[UPDATED] Initial thoughts on Ubuntu 9.10 beta

[Updated to include some great news on the evolution-rss bug. -Peng]

The Ubuntu devs released the beta of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” back on the first of the month (now available as a Release Candidate), and while I snagged the disk image pretty quickly it wasn’t until Friday a week ago that I was able to actually get a chance to fire up the LiveCD long enough to see how well it played with my system. I couldn’t find any major glitches in it other than a problem with my USB WiFi adapter, and I had already seen that people were having enough major issues with the combination that there was a request to change the status on the support for the adapter from some support to absolutely no support. Luckily I was already having enough connectivity issues with our Linksys WiFi router that I has already gone back to using the good, old-fashioned CAT 5 cable to connect to it.

After looking at a number of other items that are important to me I went to the page on the Ubuntu website about the 9.10 beta to check for any known issues that I needed to be aware of and decided it was an upgrade I could probably do safely. I ran command sudo do-release-upgrade -d with the Run Application (Alt-F2) tool, although you could also run it in the terminal, and waited the two hours plus while my system got upgraded. Your system may take the upgrade more quickly or more slowly than mine, but having done a clean installation for version 9.04 I decided I didn’t want to go through the hassle of having to reinstall every bloody app and tool I use this time around. I did notice a number of dbus errors during the upgrade and unfortunately I didn’t think to document what they were about. They may have had something to do with how long my upgrade took, but I hadn’t found any dbus issues connected with the upgrade so I have absolutely no clue what the errors should have told me.

Now that I’ve used and updating Karmic for just over a week I found some things that I want to point out, some good, some not so good.

Overall Thoughts

I kept seeing people say that the boot times for Ubuntu 9.10 are shorter and sure enough my boot time is shorter. Of course since the Ubuntu devs decided to switch from using Usplash for the initial boot splash to XSplash any Mac4Lin boot splashes would have been broken anyway (I never did get a Usplash working for Mac4Lin 1.0, much to may chagrin) but I have to say that I really do like the look of the new splash screens. The boot splash is a simple Ubuntu logo on a dark background, but I have to say the new XSplash is a thing of beauty. As you can see in a YouTube video posted on Softpedia’s article on the newly released Ubuntu 9.10 beta, it’s no longer a simple case of the Ubuntu logo and a progress bar. The Ubuntu logo is now suspended and lit by an overhead spotlight and the animated bar now scrolls up rather than going from left to right.

In addition, they’ve added the Ubuntu Software Center (USC) as a new tool for adding software to the usual collection of Synaptic and Add/Remove Software. When I first looked at it I thought, “So what? I can do the same thing with existing tools.” Except the UI for the USC makes it a lot handier than Add/Remove Software. You can either search for a specific app or browse through the library and when you find what you’re looking for you’re provided with a much nicer information screen complete with buttons to wither install the software as well as to go to the app’s website where you can get even more information. The information screen even lets you know the version that’s available, something that Add/Remove Software never had. Have software you installed from a Debian package (.deb)? The USC knows about the app (at least what the package told the system) and gives you a button to remove it. It may not always have the application’s icon, but that may be more of a limitation in the package itself. Yes, you can do all this via Synaptic, but not everyone’s all that comfortable with it.

The Good

For the most part I’m pretty happy with the upgrade. I won’t bore you with a ton of specifics or screenies (I’ll include a link to some screenshots I made at the end) but there are a few things that I noticed are definite improvements in the user experience for me. The first thing I noticed was a dialog that popped up on my first reboot after the upgrade was done. I knew my hard drives were getting a bit old in the tooth, but now I could see just how bad things are getting. I dismissed the dialog, but now when I boot up I get an icon in my notification area and when I click on it I get a helpful message. I can click on the message and get more information, and I know I need to replace that drive one of these days but now I know I need to do it sooner than later (picture). I can disable the message if I want, as I can for the warnings that I’m getting low on disk space on my partitions. Those warnings come up each boot, as well as when I’m working with videos and the available space gets too small. Yes, they can be a little annoying, but I haven’t decided to silence them just yet.

