A Man and his Penguin

Podcast 20 sounds so terrible. Our content was good, it’s just that the limited speed of light and electricity, my podcast inexperience and our geographic locations, meant that I kept cutting off Sal and Josh accidentally. Sorry guys

Also, my mike was probably too close to my face - I sounded awfully loud.

On the plus side, Aaron did a good job of editing the podcast. There was a bit where it sounded like I’d been disconnected from the others, and I had a lot of interference on my line. Aaron noticed the few seconds where I thought I’d been disconnected and cut them from the final file.

Now I’m trying to seed the podcast with Bittornado, and I don’t know if I’m doing it right. I downloaded the file from the mirrors, downloaded the .torrent file, and told Bittornado to download the torrent to the same location as the actual Ogg file. The progress bar quickly went to 100% (within a few seconds) but now it’s sitting on "0.0% (0.00MiB)", so I don’t know if that means that it’s ready to serve the file or not.

I didn’t get the job. And I haven’t heard back from Kym for a while.

On the plus side, I did another podcast with Josh and Sal. Aaron (biggest KDE fan I know!) is editing it right now, and he asked me to give him credit for that

Josh came up with the idea of having a torrent for the podcast. It’s a good idea, but it means I have to stick around in Ubuntu to seed the torrent :-)  Not a problem.

I suppose I don’t really have any other news. I completely forgot that I was going to take my friend Joe to the movies because he fixed my car… oh well, I’ll take him and his girlfriend when they’re both free, as she was working on her folio last week.

I didn’t get the job. And I haven’t heard back from Kym for a while.

On the plus side, I did another podcast with Josh and Sal. Aaron (biggest KDE fan I know!) is editing it right now, and he asked me to give him credit for that

Josh came up with the idea of having a torrent for the podcast. It’s a good idea, but it means I have to stick around in Ubuntu to seed the torrent :-)  Not a problem.

I suppose I don’t really have any other news. I completely forgot that I was going to take my friend Joe to the movies because he fixed my car… oh well, I’ll take him and his girlfriend when they’re both free, as she was working on her folio last week.

I didn’t get the job. And I haven’t heard back from Kym for a while.

On the plus side, I did another podcast with Josh and Sal. Aaron (biggest KDE fan I know!) is editing it right now, and he asked me to give him credit for that

Josh came up with the idea of having a torrent for the podcast. It’s a good idea, but it means I have to stick around in Ubuntu to seed the torrent :-)  Not a problem.

I suppose I don’t really have any other news. I completely forgot that I was going to take my friend Joe to the movies because he fixed my car… oh well, I’ll take him and his girlfriend when they’re both free, as she was working on her folio last week.

I didn’t get the job. And I haven’t heard back from Kym for a while.

On the plus side, I did another podcast with Josh and Sal. Aaron (biggest KDE fan I know!) is editing it right now, and he asked me to give him credit for that

Josh came up with the idea of having a torrent for the podcast. It’s a good idea, but it means I have to stick around in Ubuntu to seed the torrent :-)  Not a problem.

I suppose I don’t really have any other news. I completely forgot that I was going to take my friend Joe to the movies because he fixed my car… oh well, I’ll take him and his girlfriend when they’re both free, as she was working on her folio last week.

The term ‘driverless’ is partially inaccurate, but this is at least what ZyXEL brand it as.
Some ZD1211 devices come with the driver included on some kind of flash memory. When you plug these devices into a system for the first time, the device appears as a CDROM drive.
There is a virtual CD inside this virtual CDROM drive, which contains the windows driver. Upon insertion to a windows PC, this CDROM autoplays, and the windows driver is automatically installed. Soon after, the CDROM drive mysteriously disappears, and a networking device pops up in its place. On all future plugins, the WLAN device appears right away.

Quoted from http://zd1211.ath.cx/wiki/DriverlessDevice
————–

Years and years and YEARS ago, I had this idea; that drivers should be stored on flash memory INSIDE the device. Admittedly, I didn’t think of the “virtual CD-ROM autoplay” bit - I just thought that the operating system itself would have to have some way of detecting the driver in the Flash memory, and transparently install it.

I should have patented this idea. As it is, let’s hope that more hardware manufacturers build in this kind of feature, and make sure it’s compatible with Linux without the cludgy solution detailed on that page.

You’ll be able to catch my first Ubuntu Podcast with Josh soon. (sorry mate… I put you on the spot with those unscripted questions!)

For once, Skype actually worked perfectly for me. I downloaded the release version, it felt a little different, but the best thing was: It works!

Now I’ve got a sore throat
In other news, I’ve got an interview for a job at Westpac tomorrow. Wish me luck (although, to be honest, I’m not sure I really want to be working for a bank as a call-centre operator).

