I happened to like QtCurve (style and window decorator) anyway, so I compiled the latest version and installed it.  As soon as I started using the window decorator, replacing the default Oxygen one, poof, instant speed.  The response time is excellent with absolutely no hiccups at all.  Is QtCurve just that much faster than Oxygen, or did building it from source specifically for this hardware make enough of a difference to increase the speed?

Either way, it is smooth sailing from here on out.

SublimeVideo does just that.  It feels like you are watching an HD video from a Blu Ray drive on your computer.  If you have an HDMI out on your laptop, you could display it on your TV, and it would be picture-perfect.  Flash never functions exactly like native video, and it hogs CPU and RAM.  Anyone with dual monitors like me knows that playing Flash in fullscreen is a pain as well.

HTML5 video requires no additional browser plugin, and the webmaster has the freedom to customize the interface and fullscreen support (which is built in to browsers anyway).

To view the video, you will need the latest release of Safari (v4.0.4+), Google Chrome (v4.0+), or Firefox (v3.6+).  It also works with Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame installed.

From the perspective of historical preservation, appreciation of literature, and a general love of books, I would certainly miss holding a book in my hand — the smell and texture of the pages, the feeling of turning each one with my fingers, and the weight of the object in my hand.

Nevertheless, I recognize that a change must come.  Printing anything on paper is destroying our environment, the only earth we have. Something must replace the traditional book, but the real question here is whether e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle or over-glorified e-book readers like the new iPad are the answer to this dilemma.  I think not.

There are two main problems with this theory.  The first is cost.  While there may be future devices that are inexpensive and easily distributable, these devices are not.  As much as Apple fanboys would have you believe that everyone and their mama is going out to buy an iPad, that simply is not the case.  If people have to pay more or even as much for a reading device as they do for mobile service or cable television, people will simply stop reading.

The second problem is format.  Digital media is currently laced with poison (i.e. DRM).  It is a hassle that you cannot share your e-books with others as easily as you would shared a print book.  It is ridiculous that libraries cannot do this, and until they can, e-books will always be second-rate.  The format problem is also reflected in the devices themselves.  No matter how thin they get, they are not going to replace the look and feel of a real book.

I believe the real solution is something like I saw on Caprica: a page that looks and feels like paper but is electronic.  We have the ability to synthesize almost anything these days.  I am lactose intolerant but can eat soy cheese and hardly notice the difference.  Paper can be synthesized and so can book covers that are stronger and more resilient than the current offerings.  Imagine hold a book that looks and feels just like a real book, but you can press a button when you are finished reading and turn it into the book’s sequel.

I am not writing this because of nostalgia or my love of books but just based on my observation of library patrons and people in general.  I believe that until we reach the point where the benefits of e-books outweigh the inconveniences and high cost, print books are safe.

Miniaturize Your Photos With TiltShift Generator

How to Install QtCurve in KDE

How to Install OpenOffice.org 3.2 in Ubuntu 9.10

How to Install And Setup Ubuntu One In Kubuntu

XMind: A Cross-platform Mind-mapping Solution

How to Run Fullscreen Games In Linux With Dual Monitors

I am also writing for a new website, ServerSchool.com. Make sure you check it out too.

The solution is to remove sun-java6 and its associated components and reinstall (You can also downgrade in Synaptic by using "force version" and selecting the Karmic version).

When will computer manufacturers finally get it right? For a serious computer user, four or even six USB ports is just not enough. In this day and age, I should not have to attach a HUB just so I can have all of my devices connected at once. Everyone is different, but let me give you an example of everything I need plugged in at once:

1. keyboard

2. mouse

3. graphics tablet

4. external hard drive

5. printer

6. game controller 1

7. game controller 2

Then, I need at least one free port for card readers and/or flash drives that I might attach. Is that really too much to ask? 8 to 10 ports on every desktop PC should be standard. A laptop should at least have four (I’m looking at you, Apple, with a disappointed expression on my face). It’s time to get it right. My computer should have more ports than an island nation, more ports than a submarine, more ports than…you get the idea. Four in the front and six in the back. That’s all I need.

As a writer, I have long wished for tabbed word processing (outside of Google Docs), and now that will be possible with this KWin feature.

Some hardware vendors, such as Dell, now sell Linux desktop computers, although you have to page through their online catalog to find it, and their promotion of it seems spotty at best. The netbook craze has also seen the rise of several Linux offerings, but even the company that arguably started the netbook craze with its Eee PCs, Asus, still proudly displays “Better with Windows” on their website.

According to some estimates, there are now more Linux desktop computers in the world than Apple computers running Mac OS X. Most of them are in countries outside the United States, however, where some countries have issued large scale adoption for their government offices. Still, the recognition of Apple’s product line is better known, and services and software vendors are still more inclined to support Apple before they support Linux (take Netflix’s Watch Now service as an example).

Despite all of those setbacks, Linux has begun to ascend in an entirely different arena: the mobile phone market. The number of Linux-based phones has not only surpassed the “handful” mark, some of them are now becoming serious contenders. Google shifted the playing field when it released Android, an open-source Linux-based mobile operating system. Android-based phones (including their MyTouch G3) are featured prominently on mobile carrier websites (see T-Mobile’s website).

The world was rocked yet again when Palm released its long anticipated Palm Pre. Just when people had all but left Palm for dead, the Palm Pre has become highly competitive in mobile sales. Its WebOS is a revolutionary Linux-based operating system that has drawn gawking even from iPhone users.

Now, another major vendor is entering the Linux fold in a big way. Nokia, which is still the world’s leading smartphone seller, has invested years of research and financial backing into development of the open source Maemo operating system. It powered the Nokia 770, N800, and N810, all of which were not phones. The release of the N900, however, could very well solidify Linux’s position in the mobile market.

Rather than a Linux whim, like that of Asus or Dell, Nokia seems poised to make Maemo their OS of choice. Their recent acquisition of Trolltech highlights this. Trolltech was responsible for the QT graphical user interface and framework that powers KDE (a Linux desktop environment) and the Opera web browser, among other software. Nokia is in it for the long-haul, and the N900 will most likely be the first of many maemo-based mobile phones.  Furthermore, Nokia’s acquisition of Symbian, which makes the most prominent mobile operating system, has committed to releasing Symbian OS under an open source license.

Will Android, WebOS, and Maemo surpass other operating systems in the cellphone market? Will other smartphone manufactures follow? (Motorola is now shipping Linux-based phones, among others). The writing seems to be on the wall, so I am calling it. 2009 will be the year of the Linux mobile phone. There…I said it. I don’t even know what it really means, but I do know the game has changed.

Three popular services that Digikam can handle are Flickr, PicasaWeb, and Facebook. The first two are social photo sites, and the last is a social networking site. All three support photo plugins used by Digikam. This makes uploading photos quick, easy, and painless.

I am operating under the assumption that you already have accounts on the services you want to use. If not, you will need to register and activate whichever accounts you want before you proceed.

Read the rest

The Web is buzzing about Nokia’s announcement of the next in the Nokia Nxxx series, the N900.  I found it odd that Nokia had chosen to make this version a phone when the previous three versions, the 770, N800, and N810 were all “internet tablets”.  The only reason I even believed this one would be a phone is because of all of the buzzing, with numerous tech news sources reporting it as Nokia’s new phone.

After looking at the website for the device for a few minutes this morning, however, I found absolutely no mention of it being a phone.  They have pictures of its interface but never show a dialing pad.  The specs mention mobile broadband but not mobile voice.

It does run the new Linux-based version of Nokia’s Maemo operating system, which will probably not be compatible with previous versions of the tablet, since this tablet will finally introduce a 3D graphics chip with iphone-ish effects (as if that’s important).

But no, it is not a phone, unless Nokia just really wants to minimize the significance of it being a phone.  According to Nokia’s own website, it is the “Nokia N900 mobile computer”.

UPDATE (2009-08-27): The features site now mentions “phone” as one of the features.  It actually looks pretty cool.  Let’s just hope they don’t tie customers to a 2-year contract with a crappy service provider like a certain other company who shall remain a nameless red fruit.

There have been numerous reports lately about employers checking up on employees or potential employees on Facebook, MySpace, and other forms of social media.  I do not have a problem with this in principle.  I am one who has always believed that you should be real wherever you are.  If the real you is a crazy, backbiting, vendetta-seeking drunk, it is going to catch up with you.

Being denied employment because someone found out ahead of time instead of firing you later might actually do you a favor.  It might just give a person the motivation he needs to get his life together.  What bothers me more than extreme cases like that is, in most instances, the information that people provide about themselves on Facebook and other social media sites is personal information.

It is already difficult enough for people to get jobs because of personal matters that an employer might be able to see.  A pregnant woman will never know if she did not get that job because she tanked the interview or because the employer saw the bulge in her belly.  The Muslim woman never really knows if it was because of her hijab or her CV.  And of course, despite what some affirmative action opponents may think, a black man never knows if he failed to get a job because of his skill set or because of the color of his skin.

Those are the apparent issues.  Now throw in all of the other personal issues that are not apparent.  For example, maybe an employer is fine with the pregnant woman and her interview, but then he goes on MySpace and sees an entry she wrote about abortion.  She might be for or against it, but suddenly that woman’s personal views are under the scrutiny of someone who might have the power to hire or fire her.

Perhaps that Muslim woman was all set to get the job until her interviewer read her blog post about supporting Palestinians’ right of return.  Maybe he could overlook her hijab but not her views on Israel.  The possibilities for discrimination are multiplied tenfold.

You can learn a lot about a person on such sites: political views, religious views, sexual orientation, personal plans, lifestyle, even information about their family members.  All of it is personal, and despite the fact that it might be readily available on the Internet, none of it should affect employment.  Companies should set policies against social media snooping or at least establish stringent guidelines over what is and is not fair game.  After all, your love for shooting people in Grand Theft Auto IV and then bragging about it on Twitter, might just cost you your job, and you will never know.

What makes KDE unique is that there are over 50 KIO slaves available for use. These include everything from basic file management (file:/directoryname) to remote network management (remote:/). I have selected a few notable KIO slaves to demonstrate how they are used and have also included a list of useful ones at the end of this post.

Read the rest at MakeTechEasier

KWin

Read the rest at MakeTechEasier

Part 1 (if you missed it)

Part 2

Part 3

In an effort to bring more exposure to KDE and its features, I have created two videos.  One is a brief introduction to KDE and some highly acclaimed features.  The second is about a specific application: Krunner.  It is based on an article I wrote for MakeTechEasier.

Both videos are available for streaming and download.

Introducing KDE 4.3

10 Awesome Features of Krunner in KDE 4

The production plan is also available in PDF format.

There is a long list of reasons why you might need to prepare an OpenOffice.org document in book form, and once you have learned how to do it, you will have a useful skill that you or people you know may need in the future. You can use this method for both print publications and e-books.

Read the rest

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.

Read the rest…

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.

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.

Read the rest at MakeTechEasier

Read the rest…

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.

When I graduated from Lawrence Central High School in 1996, our school still did not have Internet access available to students.  Only two years later, in 1998, universities were offering high-speed Internet access across their campuses, in dorm rooms and even in family housing.  By the time I graduated in 2000, I was addicted to high speed Internet and could never dream of going back to dial-up.  DSL was not yet widely available.  So, I subscribed to cable Internet access, and never looked back.

Since then we have seen a revolution, both in distribution of and access to information.  Encyclopedia salesmen used to travel door-to-door promising to unlock tens of volumes worth of knowledge to their customers.  Such information is now accessible with the click of a button.  Moreover, few would be satisfied if the Internet only offered them encyclopedic knowledge.  They expect more: more details, more photos, more video, more social interaction, and more personal insight.

The turn of the century was described as the “Information Age” when knowledge was literally at an individual’s fingertips.  The immense power that information provides an individual was evident by the premium Internet services that emerged, turning some ordinary citizens into millionaires.  But with great power, comes great responsibility.

When the Internet was in danger of becoming nothing more than a commodity, a revolution quietly began.  The phenomenon that people call Web 2.0 is really only the technical side of it.  It is much more than new technology.  People made a conscious decision to keep information and the tools to access it free.  They formed organizations such as the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation long before the term Web 2.0 was even envisioned. This led to innovations such as Creative Commons and Wikipedia.

In 2009, newspapers are on the verge of collapse; the music industry is floundering; movies are shared through BitTorrent before they are even released in theaters, and the cable television mega-corporations are lashing out with a vengeance.  They have learned little from the past.  Those who resist progress fade into the annals of history, and so some have chosen to embrace it.  What has emerged are DRM-free online music stores, online television content providers, and the hundreds of newspapers and media outlets providing nearly real-time coverage of events around he world, free of charge.

People of the 21st century want content when and where they want it.  They want to be able to watch Heroes or Dancing With The Stars from their laptops in coffee shops or their mobile phones on a train.    They want streaming up-to-date news at the push of a button.  They want to download a song, pass it on to a friend’s MP3 player, and then upload it to their social network site to share with their 500 other friends.  They are no longer satisfied with one news station’s account of events in a war zone, when actual footage from a witness’ cellphone is captured and uploaded to YouTube.

People want seamless, real time, unrestricted content, access, and portability.  The future beyond the Information Age is the age of global connectivity.  The only question is, will you be part of this new movement or part of what we must move aside to make room for it?

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.

Read the rest at Make Tech Easier

One of the most innovative and simultaneously controversial features of KDE 4 is the Plasma widget, Folderview. Simply put, it allows a user to display the contents of a file system folder within a widget on the desktop.

