Category: Techspeak

Last night, for some reason, I decided to download and install a copy of Fedora‘s latest release, version 8. But “I thought you didn’t like Red Hat releases,” you might say? Hey, I’m sick and on cold meds – I can’t be held accountable for my actions. Continue reading “Fiddling With Fedora 8 First Impressions – Part 1: Installation”

I’m curious as to why I can’t play a .WAV file that I receive as an attachment to an email without installing necessary codecs, but I am able to play .WAV files which are included with Ubuntu by default, like the default system sounds. Whether I try to play the file as an email attachment in Thunderbird or Evolution, or I save it to the desktop and double-click, Totem wants codecs installed. Is there something I’m missing?

One of our listeners of the Fresh Ubuntu podcast wrote in asking our opinions on Jaiku versus Twitter. Since I hadn’t really played with Jaiku for a while, I decided to give a shot at using Jaiku for a while, since I never gave it a lot of time a couple months ago, as I was already using Twitter and liking it. The first thing I decided to do was publish all of my Twitter notices into Jaiku. I did not do this a few months ago, because I was using Twitter for private (family and friends) stuff, and Pownce (and, by extension, Jaiku) for general notices.
I did have to put a little thought into this. Since I have several web feeds published into my Twitter history via Twitterfeed, as well as into Jaiku, I don’t want to have duplicates (i.e. Del.icio.us posts showing up twice) or make an endless loop, where Twitter would feed into Jaikus which would feed into Twitter into Jaiku ad infinitum. While it may be funny to read for a while, I’m sure it would get old very quickly, and don’t know that Jaiku and/or Twitterfeed have any provision for dealing with such a mess, other than to limit the number of posts they publish in any given amount of time.
After a little fiddling with my RSS feeds, I decided to make Jaiku my primary notification aggregator instead of Twitter, to give it a fair shot. I’m not considering Pownce for this again for now because logging in always requires a couple of steps – their homepage login never works for me and I have to enter my username and password again – and there is still no “Pownce mobile.” Even as lightweight as Pownce is, it’s a pain to navigate on my mobile phone.
Here’s how things break down now.
Reasons to Use Jaiku Primarily

• Jaiku has built in RSS feed subscription. This means I would not need to use a third-party service (like Twitterfeed.com, (which requires an OpenID provider, which I use idproxy.net for (which uses my Yahoo! account))). Oh, the onion-like layers of indirection!
• Jaiku has an application for my Nokia e61. Theoretically I’d get better performance out of it than loading a web page to post my updates.
• Jaiku is owned by Google now, so it’s cooler.
• Jaiku appears to publish its RSS feed more quickly than Twitter. I put a couple of Twitters in a few hours ago, and they still have not shown up in the RSS feed.
• Twitter does seem to be down for maintenance a lot.
• TwitterIM doesn’t always catch every post.

Reasons to Use Twitter Primarily

• Most of my “social networking” is now done on Twitter, and a couple of the folks on my list only publish their notifications privately. I’m not sure if they will show up in an RSS feed out of Twitter. If they do, that’s bad, because I’m telling the public their private business. If they don’t, that’s bad, because I have to be on Twitter to see them, and if I’m using Jaiku as my primary interface for notices, I’m not likely to look at Twitter all that often.
• I like the way Twitter works, usually, on my desktop and my mobile phone.
• TwitterIM is offered by Twitter, whereas Jaiku requires use of Imified to work with AIM, Yahoo! and MSN. Interesting that they choose to work with Google, Jabber, and Livejournal, but not the most popular IM platform.
• Jaiku is owned by Google, so it’s evil.
  Okay, I’m joking. A little. Seriously though, try and live a single day on the Internet without using anything Google. First off even if you don’t know it, you’re probably using Google search results somewhere if you’re doing any searching. Second, how many times do you interact with someone else who used Gmail to email you (yes, Google can read that email too), a PC running Google Toolbar (tracking your search patterns),or Google Desktop Search (keeping an index of all of your documents and email on their server). Gah, I gotta stop. This is a blog post in and of itself.

