Today I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR.  They had an economics guy on who’s now a professor at one of the University of Maryland campuses and was involved in Clinton’s economic team.  (Although he didn’t always see eye to eye with Clinton’s treasury secretary)  This guy put the current economic crisis in the best terms and framed it so well, I can’t believe that we’re in this mess.  Those stupid jackasses on Wall Street “were betting that people who did not have money to pay their mortgage would pay their mortgage.”  Just take a second and read that again.  Yeah, pretty nutty, isn’t it?  If people had just used their noggins we wouldn’t be in this mess.  “Sure,” you might say, “hindsight is 20/20.”  Yeah, but it doesn’t take hindsight to see that people who have bad credit probably aren’t going to pay their mortgage.  Couple that with the fact that Wall Street swindled them into interest only loans and variable rate mortgages, and you HAD to see that a disaster was on the way.  Again, they were betting that people who didn’t have the money to pay their mortgage would somehow pay their mortgage.  Again, in their defense you might say, “but they thought housing prices were always going to go up.”  And to that I say, WHEN has ANY market EVER gone up FOREVER?  Hello!  The tech bubble was just 10 years ago!  Nothing ever goes up without an end.  That’s just ridiculous.  Sigh!  Seriously, I don’t know how they let this happen.  These guys all have degrees in finance.  They should have known and done case studies on how whatever’s hot now won’t be hot in a few years.  And then AIG freakin’ insures the mortgages of people with bad credit?  I just can’t believe it!

So I waited until about halfway through Fedora 9’s initial life-cycle to install it.  I listed the reasons for that here.  Once KDE 4.1 was finally out and most of the complaints had stopped, I took the plunge.  I am actually very happy with Fedora 9.  I think most of the reviews you may have read criticizing Fedora 9 focused on the initial version.  That was, according to the mailing list, very buggy.  But, for those who run Fedora on their day-to-day systems, simply waiting a few months is enough to get most of the bugs ironed out.  First I’ll focus on what I have thought of Gnome since I’ve been using it since the install.  Due to Fedora’s servers getting cracked, I just got KDE 4.1, so I’ll just be giving my preliminary impressions there.  I’ve been wondering if KDE 4 would bring me back into the KDE came from the Gnome side.  We’ll see.  I intend to boot into KDE 4 for the next week or so to see how I like it.

This one goes out to all the physics geeks out there.  (Applied Engineering Physics counts too, Jing Qing)

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:

PropertyValue

ManufacturerASUSTeK Computer Inc.

ModelP4P800-E

VersionRev 1.xx

Serial NumberMB-1234567890

North BridgeIntel i865P/PE/G/i848P Revision A2

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 bar 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.

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Now if we could only get this on TV…

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.

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.

My latest pictures moving from one views group to another.

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