Beyond just displaying files on your computer, Folderview can be used to launch applications, display remote file systems, filter large folders for particular types of files, or serve as a traditional desktop.

Read the rest at Make Tech Easier

Rupert Murdoch has once again made headlines (pun intended) by telling CNN that visitors to the web sites belonging to some of the numerous newspapers that his News Corporation owns will soon have to pay to access certain content. Instead of having free access to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post, a visitor would have to “pay handsomely”, according Murdoch.

I know the man is old, but is he really that out of touch with technology and the development of new media?  Does he really believe that people cannot live without his newspapers?

When a news organization is failing, as many newspapers are, why would it benefit them to make it more difficult to get news to people who could use it?  Their goal should be to gain readers, not drive away the few they have left.

If a person has to pay to find out a piece of information on one site, they will simply find it on another site for free.  Instead of arrogantly thinking that they can just muscle people into giving them money, they should try earning it.  Give people a real reason to come to your web site.  Come up with something innovative that makes your site worth their time.

We live in an age where media is interactive, collaborative, and, most importantly, open to all.  If News Corporation or any other mega-news conglomerate fails to realize that, it might very well be the last mistake they make.  And maybe the world will be a better, more truthful place without them.

May 6th, 2009. The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.2.3, another bugfix and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. This is a monthly update to KDE 4.2. It ships with desktop workspace and many cross-platform applications such as administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, development tools and more. KDE’s award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages.

See the full announcement.

I am about to start trying to fix this now, but in the meantime, consider yourself forewarned. From what I have heard, this bug seems to only affect the 900 model, and the newest array.org kernel is not yet available for Jaunty.

Hijrah calendar gadget

Kubuntu ships with a modified version of KDE’s plasma that has Google Gadget support disabled.  If you care, their justification for it is here.  I have wanted to add Google Gadgets seemlessly to my desktop for some time and had hoped that the new version 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope would fulfill my dreams.  As of Release Candidate 1, however, it appears it will not.

Nevertheless, hope is not lost. Someone has put together a nice quick and easy guide to getting Google Gadgets into Jaunty’s plasma desktop.

1. The semester is closing, and I have two big projects to complete: one cataloging final project and an annotated bibliography for my reference class.

2. In the next few days, I am expecting to receive a contract from the publishing company that is commissioning me to write a book. I will give more detail on that when it is signed and sealed.

3. I am looking for freelance writing jobs and might have found a long-term gig. Again, I will provide more information on that when available.

4. Summer classes start in May. I have already planned out the rest of my master’s program, which concludes a year from May (2010).

5. My kids are growing like weeds and eating like bottomless pits. I will post pictures soon.

6. We are about to push the TV show online in a big way; more on that as it develops.

Applicants must demonstrate their commitment to enhanced diversity in Indiana libraries and agree to work in an Indiana library for at least two years after completing the 16-month program. (And Indiana is a great place to live, in case you were wondering).

I am 1/4 of the way through the program and have enjoyed it thoroughly thus far. It is hard work but well worth it in the end. Contact me if you need help applying. For more general information, see here.

No, this is not an ad for Google.  There are plenty of services for RSS, but I normally use Akregator to handle mine on my desktop.  I never bothered to set it up on my netbook.

The funny part of it all is that I have no recollection of ever setting up Google Reader.  I would have needed to import my .opml file (the file that contains the feeds) in order for my feeds to be there on demand, that is unless Google somehow scooped off of my hard drive (I’m working on a new conspiracy theory).  So much for getting work done.  Darn cloud computing.

News has been circulating about the patent lawsuit between Microsoft and a company called TomTom.  Microsoft claims that, by using the Linux kernel, TomTom is infringing upon some of its patents.  By settling out of court, it seems to give Microsoft an opportunity to go after other Linux-based vendors.

I, however, believe this move from Microsoft comes too little and too late.  We saw what happened with SCO vs. the World.  Novell, IBM, et al ate them for lunch.  One might think that it still means that Microsoft can bully the smaller companies, but I do not think that is practical for them.

The reality is that Linux started outside of the business world, and it will continue to thrive on its own whether or not Microsoft sues companies that use it or not.  Free software is free and continually changing.  Suing a company for using Linux is like suing them for using the Internet.  It sounds to me as though Microsoft is getting pretty desperate, pathetically desperate.

Now that I have made that clear, I can freely discuss the problems I am currently having with it.  The phonon Xine backend has never worked with Alsa on my computer.  It simply produces no sound.  The Gstreamer backend worked with KDE 4.1 and 4.2.  With KDE 4.2.1, the Gstreamer backend ceased functioning.  I do not know if this is a local Kubuntu issue or a KDE-wide one, but it is a serious problem.  In order to get sound back into Amarok, I had to enable the Xine backend and then use Pulseaudio.

There is an Ubuntu forums thread here.  If anyone has any suggestions regarding this, please leave a comment.  I will post a bug report soon.

I could not help but chuckle at their gimmicky slogan:

“Give a laptop.  Get a laptop. Change the world.”

Being the avid Heroes fan that I am, I could not help but picture the futuristic Hiro Nakamura saying, “Save the laptop, save the world.”

Click the image for a larger peek.  I did not have my camera while driving to work.  The picture came from here.

All Things Considered, February 21, 2009· Google wants to give you access to its huge database of scanned, out-of-print books, but the company is going to charge for it. Robert Darnton, head librarian at Harvard University, says the deal violates a basic American principle — that knowledge should be free and accessible to all.

When I first saw the headline, I thought, “So what? What major online content provider actually gives their content away for free?  Academic and public libraries pay premium prices to get access to paid-content databases, only to turn around and offer it to the public for free.”

After hearing what the librarian had to say, however, I can see his point.  Those paid-for databases are already a commodity, but if Google might in fact provide us with the “future of books” (when we’ve overspent our use of trees and can no longer print physical books), it will be an travesty if our only access to libraries will be through commercial corporations such as Google.

Why do authors (or their lawyers), the RIAA, the MPAA, etc. get so uptight about their content being offered over the internet but yet are perfectly fine with them being offered through brick and mortar libraries?  Do they somehow think that because something is digitized they lose all control and copyright over it?  I would never read a novel sitting in front of my computer screen unless someone forced me to, but if I could preview a book, or just fine a quote from a particular page online, that would be fantastic.  Would I pay for it?  Definitely not.

Aside from switching from C to C++, it adds features such as a non-compositing option to the window-manager (handy if you need to turn off compositing while playing a 3D resource leach like SecondLife).  Also, it adds the option of using non-3D rendering such as XRender, handy for older machines without decent 3D cards.

It is not part of the main branch of Compiz, and it will be up to the community to decide, but it looks promising.

Interestingly enough, as of KDE 4.1, those features mentioned above are already present in KWin.  One wonders if that served as inspiration for the Compiz++ developer.  KDE 4.2, which just released Beta2 (and is scheduled for full release in 25 days), will add even more features to its compositing arsenal, putting it pretty much on an even plane (or perhaps even surpassing) Compiz-Fusion.

But the new Google G1 phone is fruit and cake.*

If I were to ever buy another mobile phone, it would most likely be one of these.  It is slick, user-friendly, and reasonably priced.  The best thing, however, is that it runs Android, a free and open source Linux-based operating system.  It is extendable, expandable, and oh-so-cool.

*My apologies to Nabisco.

For those of you who do not know, Zekr is an cross-platform, free and open source, Qur’an study tool.  It allows you to read the Qur’an in Arabic, numerous language translations, transliteration, and audio recitation.

Two features that I’m really digging are:

1. Searching arabic root words.
2. Searching arabic and english translation

Zekr will also recite line-by-line or continuous, which is really handy if you are trying to memorize a sura.

You can download Zekr for Linux, Mac, and Windows here.

The new Google web browser called Google Chrome, is currently available for download for Windows and will soon (we are told) be available for Linux and Mac OS X.

What could possibly go wrong you ask? Think Internet Explorer and ActiveX back in the 90s. When you already dictate a big chunk of the web, providing the browser to view can become a self-serving activity. Imagine opening Firefox and navigating to the new Google Music site (not saying there really is or will be one) and you get a nice little message stating, “We’re sorry, but this website is only viewable with Google Chrome 2.0 or later.”

As I mentioned, however, Google tends to be more open than that, but stranger things have happened. By the way, the new browser engine is based on Webkit, which is based on KHTML, which comes from KDE, which is free and open source software.

Do not get me wrong here. I am not criticizing the new propaganda machine at work. If anything, I think it is brilliant and well played. I have been using the release candidate of 4.1, and I can tell you that it is phenomenal and will live up to the hype. It won’t please everyone, but it is revolutionary for desktop computing. There is nothing else like it on the market, not from Microsoft, not from Apple, not from Sun, and not even from Gnome.

And that is the end of the matter.

As someone who has been using KDE 4.1 (a Beta version mind you) on my production system for quite a few weeks now, I am wondering what the big fuss is really about. No doubt, I agree with some in that KDE developers should have not called a “work in progress” “4.0″. That is misleading. Heck, Google keeps things in Beta for years. The word “beta” is in fashion to the point where they could just always have “Beta” after any KDE release and it would probably attract users.

Therein lies the problem. This time around, “still in development” was a literal warning, not a modest display of humility. The KDE developers warned everyone that 4.0 was not ready for production. Certain distributions, such as Kubuntu, took heed and left KDE 3.5 as the main desktop, offering 4.0 as an option.

If a distribution left KDE 4.0 as the only option, that means KDE 3.5 applications were no longer available. There is no question that certain applications are much further along than others. Dolphin, the file manager, for example is very stable and feature-rich, whereas most of the KDE-PIM applications are still under heavy development.

With both desktops still installed, one can use KDE 4.0 as the desktop and still use some KDE 3.5 apps without any decrease in performance and with no difficulty. That is drastically different from an operating system upgrade. There is no problem with compatibility between 4.0 and 3.5 apps. Therefore, comparing it to Windows Vista carries little weight.

I think those who hate KDE 4 can be placed into four categories:

1. Those who just dislike the new features (plasma, krunner, etc). That is fine. Everyone has their opinion.

2. Those who actually did not use KDE anyway and are just making noise for the sake of making noise.

3. Those who are not very patient and/or not very good at making things work for them (They were used to using KDE 3.5 which “just worked” out of the box — KDE 4 will eventually reach that stage, but it is not quite there yet).

4. Those who miss their favorite component fromKDE 3. Some people especially miss the “kicker” (KDE’s desktop panel), but a lot of them miss it for the strangest reasons. For example, someone mentioned that he did not like that plasma does not have the various options for different types of secondary panels. My response to that is, how many people actually used any of those secondary panels? I’ve seen plenty of KDE desktops and have seen very few, if any, who used the “Mac OS” menu bar or any of the other available features. Having a feature only for the sake of having it only leads to bloated software.

I for one think KDE 4 is coming along nicely. I am in love with plasma. However, I will be the first to admit that it has some way to go, as did KDE 3 when it was first released.
The truth is some people just hate change, but change is going to come with or without them. That is the nature of this world and is certainly the nature of technology.

With previous versions of Firefox, dragging an image to the KDE desktop produced an empty clipboard text box and no image. Now, icons on the KDE desktop are essentially gone, replaced with the Folderview plasmoid. Firefox 3.0 also allows for perfect dragging and dropping. I can drag an image not only into folderview or one of folder icons but also directly into Dolphin (file manager).

It just keeps getting better and better.

Other cool plasmoids:

1. Prayertimes plasmoid
2. Weather plasmoid (I have been waiting for this one)
3. Quick Access plasmoid (just so useful).

Imagine going to the beach in a solar powered swimsuit. (Obviously you’d want to avoid diving into the water with your electric power pack on — but still). You spend the day there absorbing the sunlight, which is collected into your stylish power pack.

When you’re finished, you have two options:

1) Go home and deposit your power into your personal home “power cube”.

2) Before leaving the beach you stop at the “power exchange machine”. You attach your power pack to the machine, which extracts the energy. It then pays you for the amount of energy deposited in cash (or more likely change).

Here is just one word of caution. In the past, if an SSL certificate was expired, not verified, or not recognized, Firefox would initiate a pop-up window telling you this. Now, it takes you to a very scary error page that, if you are like many Americans who don’t bother to read such pages, will make you think the page could not be reached.

In order to view the page (and there are many self-signed certificate pages that you will want to view), you’ll need to add an exception by clicking the “add exception” button at the bottom. The next time you visit the page, you will have no problems.

Then, I read this. Whoever you are, Tiger, you rock.

“I get 100 miles to the ounce on water. I can run any water, distilled water, drinking water, tap water,” said Brown.

The self-proclaimed inventor said he has almost done the job and has fixed his car to run mostly on water, Firstcoastnews.com reported.

“Right now it’s using a little bit of gas. If anything it’s getting a fuel vapor. I’ve got the fuel injection system shut down,” said Brown.

“When you separate the water from the oxygen from the hydrogen, it cooks and it cooks down to a brown color. We’re not having any waste product off of it. Everything is consumed and burned,” he explained.

Brown said the invention would be complete within the next few months and the profits would be used to help missionaries around the world.

