ipsidixit.net

Google versus… anyone

Recently Microsoft launched another attempt to dethrone Google as the search-engine kings of the Internet. Welcome to Bing. Go on, give it a try. You know, it’s actually not bad. In fact it’s quite good. Or at least not too far off as good as a search engine can be. Hooray! The king is dead, long live the king?

There are articles appearing out there which would appear to agree. cnet are very excited about it, for example. Am I? Well, no. But not for the obvious reasons. I am a bit of a Google fan – I like their services and I suppose I like their “image” (aka marketing) And Microsoft? The opposite. I have little use for their services or software, and I really do not like their image. However a lot of that is, of course, very subjective.

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Old fogies reunited

Friends Reunited, a web-site I joined a while ago and which I’ve rarely accessed, emails me to try and get me to log back in. They’ve started some sort of “Groups” thing and reckon that based upon my demographic and goodness-knows-what-else I might be interested in some of these:

- Over Forties
Thanks a bunch Friends Reunited. Accurate, but do you have to put it FIRST in the list?

- Pink Floyd
I haven’t touched illegal drugs for about 20 years, so I think Pink Floyd and I would have less intense relationship than previously. But not too far wrong.

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QuadKonsole on KDE4

Under KDE 3 I’ve made major use of the wonderful quadkonsole, from Simon Perreault. It’s a lovely thing, allowing you to embed 4 (by default, other permutations possible) konsoles in a single window, with them all resizing together. Kinda hard to explain, but very useful in some situations.

KDE 4 comes along and, finally, is about ready for day to day use. Many improvements, some drawbacks, but on balance I’m now ready to use it in anger for real work. The KDE 4 konsole is quite nice. And it even pretends that it can do something similar to quadkonsole. Which it can only very very slightly.

So us KDE 3 quadkonsolers demand that quadkonsole run under KDE 4! And so it does…. read on.

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VIA – Hot stuff!

A while back I wrote a few notes on building a small home server box. Specifically that I had chosen this neat Morex case and this VIA EK Corefusion motherboard.

Here in southern Europe the summer has been in full swing, and it got hotter by the day. A few weekends back I thought I’d do a quick check on temperatures on this system to make sure it wasn’t about to burst into flames.

Logged in and ran ‘sensors’. Yikes! CPU at 77 degrees C, and the chassis temp only a couple of degrees lower.

Went over to the box and touched it. Very warm. Listened. No sound of a fan. Now the motherboard is fanless (in the 800MHz version I chose for this very reason) but the Morex case has a single internal fan which I was pretty sure I had wired in to the system/case fan header on the board. Peering in the side with a torch I confirmed that it most definitely wasn’t turning.

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The usual suspects? Or the usual bullshit?

In a book review of three books (The Economist) each attempting to explore the cause of 2008′s global “credit crunch” we are told that it’s simply not fair to lay the blame at the door banks. In a telling section we are sternly lectured that “It was the Basel accords on bank capital ratios………that helped push the banks into securitising sub-prime mortgages.”

This is an outrageous statement.

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KDE 4 revisited

Back in January I wrote about the newly-released KDE 4.0, and what a disappointment it was.

Since then, and particularly in recent weeks, the FOSS community has been raging with discussions about the perceived issues with KDE4.
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Come back XP, all is forgiven!

Despite being something of a Linux enthusiast (Linux boxes at home outnumber Windows boxes) I’m also realistic. My main workstation at home runs Windows, due to the simple reason that the applications I need only run on Windows. Yes, I know all about WINE, and use it very successfully on some Linux systems at work, but some stuff just won’t, at least yet, run on WINE. Two significant problem areas for WINE are games and…. Adobe applications. And when I ain’t Photoshopping, I’m gaming. So Windows required.

Anyway, to get back to the point: having built a reasonably muscular new PC last year I decided to drop Vista on to it as my choice of Windows. Last weekend it had a catastrophic file-system error. To be fair, that’s probably not Vista-specific: Windows has a long and ignoble history of buggering up its file-system and requiring reformat, reinstall, recriminations, etc. So this was just a normal day-in-the-life of a Windows user.

The interesting part is it at last gave me the excuse I needed to ditch Vista and put Windows XP on the PC. So after several months of Vista use, why did I hate it so? Let’s list some Pros and Cons of Vista versus XP.
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Ubuntu 8.04 upgrade woes

Ubuntu’s generally splendid Linux distribution came up to version 8.04 a few days ago.

The three Ubuntu systems in my life were headed for an upgrade! First off a Kubuntu laptop I use for work. Fairly vanilla configuration. Upgrade took a while due to a *lot* of downloads, but it went well and the upgraded system worked fine. [EDIT: See below - Later saw this upgrade was bad too...]

Unfortunately this encouraged me to try two others, which both went very badly…
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Support Dan and his Data!

It’s an honour and a privilege to elevate two-fingers at the people trying to censor Dan – he of Dan’s Data, one of the better (and more idiosyncratic) technology sites on the Internet. Go to his site and see the story posted today, 19th February 2008, about how Firepower are being a pain and coming on all heavy. Go here for a fuller discussion.

And the item they wish to censor? GET IT HERE!!!!!!

EDIT: And here is Dan’s analysis of the document.

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KDE 4. Short but not sweet.

This is going to be just about the briefest review of KDE 4 you’ll read anywhere.

First things first: I LIKE KDE. I like it a lot, and have done for years. I use it every day (literally) and always look forward to new versions. They just get better and better.

KDE 4 was finally released a few days ago, and I installed the Kubuntu version of it to take it for a spin.

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