An even nicer improvement comes in the Update Manager. Now it lets you know the source for the particular updates, plus it flat-out gives you more information on the update, such as the version number. This is information that’s been missing from the Update Manager for as long as I’ve used Ubuntu.

Another small, yet a very nice set of improvements came in Evolution. The first is a better visual notification of new messages coming in. In the past when you fired up Evo you simply saw the folder names bold when you had unread messages, which is okay, unless you left some messages marked unread to follow-up on as I do. Now you’ll see that there’s a star on the folder that has brand new unread messages.

The other improvements come to those who use Evo as their RSS reader. Not only does Evo show the site icons for the folders with feeds where available (the other folders use the stock RSS feed icon), but on many sites you can now see the comments when you look at the article summaries. I’m not sure why they show up on some feeds and not others, but I have noticed that some feeds still show a count for the number of comments without actually showing the comments themselves. But it’s not all good news with Evo though.

There’s one more fan-damn-tastic improvement in Ubuntu 9.10 that I just discovered trying to get caught up on my RSS feeds: It’s a piece of baklava to enable using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to force a new X session. Just go to System > Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Layout Options. Then select Key Sequence to kill the X server and check Control + Alt + Backspace. That’s all it takes. Yooouge thanks to Panji Nushantara for pointing it out on his blog.

The Not So Good

First off all let me warn you about a potential deal breaker in the updated Evolution. If you’re like me and you use Evo for your RSS/ATOM feed reader you won’t want to grab the new Evo. The reason for this warning is the fact that for some unknown (to me) reason the evolution-rss plugin no longer works and no feeds are updated (filed as Bug #460462 with fixed link). Luckily you can export your feed list (Edit > Preferences > News and Blogs > Export) so you can migrate your subscribed feeds to another app like Liferea and hopefully not miss too many days’ posts. There’s also an advantage that Liferea has over Evolution’s RSS plugin: You can sort and rename your feed folders to your heart’s content without borking the feed settings, something that you can’t say about evolution-rss. Updated 26 October 4:00 pm: Thanks to some very quick work by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio the evolution-rss bug is already fixed. There’s a .deb package on comment #6 on the bug, or you can wait for it to be available through the Update Manager as it’s already been accepted for distribution.

There are more upgrades in Ubuntu 9.10 that aren’t such good news, and one that sticks out like a sore thumb on my system is the GNOME web browser, Epiphany. As I mentioned back in December I finally got tired of the decisions Firefox devs were making and switched to using Epiphany for my web surfing. There were two flavors of Epiphany, one using the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine and one using Webkit, but the Webkit version didn’t quite seem ready for prime time so I was using the Gecko version. It was great that I had the option and it allowed me the option of using a Gecko-based browser without dealing with what I thought were boneheaded UI decisions from Firefox devs. Unfortunately the Epiphany devs have stopped supporting the Gecko engine and since with the release of Epiphany 2.26.3 Epiphany/Gecko no longer exists, Epiphany/Gecko is simply not available in Ubuntu 9.10. You may think that’s not a big problem, except there are some basic behavior issues that no longer available.

There’s finally a semi-usable spell checker in Epiphany now. I saw semi-usable because if I select a correct spelling the misspelled word is deleted but not replaced with the correct spelling (filed as Bug #460450).

The biggest issue is that you can no longer right-click a link and select Open in New Tab from the context menu. You also can’t middle-click a link on every site and open it in a new tab, especially when the links are on a Google site like Gmail.

Another serious usability issue for me is that the extensions that I used don’t seem to work quite properly anymore. The biggest issue for me is the fact that my beloved New Blank Tab extension no longer seems to be working. I’m hoping someone will come along and fix it because while the Tab Foreground extension works it doesn’t let me open a new tab and go straight to the location bar so I can type (or paste) in a URI. This is a rather big pain in the arse, although not quite as big as the no middle-click issue.

