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.

Long story short, I'm setting up a shiny, new iMac with OS X 10.7 (aka Lion) for my graphic artist mother whose 2003-era G5 decided to die catastrophically and quickly.

Once I figured out the ancient SpeedStream modem's PPPoE issues with her formerly SBC, currently AT&T DSL connection, got her Ethernet-equipped HP LaserJet 4000n printer on the same network as the iMac (once I figured out the printer's IP address through printer-top button-pressing voodoo), all that remained was bringing the HP Scanjet 6300c scanner to life.

It shows up in the detailed view of "About this Mac." But no software is automatically downloaded (that's how OS X 10.7 configures printers and scanners, apparently, and it dealt with the LaserJet 4000n that way).

The USB-connected scanner appears to be dead. To OS X 10.7 anyway.

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I don't have any kind of traffic counter on this site. I could look in awstats on the server. Except that I don't.

This is in contrast with my Debian blog, where every post lists the number of views. And my Daily News blog(s), all of which use Omniture to slice/dice the readership any number of ways.

I have no idea how many are reading these entries. And I'm OK with that.

I haven't been doing much of any writing lately. Most of it has to do with being overloaded with the rest of my work. It's only going to get busier next week when 1/2 of my staff goes on vacation.

The other reason I've been writing less is that I've committed, in my mind anyway, to do less of this kind of writing and more of other kinds.

It's easier to do this.

Let me turn my attention to Ode for a moment.

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Update: It's all coming together now.

Using self-hosted Wordpress with Polldaddy's Javascript embeds allows that code to pass through to the RSS feed. Hopefully I can hack the CSS for this today and be testing it tonight.

So what am I doing with all of this?

We already run online polls at Dailynews.com, and they are one of the few things our aging CMS does natively. (We need native photo galleries and video, but we have native ... polls.)

But the mechanism is awkward, there is no automatic archiving of poll results. And here's the kicker: Changing the home-page poll requires modifying the home page itself.

And I want editors to create these questions themselves. I don't need to be waiting seven days a week for editors to come up with questions, e-mail them to me, and then have me code up the poll question.

So with this combination of Poll Daddy, WordPress, RSS out of WordPress, then Feedburner (and Feedburner's BuzzBoost output), I will have a syndicated poll question that can be controlled from a WordPress blog.

If I had both the skill and the time, I'd build some of this outside of all of these vendor-supplied products. Probably the next step will be coding custom output from WordPress that eliminates the need for Feedburner to be in this equation.

As we move our entire blogging operation from Movable Type to WordPress, the more I can learn about custom output, the better, because I have a whole lot going in in Movable Type that isn't just blog listing and blog entries.

Original entry from Sept. 6, 2011:

A project that was going so well three months ago when I last worked on it ran into serious problems today.

Things that worked June 1 did not work Sept. 6.

This happens to be an unholy mix of vendors, Javascript and RSS.

Vendors can make things easier at the outset, but they change on you.

I spent the greater part of today trying to salvage the thing.

Tomorrow, moving on. More meetings than I'd like. Time to get some perspective (translation: clean up my desk).

I had to generate a report today, one that included a bunch of PDF documents, and I finally figured out how to import PDFs into LibreOffice (with the help of LO's PDF Import extension, which still appears to have Oracle's fingerprints all over it, by the way).

Call it counterintuitive, but once you bring a PDF into LibreOffice, you edit it in LibreOffice Draw.

It's amazing. You can modify the text in the PDFs, move them around, bring in additional images, create text boxes and fill them.

Then you can export the whole thing as a multi-page PDF. Did that. Looks great.

Like the title says, LibreOffice Draw is my new favorite application. This week anyway.