I’m not really going to talk much about last week’s comics, as to be honest, I didn’t really pick up anything that floated my boat.

However I did pick up Grant Morrison’s latest issue of Batman, which has Bruce’s new girlfriend figuring out his secret identity.  I picked it up largely because online discussion seemed to indicate most people were taking the issue (specifically the reveal) as the lead in to Grant Morrison’s Batman RIP event.

While I’m intrigued, but not hugely hyped about Final Crisis, the interviews over the last few weeks regarding Batman RIP have really caught my interest.   I do like the Bat-franchise, but aside from Nightwing, I find the number of titles involved puts me off collecting them.

There’s not a lot of detail floating around at the moment as to what the story is actually about, but the hints seem to head towards Bruce retiring from his active role as Batman, with someone else taking on the cowl.

I’m really interested to see where this goes.   For a start, it seems to be following the “big event, contained to 1 franchise” mentality which served The Sinestro Corps War so well last year.  But I’m also interested in what form the plot will take.  Bruce being replaced as Batman has of course, been done before, with first Azrael and then Dick Grayson taking over the role during the Knightfall and Prodigal storylines (at least, in recent-ish years).   I can’t imagine we’d be facing a retread of those stories.

Of course, those stories separated Bruce from the crime fighting and Batman alter ego completely.  While Azrael was tearing up the town, Bruce was off having his own adventures during Knight Quest for example.   I wonder if Batman RIP will setup something Batman Beyond-ish with Bruce in more of a detective/support role to a new Batman on the streets?

At NYCC DC were teasing who might take over the role.  And that’s a good question in itself.    The three Robins are obvious candidates, but then I’d say Tim is currently too young to pull it off (not to mention he’s still fighting the idea of one day taking over from Bruce), Jason as a character is just poison at the moment, with DC not having a clue what to do with him.  Dick is possibly the most logical character, but they’re only just now starting to rebuild the Nightwing title.   Shunting Dick off into the Batman role would undo all that good work.

Maybe Grant could do some work on the Jason Todd character to make his taking over the role believable.  Or DC could take the hit on the Nightwing title.  Or maybe they could decide to sidestep the age issue and have Tim face his demons?

There’s Damien as well.  Bruce’s son with Talia, but to be honest, I don’t really know much about that character.

Either way, I’m increasingly intrigued by where this story could go.  So I think I’ll be picking up the titles to see what its about.

The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment « Content Consumer

Here’s an interesting experiment someone’s done. He set up a clean install of the latest Ubuntu, and gave his girlfriend a series of tasks, to try and see just how newbie friendly Ubuntu is these days.

It doesn’t do too badly, although some things do trip her up (and reasonably so - package installation is a big change for people used to using Windows for everything).

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but one thing I really wanted to sort out on my Ubuntu desktop, was setting it up as a LAMP server.

LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP. Essentially I wanted to get these setup so I could install web applications locally for messing about with, and for working on my own web development skills.

I had previously installed them all from the Ubuntu repositories, but I was having problems with the rights for my various applications, so wanted to have another shot at it.

Of course, like with most things in Ubuntu, the key is in the community resources. There’s a great tutorial for setting this up here. After a short bit of messing about, following the instructions, I was up and running. I got a public_html directory defined for my local user, and then installed a backup copy of this blog to run completely locally. The big advantage being that if there are new mods, or a significant upgrade, or if something’s just giving me grief on the live blog, I’ve now got a safe test environment to work in.

Following a brief look at a friend’s phpBB 3 forum, I’ve also decided to install it on my Ubuntu box as well. I’m really enjoying the idea of being able to play with these things, without them being public on the internet. Plus it gives me a platform to start looking at proper PHP coding, so hopefully I can start trying to customise my blog a bit more.

With Ubuntu 8.04 now including a Wubi installer on the CD, I thought this provided a great chance to try Ubuntu on my laptop. Wubi allows you to install Ubuntu as if it was a Windows application. It installs via Windows, but on rebooting, you get the choice of Windows or Ubuntu to boot into. If you decide you want rid of it, then boot into Windows, and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows app. The real benefit of this is that it doesn’t touch your Windows system, so for trying out Ubuntu it gives you the complete experience with none of the risk.

It works very well I must say. It installed easily, and on booting it sorted out the Linux system in the virtual disc it had created. Eventually I was faced with the usual Ubuntu login prompt and then desktop.

Unfortunately there was one thing that gave me a problem. I couldn’t get my wireless to work at all. My laptop (HP NX6110) has a Broadcom card that is apparently supported, but I had varying degrees of success via ndiswrapper and the bcm43xx drivers. Ndiswrapper at least managed to get my laptop’s wifi light to come on, but I couldn’t then get connected to my wireless network. I should say however that my ethernet worked no problem.

So, despite messing around with it for a good while, I just couldn’t get the wifi to work. I ended up removing the ubuntu installation, but I wouldn’t let this stop anyone else from trying out Wubi. Wifi is still tied up in proprietary Windows drivers for the most part, and for anyone else curious about trying Ubuntu out, I’d really recommend trying out the Wubi installation method. Everything else worked fine on my laptop on boot up (display, sound, ethernet) and its a great tool for anyone curious about Linux, but unsure about getting rid of their Windows installation.

You know, this season is off to such a strong start, and doesn’t seem to be letting up.

Probably an even stronger episode than last week, we had Helen Raynor’s second Dr Who story. Still dealing with the return of a classic enemy, this time she was writing the first appearance of the Sontarans in new Who.

I wasn’t a big fan of her Dalek 2-parter this year, but I’ve enjoyed her Torchwood scripts, and this was a great first part. It packed in loads, and successfully reinvented the Sontarans. Well, I say reinvented, but beyond their new blue suits, they were very true to their initial concept.

