I spent some time getting Ubuntu’s new Dapper Drake release installed on my HP AMD64 box. It seems to work fine now, but it wasn’t flawless to install.

• The desktop install ISO crashed just after booting while mounting the root fs from the CD. Hard to tell what was going on, but the kernel seemed to be crapping out in some of the CD kernel routines.
• I then tried the “alternate install disk”. I tried a text mode install, and it went through flawlessly. Very nice.
• I tried to get the system to a state that would play DVDS using the 3.0 release of EasyUbuntu, a script that is supposed to install lots of useful packages. No dice.
• Automatix worked fine, and I installed the accelerated ati drivers and totem-xine, which worked fine.

Overall, I really like Ubuntu (but I liked Fedora Core 5 too).

In Emigrant’s Pass, I stopped to take some photos from their stunning vista point. One of my pictures included this tree (click on it for a larger view).

Look closely. Can you identify the species?

Yep, it’s one of these.

Addendum: I didn’t notice that it was this particular variety until I got the picture home and viewed it on my monitor. I took it at near the limit of the zoom range of my Panasonic DMC-TZ1, which is pretty remarkable.

This is just unbelievably cool.

In the late eighties, I was fascinated by the possibilities of nanotechnology as raised by Eric Drexler. Here we are twenty years later, and I get the feeling that the early promise and enthusiasm have largely been blunted by some hard realities, and I’ve been meaning to go back and reread the book again, perhaps trying to understand why that happened to be so. It turns out that I don’t have to try to dig up my dead tree version: it’s now available online.

Engines of Creation – K. Eric Drexler

If I didn’t have a queue six books deep on books I’m already working on, I’d probably try to reread it again soon, but this post will serve as a placeholder.