[UPDATED] Forget scheduling a tee time for next week

[Updated 5:05pm to reflect the final score of today's game. -Peng]
[Updated 28 Sep 7:50am because I realized the Magic Number graphic was wrong before yesterday's game started. -Peng]

After waiting for over a week, let alone all season, I found one of the nicest images on the LA Dodgers website I’ve ever seen.

Granted, it’s not clinching the division championship again (yet), but after last night’s win they have a magic number of two that bit of news could come by the end of tomorrow afternoon’s game against the Pirates. That is unless the boys from Chavez Ravine win this afternoon and a loss by the Rockies in their late afternoon game against the Cardinals (who clinched their division last night).

What about the local nine? The Red Sox are six games ahead of Texas in the Wild Card, but the Yanks have already locked up the AL East so the best the Sox can do for now is to be able to keep playing when postseason play begins on Wednesday, 7 October. Of course the Bombers aren’t making things easy for the Sox with wins Friday night and last night with a sweep very much a possibility in today’s finale.

Now if there were only some way to get two items the team is giving away in the final games of the regular season, this tee and the calendar that was shot during this video that will be given out on Fan Appreciation Day. Some days I really hate being stuck on the wrong coast.

Updated 5:05pm: I was all ready to update the magic number graphic as the Dodgers were getting ready to beat the Pirates 6-2 going into the bottom of the ninth inning. Unfortunately Ox Broxton didn’t quite have his A game today. After allowing one run to score before even the first out was recorded Ox filled up the bases with Pirates as he loaded up the bases with one out at the bottom of the ninth. Ox didn’t lose the game though. Lastings Milledge smacked a fly to Andre Ethier out in right field and after a fielding error the three Pirates all crossed home plate as Milledge settles for an RBI single. The final score: Pittsburgh 6, the Dodgers 5. (The official recap is being written as I write this update, but that link should get you a link to the recap as soon as it’s written. The link has been updated to get you directly to the game recap.)

The St. Louis/Colorado game is in progress, and as of the top of the 5th inning the score is tied at 3 all. Hopefully when I get back to my comp tomorrow I’ll be have some good news to share from the Rockies game.

Updated 28 September 7:50am: Last night I was hearing that the Dodgers’ magic number was wrong on this post, and after reading this morning’s coverage of yesterday’s loss in the LA Times I saw that my boys got a boost toward clinching yesterday morning. Which just makes yesterday’s loss even worse since the Cardinals ended up losing their game. At least the series against the Bucs still has one more game to play, so maybe we’ll be celebrating by the time I sit down to dinner.

Snagging videos in Firefox more easily

Last year I finally got tired of the Firefox bloatware and made the switch to the GNOME project’s Epiphany web browser, although I kept the Fox around for those rare times that I simply couldn’t do in Epiphany, or at least couldn’t do that easily. One of the tasks that I kept Firefox for was downloading videos. While Epiphany does have a very nice extension for downloading videos it simply isn’t as robust as the Video DownloadHelper extension for the Fox. Not only does the Firefox extension let you prefer high quality YouTube videos and even pick which high quality vid you want to use if there are more than one available, it is also smart enough to use the video name from YouTube.

Disclaimer: This tutorial is solely intended to help you enjoy Flash videos when your system runs slowly enough to make you want to view it in a desktop video player like Totem. It is written purely for your own personal entertainment and not to help you download videos for the purpose of sharing them with others. Remember, if you find a video that you just have to share with someone you should send them the URI. That way the hosting web site gets to see how popular their video is.

My problem is that while I can enjoy videos in Epiphany the Flash plugin ends up making the video stutter, which can be a royal pain in the arse. This is especially annoying when I’m trying to enjoy highlight videos from Dodgers games so I tend to save those to my hard drive and simply fire them up in Totem. Unfortunately Epiphany’s extension doesn’t know how to snag videos from mlb.com, or the videos from my local CBS affiliate (I tend to snag video weather reports for my E100 so I can watch them when I’m away from my comp) so getting vids from either site sends me to Firefox. For some reason the Video DownloadHelper knows how to grab vids from both of those sites so until I can help port that info to the Epiphany extension I’ll have to turn to the Fox to help me watch them.

