Look What I Found
Ok, This was too good not to pass up.
Commodore 64 cleared in train crash
WHEN THE departures and arrivals computer went down at Dortmund Train Station, the journalists on the scene were quick to blame a Commodore 64 machine that was apparently running it.
I just saw on Slashdot where Battlestar Galactica is now renewed for a second Season. This is awesome.
Of course, I was a fan of the First BG. Who wasn’t at that time. Star Wars had just been out, and then _here is some more Sci-fi for you on TV_ (right on!). I remember getting Pizazz magazine (only source of a link for this worth anything) promoing BG. In this issue they had a two page view of a Cylon standing on a bridge taking a shot at Starbuck, Apollo or something. I remember thinking to myself, That silver guy is a total rip off of Darth Vader.
Well when it finally came on IIRC, Jimmy Carter broke in during the 2 hour premiere. After nagging my parents to let me stay up and watch it, the President breaks in with news on the Iran Hostages. Being a kid at the time, and having my own priorities, I was pissed (No disrespect intended). So I missed the last part of it.
Anyway, getting over that, I totally loved that series and I am really getting into the new one. It is more gritty, real, the ships are dirty (like Star Wars) and the characters are playing well off of each other. I have to say Edward James Olmos is awesome at playing Adama. He has that presence of a commander feel about him. I was sceptical about Starbuck being a woman this time around, but Katee Sackhoff is holding her own. Also interesting is the dynamic they have with a government and the miltary. It is well written, and following Ron Moore’s BG blog over at scifi.com I get the feeling that he is really into it.
If you haven’t seen it, give it a shot and here is to a Second season!
Sci Fi Wire — The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel
UPDATE:
It wasn’t the hostage situation at all, but it was Jimmy Carter:
*In some parts of North America the series premiere was interrupted for over an hour due to the signing of the Israel / Egypt peace accord by Israeli Premier Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, which was overseen by U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
Saga of a Star World
I have known for about a week or so about the fate of Star Trek Enterprise. Yea, it is canceled. After last season, I can see why. Personally I liked the show for the first two seasons. The third season was a long story arc, and it was tiring. It was about a Temporal Cold War, were sets of races that were trying to play one another against each other to a common benefit for a time traveling race. I stuck with it, but I wasn’t interested in the story any longer when it came to the last stretch of the season.
Now, This 4th season started off better, I was getting into it again, but alas it is now officially gone. Gone the way of Firefly (Thanks Fox).
Speaking of Firefly, I had heard a lot of rumbling about how this show was good and cut before it’s prime. I finally picked up the _Entire Series_ on DVD this past Christmas, and I have to say I really feel like I was missing out.
Firefly, if you don’t already know, is a mix between a Western and Sci-fi. There are no aliens, weapons are more conventional than futuristic, and there is space travel. The characters are an interesting mix, and play off of each other, and is very well written. I wish to thank Fox for having the foresight to cancel it early so as to not ruin my productivity (end sarcasm). In all fairness, there is a Firefly movie, Serenity, coming out later this year.
The new Battlestar Galactica… well… Lets make that another post.
Everyone has probably seen this already, but Tivo released viewer ship information on the Superbowl. I bet it is fun and an eye opener to see this kind of information up front.
Well it looks like Commercials were the big thing (Surprise) and the MVP phone number for dialing in a vote. Paul McCartney kept 5% more audience than the Hip-hop crap from last year. I would like to think that they were watching Paul, but I think that some were probably just curious about what “Wardrobe Malfunction” that He might have.
This last weekend I moderated Kevin Devin’s ITT Tech Chat. The Tech Chat was on IT Communications, and it went really well. I enjoyed talking to everyone about everyting from web applications that we use, Intranets including Blogging and Wikis.
We all had so much to say that it went on for quite a while. I think that it was almost 2 hours. It left me with a lot of good information, and I hope that you can get something out of it as well.
I am a sucker for eye candy, and when I saw that Fedora Core 3 Test 2 had Xorgs 6.8 included I thought that this would be a good chance to see the new Shadow and Transparency extensions that came with xorg. Well, it has been quite an event.
First off, I installed FC3t2 and ran update to get all the new updated RPMS that were new since the release , and that included the xorg 6.8 final. Then I found some postings that told you how to get it running.
Add this to your xorg.conf file:
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
Then when you restart X you should be able to open a terminal and type:
xcompmgr -c &
…to start the Shadows. I found that Metacity apparently doesn’t like this at all, and as far as I can see Metacity segfaults on me. I see it come and go a few times (My window borders come and go) and then it dies. I read somewhere that someone got Metacity 2.8.3 working without a problem, but 2.8.4 comes with FC3t2. Turns out that Metacity has some kind of a compositing manager included in it, and that was causing the conflict. I basically got the source rpm, and modified the configure.in to not enable the compositor and made a new RPM. No go there either.
Finally I said screw it. (I guess I am starting to learn to stop while I am ahead.) I installed xfwm4 and started that up instead of Metacity, and then got my shadows up and running.
It looks great, except it is a little slower moving windows.
My workstation here has a Intel i810 video card. It’s good but not great. I bet it would perform better on my Nvidia card at home.
Now how cool is that? Being able to set up a wifi access point by just booting off a CD. It looks like you can save your custom interface and all your settings to a floppy (you still got one right?) and have them read when the cd boots.
LinuxWorld | Linux-based Wi-Fi hot spot on CD
Update: Here is a link to PublicIP the project site for the CD.
Just checking out the Blogging by email.
