[UPDATED] An update from Peng

Yesterday ended up being busier than I expected, and last night my computer shut down without warning. When I fired it back up this am I found magic blue smoke coming from my year old power supply, so I am going to be offline for a while.

As a result I won’t be able to help get Mac4Lin 1.0 ready for release, and since I’m typing this from a roomie’s computer I’m unable to get at the links I had hoped to share with y’all. I’ll get back on when I can, and hopefully Nanci will be able to post things from time to time.

Updated Monday, 2 February: Over the weekend I heard from a friend that he wants to buy a new power supply for my system. As of this morning I believe the order has been placed and I should be getting it later this week. I honestly didn’t plan on resurrecting my system but I decided to accept my friend’s generosity and get back into the GNU/Linux community. To be honest with y’all I really missed using Linux, and not just having apps such as GNOME Do. I also found that I was more used to clicking a scroll bar and going right to that point (a nice plus GNU/Linux has over Windows, at least on the systems I’ve been having to use) because I kept trying to do it. It could take me a few days after I get the new PSU installed because I have quite a bit to get caught up on between the software updates to get, forums to respond to, and snagging some of my fav ‘burger pics.

Congratulations, President Obama!

I’m not very big on politics, and I didn’t volunteer to work with any of the candidates this past year or so. I’ve seen too many politicians look so good and end up screwing the voters that it’s pretty hard to get me excited about a politician. But the more I saw of Barack Obama the more I hoped he’d win. Part of it was to get rid of the Presidential Foliage but part of it was the distinct feeling that this guy was different. I’m not talking about the color of his skin, or the heritage or nationality of his family, it was something else. There was a feeling that after so many politicians promising one thing and delivering another Senator Obama might be a rare politician, one who wouldn’t promise the sun, moon and stars above just to get into office only to ignore us once he got there.

When I got up yesterday there was no way I wasn’t watching the inauguration. Politics is politics but this is history. This is one of those times where down the road people will be asking where you were when it happened, like Kennedy being shot, the Challenger disaster, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was no way I wasn’t going to be a part of it, at least in front of my tv, even if I couldn’t get to one of the many public viewing locations around Boston.

When they showed the Obamas and the Bushes before the ceremony a girlfriend commented to me that she wondered if they two women talked about what they’d be wearing, with the outgoing First Lady in silver and the incoming First Lady in gold (some people say yellow, but it looked gold to us). I said at the very least their staffs may have gotten together, but I was struck by how fitting it was. In the Olympics the gold medal is better than the silver medal, and no slight intended toward Mrs. Bush but I definitely think we’re getting a better deal with the Obamas, and not just because I don’t think President Obama will treat the former Presidential Plant’s fat cat buddies a lot different than they were treated over the past eight years. I won’t think it was any mystery why the former President got booed when he was introduced yesterday, no matter how bad taste it was to boo him. And yes, I’m glad to see him go, too, and I giggled when they booed him. My bad.

When Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts. Jr. messed up when he was administering the oath to Senator Mr. Obama yesterday (he did resign from the senate last year, after all) I had to laugh. My girlfriend suggested it was nerves, and I had to relate what I had read in the Boston Metro yesterday about how much the two men disagree on just about any subject available. Of course the Chief Justice was an inauguration virgin yesterday and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was nervous, but I love the fact that it seemed Mr. Obama was more prepared for the day than the Chief Justice was.

I loved President Obama’s speech, and while I can get the text from the speech from any number of sources I’m hoping to find a video of it somewhere that I can download to keep. (I found it! And if you go to the YouTube page there’s a link to download an MP4 video of the video. Sweet! But I should have expected that from the President who fought to keep his Blackberry.) I haven’t paid a lot of attention to a politician’s speeches in the past, especially since so many don’t seem to be worth the air it took to make them, but I have never been more proud to be an American than I was yesterday. There was one part of President Obama’s speech that were extra special to me.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.  Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward.  Where the answer is no, programs will end.  And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

I can’t begin to tell you how glad I was to hear a politician make the determining factor of whether something is continued or not a question of whether it does any good or not. The fact that he’s making accountability such a big part of his administration, even forgetting how little accountability seems to have matter in recent administrations, made my jaw drop. I have a feeling those aren’t just words, either.

Being a Caucasian woman I have no idea what it means to the African American population, but for the first time in my life I was proud of my country for who they had elected to lead it, and I look forward to seeing how President Obama handles the challenges we face in the coming four years, if not in the next eight years.

