MrCopilot

Just under a month after America's most historic election since the Kenedys, it feels like the perfect time for bit of sober considered reflection. At tmes throughout the general election, it felt as if we were all part of an old fashioned 80s style grand wager. Randolf: Isn't it a wonderful time to still be alive, and wealthy, Mortimer? Mortimer: We've certainly witnessed and profited on a chunk of history. Randolf: Indeed, capitalizism defeating comunism, the dot com bubble over shadowed by the Internet, the triumph of equal rights over racism. Mortimer: I think the latter may be a bit premature. Randolf: Surely, with african americans, and other minorities in congress, on the supreme court, not to mention cabinet posts, America must be seen as an society of diverse equals. Mortimer: But never the top post. I'd wager a well educated, articulate, fully qualified black candidate with a populist platform would lose to almost any rich white candidate no matter how incompe...

Bracing myself for another ill conceived, passionate argument for the exaggerated, premature death of the BSD family of Operating Systems, I clicked the following link. The End of BSD Instead I stumbled across a new definition of what I thought was a familiar acronym. The term entered the lingua franca via Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker . (Relevant quote: "If he could make millions of dollars come out of those phones, he became that most revered of all species: a Big Swinging Dick.") BSDs are the perennial winners of the game of conspicuous earnings (giant bonuses), conspicuous consumption (giant co-ops and summer homes), and conspicuous philanthropy (giant plaques on public edifices). Despite the all too appropriate vulgarity, the article does a fine job of trying to explain one small piece of the financial crisis. Making sure we know at least some of the guys responsible have lost a pretty chunk of change. I know I feel better. Meanwhile, never fear, our government i...

Politics. Debate 1 Foriegn Policy War: Obama Get out of Iraq, Get more into Afghanistan, and maybe a little into Pakistan ( Couple of Predators don't really count, do they? ) Reserves the right to talk to any one at the time and place of his choosing in order to keep America Safe. McCain Keep "winning" in Iraq, Keep losing in Afghanistan, Wouldn't threaten Pakistan, Won't even look at Iranian President ( he actually couldn't bring himself to say President ) but will possibly invade his country with a Legion of Doom, sorry League of Democracies. Reserves the right to kick the crap out of Iran, Syria, and North Korea. There were also some economic discussions about a financial crisis, but really, yawn, who cares about that. What amazed me was how many times Henry Kissinger was mentioned. Giving his thoughts and opinions weight on both sides. I wasn't the only one . Mcain has experience, he has been a Senator during every military action since he belatedly g...

Last week, I mentioned my disappointment concerning Google's Chrome beta for Windows . Mainly that it was an open source browser for Windows only. Knowing the source is available, It was only a matter of time before we had a Linux and Mac version. Enter Crossover Chromium from Codeweavers 7 days later. Codeweavers is a company that specializes in Wine development. Knowing Google itself admits Chromium (Chromium is the open source base for Chrome) only builds and works under windows, Codeweavers went to work on getting that build running under wine on Linux and Mac, releasing their modifications. Kudos all around. It runs, It browses. It is free, and by free I mean free as in free. but... It is not really a fair representative of the browser, taking one of Chrome's features and making it a huge drawback. Unlike Chrome, Codeweaver's Chromium takes an eternity to load a page. Gmail is all but unusable. FlashPlayer installs and just barely runs, crashing out more often t...

So he says to me, he says, "So who do ya think's gonna win?", never having met the gentleman. Seen him around work a few times. As he put down his lunch at the table one up in front of mine, I was only slightly amazed that without any reference or implicit signals, I immediately understood the subject to which he was referring. Not wanting to politically identify myself, I responded, "I think Obama will probably win", but not in an overly enthusiastic way. He said ,"I liked what I was hearing from Obama but, lately I'm not sure where he's coming from." I had finished my lunch and I left with "I haven't heard anything I didn't like from him, meanwhile I've heard almost nothing I like from the other side." All true and noncommital. I found myself wondering all through the rest of the day, the purpose of the original question, as well as questioning my wariness to answer. First, at some point in the American experience, we ha...

This tiny news advert caught my eye last week. MrsCopilot is quite the Horror buff, with bookshelves stuffed and straining under the weight and bulk of the almighty Steven King and a DVD collection of blood, murder, mayhem and pychotics. ScareFest 2008 , Seemed like just to thing to spring on her as a surprise. Stars of Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects" ( one of her favorite feel good flicks. ) Sid Haig and Bill Mosely are scheduled to appear. Off we go for a spooktacular Saturday afternoon. Lexington Convention center. Check. Yep that's a Good sign, this appears to be the place. Inside was as advertised. Creepy Artists and Collectible merchants crammed side by side with psychics and mystical crystal salesman, With back area lined with genre celebrities available for autographs and pictures. What better way to spend an afternoon than celebrity gawking and rampant discretionary spending. Admission, Tarot Reading, T Shirt, Autographed Photo, a few nick nacks, ...

