Small World

It's a small world after-all. Friends, co-workers and acquaintances all know that I have 3 main interests in life. I spend most of my time and energy in life talking about:

1. Rock Climbing
2. Politics
3. Linux (Ubuntu in particular)

For shits and giggles I read Planet Gnome and Planet Ubuntu every day during lunch. I enjoy using the products produced by these people and I learn about some interesting new products coming up before they make it into the main distributions. I don't (typically) know any of these people, I just enjoy reading about the technology.

As a result of my interests, or rather, non-interests; I usually skip/skim the conference photos and discussions of food, personal stories, etc. I'm there for my inner geek. Well today while browsing through Planet Ubuntu, I saw the following picture on Cody Somerville's blog.

HI NICK!

Imagine my surprise when I realized the sleeping guy in the photo is an old friend of mine from college! Years ago he and I lived in the same house with some other great guys who I have lost contact with. When we lived together I was a pretty rank neophyte linux user and couldn't convince my techie friend Nick that Linux was the way of the future. Imagine my surprise and joy when I found that Nick is now a contributor to Ubuntu Linux (YEAH!) and has a much more complete Launchpad page than I do.

I guess this gives me some new motivation to use Launchpad to host that SPSS -> R-CRAN translation I've been talking about. But that means I need to get off of here and get back to work so I have something to post.

The moral of the story? It's a small, small world. (and everyone should use Linux like my friend Nick!)

Ubuntu: Try II

A few months ago I tried to switch my laptop from Windows XP to Linux. In the end, it didn't work out and I had to repartition the drive. There were a couple of problems with my initial attempt to use Linux @ work.

1) OpenOffice.org is NOT 100% compatible with Miscosoft Word.
2) Microsoft Access
3) SPSS

Regarding #3, I know that SPSS now has versions that work on Linux but it's rather difficult to convince your boss to pay for a new license (over $1000) when they have a Windows license that works just fine. PSPP isn't mature enough yet to really replace SPSS in a heavy use environment and R-CRAN isn't an option since I'm the only one who knows how to use it.

Try II should yield better results. My old laptop still has Windows installed so I can use applications like SPSS and Access via VNC/RDP. As an added benefit I can make one laptop crunch the numbers while I continue to work on my main system. There are days where this results in a real productivity improvement for me.

As I become more familiar with the formatting disagreements between OOo and MS Office, my other problems should resolve on their own.