The problem comes when you try to download a video from these sites because there’s no descriptive name affiliated with the video’s filename, so even if you have that option selected for YouTube videos when you try to download the video you get what is shown on the right. (All images on this post will open in a new tab/window so you won’t keep having to use the Back button to get back to this post.) If you only want to snag a single vid it’s no problem but if you want to get at least a pair of vids you end up having to rename the vids yourself.

Today I found a way to get the name set for sites that don’t have a setting for knowing where the video name is located. The very first thing you will need to do, once you have the extension installed, is to enable the option in the preferences. If you have an icon visible simply right click the icon and select Preferences. Now go to Capture > Smart Naming and check the box for Enable Smart Naming.

Close out the Preferences window and select the name of the video as it’s shown on the webpage. Right click the selected text and select Smart naming > Define media title location. You’ll see a dialog pop up where you simply need to confirm that the text listed as the Value for this page is the same as the title you want to assign to the video. This is perfect for those times when you inadvertently select the entire text, and you need to add a letter or so to the beginning or end to the Value. Once you have it matching the text on the web page simply click on OK.

Now when you use the icon to select which video you want to save you get a much more informative filename.

The best part is that every time you visit the page the extension now knows where to look to get the video name, and if you look at multiple videos before deciding to grab one it’s a piece of cake to tell exactly which video you want.

Unfortunately this won’t work on all sites, as I found when I tried to get the latest weather forecast. The bottom line is that if you can’t select the text it won’t work since the function relies on having HTML code to look at rather than text with a Flash application as my local CBS affil uses.

First the Jackalope, then the Lynx

[Corrected the version names. -Peng]

As I mentioned in the previous post, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has reached it’s sixth, and probably last, alpha version. Not only does that mean that it should hit beta very soon (it’s scheduled for 1 October) it also means that it should have hit the feature freeze by now. And that means that the next version of Ubuntu should get its name soon.

We usually post an item when the new codename, but this time we have something even better. Over the weekend Mark Shuttleworth made the announcement as he was speaking via video to UbuCon at the Atlanta Linux Fest. Since the vid is on YouTube I’ll post it here rather than sending you off to another site to see it.

Image courtesy Wikipedia

Yes, Ubuntu 10.04, an LTS (long term support) release, will be called the Lucid Lynx. It’s nice to see the Ubuntu community will be sharing the feline love next April.

Suggestions are already coming for the 10.10 version of Ubuntu, although they may break the normal naming scheme and coordinate the name with the Debian release. I guess only time will tell on that one.

Peng’s links for Monday, 21 September

No, your eyes are not deceiving you, I finally have a new omnibus links post. I’ve meant to write one a lot sooner than today, but time and my todo list have been busted for conspiracy to deny me the time and energy to do quite all the things I want to get done.

And yes, you are seeing a new hackergotchi on my posts on Ubuntu Weblogs and the Ubuntu Universe, as well on my About page here. Since I finally got some pics of me that I don’t hate I decided it was time to make a new hackergotchi that reflected two of my loves: Mac4Lin and the Los Angeles Dodgers. As I write this the Dodgers are a mere four wins away from locking up their trip to the post season and they’re 8 wins away from repeating as the champions of the National League West.

Some of these links are a tad old, but as I went through the items I’d flagged in Evolution (there’s no way I was including 70 links in a pair of posts, let alone one post) there were a few things I’d found early last month that I really did want to share.

