According to Blackfilm.com, the new A-Team film will feature The Game playing B.A. Baracus. I actually feel kind of sorry for The Game. Maybe he is a good actor. Maybe he will even get the attitude down and have the perfect mohawk and over-the-top jewelry. Maybe he will drive the van like he was made for the job. But the bottom line is I PITTY THE FOO WHO THINKS HE CAN PLAY B.A. BETTER THAN MR. T!

Sorry I had to say it. The full story is here.

I just installed KDE 4.3 RC 1, and it is fantastic. This will undoubtedly be the best KDE release to date and will answer a lot of the complaints about missing features and stability that people have raised.

The drop shadow glitches from 4.2 are gone from Kwin, but it seems as though they fixed it by regressing back to their earlier unmodifiable shadows. Nevertheless, I can live with that for now, and that is not the topic of this blog post.

The issue that I have on my mind is the problem with certain plasmoids in KDE that seem to take Plasma to its knees. What is supposed to happen when you drop a bad plasmoid onto the desktop or your panel is that a big red box with an “X” appears informing you that the plasmoid does not work.

Unfortunately, what sometimes happens is plasma crashes completely. Usually it restarts itself, and everything is fine. Still, it is shocking for a user who is not familiar with KDE or, even worse, new to Linux, to have their entire desktop disappear — even if momentarily. I am not a programmer, so I cannot offer any concrete solutions.

What I believe needs to done, however, is to isolate plasmoids so that the plasmoid itself crashes rather than the entire plasma desktop. I would much rather have a widget literally disappear and even uninstall itself with prejudice, than to have my desktop go black.

Many KDE 3 users depended on Krun, a simple yet effective application used to execute commands. Executed simply by pressing “Alt-F2″, it was much easier to start applications using it, rather than navigating through a launch menu or opening a terminal window. The only catch with Krun was that you had to know the exact name of the command you intended to launch. With the advent of KDE 4, that has all changed.

Krunner operates independently of the Plasma desktop system as a standalone application. It includes a ton of features that make it useful beyond simple command launching. It has retained many of the features present in KDE 3 and greatly expanded them. We would fail to do it justice if we did not give it a top ten list.

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Four weeks after Ruper Murdoch tried to kill our fun by announcing that many of the newspapers you (not I) read will soon charge for access to certain online content, his new attack dog (a.k.a. chief digital officer), Jonathan Miller, claims that Hulu will start charging for content as well.

Forget the fact that Miller’s company is only a partial owner of Hulu, along with NBC and Disney, but let us just stop and think for a moment. What was it that attracted people to Hulu in the first place? I will give you a few minutes to think about it.

Give up? It is free! And I use the term loosely since their content still contains advertisements. For those people who had not already ignored Hulu and reconnected their BitTorrent clients, Miller might as well be Hulu’s messenger of death. No silly, people will not pay for your content when they can get it elsewhere for free.

I am beginning to wonder if News Corp and the cable companies are not all in league together in a final desperate attempt to ruin our lives. Nice try. Instead of trying to exploit people to make themselves rich, they should try working for a living like normal human beings. Then again, we all know they are aliens. They told us on national TV.

Dual monitor setup in Linux has never been easier. While methods such as the xinerama extension sometimes drive people insane, using RandR (Resize and Rotate) is quick and painless. This will allow you to use both monitors as one big screen instead of two identical ones (cloning). Follow these simple steps to get started.

Note: This HOWTO assumes that you are using the opensource drivers for your video card (ATI or Intel). Nvidia and AMD proprietary drivers come with their dual screen components.

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The KOffice team is extremely pleased to finally announce version 2.0.0 of KOffice. This release marks the end of more than 3 years of work to port KOffice to Qt 4 and the KDE 4 libraries and, in some cases, totally rewrite the engine of the KOffice applications.

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I have been hearing more Muslims everyday talking about “reforming” Islam.  I have read article after article (that means two articles), claiming that Islam is in the beginning, middle, or end of a reformation.  Really?  Reza Aslan, author of No god but God reportedly said this:

I believe we are living in the time of the Islamic reformation. In fact, I think we are living in the twilight of that reformation.

For me, the word reform is defined by its inevitability. This process cannot be stopped; it can be slowed down for a time but reform is inevitable. It’s an historic reformation taking place within Islam — it’s adapting itself to the realities of the world around it.

I think we’ll see the same process we saw in the Christian reformation from doctrinal absolutism to doctrinal relativism; toward a truly indigenous Islamic enlightenment.

And it’s up to us as Muslims in the US to give voice to that for our brothers and sisters who don’t have the voice or the same ability to speak out as we do.

Reza, I love you as my brother in Islam, but I think you missed the mark.  I want to write a refutation right here and now, but I think this will need some time, research, and consideration.  Look for an article in the coming weeks.

Nevertheless, I will leave this for everyone, especially Muslims, to ponder:

reform (\ri-ˈform)
transitive verb
1 a: to put or change into an improved form or conditionb: to amend or improve by change of form or removal of faults or abuses

2: to put an end to (an evil) by enforcing or introducing a better method or course of action

From Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary

I am no linguist but “reform” seems to refer to “fixing” something that is fundamentally flawed.  And “doctrinal absolutism” is something that is alien to Islam, aside from the most extreme fringes. More on this later.

One of the weird things I have noticed about myself is that when I maximize my web browser, I feel trapped.  Now that I have two monitors, I have been trying to adjust myself to the reality that I can have a maximized browser and still have an entire open desktop space.  Baby steps…

I can remember turning on my computer, dialing into IndyNet, and opening the World Wide Web inside of a terminal window.  My first web experience was through a text browser.  At $10 a month, that was all I could afford.  Eventually, I learned to hack it and give myself access to the graphical side of the web and my first experience with Netscape Navigator.

Back then, web sites usually consisted of long single pages with mostly text, a few static images scattered about, some horizontal rules, and maybe an animated GIF, if you were lucky.  For those of you too young to remember, I am not reminiscing about the 70s or even the 80s.  It was not until the 90s when the World Wide Web burst onto the scene, drawing people away from their television sets for the first time in a way that nothing else before it could.

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You would be hard-pressed to go anywhere or even watch television without hearing some reference to “Twitter”, “tweets”, or “tweeting”.  From your cousin in Iowa to Shaquille O’Neal, all types of people from all walks of life have taking a liking to Twitter.

Whether or not Twitter will become a technological standard as email or just a passing fad, remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that if you want to use Twitter while it is hot, you will probably want some type of client so that you do not always have to open your web browser and go to Twitter.com.

For KDE there are a few options, but there is one that I have found to be superior to them all.  Keep reading, or if Twitter has convinced you that you can only process 140 characters of information at one time, scroll to the end of this article.

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