– First Coast News, Jacksonville
(emphasis is mine)

Now, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program, which had the noble goal of trying to provide laptops to children in third world countries equipped with educational software running a customized version of Linux, has come under Microsoft’s scope. They knew what it would mean. Generations of young people would grow up not using Microsoft’s products. They could not allow this. They found it so damaging, so dangerous, that they’re practically giving Windows XP away (notice I said practically — they still intend to turn a profit) to what’s left of the project developers (apparently after the moral few were weeded out) to ensure that windows will make its way into every shack in the developing world.

Now these children will have laptops running bloated, battery hogging, soon to be no longer supported, security hole-filled software with little to no educational value (as you know Windows XP does not come with any office software or much else for that matter).

Thanks Microsoft. Once again you have managed to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Update: It seems Liquid weather for Superkaramba also supports Accuweather, as does the Mac OS X widget, but that still involves dependence on a particular organization.

The operating system, Internet Tablet OS 2008, is a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution with a customized GTK-based graphical interface. Beyond surfing the web, here are some of my common uses for it:

1. Media player (mp3s, videos, podcasts, mostly using Canola)
2. Sync/backup using a wireless GRsync connection.
3. Server maintenance – It is Linux after all. I can SSH into my remote server and make updates, security changes, restart services, etc.
4. HTPC control – I run a Freevo box in my living room. I currently don’t even have a keyboard attached to it, but I can wirelessly use my n800 for any tasks not accessible with the remote control
5. Alarm clock – Yes, I sleep with my n800, and it wakes me up in the morning.
6. PDA – I use the calendar program to keep track of tasks and do a three-way sync with my Google calendar and with KOrganizer.
7. Thin Client – Using a handy graphical program called kerez, I can setup an SSH connection to my desktop PC, forwarding the X server all with the click of a button. Then, I can remotely start an application and run it within my n800.

Those are just some of the less obvious uses. With a fully functional web browser, anything accessible on the web is pretty much fair game. It also behaves as an internet phone using Skype and has a built-in camera for video conferencing (currently only through Google Talk or Gizmo…not sure when the latest Skype version with video support will be released).

What more can I say? I think I’m in love with my Nokia n800. I call her “Kia” for short.

On another note, I’ve been working with the Derwin Smiley Show, mainly doing the online content distribution side of things (although also some video editing when needed). It airs on a local station here in Indianapolis, but we also have a podcast. The latest episode is now available.

DRM

It was a video-sharing website that got right what Youtube and others failed to do.  They were able to provide high quality videos and get some pretty decent content.  Granted, it’s a proprietary format (but then again so is Flash) and the video sizes were quite a bit larger, but it was lovely. 

I could download full-length episodes of shows and short films with little effort.  It will be sad to see it go, but I always wondered what their revenue-making scheme was.  Although it was a nice idea, they seemed to have no method of sustaining such a large project with huge video files (some of them in HD).  At lease with Vuze, the Azureus people are footing the bill for server bandwidth (since it uses peer-to-peer torrent technology).

At any rate, farewell, Stage6.  Many good things die young.

I had two hard drives in my computer, an older 80GB one with the operating system and applications on it, and a newer 250GB one for my data. Unfortunately, the 80GB started to make whining and clicking noises. My experience tells me that those sounds are the beginning stages of its demise. Rather than wait around for it to crash completely, it was the perfect time to upgrade.

I bought a second 250GB drive and reinstalled Kubuntu on it, transferring all of my home folder settings and files in the process.

I decided that I would try KDE 4 on a fresh install. Lo and behold, the Plasma issues were largely resolved. Icons on the desktop worked, and it doesn’t seem to have the stability problems that it had before. Apparently, one bug that I’ve found is that setting the mouse to double-click fails to activate icons, whereas single click works just fine.

The downer has been Konqueror. Since I’ve started using Dolphin as a file manager, I’ve been using Firefox more and more anyway, but with a still unusable Konqueror on KDE4, I’ve gone to Firefox full time. There are two problems with it currently:

1. The location bar disappears. I can get it back by putting it inside the main toolbar, but when I restart Konqueror, it hangs.

2. I cannot get SSL enabled sites to work. Any site that uses https fails to load. I’ve read that it is a certificate issue, but for me, this is a show stopper.

When I feel the need to use Konqueror, which I still prefer for its slimness and speed, the KDE3 version works just fine in KDE4. In fact, all KDE3 apps work perfectly well, which is much better than people’s experiences with upgrading other desktops/operating systems, such as the transition from Mac OS 9 to OS X or from Windows XP to Vista.  Hats off to the KDE and QT developers for that.

In the end, KDE4 is already beautiful and does add notable usability features. Over time it will mature into the best desktop environment in the world, a title KDE 3 currently holds.

So, what do you think?  Did Toshiba take the red pill or the green pill?  It was always a delusion.  They never had a chance.

But don’t expect me to rush out and buy a Blueray player, not until Sony shoves their DRM up their corporate behinds (or someone successfully hacks it — maybe they already have???).

Here are some of the reasons why I am not currently using KDE 4.0 despite having it installed:

1. Plasma, all-in-one the desktop, panel, widget system is simply not finished.  Desktop icons don’t work, panel icons don’t work, sometimes the background image doesn’t load, there are no, absolutely no panel options.  Those used to resizing the panel, changing the color, etc will be mortified when faced with the generic plasma panel

2. Applications tend to crash or behave erratically.  Dolphin, the file manager, gives me an error everytime I click on a file to open it.  Open a text file, get the error, “Could not open Kwrite”.  That’s not the strange part.  The strange part is that Kwrite actually does open, despite the error.  Other applications, like Kopete just crash.  The Kword version is an alpha version.  The apps simply aren’t ready.  The one set of apps that do look and work nicely are the games.  Mahjong Solitaire on KDE4 is simply magnificent.

3. Konqueror – Once the be all to end all, there was a time when KDE was synonymous with Konqueror.  It is a web browser, file manager, ftp transfer program, and many more things.  It has to work.  If it doesn’t, KDE doesn’t work.  When using it as a web browser, most of the web sites I went to did not work.  Google, Yahoo, and a few other sites did.  I couldn’t get a coherent error out of it, only something about not being able to paint widgets correctly.  This is simply not acceptable for production use.

As I mentioned before, I understand that this version is not a finished product.  I remember when Mac OS X was first released.  There were few apps for it and plenty of usability issues.  After a few versions, most of those issues were worked out and more people started to adopt it. My hope is that something similar will happen with KDE.  I like the direction they’re headed, and aside from the problems I’ve mentioned, it is beautiful, faster, and more organized that any desktop environment I’ve seen.

At this point, however, it’s simply not usable for me.

The long awaited 3D effects built into KWIN were also activated in the Kubuntu release. It is very impressive, albeit not as many effects as Beryl/Compiz.

Overall, the visual presentation was so nice that I hated going back to KDE 3.5, but it just simply is not yet stable enough for production.  It is, however, getting very close.  It will be nice to start off the new year with a brand new, beautiful, and lightning fast desktop environment.  Ready or not, here KDE4 comes.

Zekr is an open platform Quran study tool for simply browsing and researching on the Holy Quran. It is a Quran-based
project, planned to be a universal, open source, and cross-platform application to perform most of the usual refers to Quran. The main idea is to build an as generic as possible platform to accept different Islamic resources.

The Website
The Sourceforge project page

That’s “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play” in case you were wondering.

And if you’d prefer a quiet, cute, energy-efficient desktop PC, check out the newly released gPC from Everex, running the new gOS (I’m not making this up).  Did I mention they’re both inexpensive?

(Note: I am in no way promoting either of these products.  If they crash, burn, and destroy your data, please complain to the companies that sell them.  I am, however, promoting free and open source software.  Discover it, Use it, Share it.  [umm, DUS!])

Honestly, they both look like something ideal for children.  They’re not going to cost you a lot, but you can still provide your kids with something fun and easy to use.  I’m considering getting the EeePC for my wife who has been anxiously desiring to get a new desktop PC.  I will NOT, however, buy it from Wal-mart, no matter how green it is.

Anyway, some guy’s Google Summer of Code project has saved me from withdrawal with his Flash-based port of the Java-based port of Frozen Bubble.  God is Most Merciful.

I hate it so much, hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it, HATE it….almost as much as I despise Halloween.

And that is the end of the matter.

Test one
Test two
Test three

Nevertheless, I am concerned about one thing: Plasma.  It looks cool, no doubt, but here we are at Beta 3 and the thing is still broken.  Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but I still can’t get a kmenu, and half of the time, the little applets, widgets, whatever you want to call them don’t work.  They slide all over the place with no apparent way to lock them.

I don’t think the KDE developers will release it if it doesn’t work by the time December comes around.  But the question is, if it’s not ready does KDE 4.0 ship without it, or do they delay it yet again?  Am I overreacting?  Is it all going to fall into place within the next month when the release candidates start rolling out?  I don’t know.  Maybe all of the problems I’m having are related to only a few bugs that need fixing.  I really don’t know.  I’m just concerned.

Meanwhile, KDE 3.5.8 was just released and is smoother and more stable than ever.  So many questions, so little time.

If you haven’t seen it, check it out, and if you haven’t joined, now is a great time to do so.  It’s free.  Free as in price, and free as in freedom of expression.

Taubah, who is the creator of N~Flow Magazine, is the executive editor.

Still, The Death Clock, as it is aptly named, is an amusing distraction, and they provide nice health tips to help you take better care of your decaying body.

The Las Vegas-based company will send you all kinds of educational DVDs at no cost…just $5.95 for shipping and handling…and here comes the catch…PER DVD! Now, think about it. Let’s suppose I want 10 DVDs. Does it really cost $60 to ship 10 DVDs? If there are any postal workers reading this, feel free to comment and enlighten us.

Oh, and by the way, commenting on my blog is free, but it costs $5.95 for web hosting…per click.

Democracy Now
Black Agenda Report
The Nation
Common Dreams
AntiWar.com
truthout
IndyMedia

These are, I’m sure, just a few of the great ones out there. Feel free to comment and add to the list. I try to avoid pro-Democrat news sources just as much as the pro-Republican ones. I just want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The Planet still has the domain listed under my name, but when I try to login to their registration site, it takes me to a search page.  I contacted them for help, and the support supervisor, Aamir Abdullah (it’s really a shame if he’s Muslim), said (and I quote), “the fact that you were redirected disturbs me.”

Yeah, buddy, I’d say so.  But here’s what disturbs me: He went on to say, “Would you like to renew? The cost is $106.49.”

What the flip!  It seems The Planet has found a new way to make money.  They’re running their own little extortion ring.  Yes, that is disturbing, brother Aamir.  This is the company that owns my server, so they might very well shut it down tonight.  Nevertheless, I did my part.  I sent the world fair warning to stay away from a company trying to make some extra change exploiting people.

Fortunately, KDE has an easy two-step solution that should work for any machines that can pickup CUPS shared network printers. This should only be used on a network where you don’t mind ANYONE on that network printing to your printer.

Open KDE Control Center (kcontrol).

Click Administration mode and enter your root password

Click “Printer Server”

Check “Access printers on the local network” and “Share printers on the local network.”

Close Control Center.

On the other computers in your house or office, any printers attached to the first computer should automatically see your printers and allow you to print to them. If, for some reason, they do not, simply open kcontrol and make sure “Access printers on the local network” is checked.

For Macs, you might need to search for the printer and add it.

For MS Windows, as far as I know, you will probably need samba running in order to see the networked printers, but perhaps someone who actually has Windows can either confirm or deny this for me.

That’s all there is to it. Easy printer networking!

Donate it to a library like mine, which won’t have money to order copies until December. Also, there will be plenty of less fortunate kids who won’t be able to buy it right away but who would love to have it. Visit a local community center or place of worship (unless they’ll burn you at the stake for carrying a book about wizards — don’t blame me for that!).

I have a lot of work to do this school year. It should be interesting. There will be highlights (like the 20 brand new macbooks that I got at the end of last year) and nasty footnotes (I’d better not mention them here).

I didn’t accomplish a whole lot during this vacation, but hey, it’s supposed to be for rest, right?

Anyhow, Khaled Hosny has posted a new beta release of Khotot on the Arabeyes.org mailing list. I tried it in the The Gimp, and it works, الحمد لله

Now, back to work…

July 4, 2007 (The INTERNET). The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second alpha release of the K Desktop Environment. This release comes straight out of Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland where aKademy is currently taking place. Hundreds of KDE hackers are working like crazy to hunt down bugs, complete features for KDE 4.0 and sit together developing and finishing new and exciting applications for the new major version of the leading Free Desktop.”

You can download/watch aKademy videos here.

Full story

We also have an HTPC, so content is streamed to our living room (i.e. not at my desk on the computer) Here are a few of the ones that my wife and I watch regularly:

• Attack of the Show (sometimes)
• Cheat
• Game Break
• X-Play
• Ninja Warrior
• Indigital
• MobuzzTV (daily)
• How-to Girl
• Geekbrief
• TeXtra (sometimes)
• Galacticast (defunct?)
• Democracy Now (the exception to the rulers)
• Butterfly & Beautify (for the kids)
• NOVA Vodcast
• BlackMan N China (now defunct)

I know it sounds like a lot, but all of this combined is probably less than an hour of viewing per week. It beats sitting through hours of TV for a tidbit of content and a ton of commercials. This is a great way to get video news about things I like.

Since I don’t usually watch the podcasts on my computer, I just use Akregator to check them, along with all of the alternative news sites (I don’t read any mainstream press) and blogs that I read daily.

I do have a mobile phone…a cheap one, just so my wife can contact me wherever I am, whenever she wants. That is her right, not yours.

