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2005

  • in General
  • 1 min read

Sonic

A follow-up from my visit to Houston last week: I finally had the chance to eat at a Sonic, “America’s Drive-In”.

The funny thing is, none of us had any idea it was only a drive-in. I see the commericals all the time on ESPN, and have wanted to stop there to see what it was all about. I see the breakfast food commericals about ten times more often than I do for their burgers.

They were all over Houston, I saw more Sonic’s than McDonald’s (which is fine with me). Drive through or drive-in are your only choices, maybe outdoor seating if you were lucky. Had a Jalapeno Double Burger with Tater Tots and a Lime-ade, all three of which were quite good for fast food.

Definitely better than your normal chains such as Hardees, McD’s or BK. Step up from Culvers ups here in the north, but not quite as good as an In ‘N Out out west.

And our thoughts are with you for those of you in Houston right now.

Last.fm

I’m very intrigued by Last.fm, formerly Audioscrobbler.

Download a plugin for your favorite music player (Linux players included!) and start listening to music. From there Last.fm will start recommending music to you based on what you and others listened to that’s similar.

I can’t do justice to explaining it, so go read the FAQ. I’m very intrigued in Last.fm as a way to get introduced to more music, but not sold on using XMMS as my music player as I love Muine and am starting to test Banshee.

But I love the concept of Last.fm. Social networking tools own me.

Ubuntu Blog

I was taking a peek at WordPress.com (more on that in a minute) and it showed one of the top hosted blogs there is the Ubuntu weblog.

It already has some nice tips and tricks posted (like the bash command append). I’ll definitely be adding that to my blogroll.

WordPress.com is similar to Movable Type – hosted blog solution for users who don’t want or have a server to host their own blog on.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger Update

I had mentioned in my Colony 4 upgrade post some of the problems I was having. It turns out the icons weren’t appearing because I had a custom theme chosen. Choosing Clearlooks set everything right again, though Ubuntu seems to have changed the Tomboy icons in the panel and in the Applications menu.

Doing an apt-get upgrade after getting home from traveling resulted in 24 hours of panic. Upon upgrading, my networking stopped working. It seems I wasn’t the only one with this problem, but thankfully one of the posters in that thread mentioned how the upgrade seemed to have stopped half way through. Going to a terminal and doing another apt-get upgrade and a reboot fixed the problem, thank god.

Overall, I’m still very happy with Breezy Badger. I’m waiting for the X.org packages to get a bit more stable as it seems I upgrade them almost daily and then I’ll get my monitor and ATI drivers working properly.

Just a few weeks from Breezy Badger going final!

  • in General
  • 1 min read

Back again

And… I’m back. Spent most of last week traveling in Houston for work. This was my first significant time spent in the big ole state of Texas, and in some ways it’s a different world down there.

First, housing is much cheaper. Like 50% cheaper than here – and with no state income tax, cost of living must be much lower. It was 90 and humid all week – I loved it. I had the opportunity to go to Minute Maid Park and watch the Astro’s play. It feels like they just tried to cram a MLB stadium into a few spare blocks they had open in downtown – the place is tiny. All the modern amenities, but looking into the outfield and just seeing walls and no bleachers wasn’t right.

Demographics were very different. Texas state flags were everywhere – they don’t call it the Lonestar State for nothing.

Now, back to blogging.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger Colony 4 Upgrade

I upgraded my main computer with Ubuntu’s Hoary Hedgehog release from May ’04 to the latest version of testing (Colony 4) Tuesday night. I wanted to perform the upgrade with the release of GNOME 2.12 Wed., and Breezy Badger about a month out.

I used apt-get to perform the install, and considering it’s not even to preview version, some things went right and some things went wrong.

The Good:

  • Updated my /etc/apt/sources.list and replaced all instances of “Hoary” with “Breezy”

  • It took about 20 minutes to install and upgrade, had a few instances where I had to force (-f) the packages

The Bad:

  • ATI binary drivers aren’t in Breezy yet

  • My xorg.conf file is pretty messed up. My original Hoary xorg.conf included the actual scan lines for my Dell 2405 monitor. I ran through the manual setup script and removed one bad resolution (1920 x 1440) and am using DRI to draw the desktop. At least I get to the desktop to that way, though I currently have no 3d acceleration.

The Ugly:

  • My icons are pretty messed up – I’ll post a screenshot tonight. Including icons on the panel (Tomboy specifically) and on the desktop.

  • I keep my desktop clean of icons, with the exception of my Samba and SSH links to my remote servers. Those icons are messed up, as is Nautilus, including the new spatial tree view.

Overall, GNOME still feels snappy, even in DRI mode, and I’m fairly excited about some of the new features, especially the spatial tree view in Nautilus.

Bandwidth Oops

After all the problems I’ve had getting my Vonage up and running to interact properly with my TiVo, I thought I had it totally fixed.

Yet all last week, I had horrible latency on my network, that was resulting in long pauses when on the phone, and then my web browsing became very, very slow. Not quite dial-up quality, but definitely not broadband. It was very frustrating, especially as I needed to get some stuff fixed on Apatheia.org.

Friday I brought home a different router to see if that would work. First I upgraded the firmware on my current router, and then went to check a website on my 2nd machine that does all my email and IM that I don’t use a lot for web browsing.

Wait – what’s that in the bottom corner of the screen below Firefox? Sure enough, it was a Bittorrent client I had open from the previous Saturday downloading OpenSuse. It had started really, really slow – 1 – 2k download. But it had definitely finished strong as it was now uploading at 40k / second – using all of my available 384k upload speed. Turn that off, and voila – all my latency problems fixed.

Whoops.

Reamspire

I’ll have to agree whole-heartedly with Jeff Waugh on this one: Reampsire!

Here’s a Linux company who went after Microsoft with their first name (Lindows), then took Microsoft’s money to the tune of $20 million to change it, going after a project that was more dissimilar than they were when they were called Linspire.

And then, to top it off, the article itslef is belittling and insulting to other Linux distributions. No matter how many flamewars go on at any given time in the Linux community, there is always some respect between distributions and it’s users. Because you’ve made the right choice and that choice is Linux.

Yet Linspire:

The name Freespire, however, did create some confusion in the short time it was used. The name implies a “free” copy of Linspire, which of course it is not. The very things that were taken out of Linspire for Andrew’s project are in fact some of the very things that make Linspire, well…Linspire. One of the main differences between Linspire and other Linux distros (Mandriva, Ubuntu, MEPIS, etc.) is that Linspire does include a lot of legal and paid-for 3rd-party licenses for things like mp3, Java, Flash, Quick Time, Windows Media, Bitstream fonts, Real media, music, etc., and this is all pre-loaded, tested and ready to use. Take all that away and you don’t have Linspire, you have something more like other Linux distros. So you see, the term Freespire (free + Linspire) is actually an oxymoron and would be a term like VanillaChocolateCake, where you take out all the chocolate.

Andrew has decided to change the name of his project to ‘squiggle’ to avoid any confusion.

The only true “Freespire,” would need to be a FREE COPY of the real LINSPIRE.