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Joys of running an experimental OS

I’ve raved plenty in the past about Ubuntu, but finally had ran into a downer.

About 2 weeks ago, I did my normal apt-get upgrades to make sure Ubuntu had the latest and greatest updates, and the nvidia drivers were updated, but the kernel source didn’t map to the nvidia drivers as they should. Upon my first reboot a few days later after a power outage, the X server puked all over and wouldn’t load, so I was dropped to a command line.

Edited the X server configuration, turned off the Nvidia drivers and just had the 2d drivers loaded, everything seemed ok, but it was kinda ugly. You get used to the prettiness of binary drivers after a while, especially screen savers.

Being the daring person I am, I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu Warty (stable) to Ubuntu Hoary, which will be released in April. Changed my apt sources list, apt-get, and voila – Hoary! Gnome 2.92, and a whole bunch of new updated applications. There were a few bugs, but nothing I couldn’t manage. The industrial theme was gone from gnome-themes-extras, mouse icons were old-school Gnome icons, not the pretty updated Ubuntu ones, and a few other things. A few days later, I apt-get update to patch to the latest, and reboot and the system pukes all over everything – can’t even get into the OS.

I swallowed hard, bit the bullet, and reformatted the drive. This time I used Hoary Array 4 to install, and was up and running. Installed Thunderbird instead of Evolution (different story there), and everything was very similar to how it was.

This morning I apt-get upgrade again, and rebooted accidentally (hit the power button instead of the CD-ROM open button, oops) and I get kernel panics.

Swearing in my head, I download the brand spanking new Hoary disc that came out one day after I downloaded the other, this one is an actual preview of the upcoming Hoary release, supposedly more stable than an actual testing release. The just released Gnome 2.10, a new background, bittorrent clients and other goodness. So far so good – it looks more polished than the last 2 test releases I had installed, the new system updater as a front-end to apt seperate from Synaptic works well.

Once again, I’m impressed. A few weeks to the actual stable release, let’s see if I can keep this one running this time.

Still slacking

Can you tell I’ve been busy at work? No blog updates, which I usually do first thing in the morning, I need to get better at doing them at night.

I still haven’t hacked at the blog, I’m waiting to see what the outcome of the current WordPress Theme Competition may yield as themes go.

I generally like the dark colors as it is now, but one column isn’t cutting it – I need to add back the second column for links and stuff. So I’ll wait a month before updating it again. So far, I’m very happy with WordPress 1.5. The developers did a helluva job with the latest version. After one hiccup, the spaminator is killing all the comment spam, the interface is awesome, and I really dig the Dashboard feature.

WoW – wow!

Looking through the referrer logs on silwenae.com last night, I was surprised to see all the hits I’ve received from Google.

Sure enough, I tested out the links, and searched a bit on Google, and then double checked this morning on a different browser and machine to make sure I’m not crazy.

Silwenae.com, home of our World of Warcraft guild, Apatheia, is currently the 10th search result on Google when you search for “WoW Guild”. Front page of Google, baby!

Searching for “wow screenshots” results in the number two and three spots on Google.

Impressive. Google page rankings in search results are based on the number of people who link to you – and considering the search results for “wow screenshots” only has Blizzard above my website, that’s damn impressive.

Who knew I’d ever run a popular website after all the hobbyist versions I’ve had over the years?

Week in Review: Broadcast Flag in Court

A topic near and dear to my heart, which I’ve covered before, is the FCC & the Broadcast Flag.

The American Library Assoc. was in court this week, challenging the FCC on the legality of the Broadcast Flag. The 3 judge panel, while questioning if the ALA even has the right to bring a legal challenge, hammered the FCC on the FCC’s ability to mandate this without legislation from Congress. We’ll know the court’s ruling in a few months.

You can also read a blog with detailed coverage as the blogger attends in court.

We the Media

I finished We the Media by Dan Gillmor last week on the flight to Atlanta.

It was a great book, and extremely topical at this time. Published last July, the book’s focus is grassroots journalism, through mainly, blogs. While the first third of the book is very high level, it’s a great starting point for folks who aren’t necessarily steeped in technology daily. The book shares some interesting history, just in the last few years, of how blogging and grassroots journalism can help hold Big Media accountable.

It also covered the ongoing fight around copyright, Big Media, with a focus on professional journalists and their role in the evolution of journalism.