Like everybody else, I was intrigued by Google's latest venture. A new browser, promising to redesign the browsing experience. Introduced by the company who redesigned all of our browsing habits. More Videos In their introductory press release, (already a plus to the Comic nerd in us all), the big G hit all the right notes. Read the Rest New Javascript VM, Tab Centric, Open Source, sandboxed pages, process manager. Where do I sign up? Oh, here (and no sign up required.) If you've been here before you know MrCopilot runs on Linux. Sure, occasionally a VM safely encompasses a Windows OS for testing. Imagine my surprise at discovering that in such an environment was the only place I could try Chrome. Which brings me to the first dulling of the shine. Chrome's download page is a little different for us Linux Users, you'll notice right off that the download link is nowhere to be found. Instead you will see links to Chromium. Chromium is the open source project Chrome is b...

For 30 more days the American Public can ponder their choice for President. John McCain chose the Governor of Alaska as his Vice Presidential Nominee If like me, you need to study Sarah Palin interviews and debate video, I am collecting them here. Thursday October 2nd 2008 Vice Presidential Debate Video Economic Bailout, Best or Worst of Congress. Whose fault is the Financial Market Crisis? David Letterman Top 10 things heard at Sarah Palin's Debate Camp Katie Couric Sarah Palin Sept 30th - Where do you get your news? Saturday Night Live Sept 26th Sarah Palin (Tina Fey) Hillary Clinton (Amy Poehler) Palin's Response Saturday Night Live Sept Sarah Palin (Tina Fey) Katie Couric (Amy Poehler) Katie Couric Sarah Palin One on One Sarah Palin, Joe Biden Roe V Wade CBS News Sarah Palin, Joe Biden Seperation of Church and State. CBS News Sarah Palin First Interview ABCNews Charlie Gibson Sarah Palin America's Top Energy Expert? Sarah Palin explains her Foriegn Policy Experience Mor...

Yahoo! Microsoft has officially withdrawn the unsolicited buyout of Yahoo! quoth the Ballmer : "...I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!." and my favorite bit... Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft . What kind of steps ? I just don't know what you are implying . Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang responded with his own brand of Job'sian Optimism. Yahoo! is profitable, growing, and executing well on its strategic plan to capture the large opportunities in the relatively young online advertising market. Our solid results for the first quarter of 2008 and increased full...

I'm Sorry, No really, I apologize. I recently succumbed to the call of corporate America. I am now employed by an enormous company in a position that was tailor made for my talents, so much so that I had no choice but to accept their more than reasonable offer of employment. There are benefits to being no longer only self employed. Chief among them is a regular bankable paycheck. Add to that a nice benefit package and a sane work environment and management style. It also doesn't hurt that I love the work and have an opportunity to shape the direction of new Linux products. But there are also some disadvantages. First off, my new employer is located in Lexington a good 3hrs and a time zone away from what I have affectionately started to call home. My residence is dead smack in the middle of nowhere. Way out in the country with horses, cows, trees, grass and cropland as far as the eye can see and beyond. It is quiet and friendly. My daughter attends a lovely little sch...

Moses dead at 83 , seems like only 40 years ago Charlton Heston was freeing his people from pharoah and laying down the law. Sure he was Ben Hur, John the Baptist and Moses ( IMDB ) but Heston is most memorable to us geeks for his portrayal in 1968's Planet of the Apes. Spoiler: This is the Ending. A few words from an admirer of Chuck's And finally you can watch for his appearance in Tim Burton's remake. The full movie is here, and I promise Chuck is in it ;) How'd you like to be the coroner's assistant? Bill, go in there and pry that gun out of his hands will you? Too Soon? MrCopilot

Last week I did a house full of Kubuntu installs as recounted here . I went back to check up on the tweens and see if they needed anything. Everything seemed to be going fine, although they needed a little help connecting to a USB drive shared over the network from a Vista machine. Simple enough add network folder. Guess what, they needed write support and that is unsupported in network folders and Dolphin. Alrighty then. Add bookmark to smb://hostname/foldername. Asks for Username and password and all is good. While setting this up for them I notice a little game one of the girls is playing. A cute little anime style mmorpg The Mana World . Hmm, I bet my daughter would enjoy that. I finish up my work and spend the rest of the night playing with compiz on another machine. Wow, after you get it working (no small feat), so purty! But that is another story for another time. When I arrive home, I "sudo apt-get install tmw" on my Debian machine. I call my daughter in and set her ...

