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  • in General
  • 1 min read

Mmm, Pho

I’ve been meaning to write this for the last day or two, but I went out lunch Thursday to a Vietnamese restaraunt, and had Pho for the first time. Pho has been on my list of things to try since I joined the respective mailing list.

A Vietnamese soup, quite popular in the US as well, Pho is one of the few Vietnamese dishes not served family style.

Typically made with beef, it’s a soup served in a large bowl with rice noodles, beef, and a number of assorted spices. This particular restaraunt had it’s choice from beef, meatballs, tripe, beef strips, rare steak, and a few others I can’t remember. On the recommendation of the waitress I had the beef and meatballs. It was excellent – can’t wait to fnd another restaraunt to try it out.

  • in Politics
  • 1 min read

Wish I could have been there!

I wasn’t there, but my family was well represented with my father and sister in Madison today as John Kerry was joined by Bruce Springsteen and 100,000 strong.

We are 5 days away and every vote counts. Pick up the phone, ask a friend to vote, it doesn’t matter for whom, but get folks to the polls. Here in Minnesota, same day voter registration is in effect, so get out the vote!

More photo’s & news from today’s event in Madison here.

Kerry in Madison 10/28/04

Ubuntu – Holy Cow

So I knew Ubuntu was good, just see my last two posts. But I had no idea it was this good.

I took the liberty of installing it on my HP ze4600 laptop tonight. Popped in the CD, booted it up, clicked enter, and it hung. Repeat, hangs again. Guessing it’s an APCI problem, add a noirq to the boot command line, no go. Google around, see the F1 key is options before boot, and there it says add “noapic nolapic” to the boot command. Voila.

Normal install, quick and dirty. Boot up for the first time after installation is complete.

What’s this? My Synaptic touchpad is working? Double-clicking the pad is just like double tapping the mouse button. Awesome! I never did get this to work on FC2.

Looking up at the panel I see the wireless networking strength meter. Interesting, mouse over shows it sees device ath0, my D-Link AG660 PC Card that’s in there! (I don’t use the Broadcom builtin 54G, bad Broadcom for not supporting linux!) Fire up the networking settings, add the ath0 and WEP key, disable the ethernet, and wham! bang! Full wireless network support!

I spent days hacking at madwifi getting that to run on FC2. The first FC2 install I had it worked fairly easily, but after a reinstall I couldn’t get madwifi / atheros support to work to save my life. And here’s a distribution that installs this stuff by default.

I am going to make it a priority to get my music re-tagged, organized, backed up, and migrate my server over to Ubuntu in the next month or two. I’m in love, swept off my feet, by a polished, linux distribution run by Canonical, powered by Debian. I’m in awe of the work they’ve done, and am going to support them as much as I can.

Grrr – Spam

So not only is email spam a problem, but Zoe’s blog has been hit by weblog spammers. Time to download some plugins.

Each post has 4-6 comments with regular text quotations, but then the poster’s name is a link to online casinos. You’re telling me online casinos need money so badly this is what they resort too?

I’m a little angry. Got some hacking to do tonight!

Taking the plunge

I took the plunge last night, inspired by my post yesterday, and installed Ubuntu on my linux box I use for chat, email, surfing, and listening to music.

I backed up my Evolution and media files, but I forgot to export my GPG private key. Oops, I’ll have to create a new one and get my new public key posted.

I have to say I was absolutely blown away. First, as a text based installer, so what – everyone wants a GUI installer but there were only a few basic questions asked during installation, and then a few more after that to get it set up. It was, by far, the fastest installation of any linux distribution I’ve ever seen, including Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Suse and Mandrake that I’ve done in the last 5 years. A part of that is that package selection is pre-determined, and looking through the final package list of what’s on the system, I can’t say I disagree with any of them.

I said it yesterday, and I’ll say it again – Gnome 2.8 is sexy. I changed Gnome to the Industrial theme right away, I didn’t care for the earth tones of the Ubuntu default theme, nor the fonts, but that’s just personal. Evolution 2.2 wouldn’t import my old Evolution files from my Fedora box. I have ’em backed up, but I hope there wasn’t anything really important there I really need. I did Google for importing, and found a page about importing Evolution email into Thunderbird. Fired up Synaptic, installed Thunderbird, started it, and my box locked up. Hmmm. Restarted, seems to work fine. Still using Evolution at the moment, just from a starting over point, want to try the Junk filters built in now.

