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...