Trey’s Blog

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

The first line updates your repositories to the new ones, then we run apt-get update to update the repository cache. After that the dist-upgrade handles the rest. I think the only time I really needed to intervene was when the Flash-plugin for Firefox asked me if it was okay to download itself from the Internet. I knew it was almost done when my desktop background switched to a new one.

The first thing I noticed after the upgrade was the new look and feel. This may be a Gnome thing or perhaps just the default theme the Ubuntu Team chose, but it is very Web 2.0. For anyone wondering what that means, it is just a simple way of describing this new trend in making things look on the web. If I find any cool features in Edgy Eft, I’ll post them.

Upgrade if you haven’t!

10/29/2006 | Linux | No Comments

Heroes on TV

After 5 weeks of pure goodness, my new favorite show is probably Heroes. The whole premise is just plain entertaining. It reminds me of what X-Men would be like if it were more realistic. Not everyone on the team needs to look like they just stepped out of GQ or Muscle & Fitness Magazines. It has real people discovering superhuman abilities, but also having to learn how to use them. This is very much like Spiderman in that aspect, but his abilities came overnight and via radio-active spider. Anyway, this is a great show and you should check it out on Monday nights. However, I would recommend catching the episodes in order so the story doesn’t escape you. There is a lot of character building throughout the first four episodes before the story really advances. My only fear with this show is that they drag it out way too long. Lost, my previous favorite, is starting to reach this point. Networks need good writers to write short-term masterpieces (3 seasons maximum), then shift those off to syndication to bring in residuals. This would be shows similar to Mini-Series, but with a minimum of one season and a maximum of 3 seasons. Other shows I’m digging this season:

• Prison Break - First season was put off for too long, which made way for good writing I guess. Now in the second season, the story continues to unfold and we get to see how deep the conspiracy flows.
• Studio 60 On Sunset Strip - Matthew Perry is finally showing us that he has great ensemble timing
• Nip/Tuck - (this maybe an exception since the storyline is ever changing) - This also pushes the limits of morality and the FCC everytime we watch it.
• Jericho - In its first season, this has great potential for a second season, but I don’t see it pushing much further than that. This is where I think the networks should design these to fill the larger than mini-series segment. Something sensational like a nuclear weapon going off nearby will lose its sensation after a couple of seasons.
• Lost (this is the 3rd season and it appears to be nowhere near a wrap up) - I’d hate to lose interest in what appears to be a great show.
• The O.C. (this maybe the last season - 4th is pushing my limit) - You can only watch the turmoils of the rich and pop-culture references for so long before it gets tiresome.

10/24/2006 | Entertainment | 3 Comments

A Dad’s Review: The Cheetah Girls Concert

I bought two tickets for my eldest daughter’s birthday this year. She really enjoys listening to The Cheetah Girls and Hanna Montana, and fortunately for me, the concert featured both. It also featured an up-and-coming band named Everlife, which I had heard before without realizing it. Overall the concert was pretty good. Despite the generation gap of the performers and myself, the music was enjoyable. The sound engineers, however, must have had no training as the sound was horrendous. It was just enough over the comfortable limit that I started to feel guilty for subjecting my daughter to this. Maybe this is just a sign of my age, but I think the concert could have been better with someone monitoring the sound output from the stands. Everlife played about 5 songs over about 20 minutes. Miley Cyrus as Hanna Montana played 6 or 7 songs over 40 minutes. Despite the obvious presence of the background vocal track, like that used by Ashlee Simpson on SNL a couple of years ago, it was apparent that Miley was belting out her tracks. The Cheetah Girls finished the show playing for about an hour. Their performance contained a lot of choreography and simple storyline, but demonstrated talent easily obtained by years of practice and Disney promoting. Most of the songs from each performer were recognizable to anyone who has been in the room while the Disney Channel is on the tube. In fact, between performances, the side screens were utilized to promote other musicians seen on The Disney Channel. This was more proof that the Mouse will use every opportunity to promote anything. My daughter and I enjoyed the concert even after the awesomely overpriced seating options.

Ratings:

• Everlife: 3 out of 5
• Hanna Montana: 4 out of 5
• The Cheetah Girls: 4 out of 5

10/10/2006 | Entertainment | No Comments

SuSE Desktop Installed

After hours of backing up data to DVD, I finally had the opportunity to install SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on my 64-bit machine. This install went very easy. I spent the most time dealing with the partitions because I haven’t had to deal with that in a while thanks to Ubuntu. The problem wasn’t that it was all that difficult, but that it detected a Windows install on the hard drive and wanted to work around it by default. I just went, in removed the Windows partition and realigned the other partitions. Once that was under way, I confirmed the default packages, set my time zone and left it alone for 30 minutes. At this point, I needed to confirm or modify the Hardware that was detected. It did a great job of finding everything, but it used a default driver for my ATI Radeon 7500 video card. This doesn’t affect regular use, but the default driver is not capable of 3D rendering. Essentially, Novell takes much pride in their support and the fact that they have an awesome desktop solution with this product, and they want you to subscribe to their support. I believe it is usually around $50 per year, which is not bad considering you may actually need it at some point. Upon registration of this support, the system is setup to retrieve the necessary drivers for your video card, whether it be ATI, nVidia, or Intel and your desktop with XGL is only minutes away. If you haven’t seen what this can do, you should really check it out. This is a fantastic alternative to Vista, which is still not yet released, but doesn’t have the steep hardware requirements.

