Danny's Space

This is amazing. A woman fills out a raffle ticket in a Ford dealership. The win is for a Ford F-150 and all she has to do is put a hockey puck into a tiny hole from the middle of line. Watch the awesome happen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ccZqU8rJjTs

I'm staying with Clementine after trying several other alternative in the media player application category. I tried Rhythmbox and Banshee simultaneously at one time. Rhythmbox feels so under featured right now that I'd rather use CMUS. In fact I have used CMUS at one one-week period of this try-out. I enjoy playing this command line controlled media player without fuss and with minimal resources for hours on end. Banshee is the one time Ubuntu favorite media application. I always find something to be annoyed when using Banshee. Failing to start, Dbus problems, extension failures/incompatibility. I can't get internet radio to work or fetch stations (Rhythmbox trumps Banshee in this category). Banshee's feature set is exactly what I want out of a desktop media player. So the search continues. Clementine is based on Amarok-1.4 and it uses Qt. (Banshee uses mono and Rhythmbox uses Gtk). Most of the features I like in Banshee has an equivalent on Clementine. But the execu...

Congratulations to the Diaspora Team, well done.

This blog is a labor of love but i don't understand how somebody else can post here. I've changed the password for the email2post feature. Should I consider changing my email password too. This is disconcerting. Not too many people follow me in this blog but I do apologize for the spam. I am doing my best to prevent this from happening again.

Curiousity ready on the launchpad. It's 2 hours minus lauch. She is looking good.

Isaiah 49:4

Firefox-8 just looks perfect and with a persona in a Gnome 3 desktop, I'm good.

It was previewed by some but i got it from the Arch repositories just now.

It's Asteroid 2005 YU55 and it's getting bigger. approximately 3.6 lunar distance time: 1945 UTC

Against bullying and the bill about to be passed against bullying. Except she takes exception on the exceptions inserted into the bill. The bill allows bullying in cases of religion and moral grounds. In other words if I want to bully a gay person because my religion forbids homosexual relations, I'm within bounds of this bill. Let's hear her words: Youtube video.

Sisters have a great future as a band. The brother has a great future in aah.. as a music critic?

I've come to the point where I can use Arch everyday without needing anything else. I'm really happy about trying Arch out.

Reality Halloween

How do you describe something as efficient as this when it is applied to human beings? http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3a40000/3a44000/3a44200/3a44236v.jpg  

How many famoust personalities in history can you identify? Most Famous Men On One Photo  

I touched on some user annoyance and efficiency issues in my last post.  Here's a great resource on the topic of efficiency how-to in Ubuntu 11.10 and certainly a must read for Ubuntu power users if you want to use Unity.  Configuration Settings and Shortcuts in Ubuntu 11.10 - Efficiency Boosters    by Naweed Chougle.  

It's not true that Macs don't suffer malware. They do. No operating systems that I know of (been using computers since 1988, or was it 1989) is immune to it. I've used Windows-3.1 to XP. I used Macs for 6 months at work and in that time yes it got infected. On the other hand I started using Linux in 2006 (March, it was a birthday gift) at home, mostly as a hobby at the start. I am now using Linux at home, in my laptop, and at work. Not once did I have a problem with malware. I don't miss it. I remember how paranoid I was when it comes to virus in the Windows machines. Maybe I got smarter as a user. I got wiser as I got older perhaps. I know that malware for the Windows PC is in the thousands. There's none for Linux, in the wild at least. Eventually, when Linux distros get a market share above the 10 percentile maybe an enterprising hacker might be interested to code a virus that can force it to its knees, who knows?

Donato Roque added you to his circles and invited you to join Google+. Join Google+ Google+ makes sharing on the web more like sharing in real life. Circles An easy way to share some things with college buddies, others with your parents, and almost nothing with your boss. Just like in real life. Hangouts Conversations are better face-to-face. Join a video hangout from your computer or mobile phone to catch up, watch YouTube videos together, or swap stories with up to 9 of your friends at once. Mobile Lightning-fast group chat. Photos that upload themselves. A bird's-eye view of what's happening nearby. We built Google+ with mobile in mind. You received this message because Donato Roque invited d327roque.wnykm2ze7p@blogger.com to join Google+. Unsubscribe from these emails.

I have been a long time Ubuntu user. Last June I decided to install Arch Linux in my PC, side by side with Ubuntu. First I want to widen my linux skills beyond Ubuntu and secondly, with Unity in Ubuntu and Gnome-shell everywhere else, I wanted to find out which is the best. So I made a new partition and download the Arch iso. Arch of course, is a minimal distro. I can choose any DE I like from Gnome to KDE, Xfce to E17. I chose Gnome-shell.  Now that I can boot to both Unity and Gnome-shell, which one do I prefer? I must say Unity looks cool and awesome. In 11.10, most of the bugs are gone. (although I had to smile when one of the open application icon suddenly disappear when I used the alt+tab). If I want to add an application in the Launcher, I can accomplish it with drag+drop. It's a snap. If I want an application on a certain workspace I just type alt+spacebar>workspace[n] same as in Gnome-shell.  If I want the mouse to do the job, I have to go to super window mode (hit s...

