Please say it ain’t friggin’ so!

The MLB trading deadline passed about 50 minutes ago as I write this, and a little over ten minutes ago I saw a breaking news alert from our local CBS affil saying Manny Ramirez is heading to the Dodgers. Except the MLB Trade Deadline page has Manny staying put in Beantown. I also checked the Blue Notes blog from the LA Times and the only thing they’re talking about is the Greg Maddux deal that fell through, so I’m waiting for verification on this breaking story.

I’ll say one thing, though. The Dodgers don’t need another outfielder or Manny’s friggin’ drama. If Ned Coletti did in fact trade for Manny I want to know what the Dodgers gave up for him. And I really hope this is the final nail in Neddy’s coffin and the s.o.b. is handed his pink slip before the season’s done. God knows the Dodger fans don’t want Manny (we already have Andru Jones, thank you very friggin’ much), and I can’t see Joe Torre wanting Manny either.

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As I finish writing this I’m seeing that Manny is in fact joining the Dodgers in a three-team deal. And this Dodger fan trapped behind enemy lines in the middle of Red Sox Nation is definitely not happy.

When did SecondLife open up their forums to non-paying members?

For as long as I (or Peng) can remember the SecondLife Forums have been off limits to us since we not only don’t pay monthly fees (due to a combination of available funds and fairly recent bugginess, plus the fact that I’m hardly on it anymore), but I was reading a post on the SL Blog from Catherine Linden about new forum discussion threads and clicked on a link to the forums, expecting the usual “I don’t recognize you. Please log in.” response. Instead I found I was looking at a page on their forums! Wow!

I did some poking around in their Linux Client Testers section to see what was going on there and I saw some nice comments about the Cool Second Life Viewer. I had seen something about it before but a quick glance didn’t show me any “have to use” features so I hadn’t gotten it yet, but after today I may have to take it for a spin the next time I pop in to check messages and to see what the September hair from Gurl 6 is. Although looking around Six Kennedy’s blog again I think I’m going to have to subscribe to her feed. She has some pretty nice specials that I’ll want to be able to catch.

Update 1:30pm Tuesday, 26 August: I’ve had to close comments for this post since it also has become a spam magnet latly. I’ll try to open comments again in a few weeks. I’d really hate to have to disable comments accross my entire blog due to the spammers.

Peng’s links for Thursday, 31 July

• Chris Blizzard: two cool things: ogg support in mozilla and canvas in IE. From the “it’s about damned time” file, Firefox 3.1 will finally support Ogg Vorbis/Theora (audio/video) files natively. Linux users have long loved the open source Ogg media formats, and now their favorite browser will know what to do with them out of the box, even on non-Linux platforms. I’m not sure what this means for codecs on OSX and Windows.
• Melissa Draper: You’re doing what now?! Ms. Draper interrupts her hiatus from blogging to post a very important Public Service Announcement on the problem with using scripts found online that use the apt “–force-yes” flag. That’s right, it’s a really bad idea. And Ultamatix (which I mentioned Saturday) uses it a lot, which makes using the successor to Automatix a really bad idea.
• Alan Pope: Ubuntu UK Podcast Episode 11 Out. The UK Ubuntu LoCo (Local Community) Team recorded some segments for their latest podcast at the recent LUGRadio Live UK 2008. Although some of us Yanks may need closed captions since we threw some tea into Boston Harbor so many years ago.

It seems I may have had more possible posts from Planet Mozilla, expect people got trapped at the Mozilla Summit thanks to a rock slide on the road they were expecting to take to Vancouver. There’s been good natured jokes about whether summit attendees were going to have to resort to lifeboat team building events, but there is an alternate route, even if it does take eight hours rather than two and a half hours.Luckily Neil Deakin, who didn’t have that many hours to spare, found an even better route to Vancouver, so he won’t have to be late for his own wedding.

Dan Glazman came up with an even funnier way to look at the problem, and in true open source fashion someone filed a bug on the problem. I can’t help but laugh at some of the comments added to it. I think I’m going to have to subscribe to it, if for no other reason than to get even more humor out of today than my favorite cheezburger joint. But hey, we found the remote!

[UPDATED] Former Googlite thinks searching can be better when it’s Cuil

A few days ago Peng told me about a story he saw in the New York Times about a new search engine from Stanford professor Tom Costello and his wife, former Google search architect Anna Patterson. I looked at their result, Cuil (pronounced cool) and I have to say it’s definitely not your old familiar search engine. My roommates and I were talking about Bananas Foster (not necessarily the ice cream from Hagen Daaz) today so I went to Cuil to see if I could find a recipe.

Sure enough, there are some recipes. But I checked out the Restaurants in New Orleans under Explore by category, and saw Brennan’s, which happens to be a place that Peng I loved going to when we were younger in New Orleans and our grandparents would take us. And sure, enough, there was a recipie for Bananas Foster from Brennan’s. Mmmmmm. Good memories, but will the roomies let me cook with an intentional flame in the skillet?

