Fuck Portugal

That kinda charge inside the box called for a penalty in favor of Holland, only a jack ass of a referee could miss that. Meanwhile, Figo deserved not an yellow but a fucking red card. Enough said!

Futile

And I thought I was ignorant enough to not get how to install extra packages from the FC5 DVD once the sytem was installed. It’s certainly an ego boost that I’m not that ignorant after all when I read the following at Oz guy Ben’s

So, apparently their package manager can only install software from online repositories — not from the CDs. Same deal with Yum on the command line, apparently.

On a related, I need to install Drivel on this SUSE thingy, cuz I dont like logging into Blogger just to post stuff. Thats just more steps and clicks. Adios!

Now That I Know…

The new interface of Amarok 1.4.1beta is quite ugly as of now with the context browser on top instead of the left pane that we’ve gotten so used to over the years. So switched back to the stable 1.4.0 version and have it locked in Smart so that it don’t update it during a system update in SUSE 10.1. I also shot a mail and got a reply that a new layout for the context browser is also being worked upon. Still, I’m not very convinced. Why are we so resistant to change? But the good news is that developer Seb Ruiz is one of the two incharge of Last.fm integration, and he hopes to get most of the stuff in for 1.4.1 or latest by 1.4.2. Think of Last.fm radio inside of Amarok. Pretty neat, eh?

On a related note, Smart is pretty cool btw. It was so easy to get used to cuz most of the commands work like Apt. I can even lock a certain version of a software to that very version and it won’t update, something not available in Apt (or is it?). But I still feel Apt is faster than Smart — tho it can just be my box. Also I think they should adopt the Smart-gui to look like Synaptic. Synaptic has a more pleasing GUI interface, hands down.

Anyway, I’m quite pleased with SUSE, now that I’m using it as my primary O/S for the first time in 3 years. The other SUSE versions I tried were 8.2 and 10 — yeps missed out on all of the 9 series. Though their software installer YaST is dead slow compared to other RPM-based distros like Fedora or Mandriva, the latter is the quickest I guess. In my box, where a default Mandriva install takes around 30 minutes, Fedora around 50, it’s a shame that SUSE took nearly two hours. Version 10 surely wasn’t as slow. Is this some kind of a bug? If it is, then is this the same one that screws up the default online updater?

What I don’t get is why can’t all the distribution base their system on the same, or at least similar, package installer/updater. The Debian-based ones are better off in this regard that they all use Apt as the backend, thus following a standard. RPM-based distros are a whole different story — Mandriva with it’s urpmi, Fedora with it’s yum, and SUSE with it’s YaST. I haven’t tried any other RPM-based stuff, other than PCLOS which uses Apt for installation.

We seriously need a standard! Eventho, a GNU/Linux is miles ahead of an XP any day technology wise, it’s a shame that not following a standard is whats driving the PC vendors away from shipping pre-installed GNU/Linux boxes. As many people have pointed out, the vendors are certainly confused with regards to which distro to support — there are just too many and they all work differently. Adios!!

Nobody Does it Better

Aye, that’s a picture of my favorite girl and one of my oldest friends Gox. I got it today in a Yahoo! photo mail and it was titled “for those who annoy me — suck my…!!!” lol! The loony went to a Sting concert recently. Not that I like Sting or anything but she seriously deserves some butt-kicking! Following is an excerpt from the email for those who’re into Sting…

What else was good… Yeah, how could I forget that?! Monday night I went to a Sting concert and it was nice, but there were only solo guitar, bass and drums… So it sounded more like a fine pop-rock concert than a great Sting concert. He was much better 2 years ago in Budapest with all saxs, keyboards and some other musicians. And Manu Katche wasn’t drumming this time and he is an awesome drummer!!! Yeah the audience pretty much sucked… I mean, he sings some high-pitched stuff for like a minute without taking a breath and the audience just didn’t make any reaction! I screamed like hell but what’s one or a thousand screams in a crowd of 20,000 people… But Sting still has the energy and his voice is awesome. The musicians were good too, but I honestly expected more.

So there you go, coming from an expert the concert hardly had any meat. That’s about it for tonight! Adios!!

You’ve got to be crazy…

Weekend’s here! We’re now three-member strong, with three more to join soon and comments goin strong, but no one has posted. So I guess Ima do the honor again…

Just some fun screenshots I took while watching Dogs in Roger Waters’ In The Flesh – Live DVD. Ya’ll can click on the images for their original sizes.

Jon Carin — keyboards, lap steel, programming, guitar and vocals — sings most of David Gilmour’s part in this song, which means he starts the song with the acoustic rhythm and vocals.

(L-R) Lead guitarist Doyle Bramhall II, rhythm & lead guitarist Snowy White and bassist Roger Waters.

Graham Broad, the drummer who was just too good.

Doyle and Snowy play the twin lead for the first extended guitar solo break.

