So long, Manny

Two years ago last month I was definitely not happy at news that Manny Ramirez was probably going to be leaving the Boston Red Sox and going to the Los Angeles Dodgers as the trading deadline approached. As someone living in Boston I was glad to hear he was getting out of town and I could finally stop hearing news reports about what a jackass he was on an almost daily basis but as a fan of the Dodgers since my junior high days back in the 70′s the Dodgers were the one team I didn’t want him to join. Much to my disgust the rumors were true and he put on Dodger Blue to much fanfare. As he arrived in LA he said how happy he was to join the Dodgers and by the end of the season he was saying he wanted to play out the rest of his career based in Chavez Ravine.

Of course the season ended and it was time to sign a deal for Manny to continue playing in Dodger Blue, only to have Manny and his agent hold out for a better contract offer. Granted, the sticking point was that the Dodgers wanted to defer paying most of the money to Manny to future years and I could understand the concern that Manny might not get all of his money if it was deferred too far into the future but even then we were in a recession and everyone was having to count their pennies. Personally I felt it showed that all of Manny’s love for the city and the team to be just so much waste that needed a Sha-poopie to pick it up. (Thanks to NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me for re-airing Tony Shaloob’s appearance on the show over the weekend that reminded me about the Sha-poopie.) Manny did eventually get a one year contract with an option that would allow Manny to choose to play a second full season for the Dodgers, an option that I figured Manny would jump at since probably no team would be willing to pay him what the Dodgers would have to shell out.

As the 2010 season began Manny made it quite clear that he knew this would be his last season in Dodger Blue, and while many fans were unhappy at the news it turns out that I was in fact part of a growing number of fans who couldn’t wait to get rid of da bum (as he probably would have been referred to if he had played for Brooklyn). The 31 July trading deadline came and went without a trade for Manny but the Chicago White Sox made it quite clear that they were interested in taking him off our hands. As the 31 August waiver deadline approached Manny was put on waivers, allowing other teams to try to claim him, and the White Sox put a claim on him, as did the Texas Rangers and the Tampa Bay Rays. Since the ChiSox has the worst record of the three teams they were awarded exclusive rights to get Manny if he would waive the no trade clause of his contract. It was by no means guaranteed that the trade would go through, especially since the Dodgers could use his bat as they try to bridge the now 6-1/2 game gap between themselves and the Philadelphia Philles for the wild card. (Being ten games behind San Diego for the NL West title may not be impossible but I have to be honest and say I seriously doubt we’ll repeat as division champions.) Manny was definitely wanting to go to an American League team so he could audition for a job next season as a designated hitter, the role he usually played in Boston when he wasn’t Manny Being Manny.

I figured the deal would go through tomorrow if at all, just to let the Dodgers try to get the benefit of his bat this evening as they face the Phillies in PA, but I suspect that after yesterday’s game the Dodgers front office got tired of his shtick and opted not to put him on a plane on their dime. Why not? Because in yesterday’s final game of the series against Colorado in Denver Manny went into the game as a pinch hitter in the top of the sixth inning for Ronald Belisario, who had been ejected in the fifth inning. With the bases loaded and only one out in the inning Manny took a pitch from Jason Hammell that was called for a strike. Manny was so certain that it should have been called a ball that he argued the fact with the home plate umpire, Gary Cederstrom. He argues with Cederstrom so much that he was thrown out of the game after seeing one lousy pitch! Even Vin Scully was amazed at that, as you can see in the video. Reed Johnson came in to bat for Manny but ended up hitting into a double play to end the inning. The Dodgers would go on to lose 10-5.

Finally last night the news came out, Manny is Chicago bound. While it’s not a done deal, Manny should be joining former Dodger Juan Pierre, who got a lot more time on the bench when Manny went west two years ago. If the deal doesn’t fall through Manny will visit his old haunts as Chicago goes to Cleveland, Manny’s first team, and Boston.

This fan is tickled pink to see Manny take off Dodger Blue for the last time and sends his condolences to the White Sox fans. While I still love Juan Pierre I wouldn’t wish Manny on any team’s fans. Now the Dodgers will hopefully be able to prove that they don’t need Mr. Ramirez to win games, especially since it’s been my contention all along that any team that can’t win without Manny doesn’t deserve to win at all.

Go Dodger Blue!

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Get Electric Sheep playing well with a fresh KDE install

[I have no clue what happened to this page that it started displaying the HTML code, or when it happened. I apologize to anyone who's been looking for this information. I only discovered it when I added KDE to a new LMDE laptop and wanted to get Electric Sheep working on it. -Peng]

I mentioned last month that I got Electric Sheep, a very cool open source artwork screen saver, working after I changed my desktop environment from GNOME to KDE. Unfortunately a week or so ago I decided to do a fresh install of Kubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx (after not being able to install Linux Mint for some odd reason). Unfortunately once I did my fresh install of Kubuntu I lost the ability to use Electric Sheep as my screensaver again.

