Meanwhile, I’ve always assumed that dogs and cats scooped up the water in their tongue like a bucket. Turns out that was right, albeit backwards… in the slow-mo video below, you can see that dogs actually use the back of their tongue as a scoop, not the front (which is the way I would do it)!

Update: After some encouragement in the comments, Dusty sent along a video of Sarah (a six month old Gordon Setter) drinking through her snout like a straw! It may not be slow motion, but you can still clearly see her unusual approach to the problem towards the end of the video. Check it out:

… and apparently available on Zazzle.

(This stupid joke, and the linked cartoon which inspired it, will be difficult for international readers to understand. It might make slightly more sense if you replace “Andrew Bolt” with “Rush Limbaugh” as you read it, while noting that a true analogue to Limbaugh simply doesn’t exist in the Australian commentariat. Despite having our own breed of hypocritical right-wing crazies, I think it will be a long time coming before Australians would accept someone even remotely as ignorant and offensive as Limbaugh in our public conversation.)

Yesterday we adopted a beautiful, 2½ month-old Border Collie puppy. He was the more curious and attentive of two brothers, though it was still a difficult choice! He is heart-stoppingly cute, has that adorable “new puppy” smell, soft and fluffy long fur, and is already beginning to figure out the inscrutable noises of the silly humans. Po seems to be very comfortable at his new home:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So much awesome.

That’s what I would describe as “the hopes and dreams of a generation” (of Software Freedom lovers), and is the result of fantastic product definition, branding, genuine user excitement, years of incredible — and largely unsung — work of thousands of Debian developers (not to mention all the upstreams)… and a pretty substantial X factor.

Update: Whenever I talk about this chart in presentations, I always follow up with another chart which puts that incredible rising line in context: Ubuntu vs. Firefox. Interestingly, that chart is looking far less impressive today than it was last year. Which is great news… The rise and rise of Ubuntu is catching up to the star power of Firefox! Wow!

… and here’s the login screen you’ll find in the most recent release, Ubuntu 9.04. In a massive about face from the previous earthy/fleshy styles — which stood out as utterly unique and complemented Ubuntu’s “Linux for Human Beings” brand attitude — to me, this one just screams, “This is a public service announcement: You are using TECHNOLOGY.”

That said, in almost every other sense, Ubuntu 9.04 is a rocking release. In particular, it’s fantastic to see Netbook Remix and the Dust theme shipping for real, and the integrated Dovecot/Postfix mail server meta-package… Vorsprung durch Einfachheit.

Congratulations again, Ubuntu and Canonical folks!

It feels like ages ago that Pia started a company, named in such a way that I would eventually have to join… and join I did. It has been a wonderful experience, not just because it has allowed us to do great things for good money — our preferred arrangement of adjectives! — but because working together has taught us so much about business, the Open Source and ICT industries, and ourselves.

One of the nice things about the way we work is that we’ve had plenty of room for our other loves, in both our commercial and community realms. That flexibility, in turn, has changed our business. So, I’ve sunk my teeth into more technical stuff of late, while Pia has been doing lots of education related work. The up-and-down nature of consulting can sometimes be a bit scary, but the ability to evolve our business with our interests — and the changing needs of the market! — is awesome. We’re a rockin’ team.

Of course, none of what I’ve written above really helps to explain why, in the last couple of weeks, we decided to completely change everything. I suppose the flexibility bit might. Anyway, when Pia was invited to join Senator Kate Lundy’s team as a policy advisor, focusing on ICT (as an engine, not a sector), government openness and transparency, and online engagement, there was barely a heartbeat between the two of us before “yes” was the obvious answer. Pia started a week after the offer.

See, there’s a side of me that would totally take a job removing staples from parliamentary dishwashing memos in order to work in Parliament House, but Pia is not the politics tragic that I am… She’s leaping in because the recipe is right: not only are these fantastic and important things to work on, but by working with (seriously clueful) Senator Lundy, there’s a huge opportunity to actually Get Shit Done. A mission worthy of the kung fu steamroller, don’t you think?

Pia’s commute to her new office might have been more of a concern had we not bought a house and moved to Yass just before Christmas. The whole thing is surreal to me on a number of fronts: (a) we bought a house, which seems somewhat shocking among our generation, (b) we decided to buy a house in a matter of days and moved in a matter of weeks, (c) we live in Yass, and (d) we’re really, really enjoying it.

It’s so… serene. We get to spend more time with Pia’s family. There are cows on the hill behind our house. We have a back yard and a shed. The abject lack of urban convenience is improving our abject lack of routine. Win!

So, as of this anniversary we can announce that we’re taking the next logical step for the Waugh family…

We’re getting a puppy!

Happy fourth, poo.

I suppose the obvious starting point would be…

apt-get install approx

… and that’s almost all there is to it, but let’s fancy it up a bit.

In /etc/approx/approx.conf:

# use my ISP's ubuntu mirror for most packages
# use central mirrors for security, partner and ports
ubuntu     http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu
secure     http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
partner    http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu
ports      http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports
medibuntu  http://packages.medibuntu.org

# you can cache PPA packages too, see the sources.list example below
ppa        http://ppa.launchpad.net

# ISP's debian mirror, particularly handy for getting sources
debian     http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/debian

Demonstrative examples from /etc/apt/sources.list:

# get most packages from my ISP
deb http://approx:9999/ubuntu jaunty main restricted universe

# get security packages from my ISP *or* central
deb http://approx:9999/ubuntu jaunty-security main restricted universe
deb http://approx:9999/secure jaunty-security main restricted universe

# partner and medibuntu packages for naughty stuff we need
deb http://approx:9999/partner jaunty partner
deb http://approx:9999/medibuntu jaunty free non-free

# use generic PPA repository to support arbitrary PPAs!
deb http://approx:9999/ppa/jdub/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb http://approx:9999/ppa/gwibber-team/ubuntu intrepid main

Now you can configure all of your Ubuntu (or Debian) machines to grab their package lists and packages from your approx cache. No more wasted bandwidth when you’re updating, and no more wasted time when you’re stuck watching an update — this is particularly awesome for autmated installs, of course!

Other handy tidbits:

• You can use the cache to share source packages too — just change ‘deb’ to ‘deb-src’ at the beginning of the line, as usual.
• approx comes with daily and weekly cronjobs to keep your cache tidy.
• If you have a bunch of packages lying around in /var/cache/apt/archives which could be put to good use in your approx cache, just use approx-import. Very sweet.

Gosh I’m happy that someone has finally nailed this… I’m pretty sure I’ve tried every attempt to implement a dynamic apt proxy/cache that ever was. Interestingly, approx is yet another OCaml success story. Cool.

Enjoy!

This as-yet-unnamed specimen is destined to be a farm cat — yes, shock, a working cat… catching mice, vermin, etc. — but he had some time in between drinking milk and discovering the world to visit us today. There are a few more shots in my flickr feed, but no LOLcats photos sadly, as we can’t locate our invisible bicycle.

Tabby Kitten by jdubflickr