Planet TLLTS

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.

Topics include:

In today's podcast, dave provides audio proof that he has not died. After that he explains his absense, and talks about the SouthEast LinuxFest.

Links:

lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 121 ogg vorbis format;

mediatomb;

mediatomb howto;

xiph quicktime components;

moving windows in gnu screen;

butt - broadcast using this tool; and

SouthEast LinuxFest.

Some times you just can’t win.

A while back I got some decent server hardware and decided I was going to migrate my main server to a VM, so I could make it more portable and more reliable, etc.. Well that worked out really well, for the most part, until lately.

I set up the 64 bit version of VMware Server 2.X, created a brand new VM server, got all my services running on it and all was well initially. For some reason, though, recently my VMs have just been randomly powered off. I cannot find anything in the logs, and the host machine is still running. This has happened a couple times to some other people as well. It’s very puzzling and quite frustrating to me. The only thing I have noticed about the problem is that, on my server, it seems that the VMs stay powered on longer if the management console is not running. When it *is* running, the VMs get shut down in a few hours (always when I am not around to watch them or restart them it seems) and the management interface gets stopped at the same time.

Searching the internet has been absolutely no help on this one, so if anyone has any hints, tips or information, please shoot me an email before I rip out what is left of my hair.

Yes, the news is out. Apple is releasing the iPad, to start shipping in 60 days. There has been much discussion amongst the peanut gallery on this one, but I, for one, am exceedingly happy about the release, although maybe not for the reasons you may think.

The Apple iPad (I keep wanting to type POD) is basically a 10 inch version of their iPod Touch, with some really nice new features. The iPad does all the standard web browsing, games, iPod Touch / iPhone apps (minus the phone part of course), and games that you would expect but it also includes iBook, a really slick looking ebook reader program and iWork Spreadsheets/Presentation/Document software, etc.. What I was most impressed with was the 3G access. For $15 a month you can get 250meg of 3G access from AT&T with NO CONTRACT! That alone almost makes it worth buying for me as Verizon wants to soak me for a 2 year contract and an extra $30 a month…

Do I want one of these myself? Well, I probably wouldn’t turn it down as I think Apple makes some good lookin’ hardware that does what _they_ want it to do well. There are a few problems I see with it though. It does not multitask. That’s right, want to play music while you are editing that spreadsheet or reading that ebook? Nope. No camera on there either. Would have been a killer app for them to have a built in camera for an iChat, or Skype or what have you. It needs a fold out keyboard. I don’t care how slick the touch screen keyboard is, it’s fundamentally flawed as you suck up screen realestate by using it. Lastly, no real OS on there. For most people this isn’t really a problem, but I would like something a little more than an appliance….

So why am I happy about the release? Well, in a word, competition. Now that Apple has set a “standard”, other manufacturers have something to aim for and above for their own product releases. I see manufacturers turning to Linux for this because it’s developer friendly, easier to shoehorn into embedded or strange / smaller devices, and the price is right. I hope to see a multitouch tablet with a full functioning and/or upgradeable/replaceable Linux distribution on it. I want it to have a rollout/foldout keyboard. I want it to have 802.11n and 3G available, and I want to see the price point at or below what the iPad is. Think this sounds too goo to be true? I think we are all going to be surprised. At least I hope so. And just to get things going, check out the TouchBook, which by the way was available BEFORE the iPad. I think we are headed in the right direction and I, for one, am eager to see what happens!

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:

I'm organizing a "linux multimedia sprint" in which I hope to gather a
few people online at one time, and together we will troll the internet
and download as much free and open source raw artistic material (like
gimp brushes, textures, soundfonts, sound loops, stock photos,
templates, et cetera) as possible. We will then take all the material
we've collected, create a few torrent files for them, and make the
torrents available to anyone who wants to beef up their multimedia Linux
distro of choice with all the usual "extra content" that other operating
systems typically ship with.

Here is a media file/commercial: The Promo Sweetness
Won’t you please help him out? Pretty, pretty please? He needs you baby! It’s a worthy cause.

Here’s a good breakdown of the energy costs associated with HDTVs. Plasma eat more energy but it’s not as drastic as some make it out to be:
Cnet HDTV Energy Consumption breakdown

It’s definitely worth a read if you’re in the market for a new HDTV.

It’s been too long since I posted last. I got the approval from the boss (aka the wife) to start shopping for a new HDTV for the family room. I’ve checked out some HDTVs yesterday at one of the electronics stores near my office. Honestly I was most blown away by the Plasmas from Panasonic. I know they consume more power than LCDs but the difference in picture quality compared to 60 & 120 Hz LCDs were very noticeable. I was impressed by the latest 240 Hz LCDs but they tend to be a couple hundred dollars more in price than their 60 & 120 Hz brethren. Speaking to several people I hear that if you go with an LCD Samsung and Sony are currently the way to go. Plasma TVs seem to be only pushed by Panasonic and have some sort of stigma attached to them by the tree huggers because they’re “less green”. Honestly I’m not opposed to Plasmas. I want the best bang for the buck and I’m open to all options. Right now I’m leaning towards getting a plasma tv. I was very impressed with the OLED TVs they had. Ultra thin and with an excellent picture. Unfortunately they’re still relatively expensive as any newer technology tends to be in it’s infancy. I can see OLEDs becoming the norm in the near future. They didn’t have any 3D tvs on display yet. Honestly I can’t see myself sitting in my living room watching the big game sporting 3D glasses. It just seems too gimicky. But hell, I’m all for it if it drives down the prices of 2D televisions. More to come.