Cnet says the launch didn’t go completely well, but check out Cuil for yourself. If you’re running Firefox go to the site and click the down arrow beside your search icon. You can add the Cuil search engine to your list of engines to use in the Search Bar. Something tells me some of us may end up using Cuil more often than other engines.

What do you guys think of Cuil? Let me know in the comments.

Updated Sunday 10 August: Peng’s right when he said that Cuil too often returns poor, if not outright bad, results. I’ve gone back to doing most of my searching in Google unless I need to search for Ubuntu info, in which case I use Uboontu. Cuil has a lot of promise, but I guess I had beginner’s luck when I searched for a Bananas Foster recipe because other searches didn’t get me nearly as appropriate a list of results.

Congrats to Juan Pierre on his thievery milestone

Last night’s Dodgers win over the Giants saw a milestone reached in the bottom of the 7th inning when Juan Pierre stole his 500th base. In doing so, he also became only the fourth player in MLB history to steal at least 100 bases with three different teams.

There was also a bit of odd ball getting played again after Monday night’s double ejections over something that happened in the Dodgers’ third base dugout. In the sixth inning Casey Blake (again) hit a double that caused not one but two umpire conferences to figure out what happened. In the end the umpires went to the rule book and as Wasabi pointed out on the Blue Notes blog Rule 6.09g dictated that the umpire award extra bases, sending James Loney home (I wonder if he collected $200) and Blake to third.Check out the video of Blake’s disputed double on Ken Gurnick’s wrapup of the game for the Dodgers’ website.

I just pray to the Great Dodger in the Sky that the trade deadline passes this tomorrow afternoon without Manny Ramirez becoming a thorn in Joe Torre’s flesh. (Woops! I had the trade deadline a day earlier. Luckily it looks like Manny will go elsewhere. Unless he stays in Boston for the rest of the season.)

Peng’s links for Wednesday, 30 July

• Tom Dryer: StackSwitch and Wallpaper Plugins with Compiz 0.7.6. I had this link yesterday when I posted Tom’s post about updating Compiz Fusion, but I wanted to check it out before I wrote about it. The StackSwitch Plugin for Compiz Fusion is a nice application switcher that uses the flat desktop metaphor as a basis, and the Wallpaper Plugin finally lets GNOME users put a different wallpaper on each of their different desktops, although I’m not using it thanks to my use of Wallpaper Tray (available in the Universe repo in Ubuntu) to rotate my desktop wallpapers.
• Tom Dryer: Launchy Application Launcher Released for Linux. People who come to Linux from Windows may already be familiar with the Launchy open source application launcher. Now it’s available to penguin lovers as well.
• TualatriX: Improved version: Ubuntu Tweak 0.3.5 released! Earlier this month I wrote about the goodies added to Ubuntu Tweak 0.3.4, and with the release of Ubuntu Tweak 0.3.5 there are even more reasons to love ya some Tweak.
• Maximum PC: How-To: Install Linux Risk Free, With No Formatting or Repartitioning Required. Did you know you can check out Ubuntu without the hassle of installing it? You can, thanks to the 1-2 punch of the LiveCD and Wubi. Thanks to sharks on Ubuntu Forums for bringing this to my attention.

Peng’s links for Tuesday, 29 July

[Woops. I missed a link to a post by Celeste Lyn Paul I meant to include. -Peng]

• Joey Stafford: Colorado Ubuntu Wallpaper. I had seen this yesterday before I did my links post but I didn’t want to post it without seeing the images. Darrin Goodman, aka the Hilltop Yodeler, created some beautiful wallpaper for the Colorado Ubuntu LoCo (Local Community) Team. Most of them are 1680×1050 or 1600×1200, with a couple of 1024×768 images, but even if you can’t use the sizes very well you need to check out his wallpaper. The Greece and Italy wallpapers are so beautiful I had to write him and ask about other sizes. He may get other sizes up (the original images were taken by someone else) but he has some more wallpapers in the works. It makes me wonder if we have some Massachusetts LoCo wallpapers in the works.
• Matthew Helmke: Do your own homework. Some people on the Ubuntu Forums have posted questions from homework assignments hoping to get a short cut to the right answers. (If you’re wondering you should really do that only as a last resort when you simply can’t find the answer yourself no matter how hard you try.)  But one person posted a questionnaire from a possible job on the forums. Too bad the interviewer busted him for it. D’oh!
• New York Times: The Jetpack: From Comics to a Liftoff in the Yard. You’ll need to register with their website to read the article (it’s free) but we may finally have an answer to the musical question (It’s The Eighties, So Where’s Our) Rocket Packs?
• Celeste Lyn Paul: Implicit Save. Celeste makes some interesting observations on what some people call instant apply or instant editing, especially comparing how GNOME and KDE handle things.