Wallpaper Tray is another app that has broken in the upgrade. For some reason it flat out won’t launch on booting for some reason. I ended up switching to Desktop Drapes, which is a nice app that I can put right on my upper panel, but doesn’t have the hover feature of showing the path and filename for the current wallpaper like Wallpaper Tray does. Hopefully we can get that fixed before too long.

On the Whole

One the whole there are some nice benefits to the upgrade, as long as you don’t depend on the features I mentioned above. As I finally finish this post we have a mere four days before Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is released, now may be a great time to snag the ISO for the Release Candidate and try it out on your own system. Remember, try the LiveCD before you make the upgrade, and look at every app that you use now to make sure the upgrade won’t bring bad news as I found. make sure you also read the overview before you make the upgrade for more information on what’s coming in the upgrade as well as the known issues.

Check out all of my Ubuntu 9.10 screenshots in my Picasa Web Album.

Karmic Upgrade screenies

Captain Torre, I trust you know what to do with a broom

Way back when on an old blog of mine (it definitely wasn’t last year) the LA Dodgers swept a very important series and I referred to the naval tradition of submarines lashing a broom to their mast to signify that they have returned to port having defeated every enemy vessel they encountered. (I have to agree with a blogger who feels that a sub’s completion of their first sea trials isn’t the same thing defeating enemy vessels.) I wasn’t able to find a link to the old post of mine, but I did save the image I posted with that article so I could include it in this post. (Click to see the image full size, which will open in a new tab/window.)

While nobody died in the National League Division Series (NLCS) battles between the Dodgers and the Cardinals, the Dodgers the what probably nobody, including this writer, thought was possible, especially since the Cardinals so easily won the season series against the boys from the Ravine, regardless what stadium they played in. After taking both NLDS Game 1 and Game 2 at home, which wasn’t all that surprising, Dodgers skipper Joe Torre gave the ball to Vincente Padilla to start the game. Before the Red Birds could even come to bat Manny Ramirez plated Matt Kemp with an RBI double, and Mr. Walk-off, Andre Ethier, pretty much put the game away with a two-run jack to right field in the third. Only an RBI single by Albert Pujols in the 8th avoided the shutout, and a perfect game was avoided in the bottom of the first on a single by Ryan Ludwick. When all was said and done, the Dodgers won 5-1.

Why didn’t I post after the first two wins?

I didn’t blog the last two wins for two main reason. The first is that this blog is primarily a tech blog, and Dodgers baseball doesn’t really fit that classification, although I do post from time to time about what the Boys from Chavez Ravine do. But there’s also a very good reason I didn’t get to post about the wins, namely that I flat out didn’t have the time to write the posts. As I mentioned in passing twice before, I got an iriver E100 digital media player (DMP) as a belated birthday present from my mom and thanks to the wonderful open source app iriverter I am able to convert any video I can download to enjoy on my DMP. While I can enjoy some of the games on TBS, I end up missing some pretty sweet play so I either head over to the MLB.com Media Center page and use the Highlight links from the particular game or I go to the MLB.com Video Highlights page and catch the videos from there. The beauty of the Video Highlights page is that I am able to see not only highlights from a specific game, but also video content such as their FastCast of a day’s games, the Top 5 Plays from a specific day, as well as some content from the new MLB Network. On most occasions if I can see the video in my browser I can also snag the file in MP4 format and convert it to view on my E100, which makes a subway ride more enjoyable.

I had to say “on most occasions” because Friday I discovered a clip that I can see in my browser but for some unknown reason I’m unable to get it to download. If you saw the end of Game 2 of the NLDS, or at least heard about it, the Dodgers made an incredible comeback  with two outs in the bottom of the ninth to win the game. I was able to snag a video clip that includes Vin Scully on the Dodgers radio broadcast, as well as Mike Shannon on KTRS’s St. Louis radio broadcast and Dick Stockton on TBS, all calling the bottom of the ninth from Matt Holiday lost James Loney’s line drive in the lights all the way to Mark Loretta’s walk-off single. What I can’t seem to snag, even today, is the clip of just Scully calling the last five batters. I’d kill to be able to save that particular bit of multimedia to my hard drive, but for some reason the MP4 file isn’t coming up properly for saving off the MLB.com servers, so if anyone has a link that will help me snag this much desired MP4 please post it in the comments.