There’s a real mess in our country as President Obama took the oath of office, but I can’t help but feel that for the first time in my life we have someone who won’t shrink away from the hardest of jobs, who won’t try to pass off tough questions or spin his ass off to try to get us to believe that he truly had the country’s best interests in mind when he went into work every single day of his term.

There was one rather glaring note to yesterday’s events, and it’s a fashion thing that really bothered me. It wasn’t Jill Biden’s “hooker boots”, it was the shoes on Michelle Obama’s feet and especially the gloves on her hands. Other than that I loved what she wore, but the green against the yellow reminds me of something I’d want to buy TarneX to get rid of. With all due respect, Mrs. Obama, whose call was that? if it was yours, it was an example of why everyone in the public eye needs a fashion consultant every now and then to talk us down from some pretty bad fashion decisions. It it was the choice of a stylist, I trust she’s already fired and has had to forfeit some of her fee as a penalty for that one.

Congratulations, President and Mrs. Obama, and to Malia and Sasha. You didn’t get scared off when things got tough, and already you’re a wonderful example to us all. May we live up to your expectations as you’ve already started to fulfill so many of ours. I hope the press will give Malia and Sasha a chance to continue growing up without having to deal with the damned press and paparazzi too often. Luckily they’ll have the Secret Service around in case anyone get’s too carried away.

Congratulations, and thank you. I’m not sure any of us knew just how much we needed someone like you seem to be in charge of our country.

Editor’s Note: OT political posts ahead

I wanted to let everyone know that the next two posts on this blog will be completely Off Topic. When I started this blog, and asked my brother to join me in posting tech articles, Peng and I talked about whether we would cover the current political season here in the United States. Peng’s old blog (some posts are still available in the Internet Archive, but this is the last thing they have form his site), as some of you may remember, frequently had posts of a political nature as he looked at asshattery in the world we live in. With the reelection of the Presidential Foliage (something that both Peng and I are still caused to wonder what in the hell were the voters thinking???) Peng definitely had things to blog, but he told me that he grew to feel that his old blog cast too wide a net and he wished he had made it more focused on an area or two.

Last night Peng and I talked for a while about whether we want to cover the Inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States, and we ended up deciding we’d write one post a piece on the historic occasion. I wanted to sleep on it before I started writing, and Peng tells me he’s holding his post until he sees mine is online, so in the next several hours you will find posts from each of us with our response to the truly historic occasion.

If you don’t care to read posts of a political nature you can either check the site for Peng’s links post, or you can keep an eye on our feed for when that post his the Wide Wide World of Web. I hear Peng has some really nice links to share, and this morning I was greeted with news from SecondLife that is making me really glad I closed my store for a while last year. Some of you may know what news I’m referring to, and it’s making me wonder if I even want to bother reopening my store there.

Peng’s links for Thursday, 15 January

• Desktop Linux: “I’m Linux” contest open for video entries. Back on Chrismukkuh Eve I mentioned a contest from the Linux Foundation for videos spoofing the Apple and Microsoft adverts. The contest isn’t open just yet but you can start uploading your vids, so if you have a video get it in. Who knows, you may get a free trip to Tokyo in October.
• João Pinto: Development Plans for 2009. João, the person behind the GetDeb family of websites has posted some of what they have in store for the new year. Check out his post, and if you’re able to help with any of the projects please let them know.
• Lucas Rocha: New friends of GNOME. Have you ever wanted to find some way to help the devs of your favorite open source software? The GNOME team has a brand new way you can help their devs, mostly by helping funnel some cash to them to let them spend more time working on GNOME projects. I know the economy is in the dumps, but now may be the best time to help your friendly open source developer. I’m not talking hundreds of dollars, and even just buying a tee, mug, etc., will help in a real way.
• Jon Beebe: Theming Wine. Did you know there’s a way to make apps running under WINE look more like the theme you have running? WINE’s theming capabilities are kind of limited, but Jon has links to articles telling you how to do it.
• Ryan Troy: Recent Ubuntuforums Downtime. If you tried to use the Ubuntu Forums lately you know they were having some issues. Ryan was kind enough to post some information on exactly what went wrong.
• Karl Lattimer: Wine-doors 0.1.3rc1 released. WINE and CrossOver aren’t the only ways to run Windows apps on GNU/Linux, and Wine-doors is getting ready to ship an update. If you run WINE apps you should consider helping make wine-doors even better.
• Jun Auza: Free Software Song Rocks! Have you heard Richard Stallman’s “Free Software Song”? Jun has the lyrics, as well as a story about how it was written, as well as links to sone recordings of it. Plus you can see Stallman himself singing it in a video!

