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djotaku's twitter feed
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- no more cable tv for me. Saving $53/month!
- http://tinyurl.com/653oo5
- I just got 2 achievements on Spore! http://raptr.com/djotaku
- just started playing Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- just started playing Spore. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- just started playing Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- Awesome concession speech by McCain, I actually felt really sorry for him
- obama won!
- Partaking in the age-old tradition of following the election all night long.
- just started playing Solitaire. http://raptr.com/djotaku
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Aug
28
Great Linux Ad
Category: Linux | 
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Now if we could only get this on TV…
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Aug
27
Another micro-blogging post? What’s going on here? Well, when I first did my micro-blogging post, Identi.ca had just gone public and I didn’t think there was a reason to join yet another micro-blogging service. But two things came together to convince me to check out Identi.ca. First of all, I’ve overcome my reluctance to using micro-blogging services. Second, I heard an interview on Linux Outlaws with the creator of Identi.ca.
As you can see, it’s pretty much inspired by Twitter. It has a very similar interface and reply mechanisms. I got a good vibe from it - as I did with Twitter. Something about the aethetics just made me want to use it - just like Twitter and unlike Pownce. Of course, there are some negatives with Identi.ca being inspired by Twitter. Chief amongst these is the reply functionality. Only Plurk (with Pownce in a distant second) have correctly implemented replies in a way that makes sense. Without a threaded reply, it’s pretty hard to correctly follow the conversation that may come out of something posted on Twitter and Identi.ca. Of course, maybe that’s done on purpose. Perhaps replies are an afterthought because that’s not what these micro-blogging services believe micro-blogging to be about. I’d LOVE to see a mode in Identi.ca (just another tab, really) where posts could be viewed in a threaded fashion to be able to follow the conversation better. That would help Identi.ca leapfrog over Twitter in useability and functionality.
Speaking of this, it appears that Identi.ca assumes the user already knows what micro-blogging is all about. Unlike Twitter and the other services, the FAQs don’t have a lot of hand-holding “this is what a micro-blog is” talk going on.
I have found a lot more neat conversations on Identi.ca and I think that’s because a lot of the people on here are here because it’s open source. Thus, open source conversations seem to dominate on the site.
So far there doesn’t appear to be functionality in Flock or any programs in the Fedora repositories that allow posting to Identi.ca from other programs. You *can* post from GTalk, though, so that works out well.
What makes Identi.ca worth using, trying out, etc is that it’s open source. They are using the AGPL which means that you have to share source code if you make changes and then deploy it publicly over the web. But the most important aspect of the open-ness of this platform is that you can take the source code, install it on your own server, and then become part of the Identi.ca network. In other words, you can make your own customized version, but still have friends, communications, etc with the main site and with other sites running it. You no longer have to have an account on each of these sites, they can all just link to each other. Think of it as being able to interact with your friends who have myspace while you only use Facebook. It’s THAT revolutionary…potentially, anyway. We’ll see where it goes.
I’m not sure yet what I want to do with Pownce and Plurk. But I think Twitter will become my general thoughts blog while Identi.ca will be for Linux issues. There may be some cross-posting with issues that are really important to me, but I think this keeps my thoughts in the realms where they are most likely to be read. That’s the plan anyway, so let’s see what happens.
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Aug
27
Review: openSuse 11.0 (and KDE 4)
Category: Fedora, Gnome, KDE, Linux, M$, Novell, SuSe | 16 Comments
I’ve never used Suse or openSuse. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a “loyal” Fedora user since Fedora Core 1 and I have Ubuntu on my laptop since it had awesome laptop support. I even got some Suse CDs as a prize for the Letter of the Month from Linux Format magazine. However, I never even tried it at that time as I was mad at Novell for the Microsoft pact. I think it lends a lot of credibility to Microsoft’s BS argument that Linux violates its patents.
But it’s been a few years and nothing horrible has happened because of the Microsoft pact and it came as a liveDVD in the latest Linux Format Magazine. I was trying to wait until KDE 4.1 came out for Fedora so that could be my first experience with KDE 4, but that’s been delayed nearly a month now (while they, rightly, fix some bugs) so I decided to go ahead with the Suse review.