As for the other features on the iPhone, well, my computer can do more on a bigger screen. And of course, the software on my computer is free and open source.

Now, just for the heck of it, I hereby initiate the anti-iPhone movement.

To top it all off, they also release newer versions of packages that will not get updated in the official repositories until the next release.

Most of these photos are attractive, happy women holding laptops or other electronic devices. I only wonder, when a web developer may only pay $5 for a hires photo of a model to use as part an advertisement for a site that could make thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, how much did the model make?

In the case of the cover on my book, the woman selling the photo was the woman in the photo. Perhaps that is the wisest course of action.

Some of the ones that sound exciting to me:

• KOffice — collaborative editing
• Making KOrganizer look more like a paper-based calendar: theming improvements
• Kontact Journal/Blog Support (something I’ve been hoping to get for quite some time)

There are many more and also other exciting free and open source software projects contributing. The complete list is here.

I might have been willing to work with MythTV to get the problems ironed out, but my wife wasn’t trying to hear it. So, before the day was over yesterday, Freevo had returned.

There are also new Freevo packages for Ubuntu Feisty, and everything is working much better. Once there is actually a distribution of Freevo (which will be coming in the form of the new Geexbox), I think it will be marketable to the general public.

So far, everything with MythTV seems to be going well, but I have a lot of things to fine tune (mainly related to my remote control). I’ll post my results when it’s 100% perfect, inshaAllah.

Anyway, I just can’t understand [warning, Librarian rant commencing] how people lose library books! I mean really. I can understand losing your keys. I can even understand spilling your soda on a book. I can tolerate people who forget to return their books but still know where they are. But how, on God’s green earth, can you lose a book? I’m dumbfounded…flabbergasted…flummoxed…perplexed…and any other word that hints at being astonishingly confused.

OK, you left your book somewhere in your house. I mean, it’s a book, not a needle. Look for it!

I’m done.

Padman is available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and yes, even Windows. The source-code is released under GNU GPL.

A new and interesting usability feature in KHTML makes the mouse pointer indicate if a link wants to open a new browser window or not.

Official announcement

Yes, that is a Dell computer, and no I did not doctor this image. You can find it on the Dell website. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Dell has officially announced that they intend to start selling computers with Ubuntu Linux installed. Meanwhile, I’m starting my next book entitled The Decline and Fall of the Microsoft Empire.

I’m currently redesigning Medislam.org. It’s still in the early stages, but I thought it would be good to tell everyone so that I could get some feedback. So, please look at it and leave your comments.

For those who don’t know, Medislam.org was a medical information site for Muslims. Several Muslim doctors answered hundreds of questions from Muslims all over the world…that is, until I hosed it during our server upgrade. The old database survived, but the template was mashed to bits. The lead doctor has been very patient while I try to sort through the mess. I’d like to get it up and running by next week, inshaAllah. This version is running Joomla.

and a post at Third Resurrection about the all important “black vote” juxtaposed with the Islamic concept of Justice.

I’m trying to post regularly at both of those blogs. Please read them.

A lot of talk has been circulating recently about KDE4, as developers inch closer to settling on a release date. Here are some of the particularly cool features that I’ve encountered thus far…

Read the Rest

Now, help me understand the point of this. The motion picture industry supposedly wants to make legal downloads attractive to current illegal torrent downloaders, yet they seemed to have missed the mark yet again.

We don’t need another Windows/US-only download site. Plenty already exist (Movielink and CinemaNow for movies, and Google Video for TV shows, among others). What would have been revolutionary would be a multiplatform downloading system with open standards (oh wait, isn’t that what Bittorrent is supposed to be?).

So, anyway, people who live in Malaysia and want to see the latest episode of Stargate SG-1 can still use Bittorrent to download it…for free.

For those of you who don’t know…by the way, if you think dancing and music are haram, please don’t bother commenting on my blog about it. I’m already aware of the various scholarly rulings on this subject. Obviously, if I’m blogging about it, I’ve adopted a ruling that allows it…

Ahem, for those of you who don’t know, StepMania is a free software clone of the ever-popular Dance Dance Revolution. It works for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and Xbox, and it works with almost any dance pad on the market.

It is super fun and great exercise, and, best of all, it’s free. You can download it here. Of course, unless you want to use your keyboard, you’ll need a dance pad.

My favorite reason, of course, is that it runs a variant of Debian GNU/Linux.

Disclaimer

Phew! OK, having cleared that up, I can now proceed to tell you how awesome this software is! I have been waiting for a good video editing program on GNU/Linux since I started using it about four years ago. It had to be easy to use (because, if it wasn’t, I might as well do linear editing), feature-rich, and, of course, free software.

Kino is definitely feature-rich and free as in freedom, but it has some serious usability issues that made it cumbersome for me. It is definitely usable, and probably the most stable video editing software for this platform, but it just doesn’t cut it. To add effects, text, or transitions, you have to take elaborate steps, selecting frame lengths. Often times, I’d end up with erroneous cuts in my movies that I couldn’t explain.

Cinelerra has issues. It doesn’t use a standard interface (KDE or Gnome), is nearly impossible to install, and is a resource hog. It also uses a strange video format (not raw dv) for editing. In other words, it’s a pain.

There are other applications, such as Diva, that have yet to reach even the usability stage of maturity.

I’ve tried KDEnlive a few times in the past couple of years. It looked like a dream come true: KDE/Qt interface, drag-and-drop effects and transitions, easy editing timeline, etc. But I couldn’t even get it to install. It required Piave, which, to the best of my knowledge, does not come with any Linux distribution. I was forced to do ugly compile after ugly compile.

When I finally did get the software running, it wouldn’t edit any files. Every time I tried to open something, it would say that the file format was not supported (although it should have supported anything ffmpeg would support).

As it turned out, I was missing dependencies, but KDEnlive wasn’t giving any dependency errors. And that is the one complaint I have about this software: it doesn’t tell you what you’re missing. I finally found out that I need mlt++, and they now provide pre-compiled binaries of all the files needed.

Once I had it started, I tried editing a few files. Everything worked perfectly. So, I decided to trying capturing from our video camera via firewire (ieee1394). From the moment I plugged in the camera, without any configuration, I had on-screen control of the play, rewind, fast-forward, and stop from the capture monitor window. When capturing, however, it produced no file and no error.

After doing some digging, I happened to discover that KDEnlive 0.4 requires dvgrab 2.0+ (from the Kino project). I had an early of dvgrab from the Edgy repositories. It took only about 5 minutes to compile the small piece of software and have capturing working. The last video of Tahira that I posted was my first attempt at editing with it. Everything worked fine, except for a few audio issues. I haven’t quite figured out the process of adding music (or making it work, I should say).

KDEnlive is not without its problems, as I mentioned in my disclaimer. If you try weird things, it will crash with impunity. Now, I was trying weird things (like clicking on tool bars numerous times in a row) just because I like to explore interfaces and find the best usage, but KDEnlive saw me as hostile and booted me out. So, if you use it, save often, or turn on the handy auto-save feature.

It has a beautiful effect interface, and effects can be dragged right down on the timeline. It also has unlimited track support, so you can have multiple video and audio tracks. The titling system is super-easy, and can use any font that you have on your system.

One other thing that I’ve only seen done well with Apple’s iMovie, is support for video slideshows. KDEnlive allows you to select an entire directory of pictures and automatically create a slide show from them. You can also drop single photos right into your timeline and specify the length of the image clip.

Probably the best part of KDEnlive is the finished product. You can output to anything ffmpeg supports, making it one of the most versatile video applications on the market. No matter if you need mpeg1, 2, 3, or 4, ogg theora, quicktime, you name it, they support it. Also, it has a DVD creator wizard that allows you to easily create a DVD with simple menus.

It pleases me to say that a free software project has yet again produced a competitive product that can compete with some of the best commercial software. KDEnlive, when it is finished, may very well be the best.

Being a 4-DVD Netflix subscriber myself, I decided to investigate. In their FAQ, they already list the system requirements as “Windows XP or later” and “Internet Explorer 6 or later.” In other words, no Linux or Mac OS’s allowed.

Even if you are naive enough to have a computer that runs windows, you still won’t be able to watch the movie on your TV, thanks to Windows Media DRM. You won’t be able to burn it to a DVD (even temporarily) or transfer it to another computer (if you happen to have an HTPC). If you HTPC is running MythTV, Freevo, Geexbox, or even AppleTV, you’re out of luck.

I don’t blame Netflix for setting the standard. That was undoubtedly set by the MPAA. They don’t want people doing “whatever they want” with their movies (even though people do anyway). So, they place ridiculous restrictions on any legal services, causing many people to rely on the illegal channels (which are much more user-friendly and platform independent).

Until Netflix does something more revolutionary, instead of being subservient to the movie industry, you can expect many people, especially the increasing number of non-windows users, to turn to file-sharing, such as BitTorrent.

Dear Netflix, thanks for nothing.

So, courtesy of Treviño’s repository at Tuxcity, I decided to install it and give it a try.

All I can say is WOW! My first impression upon seeing screenshots was “ugh, it’s fat like the Windows XP/Vista menus” (and by fat, I mean F-A-T not P-H-A-T). But unlike the Windows menus, it’s fat for a reason and actually quite phat as well.

You have 5 tabs:

1. Favorites – You customize this menu with simple right-clicking to have your personal favorite programs as soon as the menu pops up.

2. Recently Used – Documents, videos, songs, etc. that you’ve recently used.

3. My Computer – Settings, System info, drives, etc.

4. All Programs – All your apps. Goodbye to the old hierarchy of popup menus. There is one menu that slides over when you browse through the categories. You can also scroll through the menu with the mousewheel. It’s much harder to accidentally start the wrong application.

5. Leave – Logout, shutdown, etc.

Finally, it has a killer search feature that allows you to search files on your computer, search your bookmarks (and with one click open to the web site you’re looking for), and so on…

I love it. I’m IN-love with it (sorry, Sweetie). I’m keeping it.

Ubuntu Edgy has native support for the needed widescreen 1440×900 resolution; however, the funky beta Nvidia driver that I’m using in order to have AIGLX/Beryl support would not work. No matter what I plugged into xorg.conf, it still came up with 1280×1024.

Finally, I found this solution, and it worked perfectly. To the “device” section of xorg.conf (where the nvidia card info is) add:

Option “ModeValidation” “NoEdidDFPMaxSizeCheck”

And in case anyone else has the same monitor (which is a 19 inch), here is the Modeline in the “Monitor” section:

Modeline “1440×900@60″ 136.0 1440 1520 1672 1904 900 903 909 934 +hsync +vsync

First, let me say a few things about politics. I do not consider myself to be a “free software zealot” but I am also not oblivious to the apparent political ramifications of using various types of software. Proprietary software (i.e. software that has restrictive licenses) is ultimately bad both for developers and for end-users.

I do not, however, think it is productive to completely shut out proprietary software if and only if it is needed (or strongly desired as the case may be).

Now distribution is a different animal entirely, and now that the Ubuntu developers are considering distributing the Nvidia and ATI proprietary drivers, this issue has come to the limelight. Keep in mind that Ubuntu has always distributed some binary blobs, but they have not generated much publicity in the past, and Ubuntu calls its operating system “software libre”. In an effort to make a “free” version, the Free Software Foundation came up with GNewSense.

In one corner are the pragmatists who say, “The software should just work, and it won’t work with all hardware unless those drivers are included.”

On the other side are those who say, “If it isn’t free, it doesn’t belong in a free operating system.”

I can see the pragmatic point. Mac OS X “just works”, but the question is “Why?” Well, for one, they make their own computers. All of the hardware that goes into their computers is carefully tested and supplied with drivers ahead of time.

There is a perception among some people that Windows also “just works,” but I beg to differ. For anyone who as actually installed Windows (and I’ve done so on hundreds of computers when I used to work in IT), it rarely “just works.” There are inevitably driver problems and many things that need to be installed before you have a working system. What most people experience is either a computer that has had windows installed by someone like me or a pre-installed factory shipped computer.

If a GNU/Linux distribution is pre-installed on a computer, it does “just work” because the retailers have to make sure it does. It is not the job of the distributor of the operating system to make sure it works on every piece of imaginable hardware, and it is very dangerous to start making promises that it will “just work” when, in all likelihood, there will be cases where it won’t.

In my Windows days, the Nvidia 3D accelerated driver did not even ship with Windows. I had to download it myself. How is this any different than needing to download it in GNU/Linux? Also, with serious efforts to create free driver versions, why condition people to use the binary blobs?

Furthermore, Nvidia has stated that they can never “open source” their drivers because there is too much “intellectual property” from other vendors tied into their graphics cards. If that is the case, what are the legal ramifications of distributing (either free of charge or for profit) a GNU/Linux distribution under the GPL? Is it even legal? Can it be shipped to countries like Iran or North Korea, where sanctions on proprietary software are in place?

If free software is ultimately to be about choice, why not give the user the choice as to which proprietary software to install? It need not be complicated, but it also shouldn’t be automatic. After all, installing an operating system is an advanced task. Anyone who is capable of doing it aught to be capable of installing a few drivers. If they are not, they should probably buy a pre-installed factory shipped computer with GNU/Linux already installed anyway. In the meantime, we should form a company with the sole purpose of making free and open source drivers and pay the people who work for that company to do this full-time. It is in the legal of interest of many large corporations (such as IBM, Novell, Redhat, Sun, etc.) to support such an endeavor.

