What's the best thing about Windows?  You can run Ubuntu on top of it.

Okay, so I am stuck with a locked up enterprise computer running Windows XP (... and yes we run IE6.0).  However, when I wanted to start to learn some OCaml during my spare time on my work computer I did not want to use MS Based Technology, I am not comfortable with it as a development environment. I new I had to get some flavour of Linux on it.  Linux, for me,  is the ultimate development environment, and I prefer working with it.  At first I looked at installing into full hardware virtualisation, like VMWare, Xen and VirtualBox.  I ended up trying to install Kubuntu under VirtualBox from Oracle.  It was damn slow, my Enterprise Dell Latitude D620 has no hardware virtualisation support, so the software does it, and this tends to be real slow.  Kubuntu was painfully slow using to use and for some reason it would only run in a 800x600 window.

Then I discovered Portable Ubuntu Remix (PUbuntu).  I don't know how it works, but it's great and I'm hooked.  In summary it has the following features:

• it runs Ubuntu 9.10 on top of Windows (I use it on XP, but I think it works on all versions).
• the total size is just under 4GB, so it fits on a USB nicely - this is great.
• it runs as a standalone, no need to install anything - this is awesome.
• it looks, feels and behaves just like Ubuntu.
• it comes with Synaptic / apt so you can add/remove any software, and it uses actual Ubuntu repositories, not specially developed ones.
• it's relatively fast, you can tell it's not native, but for browsing and writing code you don't notice any lag.
• It's super stable.
• The clipboard is shared between Windows and PUbuntu.
• It uses Windows as a window manager - not the best, but it is sufficient.
• Windows file system is accessable - I don't know if this is a good thing or not ;)

One cool feature it could have is to enable hibernate  This would allow me to hibernate just PUbuntu and bring it back up again to the same place when I start it again.

I really don't know what technology it uses to do this, it's not documented that I can find. And only the sourceforge page exists, the original webpage just redirects to back to sourceforge.  But it is actually running Linux, running dmesg shows the full and typical Linux log and it says it's running version 2.6.33-co-0.8.0.

... actually a little digging shows that it is running on top of coLinux, which allows you to run linux on top of Windows.  Either way I am highly impressed and use it every day now, but not at work.

 

During the week I commute between Luzern and Zurich by train.  Normally I do some work on the train, using the work issue laptop, but disconnected from the net.  For work we're stuck with Lotus Notes which has a reasonable offline mode, I can sync my mail when I get back to the office, it syncs with my Blackberry, it works mostly fine.  The problem was when I don't work I often want to send a personal email.  But I despise using my work email to send personal emails.  I used to compose the email in a text editor.

 

Recently Gmail has be brewing something in their labs.  It allows users to use Gmail offline.  This is seriously cool stuff!!  All you need to do is enable it and it will download all your emails to your local computer, this takes some time, but you can go offline before it is complete.  An icon is installed on your desktop and you can use this to access Gmail offline.  The offline version has no compromises.  You can do everything you can do while online, except, of course, things that require a connection like real-time chat.  You can search your email for keywords, and it is just as fast as when you are online.  When entering someone in the "to" field your favourite peoples names appear, like normal.  Attachments are included and can be "downloaded".  While offline an "Outbox" appears and this is where your sent mail is stored.

 

All you need to do is install gears.  It even works on IE, but I use it on chrome which I believe comes with gears built-in.

 

I highly recommend this one for those who want to use gmail on the go, without a network connection.

It's official, the Swiss are islamophobes.  What is considered a large turn-out, 57% of those voters voted "Yes" to ban minarets.  The government is going to respect the peoples choice and put this into the Swiss constitution.  I think this is totally backward and that the voting topic misses the point.  The Swiss are already known for being xenophobes, and I think the government could have done more to educate people about the consequences of such a decision.  It is not going to stop Islam in Switzerland, it is just going build a larger divide between the "traditional Swiss" and the Islamic community (many of whom are Swiss).

 

In another backward decision, the voters voted "No" on the Weapons export ban.  68% voted against.  This one is easier for me to see how poeple voted this way, since it would have had a significant impact on the economy.

 

Is there any news of this in NZ, or elsewhere?

November 27 is voting day, it is the 4th national referendum for 2009 in Switzerland.  Each referendum has one or more initiatives to vote on.  There are 3 national initatives to vote on this month, these are:

 

• Banning of Minarets - this is a peoples initiated referendum, which means someone managed to collect 100'000 signatures to start this referendum.  I think it will fail (most peoples initiated referendums fail).  I also think it's against religuous freedom and would be really bad for the image of Switzerland.  You can probably guess the way I voted.  The government recommends voting "no" on this.  UPDATE: Here is an interesting article with video, it seems that this is going to be a close call.
• Banning of the export of war material - this has been a growing industry in Switzerland in the last few years.  In 2008 around CHF800 million worth of war material (e.g. weapons) were exported, mainly to Europe, but also to North and South America, Africa and Asia.  This will have a huge affect if it comes into force.  I know people who would most likely loose their jobs.  The government recommends voting "no" on this.
• There there is some referendum on airplane taxes, I don't know much about this.  I think the government recommends voting "yes" on this one.

 

On top of the national initiatives, there are cantonal initiatives.  For the canton of Luzern (Lucerne) there are two:

 

• Voting on a project to do some study for an underground railway station in Luzern.  We already voted on this last time, but this is around the details of it.  The underground railway is a "go", I believe.  The plan is to have the Luzern station be an underground station by 2030!!  It will save a whopping 13 minutes on the train journey to Zurich (note sarcasm).  Yay, I will almost be retiring by that time.
• The other vote is around spending money on a some rescue system.  But, I don't know the details too well.

 

Okay, the reason I don't know much of the details is that my German is pretty rusty, so I only read things if I have to.  And some of these things I don't really care that much about.

I will keep you posted on the results, they will be available on voting day normally in the late afternoon.  Unlike in NZ when you have to wait how many months for all the votes to be counted?  

Okay, I need to do a geek post.  I want to learn functional programming, I have heard lots of good stuff and lots of nasty stuff about it.  But I can't comment on it unless I have tasted it.  There are 3 I am interested in.  I heard lots of good things about Erlang, it's used in many production machines, it seems to have a strong following and it's designed in such a way that you can easily upgrade a system without stopping the program.  Then there is Haskell, it seems like it's made by the super academic for the super academic, it has a steep learning curve and is purely functional, it sounds nasty.  Then there is Ocaml, apparently it's comparable in speed to C/C++, it's a mix of functional and imperative programming and the size of your code is a bit shorter than C++.

Has anybody had any experience with any of these.  I want something that is easy, and fun, to code.  Is fast.  And gives me a good taste of functional programming.  I would also possibly be able to apply it to my work in some places.  Have you seen any of these languages used in the wild, outside of academia?  If so, where have you seen them used?  What are functional program like to maintain?  With this, I am asking what happens when you come back in 6 months to update the code, is it easy to update/refactor/optimise?

In Switzerland an initiative to ban gas guzzling cars has completed it's first stage of collecting 150'000 signatures. Here is a picture. Next, I believe, it will go to parliament where it the initiative could be stopped. However, I believe this has never happened.