Their love of warfare was brought to the fore in a way it probably hadn’t been before, but I think this worked well to set them apart from the other alien menaces. I especially liked the touch of Staal being bitter about his race’s exclusion from the Time War. We also saw the return of some Sontaran staples. Just like in the Time Warrior, we saw the Sontarans hypnotising humans, pushing them to the point of death as a workforce. They’re also happy to use other humans in achieving their goals, with Rattigan being used in presumably much the same way as Irongron was (or indeed the Androgums in The Two Doctors).

For arc fans, we also had the third (by my count) mention of the Medusa Cascade this season. There seems to be a few arc threads putting put into the stories, and this seems to be one of the more mysterious. The Master mentioned it last year, and beyond its name, we have little idea of its significance.

Great to see Wilf back as well. His role as Donna’s Grandad has really clicked in a way Martha’s family didn’t last year.

And talking of Martha, I loved her return. Its no secret I was a fan of her character last year, and this more mature version works well. Her working for UNIT was, of course, mentioned in her Torchwood appearances, but still makes a lot of sense, much like Rose working for the alt-Torchwood. It makes sense that the Doctor’s companions would take up roles like these, unable to ignore what they’ve seen while travelling with the Doctor. Much like we’ve also seen Sarah Jane carrying on the cause (albeit without the benefit of a big organisation like Rose or Martha).

If the rest of the season can maintain this level of quality, then its fair to say it’ll have been the strongest one yet. Which is appropriate given its minor rest next year.

Hasbro have updated their site with new pictures of the Animated Ultra Magnus toy (there’s a lot of new info due to Botcon being this weekend).

I’m definitely picking this guy up.   He looks really cool

Another of probably a few linux posts today

So I found my first issue.  As its a new installation of Firefox (3.0 Beta 5), there’s no flash support.  No problem, since Firefox prompts you to install the Flash player, and even gives a few options of different ones to try.

Being a freedom-hater (and wanting to go with the known quantity) I installed the non-free Adobe plugin.

Which worked except there was no sound while Youtube videos were playing.

A quick search of Ubuntu Forums threw up this thread.  Essentially (for anyone else with this problem), all you have to do is fire up Synaptec and install libflashsupport.

Nice easy fix

Wow, that was surprisingly painless.

I had tried to upgrade my installation last night, but the servers were clearly choked with people upgrading, and it was getting nowhere, so I figured I’d wait until this morning while America was still asleep.

I kicked off the upgrade this morning, left it to its own devices for an hour and a half, and when I came back (aside from asking me if I wanted to change or keep a few config files) it was ready to reboot.

I did then have the minor issue that it hadn’t replaced Mandriva’s boot loader, but that actually makes sense.  I booted into Mandriva and updated the grub config to pick up the new Ubuntu entries and rebooted.

I must say, so far I’m impressed.  As I’ve mentioned before, the hallmark of the 7 series releases was to kill my soundcard off.  This time my sound was present and correct on booting.  My Nvidia drivers, Compiz settings, internet settings, multimedia codecs all seem to have survived the upgrade.

Its easily the smoothest one I’ve done yet.  It’ll be interesting to play with it properly, but so far I’m very impressed.  This is definitely how it should be.

Well, I just got emailed that the new version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) has been released.

Previous upgrades have usually broken my soundcard, so hopefully this one will be smoother. I may not bother upgrading tonight though. I imagine the servers will be taking a bit of a kicking from everyone wanting to check it out.

Well, the last few weeks have continued to pile on the shocks.

Simon had really risen up as one of the favourites in the first few weeks. Someone who obviously had his head screwed on straight, and wasn’t afraid to knuckle down and get the job done. While his firing was understandable, with the distinct feeling that he wasn’t management material (in which there’s no shame), it is a shame that he didn’t get to stay in the competition longer. Given the level of back stabbing and bitching going on this year, he was one of the few breaths of fresh air in the competition. His appearance on You’re Fired really just solidified what a nice bloke he is, as he took his firing on the chin. While I do see why he was fired, you really got a sense of regret from Sir Alan that he had to do it. I imagine Simon will do well out of his time on the show, as he’s one of the few to come out of it in a good light this year so far.

Then, last night, there was a further shock. I’ve held for a while that the editing of the episode is a big giveaway to who’s getting fired. As Lucinda’s team sailed through the task, I took it as given that Claire was up for the chop.

Oh how wrong I was. It was truely a shock result that Claire’s team won. Which (from the show) seemed to be largely down to a lot of luck in securing that big contract at the end of the day. From that point the episode became fairly uncomfortable viewing, as Lucinda’s team (who’d all gotten along brilliantly till that point) suddenly 180′d and the knives came out.

I’d been really rooting for Lucinda. She’s really struggled over the last few weeks, and took an awful lot of abuse from first Jenny, and then Helene which (near as I can tell) was undeserved. She really shone as a project manager though. Hers was a much more hands-off style of management than we’d seen up until this point. She assigned everyone to appropriate roles, and then let them do their job. Something that seemed to be a winning strategy. After all the flack she’d taken it was great to see her turn everything on its head and really shine. Even Margaret seemed impressed with her.

When it was announced that her team had lost, I feared the worst. But it was the sales team who’d been singled out as being at fault. Lindi’s eventual firing made sense in that context. The exclusivity offered to the cinema chain and pub were a bad move, although as was pointed out in You’re Fired, if they’d attached stronger conditions to that exclusivity, then they’d have probably gotten away with it.

I’m still not sure how far Lucinda’s going to go in the competition. There’s a few team members now who’ve taken a dislike to her, and I fear that in this competition, someone as nice as Lucinda tends to end up with a knife in their back.