• Panji Nushantara: Digsby: All in One IM Client for Linux (soon). Not everyone loves Pidgin, and Panji has info on a multiple IM client that’s currently available for OSX and Windows. the good news is that the Digsby devs know we’d like a Linux version and they’re hard at work on a native GNU/Linux version. They even have a page you can use to ask them to let you know when Digsby for Linux is available. With Pidgin getting replaced as the default IM client for Ubuntu 9.10, and I’m really not thrilled with what I’ve seen of Empathy so far, there’s a good possibility that Digsby may become a favorite IM client for fans of the penguin.
• directhex: Vive la différence. The person responsible for getting Moonlight easier to install for Ubuntu users has a great post about “Free Software”, including links to how a few others define that term. A must read, and I apologize for not getting the link posted before Saturday’s Software Freedom Day.
• Panji Nushantara: 2.6.30 Kernel on Jaunty Jackalope and Karmic Koala’s Kernel on Jaunty Jackalope. As always, the 9.10 version of Ubuntu Linux will include an update to the Linux kernel. Alpha 6 of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has just been released (see below), but since it’s a really bad idea to install testing releases on computers you use every day, especially alpha versions, Panji has given us a pair of posts on how to update your kernel to the newer version while still running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. I haven’t made the upgrade myself (see the above mentioned conspiracy charges) if you’re interested in making the jump yourself I’d love to hear your responses to it. Just remember the very important disclaimers about what can go wrong if you apply this upgrade. If you make the jump and your computer breaks please don’t come crying to myself, Panji or even Nanci. If you do we reserve the right to use those three words we hate using almost as much as you hate hearing: told you so.
• Colin Walters: Pay no attention to the processes and X Windows behind the curtain… Colin, a Fedora user whose posts are syndicated on Planet GNOME, gives us a nice preview of GNOME 3. There’s quite bit of geek speak in his post, but there’s also a nice glimpse at how GNOME 3 will make being a GNOME user even better than it is now.
• Scott James Remnant: Making a splash. One of the biggest pains in working with the Mac4Lin dev team is that every time Ubuntu rolls out an upgrade there are a number of things that break until we can get the components upgraded. This is the reason getting a Mac4Lin 1.0 Usplash created has been such a royal pain in the arse, and Ubuntu 9.10 includes a major change. They’re dumping Usplash for the boot splash screen, the first splash screen you get when you boot a computer into Ubuntu, and they’re replacing it with xsplash. Scott looks at the matter, including why the change is in fact a good idea. And yes, once I get 9.10 installed on my system (hopefully soon after it reaches beta status) I’ll see about getting a xsplash screen created for Mac4Lin.
• Stormy Peters: 3 ways our awesome habits get us into trouble. Currently the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, Stormy has long been a great source of information, especially on security issues within GNOME. This time Stormy looks at three habits that it’s great to develop if you don’t already have them, but she also points out “gotchas” that can turn on us if we’re not careful.
• Stormy Peters: Stacks of books are disappearing. If you love books you may be aware that libraries around the world are changing, and not always for the better. Stormy looks at the problem and why libraries are no longer the great resource they used to be.
• Dustin Kirkland: Encrypted $HOME Now Offered at Installation. I’m not one of them but some users make a point of encrypting the data on their hard drives. It’s a good idea, but in Ubuntu’s past it’s been a bit of a pain to do it. Ubuntu 9.10 has given users the ability to encrypt their home directories as a part of the install process since the fifth alpha came out earlier this month.
• André Gondim: New Ubuntu Screens Installer. Installing Ubuntu 9.10 will no longer be the rather boring experience it’s been in the past thanks to new installer screens that will finally let you know about some of the programs that are getting installed with the OS. André is kind enough to give us screenshots of the ten new information screens.
• Matthew Helmke: Drowning out what I want to hear. While not a tech post, Matthew has written a must read article on how to present your viewpoints, whether the subject be technical, religious or political. This is an article that should be bookmarked at the very least, and printing it out for future reference wouldn’t be a horrid idea.
• Stefano Forenza: LifeHacker’s Ubuntu Wishlist. LifeHacker has some things they’d like to see in Ubuntu, and it turns out the Ubuntu devs are already working on the first item. It turns out that LifeHacker has some very nice words for Mac4Lin, and Jono Bacon has written a very well thought out response to LifeHacker’s wishlist.
• Kees Cook: uninstall sun-java6. The vrms meme that’s been going around the ‘net has brought out an important reminder that there’s a very good open source replacement for Sun’s Java. I need to look into that to see if I could kick some non-free software on my system to the curb. And yes, I know I have two versions of Java installed. There’s a good reason I did that but I don’t recall what it was at this point.
• Jono Bacon: The Art of Community Available for Free Download. Jono wrote a great book about how to build a community of like minded people. While it’s not explicitly a tech book it does look at things that Jono discovered in the open source community. Now you can get a free PDF of the book, although Jono does recommend buying a printed copy of the book (and not just to put some money in his pocket). Whether you pay for your copy or not he asks that you write a review of it on Amazon.
• Christoph Haas: Tired of Nagios and Cacti? Try Zabbix. If you run network monitoring software, or even think you may want to run some, Christoph found an open source app that you should definitely consider.