From my earlier install I knew I needed to install xscreensaver so I installed it pretty quickly this time around without success. I had followed the Linux Client Instructions on the Electric Sheep website and even tried using the modified electricsheep.desktop file from both the Electric Sheep website and from KDE-Look.org and put it in both of the specified directories, /usr/share/kde4/services/ScreenSavers and ~/.kde4/share/kde4/services/ScreenSavers. Still I got bupkis.

After spending several hours over many days trying to figure out what was going wrong I started looking at why the Really Slick Screensavers, which I had also installed, wasn’t available in the screensaver options window either. My logic was that if I couldn’t run Electric Sheep I’d at least try running the Skyrocket screensaver from the Really Slick collection. I ended up finding a set of .desktop files for using the Really Slick collection on KDE on openSUSE over at KDE-Apps.org and it gave a different location to put the extracted .desktop files: /usr/share/kde4/services/ScreenSavers.

I put the Really Slick Screensavers .desktop files into that folder, plus I copied the electricsheep.desktop file I had downloaded into that directory as well. It was about time for me to power down my computer so I shut down for the night and when I turned it back on today I checked my Screen Saver dialog and found the Sheep were available to me. Needless to say I’m back to channeling John Lurie.

Remember, for this to work you have to have xscreensaver installed on your system as electricsheep.

I’m posting the directory I found to work on both the Electric Sheep and KDE-Look.org pages I used to try to get the Sheep working on KDE so others can see what I found to work but I wanted to post it here as well for anyone who gets my blog as a possible resource while trying to find a solution, as well as to make sure the info is handier the next time I end up needing it.

Share our posts more easily

Peng and I love it when someone likes what we write (ok, it’s more his writing than mine) enough to post a link on their blogs. Thanks to the good folks at WordPress it’s now even easier to let others know of things you find here.

You may have noticed that last week we added a Like button to our posts in addition to the rating stars to let you show that you like it. This isn’t a button to show that you like it on your Facebook page, but it does allow others to see how many people like it enough to click the button. (You need to be logged into your WordPress.com account to see the Like button.)

As of today you’ll find another section right below the post itself and the rating stars. Labeled Pass this along it gives you the chance to share the article more easily than copying and pasting the URL.

The first two icons will let you email and print the post, and the next icon will let you post it to StumbleUpon. Peng and I looked at the choice of using a Facebook Like button and a Facebook Share button and we ended up using a Like on Facebook button, figuring there are a number of tools to let you share our posts on Facebook but not many for simply showing that you like a post on Facebook. After that you have a button to tweet the post on Twitter.

Those are the main services we decided to support, but if you click on the + Share button you’ll find a button to share the post on Reddit as well as a button to post it to your own WordPress blog.

We hope the new buttons are helpful for you. We’ll try to keep writing posts that you’ll want to pass along to others.

Update on moving to KDE: Adding Dropbox and Amazon’s MP3 Downloader to my KDE system

I managed to get almost all of my apps reinstalled after installing Kubuntu but there are two apps that didn’t want to play with Kubuntu. I am very happy to say that I am now running both the online backup app Dropbox and Amazon’s MP3 Downloader on Kubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx”.

Dropbox

While Ubuntu One gives users the ability to store and possibly share files online, I have been using Dropbox for some time and love it. Not only does it automatically upload the newer version of a file as soon as I save it, I can share any file easily regardless of whether or not the people I want to share the file with uses Dropbox. I am also make files public so that anyone can use them. I use this feature to be able to use my custom browser start page when I am not only on my computer but no matter where I use a computer, like at the local public library. (Sorry, I’m not sharing a link to my start page because I have some personal links on that page.)

The problem with Dropbox is that while it is a cross-platform app it works on Linux thanks to having the ability to be integrated with the GNOME desktop environment, This doesn’t do a bit of good if you’re running KDE, though. After doing a bit of hunting I came across an app called Kdropbox, a QT client for Dropbox. It’s not an official Dropbox app, and it doesn’t have quite all the features the official Dropbox Linux client has, but it gives you the ability to synchronize your KDE system with Dropbox.

You can install Kdropbox with packages for Ubuntu 10.04 and OpenSUSE or you can install it form the source code. If you need an open source, cross-platform tool for either backing up your important files or sharing files without the hassle of sites that require people to deal with adverts and hassles to get access to your files I strongly recommend Dropbox, and the ability to run it on KDE makes a great program just that much better.

