Working with application development - either on the web, on the desktop or any other place - is often quite interesting. When making new releases features are added, changed - or in rare cases removed.

As a developer - or “software product manager” - it must be an interesting challenge to keep up with the users and the market to capture the features and changes to a product, which will make it better from release to release.

I’m still enjoying the fresh new Ubunutu 9.04, and one of the nice new features is a firewall – which Canonical calls “Uncomplicated Firewall”. I’m usually not hooked on firewalls, but just for the fun of it I enabled the firewall on my laptop and it seems to work quite well. The firewall doesn’t seem to have any noticeable impact on system performance and as the laptop from time to time visits open wifi’s, it’s probably a good idea to have protection from other users on open networks.

I’ve recently wiped the hard drive of my laptop and upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04. The Linux desktop is a perfect place to do development and surf the net, but the corporate network is a Windows world and to access mail and other enterprise applications we use Citrix servers. Getting Citrix running on the new Ubuntu is easier than ever.

sudo apt-get install libmotif3
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libXm.so.3.0.2 /usr/lib/libXm.so.4

download the most recent client from Citrix.

Let’s call it lift off… This site has been online in some form or another for 10+ years. During that time I’ve been runing a static HTML site (eventually with a few CGI’s), later on Movable Type a few years and most recently an odd mixture of Wordpress, Gallery2 and custom code. During the past months I’ve been trying to make things somewhat simpler, and what you’re looking at right now, is the first step - a new look (though a standard Wordpress theme and a drastically reduced plugin collection).

Quite awhile ago I posted a little piece of javascript, which could be used to a (very) simple webpage slide show. Someone requested a version a little more advanced for use in a kiosk mode, and sure why not - updating the script with the option to set different times on the webpages displayed was a minor change, and it’s been done now.

If you’d like an updated version of a basic webpage slideshow with an option to specify the time each page is displayed, go ahead get it from the lab.