Another Opinion Among Many

I hope that all Canadians are taking a moment to celebrate the creation of our young contry in 1867.  I also hope that your municipalities aren’t planning such a boneheaded family-unfriendly thing as starting the fireworks display at 10:40pm (or later).  I hope that they plan it for a more reasonable time, like 9:30 or 10:00 when it is sufficiently dark to have an excellent display.  With it being Tuesday night and with work in the morning, I have decided that my young children are going to go to bed at a reasonable hour and will miss the fireworks display.  I hope that the city of Fredericton plans its events with all citizens in mind next year.  I may miss them myself this year.  Too bad.

And, they’re over.  Apparently, from the noise, the fireworks started pretty much on time.  Now, 20 minutes later, its all over.  Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.  I didn’t go down to see them, BTW.  I hope that John got a few shots with his camera.  It would have taken longer to walk down to the river than to see the fireworks.  So, to add to my wish list for next year, I’d like to see a choreographer consulted and see if Fredericton can, for once, have an impressive display (its not the quantity - its the presentation).

Here’s what I bought.  Its a 2005 Nissan Sentra 1.8 Special Edition.  I bought it because of its low mileage (66,000kms) and the fact that its only 3 years old, rather than the alternatives that I’ve looked at, which were 5-7 years old.  This is the first vehicle that I’ve owned that has an alarm, so I’ll have to remember that.  Hopefully, it will meet or exceed the EPA fuel economy ratings of 8.4L/100km(28mpg) city and 6.7L/100km(35mpg) highway.  That would be nice.

The air conditioner apparently works, which is good.  It has air bags and a fairly decent CD stereo with an aux input for an mp3 player.  And, it apparently is safe in a crash.

I’m going to a few car dealers today to see what my options are.  Should I look into a used vehicle, or should I get a new one, which will have a warranty for 5 years or so? It’ll have to be cheap.

I just took an update today for the software on my system and I was pleasantly surprised that Ubuntu has finally upgraded the Firefox Beta 5 version to the RC 1 version.  I’m going to give it a whirl and see where it takes me.  So, how long for the RC 2 that is already out? Will Ubuntu jump straight to Final when it comes out? I did just find out what the rationale was for including FF3 in the Hardy Heron release when I finally got around to listening to the last Fresh Ubuntu podcast.  The developers were thinking to what browser would be the current technology during the life cycle of this release of the distribution.  remember that Ubuntu 8.04 is a LTS release.

That’s often a phrase used in the software industry for a hack done to fix something in the product quickly.  It may not be the most elegant solution, but it gets the job done.

This is the result of a 10 minute rainstorm outside my place.  Its the first time that weather knocked out my sattelite TV signal.  That branch is probably about 8-10 cm at the base.

Try again at a later time, it seems.  On Ubuntu Hardy Heron, I am running WINE 0.9.59.  I have previously mentioned that Caleb has really enjoyed the old Codemasters game Operation Flashpont: Cold War Crisis.  I previously had tried to install it on Linux under WINE, on a lark, not really expecting much from it.  I got what I expected.  The game didn’t work past the splash screen.  In fact, it locked up the GUI and I had to drop to a console and kill the game.

Apparently, that time is now gone.  It plays as if it is on Windows.  So, now Caleb has one more OS option if he wants to play the game.  Now if I could only get a CD crack so that I wouldn’t have to put the CD in the drive to play, it would be nearly perfect.

By the way, since I was playing with WINE anyways, I installed Adobe Photoshop CS2 to see how it would work out.  And, after opening up my exported registry key with registration information on it in Gedit and re-saving it in UTF8, I was able to import it to WINE’s “registry” and it worked like a charm.  It was just as slow and confusing as it was on Windows.  The only exception is that it looks better on Windows, as it’s not sporting the WINE’s Win95-esque gray.  Perhaps I’ll see what the fuss is about.  Now, what do I do about Tomb Raider Gold?

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.