Catch GNOME Do 0.8 being silly

Tuesday’s links post included news that GNOME Do 0.8 has reached alpha stage and since then I found an easy way to get it. The GNOME Do team has added a new PPA on Launchpad for GNOME Do testers that will probably be the easiest way to get testing builds of GNOME Do 0.8 and keep them up to date. To get them you want to add these two lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-testers/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-testers/ubuntu intrepid main

Now update your package list with

sudo apt-get update

If you already have GNOME Do installed you should get a notification from the Update Manager that you have updates to install, but if you don’t have Do installed yet just run this from your terminal:

sudo apt-get install gnome-do

That will install not only GNOME Do but also the plugins as well. Once they’re installed you can simply run gnome-do to launch it.

But GNOME Do 0.8 can get silly in version 0.7.95.1 (the second alpha release of GNOME Do 0.8). I had an issue where none of my launchers were available in Do so I had to use my menus just to be able to run Synaptic or even Sonata, the two apps I run most often. I posted a question about it on the Do support thread on the Ubuntu Forums and davidsiegel was kind enough to promptly ask me to run gnome-do --debug and post the output. When I ran that I saw that a link that I had created to a post on the Ubuntu Forums was causing problems so I moved it to a folder away from my desktop, restarted Do and saw that I could once again launch apps from Do.

I did notice that the Do icon shows up in the notification tray regardless of what I had set in the preferences dialog, but someone had already filed a bug for it. There’s also a problem with the Files and Folders plugin, but I think what I’m seeing is covered by one of two bugs already filed.

There is one very cool thing I’m seeing in Do 0.8, and I found it when I was reading my RSS feeds the other day. When I set Do to use the Docky theme I saw this on the bottom of my screen:

Yes, Do is now available as a dock, but it’s nowhere near as configurable as something like AWN, which you may notice behind the Do dock. Go ahead and play with it, but if you need to figure out how to get Do back to another theme simply use your trigger keys (usually Super (aka the Windows key)+space) or click on the first icon to get Do ready for your input, then start typing GNOME Do Preferences. When it offers that option simply go into the Appearance tab and select a different theme. I’m really liking the Nouveau theme, myself, especially when I change the background color and opacity, as you can see on the right. It still needs some work, but this is good for now.

I do have sone suggestion for you. I’d stay away from the Read Help Documentation (man) plugin. When I enabled it I got options to read the manuals for several apps before getting anywhere near the launcher for the app I wanted to run.

OMG! You can now favoritize Cheezburgers!

I just heard the best news from Peng! For quite a while now you’ve been able to add pictures on the Pundit Kitchen and I Has a Hot Dog, but not on the Cheezburger site. But that’s no longer the case.

Peng contacted the Cheezburger folks and asked about it and was told that it seemed to be a browser issue because IE and Opera users, and maybe Safari users, could do it but Firefox and Chrome users didn’t get the button on the lolcats pics for some odd reason. But he tells me that when he fired up Epiphany this morning he was able to mark Cheezburger pics as favorites. Woo hoo!

It seems like you can’t mark videos on ICHC as favs yet, but I’m going to have to join Peng in going through some of the older pics and mark some as favs. I just wish there weren’tover 90 pages to go through.

Thanks for letting me know about it, Peng, and thanks for letting me blog this one. Heopfully I’ll get this new video card installed soon and be able to start getting a few more things to post, like maybe some pics from SecondLife since I’ll finally be able to see all of the pretty Windlight goodies.