Although I’m a Gnome user, each time I log into a KDE session I’m amazed at all the settings available to me. Since I decided to familiarise myself with KDE, I have it as my default desktop environment.

For a start: Eye Candy. Don’t get me wrong, I like the simplicity of Gnome’s looks, and I love the Wii theme I have on Gnome. But KDE has some really nice looks. I have semi-transparent menus with a drop shadow. The window manager buttons fade in and out as I move my mouse over them. The quick-launch buttons have tooltips that wipe-in in a real nice way. The taskbar entries fade out. I can customise it so it doesn’t look quite so much like Windows (which is one of my gripes about KDE - it’s always so Windowsy).

Speed: KDE feels a little slower than Gnome, unfortunately. This is saying a lot, because my Gnome installation is the full “ubuntu-desktop” package, whereas my KDE is just “kdebase-bin” with a little extra stuff.

Customisation: This is where KDE shines. I could have sounds for events that I would never have sounds for. I can have different desktop backgrounds on different virtual desktops (I can hide the picture of my lady friend on a rarely-used desktop; one click shows me her picture, but if my parents are coming I can just drag all my windows onto some “safe” desktops). I can change the amount that my arrow cursor accelerates, and the threshold before KDE determines a click to be a drag. I can even have Mac-style menubars, in the top panel (only for KDE programs - still, it’s better than having to patch the GTK source code).

Maturity: KDE has so many feature-packed programs. K3B and AmaroK are so good because they have been around so long; each new version has new features, and eventually you end up with brilliant apps. I’m sure there are others too, these are just the ones that I remember off the top of my head, that most Gnome users also have.

There are heaps of options that I haven’t looked at yet, and many many standard KDE programs that I haven’t even got yet. Some I don’t need - I don’t need the stuff for a dual-head setup, and I don’t need knetwork-manager that Sal keeps talking about I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of programs that get installed by default - Kate for instance. I’d like to see what I’m missing; maybe I’ll find a DVD with all the packages from main.

I know most of you aren’t interested in hearing about my personal life, but hey! Some of this might interest you.

Today I did the John Hughes Big Walk - an 18km walk from Perth to Fremantle. It’s an excellent event, made memorable by the fact that, before the start, I saw one of the other entrants wearing a Linux.conf 2003 shirt! Very nice… I wish I could get one of those.

During the walk, I saw someone else wearing a Hi-5 backpack.

After the walk, when I got back to my car at the train station, I found that I’d left the headlights on, and the battery was as flat as a pancake. One booster battery and 5 minutes of solid idling later, my mate finally put enough juice into the car to start it.

Just now, I was asked to be on the Ubuntu Podcast, probably as a regular! I’m usually going to be doing the ‘cast with Sal, so I suppose I’ll have to set up my GDM login screen to go into KDE; I really need to familiarise myself with KDE now

I’ve also decided, after much thought, that I’m going to stop supporting my Internet friends with their computer (Windows) troubles. I’ll continue to help my real-life buddies, my grandfather and anyone who wants to pay me I’ll also provide technical support for Linux, for all my friends. I’m sure I’ll make exceptions now and then with the Windows support, but I’m tired of being called upon to compensate for Microsoft’s faulty design.

We’re all annoyed when a website tells us that we need to be using Internet Explorer on Windows. I got *really* annoyed at NineMSN when one of its sites told me that I needed IE 5 on Windows, with Flash 5 and Windows Media Player 9. I even e-mailed the web developers, telling them that I was using Firefox on Linux with Flash 5 and the MPlayer plugin with w32codecs. In reply, I got the same old crap about "Internet Explorer has essential security features" and "we will look into allowing Firefox users into our site".

For these kinds of reasons, I’ve always hated browser detection. It’s okay if it merely says "These are the system requirements, which you don’t live up to, but click here if you want to continue nevertheless". But I’ve just come across an example of why browser detection is the MOST EVIL thing on the web.

Using your sparkling new Flash 9 beta for Linux and Firefox, surf to www.hi-5.com.au. You will be told that you need Flash 8, and not let into the site. "That’s bad", I hear you say, "But it’s obviously set up to detect whether you’re running Windows too".

Not so. I tried going to the site using Firefox for Windows on Wine, which also has the Flash 9 plugin. Same problem. It used to work when I had the Flash 8 plugin installed on it. Curiously enough it works with Internet Explorer on Wine; I think it might have the Flash 8 plugin.

I’m running an XGL session right now so that might be the problem, but I doubt it.

I’m sure there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of websites with browser detection that have broken now that IE 7 has been released.