There are a few more things I definitely want to post before I hit the Publish button. First off, as I mentioned above, the sixth alpha version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has been released. It’s likely to be the last alpha release, and I’ll try to post when it gets it’s first beta release, but feel free to start taking a look at what’s coming in the new release. The devs are working on a countdown banner that I’m hoping to add to the sidebar here once they have a version that will play well with WordPress.com blogs.

On a lighter note, if you saw the Emmy awards last night you know that the show was taken over temporarily by Dr. Horrible. If you missed it then thank the good people over at the SciFi Wire because they have the video posted so we can enjoy it.

That’s almost it for today but I have one more thing to post that deserves a post all of it’s own. I trust tomorrow’s first day of fall brings you some decent weather.

I’m late to the party, but at least I’m showing up

Back in the first season of the show “The West Wing” Sam Seaborn had a great line in the episode “Mr. Willis of Ohio”.

OK. Lets…I’ll tell you what. Let’s forget about the fact that you’re comin’ a little late to the party and embrace the idea you showed up at all.

With that thought in mind I’m going to join the vrms meme that went around Planet Ubuntu earlier this month. Started by Jim Campbell, it turns out there’s an app called vrms, which is short for Virtual Richard M. Stallman. The idea is to see what non-free software is installed on your computer. Some people may think vrms is making quite a bit of do over nothing, but if you support free and open source software it’s a good idea to see what software you run that goes counter to that philosophy.

To use vrms you do have to install the program, and it’s in the Ubuntu universe repo so you just need to run sudo apt-get install vrms. Once it’s installed just run vrms in a terminal. When I run it I get this:

$ vrms
Non-free packages installed on Icebox

crossover-pro             Run Windows applications like MS Office
fglrx-modaliases          Identifiers supported by the ATI graphics driver
google-desktop-linux      Google Desktop: Personalize and organize your own comp
grokking-the-gimp         GIMP tutorial book by Carey Bunks (HTML)
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.28 modules helper script
linux-restricted-modules- Restricted Linux modules for generic kernels
nvidia-173-modaliases     Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-180-kernel-source  NVIDIA binary kernel module source
nvidia-180-libvdpau       Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix
nvidia-180-modaliases     Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-71-modaliases      Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-96-modaliases      Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-glx-180            NVIDIA binary Xorg driver
opera                     The Opera Web Browser
picasa                    Image management application from Google
python-profiler           deterministic profiling of any Python programs
rar                       Archiver for .rar files
sun-java5-bin             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 (architectu
sun-java5-jre             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 (architectu
sun-java6-bin             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-jre             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-plugin          The Java(TM) Plug-in, Java SE 6
tangerine-icon-theme      Tangerine Icon theme
ttf-larabie-deco          Decorative fonts from www.larabiefonts.com
ttf-larabie-straight      Straight fonts from www.larabiefonts.com
ttf-larabie-uncommon      Special decorative fonts from www.larabiefonts.com
unrar                     Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version)
Reason: Modifications problematic

Contrib packages installed on Icebox

gstreamer0.10-pitfdll     GStreamer plugin for using MS Windows binary codecs
nvidia-common             Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers
nvidia-settings           Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
ttf-mscorefonts-installer Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts

27 non-free packages, 1.3% of 2027 installed packages.
4 contrib packages, 0.2% of 2027 installed packages.

