Trey’s Blog

If you are running version 1.0.7 or 1.5 beta of Mozilla Firefox with the AdBlock extension (v0.5+), odds are you are not getting the Flash you deserve. Apparently, the new flash plugin (v8) perceives the Obj-Tabs of AdBlock as security threats and doesn’t allow the display of any presentations while those are present. The fix is quite easy, but you will lose a small fraction of AdBlocks usefulness. To fix, open Firefox, click on Tools–>AdBlock–>Preferences–>AdBlock Options and deselect Obj-Tabs. After this, you should be able to refresh the page and see all of the glorious Flash. Here are some before and after shots of the fix (macromedia.com).

Before

After

If you have an HDTV Tuner Card in your PC, you might be wondering how you can backup this content to DVD. HDBeat has posted about this very topic, and they couldn’t make it look more easy.

Side note: When I had my ATI HDTV Wonder I was asking myself this very question. How in the world can I make use of the .ts file that was holding my recorded HDTV shows?

I just ran across this site (open source versus) and though they did an awesome job of comparing Open Source software with the closed-sourced alternative. They’ve compared Outlook Express with Mozilla’s Thunderbird, Windows with SuSE and Ubuntu. Check them out here.

I just read this on Newsforge and thought it was cool. An OpenDocument Fellowship. Very nice.

Read the article.

Read more about OpenDocument and OpenOffice here.

See the OpenDocument Fellowship Homepage.

When I read this article, I wanted to leap into the air cheering. I think this is big news on a topic I’ve been supporting since I first heard of it. Essentially, Google sees the potential of OpenOffice in the productivity suite war against Microsoft, and decided to bring in some help for the OOo Team. Read the article.

See my previous entries about OpenOffice and OpenDocument:

OpenOffice version 2 OpenDocument (Part 1) OpenDocument Part 2

Since I started working with Linux 5 years ago, I ran into the issue of figuring out what tools to use for what in Linux. I knew what to use in Windows, but those programs usually aren’t available in Linux. For anyone who is in the search for the ’somewhat’ equivalents to those Windows-based applications in Linux, here is a list:

Windows	Linux	Job
Dreamweaver	Nvu	WYSIWYG Website Editor
Homesite	Bluefish	Code-based Website Editor
Photoshop	Gimp	2D Graphics/Photo Manipulation
MS Word	OOo Word Processor	Word Processing
MS Excel	OOo Spreadsheet	Spreadsheet
MS PowerPoint	OOo Presentation	Slide Presentation
MS Visio	OOo Drawing	Diagram drawing
MS Access	OOo Base	Entry Level Database
MS Project	Project Planner	Project Management
MS Money	GnuCash	Money Manager
MS Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ, etc	Gaim	Instant Messenger
WinZip	File Roller	Archive Manager
Partition Magic	gParted	Partition Manager

There are tons more, but this list looks like a good start. Some things that both have in common are the Azureus BitTorrent Client, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird to name a few.

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.

See the Video Here.

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 Schemas

could 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.

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.

OpenOffice.org

Apparently Microsoft has decided to call the Longhorn final product Windows Vista. See article here. I’m not sure where they pulled this from, but it smells of feces. I don’t think this name will do any better than Windows Me, and definitely won’t give this new Operating System any justice.

I also read an article two years ago about how Microsoft would be dropping Windows from the name of their next OS to eliminate any legal battles that had concerning monopolistic practices. Basically, all of the litigation surrounding the monopoly has Windows specifically mentioned, and if they no longer had the Windows product, the issue would go away. This new name announcement just tells me that they don’t care about the legal battles.

Now I need to figure out if I am going to pronounce it like an American would or with a Spanish accent.

BTW, Ubuntu is still running strong and only gets rebooted when my whole neighborhood blacks out, but there is not much I can do about that.

SlimServer is a nicely developed (Perl) piece of software that was designed for use with their own device called the SqueezeBox. I don’t own a SqueezeBox, but you can get some good use out of this server. If you want to get full functionality, it is recommended you download their ‘emulator’ called SoftSqueeze, which I’m guessing is the very source code that is use on their device.

Another option is to only use this as your streaming server and connect to it via WinAMP or iTunes. This application is very similar to ShoutCast. I haven’t configured a ShoutCast server in about 3 years, but I’m sure it is as easy as this server was to configure. For those who never have configured ShoutCast, you basically setup your playlist and hit Play, using your nicely designed Web Interface. After that you server is broadcasting your playlist to the port specified to the entire network for anyone to connect to. This is fundamental Internet Radio, and you have just setup your own radio station. To listen to your music, point your music software of choice (XMMS, WinAMP, iTunes, etc) to http://[computername]:9000/stream.mp3 and shazaam, tunes!

This server does seem to handle most types of music files and converts them to mp3 on the fly using perl libraries.

For More Information: http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_features.html

Nero Ultra Edition comes with a nice collection of software that many times I have no idea what they do because I just never open them if I install them at all. I just stumbled across this package while perusing the media-servers.com forums. Nero MediaHome is an UPnP Media Server capable for serving Music, Photos, and Videos over the network. I have it configured, but not being home right now, I cannot test its capabilities just yet. My OmniFi DMS1 was detected immediately and should be able to browse the directory I shared through MediaHome. This software is similar to MS Media Connect, and neither of them have the full-featuredness of SimpleCenter, the software that comes with the OmniFi unit. SimpleCenter is more of a media manager, but if you don’t need those capabilities, and I do not, then MediaHome and Media Connect should do just fine.

Shared Directories

Status