Mostly Harmless

Mostly about my amusement

Year: 2007 (page 15 of 18)

April 15, 2007

Just how stupid can companies (scratch that, people) be?

I should make a new category called “Just Really Really Really Stupid”. I Saw this on Digg, it’s apparently old.

Google is your XP key friend. I’m not saying Google is bad, I’m saying that the company hosting this information is amazingly too stupid for words.

“The Company (who’s name shall not be said here like Beetlejuice), located in Maynard, MA, develops and licenses Internet based products which help make personal computers easier to use and maintain by large and small business users and individual consumers.”

I’ve never heard of them but if they’re going to make available their customers data then they sure are making personal computers easy to use alright. Especially for other people.

Update: After doing a RTFA I see it’s actually business as usual. The company is not posting the information. Apparently the end users are posting it.

Whew, I feel much better now. I mean some end users will do anything…

April 14, 2007

Gears of War

Gears of War from gearsofwar.comI’m slow on getting the latest games. A few weeks ago my pal told me he got Gears of War for his Xbox 360 and loved it.

He and his son completed it on coop play. He described it as having fantastic graphics and great game play. The fact that if you don’t get cover, you’re dead was a nice touch.

I told him I’d get the game this weekend. I picked it up last night. I moved the Xbox 360 into the bed room so the kids would not get woken up by the carnage.

Except for Call of Duty 2 on the PC I’ve never seen a game where cover was required. And even on CoD2 ducking for cover is not done well. GOW handles getting cover and poking out from behind cover amazingly well. When the game started I opted for the tougher way to get out of the building. I picked up a couple of weapons and hit the game.

This game is done so well that I’m not sure a keyboard and mouse would make the play better. And the graphics were amazing. This game shows off the Xbox 360 so well that if I had gotten this game before I picked up the PS3, I might not have bought the PS3 at all. The shooting from cover is amazingly fun. You dart from cover to cover trying not to get shot.

What makes the game more fun is that the enemy does the exact same thing.

If it were not late and Lily did not remind me that today we have lots to do, I’d have played for a few hours.

April 8, 2007

Geraldo Rivera does good

I stopped paying attention to Geraldo Rivera years ago because he, well, became a big TV joke.

Check out his Wikipedia entry. Aside from being a news journalist he also was a lawyer and did a lot in his career.

The other day he was on the Bill O’Reilly show and he really, really got it 100% right. He even got Keith Olbermann to decare him worlds best person in the world.

Here’s the clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLPuGuaZTx8

I hope Geraldo keeps up the good work. He’s a smart guy who can do much more than sensational TV. His “Don’t be the Lou Dobbs mob” comment was spot on.

April 7, 2007

Google 411

Google 411Google’s Voice Local Search is an experimental service where you can dial their 411 information number 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) and look up businesses by voice.

I just used it and got connected to a local restaurant.

I was on speaker phone, there was a lot background noise, and the voice prompter understood what I was saying. It’s your typical voice recognition setup, just the back end is data collected by Google. The prompter was easy to understand and reacted correctly when I would interrupt it to cut to the chase. It read to me the business I selected and connected me to the restaurant.

Of course I gave the phone to Lily for making reservations. It’s not like I want to speak to a real person…

Google Labs logo lifted from their website.

April 7, 2007

Ubuntu and Steam

So far so good. I have tried the following with my Ubuntu installation:

  1. Tried to get Compiz running on my laptop
  2. Updated Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy to 7.04 Fiesty Fawn
  3. Get Steam working on my laptop running Ubuntu

Compiz works badly. I think it’s the xserver I am using. I’ve un-installed it already; my laptop probably just lacks the horse power to drive the effects.

Ubuntu 7.04 will likely be better. But I fat fingered something and ended up putting back on 6.10 Edgy.

Steam works so far. In the past I purchased Transgaming’s Cedega cause I really like what they’re doing. But this time I’ve installed wine using

sudo apt-get install wine

Steam now installs via a .msi file. So to get it installed I downloaded SteamInstall.msi from http://www.steampowered.com/ and Googled to locate tahoma.ttf font file.

