-
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/images/fsf.png)
djotaku's twitter feed
-
- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
-
Sep
4
System Information for Windows
Category: M$ | 
Leave a Comment
System Information for WIndows (SIW) is a program you MUST have installed on your Windows computer. It gives you all the information you could ever want to know about your computer in a nice easy to use interface. I learned about it in a recent Computer User Magazine. Here are some examples of the information it provides:
Motherboard:
Property Value
Manufacturer ASUSTeK Computer Inc.
Model P4P800-E
Version Rev 1.xx
Serial Number MB-1234567890
North Bridge Intel i865P/PE/G/i848P Revision A2
South Bridge Intel 82801EB (ICH5) Revision A2
CPU Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
Cpu Socket Socket 478 mPGA
System Slots 5 PCI, 1 AGP
Memory Summary
Maximum Capacity 4096 MBytes
Maximum Memory Module Size 1024 MBytes
Memory Slots 4
Error Correction None
Warning! Accuracy of DMI data cannot be guaranteed
Property ValueBIOS Vendor American Megatrends Inc.BIOS Version 1009.003Firmware Version 101.114BIOS Date 09/05/2005BIOS Size 512 KBBIOS Starting Segment F000hDMI Version 2.3Characteristics - supports ISA- supports PCI- supports Plug-and-Play- supports APM- upgradeable (Flash) BIOS- allows BIOS shadowing- ESCD support is available- supports booting from CD-ROM- supports selectable boot- BIOS ROM is socketed- supports Enhanced Disk Drive specification- supports INT 13 5.25-inch/1.2M floppy services- supports INT 13 3.5-inch/720K floppy services- supports INT 13 3.5-inch/2.88M floppy services- supports INT 05 print-screen- supports INT 09 and 8042 keyboard services- supports INT 14 serial services- supports INT 17 printer services- supports INT 10 CGA/Mono video services- supports ACPI- supports legacy USB- supports AGP- supports booting from LS-120- supports booting from ATAPI ZIP drive- BIOS Boot Specification supported
Property ValueNumber of CPU(s) One Physical Processor / One Core / 2 Logical Processors / 32 bitsVendor GenuineIntelCPU Name Intel Pentium 4CPU Code Name PrescottPlatform Name Socket 478 mPGACPU Full Name Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHzRevision E0Technology 90 nmInstructions MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, HTOriginal Clock 3000 MHzOriginal System Clock 200 MHzOriginal Multiplier 15.0CPU Clock 2999 MHzSystem Clock 199.9 MHzFSB 799.6 MHzL1 Data Cache 16 KBytesL1 Trace Cache 12 KuopsL2 Cache 1024 KBytes
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Sep
3
Google’s new Chrome Web Browswer has been all over the news today. See this general one here. Or this one mentioning how it’s supposed to be a Microsoft killer. This one talks about how blazingly fast it is. (I agree!) And, finally, this one talking about how Google is becoming more evil with the release of this web browser. I decided to take it for a spin and cut through the hype.
On first startup, I thought - hmm this browser looks a bit bubbly. Reminds me a bit of MSN Browser in the late 90s. Then I suddenly noticed something - no top bad on the browser! Where’s the File, Edit, Tools, menu so common to Windows programs? Even the tabs are right up in the titlebar window. But you know what? I like it - more room for viewing my websites. Tabs load up ridiculously fast. And the little things are so nice - like how there are animations when you create the tabs. They slide out from the left. Or when you close a tab, all the ones to the right of it slide over to the left. It’s pointless eye candy, but I love it! It really adds to the experience.
The search bar appears at the top. Also, when you’re typing websites into your bar, all kinds of suggestions pop up that have nothing to do with websites you’ve been to before. Like for server.ericsbinaryworld.com, when I hit “s” - sears.com was one of the choices even though I’ve never been there. I can see Google using this as a way to make money.
Your most viewed sites are there for you to click on whenever you open a new tab. Very convinient. But it reminds me a lot of Opera’s speed dial. (Except that it’s automatically filled out) Check out this shot from my Opera review.
And compare Google’s recently closed tabs to Opera’s trashed tabs:
I wonder how it feels to be Opera. They are always coming out with the latest and greatest in web browser paradigms, but no one uses them. I guess it’s their penalty for charging for their browser back in the day and then displaying ads. Otherwise, they could be eating Microsoft’s lunch now instead of Firefox. Firefox took tabs from Opera (the first MAJOR browser to implement it). Now Google’s Chrome takes Opera’s speed dial and recently closed tabs - two of their best features. (The latter is rumored to be in IE 
Although most pages loaded a LOT faster than in Flock or Firefox, flickr wasn’t THAT much faster at all. And they were touting their awesome Javascript interpreter. I wasn’t as impressed as I’d hoped to be. That could have cinched the deal for me. In fact, it seems to be, more or less, comparable to Opera in terms of rendering speed.
Overall, I am really happy with how fast and responsive Chrome is. I think I’ll use it for a couple of days like I did with Opera, Flock, and other browsers I try out. If it turns out to be fast enough, it could end up being my new default browser.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Aug
28
Great Linux Ad
Category: Linux | Leave a Comment
Now if we could only get this on TV…
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
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.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Aug
27
Review: openSuse 11.0 (and KDE 4)
Category: Fedora, Gnome, KDE, Linux, M$, Novell, SuSe | 12 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.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
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.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
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.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.