The problem has been mentioned here, here, and here, but so far, no resolution has been found. It is not Pango, as some have claimed. I also doubt it is related to Mesa or anything with xorg. It is most like related to the “radeon” open source driver. I suspect this for two reasons:

1. Most reports indicate that the proprietary ATI driver, which most x86 users choose, does not exhibit this problem.

2. My wife just installed Kubuntu Edgy on her computer, and Beryl w/ AIGLX running on her paltry Intel i810 integrated graphics card is lightning fast! She even has fire effects going full speed!

I am posting this now to try to draw attention to the problem with hopes that someone will think of a solution.

Also, I have some supplemental funds to spend (first time for everything) on DVDs (and maybe some books on CDs as well).

Now the problem. We have a designated vendor. As nice as they are, they have their flaws (and no, I don’t mean that they don’t sell my book — although that’s certainly a negative). The kids (especially the boys) are going bananas over graphic novels. Seriously…they’re going to start a riot if I don’t feed their habits. I have one boy who comes here everyday looking for new ones and then threatens me if I don’t order some more. Anyway, our vendor lists a lot of the graphic novels but seems not to keep them in stock. So, either I have to find one other vendor who will supply them or scour the libro-net for each book…Did I mention this order is due in December?

Now you know what’s going on in my library-media world.

We are also switching from Redhat Enterprise Linux to CentOS (purely an economical decision — well, that’s not entirely true. RHEL uses up2date (RHN) by default, which, IMO, really has issues. Fedora, CentOS and other open alternatives rely on YUM. Yes, before you say anything, I know that up2date uses YUM. Actually, up2date breaks YUM. Therein lies the problem).

It took me all last night and the better part of today to get the name servers up and running. I’ve done it before, but not in about four years. It all seems to be flowing like water now.

Oh yeah, best of all, we’re lowering our prices and redesigning our web site. (more on all of that later too).

It looked bleak for me on my iBook G4, but once again, free and open source software has proved to be ideal for quick responsiveness to bugs. A patch has been posted on the ubuntu bug list.

It works perfectly here. Be sure to test it and post your results. **flips the cube, just for the heck of it**

1. No direct rendering of opengl apps and painfully slow indirect rendering.
2. No support for my wacom graphics tablet.
3. Frequent slowness and bugginess.

Well, the new version of Xorg, supplied by Ubuntu comes with AIGLX built-in (sorry Novell). It works flawlessly after following these simple instructions (for Nvidia users — search wiki for other cards and distros). And after you follow that link, you’ll notice that I’m also not using Compiz but rather Quinn Storm’s fork, which is now called Beryl and uses a window manager called Emerald (thanks Quinn).

But aside from all the eye-candy goodness, Edgy seems to provide the stability, ease of use, and feature-rich applications that have become the staple of the Ubuntu/Kubuntu. From KDE 3.5.5 to the addition of digikam into the base packages, to the slick new styles and themes, to the exciting new init system that makes booting fun (OK, now I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea).

Forcing the progress through a “forcefully viral” GPL is not freedom, it’s just that: FORCING the (supposed) progress.

The problem that I see with this is that the BSD license is indeed a more free solution for the individual. If a person takes BSD licensed code, he can do whatever he wants with it (change it, add to it, stick his logo on it) and doesn’t have to give anything back to the community. He can change the license to proprietary and sell it (and no one will ever know that it was once free).

If that same person took GPL code, he could still change it, add to it, and stick his logo on it, but he has to release the source code of his changes. Is this viral? Yes. Is it placing a restriction on the individual? Possibly. But freedom should not just be for the individual. It should not be based on an elitist system. Freedom should be for all people. If I take something free, I have an obligation to make it free for everyone else, not horde it for myself. It also protects the freedom of the individual. If I make something free, why should someone come along and be allowed to deprive others of the freedom I intended it to have?

I’m sorry, but the BSD license is a strange kind of freedom…a selfish freedom.

“codename “Raptor”.

“Ratpor will be a plasmoid, a Plasma widget, and therefore building upon newest KDE 4 technology which takes care of stuff like resizing. Also there will be a clear separation from data sources and presentation – something which is a basic design principle for all KDE 4 widgets to make widget development easier (for more information see one of Aaron Seigos presentations about Plasma).

“The main goals of Raptor are clear: to provide a high quality menu everyone will like. This includes a intelligent “My Favourite” section (intelligent means really intelligent and not the stuff available today), a skin supported menu (png or svg, colour, layout), fancy effects (”rain in the menu”, whatever that means) and of course searching of all entries – at the moment implemented with strigi (which was mentioned pretty often at akademy – hope it gets even more boost!).”

Taking a look at the release schedule, it would seem that there will be a “technical preview” in October of KDE 4. There are still no release dates for alphas, betas, or release candidates, but I think we will have a better idea of what’s happening after October. What I do know for sure is that this is not another Windows Vista (or a dreaded Duke Nukem Forever).

One of the main differences is that, unlike previous minor updates of KDE (i.e. 3.5.x), the 3.5 series continues to add new 4.0 features back into the 3.5 codestream. As a result, we are continually receiving new KDE 4 technologies as they are completed, instead of waiting for a final super-release.

For those looking forward to new eye candy and a smooth new interface:
KDE Appeal

I also installed Xubuntu Dapper release on my iMac G3. It’s so sweet and lightning fast.

Unfortunately, I’ve lost the ability to print at the circ desk. I only partially had it to begin with. I could print a few pages, but anything big (like overdue notices) would kill the printer. It’s a horrible HP LaserJet 1020 (and yes, the HP worker who designed it should be dragged out into the street and beaten — I hope it’s not someone I know). It is probably one of four laser printers in the world that doesn’t work well with Linux (and I had to get one — not my choice).
EDIT: I got the 1020 working simply by installing the latest foo2zjs drivers. I guess I was just being lazy. I’m so used to not having to install drivers for anything. It felt so windows-like to have to install one.

Anyway, I usually print the big stuff on our $10,000 mega-copier-printer-thingamajig (i.e. a Toshiba E-Studio 450). But, it’s out of toner, and apparently, only one person is allowed to refill it…and she is taking her sweet time.

On the home front, I’m in the process of building a home theater system. I found a really hot case (pictured above) and the mother of all media operating systems (no, not Windows Media Center). It’s called Geexbox. It’s only 8MB on disk, and it can be run as either a LiveCD (the CD pops out after it boots so that you can insert a CD or DVD) or installed on a partition on your hard drive.

It boots very fast (about as fast as the average DVD player) and shuts down instantly, just like a normal electronic appliance. It is preconfigured to work with tv-out cards and with remote controls. In fact, almost everything is preconfigured. I really haven’t touched the config files.

On the other partition of the hard drive, I installed Xandros, so that any guests we have, who will inevitably wish to check their email (read Mother-in-Law) can do so without disturbing any of my computers.

We are repeatedly having floods of air conditioners in classrooms as well; the difference being that they do not have carpet. I would imagine that they have to spend more money and man-power constantly fixing the air conditioners than if they just replaced them (or got central air).

Now they want to put in new carpet, which I would love, but that means more work for me. And more work for what? For brand new carpet to get ruined all over again? Count me among the skeptics. At any rate, it has become a daily morning ritual for me (in between turning on workstations and booting up the circulation desk) to empty my dehumidifier buckets. Sad isn’t it? Donations accepted.

“What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education.“

–Harold Howe, former U.S. Commissioner of Education

I read it in one day (couldn’t put it down), and trust me, that’s a compliment coming from someone who probably only reads four or five fiction books a year.

Anyway, *waves his Jedi hand in the air* You WILL buy it.

Similarly, DRM (Digital Rights Management — their words, not mine) is evil…perhaps much more evil than SPAM because people are actually paying to use it. Whenever they buy one of those MP3 players or download music that won’t allow them to, well, do whatever they want with the product they bought with their own money, DRM is probably in effect. But if it were only about music, I wouldn’t care. What scares me is that it has spread to movies, software, hardware, and electronics.

Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation has proposed an acronym that would more appropriately describe DRM: Cancellation, Restriction And Punishment or CRAP. Now, let us join hands and flush the CRAP down the toilet.

I neglected to ever post XGL screenshots (shame on me). So, here they are, taken with Ksnapshot. There are 18 shots available. Next time, I’ll try not to ignore my screenshot obligations for so long.

The only catch: It is in Theora video format. It is a free and open video codec, and I figured that this was the perfect time to promote it. If you have a free operating system (such as GNU/Linux), you already have built-in support for it. If you have a proprietary OS (such as Windows or Mac OS X), you can use VLC media player to watch it. You may also use just about any player, with the right codecs installed.

I strongly recommend trying it. It has a long way to go to be a competitively commercial-grade vector editing program, on the Adobe Illustrator level, but it certainly has the potential. Some of the nice features that I noticed immediately are the ease in which you can make and manipulate drop shadows, text, and gradients.

I’ve always preferred object-oriented graphics editing but never found a good Linux program that could do it. Inkscape is great, but the user interface could use a little work. Nevertheless, it has a multitude of features not yet available in Xara Xtreme. It would appear, from the Xara FAQ, that the developers from both projects have agreed to work cooperatively. Even if they do not, the source code from Xara could definitely benefit the Inkscape project, which does not have the corporate funding of Xara.

The future for GNU/Linux graphics looks very bright. Let’s hope the success of Xara will bring other companies to the free software arena.

Apparently, some poor fellow tried to self-repair his dead iPod, and it exploded in his face. The lesson: don’t try this at home or on a crowded bus.

Alas, I eschew idolatry. So, I finally cast down the Toshiba beast from its demonic throne (did I mention you had to use Internet Explorer to configure it? Other browsers choked on it). I have seen the pits of router hell, firsthand. I bathed in the boiling depths of its lost packets and poorly configured IP forwards. Now, I have seen the light, and I can proclaim its truth and righteousness.

Behold, the Linksys WRT54GL (the “L” after it is important)! It was once believed to be extinct (kind of like the coelacanth), though reports of its demise were premature. The “L”, my fellow believers, stands for Linux (the Kernel!). This is the best router I’ve ever used. Why, you ask? Because I installed my choice of firmware onto it. It is a hacked-up version of the standard firmware.

Can you pimp your router? I can now do things like SSH into my router and run apps from it. I can set static IPs according to the MAC hardware addresses of every computer in the house. I can…(breath…breath)…I can take over the world! (Not that I would of course. Islam means peace. We Muslims are law-abiding citizens…ahem).

Anyway, I do recommend this router. It is the best, hands down, for home or small office use. Hey, it runs Linux. You cannot go wrong with that.

Anyway, the coelacanth. Scientists thought it was extinct, until they caught one off the coast of Madagascar.

Anyway, problem solved. NetworkManager does the trick. Now, before you say, “You dork, NetworkManger isn’t new,” I know that, but I never got it to work until I read a post on the ubuntu forums suggesting to comment out everything in: /etc/network/interfaces [EDIT: Comment out only the devices you want NetworkManager to manage. In other words, don't comment out the lo (lookback) device. You'll run into problems.]

For those of you new to GNU/Linux, you can comment out lines in a configuration file by putting a # sign in front of them.

Anyway, on Kubuntu Dapper, I simply installed KNetworkManager (an Opensuse project, KDE frontend for NetworkManager).

As soon as I installed it and commented out the above-mentioned file, it detected wireless networks and allowed me to connect effortlessly.

The other problem I faced, however, is that the wireless interface is down after resuming from Suspend-to-RAM. To fix that, I found this blog post and installed this modified version of the fellow’s script. [make sure to change the interface name from "eth1" to whatever yours is...you can run ifconfig to find out.]

Now, wherever I go, I can effortlessly connect to wireless networks. It remembers the networks you’ve connected to and saves the important info, so you can connect automatically the next time.

On another related note, I installed Kpowersave, another Opensuse project which is much better than Klaptop, in my opinion.

GNU/Linux on the the laptop has arrived, folks.

When did printing become such a difficult exercise? I have 52 pages of overdue notices (3 or 4 notices per page, do the math). Anyway, I’ve tried my desktop printer and the big lab copier/printer $10,000 behemoth. My desktop printer printed a blank page, and the behemoth printed about 15 of them, three times.

Our automation system runs through a Windows 2000 terminal server, so the printing system is really messy. Actually, it’s Citrix MetaFrame. Anyway, whatever it actually is, it sucks. This summer, we’re supposed to get a new system, hopefully web-based. They’ve already ruled out any “open source” systems (and I don’t feel like trying to fight it), so we’ll have to hope and pray that we get something semi-decent.

Right now I’m going to see if I can paste this into a word processor, page-by-page.

There are a couple of sad things to note about this sorry-excuse-for-a-port.

1. It’s not free (as in freedom that is). It’s proprietary…about like installing Opera as your web browser.

2. It hasn’t actually been ported, despite their claims. It runs through Wine, and although I can’t imagine how cheesy and windows-ish the interface must look, I also can’t bear the thought of downloading it and making fun of it.

3. Digikam, F-Spot, heck, even LPhoto are very good photo management programs for KDE/GNOME desktops and they’re free and open source. Why then, would someone want Picasa? Just because they can?

I understand what Google is trying to do, make “Linux” popular. They’ve made over 100 patches for Wine, to improve it in running other Windows proprietary apps. The problem I see with this is that they’re too little, too late. I can understand someone who runs a proprietary app when there is not viable free software alternative, but with photo management, that simply isn’t the case.