I moved the tahoma.ttf file to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/ and ran

msiexec /a SteamInstall.msi

The mouse worked but I could not get the keyboard focused on the installer. Everything I typed ended up in the terminal I used to run wine. I ended up running winecfg and unchecking the “Allow window manager to control the windows” which was enough to get it installed.

Later on I put that option back and ran wine again with this on the command line:

WINEDEBUG="fixme-all" wine "C:Program FilesSteamsteam.exe"

This was lifted from a Ubuntuforums.org page. BTW I just pasted the snippet from the web page into the WordPress TinyMCE window. All formatting was taken care of, very cool. All I did was use the Code tab to adjust the width of the box.

The installation of a Steam game created a link on my desktop complete with icon. Later on I just double-clicked that link and the Steam app is installing my copy of Condition Zero.

The only problem I have is that the Steam window stays on top all the time. I will see if I can get that fixed.

April 1, 2007

Ubuntu 6.10 on a IBM T40 laptop

Update: Well the keyconfig extension no longer works despite hacking the install.rdf in the file. I had to follow the instructions located at this website.

On my Ubuntu laptop I did the following at a bash shell prompt:

cd /usr/share/firefox/chrome/browser/content/browser
sudo vi browser.xul

Did a search for “mainKeyset” and right after the line

<keyset id=”mainKeyset”>

I added the following two lines:

<key id=”goBackKb” keycode=”VK_F19″ command=”Browser:Back” />
<key id=”goForwardKb” keycode=”VK_F20″ command=”Browser:Forward” />

I then saved the file and the two IBM keys worked fine. This requires the lines in ~/.Xmodmap below. I’m not pleased with this solution because I have to update the main firefox package files. I will have to figure out how to do this in my home directory.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

keyconfig extensionThat was way too easy.

I installed Ubuntu 6.06 from the Live/Install CD I had and ran the updater to get all the patches. I played with it for an hour or two and then ran

sudo “update-manager -c -d”

in a terminal window. This permitted me to upgrade the laptop to Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy. I added some more software using Synaptic and was good to go.

Everything worked except in Firefox the keyboard navigation keys for previous/next page did not get recognized. So I added ~/.Xmodmap and put in the following two lines

keycode 234 = F19
keycode 233 = F20

I was all set to do the keyboard macro dance of death when I located and downloaded the keyconfig firefox extension. This extension lets you remap or assign functions to keys in Firefox. That’s very cool since I only was interested in making the keys work in Firefox.

I ran “xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap” and used the extension to map Back as F19 and Forward as F20.

If you download animation or watch video clips, get and install Automatix2. All my vids work due to getting the correct codecs. I’m finding Totem to be a good player.

The real test of if this will work is Lily. She has used the laptop once or twice for browsing and I have even used this laptop to connect to my work’s remote desktop in a browser solution. It’s all working fine.

If she has no issues I’m leaving Ubuntu on this laptop.

March 31, 2007

Laptop committed XP suicide

Cool Ubuntu logo from www.linuxextremist.comFor about a week my IBM T40 laptop has been acting bizarre.

It boots, complains about different problems, and none of the network connections work at all. Using the few tools I have for XP, I can’t get the thing to work.

It’s gotten to the point where I have to dig out the IBM CD’s and re-install XP and the utilities from the CD. I don’t think it’s a virus but the laptop has ticked me off to the point where I’m “Let’s just buy a new one!”

Without slip-streaming an updated copy of XP, that means I have to do the factory re-install and download a few hundred megabytes of patches. It’ll take hours to do.

X-<

As a rule I don’t keep anything important on my laptop. I have a USB key fob and keep copies of the important docs on my servers. Since all I plan to do is use the laptop for browsing and ssh’ing to my boxes, I am installing Ubuntu.

As I am typing this on another virtual desktop, I’m currently installing Ubuntu 6.06 from a live CD. That’s just not an option when installing XP.

This should be good, I will see how long I keep it.

Cool logo found on www.linuxextremist.com.

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Jan Dembowski

Jan Dembowski

I am a software enthusiast who is easily amused and definitely mostly harmless.

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