The title of this post is, of course, a play on words. The company Ximian has developed Mono, an open source competitor to MS’s .NET. Mono is spanish (and probably latin) for monkey. The reason I’m excited is that according to Gnomedesktop.org, Fedora Core 5 will have mono! This means we’ll get great new programs being coded in Mono such as F-Spot, a photo organization program, and Beagle, an AMAZING search tool on par with the search tool in the latest Macintosh. Basically, it indexes the file system in such a way as to be able to look through not only filenames, but also tags in photos, music, and documents. Beagle even searches through AIM logs created by Kopete and Gaim. But the COOLEST thing is that, unlike the search in Windows which takes forever, this is instantaneous since it’s always indexing your computer. In fact, there are demos you can see by clicking on the beagle link on the right-hand side of my blog, that show a search being conducted and as the author write stuff in his IMs, it appears in the search. I can’t wait for this to be available to us Fedora users!

I was successful in sharing the drive with my windows computer and have tested that I can create files and delete them in Windows. I followed this tutorial. I did everything as they said to setup Samba, which communicates on the Windows smb protocol. They only thing different was to uncomment the line security = user. That has to be set to security = share. Now I’m trying to adapt their NFS to work for me for sharing with Linux. It was working before I formated the drive from FAT32 to ext3. (I reformatted because FAT32 has no ability to set file permissions. Shame on you BGates!) If/When I figure it out, I’ll probably post what I did differently on here. Stay tuned!

In Fedora Core 4 (and earlier Cores) when the user is in Gnome or KDE, the HAL daemon will automatically recognize when a USB drive is attached to the computer. It will then create an fstab entry and all will be good in the world. I’m not sure if this happens in Debian, but I’m using Debian as a print/file server so I don’t have any GUIs installed. So I will go over my learning process for others who may be having the same difficulties.

Here is the abbreviated commentary on my building of my new computer.Above are the new computer parts I used. In addition to these, I scavanged my DVD-ROM, DVD+-R, and hard drive from my old computer. I actually didn’t use the firewire ports as my motherboard has one in back and a connection for one in the front. I only use firewire for my video camera, so that was enough for my needs. I’m hanging on the to the firewire card for future potential projects.

At first, Civ4 seemed not to play much better on this computer with twice the stats of my old machine. Yeah, the game didn’t take 15 minutes to load, but it wasn’t as close to instantaneous as I’d hoped. But then I slowly began to see the places where Civ4 was much better on this computer. The first thing I noticed is that the Wonder videos are no longer out of sync with the sound, so I was able to watch them and enjoy what the programmers had put together. Then I noticed that the scrolling was much, much smoother than it previously had been. Finally, I was able to talk to other civs without that causing me to have to wait 3 minutes for the other civ to load up. I finished yet another game, this time as the chinese, and I’ll be uploading that soon.

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.