Veterans of Linux installs from the early days may chuckle at my new discovery, but I’ve only been installing Linux since the graphical days of Anaconda and Fedora Core 1. (But first some background info) I was recently installing Xubuntu on my father-in-law’s computer. He wanted me to install a new Windows Media Player version, but I needed to upgrade to Windows Service Pack 2. The Kami at M$ were not smiling upon his household because this hosed the computer.

I’ve done a few updates in the past week or so and I’ve been in fvwm-crystal, so I don’t know which update fixed things, but Gnome finally handles Dual Screen Compiz correctly. Previously, if I maximized a window, it would maximize across both monitors! I NEVER want that kind of behaviour because my screens are not only a few inches apart, but they also have a 2-3 inch frame between viewable areas. I really didn’t like that discontinuity in my viewing area, so I would always have to manually size up the windows. This behaviour was only occuring in Gnome; KDE, fluxbox, fvwm-crystal and other WMs were correctly handling the maximize command. So I’m glad that Gnome will no longer be a source of frustration for me.

To all who celebrate this as the start of a new year (not just Chinese).

Welcome, Year of the Pig! Goodbye Year of the Dog.

Back in 2005, when gas prices were high, the Republican Congress (although the Dems may have acted the same in their shoes) decided that, to save a few barrels of oil, they would move daylight savings up 3 weeks. They forgot that the ENTIRE WORLD now runs all of its most critical applications on computers and computers are programmed to follow the same daylight savings from 60 years ago! Now Bill Gates is warning people not to trust their appointments in MS Outlook and other software until the day of the old daylight savings. Don’t these guys remember the Y2K mess? And now they want to mess with the way computers keep time AGAIN?

I’m pretty sure that in previous posts I’ve mentioned that the RIAA has always been wrong about what technological disruptions do to their business. They wanted to kill LPs because they thought no one would go see live performances. They wanted to quash AM radio for fear no one would by LPs. They wanted to kill the cassette tape because it would allow piracy of LPs. Currently they want to prevent the existence of a Tivo-like device for digital radio.

….that my wife, who hates the idea of Linux on her computer, told me that when her computer dies, rather than have Windows Vista on her computer she wants me to install Linux on the computer for her. That’s right, she’d rather have Linux on her computer than the next version of Windows. Why? First of all, she’s heard all the problems of how Vista doesn’t have any drivers for any hardware. She’s also heard about how they’re already getting virii and other exploits and even Forbes recently recommended not updating because of the digital restrictions management and how that messes up your system. Specifically it causes your CPU to use up cycles trying to make sure you aren’t doing anything disapproved of.

Finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 - I was waiting to make sure there weren’t any show-stopper bugs as there were in the previous version. So far no one seems to have found any problems. They didn’t do too many cosmetic changes because I can’t really tell what’s changed. I’ll have to review the changelog again. So far the BEST change is that “General” is not automatically selected as a category. It was annoying to uncheck that EVERY time!