Peng’s links for Tuesday, 13 January

• Linux Today: Favorite Linux Shortcuts. Carla Schroder knows that one of the best tools in a computer’s toolbox are keyboard shortcuts, those simple little key combinations that get things done without having to reach for the rodent. She shares some of the handiest GNOME and KDE shortcuts that you may want to get into your memory bank, as well as fussing at a desktop environment who makes things harder for their users to find.
• New York Times: A Software Populist Who Doesn’t Do Windows. A delightful article about Mark Shuttleworth, complete with some damned nice ink for Ubuntu and open source software in general. Despite what you may think form the article’s title, it’s not a Microsoft bashing piece. Although not everyone loves the article.
• MakeUseOf.com: How To Add Custom Functionality To Nautilus. I’ve got several Nautilus scripts that I really don’t want to use the default Ubuntu file manager without, like terminal here, root-mautilus-here and Open with gedit (as root) (from Google’s cache since the forums seem down at the mo, although I got it from Automatix a while back), but maco let me know about an article that shows you how to add things to Nautilus-Actions which will let you personalize your system even more. Thanks, maco!
• gnome-do group: New GNOME Do Website! Ok, it’s not an article, but if you’ve ever used GNOME Do you should check out their new site. And if you like Do now just wait until you see what they have in store for version 0.8, like a total of four UI themes and their new freeze protection feature. Check it out now with the new alpha release.
• Thomas Thurman: Themers. If you create themes for Metacity Thomas would love to hear from you.
• Calum: Different day, same Places. Have you ever noticed how different the Places menu can be depending on where you see it? Calum has, and he’s got a diagram of some of the differences. But he doesn’t just kvetch about it, he suggests a way to make it better. And A. Walton wants your feedback on a mockup.
• Jono Bacon: Winning Formula. The guys and gals over at the Ubuntu Forums (which is oddly borked for the time being, but I think I saw something about a software update coming today) have gotten an award from Linux Format magazine for being the Best Support Resource, beating even a certain search company from Mountain View. And awards also went to Ubuntu, Canonical and the KDE team. Check out Jono’s post to see what the awards are. Way to go, y’all!
• Matthew Helmke: Ubuntu 8.10 magazine. Matthew has written and co-written several articles in the new issue of Linux Identity magazine, including the editorial in the front of the issue. Matthew writes some very good posts for his blog so if you can get the new Linux Identity I think it will be worth your money, partly because of the two free DVDs that come with it and for a tool for introducing Ubuntu to folks you know.
• Desktop Linux: Bluefish top Linux HTML editor. As someone who used Dreamweaver as a Windows XP user I was let down by the poor state of affairs when it came to web design software for GNU/Linux a year or so ago. It’s definitely gotten better, and Desktop Linux held a shoot-out between seven text editing software packages for folks who don’t use Windows or OSX.
• Steven Harms: Dirty little secret. A very short post, but with an important message for people who feel they have to dump on Linux users. I had to share the article because I love the way he’s responding to them.
• Jun Auza: 7 Great Free/Open-source Platform Games for Linux. Not every game that people enjoy spending time with are MMOPRG’s, and Jun gives some very nice platform-type games that run natively on GNU/Linux. Don’t read the article, though, if you don’t have time to spend on something that has little productive value other than to relax.
• Sayak Banerjee: 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Ubuntu Brainstorm now runs on Ideatorrent software! Big thanks to nand and Ng for putting in the hard work getting it ready for the masses.

Before I publish this I wanted to let everyone know that the problem with Nautilus needing to be refreshed when you use multiple tabs has been fixed (thank you Alberto Milone!), and Christoph Korn has packages with the fix in his PPA that you can use.

For those of you in the grater Boston area get ready to bundle up with extra layers in a few days. And for those of you who live in warmer climes, please don’t rub it in too much, ‘kay? Thx.

Subscribe to posts

Thanks to a new feature from WordPress.com you can now subscribe to any post on one of their hosted blogs. What does that mean in English? Simply that if you post a comment on a blog that’s hosted by WordPress.com (like this one), you can check the box that says “Notify me of followup comments via email” and when someone else adds a comment you’ll get an email so you can know to come see what the comment is.

There’s more to the new feature, and you can get the whole story on the WordPress.com blog.

Hardware Upgrade: Complete

This year Santa Claws was very good to me. Not only did I get a couple of gigs of memory almost tripling my available 749MB of RAM for Chrismukkuh, we had a network issue last week that prompted us all to upgrade to wireless networking. Granted I had to pay for it myself, but it’s still a holiday season upgrade.

My mom sent me a check for Chrismukkuh and I quickly decided that since we were already heading off to MicroCenter I would get a new video card. You may remember that I used to use an Nvidia MX100-200, which is practically a dinosaur. Since my motherboard only supports PCI cards I didn’t have many options. I looked at a PNY card but they were out of stock, so I went with an EVGA e-GeForce 6200 (MicroCenter’s info), a PCI video card with 256 MB of RAM. Alas, I got it home and put it in my comp and it sat there like a log’s bump. With everything going on this week, including a decision to reinstall Ubuntu to clean up behind a lot of installations and uninstalls of various software packages, so I didn’t get to head back to MicroCenter until today.

