Kennon’s Space

I’m calling for a do over…I’m staying home this November. Wake me up in 2012. If McCain and Obama are the best this country can muster I will sit this one out.

“The government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
-Ronald Reagan

I have no artistic ability what so ever…but I have been using this desktop wallpaper now for a few weeks because I like the red…Someone at Novell released some SUSE Geeko images. I just took the surfer and put it on top of the swirly thing. I made it for myself but thought I would share it for any other art-imparied like me who wanted something Novellish for their wallpaper.

The original artist for the wallpaper is bitblitter _AT_ gmail.com. Novell owns Geeko methinks…

This video is pretty awesome. If you were to replace Halo with Counter-Strike or Team Fortress Classic this could have been a hidden camera in my office when I worked at Fresno State back in the late 90’s. Enjoy…

Well I know compared to most people I am writing down my opinion of the latest OpenSUSE release a little late but…I wanted to try it out a bit, kick the tires before I put anything on here about it. And I am certainly glad I did.

OpenSUSE 11 is slick. And I don’t just mean slick looking, I mean it is fast too. Normally we expect to sacrifice speed for pretty, or vice versus. Honestly I did not find this to be the case in the least with OpenSUSE 11. I have been running it now for about 2 weeks solid on my home workstation. It is a now fairly aged AMD 3500+ Venice Chipset with 2 gigs of Ram and a GeForce 7800GS video card all sitting snuggly on an Asus A8V Deluxe mobo. Three years ago when I built it, it was a very decent rig. Today they sell $900 HP Pavillions at Costco that could blow it out of the water.

I don’t really want to dwell on the points you’ve probably read 100 times about the new installer and how much faster the package manager zypper is etc…I’ve read about 10 reviews so far and they all pretty much say the same things. I’d like to point out a couple of my favorite features. Some of these are not unique to OpenSUSE 11 as we saw a few of them in 10.3 but these are all reasons I use it both at work and at home.

I have some seriously mixed feelings about single-click install. I think it is a great idea for power users but a very bad idea for Linux noobs. Which is kind of counter-intuitive considering I’m pretty sure it was meant for the latter group. But for me, I love it. I read the URL provided and decide if I trust that repo and click OK and away it goes. I have used single-click now to install a lot of apps in OpenSUSE 11. I tried to stay way from it in 10.3 but decided to give it a go in 11. I keep close tabs on CyberOrg’s blog because I am a desktop effects/Compiz whore. Just before release on 11 he posted a single-click link for not only the latest versions of Compiz but also for the NVIDIA drivers, ATI drivers and arguably even more importantly the Gnome and KDE multimedia codecs. This is a huge time saver for me and I really appreciate his efforts.

OpenSUSE’s implementation of KDE 4 is the first one I have actually felt was usable. I ran 4.0 on OpenSUSE 10.3 and I ran Fedora 9’s version and they both pretty much sucked. KDE 4 on OpenSUSE 11 is really actually pretty beautiful. I still don’t like it as a day-to-day work environment but for someone who likes to just stares at his desktop sometimes and appreciate the art KDE 4 on OpenSUSE 11 is the shit.

Along that same vein it isn’t just KDE that is beautiful. The Gnome 2.22 desktop environment on 11 is elegant. On Ubuntu and Fedora I generally end up opening the theme control first thing and monkeying around with stuff. OpenSUSE 11’s default Gnome theme, to me, is gorgeous. Smooth fonts, simple yet very sharp icons all with a somewhat luminescent quality. I found myself changing one setting only. And that is the active window title bar color from blue to the new shade of grey they are using.

The new Yast interface in Gnome is pretty amazing. In alpha and beta versions this was troublesome for me as it would randomly crash in the middle of package installation using the software manager. I had horrific flashbacks to the package management nightmares in OpenSUSE 10.1 and got scared. But in release it has yet to crash once on me. I start typing the name of a package and viola the list of available packages begins filtering on my input. I think this is very slick and time saving.

An oldy but goody, the Gnome Slab…The name sucks and I hear people gripe about it all the time, but once I started using it on my day to day desktop I couldn’t stop. It is seriously the best thing to happen to Gnome from a UI perspective in a really long time. When I boot into Gnome without the slab it feels primitive. The same way I feel now a days when I am forced to use a Windows XP machine without desktop effects.

OpenOffice runs really well on 11. And the best part is, it actually looks like a KDE app in KDE. Unlike every other KDE I have run it in OpenOffice looks and runs slow and clunky. In OpenSUSE 11 it seems like a completely new Office system.

So at this point I went ahead and installed it on my old work laptop. An IBM Thinkpad T43p with 2 gigs of ram. I ran into a fairly significant problem on the laptop. The install went very well and everything seemed to work flawlessly out of the box. But as soon as I installed the latest ATI driver for the FireGL 3200 onboard the Thinkpad things went south quickly. At first everything seemed to be running ok after the FGLRX driver was in place. But as soon as I installed and enabled the latest Compiz from CyberOrg’s One-Click that laptop started sucking wind. I couldn’t resize any windows, mouse cursor moves became choppy and the system would idle at 8-12% CPU utilization. I tried installing and reinstalling the driver about half a dozen times to no avail. I played with settings I switched from AiGLX to the older XGL nothing seemed to help very much. At one point I even got the dreaded white cube of Compiz death which I hadn’t seen in a long time.