Google+ games include 'Dragons of Atlantis', 'Angry Birds', 'Mafia Wars 2' etc. I am increasingly engaged on several games here. Engage means several hours everyday. Hey it's free and social.   This could be the start of something bad and addictive I think. Like when I start scratching something until my finger bleeds.      

I am back on my Arch Linux side of the hard drive because ... wait. My plan tonight is to use Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot for the rest of the night maybe until tomorrow but after I updated my packages with the latest updates there are several problems. Firefox' cpu usage is spiking to beyond 100% and Banshee is also showing beyond 100% cpu usage. Good news for Gwibber. It's fast now seemed to be working the way it should. I killed both Firefox and Banshee and restarted them both. The events for both applications are reproducible therefore it is a bug. No apport window prompts appeared. They might have disable it. Might not be working to their liking. In any case I switched back to here, my Arch Linux OS. Unity shell seems to me stable so why these two applications. Let me show some screenshots of my upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot. After careful calculation Ubuntu up...

Updated (October 22, 2011): Ubuntu One client is now back in the Ayatana repository. I recommend adding the Ayatana repository to your package source and installing it using Pacman. If you already have Ubuntu one client (via AUR) and wish to get it from Ayatana but getting error messages when installing it, please post to Arch Linux forum for support. Ubuntu One is a very good alternative to Dropbox . It comes with Ubuntu and if you created an account you need not leave it if you are using another distro. Ubuntu One developers will work with you in installing Ubuntu One on your distro. I use Arch Linux. It is available in AUR (Arch User Repository). The ubuntuone-client is available to Arch users here. Arch users should be familiar with installing packages from AUR. If you need to get some background on how to do that, please read this. There are several dependencies that you also get from AUR, so install those first. In any case,...

I don't believe in global warming. street.art by imaginerin

A growing trend in UI these days is minimalism. From Google+ to the new Facebook UI. The drakfire dream theme for GNOME 3 desktop is no exception. No more title bars? No more titles? I just updated Banshee to 2.2.x. It automatically refreshed metadata by scanning my directory. It came out fine for me. I just don't like not being told before it does that.

I've been using networking in Arch by default. It is quite sufficient since I have a wired network and this is a residential desktop. But since the whole point of using Arch is to learn I have decided to use Networkmanager to simulate what ordinary laptop users will have to do to get connections from mobile sources for example. So to download the necessary packages, I did: $ pacman -S networkmanager network-manager-applet as well as: $ pacman -S dhclient modemmanager dnsmasq There's still a little tweak that must be done first to make this work. First open /etc/rc.conf and go to Daemons to edit the array. Make sure to remove networking and add networkmanager. Place it after dbus to enable applications which will need internet connection to get information from network manager. So I have mine like so: Daemons={...dbus networkmanager ...} This will ensure that network manager will work at every boot. I did open GNOME network connection gui too. I made sure it is using opendns. Cl...

Screen shot of the dash in GNOME Drakfire theme with Faenza dark icons.

The default theme for the GNOME desktop is Adwaita. I changed mine to Drakfire complete theme plus a change from the default GNOME icons to Faenza [dark].

Since I started to dual boot Ubuntu 11.04 and Arch Linux, I haven't found a good solution to my various partitions failing to mount at boot. It works in Ubuntu fstab but when it comes to the Arch fstab, one or two partitions fail to mount at boot. I have a partition that mounts on another partition. Or should I say a partition within a partition, to be clearer. I should have the various partitions listed in the order that I want them mounted. Ok so it's a newbie mistake but I was blinded by the Ubuntu fstab that works. After checking the list of partitions, "/", root first then "/home". After these two partitions come "/home/user/Directory". Then comes the "/home/user/Directory/sub-directory". Strictly in this order. Saved fstab. Reboot.

My apologies to Arch for the statements I made regarding the slow updates. I recently read about the security breach at kernel.org and more likely the reason for the slow speed of my updates. I have changed my /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and yes the updates have gone faster.