The Girls sing “dragged down by the stone…” : (L-R) Katie Kissoon, P. P. Arnold and Susannah Melovin (Doyle’s wife).

The Dogs: A cards’ session during the mid-song extended synth break.

Can you beat this lineup? (Second from right is Andy Fairweather Low — guitars, bass and vocals.)

I’d recommend everyone to get this video — one of the best live performances ever. An interesting trivia thingy which ya’ll maybe interested in: Doyle was recomended to Roger Waters by Eric Clapton for the 1999-2000 North Armerica tour. A short excerpt from his bio at his official Web site…

Doyle Bramhall II was raised in a home filled with the blues and rock and roll sounds that are indigenous to his birthplace – Austin, Texas. His father, Doyle Bramhall Senior, was the drummer for blues legend Lightning Hopkins and a regular collaborator with Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

When Doyle was 16 years old, he toured as second guitarist with Jimmy Vaughan’s band, The Fabulous Thunderbirds. Shortly thereafter he and fellow Texan, Charlie Sexton, co-founded the rock band Arc Angels. Doyle and Charlie enlisted the rhythm section from Stevie Ray Vaughan’s backing band, Double Trouble, to complete the lineup. The group enjoyed critical acclaim and commercial success.

That’s all folks! Adios!!

Asking Too Much…

Goddamn! Ya’ll know this Oz guy Ben’s humor. This one called Henry’s Fedora Core 5 Install Guide is an absolute killer. Even a Windoze dummy would enjoy it, so go ahead and click and READ.

And here’s one of Ben’s greato quotes from the comments section of the posty:

(Talking to Fabian) You’re welcome. I graciously accept any incoming links. Even from porn sites. Actually, especially from porn sites. How come porn sites don’t link to me anyway? It’s not fair.

P.S. –> Actually, I just found out the worldpress one is his primary blog.

Improvisation No. 1

OMG!! Look at what I got:

Isn’t that so cool? Oh in case you dunno, that’s bad-ass bassist Jaco Pastorius on the left and if you dunno who’s on the right then go jump off a cliff! I’ve just started listening to Jaco after I finally got two of his albums a few days ago. This Live in Italy album is freaking awesome.

The other day it was fun. I was talking to Zen on Yahoo!, and wanted to show him an integrated Last.fm feature in Amarok (yea, the devs recently changed the name from amaroK to Amarok. I thought the initial one was cooler tho). It’s the “Related Artists” and “Suggested Songs” thingy on Amarok’s left pane. So, I was listening to this Aimee Mann album, and among the “suggested songs”, it decided to mostly only show R.E.M. songs from my collection. And Zen being a R.E.M. nut got really excited about the whole thing. For all you Windoze nuts, following is a screenshot to help you understand what I’m talking about…

Here’s a screenshot tour for some of the exciting shits Amarok can do at a Last.fm journal post. On a different note, here’s a rather idiotic but funny discussion at Last.fm on the subject OMG guess who’s gay! And my favorite quote from the stupid but funny discussion:

My mirrors only reflect darkness, not light. That’s deep man! – Wingus

lol!! I guess I’m way too stupid too, but some of those comments are actually funny! Anyway, Zen recently got all excited to install a GNU/Linux operating system after trying out PCLinuxOS, and yes of course Amarok to listen to his songs. But the shitty thing is none of the recent not-for-geeks distribution are bug free. So we’re all eagerly waiting for our favorite packager Texstar to release the next version of PCLinuxOS. Actually, to tell you the truth I’m more eagerly waiting for the next-to-next version where he’s gonna do it from scratch. Well, what can I say I’m a huge Texstar nut as well.

Meanwhile, I guess I’m gonna have Zen install the latest SUSE, and then get him to install SMART as the package manager. I mean SMART is pretty smart, so wish the SUSE devs would make that as a backend for YaST. It’s obviously much faster than whatever backend YaST uses. Tho, I’m technically stupid, so I don’t really know whether it’s possible or not. Adios!!

P.S. –> One of my favorite tech writer is back to blogging, this time at Blogger. Jes Hall is one of those few tech writers who doesn’t talk geek stuff.

Tip Toe…

Tiptoeing through the used condoms

strewn on the piers of the westside highway

sunset behind the skyline of Jersey

walking toward the water

with a fetus holding court in my gut

my body hijacked

my tits swolen and sore

the river has more colors at sunset

than my sock drawer ever dreamed of

I could wake up screaming sometimes

but I don’t

I could step off the end of this pier

but I got shit to do

and an appointment on tuesday

to shed uninvited blood and tissue

I’ll miss you

I say to the water, to the son or daughter

I thought better of

I could fall in love with Jersey at sunset

but I leave the view to the rats

and tiptoe… back.

