Login problem after upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) from 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) via Terminal

So as most people know, yesterday a new LTS version of Ubuntu was released, version 14.04 code name Trusty Tahr. I upgraded to this version, but not without some complications, if you are like me who only upgrade to Long Term Support versions and you are a bit too comfortable with the terminal, well my first advice will be DO NOT upgrade directly from the terminal, use the Update Manager instead. Although complications can happen either ways, but graphically it might be better.

If you are like me, and you happen to run the command;

$do-realease-upgrade -d

After running this, i simply followed the steps of normal upgrade, and it was successful with minor errors which is almost unavoidable, after restarting my system, i first i booted to the login and was still seeing 12.04, that was weird but then tried to login, i landed on a black page.

Well since at first i thought it was an issue with the unity, which probably is, i opened one of my TTY's and tried running an update and then re installing ubuntu-desktop  but still the error persisted, even created a new user as though a similar problem happened in 12.04, it was a problem with the config file and creating a new user will actually resolve the issue, but not in my case.

I am an opensource guy and one of the habbit is hitting the communities, i visited the Ubuntu G+ community, asked for suggestion, obviously, at least someone have encountered the same problem as you did, well the first response i got was to backup and reload my OS, however i was a bit positive a waited a few more hours.  This morning i got a response that made my breakthrough from +Matthew Rhodes who had same problem as i did and suggested an easy fix.

Since you have access to your TTY, go into one by hitting CTR+ALT+F1 then login with your credentials. After that, run this commands;

$sudo apt-get update

$sudo apt-get upgrade

Wait for it to complete the upgrade and then restart. This should fix your problem, but optionally if it doesn't, do this instead;

$sudo apt-get update

$sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

PROBLEM
You might encounter a minor error and you can't run apt utility with an error saying, "unmet dependencies" you can resolve this with

$sudo apt-get -f install

$sudo apt-get autoclean

$sudo apt-get autoremove

$sudo apt-get update

I wish you an adventurous Linux hack.

You wanna learn to Code?

Recently i have been getting questions:  "how can i learn to program?", "How can i become a professional programmer?" Well i have rather than an answer, but a guideline. I can only show you the door, you will be the one to walk through it.

First things first, to go into this world you need to prepare your mind, be ready to learn, be ready to code at least bunch of hours a week, if you are not enthusiastic or curious about how things work, its time to start changing your mindset. Be ready to face problems that will literally turn your brain into a hyper multitasking machine, most of all be ready to see the world differently because this world you are stepping into, you haven't heard of anything like it before.

OK i didn't mean to scare you that way, fortunate for you, this days there are more easier ways to get exposed to the programming world, unlike years ago that we literally go through books and manuals in order to learn. A bunch of web applications are developed to guide you through the basics of programming in various languages, and i am going to talk about a few here.

Codecademy 
This site my favorite, why you ask? well because it has a comprehensive introduction to Python which happens to be my favorite language, aside that if you are interested in web development, there are courses for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby and each contains a project at the end to test if you actually learnt something. This site presents you with an interactive way of learning, using an online interpreter for various languages, you can follow instructions from each chapter, write the code in the editor instantly and test your code if it works. Also there are hints to somewhat "difficult" tasks in case you can't find your way. Also you gather points from actually completing modules, and they have something called streak, which is just a measurement of  consecutive days you spent completing tasks. Additionally, after completing a language training, you can choose to start learning some API's like that of twitter, facebook e.t.c and guess what? its completely free.

Code School
This web platform is similar to Codecademy in a way, with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby (Ruby on Rails). But it additionally have courses on Objective-C, iOS development, using version control systems (GIT), JQuery and a bunch of other API's. Though unlike Codecademy, some courses have charges.

Haskell
If you are curious about functional programming languages, haskell is a  place to start, this site gives a short introduction to haskell programming language interactively, giving you an overview of the concept and learning some basic syntax.

There are many other sites you can use to learn aside this one's, sites such as  Cousera  and  Udacity  where you can find full university course lectures in video with interactive course works and  tasks, which you can do to test your knowledge and also certificates are awarded in some courses to those who satisfy the requirements of the courses.

Not being in school is not an excuse to not educate yourself, this is the 21st century, you can go to school online and self educate yourself at home.

Future of development cost.

Development cost depends on various factors such as, availability of developers of the given domain, size of the project, number of technologies to be used (i.e if more than one, is there need to get a developer for each technology or one developer with knowledge of all can handle the job).

This days there has been a call for everyone to know how to code, with tech celebrities and entrepreneurs supporting the project "Code a day" (code.org) and schools introducing programming at elementary level. Even though not everyone will want to follow this path as a career, there will be a huge amount of hubby developers. If this is the case, everyone will probably develop his or her own software, that really doesn't seem practical but with availability of open source tools out there for anyone to fork, build and use, anything could happen.

So what happens when 80% of the population knows how to code, and each person either freelance to get extra cash or works as a full time professional. With this much developers, probably a lot of people will be competing for one job, this means that people can bid for a job, and everyone will like to make his or her price as low as possible in order to get the job, which will probably affect the amount it takes to develop a particular kind of product.

As it is right now in sites like freelancer.com, odesk.com e.t.c, the bids to develop a particular program are so low i am beginning to think how much it will be when we have more developers. But ironically we need more developers, a lot of countries outsource their development jobs to countries like india, and china where professionals do a work for less price, and some countries outsource because there are no good developers to get the job done where they are.

This is just a personal evaluation as i can't predict the future, and i know many of you are thinking about the same thing. Give me your feedback on what you think will happen to development in the future.