Amazon MP3 Downloader

I know not everyone likes the Amazon MP3 Downloader but for me it’s one of the best ways to get a wide range of DRM-free MP3 music, especially if you’re a GNU/Linux user. There is a problem for anyone running *Ubuntu 10.04 LTS: It flat out requires libboost 1.34 and Ubuntu 10.04 uses libboost 1.40. It’s not a problem if you get *Ubuntu 10.04 LTS via a distribution upgrade but if you make a fresh install you seem to be out of luck.

That’s right, I said “seem”, and as appearances can be deceiving. Thanks to a post by tvst on the Ubuntu Forums there’s a way to get libboost 1.34 installed. The instructions may change thanks to changes that may come down the pike in the future but for now run these lines to a terminal one at a time:

mkdir old_boost
cd old_boost
wget https://launchpadlibrarian.net/26959932/libboost-signals1.34.1_1.34.1-16ubuntu1_i386.deb https://launchpadlibrarian.net/26959936/libboost-thread1.34.1_1.34.1-16ubuntu1_i386.deb https://launchpadlibrarian.net/26959922/libboost-iostreams1.34.1_1.34.1-16ubuntu1_i386.deb https://launchpadlibrarian.net/26959918/libboost-filesystem1.34.1_1.34.1-16ubuntu1_i386.deb https://launchpadlibrarian.net/26959916/libboost-date-time1.34.1_1.34.1-16ubuntu1_i386.deb https://launchpadlibrarian.net/26959928/libboost-regex1.34.1_1.34.1-16ubuntu1_i386.deb https://launchpadlibrarian.net/34165098/libicu40_4.0.1-2ubuntu2_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
cd ..
rm -r old_boost

Once you’re finished with those lines you can go to the Amazon MP3 Downloader install page and get the installer for your Linux distribution and continue with the install process. Of course once you have it installed you should go back to the install page and click the link to enable it in your browser. When you do you’ll get the opportunity to download a free song so you can test your new software.

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Enable proprietary video drivers on a new KDE install

One of the things I’ve had to hunt for since my fresh install of Kubuntu is how to enable the proprietary drivers for my Nvidia graphics card. I don’t know if I installed something new to have it turn up, but if you have a fresh install of a KDE-based Linux distro and want to enable advanced driver you can either pull up Kicker (Alt-F2) and look for Hardware Drivers or you can go into the Kickoff menu and check for Applications > System > Hardware Drivers. Either way should let you launch the dialog to select any proprietary drivers available for hardware you have installed on your system.

Enable the drivers, reboot your system and you should have compositing enabled, which you can verify with System Settings > Desktop > Desktop Effects > General.

Of course I can’t guarantee that app will be available on other KDE-based Linux distros but that’s where I found it on Kubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”.

Now I’ll just need to figure out why Google Gadgets (Qt) have a visible border, even though I have compositing available.

Get Iriverter working with *Ubuntu Lucid

[Please forgive me if this is duplicated information. I did a quick search for it this morning before writing this post and didn't find it. -Peng]

One of the joys of doing a fresh install of Kubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” is the fact that I needed to track down the fix for Launchpad Bug #535193: Iriverter fails to launch. For those who aren’t familiar with Iriverter it’s en open source cross-platform app for converting videos for use on various digital media players, including players from iriver, who made my E100. The bug first reared its ugly head when I upgraded my system from Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” to 10.04 and discovered that iriverter refused to launch anymore. The bug status shows that the fix is released but for some reason when I installed Iriveter again the other day the bug was still there, thus launching my need to find the documentation on how to fix it.

As I stated in my first comment on the bug, iriverter is a critical app for me, in large part due to the fact that it’s the app I use to convert the weather forecast videos that I download daily from my local CBS affiliate so I can carry them on my media player.

(I know, the guys at WBZ would probably prefer I don’t download their videos but I don’t have the luxury of a fancier cell phone with a data plan that lets me watch web videos on it. That and I’m on the go so much every day that I really like having a full forecast at my disposal.)

I won’t give the full data on how iriverter fails, which can be seen on my bug report, but the issue is in the launcher script. As lhassall pointed out on my bug,

The issue is in the /usr/bin/iriverter script.  It refers to
/usr/lib/java/swt-gtk-3.5.jar but the distro contains -3.5.1.jar

You can confirm part this information by opening /usr/lib/java in your file manager. As the screenshot on the right show I’ve opened Dolphin (one of the KDE file managers) with a split showing both /usr/bin, scrolled to the iriverter launcher file, and /usr/lib/java. As you can see on the right I’ve confirmed that the file I have installed is in fact swt.gtk-3.5.1.jar, as the comment on my bug report shows.

