I added a new side-bar link to Vault. Audioscrobbler is a site that collects information on your listening habits. You can use it via a plug-in available for most applications. I use amaroK a KDE music managers that is the first such tool, on any platform, to support Audioscrobbler out of the box (if you enable it.) As an FYI, I actually have a licensed copy of iTunes that I got with my iPod. AmaroK’s iPod support is better than iTunes… just another reason why amaroK is the best music manager on ANY platform. Here is a picture of my current amaroK setup/play-list. Take note of the pop-up album announcement at the top of the screen.
Author: Bobby Rockers
The End of an Era
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to subscribe to The National Geographic (TNG.) This desire became a reality when I married by wife Heather. Evidently her parents believe that its an important part of their duty to provide a window into the the architectural and historical origins of civilization. I applaud this effort, but mostly just because it provides me with a free subscription to a publication I have always been interested in. While my interest in TNG has change a great deal from the time I was in the third grade, looking to find uncensored images of young females from some unknown tribe of recently found nudists living on the exact opposite site of planet from my Catholic grade school; my respect for the magazine has not changed. That is, until recently.
Each month my (I say my because I find that I generally have a great deal more interest in the TNG than any other immediate member of my family) brown grocery bag covered periodical arrives at my door and I eagerly open it, peer at the cover, and flip through a the magazine that I will, no doubt, read cover to cover at my next available bathroom break. A couple months ago I ripped open the paper cover to discover a startling headline.. œWas Darwin Wrong? No, I am not kidding. TNG has placed the question of the origin of species in large bold print on the cover of their magazine. Obviously TNG would not have done so unless some startling new evidence was brought to light by a team of world renounced scientists that questioned the validity of Charles postulate. I skipped right over my usual reading routine and tore open to the page referenced by the aforementioned articled headline; and their in black and white was my answer… NO! The article when on to talk about evolution in animal species around the world.
Now I am being totally serious here. The National Geographic, a mainstay of international intelligence had printed up a œNational Enquirer style headline to inform me that the status quo had NOT change in our understanding of evolution. And they had done so to push a interesting (if not mediocre) article on evolution.
Now I wish I could say this was a single abnormality, but recently I have found that this same type of occurrence (although seldom quite as dramatic) is happening with startling regularity. For example, last months issue had a cover story that appeared on news stands but was not shipped as the default cover story to subscribers. I thought my TNG copy of œThe Great Gray Owl was a wonderful article, but was dumbstruck to find sitting on the new stand at Albertson’s, œTales from a Nazi Ghost Ship. I went home to find that, indeed, the œNazi Ghost Ship article was in my copy of TNG; but it was not so prominently displayed on the cover (being only in small white type at the bottom.) I read the articles pertaining to the œNazi Ghost Ship. The articles were wonderfully interesting, and spectacularly written; but had absolutely nothing to do with Ghosts. In fact the œon location photographers didn’t even see any skeletons because of their desire to be respectful to the remains of the sunken WWII ship. Evidently being sunk is cause enough for a ship to earn the title œghost ship. Funny how I had always assumed that ghost != ship.
I guess this really started back about a year ago. Some of you may remember that TNG came out with a œspecial (special meaning that it was not shipped to subscribers and thus could only be bought on news stands.) The œspecial was (and I-shit-you-not) a TNG swim suite issue! The inside articles and photography has swim suites from around the world, from dozens of different cultures. It was NOT a bad publication, definitely not worthy of being a œspecial, but not a bad magazine. However, the front cover of this no-nonsense, reliable, bastion of cultural integrity; was a VERY attractive, VERY California looking woman with three shells covering the three most important FCC locations. The œbathing suite btw was not a suite that was particularly common amongst any indigenous peoples subgroup anywhere in the world (nor could it even be purchased at the time), it was custom made for that particular photo shoot.
The point I am making is that I had always hoped that TNG was somehow immune to the sensationalism that seems to have overtaken our culture. A publication that you could always count on to be a beacon of consistency for cultural, architectural, and historical reference. For the last 100 years or so TNG has been exactly that. There was once a time where I was in awe of a magazine that was so accurate in its depictions of world cultures that it was willing to show nudity (during the 50’s and 60’s no less) if that was the standard for that culture. Now it wouldn’t be enough to present the reality of the culture; it would, undoubtedly, be prominently displayed. And we are all the less because of it.
KDE, SUSE, and APT
Found a great how to on installing Suse via FTP and APT. Useful information for managing and using Suse. One of the most interesting parts of the article is when they tell you to install kynaptic. Yes, there is evidently a KDE APT front-end much like Synaptic. The version linked to is pretty old (Suse 9.1, about 8 months old) but I have not been able to find the repository for the Kynaptic main… yet!
While I was hunting down Kynaptic, I found another interesting link. Apt Indicator is a system try applet that works like Redhat’s up2date or Suse’s Watcher. It informs you when there are updates available in your current apt repositories.
Finally, I discovered that Kynaptic might not even be necessary. KPackage (KDE package management tool) works just fine with apt4rpm. It even auto-configured itself to work with my current apt sources. Funny, I could never get KPackage to work on Redhat. Heck, most of the time it would not even install.
KDE Kiosk Mode
Kiosk Mode is a feature (mentioned previously) that allows administrators to setup groups to manage limiting of user rights within KDE. The functionality is basically required in small business, school, and company environments. The link above is to an outstanding tutorial on using Kiosk. Like all KDE functionality, its a feature that is automatically inherited by any KDE applications.
