the Spectrum Trace

Well, this is the first post I've written up on Vox for awhile. I've been really active on Pownce and twitter (more so on the former). I had written a post that I wouldn't be giving up on Vox as a blogging platform, and I had slacked off recently. I finished a semester of school and a bunch of other commitments have been popping up with regards to working at the private school. All in all, I feel like I have a bigger purpose now more than I really ever had.

One of those reasons is that I feel like working with computers again, tweaking things and making them run different as to be customized. With the release of Ubuntu 8.04 last month, I wanted to give the Linux alternative another try.

I tried it before back in the era of 6.04 and 6.10, and I understood that it had really changed a lot from when I last tried it. If you need any other reason to give it a look-see, it's got an updated GUI system that adds extra effects and functionality to the desktop, allowing for more customization than the previous versions of the operating system.

First thing I did was test it out on my PC. I have an older Gateway box running XP Home with a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 HT processor, 1.5 GB of RAM and a inexpensively acquired ATI X1950 with 512 MB on-board.

For those that don't speak technobabble: this computer is mediocre compared to some of the machines out there today. It's not a duel-core machine and it doesn't have the speediest video card for graphics, but it's served me well, and I've never had a problem with it.

I downloaded a disc image from the Ubuntu website, and I burned it at a slow speed, 8x. I discovered that there is a way to install Ubuntu without messing with the bootloader in the computer, rather just messing with the boot.ini in Windows.

Installation in this manner uses a virtual disk and doesn't partition any space on your hard drive to make it run. All you need is simply free space on your hard drive and it will make a virtual hard drive for Ubuntu to run in.

After installation, a simple restart brings you to your new boot selection screen, where all you need to do is press the down arrow key and then Enter. Then you're off to the races with Ubuntu!

There's something amiss when one-liners start becoming the only posts I might see on my Pownce feed every other day now. I'm getting pretty frustrated with people trying to integrate all of their micro-blogging profiles to make it easier for themselves to cross-post. The whole point of the various services are that they have unique ways (for the most part) to display and update your information.

Different types of information are starting to cross-pollinate across the following web services and are seriously having me consider pulling myself out of Pownce because of it.

Twitter is the very example of micro-blogging with its simple RSS accessible feeds for its users. It's fairly easy to get involved with others through @replies (where one posts the at symbol before a username somewhere in the post to get the attention of another user) and their simple social networking scheme.

Pownce is a richer Twitter in many ways that notes can be threaded as well as specialized notes that may have events (complete with iCal event formatting), links to other websites, and even the ability to upload files to your profile to share with your friends. The lack of RSS feeds in Pownce may throw off the Twitterholic and tumblr users, but for bloggers and casual Internet people, Pownce may be the choice for them.

I just wish they would all keep themselves seperate and not cross back and forth over each other with websites like helltxt.com and so on.

Gmail was released almost four years ago, and yet it is still in beta. How long is too long for a product to be in beta?
from Vox's Technology Editor

Well, it seems that Pownce is not loading for me. I guess Pownce is down.

This is rather depressing. I don't want to fill my Vox up with microblogs: that's what Vox is for.