Now we need to open /usr/bin/iriverter for editing. Since it’s a system file you need to open it with root access. I have kde-service-menu-rootactions from Sam Rog’s PPA installed on my system so I can simply right-click the file and select Root Actions > Open as Text from the context menu but you can also open it with gksudo kate /usr/bin/iriverter (substitute your preferred text editor for kate). Provide your root password and you should end up with a screen that looks something like the image on the left. You may or may not have line numbering and text wrapping enabled in your editor like I do but the important thing to look for is in line 4.  You will want to change

$CLASSPATH:${prefix}/share/java/iriverter.jar:/usr/lib/java/swt-gtk-3.5.jar org.thestaticvoid.iriverter.ConverterUI $*

to

$CLASSPATH:${prefix}/share/java/iriverter.jar:/usr/lib/java/swt-gtk-3.5.1.jar org.thestaticvoid.iriverter.ConverterUI $*

One you’ve made the edit save the file. Now you should be able to launch iriverter without problem.

So much for installing Mint on my computer

For the past several days I’ve been getting ready to do a clean install of a KDE-based Linux distro on my system, partly to get rid of all the GNOME cruft left behind from my first few years as an Ubuntu Linux user and partly to see how KDE works on a clean system. Based on comments left on an earlier post I decided that rather than installing Kubuntu I’d go with Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu itself), especially now that Mint 9 is now available with KDE. Unfortunately that wasn’t nearly as easy as I hoped it would be.

The first problem raised its head when Mint released the KDE version as a LiveDVD and not a LiveCD. Burning a CD is easy for me since I have some rewritable CD’s I can use to burn ISO disk images to but it looked like we had used up all of our spindle of DVD -R blanks. Just before I was able to go pick up a new spindle of blank DVD’s we discovered that we still have some blanks left over so I snagged the ISO of Linux Mint 9 KDE and fired up K3B. So far so good. That is until K3B reported that my DVD-R burner didn’t like the blank media I’d put in the drive.

The hell??? I know I can burn DVD-R’s in the drive because I’ve burned both data DVD’s and DVD movies in the drive without problems in the past. In the last year I’d burned several data DVD’s-R as part of a massive backup so it shouldn’t be a problem now. I got the ISO moved to another computer on the local ‘net (running Windows XP) and burned the Mint DVD. I checked out the LiveDVD and liked what I saw so I started the install process, only to have it fail while running the manual partition editor to let Mint know where everything is and which partitions to format. After doing some checking it looked like I may have burned a bad disk and after some checking I grabbed the ISO all over again, confirmed that there were no problems in the ISO file with an MD5SUM check and tried to burn the disk again. K3B complained about the blank media again so I reinstalled Brasero, the GNOME burning app I’d used in the past with no problems, only to have it tell me my burner didn’t like the media. I ended up going back to the Windows box and burned a new Mint 9 KDE LiveDVD at the slowest speed possible. I managed to get far enough through the install setup to confirm that everything was ready to rock, although I did end up deleting my old /usr and /opt partitions since I was getting crashes when I tried to set up the installer to format those partitions. I had my important data from those folders backed up and was going to format them anyway so I thought once I got to the last setup screen I’d be able to install Mint 9 KDE.

Nope. I got an error message saying something didn’t want to work properly, and now I’m kicking myself for not at least grabbing the digital camera and grabbing a screenshot so I can try to use it to find out why Mint didn’t want to install. The big problem at that point is that having deleted so many files to try to get Mint installed I wasn’t about to see if I even had a usable computer. I had specifically started the install process just after lunch to give me enough time to get Mint installed and tweaked before I had to power down my computer and head down to Jamaica Plain for the night, and it was now getting quite late in the day and I had a big paperweight under my desk.

Luckily I had gotten my Kubuntu LiveCD from Canonical late last week so I put the disk in my drive and installed it.  I was specifically trying not to installing Kubuntu because I’d heard Mint was KDE done right and wanted to get the full benefit of the extra attention the Mint devs put into the release. They had gone so far as to hold off on releasing Mint 9 KDE until things were fixed and they could release a disk that was as ready to use as it could be, something the Ubuntu devs have shown an unwillingness to do in recent releases. (Not to slam the Ubuntu devs, but I’ve seen important fixes come out within a month of the official release the last couple of cycles because they evidently didn’t want to let the release  date slip.)

Needless to say I have a lot of software to install and a veritable ton of tweaks to apply before I’m ready to share any screenshots, and I have non-computer tasks to do in the next few days, but I do plan on writing a post with screenshots of my brand new KDE system. I will say that I ended up having to install some additional GNOME files beyond what Brasero needed since Geany, my favorite text editor, requires them. I also installed Synaptic because I find it’s much easier to use for installing packages, especially recommended packages for an app I already have. I’ll have to look at other package management apps for KDE but neither KPackageKit nor the Ubuntu Software Center (which doesn’t seem to ship with Kubuntu) give me the level of detail I’ve become accustomed to using with Synaptic.