This past week I have gravitated to using Google-Chrome and Chromium more and more and I have to say I am loving it. Everything just works, and works rather snappy. The biggest contention I have with web browsing would be the results of Flash being a friggin hog and tending to crash the browser. I have not noticed as many problems with Flash under Chrom(e|ium). No slow downs, mouse interactions work, and multiple flash elements on a page do not destroy the performance.

I installed Chrome on my wife’s eeePC and she is just loving it. That is where she spends all her time now. “Amazing” she says! She confessed the other night to absolutely loving Google-Chrome.

What can I say? Google has done a bang up job with this browser. I am even using it more and more at work! My only gripe, originally, was with newly created tabs spawning next to the current tab I was in. I had been accustomed to the tabs spawning at the end of the tab row. There is a plugin to alter this behavior called tabby. What tabby does is move the newly created tab to the end of the tab row after it is created. The effect is noticeable as you see a bit of “jumpiness” in the tab bar. Not that distracting and you eventually begin to ignore. But, I must admit that I can see the benefit of tabs spawning next to the current one and I am tempted to go back to this behavior.

The latest builds of Firefox 3.6 seem to default to this behavior. To fix it you have to go into about:config and set browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false. Chances are you will get warnings that this may violate your warranty. I never knew there was a warranty for Firefox. Anyway, be aware that this warning has a checkbox that says don’t show me this warning anymore. If you don’t click it you will get that message every time you start Firefox.

Happy browsing!

So Linc posts about his VMware woes, and I too have experienced some mysterious issues these past couple of weeks, primarily with my Asterisk image. The asterisk server would mysteriously shut down with no warnings and nothing coherent I can see in the log files. To top it off, I had my main server image go haywire requiring a reboot on Monday and then it was just down the other morning. Again, no indication as to the problem has yet been discovered.

Imagine my surprise when my Meso battery would not charge. Recall that Linc had mentioned his Acer batter not charging for some reason a few episodes back on TLLTS. I had it plugged in at work yesterday and then all night last night. When I fired it up the battery was still dead. I have it on now and plugged in and it seems to be charging though, so I hope my issues are not the same as Linc. It’s at 15% now and climbing; maybe I am out of the woods.

Never-the-less, if you are having problems of late it’s probably Linc’s fault. Remember to remind him.

Won’t you join Klaatu in his multimedia quest? I noticed that the other day I failed to post some pertinent information regarding the multimedia sprint. Once again I failed Klaatu. I hope he can forgive me:

When: January 26th from 14:00-0600 Eastern Standard Time

Where: irc.binrev.net #media

What: Linux Multimedia “extra content” Sprint

Why: Linux multimedia users want raw materials, but there’s no reason every single Linux user should have to go out and do the same leg work as every other Linux user; let’s band together, find the free content, and share it in just a few easy-to-find and easy-to-download packages.

Hopefully that will vindicate me once more in his eyes. Klaatu is a harsh task master, that he is.

I come home from work Friday night to find the MythTV box running a browser looking up Thomas Jefferson on Wikipedia. My daughter was reading up on the President and decided to use the MythTV box instead of her eeePC. Back in the day we would have to pull the right encyclopaedia volume off the book shelf or get Mom or Dad to drive us to the Library for research. Kids these days have it so easy….

Well it is good to see that she is using the technology for purposes other than watching tv or catching up on anime episodes off Animefreak.tv. I must saying, watching full screen anime from Animefreak.tv is a wonderful experience on the mythbox. Why can it not be the same way for Hulu?

Back on January 8, 2010 Klaatu sent me a great email about a project he is kicking off on January 26, 2010 and I was remiss in playing the announcement on the show. Well, I am trying to get the word out now. So without further wordiness from me and in his own words:

Running the server without the fans is probably not a good idea since I could cook an egg on the box. Well. that has prompted me to only run the workstation when needed and rely more on the other systems I have. The biggest detriment was to my email filtering as I was relying on Thunderbird to shuffle my emails into their proper folders. It was finally time to get off my lazy butt and learn procmail. This was pretty darn easy to do and now my email gets filtered properly without the need of a client.

What am I going to do with my workstation now?