I predict that those few people who do download it will probably grow tired of its bugginess (not to mention, ugliness) and lack of integration with their desktop and come running back to Digikam or F-Spot. Until I can download the Picasa source code and it’s integrated with my web browser, e-mail program, and word processors seamlessly (i.e. drag and dropping), exports to my photo gallery, creates digital mpeg videos, edits my photos, allows me to rate them, categorize them, open them in Gimp for superior editing, show me an Open-GL-based slide show with cool digital effects, and so on, it has zero chance of replacing my Digikam.

OK, seriously, my wife gave me an early birthday present (guess she couldn’t wait), the Wacom Graphire 4×5. It’s silver and oh so hot (you’d think my wife would be jealous). Anyway, the Kernel (2.6.15-23) detected it out of the box, as did X, but it didn’t work. Well, I should say, it worked, like a mouse, but it wasn’t detected by Gimp or Krita.

I spent an entire day trying to figure out why. Finally, I decided to go into my plain X session (I usually keep it running with ultra-light Fluxbox alongside XGL) to see if I could get it to work. Poof! It worked. Apparently XGL just doesn’t like Wacom. More people have experienced this same phenomenon.

Anyway, I’m loving its precision, the pressure sensitivity, and the overall feel. It’s almost like drawing on a piece of paper (in fact, sometimes I forget). Both the stylus and eraser work flawlessly. So far, I’m liking Krita more than Gimp when it comes to drawing and painting, whereas I prefer Gimp (and all of her pretty effects) for actually editing of my artwork.

I might post some samples soon, inshaAllah.

Anyway, I finally decided to do what I’d been contemplating all along, switch to Kubuntu on MotherBrain. I have enjoyed running Kubuntu on the Apple iBook, and I thought it would be a nice switch. For one, upgrades can be run simply by telling apt-get to do so. No more downloading (or buying) CD’s.

So, anyway, I did need ONE CD, the Dapper Flight 7 live cd. This was a real treat. I remember when I first tried SimplyMEPIS. It was a live CD that had the installation program built into it. Well, Kubuntu has apparently adopted this philosophy. While the system was being installed on my computer, I was surfing the web and checking e-mail. That certainly beats watching a screen with a little blue bar going across for two hours. The Kubuntu install was done in minutes.

That’s not to say I didn’t encounter a few problems. Actually, they weren’t technically even Kubuntu related. I have two hard drives with multiple partitions on each (hey don’t criticize me. I have my reasons). I copied a whole bunch of data to another drive before installing Kubuntu (you know, to back up). Well, I copied some files that probably shouldn’t have been copied. The filesystem didn’t like it, and I had to run reiserfsck a few times before Kubuntu would start. But hey, better to find out sooner than later. So, if anything, that’s a credit to the efficiency of GNU/Linux.

To make a long story even longer, everything is now running smoothly. I haven’t installed the printer yet, though, and reports of the (K)ubuntu printing issue are well known. We’ll see how it goes.

Oh yes, and XGL is running even better than it did for me under SuSE, if that doesn’t rattle your brain.

Anyway, the count in our house is now Kubuntu: 3 SuSE: 2. My wife’s desktop and laptop both still have SuSE. She’s calling me a sellout. I call myself expanding my horizons. You know, testing the waters. Oh my God! I sound like Shoe!

Me: “OK, sure.”

The girl walks all the way to the back of the library to the “collective biographies” section and then returns with a Gossip Girl book.

Me: “Where did you get that?”

Girl (points to the biography section): “From back there.”

Me: “Why was it back there?”

Girl: “I hid it there so no one else could get it.”

Me: “…”

I then check out the books and smile to the girl as she leaves.

You have to pick your battles, and there was no way I was going to win that one.

I decided to check the debian package to see if it was present, and it was. I installed it, and now I have a working baghira sidebar.

That is all fine and dandy, except I prefer not to use Kontact. Instead, I use the separate programs, including KOrganizer. Well, on my calendar, no birthdays, and there’s no plugin for birthdays.

Simple Solution:

Control Center –> KDE Components –> KDE Resources –> Calendar

Now, click “Add” and select “birthdays-resource”

Poof, automagically, you will now have all of your contacts’ birthdays in your calendar. You can also set how many days in advance you’d like to be reminded. This is particularly useful for you dolts who forget your wives’ birthdays, yours truly excluded.

Here are some of the features that make Basket simply fantastic:

1. You can literally paste anything into it, text, images, links, etc.
2. It has multiple tabs for more than one project. I usually keep one “general” tab and then other specific projects
3. It can be exported to an HTML page that can then be printed.
4. You can type and/or paste rich text (i.e. styles such as bold or italics).
5. There are different formats, such as stacks, to-do lists, clipboard managers, etc.
6. For web designers, you can paste colors.
7. Mirror entire folders.
8. Search as you type.

You can check it out at the Basket website. It is still in a development version, although it is stable and easy to use, and it is already available for install in most GNU/Linux distributions and for FreeBSD.

Umm Zahra filmed the video with our new Samsung SCD-353 DVC camera. It’s a pretty nice, mid-range digital camcorder that only cost me $160 (Amazon has it listed for $311.99 — I got it refurbished). Anyway, I had to use Mac OS X to do the video editing. Yes, sad but true. But iMovie (the Apple program I used) doesn’t export to any usable format besides Quicktime. So, I then had to use FFMPEG to convert it to mpeg format, which is what you’ll see. Unfortunately, there is no working video editing software for Linux PPC (Kino has some powerpc bugs), and I only have a firewire port on the laptop.

I ordered a $10 firewire card for MotherBrain (my desktop), that should be powerful enough to run Cinelerra, which is much more powerful than iMovie.

I think I might be a geek. Tell me what you think. Be honest.

1. We have 5 computers and only one television.
2. My toddler has an iMac.
3. I name my computers.
4. I have a server (in some remote location) hosting this web site and about 50 others.
5. All of my computers have Linux on them, even my wife’s and daughter’s.
6. My wife and I sometimes chat with each other online (while we’re sitting right next to each other on our computers).
7. When I want to take something upstairs, I type “fish://192.168.254.102” and click and drag it.
8. Sometimes, in the middle of web designing or writing, I forget to eat.
9. The phrase, “httpd dead but pid file exists” actually means something to me.
10. My daughter cannot read but she can open Xine, start Dora the Explorer, maximize it to full screen, and turn up the volume.
11. When I go over someone’s house I ask for their WEP key.
12. If someone asks me if I’ve caught the latest virus that’s been going around, I reply, “No, I run Linux.”
13. Apple is not food. A thread is not a piece of string. A child process has nothing to do with kids. And I can assure you that fsck is actually good and is not a cute way to write a curse word.

So, does that make me a geek?

Let me clarify in saying that we do own a television and a DVD player, but we do not have cable or an antenna. We get zero TV channels. I cannot tell you how liberating it has been these past three years. I used to be one of those people who complained about not having time to do things, never realizing that it was the TV taking up that time. Even watching the news is unnecessarily time consuming. They repeat the same 5 stories over and over. I used to be a channel surfer. Now, I’m a writer, a storyteller, and so much more. My wife and I have time to read books together.

I’m not even going to get into all of the haram things on TV, because it is possible to avoid them, but it takes a lot of effort. The advertising is also very intrusive. If we want to watch something, we just get a DVD. Yes, Dora the Explorer without commercials! And the DVD just keeps looping over and over…*sigh* So, like I said, the TV is used, but it is used the way we want it to be used. We are in full control, by the grace of Allah.

Whenever I am over someone’s house now and they inevitable have the TV on, I get so irritated with the constant commercial interruptions. It is like living in the country with fresh air and beautiful trees for years and to then visit the city with all of its noise, congestion, and pollution.

Alhamdulillah, I just got my three-year chip, and I could not be happier. Now pass the popcorn, my favorite book is on.

I really didn’t know what to do at first, but then I decided that it probably needed some oil. Enter Joann fabric store and their magical sewing machine oil (which was 40% off). A couple of drops on the bottom where the thingamajig that the fan spins around is located (you have to take apart your power supply to do this — please remember where all the parts go. Don’t e-mail me and expect me to be able to tell you), and poof! It’s now purring like a kitty…a cute kitty.

It’s so nice to be back on MotherBrain, and back with XGL. Long live MotherBrain…inshaAllah.

Note: You must use high grade sewing machine oil or something that can handle high-speed fans. WD-40 will not work. Happy lubing

The genres are pretty much unlimited. Although most people think of comics in relation to super heroes and possibly manga-style martial artsy type books, there are a number of graphic novels that cover everything from high-school (there are even Lizzie McGuire graphic novels) to the Holocaust. That leads me to the next point, which is that graphic non-fiction is an excellent resource, especially for students who are struggling with research because of their low reading levels.

I have non-fiction books about topics such as Harriet Tubman, the Titanic, and the American Revolution, all in “comic book” format.

Granted, it does add a little work to your plate. Not all graphic novels are suitable for young people, but I am assuming that if you are a school or children’s librarian, you make those kind of judgment calls with all books.

Please do not be deceived into thinking that this cheats kids out of “real reading.” Not only does it encourage reading, but the graphic novels themselves are an excellent source of “reading practice,” and studies have shown that the reading level of graphic novels is actually higher than many traditional adolescent novels. After all, they can get away with higher level words because they have pictures to describe them. Kids love them, and any librarian who deprives them of what they love to read is just evil.

**Climbs down from the pulpit**

It is a fantasy/adventure book, but I’m hoping it will cross all genres, inshaAllah, attracting the interests of all types of people. My goal is to have the manuscript complete by June, editing finished by October, and publishing sometime after that. Lantern Torch will be doing all of the editing and publishing, but I might hire some others to assist along the way. Final printing will be done by Lulu, inshaAllah, but I do reserve the right to print other editions.

Writing is fun, and the deeper I get into the world, the more I start to feel as though I’m a part of it, that we all are, and I hope that all of you readers out there will want to become a part of it as well (in other words, I hope it doesn’t suck).

Also, for more information on the fast-developing status of Linux running on intel-based Apple computers, please see the Mactel-Linux site.

Some people have wondered why anyone would want to run GNU/Linux on a Mac when OS X appears to be a fully-functioning “UNIX-based” OS. The answer is simple: freedom. If I install Kubuntu on a Mac, for example, I decide what goes in and what stays out of it. There is a plethora of free software available for it (sorry, fink doesn’t cut it) at the click of a button. It runs fast, is extremely powerful (OS X should be called OS Ex-Unix..they crippled it). Most importantly, when it comes time to upgrade, I don’t have to run out to the store and pick up the latest $110 version and then pray that it’s still compatible with all of my current shareware and proprietary software. It’s just about freedom and power. Freedom IS power.

1. To fix the “no windows in the taskbar” issue, go into “Control Center -> Desktop -> Taskbar -> Show Windows from all Desktops. (you have to do this before you enable Compiz. Afterwards, it will disappear.

2. To fix a problem that I had with wobbly windows kind of freezing a little, run the System Monitor applet and set the refresh rate to 50 msec. I know, it’s annoying, but it works. In Gnome, you can fix this issue by editing the Compiz gconf entry and changing the refresh rate to 60.

Any new apps that are started that normally sit in the systray, disappear. There is a patch for this somewhere on the Ubuntu forums, but it requires recompiling the entire kdelibs. It’s not a big deal to me. As long as you start the program before Compiz, it will stay in the systray.

Desktop Pager does not show more than one desktop, but that’s kind of a non-issue since you can switch desktops with ctrl-alt-arrow key. The only time it would be an issue is if you totally forget what is on the other desktops, but it’s more fun to spin the cube to find them anyway.

I’ll post screenshots tomorrow, insha’Allah.

It’s not so bad, though. Gnome is, after all, free software in every sense of the word. Also, I can still run any of the programs that I run with KDE.

Regarding the whole Direct Rendering thing, it is supposed to work with the current Nvidia driver on my GeForce FX 6200, but it does not. Anyway, I have to start another regular X server on another screen to play games. Surprisingly, this works well. After all, running games in Window-Maker or some other light window manager is much faster anyway. In the past, I’ve often run intense games in failsafe X.

Gawsh, I sound like a total addict. What did I expect though? It’s like eating steak for the first time. You just can’t go back to your old hamburgers. I’m an Xgl-fiend. As I’m writing this, I’m contemplating how to get it working on this iBook. I’m sick…

It is everything I imagined and more. It’s extremely pleasing to the eyes, smooth, fast, and useful (not just cute).

Nevertheless, I can’t use it all the time, for a number of reasons:

1. I can’t get it to work right in KDE. The compiz window manager is for Gnome. Although I was able to replace KWin with compiz, the taskbar ignores new windows. That’s simply unacceptable. Also, the pager and other kicker features simply do not work.

2. I won’t use Gnome. It is just not my preference, and I think KDE is superior for numerous reasons, which, mentioning all of them would make this post unduly long. Although Xgl is tempting, my preference for KDE greatly outweighs it.

3. Most importantly, Direct Rendering is apparently inoperable with Xgl. (someone can correct me if I’m wrong). That means no 3D games or anything else that requires OpenGL.

I am hopeful that, when KDE 4 comes out, Xgl will be ready for prime time.

To top it all off, I received more chairs. I now have four chairs per table like, as the children would say, “a real library.”

Well, anyway, I’m going home, inshaAllah.

Anyway, the drivers were reversed engineered by some software geniuses, and, after months of trial and error, Linux (the Kernel) now has a driver for the Broadcom chipset, which is also on many PC network cards and a LinkSys router.

