I’ve been traveling all over the world for the past month. No I didn’t suddenly win the lotto, I’m still a poor college student. But, through flickr, I have been traveling around the world through the photos of others. I really love doing this because it will be quite a few years before I can actually afford to travel all around the world, so the cheapest way is to enjoy the pictures of people who live in these areas. It has been amazing seeing the world through the lenses of these photographers, some of them have amazing quality work. This last week alone I have been to Malaysia, Iraq, and Japan. Over the next few days I will be blogging about some of my favorite pictures from around the world. This may be in addition to other posts if other exciting things happen around the world this week.

One of the most well-known Linux distributions has recently changed names! After their recent merger with Connectiva, Mandrakesoft is changing its name to Mandriva. No more Mandrake Linux! It’s Mandriva Linux now. Their URL will soon be changing to reflect this, so make sure to update your bookmarks.

Only in the Linux world can a brand name change without much repercussion. Information travels fast so everyone knows it’s the same thing. Imaging frosted flakes changing the name and mascot of its cereal. Without an expensive ad campaign everyone would assume it was a new cereal and they would lose their brand recognition. Not so with purely internet entities.

Technology continues to be an amazing force and I’m always amazed at even the little things that technology can achieve. Until I was in High School I used to read Marvel comics every month when a new issue would come out. There were only three Marvel comics I cared about: (which happen to be some of the most famous ones) Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, and X-Men.

I liked Spiderman because he was really witty. Even when he was getting beaten up by his enemies, he would still make fun of them with all sorts of wise guy remarks. I also liked the fact that he always had a lot of real-world problems. Unlike a lot of other super heroes he always had problems. His best friend’s dad goes crazy and he is constantly battling with him. Jameson, at the newpaper, is always writing bad articles about Spiderman. No matter how good of a job he does, Jameson is always dragging his name through the mud. He has issues with MJ about why he is always dissapearing. Unlike Lois Lane, she doesn’t naively accept this, she gets ticked and goes out with other guys. Also, for most of the time, his Aunt May, who he so dearly loves, hates Spiderman.

According to CNN Google will begin offering a new map service to rival and surpass Mapquest. They bought this service from Keyhole, a company with a large repository of satellite pictures of people’s houses. Some people are protesting this from a privacy point of view. I don’t see why they are protesting. It’s not as though I can pull up a live picture from your house. All I can do is see a picture that was taken at some point in the past (Google claims 6 months). I don’t see how that’s a privacy issue? Right now I could pay someone to go take pictures of your house and you probably wouldn’t know. As long as they aren’t tracking people or anything (something nearly impossible with civilian satellites), it’s not a big deal. If you look at the CNN articles you will see from the pictures that the resolution isn’t all that. It’s more of a cool geek thing than anything else. Actually, the article did mention the only good use I can see for this service, checking to see just how far that hotel is from the beach when they claim they are just “minutes away from the water”. Actually, I can think of one other thing. If you are trying to figure out which houses to visit with your realtor, you can look it up on Google and see just how big the yard is, front property, etc.

I am coming to the end of the Lexus and The Olive Tree. In part three of his book, he had a very interesting analogy for the world’s economic systems. If they were a gas station….

Japan - the gas costs $5/gal, but there are five guys who service your car. They pump your gas, fill your tires, and clean your windshield. They are all guaranteed to have their jobs for life.

I am a little late in mentioning this due to events in my life at the time at which it occurred, but the Fedora Core 4 Test Release 1 is now available! This is only for use on a test machine because, as the test 1 release, it is very full of bugs. However, if you have an extra machine you can throw it on, you can help them in the debugging process. They have all new goodies that you can’t get anywhere else like Gnome desktop 2.10 and KDE desktop 3.4. Most distros are still on 2.8 and 3.2!

I was looking at the stats for my server and I saw that four people had come here by searching: “a mexican and asian guy singing the numa numa remix”. I googled it myself and saw that you guys had been tricked by Google. I had written about Asia in one post and Numa Numa in the other. None of the other search results had anything to do with it, and mine was one top. I was very happy to be the top item in the search, but felt bad that people coming here weren’t getting what they wanted. I looked around on the Internet to see just what this Mexican and Asian Numa Numa dance was all about. Turned out to be quite hilarious! So, I decided to copy the video and put it on this server for you to be able to see! (Because it was on some weird site that was full of weird ads.) So you can access it here!. Save it to your computer and then enjoy the Numa Numa happiness!

The funny thing about the changing of the time that we do twice a year here in the US is that no one ever seems to know when the day is for changing the clocks. We all know approximately when the time is: in the early spring and early fall. But, even the week before, if you go around asking people, no one seems to know that it will be the next Sunday. Yet, without fail, the night before there is a slew of emails as one person finally figures out that this night is the night to move the clocks. They email their friends and acquaintances who email their friends until about 90% of the people know. Everyone else, like one of my homework group members who isn’t here right now, finds out when they turn on their computers the next day or any other electronic device that automatically adjusts itself.

Don’t forget to set your clocks1 hr ahead at 2am Sunday!

I’m still listening to The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which I mentioned back back on 12 March, since it’s a massive 21 hour book. Today I heard what I consider to be one of the most interesting theories involving wars. The author of the book noticed that no two countries containing a McDonald’s in their borders had ever fought. In other words, if Country A and Country B both have a McDonald’s they won’t fight each other. If Country C didn’t have a McDonald’s, then it may be attacked by either Country A or Country B, or it may attack either of these countries. His main exclusion to this theory is that a Civil war doesn’t count, so the problems in Yugoslavia don’t disprove the theory. The author then took his theory to McDonald’s who then independently verified that no two countries containing a McDonald’s had ever attacked each other.