Say goodbye to my faithful workstation that has served me for a good 5 or so years. About a year ago it started giving me boot issues, would lock up with some regularity and was just ornary. Well, today was the final straw. I ripped it out of my rack and removed the hard drive. Slapped that in my the spare rack server I had over here for backup purposes and went at it.

Arch did not want to boot because it could not find the hard drive. Luckily there was a failsafe image on there. I suspect the regular arch image was tailored to the old hardware so the initrd system did not have the proper modules. Couple this with some knowledge of grub and I was golden.

This system has an ATI Rage XL and getting that configured and using something other than 800×600 was a chore. It made me realize I have no desire to use ati cards in the near future. While people may complain about nvidia, and I used the open nv driver, they work a hell of a lot better than any ATI card I have ever tried.

The biggest problem, though, were the four fans in this thing. The old Compaq server I had sounded like a jet taking off. This damn box sounds like a whole squadron. Did they have to make the fans so loud?

The horror, the horror.

Well Arch is running and I am back into my fluxbox. Hooray!

Wow! I’ve heard a bit about how good this game is for some time but man, am I blown away. This has got to be one of the most involving and exciting games I have played in a long time. Orginally released on the Super Nintendo, Chrono Trigger is an epic quest across time that has fantastic role playing elements combined with a terrific storyline. I cannot believe how awesome this game is.

Your main character starts off the morning with plans to visit the centennial festival. There you play some games and complete some mini-quests which actually alter the storyline a bit later on down the line depending on the choices you make. You meet up with you friend, a female mechanic who has created a teleporter. You are the first brave sole to take a try. Success compells another female companion who you hook up with to jump on in there but she gets kicked out of time and you have to go rescue her. Your quest continues through about 5 different eras in history each with links to one another. How this all ties together is just utterly fascinating. The character development is top notch.

There are so many twists and turns in this games and events that happen which just floor me. I don’t want to give any of the surprises away so I will say little more. Suffice to add that when it feels like the game might be reaching a climax you learn that you still have a long way to go.

The combat system is really cool. From the start you have the choice to use traditional turn based combat or ongoing combat. The latter has you making choices and attacking while the enemy is doing the same with no pause and no break, so you have to be on your toes. I suspect it was unique for its time and I have not played many other games that utilize this type of system. It’s almost Balder’s Gate in some ways, but you cannot pause the flow.

This game is an absolute must have for the DS. You can pick it up just about anywhere that sells older or used games. I recommend trying to find it new, but don’t pay more than $20. I saw it at Kmart for $19.99 unopened.

You can also find the rom on line for the snes emulator, but come on, you know you want to get it legitimately.

You hear so much about Zelda and Final Fantasy, it’s a shame a game like this never received the mainstream recongnition it deserved. Chrono Trigger is truly a treasure.

There is a sequel, Chrono Cross, for the Playstation.

Congratulations to the wife, she just passed her Massage Therapist Certification exam. Now she is a $50 Virginia license away from going into business for herself. Hooray!

Now if only I could get her to give me a massage!

So I noticed that for some reason if the screen blanks on the System76 running Karmic and I slide across the trackpad or hit a key when it comes back for some reason it borks audacity and the recording stops. When this happened I was able to recover and save the file then open a new instance and continue recording. I went back to the original file after the show and it said something about deleting some blank blocks so I said ok. At the time I had the other files open and things were getting a bit slow so I figured I would save and close the new file then process the other files, export to wav and open the orginal project and piece it all together. Easy peasy!

Well, when I opened the original project Audacity just sat there as if it were processing, the file open, but I could do nothing. Try as I might, it was not going to happen. So I went to manually recovering the files which were saved and not in the temp directory.

I knew I could concat all the .au files together using sox only little did I know they just using sox *.au pt1.au would not piece them together in the right order. It was a mess. So I created a script to copy all the files using the modifcation date and the file name to another location (never mess with the originals). I used sox to piece all these files together and something was still not right. Then it hit me! I was piecing them together backwards, I had to reverse the list sorted on modifcation date. After doing that in the various data sub directories (luckily there were only 5) I had the original part 1 of the show back together. I pulled this into audacity with the second part and the show was good to go (I hope). Or it seems to be good from what I listened to so far….