Back when I reviewed an earlier version of Flock, one of my complaints was that it was impossible to watch Youtube because the video was always stuttering.  Well, the Flock programmers have fixed that bug and it’s now definitely usable to watch Youtube videos.  I’ll admit that I only watch, perhaps, 1 a month, but to most people that was a deal-killer before.

Some developers are working on a neat new program menu for KDE called Raptor Menu.  Thanks to Plasma and other underlying KDE 4 technologies it is now a pretty trivial hack to change the program menu if you don’t like the default.  Such enhancements exist for KDE 3, but they are all very kludgey.  Thanks to Plasma’s modular nature, it’s easy to replace it.  Even the KDE developers have acknowledged this when people have complained about their new program menu.  Bear with them to fix it, they say, but if you don’t like it, it’s now very easy to implement your own.

Thanks, as usual, to Monroe of xkcd:

Yes, the race for the White House has hit new lows, even for this race.  It appears that we haven’t learned from the past two races and it’s starting to scare me.  Both in 2000 and 2004 one of the biggest reasons stated for George W Bush winning was that both Al Gore and John Kerry seemed too “elite” and “aloof”.  George Bush seemed a little more down to earth, someone you could invite to a BBQ.  Well look where that got us!!

Which is not Mexican Independence Day.

Written Friday, 2 May 2008

Today I decided to upgrade my Mythdora to the latest verison, 5.0. I downloaded the CD media and booted into the install. I had to do a text install to be able to watch it on my TV. Then I just needed to yum install the kmod-nvidia drivers. (Although, first I had to uninstall the previous nvidia drivers - they were neither automatically upgraded nor uninstalled) I started at about 1930 and was able to be completely up and running by 2055, just in time so that I didn’t have to missmy 2100 recording of “Best Week Ever”.

Ever since I first started playing computer games in elementary school there have been three categories of games that I’ve loved: puzzle games (eg Lemmings, Tetris, Puzzle Bobble), simulation games (eg Sim City), and real-time strategy games and the related turn-based strategy games (eg Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Civilization).  I play other types of games periodically, but these are the ones I always return to.

There are essentially 3 main RTS games and all other games usually license their game engines.  These are Command and Conquer (C&C), Warcraft (WC), and Age of Empires (AoE).  I cut my teeth, so to speak, on C&C with a disc a friend lent me so we could play against each other over the net.  I then played a shareware version of WC and a demo version of AoE.

If this story is accurate, then Micro$oft has withdrawn their offer to buy Yahoo!  This is great news because I love the guys at Yahoo and the programs they run, such as Flickr and delicious and I love the fact that they use FreeBSD for their servers.  You can bet that Microsoft wouldn’t have been having any of that and would have made them switch to the inferior Microsoft IIS.  Plus, they probably would have wrecked my Flickr!

One of the new features of Gnome 2.22 is the fact that Totem now has a plugin to access your MythTV programs. I installed the plugin and found myself wondering what to do next. I checked on Google for totem mythtv and didn’t find anything until today when Google finally got around to indexing a forum post about it on the Ubuntu Forums. I followed the directions about editing Gconf and had success!

To all the heathens on the hill back at Cornell!  Hope the weather’s nice and the entertainment is fun.