Broadband Access

I finally decided to take the plunge and install ADSL at home. Unfortunately here in good old South Africa the boradband options aren't that good so I will only get a 384kbps pipe into my house, but it should be fine.

Telkom, the service provider, also does not have a very good track record. I will have to wait for at least 3 weeks, hopefully not more.

Amarok

Being a devout gnome user I don't like installing KDE software on by Ubuntu machine but all the talk on the wire about Amarok made me curious enough to install it and try it out.

I must say that all the talk is justified, Amarok is really an amazing piece of software and I am thoroughly impressed.

Nokia 9300

I just received my Nokia 9300 and I am impressed so far. I downloaded the mobile GMail application and it works good. I think it works better than on my SE w550i.

The standard Inbox

Conversation view

Edgy Eft Power Management Applet

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to see my Edgy Eft power management applet support my wireless Logitech mouse.

Very nice touch.

flv2mpg

I regularly download movies from YouTube but they are always in Flash format which is no good for most people I want to email funny bits.

After some searching on the web I found that ffmpeg will be able to convert all my .flv files to .mpg files. I also found a nice script to do the job.

With some modifications to those scripts I created two scripts that will allow you to right click any .flv file in Nautilus and convert it to a .mpg file. The new .mpg file will have to same name than the .flv file and will be in the same directory.

Also it is possible to select multiple .flv files and convert all of them. The script will also check for a valid .flv file before converting it so to convert a lot of .flv files is a simple as Ctrl+A and then flv2mpg.

The attached flv2mp3.tar.gz contains both scripts and it should be as simple as just extracting the tar file into your home directory.

Ubuntu 6.10 Installed

Finally I installed Edgy Eft on my laptop. I had an unfortunate bug with my ATI FireGL drivers but the Ubuntu help sorted it out.

All I need to do now is install Automatix and all my other nice tools I am used to, will have to wait for Monday though, no broadband at home.

rDesktop 1.4 that comes with Edgy rocks, had some issues while my FireGL was still detected as Mesa compatible and not as fglrx compatible, but after the ATI fix my rDesktop is fast and very efficient.

Ubuntu 6.10 Released

At long last last Edgy Eft is available for download, unfortunately staying in South Africa with the Telscum (Telkom) monopoly it means my download will be done by sometime tomorrow if I am lucky.

So this weekend seems to be the Edgy Eft weekend I've been waiting for.

rDesktop

It seems I do not need to try and make Remote Desktop work on my Linux machine via Wine anymore. Apparently I can use rDesktop to connect to my Windows boxes via the RDP protocol, if this works well it will be brilliant.

Will try rDesktop as soon as I installed Ubuntu 6.10 on my Laptop.

Ubuntu 6.10

I can not wait for Ubuntu 6.10 to be released. I almost forgot how much Windows XP sucked. The last week of using XP again brought all my bad memories back. One more week and then I have my Ubuntu back again. Brilliant.

I broke Ubuntu

I recently reconfigured my partitions on my notebook and I broke Ubuntu in the process. My bootup process gets stuck at Mount root filesystem..., I tried all the fixes I could lay my hands on but to no avail, so now I will just wait for the new 6.10 release and reinstall which should be by the end of October.

So for now I will use Windows XP again.

VM Keyboard Problem

I always had a nagging issue with my Windows 2000 vm whenever my laptop is not docked into my docking station, for some reason the keyboard would have a lag, so I would press a key and the character will only appear a second or two later.

I sort of found a hack for the problem over at the VMWare knowledge base, it is not pretty but it seems to work, so now my clock is very fast when I am docked into my docking station but at least my clock is running at an acceptable speed when I am not docked.

Firefox has sound!

My Firefox on Ubuntu 6.06 never had sound, not when watching YouTube videos and not when using Meebo, but today I realized with a shock that YouTube and Meebo has sound all of the sudden.

All I can think of why it is suddenly working is that I upgraded to Firefox 1.5.0.7 recently and my Ubuntu installed approx. 70 updates in the last week. Whatever it was, it is great to have sound in my browser.

Windows Vista RC1

One of our clients decided their new product must work on Windows Vista RC1. I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my Linux machine using VMWare Server and VMPlayer.

A full screen image is available here.

Why I like VMPlayer

I am using VMWare's VMPlayer extensively now and a feature I only recently discovered is that the VMPlayer will dynamically change the resolution of the guest OS when I resize the VMPlayer window, thus it is possible to have unlikely resolutions of 433x900 etc.

To me this is great, I can now run my VM alongside my other applications and it looks like just another application actually. I have a screenshot available just to give some background to why I am so impressed, just be warned it is a 1920x1200 PNG image.

Opera 8.6 for PocketPC

I downloaded the new Opera for PocketPC and it is very stable and much better than Pocket IE. At last I have JavaScript 1.2 support and some other goodies Pocket IE does not have.

Unfortunately Opera for PPC is not free so I will have to fork out $29 for my full copy soon. At least it will be money well spent.

iPAQ Bluetooth Keyboard

I bought myself an iPAQ hx4700 PDA a bit more than a year ago and I have been using it mosly everyday. I just recently decided to by the iPAQ bluetooth keyboard as well.

The keyboard works like a charm, I am actually typing this blog using my iPAQ, the BT keyboard and my Sony Ericsson W550i cell phone.

VMware Player vs. Workstation

I am currently using VMware Workstation 5.5 to do my Windows development on my Ubuntu laptop, the problem is I need to buy VMware Workstation to keep on using it and I do not really have $189 to spent on it, especially since I am only using it run Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

I considered using the VMware Player instead but could not find any meaningful benchmarks or comparisons so I decided to download SiSoft Sandra 2005 and do some tests myself and I am very impressed with the Player's speed.

I am not allowed to publish any benchmarks but suffice to say that I will be using the free VMware player to do my development on from now on and not the VMware workstation anymore.

JDiskReport and Unison

In my search to find utilities that can replace the Windows utilities I was used to I discovered these two applications.

jDiskReport is a utility that allows me to analyze my hard disk to find directories that are becoming a bit bloated. The added benefit is that it is a 100% Java application which allows for easy installation.

Unison is a utility that allows me to synchronize my files on my hard disk to my backup hard disk. I always used FileSync for this on my Windows machine and this utility has equivalent functionality.

CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office

I use Ubuntu exclusively now but my job requires me to still use Microsoft Office. Now I used MS Office inside my Windows 2000 VM but then I tried a product called CrossOver Office and it works great.

I am now using Microsoft Office XP on my Ubuntu machine without any problems, the little envelope from Outlook even appears in my Ubuntu notification area. I am definitely going to invest in this application very soon.

My Desktop even has the MS Office icons as any other Windows PC would have.

Just more reason not to ever go back to Windows again except maybe for gaming.

Ubuntu Printing

Again I am very impressed with Ubuntu, everything just works so far. I setup my machine to be able to print to PDF from any application and I setup my network printing to our company's network printer on the Windows server.

Both work perfectly and it took my only 30 minutes about to do it all. Still a bit longer than in Windows but I think I am able to setup a printer in Windows much quicker because I've done it so many times before.