Facebook, Privacy…and Friends

The whole point is to make contact with people. There is that need to reach out and connect to friends and family. But this is not your old mail any more. Using new technology is fun. Also full of unintended consequences.

Here is a link to an article about privacy settings in Facebook. You can read the blog then head on out to your Facebook page and review your privacy settings.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is Here

Karmic is now available for download at the Ubuntu website.

I was answering some questions in the ubuntuforum and happen to refresh the website and voila the new page shows that Ubuntu 9.10 is ready indeed. There’s a couple of threads dedicated to people waiting for the version. It is now October 30, 07:45, after waking up I find my download ready for burning.

In the spirit of Ubuntu I urged the several threads I could find for people to use the Bittorrent method of downloading the ISO to lighten the burnden on Ubuntu servers and also foster the spirit of sharing within the community.

I don’t have a blank cd but I found a 1 GB flash stick drive. I’m going to use the feature available on Jaunty to make a bootable usb stick off of the ISO image I’ve downloaded.

It’s a faster affair to do this on a usb stick and it even gave me the option to store any settings available on the remaining space-about 286MB. Nice option although I want this to be a read only copy so I ticked the option away.

Now that Karmic is on a usb stick I can reboot my computer and it should boot into Karmic, live.

facebook: the Genie back in its Bottle

I opened a facebook account almost 2 weeks ago and it proceeded without problems. I filled all the blanks in the profile section and added my siblings and 1 or two of my friends. These are the people I am regularly sending email to. They in turn added me as friend in their account.

Yesterday a slew of email and messages started arriving in my inbox and facebook wall. Suddenly names and faces from way back to my high school days came back in a torrent. There’s this deluge of hi and hellos. It felt like I want to put the genie back in its bottle. I now can understand the appeal of social networking and the fundamental change this web tool has brought.