Joost recently (within the last couple of weeks) came out of Invitation-only beta.  It’s a program developed by the same people who brought you Kazaa and Skype.  Like those programs it also harnesses the power of peer to peer (P2P) technology.  (Another reason for advocating net neutrality!)  Joost is meant to replace cable TV and provide the viewer with programs on demand.  There are a lot of other people trying to work on the same goals, but a key difference is that Joost actually has deal with content providers to legitimately provide content.  Both The National Geographic Channel and Viacom Channels are available.

The Open Source Advocate has an article discussing the merits of all the distros releasing on the same schedule.  His main argument, bolstered by quotes from Shuttleworth is that by having them all release at the same time, they will end up with the same software and cause a massive synchronization across all major open source projects.  The 2 main quotes I’d like to focus on are:

“Simply set a hard date and modify your goals to make that release date.” - Article Author

The Free Software Foundation’s Defective by Design is reporting that MSN Music is shutting down, leaving anyone who bought music legally left with music they can no longer listen to.  This will have two outcomes and neither of which is what the music labels really want.  Some people will decide they got left holding the bomb with one second left for doing the right thing and paying for music.  They will decide to download music without paying from now on.  They will reason that if they ever buy music again they won’t know if it will cease working.  Or they will being to take note of places like Amie Street and Amazon.com that sell DRM-free music.

If you’ve ever looked at a reprint of the Kama Sutra, I think you’ll agree that reading it without being careful can lead to some interesting things.  Such as this:

It’s AWESOME!  Check out the video i n this post from Andrew’s blog.  If you ever played the original Nintendo, you’ll go nuts.

Here are some pictures of the flood & damage:

The sewers backed up in my apartment flooding my bathroom via my bathtub and toilet and my living room via the front door with water full of excrement and urine.  However, even in these horrible and anoying times, you still have to look at it positively.  Our neighbors got flooded throughout their entire house.  For us it didn’t spread of out the bathroom or living room.  It was royally disgusting and smelly, but at least the cleaning crew worked through the night and morning to get our apartment to a usable state.

Some little updates on my KDE experiment.  First of all, I run an rsync script semi-daily to backup my home drive to an external hard drive in case the main one fails.  It’s already happened to me once before and I was really glad to have had backups.  However, as you can imagine, this is a huge drain on my computer’s resources while the backup is being performed.  Since I have it running from a cron job so that I can just forget about it, I tend to forget when it’s set to run and I get really annoyed if my computer starts slowing down and I can’t figure out why.  So I put a wall command into my script.  This sends a message to all terminal emulators and everyone logged into the computer via terminals or ssh.  Usually in Gnome I can only see the message if I happen to have Gnome termnal open.  However, KDE does something very awesome and useful.  Here’s a screenshot:

Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron will be released today.  As the name implies, 8.04 will be Hardy because it is a Long Term Support (LTS) version.  This means that for 18 months they will release security updates.  What does that really mean?  It means that if you like Ubuntu, but don’t feel like upgrading every six months, you can stick with Hardy Heron for 3 release cycles.  You won’t get the latest programs, but you’ll get security updates to protect you against crackers, viruses, and other malicious things.

As many of you know, according to the Google search terms that bring people here.  I am of the not-so-humble opinion that Fedora’s upgrade process is about as pleasant as being forced to walk through the desert without a canteen of water.  First of all, they recommend to just do a fresh install which is a non-starter for me.  I’d have to waste way too much time restoring all my files and settings.  Ubuntu and Debian seem to get me through upgrades without reinstalling without any problems.  I blogged about the horrors up upgrading to Fedora 8 here and here.  I blogged about how awesome the yum upgrade worked here, here, here, and here.