As it is, I was able to get 40 or so clips from the game, which took a good bit of time to download and then convert with iriverter. Game 1 of the NLDS only had a dozen clips I wanted to put on my E100, but last night’s game has another 40 clips (including postgame coverage) for me to see what I want to put on my DMP. Luckily I can snag the 38-second clip of Scully calling the final out and the Dodgers’ sweep of the 2009 NLDS.

What about the other teams still playing?

Yesterday’s NLDS Game 3 between the Rockies and Phillies was snowed out yesterday in Denver so it will have to be played tonight with the first pitch scheduled for 10:07 pm Eastern Time. That series is tied at a game a piece, but it won’t matter that much to the Dodgers who already know that there next game, Game 1 of the National League Championship Series (NLCS), will be on Thursday, with a start time to be announced. As with the NLDS, TBS will be carrying every game of the NLCS while the ALCS will head over to FOX. FOX will also be carrying the World Series when it starts on Wednesday, 28 October. You can see the entire postseason schedule on MLB.com.

Who would I like to see the Dodgers face in the NLCS? The Dodgers lost only four games out of 18 to the Rox, and against the Phillies they went 4-out-of-7, taking one series in May in Philly and splitting their series at home in June. Of course the Dodgers also met the Phillies in last year’s NLCS, with the Phillies beating the boys in Dodger Blue four games to one enroute to beating Tampa’s Rays four games to one to win the ‘08 World Series, and this past season doesn’t mean much of anything, let alone last year’s results, so I’m going to have to go with my gut on this one. I’m hoping for a Dodgers-Phillies NLCS, followed by a Freeway Series to start three days before All Hallow’s Eve. The rest of the country may not like an All-California Series, but I’d love to see the Dodgers beat the team that is so bad at geography that they doesn’t even know what city, let alone which county they play in (another item on my old blog that I’m not able to find archived to share).

It took a week, but they got it done

[Updated Monday 5 October to include the time for the first game of the Dodgers/Cardinals series and provide a link to the MLB.com site for this year's postseason play. -Peng]

A week ago I had the pleasure of writing that the Los Angeles Dodgers had clinched their place in the postseason. For the past week Dodger fans around the world have waited for one more win by the boys in Dodger Blue or one more loss by the guys from the mountains to be able to celebrate Joe Torre’s boys being the National League West Champions for the second year in a row.

The game went way past my bedtime last night so one of the first things I did this morning was to grab my cell phone and get the results from last night. Dodgers 5, Rockies Zip.

Of course that’s not all the good news Dodgers fans get this morning, as they also have home field advantage through the National League Division Series. While we know the schedule starts Wednesday in Chavez Ravine against the Cardinals, we don’t have times yet nor which network is carrying the games.

We do know that TBS will carry the last game of the regular season with the Dodgers trying to beat the NL Wild Card team one more time before the postseason kicks off. The coverage will begin at 4 PM Eastern Time.

Update 5 October: The first game will be on Wednesday, 7 October at 9:37pm Eastern Time on TBS. You can get info on all of his year’s postseason games on Major League Baseball’s newly refreshed WorldSeries.com site. Dodger fans will also want to make sure you check out the latest Inside Dodgertown video on the Dodgers Media Network. If you haven’t been to the DMN lately there are some great videos that you’re missing.

Last year when the Dodgers clinched the NL West title on the road I posted a video of what has to be one of the favorite songs, although I see now that the video has been removed from YouTube. I found an “official” version of the video and fixed that post, and in honor of the Boys from Chavez Ravine I’m going to post it here as well because the song is so fitting on this last morning of the 2009 regular season.

I look forward to having three more rounds of good news to post as the Dodgers hopefully will go all the way to be not only the NL West champs, or even the National League champions, but the winners of the 2009 World Series.

