Another Opinion Among Many

I was watching beatbox videos on YouTube and came across this funny edited one of George Bush.  Its good clean fun.

I took the plunge and upgraded my Ubuntu install from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron and now apt-get doesn’t work.  Everything that depends on it or anything like it doesn’t seem to work.  dpkg still does.  So, if I update and upgrade (or dist-upgrade), it’ll fetch the packages, just as the update-manager does, but it will crap out with a segmentation fault when its time to install the packages.  I’ve joined Lymatas thread at the Ubuntu forums.  This will be the first time that I’ve ever asked for help, as the solution has always been a search query away.  The solution presented (which is the one that helps most people) does not work for me.  If anyone has overcome this problem, let me know how you solved it.  I’m about to ask a question on LQ for the first time.

I’ve decided that Lymatas has a different problem and have created my own thread - the first ever linux question I’ve posted to a forum (will also request help at LQ - this is getting to be ridiculous).  Check out my request right HERE and see if you can help me kill apt and ressurect it from its death! (or something like that).

I just wiped my website’s directory (on purpose) and replaced the whole thing, to what I think is, with just the files I want.  Perhaps that will satisfy the nagging bug that came from the hole in pre-2.5.1.  Let me know if anything doesn’t function as expected.  Thanks.

I’ve always loved the colors of the sunset and of the sunrise.  Here’s a picture after sunset that I took last night.

Seriously, I’d like to know why anyone would be trying to squeeze their tax filing in before midnight on April 30th.  Your information slips have to be sent as of Feb 28, so what takes you so damn long? Why are you feeling so entitled to special treatment for an extension if you’ve had that much time? Huh? What’s that echo?

I’ve added a few pictures of the flooding in town tonight.  The Police have closed some roads for safety and the water is expected to rise another metre above sea level over night.  Yikes.  Never say it won’t come close to home, huh? I’ve not added any friendly info yet, but the ones from 00053 and up are from April 30 (today).

This is not a review

Well, I must say, the title says a lot. I’ve just installed KDE on Arch Linux, which has resided on my computer for the last few months as a second operating system, after Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Now, I must confess, I installed a cleaned up and themed version called KDEMod, that’s been packaged for Arch. Its what the Arch community has been asking for, since many other distributions are now offering a modular version of KDE.

KDEMod Rocks

Now, Arch users can get this version that has been patched for more eye candy and functionality and they’ve tweaked Qt3 to drive it over the top. Now, I’ve not used the interface for more than a few hours so far, but I’m impressed. Its cleaned up and respectable. After the simple yet functional application menu deployed by Ubuntu, I was overwhelmed when I tested any KDE-centric distros afterwards.

I’ll be honest. I installed Ubuntu because I wanted an enhanced and up to date interpretation of Debian that wasn’t as crashy and unpredictable as the “Unstable” branch. Once I began to use the tools that were developed at Ubuntu to make Gnome useful, I realized that my former preference of KDE (for its convenient and useful apps), had gone by the wayside, in lieu of enhanced functionality. I was tired of wading through the menus and sub menus just to open an application. Finally, I get a nice compromise between the granular selection that I liked about KDE and the simplicity of a well laid out menu structure that has been the emerging appeal of Gnome for me.

I don’t know the magic but…

The “eye candy” enhancements are subtle but planned. I opened Kopete and signed into my Yahoo! and MSN accounts in case someone wanted to IM me (they didn’t, BTW). The Kopete icon sat nicely in the taskbar, twirling away. I don’t know why, but I really liked the animation. One of the things that I like about using Compiz is the way that the icons expand and fade at the same time when you select an application from the taskbar quick menu. KDEMod does this as well (and I don’t have compiz installed).

I’ll have to explore some more, but this might be the switcheroo for me to act upon. Maybe Arch will become my primary desktop. Its hard to say at the moment, as Ubuntu can give me everything that is Debian, which is very popular with my little dood. Caleb is a complete Wesnoth addict (downloading for Arch now).

Compiled for Speed

Everything that I’ve called up is really fast and responsive. It reminds me of when I compiled KDE with prefetch enabled on Gentoo. Finally, the 10,000lb gorilla was as light as a bird. This is different, however. I installed binaries. Its strange that it would take several seconds for a terminal window to open, so it was refreshing when I clicked on the icon for Konsole, it was immediately on my screen. Little things like that are nice to see. However, I guess those who need a screen reader won’t be enjoying the new KDE on Arch, since there isn’t one for KDE.

I haven’t had any programs really delay in their opening. Now, there are a few that didn’t load quickly because I was using XFCE, I guess.

Anyhow, its open and I’m open for options.

Hat tip to Ray, for reminding me that KDE has a good bunch of things going for it.

If you don’t see anything here, don’t dispair.  I’m just cleaning up after that nasty “visitor” I mentioned a few posts ago.  I don’t know when I will do this.  It depends on a bit of help from my host, the most awesome Friendlier.com.  But, if its necessary that all goes dark, I’ll be back shortly.

The river sure is rising fast this year.  That’s a testament to all the snow that we’ve gotten.  I took a few pictures of Tingley Field, which has a brook running behind it.  These are pictures of where the brook swelled to in the last few days.  Those trees are at the edge of the brook and in the summer time, the water will be 20 feet below them.  The river is about 1000 feet downstream.

(24 April) I’ve added a few from the river tonight as well.

I tried something interesting to see what would result.  For one day, I turned off the Simple Spam Filter plugin, written by the most excellent Tan Tan Noodles coder, Joe Tan.  I wanted to see how much SPAM it was actually prefiltering.  Now, my site gets pretty low traffic, as far as sites go.  Depending on the stats program I use, either 160ish or 700ish visitors came to see me per day on the highest traffic months.  My total bandwidth usage has grown to about 3.5GB per month (thanks in part to the low number of videos and pictures that I host).

After entering some new keywords into the “banned words” list, I stopped having to moderate any comments at all through the Akismet moderation panel.  Anybody who has commented has probably been stopped by SSF and asked if they are indeed human at least once, as there are some pretty common words that show up in spammers comments as well as normal ones done by humans that care to engage in a REAL conversation.  I hope that you’ve enjoyed my attempt at humourously presenting the verification button to you.

What I was worried about was that legitimate commenters weren’t getting their point accross, as no spam to moderate is a bit strange.  Hopefully all you real, live commenters realize by now that you just have to click the button to have your comment appear without any further moderation.

So, what was the result? Of the comments that came through that Akismet hasn’t learned yet and auto-deleted, I got 48 comments in my spam moderation queue.  There were no false positives.  I turned SSF back on and the spam comments stopped getting through.  Thank you, TanTan Noodles!