Suse is the second oldest distro that’s still around. It started off as being based off of Slackware and later on was somewhat based on Red Hat, borrowing rpm and some other technologies. Since then it’s gone off on its own and is now considered one of the big boys. A few years after Red Hat shelved its personal distro and converted over to the community-sponsored Fedora, Suse decided to do the same thing with openSuse. Just like Fedora, they’ve had some uneven releases. However, openSuse 11 is supposed to be their comeback release. Historically, Suse has been one of the biggest supporters of KDE as the default desktop although that has fallen off a little seince they’ve been trying to compete with Red Hat in the business world.
It’s important to note, however, that Novell’s Suse team has put a LOT of work into their KDE desktop. This liveDVD is running KDE 4.0, yet they didn’t seem to have any problems getting icons on the desktop. Lots of people were complaining about being unable to do so in Fedora and other distros using KDE 4. Apparently, they just didn’t take the time that Suse did to engineer a really good KDE 4 release. (Frankly, I’m surprised that Siego didn’t point to openSuse 11.0 as an example of a well-implemented KDE 4.0 release!) They’ve also solved the problem of the ugly black panel that was too large. So, plus points go to Novell’s openSuse/Suse KDE team. They deserve an applause for doing this so well!
Novell has the KDE program menu that has annoyed so many people. One of the things I’ve always loved about KDE was the fact that it had a favorite (or most run) programs section on the start menu. Sure, there are some that believe that if you’re going to run programs that often you should have them as launchers on your taskbar. But that can make taskbars look a bit cluttered. Also, I think the most used program portion of Window’s Start Menu is one of the things they got very right with Windows XP. (I’m not sure if MS innovated that or copied it from somewhere) This menu is a good menu and doesn’t deserve all the hatred it’s received on the net. It just needs a couple of tweaks to make it perfect. The first problem with it is that if your mouse wanders down to the Favorites, Applications, etc portion of the menu, it switches you to that section. I think a click should be required there to keep people from accidentally switching. That was the biggest complaint most people had and it can be fixed so easily. No need to throw the baby out with the bath water. One other thing that was a bit unclear to me was how to go back on the applications hierarchy. The skinny arrow on the left is not noticeable enough - at least not the first time it catches you off guard.
Widgets…it’s one of the biggest, most talked about innovations of KDE 4. There is a lot of innovation going on in KDE 4 and if they can get past the KDE 4.0 stigma, I think they may end up surpassing Gnome with this release. With Superkaramba, KDE has always done widgets so much better than Gnome. Gnome’s desklets always seemed a bit kludgey and tacked on at the end. Superkaramba always felt like it was part of KDE; even before it was added as an official part of KDE 3.5. Now, with Plasma, the KDE team hopes to take them to the level of Apple’s OSX widgets. In fact, OSX widget compatibility is either in KDE 4.1 or coming in KDE 4.2.
Wow! If you’ve only seen the same old screenshots of a calculator, a click and a notepad, you haven’t seen the true power of the widgets. First of all, they have quite a few new ones now. You can see that I have a comic viewer, an RSS feed, and a Twitter feed. All of these came from the default “add widgets” dialog. I’m surprised, especially given the popularity of Twitter, that no one has showcased these widgets yet. I’m thouroughly impressed that we’ve moved beyond simple system monitors and weather widgets (although I’m sure those are coming soon enough!) They’re very easy and intuitive to position and configure. And, one of the problems I always had with widgets on any desktop was that if I had all my programs open, they were less helpful to me. Well, by clicking on the little button by the gecko or the top right corner, the plasma dashboard view is activated. This minimizes your programs and brings the widgets to the forefront. A simple click on the desktop brings your programs back! Couldn’t be easier. They’re also very pleasing to the eye with their drop shadows. They move smoothly and appear with a little fade-in. Very nice.
As far as programs go, they have a pretty standard set. OpenOffice.org provides the office suite. Again, like with Mandriva, this is a little bit out of place since they could use KOffice. However, I know that OpenOffice.org has much better compatibility with the suite from Redmond. Interestingly, GIMP and Krita don’t seem to be included - but then again, it’s a liveDVD. I’m sure it’s in the repositories.