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.

A pair of Jaunty fixes, and an AWN update

There are a pair of bugs that popped up when I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, or should I say one popped up when I made the upgrade and the other sems to have popped up in the last several days, but I’m glad to be able to say that I have found fixes for both of them thanks to the Ubunutu community.

You may recall that I mentioned that pympd stopped working when I made the upgrade, and yesterday threespacemen posted a great solution to my thread on the Ubuntu Forums about the issue.

Same thing happened to me on two different boxes after the upgrade to 9.04 – looks like a python upgrade might have been the issue. If you open /usr/bin/pympd in your favourite editor, you’ll see that the first line reads:

#!/usr/bin/python2.5

Change the 2.5 to 2.6 so that it reads:

#!/usr/bin/python2.6

Worked perfectly for me, but ymmv…

It worked beautifully for me and I now have mypd available as an MPD GUI in addition to Relaxx and my all time fav, Sonata.

What the hell broke Frostwire?

Several days ago I tried to fire up FrostWire to do a little downloading but for some reason it resulted in errors. I have no idea what changed on my system other than some updates I’ve taken, but I don’t know which one caused the issue. All I know for sure is that FrostWire could no longer see my Java installation anymore. Luckily I found the FrostWire docs on the Ubuntu Community Documentation site, and sure enough the first thing on that page talks about an invalid JRE message.  All I had to do was to run sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun in a terminal and select the alternative that matches the installation of Sun’s Java that I have installed.

:~$ sudo update-alternatives --config java
[sudo] password for peng2:

There are 5 alternatives which provide `java'.

Selection    Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
*+        1    /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java
          2    /usr/bin/gij-4.2
          3    /usr/bin/gij-4.3
          4    /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/jre/bin/java
          5    /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 5
Using '/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java' to provide 'java'.
:~$

Once I did that I was able to fire up FrostWire and get back to the downloading I needed to do.

We have a progress report on AWN 0.4

Today when I was checking for new posts on the Avant Window Navigator Forums I saw a new thread from Mark Lee (aka malept) that includes a link to an update on the current progress on AWN 0.4, along with a video. For all of you who have been wanting to move the AWN dock to the sides of your desktop, you’ll love what Mark’s video shows.

As a matter of fact, the video is so good I’ll provide it for you here, although you’ll want to read his post for some information that the vid doesn’t include.

He also has a link to Moonbeam’s update post, but he does include the highlights for those who only want to read a single post. Both malept and Moonbeam rock, and one day I’m going to have to buy both of them several brews a piece.

My birthday was an experience

As Nanci already posted, Monday was my birthday (as Jack Benny would put it, I’m <JackB_imitation>39</JackB_imitation>), and a good friend of mine took me to see the new Star Trek movie on the IMAX screen at Jordan’s Furniture in Reading, MA. Little did I realize, the furniture store that I’ve longed to shop at for the last 20 or so years has quite a bit more than furniture and IMAX movies. There’s naturally a concession area for the theatre, but there’s another entertainment area right as you enter the store.

The first thing you see is the Jelly Belly Beantown area, complete with a Sweet Shop where you can buy all of your favorite Jelly Belly candies.  But there’s more than a store for JB at Jordan’s Reading. Beantown also has a number of sites finished in jelly beans that you can see. Think the Tournament of Roses Parade but with jelly beans instead of flowers and you’ll have the general idea. There’s a Massachusetts State House, as well as a tasty rendition of the famous Make Way for Ducklings statues from the Boston Common.

But wait, there’s more! They also have a shop for Richardson’s Ice Cream (the site is down as of this writing but I’ll provide the link for your use later) for days like today when it’s approaching 90 when your bod is crying out for either iced coffee (although I did find it a tad weak) or some ice cream. There’s also the Trapeze School of New York for those who have always dreamt of life flying under the big top.