Mr. Gillmor makes the point a few times that really sticks with me: most of the hundreds of thousands of blogs are too self-centered, nothing more than online journals. It’s those blogs that find a topic, and become experts through commentary, analysis, or news that really make a difference. And he’s right – those blogs I have bookmarked are exactly that, where my blog is nothing more than an online journal.

It was a very good book, easy to read, and the timing is definitely right. Mr. Gillmor has also released it under a Creative Commons license, so you are free to read it on the web without having to buy it in a bookstore. That’s putting your money where your mouth is.

Updated, again!

WordPress 1.5 is officially out, so it’s a good thing I I downloaded a nightly build a week ago to play with it. I’ve updated the site accordingly, and downloaded a few themes to play with as well.

I like the black, but spent two hours playing with the header graphic in GIMP, and didn’t really get anywhere. I’m going to leave the black theme up for now to see how I really feel about it. If I like it, I’m going to heavily modify it, including adding the links & meta back, probably adding a second column for that stuff, and seeing what I can do with the header graphic.

Get all of Napster for free

So yesterday I’m talking about Napster, and what do I see on BoingBoing today but a link to a how-to on burning all of Napster – for free.

There I go again being ahead of the curve. But seriously, sign up for the Napster 14 day trial, download Winamp 5 and a couple of plugins, configure them, and stream the albums on Napster. The plugins will take the stream, and convert it to wav, which you then burn. The only catches are that one, it works in real time, so you have to listen to the music, and two, you have to provide the CD-Rs.

From the site:

Three computers, one fast networked drive, and a few dedicated people: Turning Napster’s 14 day free trial into 252 full 80 minute CDs of free music.

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Have fun!

Napster 2 Go Reviews Start

Boing Boing links to a Washington Post review of Napster to Go. Let’s just say WaPo found it… wanting. Napster’s PR firm has been running full steam lately with numerous mentions in the press (after their post-Super Bowl Ad) where they’re trying to show the math hat an iPod with 10,000 songs = $10,000 or Napster can get you the same thing for $15 / month. That is, $15 / month for forever. Because once you stop paying your songs go poof.

Now I have a friend, who shall remain nameless, that loves Napster for their streaming service. He’s had various MP3 players over the years, but they were clunky, so he bought an iPod mini mid-last year. Loved the Apple experience when it came to digital music – he’s fairly technical but Apple made it easy to get and transfer music. Yet he comes back to Napster to use their radio stations. For $10 bucks a month (or whatever it is, somewhere in that ballpark) you can listen to any song Napster has. You want to burn it? Just like iTunes, that’s 99 cents please. So Napster to Go will be the premium version of their monthly fee based service.

I can see both sides – if you have a Microsoft powered (codename Janus) player, or in Microsoft marketing speak, Plays for Sure, Napster to Go can fill up your MP3 (or should I be saying WMA?) player until you stop paying for Napster. That’s pretty cool – I can get thousands of songs to go work out to, or listen to my car, my choice of songs, for $15 month. Compare that to Sirius or XM, and it could be a better option that satellite radio.

But on the on the other hand – DRM makes bad business sense as I’ve noted before. Think about it, as Xeni points out so eloquently on BoingBoing:

What if Napster To Go were Napster The Grocery, and milk you bought could only be consumed from proprietary square mugs (known for continually sprouting holes you have to patch on your own), and milk cartons vanish from your refrigerator shelf if you don’t re-up your subscription? You’d get milk elsewhere.

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I’ll let you figure out the allegory on your own.

Why I love Ubuntu

I installed Ubuntu on another computer today – my gaming box.

Threw in a 20 gig HD I had laying around, threw in the install disc, and 20 minutes later had a fully functioning dual-boot system.

This will enable me to get back to one of my goals – learning PHP and dedicating 2 nights a week to it. Pulled up synaptic, installed screem & bluefish, and I’m ready to go!

I even installed gnome-blog so I can blog to my hearts content right from my desktop.

In 20 minutes I had a fully functioning linux install, up to date with all security fixes, and patches necessary. Apt-get a few things, had MP3 working and I was surfing away.

My only 2 complaints: This brown theme does nothing for me, thoguh I love Gnome’s Industrial theme. And ran into my first major Ubuntu bug. I’m running an Intel 865 chipset board, using the onboard sound. Sound works in Gnome, but a few of the games I installed have no sound. Must be an ALSA / OSS thing. I tried installing a few ALSA plugins, but no luck yet. I’ll have to throw Doom3 or UT2k4 on here and see how it fares.