Damn, I have a bunch of non-free apps installed, and in my defense it is only 1.3% of the apps I have installed. Although that list doesn’t include the removable drive cataloging app Gentibus CD or Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, two apps that I’ve installed under CrossOver Pro and I just haven’t found an open source app to replace them.

Of course today is Software Freedom Day, so I hope you use this opportunity to help someone find the joy that comes from running open source software.

Just a little housekeeping

Today I saw that WordPress has a pair of new features, a new RSS link widget that you will see on the left hand side of our blog as well as a new spelling and grammar checker. You can’t use the new spelling/grammar checker for writing comments, but you can use it if you have a blog hosted by WordPress.com. If you use WP software to run a blog that isn’t hosted though WP.com you can get the addon easily (see the video on the announcement). I must say the new checker rocks. It even knows how to spell Ubuntu, something that Epiphany’s spell checker misses (once you figure out how to enable it, although I can’t actually use the damned thing for some reason).

I had to go to my profile to make some changes to enable the new spelling/grammar checker and when I did I decided to change how my name shows up (both here and on comments on other WP.com-hosted blogs) from Peng to BostonPeng, the name I use on other sites.

You probably won’t see any real changes other than how my name shows up, but I will double check how this post shows up on the Ubuntu Universe to see if I need to update my information there.

ETA: My name on Ubuntu Universe shows Peng Hardin, which is fine. I use BostonPeng on other sites partly because Peng is already taken on some of them but also to specify me as the Peng from Boston. It’s more to limit confusion than anything else, but since I use BostonPeng on so many other sites I decided to use it here, if for no other reason than to help people recognize me if they’ve seen my posts on other sites, such as the Ubuntu Forums, Linux Questions and the AWN forums.

A day without cats? Yeah, right!

[Updated 12 September 1:10pm: I ended up recreating the second image, so please follow the new link and re-rate and vote for it again. Thanks. -Peng]

I was going to post these earlier today but for some reason my comp is slogging through molasses today. Both images are available on I Can Has Cheezburger so please vote them up to go on the main site.

The feline in those pics is none other than Shadow, the fine feline that has me and the roomies on her personal staff. As Lyds likes to put it, dogs have masters, cats have staff.

Of course you can still vote for my other lolz to try to get them on the main pages of the sites on the Cheezburger network.

Meg over at Cute Overload has written an Ode to a Day Without Cats that you just have to read, plus they found proof that not all felines detest water. You may want to turn your speakers down a little, but the vid they found is definitely Safe For Work.

A day without cats on the Wide Wide World of Web? What you talkin’ about, Willis?

[This post was actually written by Nanci, but I'm changing the authorship to mine so we can get it on the Ubuntu Universe. -Peng]

It’s come to my attention that somebody has decided that someone has declared tomorrow, 9 September, to be A Day Without Cats on the Internet. The idea is to have a worldwide ban on cat-related coverage for the day. Of course I have to agree with the good people at I Can Has Cheezburger and say that this is an utterly horrible idea. Lucky for us fanciers of felines the good folks at Cheezburger have out backs.

To those who think this “celebration” is a good idea, just remember that you can post about other animals any time your heart desires. In fact the Cheezburger devs already have a site devoted to the adorable canines out there. You may remember that I wrote about it back in 2007 when I found out about it.

