A Man and his Penguin

I took a look at a website that I had bookmarked back when Beryl was known as Compiz.

The videos of the latest version of Compiz really took my breath away. Check them out!

Beerorkid

As if I needed another reason to move to Feisty!

Here is an open letter to Novell.

Re: Banshee Music Player

Dear Novell,

Please note that Linux supports having spaces within filenames. In fact, it has supported this since before you got involved in Linux. Please update Banshee with this knowledge. That simple four-character addition to your program will bring Banshee up into the 1990s at least.

While you’re at it, can you fix Banshee’s file allocation monitor plugin so it actually, like, does what it’s mean to do and save me having to manually import new songs?

A bold assertion? Not really so bold. Look at this screenshot of the opening page when I logged into Hotmail today:

It clearly shows a typical Viagra spam as being from one of my contacts. I assure you, I do not subscribe to Viagra spam, nor do I know any Viagra spammers (I do know someone who takes Viagra, doesn’t have impotence and buys it off an old man who does - which ironically is more illegal than sending spam!).

This isn’t the first example of blatant spam coming as from "one of my contacts". This has been happening to me a bit. Microsoft must have deals with these spammers so their messages get pride of place on Hotmail accounts. Nasty. I hope their Australian office gets hit with the full extent of the law.

In other news, I found out that I had $4.33 left on my iTunes account, so I downloaded Mylene Farmer’s song "Beyond My Control", and her duet with Moby "Slipping Away". I don’t want to give the DRM-mongers $4 for free! But I still feel guilty, especially since I want to get more music cards to download some of Mylene’s other albums. I think buying DRM’ed tracks is okay as long as you de-DRM them and distribute them to at least 5 other people :-)  I have distributed my Mylene albums to one other person - anyone out there want some MP3s?

Yes, my computer definately feels slow… time for a spot of rkhunter I suspect. Audacity (I couldn’t get the latest version to compile) took a mammoth amount of time to output the 1 hr 40 minute podcast to mono WAV. Gimp took about 20 seconds to output a 1024×768 simple image to PNG.

You know the girl from Novell’s Mac ad spoofs? I’ve been saying for days that someone should make a wallpaper of her. Well, in true open-source software fashion, I did it myself! (admittedly, it’s terribly unartistic, but a beautiful screen capture of her).

I also support the concept of nicknaming her "Beryl".

My comment to the blog I linked to was rejected. I’m not terribly surprised - it began with the sentence "If she’s Linux, does that mean anyone is allowed to use her any way they wish?"!

Right now I’m compiling Wx 2.8 in the background, while editing the podcast with Audacity.

It took a while to configure, and it’s already taking a surprisingly long amount of time to actually compile. Maybe that’s due to the sheer number of source files to compile, when I’m used to compiling programs with only a small number of larger files. But it makes me a bit nervous about compiling the latest version of Audacity (which is the reason why I’m compiling Wx 2.8 - it’s a dependency). Will it take forever? Should I be running the 64-bit edition of Ubuntu? (Note: I don’t actually believe in performance benefits with the 64-bit edition).

I also think I will buy those parts and build that computer.

Last Friday morning, I was a bit depressed that summer was nearly over. Daylight Saving is finishing on March 25, the daylight hours are getting fewer, the Joondalup Sunset Markets are finishing on the 23rd, and the Joondalup Festival (always held at the end of summer) is coming up very soon.

I’m mostly cheerful now again, but it occurred to me that Australians do miss summer.

There are four things I wanted to do before summer ends:

1. Go for a swim at the beach (accomplished this afternoon)
2. Sit outside with a cup of coffee and read (bought a Linux magazine today, so I’ll do that tonight)
3. Go for a bike ride one morning to a cafe (I’ll try and do that this Sunday if possible)
4. Go to the Joondalup Festival (I’ll do that the Sunday after).

Once we get into winter, I’m going to start a new programme of personal events, which will ensure that I do as many nice things in winter as I would do in summer.

I recently came into money - I was finally paid for a video digitising job I did last year. I must admit, I splurged - I bought the latest Linux Format magazine, a birthday present for my boss (Beegees Live DVD), and the Unreal Anthology (all four games on DVD; Tux is sitting on the back cover and I’ve heard that some of the games are Linux-native).

Unreal Anthology was something I’ve wanted to get for a while, along with the Quake collection. Recently I’ve been getting into Nexuiz, although it runs like a dog on my hardware. To get it running better, I tried running it without X (doesn’t work at all) and without a window manager (graphical problems and is much slower). I’m sure Unreal Tournament, the original, will run well on this computer as it is playable on my iMac with OS 9! If I’m lucky, maybe UT 2004 will also run well.

Final thing: I’m currently compiling the Metisse window manager on Ubuntu. Fingers crossed! I can’t enable all the features unfortunately, as I’m missing some suggested dependencies and Ubuntu’s repositories are down.

I used to have a website that parodies the W3C - it’s available at http://members.lycos.co.uk/bigbolshevik/w3c/

It has a "birthday card" in it that you can sign, the trick being that as you press keys on your keyboard, it actually types what IT wants you to say. At the end, you can submit it and it will appear on the page.

The reason I mention it is because I got an e-mail from Lycos today, telling me that my MySQL database has been locked due to it going over its 10 megabyte limit. Fcuk! I checked it out - looks like the birthday card has been mercilessly spammed. That’s right: There is nearly 10 megabytes of plain-text spam in that table. Scary.

There is a HOWTO on Ubuntu Forums, about how to get a useful and fun Linux system up without using X:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=387598

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get the framebuffer working on Virtualbox, so I haven’t properly tried it out!

Remember those "mood rings" that were popular in the early 90s, and that you can still find today at lesbian stalls in street markets? They changed colour depending on your mood - well, that was the theory.

I got depressed today because, well, I’m lonely and I just saw the girl down the road who-I-like-but-doesn’t-think-I’m-that-great. So I did as any guy would do when feeling down in the dumps: Changed his desktop theming.

I’m not like Sal where I change it every day for the benefit of my readers :-)   And I’d never noticed me changing themes depending on general mood. But today, hey, I was lonely and so I started fiddling. I didn’t have any GTK or Metacity themes that I felt like using, so I searched out some - for some reason, I was looking for Vista lookalikes.

But then I spotted a rare treasure: A distinctive, attractive theme that is easy on the eyes. Admittedly, the Metacity part is meant to look like Mac OS X, but both parts are tasteful and look excellent. And there is enough difference between active and inactive windows, and between checkboxes being turned on and off. I present for you, the theme of loneliness:

Now I’ve just got to try it on XFCE, and we’ll see if it will replace IndustrialTango in Copland.

A while back, some loser sent me a message on Ubuntu Forums, asking me how to hack into a Windows system "just so I can listen to their music". They followed me to MSN.

Now that I know about Goatse, I just replied to them and told them that www.goatse.cz had a lot of Windows hacking information.

I wonder if Ashton Kulcher will host a new show on MTV called "Goatse’d"?