Sky's Blog

The ways I choose to get regular exercise are hiking and biking. I never could stand “going to the gym” and doing an indoor workout. It always seemed to me that there was little point in getting in the car, driving somewhere, parking, going inside to exercise on machines, getting all sweaty, then back in the car, and driving home again. And running was always hard on my feet and knees, so although I did run for a few years (up and down San Francisco hills), it didn’t really last.

I find that hiking 10+ miles with a 20-lb pack gives me an opportunity to clear my mind for 3 hours, see some of the city (or the surrounding territory), work off a thousand or so calories, take a few interesting photos, and see people doing a lot of silly things.

Read more about that iPhone app EveryTrail…

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I was amused and delighted by the topic, but a schedule conflict prevented me from attending a meeting at the Institute For The Future (IFTF) about “the quantified self” a month ago. The topic, however, is completely intriguing to me as I find my life increasingly digitized – as if it weren’t already. (See The Quantified Self Group.)

I picked up an iPhone app called EveryTrail, and have been testing it against measured walking/running courses all weekend, and also tried to use it to measure a walk from my house to the Ferry Building and back on Sunday (it was way off due to GPS inaccuracies in the skyscraper canyons of downtown San Francisco, but it’s spot-on when the GPS satellites are unobstructed, such as on the waterfront).

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I have Ubuntu 8.04 running on an old Toshiba “tablet PC” whose touch-screen no longer functions (and Windows therefore malfunctions), and yesterday Ubuntu 8.10 was released so I jumped right on the bandwagon to try to install it so I could test it out.

My choice was to install using VMWare Fusion on Macintosh OSX, so I downloaded the Ubuntu 8.10 distribution, burned a CD, installed VMWare Fusion’s 30-day trial version for OSX, and then first installed 8.04. That installation went without a hitch, as Fusion detects the CD and the version of Ubuntu and goes right ahead and without any problem installs a virtual machine that seems to run flawlessly.

Installing the 8.10 distro, however, was odd. Fusion first warned me that it was a pre-7.0 Linux distribution, but allowed me to move forward.

Once installed (which I let run overnight because it just was a terribly slow process), 8.10 did run, but “VMWare Tools” didn’t install. So I found the VMWare Tools install volume and ran a “manual” installation from Terminal. It required (automatically) recompiling a lot of modules for the (upgraded Linux) kernel. Following that process, I was able to reconfigure the screen to greater than 800×600, which I guess means that the tools were successfully installed. I installed a few plug-ins (such as Flash for the browsers) and they work just great. A bit scary, but looks like it was a success.

I didn’t need to refer to other sources, but look around if you find you need help.