Here is the latest batch of quotes I have gathered up:

Found in the winehq irc room 1. Knowledge is Power 2. Power Corrupts therefore Study hard and become evil

“How many kamikaze missions have you flown?” “Fourteen Sir!” “Shouldn’t it be just one?” -Early work of Douglas Adams

Apple for style, Linux for security, Windows for Solitaire

[‘a’, ‘b’, ’new’, ‘mpilgrim’, ‘z’, ’example’, ’new’, ‘False’]

> “False” in li True

Thanks to Danny, I am now a member of the yet another addictive internet site. Last.fm, which works with the Linux music player amaroK will collect all the songs you listen to. It will then display it on a webpage such as this one. If this was all it did, it would be mildly fun, but it combines the best of the social web phenomenon involved in web 2.0. Clicking on a song will tell you how many users listened to that song from that artist. It also has a “neighbors” feature where it lists other users that have the same musical taste as you. This should be interesting given the variety of music I listen to. Also, I have added a plugin to the sidebar here so that you can see the latest songs I’ve listend to on my Linux computer. These are the invasions of privacy I don’t mind since I’m volunteering this information. It’s when programs, websites, and ISPs take this information without asking me that I get annoyed.

Alright! Google Earth 4 has been released. This time around Google has not let us Linux users high and dry! In fact, they have released Windows, Linux AND Macintosh versions of Google Earth! I think I will finally download it - I had been waiting for the rumored Linux version. Read the exciting announcement here and look for me to be blogging about it in a few days.

The computing industry has lots of euphimisms, but one of the ones that gets me really miffed is “trusted computing”. It is a process by which computer companies are trying to exert THEIR control on machines WE have bought with OUR money! Trusted Computing is the way they show they don’t trust us, but not allowing us to do whatever we want on our machines. This goes against the very love of tinkering that drives so many of us. It’s why more and more people are turning to the BSDs and Linux distros in order to be able to have the FREEDOM to tinker with THEIR OWN software as they wish. Instead, the industry wants to tell us how we should experience their items! I don’t want to hear it! If I want to buy a CD or DVD and rip it to my computer and put it on my iPod, then that’s my own business! Especially if I have PURCHASED IT! There have always been and always will be pirates. If you embed these systems into our hardware, you think it will stop us from experiencing our media the way we want to, but it won’t! There’s not a thing you can do to stop the resourcefulness of computer geeks, CS, and ECE majors. You can push congress to make it illegal, but that just means another DVD Jon in Scandanavia will figure it out. Just let us do what we wish. There has always been piracy and somehow you’ve still managed to make money anyway.

Others have probably covered it to death. I am just mentioning it because it is that important.

As I was browsing around /usr/share/emacs/21.4/etc/ looking for the emacs manual in order to look for the command to launch the doctor and I found the following. It’ll be funniest if you’re used to Unix man pages. Here it is, the man page for condom.

CONDOM(1) EUNUCH Programmer’s Manual CONDOM(1)

NAME condom - Protection against viruses and prevention of child processes

SYNOPSIS condom [options] [processid]

DESCRIPTION _condom_ provides protection against System Transmitted Viruses (STVs) that may invade your system. Although the spread of such viruses across a network can only be abated by aware and cautious users, _condom_ is the only highly-effective means of preventing viruses from entering your system (see celibacy(1)). Any data passed to _condom_ by the protected process will be blocked, as specified by the value of the -s option (see OPTIONS below). _condom_ is known to defend against the following viruses and other malicious afflictions…

As you doubtless know, the Superman franchise is coming back. After a false start in the 90s where Superman was going to go crazy (inspiring the song Kryptonite by 3 Doors Down), they are actually working on this one. It’s supposed to fit in the timeline after Superman II with Christopher Reeves and is titled Superman Returns. While reading an article about the upcoming movie in the June 2006 issue of Wired Magazine, a side panel titled “The Myth of Superman”, reminded me of one of my favorite monologues in Kill Bill Vol. 2. First what Niel Gaiman and Adam Rogers say in their article:

To All Responsible at nVidia for the production of device drivers,

I want to thank you for producing binary drivers for Linux at a time when most other companies don’t feel that the Linux market penetration is larger enough to develop drivers. So thanks for doing that! In fact, that is why I exclusively buy nVidia for my machines whenever possible. Sure, ATI is sharing NOW, but you were the first to divert some programmers to produce it and your reward is faithful customers like me. Of course, supplying closed-source binary drivers is not the perfect solution, as you have no doubt heard from others. However, I think this is an important first step which allows me to use my computer’s hardware to its maximum and allows Linux programmers to make GUIs capable of eye candy rivaling (and in some cases surpasing) that of Windows and Macintosh.

A little bit of info to impart here with respect to using the proprietary nVidia drivers. So, first I went to livna and downloaded the nVidia kernel modules that match my kernel. Then things were running great - even a little better than before, but something seemed wrong. The people in the irc room were unhelpful when I tried to ask them if nVidia was running. When I tried to run BZFlag, it no longer ran! I kept getting GLX missing errors! Turns out that it wasn’t running! I had to go to system-config-display (in Red Hat Fedora) and tell it to use the nVidia card as my graphics card. Then I opened up a terminal and typed init 3 and went to another VT for init 5 to restart the X server. This time I saw the nVidia logo when I got to the login screen. Success!

I got my graphics card today. Nothing crazy - just a $30 PNY 128 MB nvidia graphics card from newegg. I haven’t installed the nvidia drivers yet, but it has already been amazing in difference. The colors are brighter and more vibrant, the cpu, bereft of its need to draw the graphics runs faster, and windows don’t lag when I drag them around - a problem since Fedora switched to Cairo. There’s also no lag in SuperTux!