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2007

Dreamhaven Books

Dreamhaven Books on Lake Street in Minneapolis is one of my favorite bookstores that I’ve ever been to. Dreamhaven specializes in science fiction, comic books, and fantasy and horror. Not only does one of my favorite authors frequent there, they have a great collection of new and used books, with some of the deepest catalog selections you’ll see in a book store. They have very rare books, and a large selection of author signed books.

Unfortunately, Neil Gaiman writes on his blog that Dreamhaven was broken in to Saturday. From the email he received from Greg Ketter, owner of Dreamhaven:

We had a break-in on Saturday night. They got a bit of cash but wreaked

terrible havoc on the store and my office. Damages will be costly but

insurance should cover a lot of it. But after the lull in current

business, this really will hurt. I don’t like charity but if you could

encourage people to maybe buy an extra book off us soon, it may help.

Three bookstores have closed in the Twin Cities in the past two months and

I don’t want to make it four.

Hit up Neil’s blog for more info. Dreamhaven was the bookstore that sponsored Neil’s reading and showing of Mirrormask late last year for the launch of Neil’s latest book, Fragile Things. This was where I won a very rare copy of Mr. Gaiman’s Angel’s & Visitations, that was published by, who else, but Dreamhaven books.

I get to Dreamahaven a couple of times a year – and I was just there last Friday spending my birthday money a day before the break-in. Looks like I’m on my way back to pick up an extra book or two to help them out in their time of need.

Geek Mafia

Welcome to the first in a new ongoing feature, “Recently Read”. Brief reviews of books I’ve just finished reading, Recently Read starts with G33K Mafia by Rick Dakan. I’ve been taking recommendations from Cory Doctorow, and reading books based on his recommendations and reviews he posts at Boing Boing, and he hasn’t done me wrong yet, starting with Geek Mafia.

Geek Mafia

Geek Mafia tells the story of Paul Reynolds, a former comic book writer who co-founds a gaming company, and is let go from the company he co-founded a few years later. Paul, while wallowing in his sorrows, meets Chloe, and together Chloe helps him hatch a scheme to get back at his former company. Paul’s adventures continue with Chloe, who leads a small band of con artists, and Paul soon finds himself involved in the underground world of hackers and con artists.

The book is fast paced, and you quickly come to care about the characters. Trying to figure out who’s conning who, Geek Mafia gives you an insider’s view to a seedy side of Silicon Valley you never thought was possible.

After reading Geek Mafia, I visited Rick Dakan’s home on the web, and was surprised to learn he self-published Geek Mafia (which explains a lot of the typos found in the book) and that the book was semi-autobiographical. Rick co-founded Cryptic Studios, makers or City of Heroes, and was also let go before the game came to fruition. Rick is currently working on a sequel and blogs frequently at Rickdakan.com.

HOWTO: Upgrading to Banshee 0.11.6 (SVN) on Ubuntu 6.10

Banshee 0.11.6 was released on Feb. 5th, 2007. Banshee 0.11.1 is included in Ubuntu 6.10, Edgy Eft. Major changes to Banshee 0.11.1 include:

  • Banshee-official-plugins merged with core
  • Radio stations can now be added/edited/removed from the radio plugin; additionally the remote stations can be easily and optionally disabled
  • Usability and interface updates to the podcast plugin

How to upgrade Banshee on Ubuntu 6.10 from Subversion:

Step 1: Create your build environment:

sudo apt-get build-dep banshee

Step 2: Get the required development packages and configure them:

sudo apt-get install libmono-sqlite2.0-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libglib2.0-dev<br /> libtool subversion autoconf automake1.9 gnome-common libavahi1.0-cil

sudo update-alternatives --set automake /usr/bin/automake-1.9

sudo ldconfig

Step 3: Remove Banshee 0.11.1:

<br /> sudo apt-get remove banshee

Step 4: Get Banshee from Subversion:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/banshee/trunk/banshee

Step 5: Build Banshee 0.11.6 with Avahi support:

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --enable-avahi --disable-docs

make

sudo make install

And run Banshee!

I have to say I really like the Internet Radio plugin, the layout is well done and the icons look great. Banshee feels snappier overall as well.

If I feel really brave, I may try to get MTP working later this week.

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Ubuntu Feisty Fawn First Impressions

I installed Ubuntu’s latest alpha release, the Feisty Fawn Herd 3, this morning on my development machine. Herd 2 had a bug that wouldn’t install, but Herd 3 installed like a champ.

I’m not going to put up any screenshots – since the release on Thursday, there are plenty of sites that have screenshots up.

Some random thoughts and first impressions:

  • Network Manager comes installed default now. The icon on the taskbar caught be my surprise. I installed on a desktop with a wired connection, but now I’m itching to go install Herd 3 on my extra laptop.
  • Control Center is more intuitive than I expected. For whatever reason, I had in my head that Control Center was just going to be a knockoff of Window’s Control Panel, but it’s not. I like how it groups Hardware, System and Other. The Filter box works very well as well.
  • The Ubuntu color scheme is the same as usual. It is what it is.

  • I installed Compiz from the Ubuntu repositories instead of Beryl, which I’m running on my Edgy Eft / main desktop. I wanted to give Compiz a try and see how it’s different. The best way I can explain it, after only using it for an hour or two now, and not knowing the in’s and out’s of Compiz, is that it seems more vanilla than Beryl. With Beryl being actively developed by the community (not that Compiz isn’t) Beryl seems to have much more eye candy and bells and whistles. I don’t have the stability problem or resources issues others have complained about on Edgy, and Compiz seems to do fine on my Feisty box using the Nvidia binary drivers in the Ubuntu repository. However, installing Compiz out of the box, including the packages compiz, compiz-gnome, and desktop-effects, along with the required dependencies, I had no window borders. The first thread on the Feisty Fawn forums on Ubuntuforums.org didn’t fix it, nor did a post 3 pages in. One post did link to the Compiz forums, and doing the following got it to work:

    sudo nvidia-xconfig --composite<br /> sudo nvidia-xconfig --render-accel<br /> sudo nvidia-xconfig --allow-glx-with-composite<br /> sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals

  • Banshee’s latest release, 0.11.5, is included and feels quite snappy.

  • Other than that, it doesn’t seem too different from Edgy (yet), but there’s still 2 months of development time to go.