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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary

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

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