[sarcasm] Of course if you would prefer not to see posts about cuts felines, canines or other animals there’s an invention you can use to avoid them, just like there’s an invention for people who hate a particular television program. For web users you can connect a device called a mouse to your computer and use it to leave any site you don’t like. In fact I bet you already have one connected to your computer. [/sarcasm]

I trust none of our readers are getting this error message today.

Mac4Lin 1.0 documentation has been released

While fighting with a dead parrot, er computer, Anirudh Acharya, the lead developer for Mac4Lin, announced in a post on the Mac4Lin support thread on the Ubuntu Forums that the Mac4Lin 1.0 Documentation is finally available. You can download it form the Mac4Lin download page.

That’s not all the good news Ani has for us, either. He posted on his own blog yesterday that Mac4Lin has gotten some nice in an article by Howard Wen in ComputerWorld magazine about Transformation Packs.

Of course with Ubuntu 9.10  “Karmic Koala” reaching the Alpha 5 milestone there’s a good chance that once it comes out some parts of Mac4Lin will break, all thanks to changes devs are making in features that Mac4Lin uses. (This is why the Usplash for Ubuntu 1.0 hasn’t been released yet, unless I missed something.) The Mac4Lin development team will be looking at the interaction of Mac4Lin and Ubuntu 9.10 as Karmic moves it’s way to the final release and we will do all we can to make sure the Mac4Lin themes, etc., play well with the newest release of our favorite open source OS.

Here we go again

[Updated 4:30pm to add some good news that was discovered after I posted the article. -Peng]

As I mentioned before, my computer had once again decided it wasn’t going to work at all. Connecting another LCD display didn’t resolve the issue like it had before, and other than the fact that my optical (DVD burner) drive showed signs of life my system had become nothing but a very big charging station for my iriver E100 media player.

Then the weirdest thing happened this morning when I fired up my system to use the USB cable to charge my E100: I heard a beep from my computer when it powered up. That hadn’t happened in the last week or so and was a very pleasnat surprise. I had disconnected my LCD display to not waste the electrisity any worse than I was already doing, and I had unplugged my hard drives to keep from accidentally borking them and losing what data was stored, so I had to plug in my LCD display to see what was happeneing. I didn’t reconnect the hard drives until I could see what was actually happening, or at least what was trying to happen, so I dropped my Ubuntu 9.04 LiveCD in the DVD drive and lo and behold, my computer is working again!

It’s a very busy holiday weekend around theese parts so I’ll have to reconnect my drives later today, but I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to be able to use my GNU Linux system again, even just from a LiveCD. One thing I definitely need to look into is why the hell is my system dying so often (twice within 3 weeks). I’m thinking it may be my Intel D845GLVA motherboard, and if that’s the case I may be able to replace it in the coming weeks, but I have no idea how to test for other issues.

Does anyone have a link to info on how I could test my system to try to see exactly what’s failing? All I know for certain at this point is that my display kept giving me a “No Signal” error and my comp flat refused to even beep at me when I turned it on in the past week. If it’s a mobo issue am I right thinking that a new mobo may be able to resolve my issues, even for a year or so? I honestly can’t afford to upgrade my entire system so if I’m resurrecting this box I need to be able to use my current PC2100 RAM, processor and PCI video card.

All assistance will be greatly appreciated, and the only comments I won’t approve will be comments that are clearly spam. Now that my system is being a little more relaible I may even talk to Nanci about not requiring comments to be approved before going live, although we are still seeing come comment spam trying to get approved.

Update 4:30pm: Not too long after I published this post I fired up my computer to charge up my E100 when I hared something I hadn’t heard in 21 days: My computer beeped at me like it does when I boot it up. Sure enough, I am back on my Ubuntu box although I don’t know how long it will last this time. If anyone has any ideas how to diagnose what’s going wrong I’d really appreciate it. I’m hoping to have a week or so to use it before it gets stupid again and I’d really like to have some info on how to respond the next time it happens if anyone has any info they’d like  to pass along.