I have one more link, but it’s from the “WTH???” file rather than being a tech article. In last night’s game against the Giants in Chavez Ravine, Casey Blake and Joe Torre got thrown out of the game for some things that happened completely in the dugout. Take a look at the video clip of the incident and tell me if you think Torre, if not Blake as well, has a valid complaint to file against Greg Gibson. (If that link doesn’t take you to the right video visit the story about the game and click the link for Blake and Torre ejections.)

Peng’s links for Monday, 28 July

Can you believe it’s almost August? Dang the seasons (other than maybe winter) are flying by more and more. I’m sure it’s not technology’s fault.

• Alan Pope: Demented by Design. While I support the anti-DRM work of Defective by Design, their latest effort will probably mean more people within the Mac community, especially people who work and use the Genius Bar, will like the open source community even more. +1, Alan.
• Scott Ritchie: Wine should “embrace and extend” the Microsoft Installer format. Scott has a great idea, but I wonder how well it would work in real world code. If it can work it would be a great way to help more people move to open source operating systems.
• Juan Carlos Torres: KDE 4.1: Good enough for ME. Juan Carlos give a great preview of some of the goodies coming in the new “dot release” for KDE, due tomorrow. It looks nice enough it almost makes me want to install KDE 4 on my Ubuntu box so I can take it for a test drive. Too bad I’m not sure how all of my goodies like AWN and Do, let alone Mac4Lin, would play with it.
• Mark Shuttleworth: Economic clustering and Free Software release coordination. Back in April our favorite spaceman suggested that open source devs should release most of their new versions the same day to boost the press that open source projects get. He was speaking at the Linux Symposium on Friday and great feedback on his idea. The comparison to car manufacturers that he relates really helps illustrate what he’s trying to say.

Before I close I have to pass along a picture I saw yesterday.

I can only think of two words that express how I feel about this picture. Hell. Yeah. I don’t think I could have said it better myself.

[UPDATED] SecondLife finally rolls out 1.20 viewer

[Added a link to another video from Torley. - Nanci]

It took LindenLabs 14 release clients (although many of them were misnamed betas IMO) but SecondLife version 1.20 came out last week. I was waiting to blog it until I could confirm that VWR-2778 (the annoying invisible skirt bug) is truly fixed, and when I fired it up I had to rebake my textures (Ctrl+Alt+R) and sure enough, it seems that skirts are finally showing up.

They’re calling 112 bugs as being fixed in this new version, plus we finally have the ability to use different skins, although I’m still trying to find out how to add skins to the ones available. I miss my Retro skin.

There are more things available in SecondLife 1.20, such as the appearance of “cloud people”, and there’s a handy wiki page to discover ten things you’ll want to check out in the new viewer.

This new viewer is completely optional, but I strongly recommend any female in SecondLife to upgrade to this new version, even if only for the fix to the system skirt issue that has been bugging the daylights out of many of us since last October.

While you’re updating your SecondLife don’t forget to check out Torley Linden’s seventh set of QuickTip videos. I definitely want to check out the Customized Speech Gestures, Lip Syncing (while talking, not singing, naturally), sitting tricks and a whole lot more. YAYZERAMA, indeed!

Updated 28 July 9:12am: Woops! I knew I had a video from Torley that specifically addressed this new release but I had it flagged wrong so it didn’t come up when I was looking at the tings I wanted to blog. It’s Torley’s Video Tip of the Week #43 – What’s new in SecondLife 1.20! Sorry about that.

Walter O’Mally joins the Hall of Fame

Today Walter O’Malley, former owner of the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers, will be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, in a ceremony that some say is “long overdue.”

Naturally there are many tributes appearing in ink (or pixels) but I saw two that I couldn’t keep to myself. The first one is from the Los Angeles Times, who talked to Billy DeLury, who was a mere office boy when the Dodgers won the pennant in 1955. O’Malley walked up to him and asked for his size. DeLury didn’t know what size the boss had in mind, but it turns out he was asking for DeLury’s ring size. Yes, the office boy got a World Series ring, just for being a part of the office staff for the Brooklyn Dodgers that year.

The other is from one of the coaches O’Malley hired, Tommy Lasorda. Tommy sheds light on a part of the move to Los Angeles fifty years ago that I suspect many of us may not be aware of.

For even more information about this incredible owner you can visit the website one of his sons created to celebrate him.

Of course O’Malley isn’t the only person being inducted today. The list of inductees also includes Rich “Goose” Gossage, Dick Williams, Barney Dreyfuss, Bowie Kuhn and Billy Southworth.

For complete coverage on today’s induction ceremony visit MLB.com’s Hall of Fame area as well as the National Baseball Hall of Fame website. You can see the ceremony at 1:30 PM (Eastern Time) on MLB.com and ESPN Classic (their site doesn’t recognize Flash 10 yet). ESPN2 will air the ceremony tomorrow.

ADDENDUM: You can also catch the Hall of Fame induction ceremony on BaseballChannel.tv.