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Could it be?

Could that be silwenae.net making a return? With the music server?

I have proof:

silwenae.net screenshot

And it’s streaming music as we speak.

There’s some kinks to work out, so if you had access to the old music server, I have some things to fix first. But progress is being made!

iPod One

What’s on President Bush’s iPod, you might be wondering?

CNN is here to let you know.

The playlist does reveal a rather narrow range of babyboomer tunes. Writing in the London Times, Caitlin Moran noted: “No black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles.”

Why am I not surprised?

Ubuntu migration (almost) complete

I’ve upgraded 3 of my main machines to Ubuntu 5.04, aka the Hoary Hedgehog release. The laptop went flawlessly, as did my gaming machine, which is installed on a second hard drive. Most impressively, the ATI binary drivers, with the change to X.org, stayed and worked on my gaming box automagically. OpenGL is beautiful, the fonts are beautiful, and I’ve switched to the Clearlooks theme from Industrial.

My two major complaints are the Industrial theme disappearing and they’ve changed Nautilus’ spatial nature. Clearlooks is acceptable as a replacement, but I don’t understand why they’ve had to go and screw with Nautilus. Gnome’s default behavior for Nautilus is to open every window in a new window. I like it that way. Ubuntu, being a Gnome-centric distribution, and dedicated to releasing after every major Gnome release, should follow that direction. I can understand why some people don’t like it, but it strikes me as odd they’ve made this change.

Only the server is left to upgrade, and based on the 3 upgrades I’ve done from Warty to Hoary, should go flawless. Then it’s a matter of getting the server up on the network, which is a different story after my network rebuild last weekend.

Xeni Profile from LA Times

Courtesy of Boing Boing.net, the LA Times has written a profile of Xeni Jardin. Xeni is famous as a co-author of the Boing Boing blog, tech writer for Playboy, Wired, and Popular Science, and radio correspondent for NPR’s Day to Day.

Xeni is pretty interesting. I’ve TiVo’d a few shows she’s been on as a guest, and listened to her on NPR, and her voice always strikes me as something I didn’t expect after seeing her picture. She’s one of the new breed of journalists who “gets it” – the convergence of media, pop culture and the internet are creating a new form of journalism.

Ubuntu Linux 5.04 is out!

Ubuntu Linux 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog release) is out!

Go download it!

Ubuntu has, by far, become my favorite linux distribution. Releasing stable version of Debian every 6 months, with the latest version of the Gnome desktop, an awesome user community, and a great selection of software.

The Hoary Hedgehog release adds X.org for the xserver, faster boot process, much better laptop support, and what I think may be a first for a Linux distribution, automated package manager download and installer to upgrade the OS. Check it:

Ubuntu 5.04 includes two new packages to help you keep your computer up to date: update-manager and upgrade-notifier. The Synaptic package manager also now includes support to upgrade your Ubuntu Distribution.

update-manager is a package that allows you to quickly and efficiently upgrade your software in the background. The process is simple but without the fine-grained choices offered with the Synaptic package manager. The package is good for people who like the simplicity of a one-click upgrade, similar to that available in other operating systems.

Read the Release notes here.

I know what I’ll be doing this weekend: Upgrading 5 machines to Hoary, including my server. (My original plan was to get the server back up on the DMZ and get Jinzora working. Ack).

Playing with a new theme

The WordPress Themes Competition winners have been announced. I’m torn to what theme I want to use.

I’m testing the equix theme, which I like as a light colored theme, though I’m still debating about going back to a dark theme. I don’t like the mouse cursor, and I don’t know why it doesn’t render correct in IE (damn work forcing my browser choice). It works fine in Firefox. I like it’s clean look though.

…Must learn more HTML, PHP and CSS.

Update 6:00 p.m.: Cursor fixed, thank god

Interview with Jon Lech Johansen

Slyck.com Interviews Jon Lech Johansen, famous (or infamous if you work for Big Media) of DeCSS fame, and *Musique fame. Interesting follow-up to last week’s post about Digital Music on Linux.

Miguel de Icaza, of Gnome & Mono fame, recently reached out to Jon to create a pyMusique port to GTK# resulting in SharpeMusique.

It’s on my t0do list to download and try out. I’d give Apple’s iTMS a shot if it works. I’m hoping it shows up soon in the Ubuntu universe (I haven’t checked yet). I have Mono running, with a few apps (I love Muine) and I miss Tomboy (Tomboy isn’t working in Hoary for me, no idea why, it was fine in Warty).

24 – Day 4 – 10:00 – 11:00 PM

This week’s episode, in Season 4 (Day 4, 10:00 – 11:00 p.m.) might just be the best episode of 24 ever.

It’s definitely tied in my mind right now with the season finale from Day 1. I’m not going to spoil anything, but it’s an interesting twist to what has come before.

Well done.