For those who just want to sit a spell before you make your way to the theater (or before shopping for great furniture deals) you can watch their Liquid Fireworks display. Just about all of us have seed a fireworks show synchronized to music, and Jordan’s has done the same thing, only with water. I was glad just to sit there and take picture after picture of the “show”, thinking it was too bad I didn’t have a video camera to shoot the show with. Luckily someone else did and posted it to YouTube for us to enjoy.

Of course Jordan’s Furniture is best known as a place to find some very good furniture, although at a rather high price tag. I found one chair that was so comfy I didn’t want to get out of it to go see the movie. The price? $500. Ouch! But it was so comfy I bet it’s worth every penny.

And for those times when you want more than just movie fare or ice cream, either before or after the show, there’s a Fuddrucker’s restaurant right off Beantown. They bake their bread daily, and when I arrived for the first show of the day I could smell the baking. If you can manage to make the schedule I recommend their lunch special, a 1/3 pound hamburger, fries, and a bottomless soda all for $4.99.

I know what some of you are thinking. “That’s great Peng, but what did you think of the movie?” Before I tell you that I want to make something clear. I was in no way excited to see the movie. I’m one of those annoying people who see Hollywood reach back into the celluloid (or television) archives to bring back an old favorite to make it and make more money off people who may or may not have seen it before and immediately groan. Hollywood has developed (IMO) a very bad habit of rehashing old material rather than actually coming up with a fresh idea, and the “reboot” model has become one of the newest and best things. Sorry, to this movie viewer I tend to wait until one of those movies hits cable so I can see it for free. I really do hate rewarding the studios with my limited money for taking the (rather) cheap and easy path rather than simply making something we’ve never seen before.

Why did I go see Trek then? A good friend and his wife went to see it a week earlier and said I had to see it on the IMAX screen, and he’d take me for my birthday. I tried to talk him out of it, but ended up saying yes. In the end I have to say it isn’t bad. I can see why younger folks like it, especially since it is good as a popcorn flick. For those of us who have grown up with Trek (in any of it’s seven television incarnations and ten previous theatrical films), some of you will like it, some of you may not.

I don’t want to get too much into why I didn’t like it for the benefit of those who are still waiting to see it, but I will specify one thing that kept rubbing me the wrong way.The actors picked to play Bones, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov were spot on, and the actors who played Kirk and Uhuru were pretty good as well. I didn’t even mind Bruce Greenwood as Capt. Pike, and I was able to forget all of the asshole roles he’s played so well. But they cast Zachary Quinto to play Spock, and on those rare occasions where he was believable as Spock he had to go and open his mouth, and every time he did my brain immediately shouted, “It’s Syler. It’s fricking Syler.” And every time it did I found myself enjoying the movie less.

All in all the movie was okay, and I really liked the IMAX theater (their use of the ButtKicker brought a smile to my face since I’ve known about them for about a decade thanks to my work in live sound), but I enjoyed the Liquid Fireworks and Beantown more than the movie itself. And yes, I still kind of wish my friends had saved the $11 for another movie, even if I didn’t get to see it on my birthday, and let me see Trek on cable. I liked it that much.

---

See all 23 pictures in my Birdie Experience 2009 Picasa album

I’ve got 23 pictures that I took at Jordan’s in a Picasa album, and there are a number of pics of the Liquid Fireworks show. Feel free to check them out and leave a comment if you’d like.

Sorry it took so long to get this posted. Every time this week that I thought I had a chance to finish it some other task insisted on pushing it to the back burner.

Nope, I’m not dead yet

I know I haven’t posted much lately, but I really should have done a proper backup from Evolution before starting my clean install of Ubuntu 9.04. I’m having to go back through several years of email messages and get rid of duplicate messages. I’m finally getting to my recent RSS feeds, and I do have some thing that I’ve found that I want to pass along, but I want to get through the feeds a little better before I post the links and it could take until closer to the end of the week.

I did see something in my inbox this afternoon that I simply have to pass along. As regular readers know I’m a feind for Starbucks coffee, and I got an email from YouTube letting me know that there are some new videos from Starbucks available. One of them is a sneak preview of their new ad campaign, and it really points out some of the reasons people like me like their coffee so much. Rather than just posting a link they’re kind enought to let me embed the vid, so I shall.

