Archives for September, 2005
Windows Vista Aero Interface
As much as I hate to give Microsoft credit for anything, after seeing some video interviews on Channel9 with the folks at MS, I believe they are making huge progress with the Vista user interface. Granted you’ll likely need some beefy hardware to take full advantage, I’m thinking that many people will rethink their systems once they see this interface. I sure hope the people at Gnome and KDE will do their best to compete.
Ubuntu and Firefox again
When doing a regular system update, I got a notice that mozilla-firefox couldn’t be updated. I believe this was since my last dealings with it. The error suggested I do a apt-get dist-upgrade or a Smart-Upgrade in Synaptic. When I took the apt-get approach, apt planned on removing mozilla-firefox-gnome-support, installing firefox, and upgrading mozilla-firefox. I found that the backports repositories were not resolving, which I believe means the servers/mirrors are down. To fix, I just replaced the current backports repository:
deb http://ubuntu-backports.mirrormax.net/ hoary-backports main universe multiv
erse restricted
with:
deb http://acm.cs.umn.edu/ubp/ hoary-backports main universe multiverse restricted
in the /etc/apt/sources.list file.
Once I made those changes to the sources.list, and after an apt-get update, I was able to rerun apt-get dist-upgrade and everything went through and the problem is fixed.
Plesk 7 with External Mail Server
To use an external mail server in conjunction with Plesk 7 (I’m using 7.0.3), you need to setup a new A record for that mail name. You do this in the DNS record for the specific domain. The record will point mail.yourdomain.com. to your external mail server’s IP address, then remove the previous A record for mail.yourdomain.com. This means all mail going through mail.yourdomain.com will now be sent to that new IP Address, which should already be setup to listen for mail. Next, go into the Mail section of that domain and and make sure you Disable mail. Normally, this would be the last step, but there is a bug in this and previous versions of Plesk for Linux/UNIX. All will seem to be working with the exception of any mail() functions you may be using in your code. These will all try to send mail locally despite you having turned off mail for that domain. To fix this, remove the domain from these two files:
/var/qmail/control/rcpthosts
/var/qmail/control/virtualdomains
Then restart the qmail service. All mail, even local scripts, will now send mail to the external mail server.
HDTV equipment arrived
I purchased a Samsung SIR-T451 last week and it arrived today. Sadly, it’ll take some work to get the SR15 antenna I bought from AntennasDirect mounted and connected, so no HD for me tonight. I’m actually very busy with Core Web Technology stuff, so it may be a week or so before I can even consider getting on my roof (and holding on for dear life) to mount my antenna.
OpenDocument Part 2
I may be reading way too much into this, but it seems that this statement by Microsoft
Microsoft offers open and royalty-free documentation and licenses for the Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemascould be the next steps towards all Office Suites using a standard XML format… or at the very least the Non-M$ suites now have a chance to easily program something compatible with each release of M$ Office. That is the Optimist talking! The Pessimist in me tells me that Microsoft is telling us about their new standard here until they release next year’s new standard. You can draw your own conclusions… here is the link.
Read OpenDocument Part 1 here.
Ubuntu and Firefox upgrade
Today, I received a notification that there was an upgrade for Firefox that would advance me from 1.0.6 to 1.0.7 (Ubuntu release). I went ahead with the upgrade, but was thrown an unexpected error.
E: /var/cache/apt/archives/mozilla-firefox1.0.7-0ubuntu0.1i386.deb: trying to overwrite `/var/lib/mozilla-firefox/extensions.d/00classic’, which is also in package firefox
This was unexpected because I’ve never had an issue with an upgrade in Ubuntu. I looked through a couple forums and ran across some different approaches to solving this problem. Of course I took the one that looked easiest. I opened Synaptic, searched for ‘firefox’ and removed both instances (firefox v1.0.6 and mozilla-firefox v1.0.6). After that, I reinstalled mozilla-firefox v1.0.7 and everything worked fine. My settings were also intact, so no worries.
Hurricane Rita
Fortunately, Hurricane Rita missed Katy, TX. My wife and kids were prepared for the worst thinking our house would be in ruins after Rita came through, but we were relieved after watching the news for the 12 straight hour to hear that Rita took a more eastern path. Relief
OpenDocument
I don’t think many people realize the importance of this initiative. OpenDocument is basically a push for all productivity software suites to use a standardized format, essentially making the GUI the distinguishing factor. Besides the fact that the whole world would get better products from this, it would also force overdue competition for Microsoft. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why someone would rather pay $600+ for MS Office, when they can get a comparable package for free in OpenOffice. The only thing I can think of is that people resist change. This is where stressing the importance of OpenDocument comes in. If everyone agrees that we should be using a standard format, then acted on it, Microsoft would have to redevelop their next version of office to be compatible or continue to lose market share. I will give MS credit in that they have a nicely polished suite of apps in their Office package, but it is not worth the money they charge for it. I don’t think everything should be free, but if MS Office cost $100 or $150, then I might consider using it again, but that type of price cut would require them to adopt the OpenDocument standard to reduce the effort necessary for each new version. Until then, I’ll stick with my OpenOffice.
For more information regarding OpenDocument, check out the article at WikiPedia.
Switching to Linux Full-time
Although I spend at least 90% of my time in Linux, there are a few things that keep me going back to Windows to accomplish. Whether or not these tools are just not sufficient in Linux or that I’m just accustomed to doing these tasks in Windows, I still can’t seem to shake it. The things I’ve encountered that keep me using Windows are:
- Photoshop - I know Gimp 2.0 has brought the Linux world closer to Photoshop (I’ll never understand why Adobe will rewrite for Mac OSX, but not for Linux.), but after 5 years of using Photoshop for web graphics, I find PS easier to use.
- DVD projects - whether burning, duplicating, or editing home videos, I haven’t found many robust tools for doing this in Linux. I’ve heard that Pixar and the like use Linux for their projects, but they must be using their own homegrown products, because Kino is the only thing I’ve seen that comes close to something for the masses. Even something as simple as watching a DVD seems easier in Windows. DVD-ROMs have been around for a while and my 1GHz celeron processor has issues with playing back DVDs. The video is always choppy.
- Office 2003 - I wish that someone would halt the Microsoft redevelopment of Office. Can’t they focus on fixing bugs and creating enhancements rather than rebuilding the damn suite every three years? OpenOffice is a fantastic alternative for MS Office, but I have found a few clients that send me heavily formatted documents created in Office 2003, which don’t fair very well when opened by OpenOffice. Currently OpenOffice supports up to Office XP.
If I can manage to get past these few things, then I think I’m ready for the complete independence from Microsoft. I really have nothing against Microsoft, but I think they should charge less for the bugs they provide us.