In fact, let’s check out Yast, their control center. It appears to control any setting you might want to change. Plus points for them for making it all nice and organized. In fact, they seem to be on par with Mandriva here in terms of everyting you could possibly want in one place. Minus a very small point for it not looking as pretty as Mandriva or even as pretty as the rest of openSuse 11.0. From here we can install programs. Let’s see how well that appears to work.
I have to say that it is indeed ugly to look at. I couldn’t really get a good feel for it as it didn’t have repositories defined. I’ve really become much more of a fan of PackageKit’s interface. (Which I’ll talk about in my Fedora review) More and more Gnome-based distros are moving to PackageKit and I think there’s even a KDE version of Packagekit. It works very well for package management and you can’t argue against the value of a consistent interface across distros.
Some last little things I noticed. Take a look at what came up when I clicked on “My Computer”:
I really, really like this page that it loads up. It is very useful for locating places on your computer AND for getting information. To get the same info in Windows you’d have to open up “My Computer” AND right-click on “My Computer” and click on properties. Here you have some quick links to “Common Folders” and also you can see that it recognized my NTFS hard drives. You also have all the key information you need in order to get help from someone: kernel version, distro, KDE version, graphics card driver, graphics card info, CPU info, and the total and free RAM. Just one look gives you everything you need to know. And I want to finish up with just a quick look at some of the neat finishing touches that Novell has done with openSuse.
Look at that - there’s a little gecko - the Suse mascot on the title bar. This little dude appears on any title bar that has focus. It’s just little touches like this that make the distro seem more professional. I wish more distros would do things like this. And look at this:
Now, this is probably a KDE setting, as opposed to Suse, but good on Novell for leaving it in. There are many things I like about this setup. First of all, the expansion button is not next to the exit button. The number of times I’ve been frustrated by accidentally closing a window when I meant to resize it is just too numerous to count. Also, the up arrow makes more sense to me than Microsoft’s icon. It’s just that we’ve been around with the Microsoft implementation for 20 years.
So, what’s my final verdict? I think Novell has done a really, really good job with openSuse 11.0. Unlike Fedora, they did a very good job with the unfinished KDE 4.0 and turned it into something usable. Lots of visual finishing touches make the distro just feel professional and not hacked together. There are a few rough edges here and there. I also didn’t test out flash, MP3 playback, or DVD playback. I presume these can all be downloaded from some third party repository in some country where they don’t implement silly things like software patents.
Except for the still touchy subject of the Microsoft deal, I’d recommend Novell to someone who was new to Linux but ready to learn. It doesn’t have the same hand-hold style of Ubuntu, so that’s still my top choice. Right now it’s really almost a tie between recommending Mandriva and openSuse as the next best thing after Ubuntu. Fedora is often broken due to being bleeding edge and I wouldn’t recommend it to someone brand new to Linux. Of course, there still is the patent deal and they either did it to make themselves more palatable to companies than Red Hat (thus having bad motives) or they had to satisfy investors (which they legally must do in the USA). So I guess that would break the tie and give it to Mandriva. But Novell has made a top notch distro and if they can get over the negative press from the Microsoft deal (and there are websites like boycottNovell to prevent that), then I think openSuse may end up on more magazine covers and start to steal some of the thunder away from Ubuntu.
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Aug
26
My latest pictures moving from one views group to another.
25 to 50:
50 to 76:
100 to 200:
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Aug
24
Micro-blogging: One Month Later
Category: Geek Love, Internet | Leave a Comment
It’s been about a month since I signed up for a bunch of micro-blogging websites. So what do I think after about a month? Let me start off with Twitter.
In my first look at the micro-blogs I had some pretty good feelings about Twitter. That has basically carried over for the past few weeks. I added a Twitter plugin to my blog, using it for quick thoughts I don’t want to elaborate on with a blog post. I’m also using Twitux on my Linux computer for posting without having to load up the Twitter site. I haven’t really been using the Flock Twitter plugin because it doesn’t seem to update correctly or often enough. I’m enjoying using it for those quick thoughts. I’m definitely going to keep using Twitter for the foreseeable future. So I feel the way about Twitter as I did a month ago - I like it.
