Today I became a little more involved in FOSS. Until now I had just been a user of FOSS without giving back. But two days ago I did what can be considered the simplest action in FOSS, I filed a bug report. Actually, I filed two bug reports! Why is this more than just complaining? And what’s so useful about it? Well, since FOSS developers are working for free, they have to do most of the coding in their free time. So they don’t have time to go over every single scenario looking for bugs. Heck, the Windows programmers ARE paid and they don’t have time to go over every single scenario. So, by submitting bug reports, you can help programmers find problems. They may also not know how annoying a bug is, unless people complain about it.

It only took me about 4 hours. Most of it was spent doing tedious things like trying to get the motherboard screws to align with the motherboard and getting the dagnabbin’ default motherboard I/O template and the new one in. So to replace my 1.5 Ghz 1 GB RAM dell that died, I now have a 3 Ghz 2 GB Ram Eric Mesa computer. Really my only complaint in the whole process is that the Asus motherboard holes didn’t line up with the Aspire X-Navigator Holes so it’s not as securely fastened as I would have liked.

Check out: Planned Obsolescence This kind of stuff ticks me off. But it’s the reason why I’m currently building my won computer. I’m sick and tired of the big name vendors thinking that they can do whatever they want to us, and think that we are ignorant enough to accept it. Stand up and realize that the power is in YOUR hands! You can build your own computer and upgrade it and don’t need to or want to be forced to pay for upgrades every few years! I’m going to be building a new computer since my Dell finally died. I’ll be documenting the process so that you can see just how simple it is. Stay tuned!

Welcome to 2006!

My Kodak 3600 DX served me well. That 2.2 Megapixel camera was my first digital camera and I took many great shots with it. Some of my favorites are:

But it was time for me to finally upgrade to a camera with sufficient resolution, but which I could carry in my pocket. My Fujifilm Finepix S7000 is a great camera, but extremely bulky. It was a little annoying at Disney to have that huge thing with me. So today I bought a Fujifilm Finepix A345. It’s a 4.0 Megapixel camera. Yes, they have 5 Megapixel point and shoot cameras, but as I tell everyone, unless you plan to blow the pictures up to 16 x 20, a 3 MP camera is enough. So I wanted to give myself the lattitude to be able to do creative things with this camera, but without going overboard. My S7000 is now for planned shots that I want at the best quality. The camera is a little heavy to walk around with everywhere and since 11 Sept 2001, police don’t like people coming into places with bags. So I will have the A345 in my pocket for any shot that comes up and for those fun little shots that you can’t capture on the big boys. I’ll miss my Kodak, as it ushered me into this era, but I think I will really love the A345. And today, being the end of the year, seemed to be the perfect time to get the new guy.

Well, about 14 hours ago WordPress went 2.0!! It is amazing! They have REALLY revamped things. I’ll have to relearn how to do some tasks, but it is genrally very amazing. For example, now I can create new categories from within the post instead of saving, going to the categories page, creating it, and then coming back. (using AJAX - like flickr.com) It allows me to be a LOT more flexible in my tagging and I love that. Also, the preview is not just the text and images anymore, they make it look EXACTLY like your page! It’s really awesome and I’m glad I upgraded. They have continued to create great blogging software that puts all other blogging software to shame!

KDE 3.5 is the last KDE release before KDE 4. As you will know if you are into the Linux world, most projects reserve a major number change for possible imcompabilities. It’s part of the reason why Gnome is no longer following math and is at release 2.13, which is larger than 2.9. When Gnome finally switches to 3, it’s open season for breaking compatibility with all the GTK+ apps that work with the past few years of Gnome. It’s a chance for programmers to say, “Hey, when I made function foo, I had to use a hack to make it work with the Gnome 2.0 series. Now, I can rewrite the Gnome libraries to make it work with proper programming techniques so it works right.” The same will happen with KDE 4, which is having a rewrite of many of the core libraries.

Think flickr is addictive? Spend hours perusing Wikipedia? Then you better stay away from The Jargon File, a reference to geek terms maintained by hacking demigod Eric Raymond. You can easily spend HOURS learning the meaning behind words in geekspeek or (even more fun) reading about the background BEHIND these terms. Eric Raymond, the major co-author of the introduction, is a great author and the intro is as much fun as the rest of The Jargon File. Especially awesome is the part about the geek psyche. It explains why we find funny:

Yumex, the graphical frontend for yum has been upgraded to version 0.44. This version fixes all that was annoying about the previous version. It now automatically takes the user to the output page during updates to see what is going on. The interface is also a lot cleaner and there are a lot less popup windows which had a tendency to get “lost” if heavily using multiple desktops.

there will be a series of short posts today to make up for a long and substantial one.

SETI at Home is now over! I never thought this phenom would end, but, sadly, it has.