The countdown is on…
January 7th is the day I will be undergoing major dental work. It's been a long time coming and I'm looking forward to ending this continual pain in my head. It's been years since I've been without it. I almost feel like I'll be losing a friend.
Wednesday’s the day.
Wednesday morning I go into approve some major dental work that has been a long time coming. I'm nervous, but excited about the work that will be done.
There will be before/after pictures when the procedure is complete. I expect the differences are going to be very dramatic.
Some screenshots of XBMC on my XBOX.
I really enjoy XBMC. It's the only thing that makes my old first-gen XBOX worth a damn any more. GameStop no longer carries them, but PS2 and GameCube titles are readily available. So, an open source project has given it new life.
Here's some recent screenshots:
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| From XBMC Screenshots |
And one more:
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| From XBMC Screenshots |
Listening to some Professor Kliq, an artist whose work is licensed under a rather liberalCreative Commons license. The XBMC skin is Focus from SVN.
had teeth pulled – anxious as all hell now.
had 4 teeth pulled on Monday from the left side of my face. Punchy, but I'm managing.
Song of my now: Under the Influence by Matthew Good Band
Mother told me to be something
so I'm afraid enough to stay wide awake.
Technorati Tags: insomnia
“Relevant ads”
I just need to get this off my chest. There are no such thing as "relevant ads." Ads by their very nature are irrelevant. Ads are intended to sell or inform you about a product or service that you didn't even know you needed.
If it was something you needed, you'd already know where to find it or necessity would drive you to locate it. Instead, marketers use advertising to leave you feeling like there's something missing in your life without the wares they're peddling.
I was just thinking today about how adding the term relevant doesn't really make the advertisement any more meaningful. It just means that marketers have targeted my likes and behaviours better than in the past. This is, in part, due to the advent of tracking cookies, referral links, adfarms and other web technologies used solely for marketing purposes.
I would recommend that we remove that particular phrase from the English lexicon. And stone to death any marketers that utter it.
New post on my technology blog.
I won't do this very often, but I'd like to announce that I have a new post on Feeding the Machine that may be of interest. It is in regards to how our usage of internet websites is tracked beyond the sites we visit.
I'd love any feedback you can provide me.
New wallpaper
Every once in a while, I make abstract wallpapers. Here's one of them:
Another red abstract wallpaper
Taking a chill pill.
I don't know that I'll be contributing to Ubuntu by way of Kubuntu for a while. language-selector's been ported to PyKDE4 and is awaiting a wrapper to integrate Python applications into System Settings as control modules, so my part's done. That being said, I think I'm going to have to leave Kubuntu behind.
You see, I don't have a snappy new computer with loads of RAM and a dual-core processor. I have a nearly 4-year-old setup with 1 gig of RAM and an older NVIDIA card. I can't continue to run KDE4 as, even with Desktop Effects turned off, the desktop runs so sluggishly as to almost render it unusable.
Thanks to KDE 3.5.9, however, I've lost my irrational bias for QT applications. In fact, I've found a wonderful cross-platform IRC application: Quassel. It runs a core process, that maintains connections and communicates with the actual IRC server, and a client that makes IRC requests through the core. This gives the benefit of being able to remain connected to IRC from anywhere through one core.
So, for now, I'm giving Xubuntu a shot since I've played with the lightweight XFCE desktop environment in the past and loved it. Compositing in X works fine, Firefox doesn't crash when visiting certain websites (this did happen in KDE4 w/Desktop Effects turned on) and overall, my machine feels responsive.
Linux has always had the reputation of making older hardware perform better than in it would in Windows. KDE4 seems to run contrary to this, however. Hopefully, by the time 4.2 is released, I'll be proven wrong. If I were interested in purchasing new hardware to keep up, I'd already be running Windows or Mac OS X.
Finally giving something back…
Thanks to a co-worker, I am now a KDE user. I run Kubuntu 8.04 as my primary operating system. Kubuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu Linux which uses KDE as it's desktop environment. Having been a long time Gnome user, it was with great trepidation that I even begin using KDE as my primary desktop. (If I've already lost you, it's ok. *You* have not yet fallen prey to the seductive wiles of a free OS or you run proprietary hardware that prevents you from doing so.)
Ever since I started using KDE 3.5.9 and actually spending the time to configure it to my tastes, I was hooked. Advanced Window settings allowed me to pin an application to any one of my four active workspaces. My keyboard shortcuts were considered global so that meant that an application couldn't override the keyboard shortcuts *I* wanted to use. KDE was the word and the way.
Backtrack to 7/3/2008: A few Midori sours and I logged into #kubuntu-devel, the Kubuntu Developers channel on IRC. I asked if there was some way that a longtime Linux user with moderate Python abilities could help out with Kubuntu's future. Jonathan Riddell, founder of Kubuntu, responded with a yes: Help us port Ubuntu language-selector to PyKDE4. I agreed and I am happy to contribute to Kubuntu in whatever way I can.
As wonderful as the experience of modifying and committing code has been, the KDE4 experience hasn't been all that glorious. Here are some of the low points:
- Clicking on an application in the taskbar causes that application to minimize if I'm already on that desktop. In other words, if I attempt to use the taskbar to switch applications that are on the same desktop by clicking it's icon in the taskbar, the application I want to use gets minimized.
- Turning on Desktop Effects (aka Compiz for Gnome users), causes my computer to run like it's powered by hamster wheels.
- Most of the icons in my menus and for the plasmoids (widgets, gadgets, et al) are the standard box with a -?-
- The taskbar at the bottom will sometimes show corrupted graphics
- Kopete can't connect to Google Talk securely without crashing
Good points:
- KDE 4.1 is really pretty.
- KDE 4.1 implements a "dashboard" layer where the plasmoids are separate from the desktop.
- Konqueror is MUCH improved - faster, cleaner looking
- Dolphin has column view. Ah, how I missed that.
Still, I'm glad to be helping what I believe to be the best operating system. I hope to continue contributing to Kubuntu for some time to come.
In the meantime, I'll be using KDE 4.1 extensively and exclusively. When I remember, I'll post my experiences working with it here. Currently, I'm giving KMail a once-over. I'm a long-time Thunderbird user and I'm not pleased by the preliminary looks of the KDE 4.1 equivalent. It's been one night, though, so we'll give it some time and see what happens.
What Patriotism Is, and Is Not
To find the U.S. patriotism in foreign soil, Iraq brought to you by Barack Obama of the 21st century.
read more | digg story
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