Now onto Pownce. I have barely used Pownce. I’ve made perhaps somewhere between 15 and 20 posts and that’s about it. I think part of the problem is that everyone I know is on Twitter or will be on Twitter in the near future, but no one I know or care about is on Pownce. I mean, even NPR’s Talk of the Nation is on Twitter. The reply feature is nice, but so far I haven’t been able to use it since no one is following me on Pownce. I haven’t had a chance to use the fileshare or calendar features I was excited about in my review a month ago since I don’t know anyone on this service. I may keep updating it for a little while, but if that account lapsed and they canceled my account, I wouldn’t care. I’m also using a Wordpress Plugin for Pownce and it looks exactly like the one for Twitter. Just like a month ago, I am not that fond of Pownce.
Finally, onto Plurk. I think Plurk was the Internet addiction I was quickest to get over. Previous addictions include Facebook and Flickr. I have met a lot of people on Plurk that seem to be pretty neat people to talk to. There’s also a huge knitting in the Plurk constituency. At least, everyone I click on from the “interesting plurkers” links appears to be into knitting. It’s a pointless fact, but a strange one. Plurk was a very interesting ride when compared to last month’s review. The action items in Plurk turned out not to bother me that much and I eventually came to like them and tried to always format my answer in the third person. And, there was the option to pick a blank option and just put whatever you wanted in there. So instead of annoying me, it ended up forcing me to be creative. I didn’t like that there was only a line for typing - but the line dynamically becomes a box if you type more in. I was also excited about the karma.
So, interesting, the karma did what it was supposed to do at first - get me to come back and do lots of commenting on other people’s plurks. It also got me to befriend a bunch of people. But then the karma ended up getting me more and more pissed off. Now I’m at the point where the karma is actually what is causing me to consider just getting rid of Plurk. I absolutely had the feeling that I’m being forced to Plurk. I’ve never liked people forcing me to do things and I’ve always left any organization where I had to be forced to do something. The most annoying part is they expect you to plurk from work instead of actually working. At a lot of jobs, like mine, this is against the computer policy and people have been fired over it. So every day when I got home, my karma had gone lowered. This was made even more annoying by the fact that you get more abilities on the site as you get more karma. Also, if the others are right, then by not using smilies and dancing bananas, I’m limiting my karmic growth. I don’t want to be forced to use smilies if I don’t feel like it.
Also, as more and more people did more and more plurking, it became harder to keep up if I took some time off to spend with my family or others in the real world. I would come back and find hundreds of plurks for me to look over. If I don’t look them over, it’s hard for me to find replies to my most recent plurks. So they need to somehow fix that - I can’t think of the best way to do it right now, but it certainly doesn’t work well. People are constantly claiming plurk bankruptcy. Also, when I’m skipping through these hundreds of plurks it makes me feel bad that I’m not reading what others are saying, but I expect them to read my plurks and respond so we can have a conversation.
So, in the end, I really enjoy Twitter - the original. Pownce is just there and I haven’t found a compelling reason to stay with it. Plurk has annoyed me so much with the karma and bad reply interface that I’m thinking of quitting it. I’ve been purposely boycotting it for the past 48+ hours and just spending time in the real world instead of the 20+ minutes it’s going to take me to get through all the replies. I may go back to Plurk, but I’d probably just end up ignoring the karma.
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Aug
23
Empathize!
Category: Gnome, Red Hat | 2 Comments
Well, the latest craze to hit the Linux bloggers is talking about Empathy. Everyone is talking about it. It’s apparently going to be in the next version of Gnome and Ubuntu is considering replacing Pidgin with Empathy for the next release. First of all, depending on how much work is done on Empathy between now and then, I think this may be a bad idea. Ubuntu is the distro we give our Linux n00b friends to play with. Pidgin can do (more or less) everything Trillian can do (and definitely everything AIM can do - except voice/vid). Do we want them thinking that Linux is crap because they are using the feature incomplete Empathy?