In a triumph of marketing and (alright, alleged) ballot stuffing, Microsoft's OOXML has garnered enough votes to be approved as an ISO standard . Bringing with it all the benefits therein. Mainly, conforming to the various government agencies around the world who have enacted the sensible regulations requiring their documents to be in a format that is vendor neutral and have meaningful archival lifetimes. Now the fun really begins. Watching Microsoft try to implement the augmented standard in Office. While simultaneously implementing it in Open Source Software, Koffice , OpenOffice. I've argued in the past that Microsoft has a format they call OOXML right now shipping in Office 2007, and the new standard with the changes made to get it past ISO are going to cause us and Microsoft difficulties. I hope I am wrong on this. OpenOffice has already begun that work, with limited success in the upcoming version 3 now in alpha scheduled for September. KOffice, has been pretty critical...

After conquering the Console space on the industry leader XBox and XBox360 Microsoft has finally decided to throw their hat into the Linux Gaming space in a big way. http://code.google.com/p/openhalo/ Microsoft thinks its high time some quality open source games are released in the Linux market. Okay, you got me, it's is April 1st after all. Microsoft has no interest whatsoever in open sourcing Halo. Does that mean us Linux users are left Master Chiefless forever? Nope. Not at all. Halo does in fact run in wine and quite well. For more info on how to set it up see: How I got Halo: Combat evolved working on wine 0.9.39 and http://wine-review.blogspot.com/2007/11/halo-combat-evolved-on-linux-with-wine.html The other method, my preferred method actually, is through a native Linux game. Unreal Tournament 2004. In the now defunct Mod Project Torlan. Halo "feels" a lot better in the UT engine and running natively. Downloads are still up, even if the site is in a state of disrep...

Perhaps you have heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operated by European Center for Nuclear Research or NAMBLA, err I mean CERN . For those of you who haven't. Its a monstrous 8 Billion dollar machine outside Geneva, constructed for the purpose of smashing tiny particles into each other at unbelievable levels of energy and speed to recreate conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Why, well to do science requires observation. We cannot exactly observe that instant back in time, so why not recreate it. The problem is, a couple of people think its a really, really bad idea. The kind of idea that could end life as we know it on earth, either through the production of stranglets or a micro black hole that could swallow us all. Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho feel so strongly that they are suing CERN in Hawaii asking for "a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environm...

Dear Miguel, Read your post . One question immediately springs to mind. Why? You said: I have been reading the OOXML storm in a teacup for more than a year now. Am looking forward to the approval of OOXML as an ISO standard and to be able to move the discussion back to the things that actually matter: free and open source software. I think we all agree that what matters is Free and Open Source software. Where we differ is in the looking forward to the ISO approval of OOXML. How would this be beneficial to FLOSS? The implication is that the long string of "countless bytes" being "wasted" on this subject would be over, and we will all get back to writing about more important matters. The problem with this way of thinking is not to hard understand. Most of the Free Software community is strongly opposed to OOXML as an ISO standard, either because of the FACT that it is a horribly incomplete and unimplementable document format or the FACT that OOXML is redundant. ...

Often the Internet is touted as a worldwide communication medium that brings people together. Well in Jacksonville, Oregon this week, the Internet certainly brought quite few people together. They were responding to a Craigslist posting about a man forced to leave his home in a hurry and abandon his property including his Horse and all needed new homes. This delighted the surrounding community and surprised Robert Salisbury, the owner. Salisbury came home to find around 30 people rummaging through his property. En route he passed a truck filled with his lawn equipment and cars loaded with his belongings. "I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back," Salisbury said. "They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did." "They honestly thought that because it appeared on the Internet it was true," Salisbury said. "It boggles the mind." It certainly does. Police are promisi...

Apple was kind enough to let me know a new updated iPhone SDK has been released. The second beta version of the iPhone SDK is now available and includes Interface Builder, a powerful tool that allows you to visually build your interface and makes creating a UI as simple as drag and drop. We've also added new sample code and updated documentation to the rich set of resources available to you in the iPhone Dev Center. Log in to the iPhone Dev Center today and download the new version of the iPhone SDK. Too bad I can't use it. No Mac, No way to check out what sounds like a nifty Gui Builder. Leaving us Linux (and Windows) using devs out in the cold. Par for the course I suppose. Could this be the must have thing to get me to take the plunge? A Mac Mini wouldn't be so bad would it? Still torn. MrCopilot

You may remember an April Fools hoax a few years ago about audio captured on clay pottery that made its way around the net. Or you may remember the Mythbusters covering the possibility (Busted, If I remember correctly). Leaving Edison as the first able to "record" audio for future playback. Well, not exactly. According to the NYTimes, that honor goes to a Frenchman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who "recorded" a 10 second clip of “Au Clair de la Lune” on of all things PAPER almost 20 years before Edison and his tin foil and nearly 30 years before the wax cylinder. Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered. NYTimes The NYTimes article has even included the clip in...