Follow my Twitters and Jaikus to see where I end up!
Update 2007-11-06: I’ve gone back to Twitter as my “main” and set Jaiku to subscribe to my Twitter RSS feed. We’ll see what happens.

I recently mentioned on the Fresh Ubuntu podcast how I liked the write support for NTFS partitions that comes pre-installed and how the first thing I did with it was to use it to maintain a common set of profiles for Firefox and Thunderbird between my Windows XP and Gutsy installations. Basically, what this means is that I now have to configure new email accounts, extensions/add-ons, etc., one time. When I boot into the other OS, I get the same exact configuration. Continue reading “Dual Boot Your Firefox and Thunderbird on Ubuntu 7.10 Guty Gibbon”

Today’s rant will focus on something that really ticks me off: poor pronunciation. I don’t mind when someone has trouble pronouncing a difficult word, but some of these are just inexcusable.

• McAfee – People say this “MAC-afee,” with the emphasis on the “MAC.” First off, it’s not even “Mac,” it’s “Mc,” which is pronounced so as to rhyme with “stick,” not “crack.” Speaking of that, why do they sell a “Big Mac” at McDonald’s? Shouldn’t it be a “Big Mc?” Oh, and it’s sure as hell not “Macafree.”
• Asterisk – Okay folks, this one is just plain inexcusable. I’ve heard the name of the popular open-source telephony server pronounced “as-ter-iks,” and “as-ter-ik.” Hello? When did an ‘s’ which preceeds a ‘k’ become silent in this language? And since when do we swap their places so that “sk” sounds like “ks?” Unless you be talkin’ ebonics, where we “axe” you a question, asterisk is pronounced “as-ter-isk.”
• Linux – This one is sort of flexible. Since it’s a mix of “Linus” (as in Torvalds) and “Unix,” one could pronounce it “LINE-ooks” which rhymes with the American English pronounciation of “Linus.” However, in Europe, the name is usually pronounced “LIN-oos,” so calling it “LIN-ooks” works too. However, if you do this, you should pronounce his name “LIN-oos” instead of “LINE-oos” to be consistent. Oh, an to the math teacher in Randolph, Vermont who called it “Lan-X,” I have no idea where you got that.
• Debian – Take the names “Deb” and “Ian”, and put then together to get “deb-e-an.” Not “deeb-e-an” and not “deb-e-on.”
• Suse – To get the pronounciation of a German Linux distro, I consulted an authority – a German. She said you would say Suse as “Soo-seh.” It doesn’t rhyme with (Dr.) Seuss, or “Sooza” and sure does not sound like “Susie.”
• Ubuntu – To pronounce a word from an African language, I decided to check with someone from Africa. How about we ask, say, Mark Shuttleworth, the guy who started Canonical and Ubuntu? It’s “oo-BOON-too” (with each syllable rhyming). Not “yoo-boon-too, “”oo-BUN-too,” and surely not “yoo-bun-too.”
• PostgreSQL – “Post-gres-que-elle.” You don’t say the “Postgre” portion without the “SQL,” so there’s nothing that sounds like “postgray.”

That’s it for now. More to come, I’m sure.

Excellent article on how to pronounce Ubuntu. I couldn’t have said it better myself. I started a post on this and other things a while back, but never finished it. Maybe I will soon.

I’ve been using Copernic’s desktop search program for the last several weeks as part of my ongoing effort to wean myself from Google. It’s not going too well. Unfortunately, Copernic just doesn’t find my stuff when I look for it. Furthermore, on the occasion when it does find some data (that which I have forcibly made it index and verified that it’s there), it takes a lot longer than Google Desktop Search to return my results.
Previously, I tried Microsoft’s new search, and dropped it within a few hours because it is hideously slow and a system resource pig. I also tried the desktop search from Ask.com, but since it only indexes Outlook emails, not Thunderbird, that isn’t an option.
So, I’m uninstalling that and moving on the the next candidate. Perhaps I’ll suck it up and try X1. I suppose if it works as well as Google’s desktop search, then it would be worth purchasing.