But this isn’t even the most interesting thing about this for me. The most interesting thing is that Empathy uses libpurple for the backend for some of its IM capabilities. On first glance this seems like the perfect *nix-y thing to do. You don’t want developers wasting their time writing functionality that already exists. Instead they should make the core functionality a library that all the other programs can use. This gives rise to all kinds of awesome programs - think of all Gnome programs using one program to provide spell checking so that they don’t each have to implement it and their own dictionary, etc. However, on second glance you start to wonder if it’s a good thing in this context. The spelling library being used by all the programs is fine because they don’t all compete with each other.
Now we have Empathy as a possible replacement for Pidgin and it uses Pidgin’s libraries! That seems like a bit of a slap in the face to me. It’s like, “Thanks for your libraries and now I will use them to dominate you and wipe you out.” After all, I keep hearing people calling for distros to only ship one program per function. One word processor and ONE IM program. So if they start shipping Empathy as the default, I think that for a growing category of new Linux users, that means they won’t be using Pidgin. After all, why stray from what the distro has provided for you?
So, first of all, how does this make the Pidgin developers feel? It’s like a fork, but even worse because it’s a totally different code base that can’t be morphed back into Pidgin. And what if Empathy gets more and more popular until no one is using Pidgin? Then the developers stop working on libpurple. But Empathy depends on libpurple and they’ve just shot themselves in the foot. Well, at least until they get someone who understands enough about how libpurple was working to continue working on the code (the magic of the GPL). But, more likely, they’ll just use libpurple as a stop-gap and then work on a new library - wasting the developer time they wanted to save by using libpurple in the first place.
This reminds me of a similar battle in the Linux world - Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Oracle is using Red Hat’s source code to make their own Linux. They are competing against, and hope to dominate Red Hat. But what happens if they crush Red Hat? They’ve killed their source of source code.
So, where do things go from here? There are three possible scenarios that I can see. 1) Empathy and Pidgin get into an arms race. This benefits the users from the competition as more and more features get added. Of course, it can also hurt the users if new features are added so hastily that they introduce tons of bugs and security holes. 2) The Pidgin project folds into the Empathy project. Kind of like an unforking, in a way. Pidgin, which has always been the default IM client for Gnome, basically becomes an official Gnome project by way of becoming Empathy. 3) The Pidgin team gives up UI coding. They decide to remain their own project, but only work on libpurple. There are already other programs that use libpurple like Adium and some other duck-themed one for Macintosh. So they’re already used to people using their backend and creating other programs. (They’re just usually on Macs and don’t compete directly with Pidgin) I think I’d prefer either outcome 2 or 3 as it’d probably result in the least ill-will in the community and the most benefit for users.
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Aug
21
64 Studio Review
Category: Debian, M$ | 7 Comments
Many people know the mantra - if you are a gamer or office worker, you use the OS from Redmond. If you are a creative person such as a musician, video editor, etc you use a Mac. Geeks use Linux. But more and more people are moving away from Windows and seeking either Macs or Linux. If you switch to Mac you have to spend a ton of money and if you switch to Linux, it’s free and you can use the hardware you already have. But what if you’re a creative person? Can you only go to a Mac? Lots of people want to allow the creative people to come to Linux so there are more and more Linux distros for the creative types. This month, in Linux Format Magazine, 64 Studio was bundled on the disc. It doesn’t run as a liveCD or liveDVD so I’m running it in VirtualBox. As you can see here, it is a Debian-based distro:
I haven’t installed Debian since Debian 3 when I installed it for my print/file server (luigi), so I’m not sure if the GUI installation begins this way, but strangely it appears to use the ncurces installation.
All the detection stuff continues in the ncurses screens. Eventually it gets to the partitioning section. It gives me two choices, Guided or Manual:
I go through all of the defaults including putting everything on one partition. No biggie since I’m not planning to keep this forever as my studio box. So it starts the partitioning and that takes a little while. Then I set up my timezone, root password, username, and user password. Finally it starts to install. I think this is quite a bad idea for a Mac replacement. There isn’t anything hard about it or bad about it, but then again, I’ve been installing Linux distros for something like 5 years now. (wow!) It’s just not pretty and Mac users like pretty. I suggest moving to Anaconda or whatever it is that Debian’s using nowadays.
