Ubuntu Karmic Koala on Inspiron 545 MT

This is the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. There is little point to running down the entire catalogue. Almost everything works Out of the Box® as we have come to expect from Ubuntu. When it doesn’t is when we have something to say. Further, having something to say is often limited to what little we each [...]

Biggest Dope Dealer in the World: CIA

It’s easy to confuse things talking about the US Government, as if it were one single thing. It’s not. The federal bureaucracy is multiple governments under a single umbrella, and occasionally competing. I have long said one of the greatest threats to the average US resident is the CIA. It’s not as if they spend [...]

The Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 2: Research

He stared into the darkened ceiling.
The concept of “bureaucratic efficiency” had been an oxymoron since the creation of bureaucrats. His request for a separate space to simply sit and think quietly was almost unheard of in that day and time, so the agency disregarded it. Instead, he got a ship like all the others. It [...]

openSUSE 11.2-RC1 64-bit Sound and Flash

Novell has taken the safe path like RHEL, in that they don’t include any controversial codecs and such with the distribution. However, unlike RHEL, Novell actually cripples their bundled media players, so that you have to rebuild them, get someone else to do it, or use something else. For most releases up to 11.1, the [...]

The Search Continues: Testing openSUSE 11.2

Because this machine is so new, I realize it will take awhile for my favorite Linux distro to catch up (CentOS). So I use what does work, and it gives me a chance to review other stuff I might not normally touch.
I just finished a couple of weeks with Ubuntu 9.04. It works okay, and [...]

Stumbling from One Mess to Another

So we know Obama declared a national emergency over the alleged threat from the Swine Flu. If you review all the various laws and declarations which are linked to this, you could justly say we are one phone call from national martial law. You might reasonably expect any emergency decisions and actions would have to [...]

The Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 1: Travel

In the ancient literature, they called it “hyperspace.” Lacking the conceptual tools for discussing the means for spatial displacement which didn’t require actually crossing the space, they came up with a word which missed the point, but was still popularly used. The technical explanations were not his specialty, but he was aware enough to be [...]

Opera Browser 10 Unstable on Linux 64-bit

This happens often enough it seems to be trend. I’m not the only one who experiences this. I found complaints on forums at Ubuntu and other Linux distros, as well as the Opera forums. It appears on all sorts of hardware, and the only common thread so far is Linux 64-bit.
When running 64-bit Linux, Opera [...]

Net Justice

God’s justice assumes you’ll do your best to stay out of other peoples’ way, but that their way won’t mean harming you. It’s a never-ending tension and renegotiation. The biggest source of conflict is unrealistic expectations, particularly regarding what God considers just, and what is possible.
Perception of some things is buried under tons of idiocy. [...]

Accidental Conformity

I can give only what I have. Some say I am able to package it nicely, and it is surely a pleasure for me to do the wrapping. But in the end, it’s what’s inside the packaging that counts.
It is my nature, built into my very DNA, to avoid conforming. It would be easy enough [...]