Stumbled across this during my nightly insomniac surfing time.

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
— by Mark Twain

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped
to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer
be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained
would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2
might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the
same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with
“i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear
with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12
or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi
ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz
ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud
hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

And in other and totally unrelated news…
Gnome 2.8 is out as well as X11 6.8, which has a some nice eye-candy improvements like drop-shadow and true alpha-blending (and other cool improvements/features like XDamage and XComposite.) Watch out Mac-users, your bloody good looking GUI has been challenged.

A little more relavant
is my discovery of Ubuntu Linux. Their website says: “Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “Humanity To Others”. Which they are proving by sending out free (free as in speech and free as in beer) Ubuntu installation CD’s to everyone interested. (No, not even a shipping fee or anything.) They even encourage one to order more, as shipping is usually more expensive than the CD - then you can order 10 (like I did) and give them to friends and family. Of course, like every other Linux distribution, they let you download a free CD-image, which you can burn and install if you can’t wait for the shipping. Information about both methods can be found at: http://ubuntulinux.org/download/.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to say that Ubuntu Linux is a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution and comes with kernel 2.6 and the brand spanking new Gnome 2.8 (don’t know about X11 6.8). According to the rumours Ubuntu Linux should be extremely easy to install/setup/use compared to many other Linux distributions - but I’ll have to wait for the CD’s to arrive to try it out for myself, since I don’t intend to download the 509 MB CD-image on this crumby 256k connection.