At first it died on ef2progs. I restarted my installation. (This isn’t necessarily their fault - might be a VirtualBox issue) Once that was over and it rebooted, I was greeted with a very plain GDM screen. In fact, I was floored at how plain it was for a studio-based distro.
So I logged in. It took me a while to figure out what the background was. (It is a guitar string up-close, isn’t it?) It’s also, interestingly enough, they put Gnome on the bottom. Since people using 64 Studio are probably coming from Macs, this seems to be a very interesting choice to me.
The preferences are in a really weird place compared to Ubuntu and Fedora. (And most other Gnome-based Linux distros that I’ve used) Usually they’re under the System menu, which has made a lot of sense to me. You’re changing things about the system. Here’s what it looks like:
Also, it’s strangely just coming out of the Gnome foot. Will people know to just click on that? I guess with the Macs I’ve used there’s the apple, but again, that’s at the top with Apple. So there seems to be some kind of inconsistency where they are making it like apple where there’s just a little icon in the corner, but then they put the menu on the bottom. (Which isn’t even standard for Gnome!)
On to applications. Under internet they have Iceweasel instead of Firefox and Icedove instead of Thunderbird. It’s the exact same program, but with different art and a different name. Makes sense since it’s based on Debian. I thinkperhaps they could use a little README file on the desktop explaining this to anyone coming from Mac or Windows so they know it’s the same thing as Firefox.
They have some very interesting choices for the office programs. Abiword provides the wordprocessor and Gnumeric provides the spreadsheet. OpenOffice.org is nowhere to be found. It makes sense because 64 Studio is meant to be a creativity distro instead of a generic destkop distro.
When it comes to the applications included to make this a studio distro, they’ve got quite a few programs under graphics.
So they have some of the usual subjects like GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, and (depending on the distro) Blender. But they also have some programs I haven’t seen before such as K-3D, KToon, Stopmotion, and Xara Extreme. Of course, Xara and Inkscape cover the same territory and the only reason I’ve ever heard for using Xara on Linux is because you’re used to Xara on your other platform. I decided to see what K-3D, KToon and Stopmotion were about.
Up there you can see the startup of K-3D the first time I open it up. Just on my absolute first impressions it appears to be designed to have a much friendlier interface than Blender. It looks a lot less intimidating and you can see the shapes you’re going to create without having to right-click or something like that. I’ve been using Blender for about 2 years now and now I find it very easy to use and quite natural. But the first time I ever started it up, I closed it about five minutes later, frustrated. I clicked a few buttons and came up with this. I tried to render and it didn’t work. But I didn’t feel like taking the time to figure it out.
I couldn’t quite figure out how KToon was supposed to work, but no biggie. It’s nice that it’s there. Here’s the Stopmotion GUI:
Stopmotion looks very interesting. It appears as though you hook up your webcam (or other type of camera that you can tether to the computer) and then you hit the camera button over and over to capture each frame. Sounds very, very tempting to try out and I’ll probably be installing it on my Fedora and Ubuntu computers. Of course, under sound and video, there are a ton of applications, such as a synthesizer. Unfortunately I couldn’t try it because the sound wasn’t working. I’ll chalk that up to VirtualBox.
TerminatorX is a really cool DJ program I discovered. I definitely want to check this out on my Fedora and Ubuntu computers.
So, what do I think of 64 Studio? On the one hand, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference on the surface between 64 Studio and just taking a vanilla Debian install and installing the same packages as 64 Studio. On the other hand, there’s something to be said about a distro that already has all the packages installed and that you can just hand to a technologically-minded creative person and they can install it and start getting creative with free software. Minus points for not having a graphical installer and minus points for having the menu bar at the bottom. Also, it’s possible that a lot of the benefits of 64 Studio vs Vanilla Debian are below the surface. If they have a custom kernel tuned for creativity and have the jack audio framework all setup for you already, then that’s a huge plus for them. I’d definitely check it out, but you might also want to try Ubuntu Studio to see what they’re up to.
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