Today I went back to Cambridge and talked with Ryan, who works in the peripherals department. We was surprised it didn’t work but said I could exchange it with no problem. He also said they should get some other cards in this week so if my EVGA card didn’t work I could check the site for when they get their shipment in, then call him and he’d hold the card I want on the side so it wouldn’t get sold out before I could get back there.

I got back home and got my computer ready (switching the window manager to Metacity, disabling the legacy 96 driver for my old video card), and restarted my system just to confirm everything was ready for a new video card. I pulled the old card, installed the new one and reconnected everything, then turned the IceBox back on and hoped for the best.

It looked good when I saw the Intel BIOS splash, which I didn’t see with the first card I got, and when Ubuntu loaded up I was pleasantly surprised to see a notification that the OS had seen that I had installed a new piece of hardware and that it wanted to get the proprietary drivers for me. A few minutes later (the first try at getting the driver didn’t work right for some reason) I was restarting my comp and tracking down a piece of eye candy that I had looked at some time back but I needed a better video card to use it. And now, in honor of the storm coming in this evening …

IT’S SNOWING!!!

Now that I have a better video card, as well as more memory, I may have to see about firing up SecondLife and checking out all the goodies in Windlight that my older video card couldn’t support.

And yes, Nanci, now that I’ve confirmed that this card will work on a system like ours I’ll help you get one and get it set up for you.

[UPDATED] Moonlight got easier for Ubuntu users

[Updated to include instructions for getting the PPA's OpenPGP key. -Peng]

Last month I mentioned that version 1 of Moonlight, the open source port of Microsoft’s Silverlight software, reached both beta status and finally it’s official release (download the Firefox plugin here). Of course I still had one problem. Since I moved from Firefox 3 to Epiphany I couldn’t use the plugin for Firefox.

I posted a question on the Ubuntu Forums yesterday asking if anyone had gotten it to work with Epiphany-Gecko, and a mere nine hours after I asked my question I got a response from directhex. He has a Personal Package Archive (PPA) on Launchpad that has packages for Moonlight for users of both Ubuntu Hardy and Ubuntu Intrepid. (The PPA is now labeled the badgerports PPA so don’t be concerned if you find that prominently displayed and not his name.) He did warn me that

(tested quickly on AMD64 Intrepid; minor focus problem w/ right-click menus on Epi; packages may not have built yet on the PPA – be patient)

I added his PPA to my sources and checked for moonlight-plugin-mozilla, which had been built for a little over 12 hours, and once I restarted Epiphany I see under about:plugins that it’s installed, although it didn’t work that well for either MLB.com’s video content or for the popup player from a local classic rock radio station’s 70’s specific HD radio station. I was able to see that Silverlight is there on the MLB site, but the local radio station’s player acts as if I didn’t install Silverlight at all. I’ve let directhex know about the issue, and it seems it may be an issue of the sites requiring Silverlight 2, and Moonlight is currently at version 1 compatibility.

Running on Ubuntu, or possibly any recent Debian-based distro, and want to give it a try for yourself? You can snag Moonlight from directhex’s repo and be assured that if he updates his package you’ll get the update notification from the Update Manager. Just add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/directhex/ubuntu intrepid main

then update your package list with

sudo apt-get update

And finally add the moonlight package

sudo apt-get install moonlight-plugin-mozilla

Updated 20 October: Thanks to Dale’s comment I realized that I needed to include the information on getting the OpenPGP PPA key.  Before you run the install command you need to get the PPA’s key so Ubuntu will know that the files in the archive are authenticated. If you go to the main information page for directhex’s PPA you’ll see a link to get technical details about the PPA. Click that link and you’ll see the line to add to your sources.list Below you’ll see information on getting the signing key, as well as a link to info on how to actually get the key for apt to use. Instead of making you go through all of that hassle I’ll summarize it here and you will have the steps for use on any Launchpad PPA. Look at the numbers under where it says Signing key and either copy or make not of the part after the slash. In this case the line is 1024R/23DC003A so you want to use 23DC003A. Now open a terminal and run this command

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 23DC003A

replacing the text after --recv-keys with the information you copied from the PPA’s details. Once that’s run go ahead and update your package list and you’ll be ready to install Moonlight without any arguments from apt about an unverified source.

Once you’ve installed the packages restart your browser and visit your favorite site that has Silverlight content and enjoy the fact that you’re no longer shut out from Microsoft’s newest proprietary technology. Directhex has a test page that he always uses, and it works for me, plus it has some very cool content for you to test your new plugin with.