Things to note about the SuSE Desktop install:

• The default install has just about everything the average user would want as far as software
• Mono, the .NET framework for linux, comes installed and already configured
• .NET apps such as Beagle, Banshee, and F-Spot are installed and ready to go.
• Firefox flash plug-ins are already installed. (this can be a bit of a hassle* with other distros)
• The ’start’/computer menu is very user friendly and a little Vista-ish.
• Desktop search via Beagle is very very impressive

*hassle: this is usually a hassle with other distributions because Firefox has a way of telling you you need the plugin, it greets you with a way to do it quickly through their interface, but with linux, this never seems to work. I’ve always had to go to adobe.com, get the installer scripts and run them manually. Granted this only take a couple of minutes, but I’m really bothered by the failed attempt on the Firefox end.

My next task is to attempt some DVD+DL burning, which always seem to fail in Windows on this particular box. I’ll also test Banshee with my iPod, although I’ve heard that it will not play non-DRM media. I find this very hard to believe, but time will tell.

10/02/2006 | Linux | No Comments

Current Computer Lineup

About every six months or so I like to post my current computer lineup which is very basic information about the computers and most importantly, what operating systems I’m running on each.

Mac Mini Core Duo (2GB RAM) - Mac OS X 10.4

AMD64 3500+ (1GB RAM) - Windows XP –> soon to be SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10

HP 1.4GHz (1GB RAM) - Ubuntu Linux (Dapper)

Sony VAIO Notebook (256MB RAM) - Ubuntu Linux (Dapper)

AMD 2600+ (1GB RAM) - Windows XP

This is not looking good for Microsoft. The only remaining machine with Windows on it is the one my daughters use for gaming. However, I did purchase Cedega last year, but never got past the install stage. Cedega should allow me to run all/most of their Windows games under Linux. I may try that in a couple of months. They’ll be due for a reformat of Windows by then anyway.

10/01/2006 | Hardware, Linux, Mac, Windows | No Comments

Failed Attempt at installing SuSE Linux on my VAIO notebook

When my new hard drive arrived, I had just attended the SuSE Linux Enterprise Roadshow and thought the latest release of SuSE looked amazing.  I decided to give installing SuSE a try and to my surprise, I got caught up on something simple.  I made it all the way through the install to the point of video configuration and SuSE couldn’t identify the LCD model being used by my Sony PCG-R505DL.  I tried the basic LCD and Sony, but no joy with either.  Why SuSE can’t choose a basic driver to use when Ubuntu has no issue with this, is beyond me.  Anyway, I gave up after an hour of trial and error with different configuration tests.

In the next few months, I’ll be trying this distro out on what is my Windows XP box being decommissioned.  I think the hardware on that machine should be easy to identify and should perform very very well with SLED (SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop).

09/29/2006 | Hardware, Linux | No Comments

Apple Rumormill (Chicken or the Egg)

Anyone who spends anytime surfing the Net is bound to run across an article with speculation around what Apple will release next, but at some point I think the rumors and fakery images tend to skew our expectations leaving us disappointed when we don’t get what we’ve wanted. A perfect example of this is the rumor surrounding a new widescreen iPod. We’ve been through two different product releases and still no widescreen iPod. Does this mean it won’t ever happen? Not necessarily, but what I really want to know is did Apple ever plan on producing a widescreen version of the world’s favorite digital media player, or will they just produce one now to make the people happy? (Chicken or the Egg) At what point do you listen to the people and give them what they want because they’ve asked repeatedly? On the other hand, I think Apple has done a good job so far giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted. I was listening to MacCast, a Mac-centric podcast, and he mentioned that he tries to not put too much stock in the rumors to prevent from setting expectations higher than Apple product development can achieve. Are we, as a geek society, so hooked on these gadgets that we really get upset when a company doesn’t release what we think would be the next big thing?

On the flipside, I’d like to say that while I enjoy a good bit of progress in the world of computing, I find it unsettling that Apple releases new versions of their computers at least once per year. If anyone ever tries to get the best available at any given time, their purchase will only be the best available for another 9 months MAX. I’ve run into this with my Mac Mini where I bought the best available at the time and upgraded my RAM to the maximum allowed (2GB) and now, not even 6 months later, a newer faster processor is now available. Apple has also done this with the new set of iPods, but this time they’ve actually done a major disservice to their customers. They’ve released the new more featureful models at a lower price than the previously better models. In other words, those who bought the best 2 months ago have just had their model depreciate by $100 overnight. Is this the price we pay for style? Don’t get me wrong, I have an iPod and I think it is a great little device, but when I bought mine, I went with the last year’s model at the time just so I wouldn’t feel so bad when the newer new models came out.