I finally got my printers working. I got cups (and cupsd in the /etc/rc.conf) I installed hpoj and a group of printer drivers. So to get my Arch linux to recognize there's a usb printer connected to my system I have to run a daemon (ptal-init setup) and include it in /etc/rc.conf. That finally enabled (after a reboot) my GNOME control center to acknowledge that there is indeed an HP-3900 at the end of my usb port. The real personal story behind my saga with a printer is pacman. It is now throwing 'network not reachable' everytime I start it. Every download and sync. I ran --debug and ping ip addresses and so far I will conclude that it's a really really slow ftp server. The server is so slow pacman is timing out connections. It's unusable guys. My first rolling release distro and I've decided that Arch rises and falls with the performance of their package manager. Great distro for the DIY community. But sorry I can't recommend Arch linux to my mother who jus...

The new Software Center UI.

Started the upgrade process at 1:45 am and finished with a reboot at 4:05 am today. It's faster to download at the early morning hours. Or perhaps I am a real geek for spending a Friday night infront of my computer. But this image is nice though.

Here's the download page for the beta . Not recommended for those who want a stable system. Can you name another linux distro whose beta generates this kind of buzz?

I have a previous post about my efforts at dual booting Ubuntu 11.04 and Arch Linux. My goal is to continue using and learning Linux. Switching between the two distros will give me the familiarity of Ubuntu and the 'forced' minimalism of Arch. Minimalism here just means using the command line and modifying config files for various customizations. Things which Ubuntu doesn't conveniently reveal to general users.   Previous post here will explain the start of this journey. Now where am I in this little walk. I'm using GNOME 3 in Arch because it's the latest. I'm still using the old GNOME with the Unity shell when I'm in Ubuntu 11.04. This will not last very long now because I plan to upgrade to Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot Beta tomorrow. I heard a lot of good things during the alpha. Drooling now... An aside to the post here:      I'm using a brand new UI for Blogger right now and there's this quirky cursor behavior. When I hit [enter] the cursor jump...

I caught the news in Mashable while fast reading my Google Reader. They finally released the new Blogger. Yay! I'll say that the UI is very clean and non-distracting. It integrates very well with Google+ and with Google Reader. I think I'll be using Blogger more now than before. I like what they did here.

Donato Roque shared a post with you on Google+. The Google+ project makes sharing on the web more like sharing in real-life. Learn more . Join Google+ A chinese tycoon offers to buy 300 km2 of Iceland to develop for a hotel and golf course. The offer is 100 million dollars. The planned land purchase is 0.35% of the land area of Iceland. View or comment on Donato Roque's post » You received this message because Donato Roque shared it with d327roque.wnykm2ze7p@blogger.com. Unsubscribe from these emails.

Donato Roque shared a post with you on Google+. The Google+ project makes sharing on the web more like sharing in real-life. Learn more . Join Google+ What's the point of the social media? Like you throw fresh meat into a crocodile enclosure and then let the wild animals bite and tear and regurgitate...yuck. Then it gets interesting. View or comment on Donato Roque's post » You received this message because Donato Roque shared it with d327roque.wnykm2ze7p@blogger.com. Unsubscribe from these emails.

The Linux desktop wasn't at the top of developers priorities. It took Ubuntu to focus on the general users and highlight new users to Linux. So I've been trying to find images and screenshots of my own desktop over the years. This was circa early 2007. I'm using Ubuntu 7.04. I started manipulating the panels and fonts. While this is a year later with Ubuntu 8.10.  I got a brand new computer at this time with Nvidia 8500 GeForce  and my desktop feels solid and nimble. The Gnome 2.32 desktop environment is at its most mature. I guess if there's such a thing as the golden year of Gnome this is it. The next big thing to happen to the Ubuntu desktop is Canonical's best move in terms of leaving its mark on the desktop. It's the coming of the Ubuntu font. Although the next image doesn't have the Ubuntu font, it was a good illustration of what an appropriate font can do to a desktop. This is Ubuntu 9.04 with URW Gothic fon...

'One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.' When Neil Armstrong said those famous words, the whole world was literally watching. I was only discovering this magical mesmerizing box of light and images. I was a boy of three and I had to ask mother's permission to go to a neighbor's home to watch the first man on the moon. The world's love affair with the television has begun long before this though. But no other event pushed this electronic device out to the masses like the moon landing. My family got our own television set two weeks after the global event. I like to think we got the television because father saw the potential of the technology but mother will later tease us that he was just anticipating a boxing match by Gabriel 'flash' Elorde. ( I very much doubt this.*smile*) It doesn't matter which event I should thank. I got Sesame Street when I was five. I watched The Twilight Zone and Star Trek when I was ten. Our first television...

These are very beautiful designs of buildings from the best of modern architecture. These are not surprisingly finalists for the Stirling Price. 1. The Royal Shakespeare Theater 2. Evelyn Grace Academy 3. Olympic Velodrome at Olympic Park, London (London Olympics) 4. Crushed Glass Museum in the Ruhr industrial region, Germany 5. An Gaelaras Cultural Centre 6. Angel Building (office block) See the full gallery on Posterous