I already have the Widgets Plus Google-Plus (aka Google+) widget on my official Los Angeles Daily News-sponsored, Movable Type-running blog, and today I added it to this blog, which runs under Ode.

I had to tweak more than a couple of parameters to fit the widget in the 178px space in Click, but for the 235px space at

Posted: Oct 24, 2011 2:51pm UTC

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I’m in the process of moving the entries from this blog into my new site at http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog. Eventually I hope to have the Debian posts on that blog, running under the Ode platform, appearing with their own theme, something (i.e. different themes for different parts of the same site) that is very possible to do in Ode, a system developed by Rob Reed to use flat files like FlatPress, but in a less-WordPress-ish and more Blosxom-y way.

Today I turned off comments for all of these FlatPress blog entries because they have been attracting a significant amount of spam.

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ZDNet writer David Gerwitz is so fed up with the way his co-located Linux server responded to an upgrade (by not running) that he's made a huge deal out of giving up Linux for Windows. On a server.

Fellow ZDNet writer and Linux partisan Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols (aka SJVN) wonders what all the shouting is about.

In case you hadn't guessed, I'm with SJVN on this one. Sure I've bricked a few Linux and BSD installations in my time, but when it comes to production systems, it's extremely easy to stay on the straight and narrow with Linux and BSD. Upgrades can be tricky, but that's true for Windows, too. I'm taking upgrades from one release to another.

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Ever since Ubuntu shipped its first long-term-support release, the 6.06 Dapper Drake (one of my all-time favorites by the way), the distro's LTS editions have enjoyed three years of support on the desktop and five years on the server.

Now Canonical is extending desktop support for the upcoming 12.04 LTS (to be named Precise Pangolin) to a full five years on both the desktop and server, making the release that much more compelling for enterprise users and others (like myself) who might not necessarily stick with the release for the full five years but want the option of doing so.

It makes the quality and stability of this next release that much more important, as SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth enumerated in a blog post yesterday.

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I've seen these Google+ widgets popping up all over. Here's where you can get one.

I decided to give the OpenShot video editor for Linux another try.

Not entirely satisfied with my last effort in OpenShot, I wanted to try something else, and that something turned out to be Blender's Video Sequence Editor feature. That was a resounding failure. I had no idea how to do just about anything, and I find the Blender UI extremely uninviting.

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Debian has been entirely sane and usable for me from Etch through Lenny and now Squeeze. Can I count on Wheezy to be as good or better when it becomes the Stable release?

I say this because of all the trouble I now only see and hear about but don't experience with new technologies on the desktop that aren't quite (or at all) ready for production and sap users' ability to do much but try to get things working.

I've been there, and if that's your thing (latest, greatest), then have at it. I've never had fewer problems than when riding Debian Stable.