I’m not sure where I was going with this post, so it may have been just a brain dump. Getting these thoughts out of my head should make room for more important things.

09/18/2006 | Gadgets, Hardware, Mac | 2 Comments

Enter Tivo.

I feel like I’m the last one on the bandwagon of Tivo or DVRs in general. Everyone I talk to in my everyday life, assuming they even watch TV, has a DVR of some kind. With all of the gadgets that I have, they always assumed I would have one as well. Anyway, the time has come and my wife mentioned how her work schedule wasn’t going to allow her to watch her favorite shows this season. I saw this as a good opportunity to surprise her with a Tivo.

I went ahead and went for the best deal possible which was $30 for a dual tuner Series2 Tivo with prepaid subscription. No rebates were necessary so the deal was immediate. It was quite a hit to take all at once, but it will be hassle free for the next three years and by then TVs might come with built-in DVRs… or not.

On the coolness side, which is what you all are looking for, I was able to use my hardly utilized wireless USB adapter from my OmniFi unit (the D-Link DWL-120R) to connect my Tivo to the Internet and it worked like a charm. In fact, within about 10 minutes, I had my entire iTunes Library and iPhoto Library shared across my house to the Tivo. Very nice.

For those who are wondering why I’ve waited so long to purchase a DVR, I’m still in the mindset that when I miss a show, it is very likely that that same evening or the next day, I’ll be able to download it via BitTorrent in better quality than my basic cable can provide. When I watch my shows ontime, I’m enjoying them on my HDTV with Over-The-Air antenna which has no DVR options at the moment. My wife on the otherhand, was the major deciding factor, because I always knew I could get by with my current methods, but she wanted something easier… something she could control. Enter Tivo.

09/15/2006 | Entertainment, Gadgets, Hardware, Mac | No Comments

Rant: Public School System in Texas

I’m fully aware of the ‘No kid left behind’ campaign by the Bush Administration, but I do not like that fact that this implies that ‘no kid will get ahead.’ I’ve heard from many sources, mostly from school teachers and administrators, that around the second grade, most kids learning levels/skills will level off. Perhaps what they mean is that the children who are behind should be caught up by then, by what this also means is that the children who are excelling will be unchallenged until the rest of the herd catches up. Is this all they have to offer our kids who excel? I know many parents, like myself, may suffer from pride in our children, but it wasn’t until I heard the goals to be reached by the end of Kindergarten that I got worried. They mentioned children should know certain basic site words, be able to count to 100, and other such tasks. My daughter can do these things already, so this tells me that for the next 9 months, she’ll be relearning her ABCs, coloring pictures, and learning to count. She is not the only one in her class who is showing these signs of boredom. My wife and I know of at least one other student who is already capable of completing the tasks set as the goal for the year. Since she is in Kindergarten, my daughter must wait until Spring to be tested for the gifted and talented program, whatever it is called now, but that is not necessarily what I’m looking for in educating her. I’d presonally like to not label her while challenging her.

My daughter’s birthday falls only four days after the enrollment cutoff date of September 2. Because of this, she had to wait a year to be enrolled in Kindergarten. We felt she was more than ready and the Principal of the school would not allow us to enroll her earlier than her birthdate would allow. Here we are a year later and she is showing signs of first grade readiness. While other kids are learning how to write their names, she is reading and writing stories. This puts me in a position I didn’t want to be in because I’m not in favor of having children skip grades unless it is absolutely necessary. I simply wanted her to start Kindergarten when she was ready one year ago.  When I was young the cutoff date actually came closer to the start of school date, so it made a little moer sense, but I would also venture to guess that kids who showed signs of readiness were not told to wait their turn. Challenge our kids!

I’d love hear feedback on this. If I’m wrong, please provide me the proof so I can learn to be right.

09/12/2006 | General, Rants | 1 Comment

CD Encoding on Mac OS X

I know most people prefer the use of application for all of their needs, but I’m the type of person who thinks that sometimes better results can come out of using specialized software. This is not always the case, but for my situation is works out better for me. I have my CDs backed up on my Linux box which can be seen from any device on my network including my Mac. I’m also very keen on keeping my naming convention the same for new directories and files. iTunes may be able to do all of this, but for me, I like the idea of trusting a separate application to give me exactly what I want. I found Max, and it appears to be one of the better encoders available at no cost. It can encode to FLAC, OGG, and MP3. I still prefer MP3 because of device compatibiliy. It also has the ability to connect to amazon.com and retrieve album art to be embedded in the meta data for each song. This helps if and when I add the album to my iTunes Library.

How I do things against the norm: Rather than using iTunes to encode my CDs straight into the iTunes Library, storing them locally on my Mac, I’m using Max to encode them locally. I then double check the files for quality before moving them to the music share. My wife would love nothing more than to be listening to some music downstairs and have the song full of JITTS and SCWARBLES. Once the album is moved into the appropriate genre folder, I manually add it to the iTunes Library. I don’t use the automatic feature, because I’d like to have the say of if and when something gets put into the Library. Ultimately, my music storage is easy, clean, and logical as is my iTunes.

08/31/2006 | Free Software, Mac | No Comments

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