Went to change my desktop background, and tried to download a blue Ubuntu background. Firefox locked up. Restarted. Hmm. Wonder if it’s a hardware thing or just me? Seems to be working fine though.

Some of the things that absolutely kick ass. Clean theme, no icons on the desktop. I like splitting the Applications and Computer on the Gnome panel bar thing. Samba functionality worked out of the box. Can completely see my server in the basement and can browse SMB shares. Linked to the shares on my desktop. I never could get that working in Gnome 2.6 / Nautilus on my Fedora Core 2 box.

Synaptic runs like a champ. Being a long time user of Apt from Freshrpms on Fedora & Red Hat, on a Debian based system it even feels better.

Next steps are getting full multimedia functionality, including DVD & MP3; Bluefish and some editor type stuff, and seeing if Rhythmbox can connect over a Samba share. And maybe importing my Evolution stuff.

Then I’ll be on to installing Ubuntu on the laptop and the Athlon 64! And if I’m really daring, wiping my Gaming box. Getting closer everyday.

Progress

Finally figured out what’s hanging my linux box – GAIM, my IM client. Can’t say I’m shocked, there have been a ton of updates lately.

It’s driving me pretty close to using Ubuntu Linux though. I’ve tried Debian, Gentoo, and have been (and still am) a long time user of Red Hat & Fedora. The box currently has Fedora Core 2 on it, and Fedora Core 3 hasn’t come out fast enough for me.

Gnome 2.8 is sexy.

Ubuntu, as a Debian derivative is very interesting me. 6 month release cycles (similar to Fedora), tied to Gnome releases, which are 6 months as well (close, but not quite similar to Fedora).

I am very excited about the community aspect of Ubuntu – Debian with all the updates, contributed back to the Debian core teams, funded by a .com millionaire to make a great Linux distro. As a huge Gnome fan, their Gnome integration looks (from the outside) fabulous. All the power of apt-get, with the power of Debian.

I always hated the Debian installer – I had to actually get help at a TCLUG installfest to get installed (damn network). Ubuntu looks to take some of that complexity away. In addition, their interesting choice of using sudo instead of a root account is intriguing.

I tried their pre-release on my laptop, but it wouldn’t boot, but I’m sure it was ACPI related. I just didn’t spend the 15 minutes needed to find the boot command. I burned the final version last week – I’m going to get on my linux box as I backed up my music and email a day or two ago, and then my laptop and AMD64 box right after that.

More to come.

  • in Sports
  • 1 min read

ESPN's Daily Quickie

If you don’t read ESPN’s Daily Quick on Page 2, you should.

One editor’s opinions about the previous day’s sports activities. While there is a lot of bandwagon hopping on and off certain trends, Dan Shakoff provides insight and opinions that’s worth the 5 minute read daily. (See University of Wisconsin: highlights potential upset for Northwestern Friday, today’s he’s hopping on the Badger bandwagon for a BCS championship bid).

Tomorrow: Tuesday Morning QB on NFL.com.

Good Sports Weekend

Badgers & Packers both win big this weekend.

With the exception of 2 minutes in the 2nd half, the Badgers were dominating, even with 3 defensive starters out.

Packers looked simply awesome (where have they been all year?!) – Grady Jackson was back stuffing the run and knocking down a pass, the secondary looked good, and the offense looked awesome. Go Go Javon and Ahman!

Badgers are off this weekend, and the Packers are at the Redskins. I need to look in to that whole superstition about the Redskins and Presidential picks, and make sure the Packers get to win.

Last Starfighter: The Musical

Ah, the 80’s. When I was young, impressionable, and naive.

From the goodness that is BoingBoing, I bring you: The Last Starfighter: The Musical, an off Broadway production.

Jason Scott’s blog has the review.

One of my favorite movies, I remember when Jason bought this a year or two back (at full price, no less) and we watched it. And then John mentioned a month or two back he had bought it too.

Must add to the wishlist.