All You Got…

Apparently Jo-so-fine has been complaining how little space I have between the right- and the left-side panes. So I checked it today on MSIE and it indeed doesn’t show any space. Tho my Blogger XHTML code isn’t optimized perfectly as Web standards’ body W3C dictates — and I’m too lazy to fix it, sorry — but the standard body’s own browser Amaya renders the spacing properly. So a first hand experience of how screwed up and standards’ non-compliant whatever that comes out of Redmond, Wa. are. I hope Micro$oft fixes the browser issues before version 7 gets out. But of course, I never need to use MSIE so I don’t care. However, for all you kno this page works just fine on Firefox, Konqueror and even Opera, which btw is not even Free Software. I kinda like Opera for the simple matter that they are one of the very few proprietary software companies which while embracing standards can still innovate.

Came across an awesome Oz tech blog last morning. His review of Automatix cracked me up. Well Automatix is something… aye, here’s what the blogger quotes the script maintainer…

Or you could just listen to Arnieboy: “This is a graphical interface for installation of a lot of apps on Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu BREEZY AND DAPPER (DOES NOT WORK ON Warty or Hoary) and for tweaking a few things to get your Ubuntu box up and working in full throttle in the quickest possible timespan.”

But the blogger’s take on the script was…

Automatix is this neat thingy that does stuff to your Ubuntu system to make it work better… Some of the cool things you can install include w32codecs (for watching porn), mplayer (for watching porn), realplayer (for watching porn), frostwire (for downloading porn), azureus (for downloading porn), wine (for getting drunk while watching porn), plus a whole heap of other stuff that doesn’t seem to have much to do with porn for some reason.

But my favorite part was where he talks about his way of reporting a bug when it didn’t work the way it should…

The first time I tried Automatix it failed silently, claiming that the install was successful when in fact nothing had been installed. So I went on over to the forum and left a really helpful bug report (“This fucking sucks”).

Then some guy replied and suggested that I needed to provide more information.

Well, I was not about to take that kind of abuse lying down, so I dashed off an immediate reply: “This really fucking sucks. Lots.” How’s that for more fucking information.

This is probably the best form of tech writing I can imagine. I mean, who the hell wants to read a 100-page documentation on stuff which reads BORING? Meanwhile, I also came across the Indian Media’s Losers Association’s hangout at Blogger.com. And occasionally many others wondered why the Indian media stinks so much… There you go buddy! How can it rock, if the people who are supposed to do their job don’t do it as most of them are busy bitching and bashing their colleagues in the profession. I bet they are so pissed poor at what they do that they don’t get any assignments to work on and have all the free time in the world to bitch. And the best part is none of them have the spine to spill out their real name or existance… like you know “Anonymous” is the in thing nowadays. lol!! Aye, but can a blame its readers? I mean this blogger goes “we” like it’s some real hot exclusive news item worth somethin, only forgetting to link his/her profile that points one to who that “we” is supposed to be. The writings have got as much weight as newspaper items that read “highly placed sources said”. Mind spilling out who those sources are? If you can’t, then just shuddup!

And there I got pissed at a Washington Post editorial writer a while back over no big deal when compared to the state of Indian mediapersons. Umm… OK I take that back… cuz Indian media doesn’t affect my life, but a non-neutral Internet does!

Anyway, I’ve been listenin to these Canadian chicks who go by Tegan and Sara, and they are pretty neat. Thanks Zen for suggesting their stuff. I like this album called The Business of Art. The following kinda goes with me…

Had a bad day as bad as they come

Time to get a real job you gotta stop having fun

So I, so I got a real job I’m working nine to nine

I’m making five bucks an hour ’til the day I die

Umm, OK Zen I’m gonna write the Ubuntu install experience by tomorrow and have it up here. But you should know that I’m lazy and that’s why I use PCLinuxOS, cuz its “Radically Simple!!” Adios!!

PS –> Did I ever tell ya’ll how much Miguel di Icaza rocks? Listen to him here at this FLOSS Weekly podcast #5 with Leo Laporte and Google’s own Chris DiBona as hosts. BTW, that was the podcast I was listening to while I took the screenshot for the amaroK’s podcast-support post below.

Somebody’s Miracle

So, I’ve been running the new version 1.4 of amaroK for a while now, and among other things I really like the much improved podcast support. Here’s a screenshot of amaroK displaying the same…

Click for a larger image.

Coming from version 1.3.x series, where support for a podcast was only that it could play it, with the left-side pane displaying just the URL of the episode. Now it also streams in details like the thumbnail artwork of the show, summary information about the currently playing episode, and all the other podcast episodes for which the feed is available in a very well organized manner.

Though some of the things I need the developers to fix are: the slidebar (as you can see it doesn’t move and stays where it is at the beginning of the progress bar), and to display the episode length in the main playlist window as it does in the left-side pane.

Otherwise, I can’t complain much. Like I said: Rock n’ roll in me amaroK is all I need. Or like Uncle Rodney says, “10/10. amaroK is simply super!” Adios!!