Sweeps can be fun, but record-setting streaks are even better.

MLB grants Silverlight it’s unconditional release

Last year I displayed my severe displeasure for Major League baseball’s decision to use Microsoft’s Silverlight technology for their online video, a move that essentially cut GNU/Linux users out unless they wantedto jump thorough a number of hoops. Last night I was reading some news from Cnet and I got some delightful news. It turns out that back in November MLB decided not to continue to use Silverlight technology for their online videos, going back to relying on Flash technology that a very large majority of computer users already have installed.

It seems that MLB realized that to install Silverlight a user needs to have administrative privileges, something most users won’t have on their work PCs. There were also a number of glitches that made viewing the video content from Netflix (and I assume MLB) even harder.

All in all it’s a nice win for fans to start the season with, regardless of which team they root for. To make things even better, while fans in Boston have to wait an extra day for the start of the season thanks to some rain in the area yesterday, I saw this morning that the team I root for started off their season with a win yesterday. Hopefully we’ll get another win in the home opener next Monday.

For more on why MLB found Flash to be a better solution for their online video you can read the article I found last night from Cnet’s News.com. I love being abletoread the news on my PDA.

Peng’s links for Sunday, 29 Mar

The hell??? A Sunday links post on top of the other posts from today? You betcha.

I’m going to have to hold off on the promised post about Ubuntu 9.04. I’ve got it downloaded and burned (I’m not sure why my flash drive with it just sits there like a log’s bump) but I haven’t had a chance to do more than a quick look at it, plus I want to take the upgrade before I report on it. Yes, it looks solid enough that I’m going to snag the upgrade but before you do I strongly recommend that you check your computer with the iso on either a burned CD-ROM or a flash drive. That way you will get a better idea of how well your system will play with the Jackalope.

• Ronnie Tucker: Come grab Issue #23, hot from the digital presses! You need to read the latest issue, I’m just going to give you the link and leave it at that.
  
• Jonathan Jesse: Successful upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty. It’s a short post, but Jonathan had an easy time going from Kubuntu 8.10 to Kubuntu 9.04 (both 64-bit versions). He also finds something he really likes, which is why you should read it regardless of which flavor of *Ubuntu you prefer.
• Isabelle Duchatelle: Kill X session in Jaunty Jackalope. The devs have decided that users don’t want to be able to use Ctrl-Alt-Backspace as an emergency way to get out of a frozen session. (Silly devs, we really do need that every now and then.) Luckily Isabelle shows us how to get it back.
• Jun Auza: Easy Way To Save Flash/YouTube Videos on Linux. Yes, Linux users like to not only watch Flash movies, we like to snag them every now and then to our hard drive so we can enjoy it without having to go back to the server to get the vid again. You know what? It’s eeeeeasy to do if you’re a GNU/Linux user.

That’s it for today. Enjoy the end of March, because April is looking pretty nice for the GNU/Linux community. Plus Opening Day is just 8 days away!

Happy Mardi Gras!

Today’s Mardi Gras Day in our hometown of New Orleans, and as Peng’s said in the past there’s an easy way to catch the festivities online. Simply go to the website for WWL TV, the local CBS affiliate, and they’ll be streaming all of today’s parade coverage.

Their coverage started about 45 minutes ago, at 9 am Central Time (10 am Eastern Time) but they’re going until 3 pm (4pm ET) as they look at Zulu, Rex, Elks and Crescent City in New Orleans, as well as Argus, Elks Jefferson an the Jefferson parades in Metairie, not to mention the parades in Covington and Houma. As always, their anchors and reporters are costumed and they have a crew in the French Quarter to check out the festivities there as well.

Speaking of  “da Quatas”,  check out their Bourbon Street Cam to see the revelers there (especially helpful if you can’t get the video stream), and don’t miss the coverage from the New Orleans Times-Picayune at NOLA.com, including their various cams and blogs.

Today’s the last big party before Lent, so make the most of it.