can stream output which does work but tends to lose the first few seconds in a garbled mess.  Both of these have the advantage of being cross platform however.  So if you know of a Linux alternative then feel free to let me know about it.

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This is because of vi compatible mode and is easily redressed by adding “set nocompatible” in “~/.vimrc”.  I understood from this page that this was the default but I might be misreading.  It seems to be a peculiarity of Ubuntu, I didn’t notice this in RHEL, Arch or Fedora (three distributions I use fairly regularly).

Is this an indicator that vim is not perhaps as popular in Ubuntu?  I notice that most times I see a guide online it will suggest using gedit, even if invoked from the terminal.  Perhaps, as I’m not au fait with Debian, our lineage prefers the compatible mode.

I’m sure its not important and we all have our preferences for editors but I do like vim and wish that this behavior was default.  One of the paradoxes with OSS, GNU/Linux in particular, is the freedom afforded allowing us to configure our environments in whatever fashion we prefer creates a diversity that is difficult to train new users, especially between distributions.

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<rant>

Things that do not make me happy:

Spending the first of your two weeks leave that you finally managed to get at the same time as your kids in bed sick.

Your clan mates PS3 packing in.

Upgrading to Ubuntu Netbook Remix Jaunty only to find it won’t do wireless any more and that you’re going to need to install it in a VM on another box to write its documentation.

Paying insurance premiums religously only to find that after a genuine accident they don’t fancy paying out because there’s some technicality. Then your neighbour comes for coffee and laughingly tells a story about how they just poured juice down the back of the TV and are getting a new one through their insurance.

In-fighting in teams.

Trying to integrate DokuWiki and Drupal.

Spending several weeks on a calculus paper only to screw up the final result because you transposed a sign for some reason.

Writing a very clever piece of Java only to present it and someone say “why didn’t you use the method in such and such a standard object”.

Being unable to convey why using the same String object in a for loop is a bad idea in a cryptographic system (it creates new instances until garbage is collected)
Consistantly being overlooked because you “don’t have XML/XSLT” skills – despite having a track record with them.

Looking forward to the one damn thing you can eat when you have a sore throat, stawberry ice cream, only to find the store changed their opening times without telling anyone

Lastly, my number one pet hate, so big it deserves its own paragraph.

If I was a plumber, would my colleagues and neighbours expect me to fit a new bathroom for them free of charge? Should I have chosen the carpenters path then would it be reasonable to expect a free conservatory? No. So why is acceptable to expect on call IT support, application development and fixing computers riddled with viruses without so much as a damn beer?

</rant>

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