A Man and his Penguin

One night, there wasn’t much on TV, so I watched the film "The American President". At the end of it, I thought "Yes, that was a nice film". While flicking over to the other TV stations, a movie that was half-over on SBS caught my eye. I watched until the end of it, and I loved every minute. This movie was called "Girls On Top", and it was German. The next time it was on SBS I watched and recorded it, and I still love it. My Friendster profile lists it as my favourite movie.

This time last week, while looking in the TV guide, I discovered that SBS were going to be showing the sequel to it - this was the first time I’d heard that there was a sequel. Naturally, I got hyped up about it, especially since the reviewer had given it 3 stars.

They showed it tonight. In comparison to the original, it sucks arse. It definately wasn’t anywhere near as funny as the original; I suspect that some of the humour was lost in the translation from German to English, but even so the funniest part of this sequel was actually the same joke as at the beginning of the original.

Yes. They abandoned the formula. One of the funniest characters from the original was absent in this sequel, and her replacement was nowhere near as good. Inken, Lena and Flin were the only returning characters, and I think the whole storyline involving Sebastian was lifted from Shakespeare or Dickens. Possibly both.

The Inken/Flin storyline was quite satisfying in terms of what the viewer wanted to see, and also in fleshing out the two characters. In fact, some of it actually reminded me of myself… I’ve gotta give credit where it’s due, this was the film’s strong point.

Standing on its own, Girls On Top 2 is an engaging movie. But as a sequel it falls short. "That was a nice film". 5 stars out of 10.

P.S. Foxtel is only standard definition. In the credits, did it really say that all those songs were performed by Tears? ‘Cos they’re the Swiss Popstars group!

Satan has today announced that Hell has frozen over. His announcement came after Mel C’s shock announcement that she was rejoining the Spice Girls in a reunion, and after Mr Christopher Lees of Perth registered an account with Denden Forums.

—-

If there’s one thing that was less likely than me temporarily putting my differences aside with Denden Forums, it was that there would be a full Spice Girls reunion. All the same, it’s a little disappointing - neither album nor single was promised, and they have surprisingly missed out several Spice hotspots. Canada, France, and Brazil are absent from the list of tour dates when they REALLY shouldn’t have been; and Beijing, Hong Kong and South Africa have been included when I don’t think the Girls actually have any fans there.

—-

For the Ubuntu users among you, something interesting happened today. I went to a guy’s place to fix up his TV, and noticed all these computers and computer parts lying around. I ask about it, and he’s big on building computers from parts. While he was talking to me, I noticed a CD-R with "Ubuntu" written on it behind him. So I ask the question ("Have you used Ubuntu?") and he says that his friend has installed it, and that he is going to install it, having been impressed with the Youtube videos of Beryl (or should I say, Compiz Fusion?).

I’ve promised to help him if he runs into any trouble (gave him a couple of tips already), and he’s promised to give me a spare Nvidia graphics card for free!

His decision to try Ubuntu came after using Windows Vista. No surprises there, really; he hates being locked into Microsoft and its stolen technology, and at one point showed me an Amiga lying under a coffee table, that apparantly still works and could still be useful. Remnants of a time before the Microsoft lock-in.

From the Ubuntu Forums:

I decided to look for a file shredder that could be used in Ubuntu/
Kubuntu, I could find no such program. My question to people in the
Linux community is this: if Linux is so "secure" then why is there not
a Linux file shredder? (after all, when you "delete" a file it is not
erased like file shredders do,the file is simply "Ignored" and remains
on the hardrive for all to see when you get rid of your computer.) I
would switch to Linux Ubuntu in a heartbeat if there was a file
shredder for it, hands down. Unfortunately I had to switch back to
Windows XP since it has file shredders written for it.
I would also like to add that if Linux is to ever Trump Windows
completly, it needs to have a file shredder to prove once and for all
that Linux is the most secure operating system.

How simple: To conquer the desktop, all Linux needs is a program to completely delete files. Why didn’t I think of that? The hordes of Average Joes are queuing up to use Linux as soon as you can overwrite files with zeros.

The first reply on that thread:

Try the command ’shred’.

I love it when n00bs are put in their place. Incidentally, I find it hilarious that he’s so overly concerned about people finding his discarded data, yet he’s not using Bitlocker (which would encrypt all his past and present data in his home directory).

From the Ubuntu Forums:

I decided to look for a file shredder that could be used in Ubuntu/
Kubuntu, I could find no such program. My question to people in the
Linux community is this: if Linux is so "secure" then why is there not
a Linux file shredder? (after all, when you "delete" a file it is not
erased like file shredders do,the file is simply "Ignored" and remains
on the hardrive for all to see when you get rid of your computer.) I
would switch to Linux Ubuntu in a heartbeat if there was a file
shredder for it, hands down. Unfortunately I had to switch back to
Windows XP since it has file shredders written for it.
I would also like to add that if Linux is to ever Trump Windows
completly, it needs to have a file shredder to prove once and for all
that Linux is the most secure operating system.

How simple: To conquer the desktop, all Linux needs is a program to completely delete files. Why didn’t I think of that? The hordes of Average Joes are queuing up to use Linux as soon as you can overwrite files with zeros.

The first reply on that thread:

Try the command ’shred’.

I love it when n00bs are put in their place. Incidentally, I find it hilarious that he’s so overly concerned about people finding his discarded data, yet he’s not using Bitlocker (which would encrypt all his past and present data in his home directory).