Making Vi even harder to use
One of the necessary evils of the *nix world is vi (or more preferably vim.) Suse 9.2 has been a wonderful distrobution for me to use; but one of the HUGE annoyances of it is the busted-ass-pain-in-the-butt way Suse 9.2’s Vim handles the backspace key. You would think that the backspace key… ya know.. deletes stuff to the left of your cursor. Well in Vim on Suse 9.2 you would be wrong.
For some reason that continues to remain a mystery to me, Suse has decided that the backspace key should beep at me. Its not enough that the key would not work, but it actually has to annoy me with loud beeping noises. A quick check with the vi homepage FAQ shows that the correct behavior of the backspace key is… to delete stuff to the left of the cursor (will wonders never cease.) In fact they are so infuriated by this change of behavior (justifiable, I might add) that they have created a vim command to fix any problems vendors may have introduced into the beloved backspace key.
:fixdel
Textbooks and Tutorials
While I have the RHCE, one of the more popular Linux certifications is the Linux Professional Institutes’s LPI. While not as “intense” as the RHCE, the LPI confers a core level of competency on Linux systems. A competency that is fairly distribution agnostic.
While in the process of looking up documentation models on the Internet; I ran into wikibooks.org. Wikibooks is an attempt to create an on line book repository the likes of wikipedia does for the encyclopedia. The array of books available for access it quite amazing, ranging from cookbooks to foreign language guides. Most of the books have a educational slant on them, but that is generally the kind of book I am looking for when searching for on line book content.
How does this tie into the LPI? Wikibooks has a complete (if unofficial) list of prep books for the LPI. Notice the LPI level 3 is still in preparation by the Linux Professional Institute.
In an semi related link, I have been reading up on Ade’s blog post proposing an on-line KDE course catalog of how to documents organized in a collegiate format. He calls his proposal UofKDE. Overall I think the idea is a great improvement over the current on line documentation organization (or lack of it.) Maybe this will start to put the design level of KDE’s documentation more on par with KDE development environment. I think its about time for a open source documentation revolution; particularly in the KDE world. And the innovations in that field will not be made with the same level of thinking got us to were we are now.
KToon, SVG, and Flash
Ktoon is an SVG editor and animator created by Toonka Films, focused mostly on the Cartoon Industry. The SVG format is roughly equivalent to Flash.
And while we are on that subject check out vnc2swf a application for making flash movies of vnc screen captures. For those interested in making screen capture movies O’Reilly has an article on doing it a slightly different way.
KDE Documentation Notes
The head of documentation for the KDE project has listed a couple FYI points for anyone thinking about doing KDE documentation.
- Docs are strings. When strings are frozen, so are the docs. The dates for string freezes are noted in the release schedule.
- Screenshots are not strings. They are not frozen during the string freeze.
- During string freezes, you can always send patches to kde-doc-english@. They will be applied after kde-i18n is ready, so they will be included in the release tarballs for your application, but they will not be translated until the next point release.
- You do not have to write docs in docbook, if you send plain text content to kde-doc-english@ (or attach it to any open bug reports about your application documentation) we will mark it up for you.
- Documentation should not be optional. Missing documentation is a bug, and may already be filed as such.
- A command/menu reference is considered required for all docs, but it is a bare minimum. Do try to write more useful content if you can.
- There is a questionnaire available to fill in with questions about your application. This can serve two purposes:
- If you are a developer who wants to write your own documentation but you are not sure how to start, the questionnaire will help you clarify the important points that must be covered.
- If you are not able to write documentation, answering the questions will give a good head start to anyone who volunteers to help you out, and will save them a lot of time asking questions, and you a lot of time answering them.
And be sure to check out my desktop image directory. There are some pretty freggin cool screenshots of my KDE 3.4 beta2 desktop. XFree86 is dead, long live X.org!
Open Source and RPG’s
Linux Journal has an article discussing independent publishing and the role that Linux and open source applications can play in making it cost effective for independent authors. It discusses the publication of an independent RPG by Clinton Nixon titled “The Shadow of Yesterday.” The game seems to be fairly solid, but not necessarily widely popular. Nixon published the game both on line and in book format. “The Shadow of Yesterday” had a print run of only 150 books, but Nixon was able to recoup all this publishing costs within five weeks of publication.
Much of print publication cost was saved in the actual printing (Nixon works for a printing company) but a surprising about of the cost was saved in the use of web technologies, Linux, and open source publishing applications that allowed him to manage (CVS), word process (OpenOffice.org), format the print layout (Scribus), and create/manage/edit graphics (The Gimp.) Combine these tools with current print-on-demand solutions and you have a powerful combination.
This is amazing news that has the potential to opens up a wide area of innovation in the print publication world. Think about the opportunity that is available to independent authors if the financial limitations of print publishing are in the $1000-2000 range.
When I was ten I created a RPG that my brother and our friends would play. Thats the kind of price range that make me think about publishing some of my old work, and working on some new ideas.
Who Told Me This?
The most interesting piece of news I have read concerning the Valerie Plame case concerns the protected status of media sources. Evidently there is none! What is more interesting, according the historical Court rulings, there has never been such protection. Newspapers, TV news, and print media organizations have argued for years that they can protect their sources via the First Amendments “free speech” clause. However, this has simply been a matter of wishful thinking. The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to ever rule in favor of the protected status of media sources.
This is totally counter to what I was taught in school. I had always believed that media sources could not be forcible taken from reporters except in the event of national security.