I did not compile the drivers from source, so I cannot predict if you will be successful in doing so. The latest Kernel that I’m using, 2.6.15, comes with the driver installed and enabled. Getting the card to connect to a wireless network and retrieve an IP address was an entirely different beast.

For that I went to a Gentoo forum and found the solution to my problem.

The following formula worked for me on the iBook G4:

1. First I had to steal the firmware code from Apple (it sounds more scandalous that it was). I went into Mac OS X and, I uploaded the file /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirPort2.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleAirPort2 to a remote location on lanterntorch.net

2. I then downloaded that firmware package to Linux and used fwcutter to cut out the firmware. I then installed it into /lib/firmware (please follow the directions that come with it).

3. Interestingly, my particular computer kept assigning the broadcom card a network ID of “eth0_clashed.” This was unacceptable. So, I went into “/etc/modprobe.d/aliases” and added an alias “eth1 bcm43xx”.

4. Next, I needed to get the card to connect to a wireless network and receive an IP address from DHCP. The normal methods were not working. It had to be done in a certain order.

To accomplish this, I made the following script:

#!/bin/sh
ifconfig eth1 down
ifconfig eth1 up
iwconfig eth1 channel #
iwconfig eth1 rate #M
iwconfig eth1 essid “AP_ESSID”

Of course, generic “#” and “AP_ESSID” were filled with real values. I then made a menu entry in the Kmenu so that I could run the script easily. I also mapped it to a shortcut key-combo. I have two shortcuts, “Command/Apple + H” gives me a wireless connection at home. “Command/Apple + W” gives me a wireless connection at work.

My standard KDE 3.5.1 desktop

Mozilla Firefox on my desktop. Notice the composite shadows. Unlike the iBook, which uses EXA, this is rendered using Nvidia’s 3D driver.

KWord, over a translucent Firefox.

A really fun game, called Neverball.

This is a screenshot of Akregator for KDE. It is the RSS reader that I use to view all of your blogs. If you see your blog on the list, you should feel really cool right about now.

The eye candy is rendered using EXA (an X.org 7.0 feature).

Here is a picture of it with some windows open.

Here is a picture of me running Mac-on-Linux, which, in the latest release, allows me to run Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger inside of a window, inside of Linux.

Here is another mac-on-Linux screenie.

This is the program that I use to blog. It’s actually a Gnome program called Drivel.

This is a screen shot of this blog post.

To listen, click here

Use this link to subscribe

There are 5 distinct sounds. Can you guess what they are?

In all, I think I spent about $3,500 (yes, it was fun), but to all you non-Librarians: No, that’s NOT a lot of money. In fact, that’s practically nothing. We need a LOT more books.

Anyway, I cannot complain, alhamdulillah. We’ve got a good bunch of books this Quarter.

I admit defeat.

My wife, who is no idiot, but who is certainly not a techie, needed to send a picture of herself to her father. Of course, she is running SuSE Linux 10.0 on a laptop, with KDE as her default desktop. She had Digikam open, looking at her picture, and she asked me, “How do I make this an attachment in my e-mail?”

At first, I was going to explain to her how she can go into the menu in Kmail and click, “attachment” or something like that. But then I thought, “Why make it hard, when KDE makes it easy.” Everything is integrated so well in KDE. So, I said, “Why don’t you just try dragging it?” (having NO idea whether or not that would actually work).

She clicked and dragged the picture from digikam into the e-mail that she was preparing to send to her father. Poof! A little message popped up and asked if she was trying to make an attachment. She clicked it, and voila! Who said things have to be complicated to be good?

The kids had a 1/2 day today. After they left, I taught a workshop to the teachers on Information Literacy and the research process. Kids these days have NO clue how to research. Anyway, you can download the PDF notes, exported from my Apple Keynote presentation. I tried to undo the Keynote mess and convert it back to an Oasis OpenDocument Presentation, but it became more headache than anything. So, if you want to use the presentation, you’ll have to recreate it yourself.

After that, I actually had a departmental meeting (which is a rarity) with the Computer Specialist. Apparently, Apple is pushing schools to get onto the podcasting bandwagon. Well, since it’s free, they do not have to push me very hard. We are going to start podcasting at our school, insha’Allah Teachers will be able to podcast lessons, homework assignments, etc. And hopefully, students will want to podcast too.

Some countries have adopted laws prohibiting software that enables users to escape from Digital Restrictions Management. DRM is fundamentally incompatible with the purpose of the GPL, which is to protect users’ freedom; therefore, the GPL ensures that the software it covers will neither be subject to, nor subject other works to, digital restrictions from which escape is forbidden.

For Linus, this seems to be extreme. It is “not a software issue,” in his mind. But Mr. Torvalds, whom I respect and admire, must surely realize that this is bigger than he, bigger than Linux, and bigger than “open source” software. Linus needs to realize that freedom matters.

According to the terms of the current GPL v2, when TiVo utilized Linux as their embeded operating system, inserted proprietary software on top of it, and then utilized DRM, they were still following the “letter of the law” of the GPL. Nevertheless, they certainly broke the “spirit of the GPL” by ignoring the freedom of their users. Yes, Linus, it is about freedom. Torvalds thinks that DRM is not a software license issue and that it should be left up to licenses like the Creative Commons License to prevent DRM, but since when do major artists choose the licenses for their own music, movies, etc? That means we’d be leaving it up to the production and distribution companies to decide which license (and Digital Restrictions Management) to use, while it seems they’ve already made their decision.

The clause in the GPL v3 essentially says, if you want to use GPLed software, which is increasingly becoming the most popular choice for embeded devices, you MUST release any encryption specifications for anything that is DRMed. Linus thinks that this is getting into the “political” or “religious” aspect of free software, which is not his concern. Software is not to be a political issue, he says. But by rejecting the GPL v3, he’s making it a political issue. After all, adopting the GPL v3 doesn’t hurt his ability to develop his software. So, by rejecting it, he’s making a political stance, which is undoubtedly his right. But at what cost?

It’s kind of funny. With the movie industry trying to encourage people not to download pirated movies, you’d think they’d be a little nicer to the honest citizens, like us, who want to watch movies but who don’t want the commercials and junk that comes with cable TV.

Instead, they pull stunts like this, and I think it’s about time for me to fire up Bittorrent.

When will they ever learn?

I am implementing some much-needed security measures (including disabling wget, curl, fetch, lynx, and any other method of downloading files). Almost without exception, the attacker has used wget, curl, and fetch. Also, OneUmmah’s CMS needs to be updated to the latest version to patch any of the obvious PHP security holes.

I guess I should have known from the beginning that OneUmmah.net would be the main target. It is one of the larger, longer-running Islamic sites on the web (since 1999). Other major sites, such as al-islam.org, link to it. So, it should have been no surprise to me that someone would attack it, especially in light of the constant anti-Islamic rhetoric that hapless doornails post on MuslimMessage.net.

I also have to apologize to any of the secondary sites that are hosted on OneUmmah.net. It does not affect our other hosted TLD sites on LanternTorch.net, but it certainly affects any subdomains.

For anyone who needs some Apache server security solutions, please check out ModSecurity.

Anyway, here are Novell’s videos and images of the new and exciting Xgl eye candy. And yes, you can download the source code. It might have been closed development, but it’s definitely free, as in freedom. Look for distro binaries in the very near future…I’m sure Novell already has them in the pipeline for theirs.

“The end result is that we will be contacting the vendors of these applications, asking them to partner with Novell to port their software to Linux,” said CoolSolutions site editor Scott Morris.

Strange…very strange indeed. I use GNU/Linux so that I won’t have to mess with Windows or its proprietary applications and their annoying licenses and access keys. Obviously, Novell is trying to reach out to people in the business world who need certain business applications, like Adobe Photoshop. Apparently the people at Adobe just don’t like making money. Even Dreamworks SKG, which runs all Linux-based desktops, couldn’t get them to port Photoshop to Linux, even though the rest of their proprietary friends did. So, they’re using Photoshop via VMware.

The whole thing seems rather silly to me.

Once you get over the whole name thing, we have to acknowledge that this is an important step in the right direction. Having Apple software on x86 means that there will be more software standards and more compatibility across the board. Apple, which has been more forthcoming as far as releasing source code (Darwin and Safari for example), than Microsoft, has the opportunity to bridge the gap that currently exists between proprietary and free software. Apple has also been more willing to work with standards (such as the more standards-compliant browser, Safari contrasted with the coding disaster that is Internet Explorer). Porting applications to and from OS X should be much easier with a standard processing platform, if they are willing to cooperate.

Whether or not that will actually happen remains to be seen. What we should hope for is that open standards will prevail over patents and proprietary licenses. We already know that GNU/Linux and BSD-variants run on nearly all platforms, including PPC. Now, that will be expanded to a new area of Dual core Intel-based systems. It is also significant to note how much the free software movement has already taken advantage of the AMD64 processors. All of this leaves “Wintel” in the lurch trying to catch up with current standards.

Right now it would seem that Vista will be another mess of licenses, activation, and pirating. Nevertheless, the hope is that increased pressure from a growing free software movement will leave no room for anyone to choose proprietary software. It has always been a pain for someone who prefers the Apple hardware, to have to deal with the PPC binary incompatibility with x86 binaries. With that problem most likely eliminated, the only question to ask is why would anyone prefer proprietary software?

Contrary to what some people have written, x86 Macs will not increase competition for Linux, instead they will increase the likelihood that someone will explore an alternative to Windows and ultimately learn about the undeniable benefits of moving from partially free software (OS X) to completely free software.

The goal, by the next release is to have 100% sync with Apples KJS. KDE developers (or at least one) now have access to Apple’s repository and can merge KDE patches back into their repository as well.

It looks as though cooperation between Apple and KDE is finally coming into sync (no pun intended). Just to let you know, this does not change my criticisms of Apple and their usage of proprietary software layered over free software. Hopefully, they will change that in the future.

I decided to try out a tech demo of some of the features, namely a little app called “Kruisecontrol (http://home.arcor.de/hans.oischinger/kruisekontrol-0.1.tar.gz)” that Hans Oischinger apparently threw together. When I first downloaded it, I ran the normal ./configure, make, but “make” gave me an ugly error about not having “automake 1.6.” I took a chance and replaced the “admin” directory with the one from my kde 3.5.0 source directory. I then ran, “make -f Makefile.cvs” It made new configue files. I then ran “./configure, make, and make install” successfully.

The program allows you to take a new approach to task switching. Sometimes, the taskbar just doesn’t cut it if you don’t remember what the names of all your windows are. You end up alt-tabbing through all of them. Well, with kruisecontrol, you press a shortcut key, and the normal “alt-tab” switcher comes up, but as you move your mouse over each name, the other windows fly off of the screen leaving only the one you have highlighted. If you click one, the other windows return leaving your choice on top.

For a preview of other Coolness features, check out the videos here (http://www.lanterntorch.org/video/exposite-ng.avi), here (http://www.lanterntorch.org/video/exposite1.avi), and here (http://www.lanterntorch.org/video/exposite2.avi).

Coolness.

EXA is lightning fast, and all of this without a proprietary ATI driver.

Many people have complained about the decision to not make Xgl a priority (not that it was really a decision, since only one guy was working on it), the decision to work on EXA so that it would be ready for 6.9/7.0, and the privatization of Xgl by Novell (by hiring the one fellow who was working on it).

The main complaint in the “open source” development circles is that Novell is somehow doing a disservice to the project. I disagree. First of all, it is not as if these people who are complaining were working on the project. If they were, Novell would have seen no need to hire the guy and make it a priority. As it stands, this man can now work on it full time instead of just when he “has time.”

Secondly, I am forced again to distinguish between “free software” and “open source.” Novell is not privatizing the source code (as far as I know, they cannot). And that is the nature of free software. If I choose to privately write a program and release on GPL, I am not obligated to include you in the project development. GPL is not meant to be democratic (sorry to all you die-hard Americans). In fact, it is more of a socialistic concept. If you don’t like what I’m doing with my project, you’re free to take the source code and make your own version.

At any rate, Xgl will come, but I think it is important to do it the right way (without proprietary video card drivers). That will take time, and cooperation from the OpenGL folks, as well as the large hardware companies.

I have a plan/theory about free software and open hardware development that I will discuss later. For now, I am content with EXA, because I have drop shadows on windows, translucency, and other cool effects that I didn’t have before. The only real drawback with this release is that all the drivers (most disappointingly, the Intel i810) were not finished. Other than that, X11R6.9 is an overall success, and coupled with KDE (http://www.kde.org) 3.5, it is quite the eyecandy treatment my laptop needed.

Mac OS X, eat your heart out (gosh that’s such a nasty expression).

It is available for download now, and most appropriately, they’ve been slashdotted. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect)

They said no, stating that they intended to use an operating system that is “completely open source.” No room for half-steppin’.

The students will be able to use the laptops at school and at home. One power solution possibility is a crank generator that will power up the laptop’s battery. The best part of all is that these laptops will run a version of GNU/Linux (http://www.linux.org).

For more info, check out the MIT Media Lab site (http://laptop.media.mit.edu/).

I am also giving away free software CDs to any willing students and/or teachers. The CD is Kubuntu Live CD, which comes with software from the OpenCD project (http://www.theopencd.org/). In addition to the Kubuntu Live experience, users can also install Windows software, such as AbiWord, OpenOffice.org, and Firefox (http://www.spreadfirefox.com). Pretty cool!

The only probablems I’ve noticed are some Konqueror crashes with
various javascript functions.� Other than that, it seems to work
very well.