From the Ubuntu Forums:

I decided to look for a file shredder that could be used in Ubuntu/
Kubuntu, I could find no such program. My question to people in the
Linux community is this: if Linux is so "secure" then why is there not
a Linux file shredder? (after all, when you "delete" a file it is not
erased like file shredders do,the file is simply "Ignored" and remains
on the hardrive for all to see when you get rid of your computer.) I
would switch to Linux Ubuntu in a heartbeat if there was a file
shredder for it, hands down. Unfortunately I had to switch back to
Windows XP since it has file shredders written for it.
I would also like to add that if Linux is to ever Trump Windows
completly, it needs to have a file shredder to prove once and for all
that Linux is the most secure operating system.

How simple: To conquer the desktop, all Linux needs is a program to completely delete files. Why didn’t I think of that? The hordes of Average Joes are queuing up to use Linux as soon as you can overwrite files with zeros.

The first reply on that thread:

Try the command ’shred’.

I love it when n00bs are put in their place. Incidentally, I find it hilarious that he’s so overly concerned about people finding his discarded data, yet he’s not using Bitlocker (which would encrypt all his past and present data in his home directory).

I went to Mandurah today.

"How nice Chris, you finally got a holiday!"

Not quite… I was delivering 2 gas hot water systems in my car. I’m amazed at:

a. The car made it there and back
b. It used under a quarter of a tank of petrol
c. How tired I felt afterward

———
A guy came into work today to buy a kettle. A corded kettle. He had to have this particular one. Anyway, he said he worked for Apple, and that Apple had forecast sales of 10 million iPhones in the first year. Optimistic? I told him that I was more of a Linux man, and he thought I must be really advanced. I lied - I said that I wasn’t really that good with computers, but that Linux was easy for me to use. I betrayed my real knowledge when he said "Linux is apparantly very stable, that’s why Apple uses it in OS X" and I corrected him with "OS X doesn’t use Linux, it uses Unix; BSD.".

Interesting about the Apple iPhone bit. He had some rather dubious "facts" about Macintosh sales. A company with 5% of the pie does NOT have more marketshare than any other single computer manufacturer. Maybe in terms of total computers sold over Apple’s total history, but then Apple has been around longer in the PC business than any of its current competitors.

Feedback Results on Copland:

1. It was a good idea.

2. It’s not a necessary distribution anymore because (X)Ubuntu Feisty is so good.

3. The classic MacOS-styled desktop was difficult for certain people to use (understandable, I find the OS X desktop difficult to use), but others liked it and would continue using it in the future.

4. The community preview version of the distro was too unstable and buggy.

5. I should help the PowerPC community team.

Number 5 is something I can’t really do - I don’t get enough download allowance to download Tribes and Dailys, and I don’t have enough coding knowledge to debug anything written in a language other than Python.

Number 4 I agree with.

Number 3, about the OS 9 desktop, is something I might consider implementing in Gnome as well as XFCE, and offering it as a kind of one-in-one-out pack for Ubuntu and Xubuntu on all arches.

Number 1 and 2 I agree with.

Here’s the deal: I want to contribute to PowerPC users. I’m thinking I might do that through learning again how to create Debian packages, and creating those for the latest versions of programs and stuff like that. Long-time readers will know that I once created a real Debian package for the game Bloboats, but unfortunately it could’ve caused system breakage.

My only concern is how to back up my father’s data on the iMac before I attempt to install Xubuntu Feisty on it. I don’t have another Mac, so how on earth will I preserve the resource forks of the files? The only things I can think of are to create disk images of the partitions and put them onto the external hard drive, or binhex everything.

Disk images is probably the better idea, as long as they aren’t over 4 gigabytes (the iMac can only access the Fat32 partition of the external hard drive, and Fat32 has a filesize limit of 4 gigabytes).

I’ve just downloaded Xubuntu 7.04 PPC with the intention of creating Copland from it.

But it seems to be an excellent PowerPC distribution - my iMac’s screen
started up immediately which it never did before under straight
Xubuntu, there’s compositing support in XFCE immediately, my Mac
partitions were recognised and mounted out-of-the-box, and the only bug
I’ve found in it was one that I couldn’t fix in Copland CP! It’s
reasonably fast, too.

It looks like the community PowerPC team has created something very
impressive; not to mention the XFCE/Xubuntu team. Frankly people, I
can’t see anything that I can do to improve on this. My wish was for
PowerPC users to be serviced properly by a distribution which
understands the pitfalls of working on this platform; it looks to my
superficial eye like this has already been achieved.

Are PowerPC users left wanting of anything, other than a precompiled Gnash?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased and very impressed. But I’m at a loss
and I have to reconsider whether I can really add anything to Xubuntu
PowerPC.

Spooky stuff.

I downloaded and burned Xubuntu 7.04 for PowerPC. I booted it up. It went straight to an X display - no blank screen, no BSOXD (Blue Screen Of Xorg Death). When it got to the desktop, the panels didn’t start!

But in all seriousness, I’m wondering if PowerPC users really need Copland. Xubuntu Feisty for PowerPC appears to be excellent. It even automatically mounts my HFS partitions.

It’s 11:58pm here in Perth. Right now I’m downloading Feisty Xubuntu for PowerPC - the long-awaited release version.

Once that’s done and I’ve got a few moments, I’ll extract the SquashFS image and begin work on merging Copland’s changes with the new Feisty codebase.

This might not take such a long time. I want to keep track of exactly what changes I make, so if anything breaks I can reverse my changes. In particular, I want to see at what point the installer breaks, if it does actually.

For those wanting some information about the next Copland release, I have two words for you: Gnash 0.8! (there will be more new features, don’t worry! Possibly something to do with MoL!)