Tuesday, March 29, 2011

birthers

Donald Trump:

"It took me one hour to get my birth certificate. It's inconceivable that after four years of questioning, the president still hasn't produced his birth certificate."
(http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20048318-503544.html)

Please. These "birthers" are beyond ridiculous. This is no conspiracy conceived years ago by Mr. Obama's parents, hoping for the kid to become president someday. And Mr. Trump needs to get his facts straight.

Seriously, in Hawaii, birth certificates are not public record, and only family members can get copies of them. But Obama put his out there a few years ago in response to all this nonsense. Check out the following web pages:

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jun/27/obamas-birth-certificate-part-ii/

Happy now, birthers? I thought not.

We all know what this is really about.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

fedora and pclos

Okay, slow package management aside, and even though I don't care much for the PCLinuxOS forums, I'm more and more impressed by both Fedora and PCLOS as time passes. Seems that there's the possibility of breakage, perhaps more so than in some other distros, but I haven't had that problem come up (yet). Both distros just continue to impress me.

PCLOS recently updated to KDE 4.6.1 with no real issues other than that I had to set up the desktop all over again. I really liked how, when Firefox 4 came out, I was able to easily update Firefox via Synaptic within a day or two of FF4's release.

Fedora seems to have the best implementation of KDE4 among the distros I've tried (I'm using the KDE version of Fedora 14). Also, while Fedora might not be as nice "out-of-the-box" as PCLOS, it seems to be one of the most "solid" distros that I've got installed here.

Kudos to both.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

new chrome/chromium logos - ugh!

No, I don't like the new logos for Google Chrome and Chromium better than the old ones. Check out the article "New Chrome Logo."

The idea is that the new logos look better "as desktop icons." I don't use desktop icons, but I do use panel icons; and, fortunately, I can choose my own icons for my Linux panels.

For example, I'm using GNOME in Debian Squeeze. Right-clicking on my panel's Chromium icon and clicking on Properties brings up this window:



Clicking on the Chromium icon image there opens Nautilus up, showing the path to the .png image that's being used for the icon: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/chromium-browser.png.



Just to make sure that I'll still have the old icon available to use, I copied chromium-browser.png to another directory...

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

final four

Talk about going out on a limb! Obama's picks to make the Final Four: Duke, Kansas, Ohio State, and PIttsburgh. On the women's side, he picks Baylor, UConn, Stanford, and Tennessee.

In other words, he went with the #1 seed every time!

How boring.

How about going with the approach mentioned in this article:

March Madness Advice: 3 Tips for How to Actually Enjoy the NCAA Tournament

#1: Pick your team to win it all.
#2: Pick some REAL upsets.
#3: Cheer for the games, not your brackets.

Yeah, that's kinda how I feel! It ain't March Madness without the upsets! I personally enjoy the tournament a lot more when I don't fill out a bracket, but that's just me -- I almost feel un-American in saying that! But, hey, here's hoping that NONE of the #1 seeds make the Final Four!

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

cold heat

Last night, the Miami Heat dropped their 5th in a row, losing to Portland, 105-96, despite 38 points, 6 rebounds, and 5 assists from Dwyane Wade, and 31 points, 11 rebounds, and 8 assists from LeBron James.

Chris Bosh, the third man of Miami's "Big Three," managed only 7 points and 4 rebounds in 40 minutes of play.

What's kind of shocking is that the Heat now have as many losses as the Cleveland Cavaliers (LeBron's team last year) had all of last season! The Cavs went 61-21; Miami is now 43-21.

What a disappointment. Heat fans can only hope that this team can turn things around a make a run in the playoffs.

Even more disappointing for me is that, although I'm not a Heat fan, Wade is one of my favorite players; and another player who I like -- Mike Bibby, who was one of the best high school guards I've ever seen when he played at Phoenix's Shadow Mountain H.S. -- has joined the team. I'd like to see both of those guys do well, but it doesn't look like they're gonna make a difference for the Heat this year.

bodhi hit hard

Ouch!

Dedoimedo reviewed Bodhi Linux after, as he say Bodhi's main dev contacted him and asked him to take it "for a spin."

Be careful what you ask for. The title: "Bodhi Linux -- Minimalistic and pointless."

Bodhi comes with E17, and I have to agree with some of Dedoimedo's comments about that environment. I have it installed in PCLOS, but I'm finding that I don't log into it very much. My experiences with both Enlightenment (both E16 and E17) have been kinda fun, but... the word "unprofessional" comes to mind, I guess.

Bodhi is another Ubuntu spin-off. As Dedoimedo says, "Seriously, do we really need another Ubuntu pimpage...?" Hm.

And, he sure did run into a lot of issues with the distro, even though he did state that it was an early release.

From his concluding comments:

   Bodhi Linux is pointless. There's no other word to describe it.
   The distribution lacks pretty much everything to be functional, starting with a text editor and continuing everywhere. There are many bugs and problems, both visual and functional. The desktop theme is designed to be stylish, but it manages to be cramped and archaic, with the old-looking font decorations that pale against the typical modern Gnome or KDE stuff.
   But even if you ignore the aesthetics, Bodhi Linux gives you no reason to use it. Absolutely everything you might expect from a typical desktop is missing, save the Web browser, which too lacks the bling-bling demanded by today's users [...] 
   Dedoimedo says no to Bodhi. Perhaps one day.