If Microsoft thought they would have the IE 7.0 release to gloat about for long, they were wrong. Firefox 2.0 is due to debut this afternoon. I’ve provided a nice little link over to the page to download Firefox, but I don’t expect it to be updated to Firefox 2.0 until this afternoon when the new code will hit the mirrors. Lots of new code for me to play with today!

The wait is over for Fedora Core 6 will be releasing today, 24 Oct, at 1400 GMT or 0900 EST. Get on those bittorrents so that I can torrent off of you when I get to work. Hopefully, the Livna repositories will get those nvidia drivers working quickly.

You may have noticed a new addition to the top of my page. I’ve decided to add in some Google ads to my page. Nothing else will change, I’m just trying to help earn a little extra cash. I’m new to the AdSense program, so be patient with me if things look weird or ugly until I get the hang of it. For now, it looks like they are showing PSAs, which they show if there aren’t any ads to serve up. Thanks guys.

But at least I continue to surprise myself with the amount of pictures I have, not only of my grandmother, but of my grandmother with my brothers and I. I have spent months dispairing that I had not taken enough pictures of her before she left us, but as I’ve gone through my old photos looking for pictures that should be on flickr, I have found so many of them. They bring me so much happiness and sadness at once that they cancel each other out and all I can do is stare at them and thank God that I took them.

if anyone can tell me the name of a group and album in which one of the tracks is simply a female who keeps repeating “eight foot fiberglass penguin”, let me know. I’ve searched google and everywhere else and can’t find it. Thanks! (I heard it on NPR, if it helps….)

As I read my Linuxtoday.com RSS feed today, I discovered a new piece of software. Songbird aims to be, in their words, “the Firefox of media players.” They seem to be on the right track. First of all, it works on all majors operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux (and by extention BSD). Second, it has taken a good, intuitive interface which appears to have based on a cross between Linux’s Rhythmn Box and Mac/Window’s iTunes. I downloaded developer release 0.2 to see what the fuss was about. Frankly, it’s doing quite well for just being a developer release!

Recently you’ve read about Linux in computers, servers, cell phones, Playstation 3, and the Nintendo Wii. But did you know about Linux being put into a surgeon? The Oct 2006 issue of Spectrum includes a story about a team designing a robotic surgeon to allow a human surgeon to do surgery from afar. The thought is for them to deploy this in the battlefield so that doctors don’t have to be at risk of dying and to obviate the long flight to a safe base for surgery. Why did they choose Linux? Well, since they were designing something revolutionary, there probably weren’t Windows drivers for controlling a robotic surgeon. With Linux being open-source, they could see how it works and easily write device drivers for their robot. One reads a lot about stuff like this - experimental robots and automated vehicles tend to use Linux. Of course, it also is available for free and doesn’t require registration for activation. Finally, you can scale it back to just the kernel and what you need instead of the whole gargantuan OS - as in the case of Windows.

Dan and Dave, my brothers:

A couple of stories that I found interesting today.

First of all, there’s a new Red Hat Fedora Core-based disto on the block, and it’s called Linux XP. It’s meant to be a drop-in replacement for Windows users. The screenshots look VERY nice and it definitely seems like a pretty enticing distro to show your Redmond-loving friends. However, this review found the Linux XP to be lacking in some stability features.

To read an article by someone who’s pretty much been with Linux since the beginning, check out this article.

Fedora Core 6 has slipped another two days to a release date of 19 Oct 2006.