This Old Blog

It's January 29th here in Florida (as in the rest of the world) and time once again for Primary Follies, in which the Democratic Party gets to decide on essentially nothing. We were given the political "death sentence" by the DNC because Florida's Republican-controlled legislature moved the date up to today. So the DNC, in a fit of righteous indignation, punished us Democrats and said our early vote couldn't determine how our party deligates would be divided. Well, piss on you guys. After watching the Clintons act like a pair of grand jackasses on the campaign trail, I decided to cast my vote anyway - for Barack Obama. I'm not voting for Hillary because she's a woman, I'm not voting for Hillary because she's a Clinton. To me, the Clintons have come to represent the old party machine that's screwing us over. After getting slapped around multiple times in 2000 and 2004 by the Republicans, I'm in no mood to put up with it in 2008 from the DNC....

Based on a comment left on an earlier post I pulled down and booted Simply Mepis 7. I remember Simply Mepis as the distribution that switched from using Ubuntu as its foundation to using Debian as its foundation. The reason given at the time was that Ubuntu wasn't upgrading adequately within a given release. Apparently baseline Debian was. This is the first time I've ever booted Mepis, and the experience has been quite positive. As usual I haven't devoted a lot of time checking every feature. Instead I just wanted to see if it would boot and if everything worked; everything to me being graphics, networking, sound, and multimedia codecs. Mepis boots just fine to a full KDE graphical desktop. The only issue I have is that the screen resolution is limited to 1280 by 1024. Contrast this with Ubuntu and Mint (3 and 4) which boot the screen up into 1900 by 1440. Lower resolutions always herald a later problem with choosing higher resolutions after installation. It's something...

I'm a commercial user of Trolltech's Qt on Windows. I got this in the inbox today: 28 January 2008 Dear Customer, Today, Nokia has made a public tender offer for all the shares in Trolltech. We think this is great news for both you and us. In Trolltech, we have for a long time had a vision of “Qt Everywhere”. Being acquired* by Nokia, we will continue to provide you with the most advanced cross-platform software framework for desktop and devices in the market. There will be further investments in Qt and Qtopia and an even better long-term security in your decision to choose Trolltech for your business. We are confident that with Nokia we can accelerate our cross-platform software capabilities and grow Qt and Qtopia significantly in desktop and mass-volume device markets. The plan is that we will continue our current organizational setup, operating inside Nokia as a distinct unit. Nokia is already using Qt for its PC Suite, and they aim to significantly expand the use of these t...

It's mid-winter and the start of a new year. While the weather is mild here in central Florida it's still been cloudy and rainy, so I've spent a some time downloading ISOs and booting them just to see what's available. Mint 4 KDE I've always been impressed by the quality of Mint, even if I've not used it. After reading of the announcement on Distrowatch I downloaded the current KDE beta and booted it on europa. It came up in 1920 by 1440 resolution. It's currently using KDE version 3.5, which is just fine given the overall polish that Mint KDE has applied to the KDE desktop environment. It's probably the best default look-and-feel I've ever seen delivered with any version of KDE on any distribution. What's nice about Mint 4 KDE is that everything, as usual, just works. As you can see in the screen shot above I was able to view Flash-based audio/video from CNN as well as play a DVD in the second DVD player on europa via Kaffeine. I know I've w...

No Wow, No How. It's just that Vista isn't all that good. Many of the innovations the operating system was supposed to bring--like more efficient file and communications systems--got tossed overboard as Microsoft struggled to get the OS out the door, some three years after it was first promised . Despite its hefty hardware requirements, Vista is slower than XP . When it debuted last January, incompatibilities were rampant --in part because hardware and software makers didn't feel any urgency to revamp their products to work with the new OS. The user account controls that were supposed to make users feel safer just made them feel irritated. And at $399 ($299 upgrade) for Windows Ultimate, we couldn't help feeling more than a little gouged . No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back . And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro , there...

"Their religious belief is that they'll bleed the beast, meaning the government," said Mark Shurtleff, Utah's attorney general. "They hate the government, so they'll bleed it for everything they can through welfare, tax evasion and fraud. Anderson Cooper 360 Blog, CNN Utah's Reputation as America's "Scam Capital" Grows The Utah state legislature has passed a "safe harbor" amendment to its anti-pyramid scheme statute that legalizes the types of schemes that have been prosecuted by the FTC and other states over the last 30 years. Utah has the highest concentration of multi-level marketing scheme headquarters per capita of any state in America. Utah Company's 'Mortgage Scam' The Salt Lake City headquarters of the big mortgage company, Fairbanks Capital, seems almost under siege, with accusations the company has been cheating some of America's most vulnerable homeowners... Fairbanks charged Jill Potts hundreds of dollar...

Mandriva Alpha 1 was released today. So I downloaded the ISO onto europa and booted 'er up. Mandriva Spring 2008 fired up without any issues on this hardware. Overall it's quite usable and stable for an alpha. What's more, I'm encouraged by the evolutionary polish that this release exhibits. Consider, as one example, how text is rendered. Call me silly, but I really do pay attention to how text is rendered by all the applications that run on top of Linux, especially Firefox. I find I'm spending quite a bit of time reading on-line, and with my bad (and aging) eyesight I find that crisp, clear readable text is of great importance. Firefox (2.0.0.11) running on this release of Mandriva provides the best readability experience by far of any Linux distribution I've touched to date. Every difficult web site I know about that fails to render well under older distributions renders perfectly with this combination. Consider, for example, the Eweek site. You see how it re...