Here are some of the cool features:

Multiple search engines in the Konqueror search bar
Ad-blocker built into Konqueror
Those cool pop-up bubble thingies for the whole kicker (not just
the buttons).� You get it for the pager (which lists every window
open on a desktop –also shows the icon and/or thumbnail), the clock
–showing every timezone you have selected, and the taskbar.
Kopete now supports AOL chat and a whole host of other stuff I don’t use.
Adding an applet to the kicker produces a whole dialog installation box.
The taskbar now has three styles: elegant, classic, and
transparent.� This makes it look much nicer depending on the type
of kicker you prefer.� The taskbar now blends right in.
New throbber for Konqueror.

There’s lots of other features (possibly more important ones), but those are the cool ones I can think of right now.

Most people are busy talking about KDE (http://www.kde.org) 4.� So, 3.5 proably won’t make a lot of noise.

All emphasis is mine:

You may not use the Software on non-PC products, devices, or
embedded in any other product, including, but not limited to, mobile
devices, internet appliances, set top boxes (STB), handhelds, PDAs,
phones, web pads, tablets, game consoles, TVs, gaming machines, home
automation systems, or any other consumer electronics devices or
mobile/cable/satellite/television or closed system based service.

You may not sell, rent, lease or sublicense the Software, without the explicit
written consent of Opera Software ASA.

The Software is protected by copyright laws and international treaties.

All intellectual property rights such as but not limited to patents,
trademarks, copyrights or trade secret rights related to the Software
are the property of and remains vested in Opera Software ASA/its
suppliers.

You shall not modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile or
disassemble the Software or any part thereof or otherwise attempt to
derive source code or create derivative works therefrom.

You are not allowed to remove, alter or destroy any proprietary, trademark or copyright markings or notices placed upon or contained with the Software.

As you can see, Opera is now free as in beer.� It is not, however,
free as in freedom.� When it asked me if I agreed or disagreed to
the EULA, I clicked disagree because I was just being honest.�
Well, it closed the installation program.� Hmph!

(By the way, I’m typing this on Firefox (http://www.spreadfirefox.com)).

My real project with the iBooks, however, is blog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)ging. I want the kids to have their own Drupal for this one. It’s pretty cool, and GPL.

The Drupal system allows teachers to monitor all the blog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)s (teachers must approve them BEFORE they’re posted). Students can remain anonymous to the outside world while their teachers still know who’s who.

Now, training the students should be a piece of cake, but training the teachers might prove difficult. I welcome any creative ideas.

2. Like all BSD (http://www.bsd.org/)s, it uses tcsh by default instead of bash. Not a problem for me because, when I installed KDE (http://www.kde.org), Konsole defaults to bash.

Oh, wait, that makes three things I noticed. The third thing is that the terminal had no color. There was no color-coded “ls” that I’m used to with Linux (http://www.linux.org). It turns out that, for whatever reason, Apple did not ship it with the color coding. So, I downloaded fileutils-4.1 and compiled it. That gave me the color coding, but how to enable it by default?

Someone’s blog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog) (sorry don’t remember who) told me to use an alias in the “.bashrc” file in the home directory (i.e. ~/.bashrc). A simple one-liner:

alias ls=”ls –color=auto”

Now, I have pretty colors. Seriously, it’s not just so it looks nice. It’s a lot easier to tell what is a folder and what is a file when the folders are blue. Also executable files show up in green.

Huzzah!

I’ve long advocated adding moral education to classrooms so that students could learn how to live as peaceful citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation (or lack thereof). But that will never happen as long as the teachers themselves are morally bankrupt and corruption is rampant. They are the role models for the next generation, and the future is looking more and more bleak everyday.

On the other hand, I just bought this wonderful $18 wet/dry cordless vacuum cleaner from Amazon.com. Go figure.

My only conclusion is that these adults, themselves, have long since
given up higher level thinking.� They are content with the
mundane.� Thinking takes too much work and too much time away from
the simple pleasures of ignorance.� They never question
anything.� I’m sure they did at one time, but there was probably
an adult over them who crushed any dreams of intellectual maturation
and forced them into dormancy.

For that I can say that most Americans do not think deeply and never
ponder their own realities.� Why are we happy with mythology
(particularly Greek Mythology) but afraid of philosophy?� Is it
because mythology is pretend and philosophy is real?� Is it
because philosophy challenges you to think and mythology helps you
forget reality?�

What I’ve found is that when a teacher starts to ask the deeper
questions, students get more involved.� They don’t want to sit
around and recite dates of historical events while ignoring the
significance of them.� They don’t want to be told a particular war
was beneficial to America or the world and not be allowed to decide for
themselves whether or not it was beneficial.� And what of free
thought and free expression?

Challenge your students and encourage them to question everything, even you.

I decided to take on the task of installing KDE (http://www.kde.org).� Yeah, I know
that sounds crazy, but how daunting could it be?� First, I
installed XDarwin (a version of xorg for Macs), kind of by accident (I
could have installed Apple X11).� Next, I started installing
KDE (http://www.kde.org).� Well, lo and behold, there are no binaries for KDE (http://www.kde.org) on
Darwin!� Surely someone has installed KDE (http://www.kde.org) on Darwin before and
uploaded their binaries!� I guess not.� Fink started
downloading each kde tar.gz source and compiling it.

I left it alone for several hours until it stopped
unsuccessfully.� After several times of giving up and even
installing Gnome (http://www.gnome.org), I went back to try KDE (http://www.kde.org) again.� I let it go all
day and well into the night building from source.

Finally, I had a working KDE (http://www.kde.org) desktop.� In full-screen mode, which
I prefer, it works pretty well.� It has no problem with Apple’s
Airport Extreme wireless card, as installing Linux (http://www.linux.org) would have caused.

I had to enable anti-aliasing of fonts (can’t remember how at the moment), and everything was looking crisp.

What’s really cool is that, even in fullscreen, you can switch back and
forth between the KDE (http://www.kde.org) desktop and the Mac OS X desktop.� I had to
change the key combo to get it to work (ctrl-option-F11).

There are, of course, some things that don’t work.� I can’t get
Kmail to work, but I don’t really need it anyway.� There is no
flash player for darwin, but I hate flash anyway.� Then there are
just some packages that Fink doesn’t include, for whatever
reason.� The whole kdemultimedia package is missing (K3B, Kaffeine,
etc.)� I can use Mplayer as a video player, but there is no plugin
package for it either.� One day I might try downloading the
sources and compiling them, but it’s not really crucial.

I am currently typing this in Firefox (http://www.spreadfirefox.com), on my KDE (http://www.kde.org) desktop, on Mac OS X,
on an iBook.� How’s that for odd?� Who’da thunk it?

I’m going to spare you my review of the iBook, because there have been
enough of those.� Frankly, it works pretty well for most purposes.

Nevertheless, it has made me think about software freedom a little more
closely.� What was Apple’s true goal in using BSD (http://www.bsd.org/) as their
base?� What is their goal in sitting with the Free Software
Foundation and making sure that their Apple Public License was in line
with the FSF’s definition of free software?� My thinking is that
Apple still doesn’t get it.� They are still driven by greed and
probably took those actions with the hope of attracting open source
unix enthusiasts.�

They did not release the source code for their developer toolkits (at
least not to anyone who did not sign a non-disclosure agreement), and
they certainly did not release the source code for their desktop
system, which could have benefitted the free software world
tremendously.� Essentially, they did not release any of the
software that could have significantly benefitted the free software
community.

Instead, they’ve simply setup a BSD (http://www.bsd.org/)-branch called Darwin that is
open source. � In doing so, they have a community of volunteer
developers, who make their software better without paying them a
cent.� What are they really giving back to the community?

The real problem is that many people do not understand the difference
between free software and open source. � Something can be open
source and not be free.� Even Microsoft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft) has jumped on the open
source bandwagon, initiating their shared source programs.�
They like the idea of having a community of developers who can help
make their software better, without having to pay them.� But that
is not the point of free software. � At the end of the day, you
still have activate your copy of Windows and only install it on one
computer.� You cannot share the source code they’ve given you with
someone in say, Iran or China, for example.� You’ll be sued and
possibly thrown in jail.� That’s not freedom.

Free software means that I can take the source code, recompile it, put
my own logo on it, sell it to whomever I please, and give it away to
anyone or everyone.� Free software means that the only limitation
on your freedom is that you cannot transform free software into
non-free software.� It’s not about money.� Many companies,
such as Redhat (http://www.redhat.com), have been very successful at selling free software.

As desktop KDE (http://www.kde.org) Appeal Desktop Project)
we will see more users turning to it.� There are already more
Linux (http://www.linux.org) desktop users than Mac desktop users.� When it starts to
compete with Windows, we will see more and more companies realizing
that they cannot compete unless they open the doors on their secret
labs. � If it does not happen, they will simply cease to exist,
which is fine by me.

First let me clarify, that my experience was on an iBook, which
wouldn’t allow me to have administrative rights.� Had I been able
to login as an admin, I could have easily downloaded all of the
necessary software that I needed.� So, the point of this article
to not to say that Mac OS X cannot be made to work for the power
user. � The point is that Linux (http://www.linux.org) works out of the box.

Late yesterday afternoon, I received a digital video of a lesson that
the principal wanted to be aired the next day.� Simple enough, I
thought.� Mac OS X has a superior video editing� program, I
thought.� Linux (http://www.linux.org)’s video editing programs just aren’t ready for
primetime, I thought,� and iMovie is just so easy.

After completing a very nice editing job with iMovie, I was ready to
explore my export options.� I knew from the beginning that this
iBook did not have a DVD burner, so my forethought led me to believe
that I would be able to burn a VCD.� On Linux (http://www.linux.org), this is a simple
task that requires no additional downloads.

I soon discovered that iMovie/Quicktime will NOT burn a VCD out of the
box.� After searching through many forums, most people said to use
Roxio’s Toast.� Well, I can’t download and install anything
without admin rights, and Toast is not free anyway.� Strike one.

I then had the bright idea that, Hey, I have my SuSE (http://www.suse.com) Linux (http://www.linux.org) laptop
sitting right next to me on this counter, why not send the dv file
through the LAN via ssh. � My thought was that, since Mac OS X is
so cleverly based on BSD (http://www.bsd.org/), ssh would surely be enabled.� And I’m
sure the ssh client is enabled, but I could not access the terminal
without admin rights!� Who ever heard of such a thing!�
Anyway, no big deal, I’d just use Safari.� I knew Safari was based
on khtml, which is based on Konqueror.� I figured, Hey, Safari
probably has all the features of Konqueror and then some, right? �
Wrong.

Trying to do an sftp connect with Safari/Finder/etc proved pointless. Strike two.

I then decided to use FTP.� I quickly installed an FTP server on
my linux laptop (because I don’t normally use ftp at home).� No
problems on the Linux (http://www.linux.org) side.� I used Finder to connect to the Linux (http://www.linux.org)
FTP server.� I then thought, Yes!� I’m so close.� Now,
with all the Mac ease and sophistication, I’ll just drag and drop this
dv movie right into my /home folder on the Linux (http://www.linux.org) laptop. � �
ERROR, read only.� What?� I logged in as myself.� How
could my own home folder be read only?� I was sure it was
something on the Linux (http://www.linux.org) side.� I set overgenerous permissions, I
checked the pure-ftpd config file.� Finally, I even download
proftpd and compiled it from source, thinking that it must be a problem
on my Linux (http://www.linux.org) end.

Still nothing.� Surely, I’m not that dumb.� So, I checked the
mac forums again.� Apparently, connecting via FTP with Macs is
always read-only.� To actually upload something via FTP, you have
to, yep you guessed it, download (or buy) another program.� Strike three.

Tasting defeat, I closed the iBook and waited until this morning when I
could just copy the edited dv back to the camera and play it through
the media retrieval system from the tape.� No VCD.

So, like I said, Mac OS X might be good for power users after one has
spent quite a good deal of time downloading, finking, and compiling all
the necessary software, but why go through the trouble?� So, I can
have widgets?� I don’t think so.� I can download FreeBSD (http://www.bsd.org/) and
have a working system with everything I need (including widgets).�
Why use Apple’s WannaBSD (http://www.bsd.org/)?

If you want to play around on your computer with cute eye candy, get an
Apple.� If you want to do some serious computing, you can still
get an Apple, but make sure you install Linux (http://www.linux.org) on it.

Publishing companies threw a fit at the prospect of Google throwing
their copyrighted works out to the wolves. � At first glance, I
would tend to side with Google.� After all, free as in freedom, right?� Copyleft,
right?� Why should access to books be a luxury of the
rich?� Oh wait, isn’t that why we have libraries?� So, Google
is just a big electronic library, right?� Well, not exactly.

Yes, Google allows a person to find information and so does a library,
but that is where the similarity ends.� Google might look like a
library, but it is no ibiblio (http://www.ibiblio.org);
trust me.� Google is a business, a for-profit corporation setting
out to make billions of dollars through its investments.

It goes against the very nature of libraries.� No matter what
Google’s pure intentions might appear to be, their ultimate goal at
the end of the day is profit.� If they were a non-profit org,
perhaps I’d have a little more sympathy and would feel more eager to
apply the hey it’s just a big cybrary analogy.� As it stands,
however, I am more than a little skeptical.� I hope this doesn’t
affect my search engine ranking.

This is a test of BloGTK that I just installed on my laptop.

Test

Test