So I’m not really sure if this whole ATI driver problem is an OpenSUSE issue. But I felt like I needed to mention it since I know a lot of Linux people run Thinkpads.

Otherwise, on the laptop a lot of features worked great. My favorite thing is that suspend and hibernate totally work like they should. Sometimes when I resume from a hibernate though the wireless nic won’t always reconnect for some reason. And just like in OpenSUSE 10.3 all the Fn buttons on the Thinkpad work with zero tweaking. Oh and lets not forget libthinkfinger comes installed on 11 and works great.

So overall I’d like to say that the folks from Nuremburg have really outdone themselves this time. OpenSUSE 11 is a solid new version with lots of really key enhancements and a great sneak peak into some of the cool stuff we can expect in Novell’s code 11 enterprise offerings coming soon!

John McCain’s reaction to the news that the rebel fleet had just destroyed the Death Star.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

This is usually not my kind of thing but it blew my mind. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I wanted to bring to your attention an article at Military.com regarding a bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga that would effectively ban the sale adult oriented magazines and material on US military bases. Now first off, lets clarify what we are talking about here. This isn’t hardcore porn, this is Playboy, Penthouse, FHM, Maxim type stuff. This is material that the US Government has failed to classify as pornography and censor for decades. This is stuff that I can walk 3-4 blocks in any direction and buy in any convenience store or even regular book store.

(Rated PG-13 Rant)

OK now that we know the who, and the what, we should discuss the why. And my answer to you is. I have no fucking idea why someone who, according to his own US congressional biographical directory entry, didn’t even serve in the military would have the gall to censor the reading material of grown men and women who have VOLUNTEERED to go into harms way to support his political party’s BROKEN ASS FOREIGN POLICY. I mean really. How dare this Georgia peach sucking ivory tower asshat tell Johnny Soldier who makes so little money that his wife and baby back home qualify for foodstamps that it is OK for him to get his arms blown off by some improvised explosive device to protect the world from non-existent weapons of mass destruction just so some Haliburton green-zone livin potato peeler who is making $150,000+/year on a government contract can come behind him and set up a fucking McDonalds franchise in some god forsaken desert shithole but Johnny’s not allowed sit on the shitter and whack off to some boobies. Why? Because he might go to hell? Let me clue you into something Mr. Broun, MOST OF THEM ARE ALREADY THERE AND YOU SENT THEM.

Ahh…I feel much better, thank you.

That is all.

According to this slashdot post that links to this site Adobe might finally be opening up Flash video. This is really exciting news because it means that there will be competition for Silver/Moonlight. And although Moonlight is FOSS it is based on a technology being developed by Microsoft which is NOT so that is always kind of scary. Beware Redmond bearing gifts I always say.

This is not an annoucement that Flash is going GPL or anything. What it means though is that Adobe supposedly is:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

So this doesn’t make Flash FOSS yet. But what it does is enables FOSS players like Gnash to maintain better compatibility. Which in turn allows you to remove that closed source flash plug-in from your Linux browser. Currently Gnash is only able to play flash video up to Flash 7 I believe.

So this ties into my last couple posts in a few ways. The most important facet though is projects like OLPC would be able to remain Free (note the capital F) while still maintaining compatibility with modern streaming video technologies (Negroponte, stuff that in your pipe and smoke it). Not that this is going to change things for OLPC’s decision to start building laptops with Windows on them, as we all know that whole Flash 9 thing was a hollow excuse. But it will enable future projects and devices to become more flash compatible so maybe some day even a Nintendo Wii or an Apple iPhone will be able to visit Disney.com!

Some people will see this not as a goodwill gesture by Adobe, but a strategic business move to keep Microsoft out of the online video space. And I think they are right. But hey, that is how market pressure works. I for one am glad Microsoft started the Silverlight project.

And remember what Lars taught us oh so many years ago…free is a four letter word.

I wasn’t too shocked to read this story over at Computerworld. Some people might be angry at some of the comments on the article. One of which I posted. They might grouse about how the OLPC project is just trying to do what is right for the children. My problem with the situation is that one of the big excuses they use for deploying OLPC with Windows, is Flash Media 9 compatibility…Give me a break. So because kids in underprivileged countries cannot access Disney.com we are going to replace the OS on the device? I thought this was supposed to be an educational tool, not a marketing tool. I guess the true purpose of the OLPC project has finally come out.

There are a ton of internet-enabled devices in the world that do not support Flash 9 because Flash 9 is a resource hogging closed source pile of proprietary shit that hopefully will be replaced soon by something more FOSS friendly like Moonlight. So because the Apple iPhone and Nintendo Wii don’t support Flash 9 in their web browsers lets make sure we don’t sell any of those to developing countries…Oh wait, those are two of the hottest selling consumer electronic devices on the planet right now. But how could that be?!? You can’t even visit Disney.com on them!!!

Reality Check: Microsoft has a lot of money. And even Mr. Negroponte is only a man. His ideals cannot stand up under the weight of billions of dollars. Whether it was bribes, junkets or intense lobbying pressure or a combination of factors. Microsoft has demonstrated time and time again that they can move mountains, defy governments, and shape entire industries with the correct application of money. I for one am extremely saddened by this news. Farewell Mr. Negroponte, never to be taken seriously by the technology community.