existence trainer

I don't know what Obama has decided, but I'm very very worried. Its a terrible decision to have to make, and it will haunt his presidency either way. War is a horrific thing, and I can never really truly support a war, even if I think it is necessary. But I don't know if what is about to happen is necessary. I don't believe its largely about combat missions (though I'm sure its implied), but more about patrolling, providing security, and building a strong army/police force to combat the Taliban. Nonetheless if he increases troop levels, it will become a defining moment of his presidency. Not only he is going to have a very hard time with the base of his party, but it might taint all the good that he is trying to do (and prevent much of it if - and when - we get mired in a long, violent struggle). The Republicans will continue to lie about him - relying on the stupidly inane memes that Democrats don't support our troops, that he's cutting the military budget,...

Karmic Koala is out! I've been using it though the beta release, and overall I'm really impressed. There are a LOT of changes under the hood, which has given rise to some unfortunate instability, but the direction the distribution is going in seems to be good. There are the beginnings of a visual refresh going on as well - I hope for more in the future! The main annoyance I have is the large number of serious bugs that came in Karmic. For example, I couldn't burn a CD from Rhythmbox (it has subsequently been fixed, but for a couple of weeks was an annoying regression). There are also reports of data loss do to the switch to the new ext4 filesystem (bug report here ) - this makes me very worried about switching to ext4. For the rest of this post, though, I want to discuss what I hope for in the next version of Ubuntu, codenamed Lucid Lynx. Given that this is an LTS release, I think that, along with the normal package/application updates, the main foci of this release should ...

I'm so pissed at myself. My computer totally crashed (because I was using a development version that wasn't very stable), and I forgot to backup my fucking pictures. I'm super pissed. For future reference, here is what I need to backup on a crash or before big updates: Photos folder Music folder dev folder .purple folder .tomboy folder .tmp2 folder scribefire.sqlite file

check out mp3splt . Its not in the Jaunty repos, but it is in Karmic!

Here are some tools that Ubuntu, or Linux generally, seems to lack: A good WYSIWYG html editor. Up until about a year ago, I was pretty satisfied with quanta plus. Since then I have become increasingly disappointed with it, mainly because no one seems to be porting it to Qt4, or developing it substantially. What had such great potential seems to be languishing. KompoZer crashes a lot - I'm waiting for the new version to come out (still in alpha), but I'm less than certain it will be better (and NVU is dead). Bluefish - although its not a WYSIWYG editor, I still think it could be good if they'd ever release a new version that updates a lot of antiquated crap in there (like not knowing how to open a browser easily) Decent blogging software Mainly I use scribefire (I'm using it now) - its ok - but it only offers the simplest options for blogging. If I want any type of formating that goes beyond a bullet point, I've got to know my html (which it visually formats in a ve...

I'm beginning to get frustrated with certain aspects of the Ubuntu development cycle, and in this post I'm going to try my best to spell out my complaint and what I think should be done about it. My Complaint First, let me say that I'm a huge Ubuntu fan. Since Gutsy (when I first started using Ubuntu) each of the iterations of Ubuntu has made large, important strides to becoming a preeminent OS. Many of the things that annoyed me about the desktop experience have been have been fixed or minimized, and with the release of Jaunty I've had very few complaints about things not doing what I want/expect them to, very few crashes, and less annoyances than at any other time using a linux based OS. As I've written before, Jaunty is the first time a Linux vendor has released a distribution that I'd pretty much recommend to anyone. As you can see, I'm a very happy user. So my complaint then isn't about the great work being done on Ubuntu, its rather an end-user com...

I hope he does sue the US government - and I hope to hell he wins. This is so outrageously unacceptable. 7½ Years For Being Muslim ~ The Story Of Lakhdar Boumediene