We went shopping recently, to one of the largest convenient stores in Belgium. At several places in the shop they have these TV's playing commercials of their own stuff. Normally i don't pay much attention to it, but this one caught my eye. It was about their on-line ordering system, and they were demoing how to buy stuff from them from the internet. The above picture is a close up from the browser used during the presentation. Statcounter i can understand, but the bittorrent and music finder links are a bit weird, don't you think?

On a normal PC, the latest Ubuntu isn't that much of a big improvement, however if you're an eee-pc owner it is a great upgrade, more on that possibly in a later post.

I did a clean install, wiped my previous xubuntu installation and started from scratch. The problem ofcourse was that my previous install was already a while ago and i didn't quite remember exactly what i did to get it booting from an USB disk. The new USB install creator doesn't work for USB disks, i guess it only works for USB sticks, which is silly. Luckily my bash history is long enough and i got it right after a few tries.

The procedure is as followed (i used xubuntu, but this method works for all ubuntu versions);

• First create a FAT16 partition on your USB disk, important to remember is the filesystem size limit is 2GB, so do not create anything bigger then this, i simply took 900MB (using gparted).
• Run syslinux on the newly created partition. 'syslinux -s /dev/sd'
• Run fdisk on the drive and set the FAT16 partition to bootable. 'fdisk /dec/sd'
• Mount the ubuntu iso image. 'mount -o loop xubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso /mnt'
• Copy the isolinux content to your USB disk. 'cp -a /mnt/isolinux /media/disk'
• Rename the isolinux config file to syslinux. 'cd /media/disk/isolinux && mv isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg'
• Get the HD disk install kernel from Ubuntu at - http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/intrepid/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/ - change the 'intrepid' depending on what Ubuntu version you want to install. You need to download both vmlinuz and initrd.gz files.
• Create an install directory on your USB disk and copy the downloaded files into it. 'mkdir /media/disk/install && cp ~/downloads/vmlinuz ~/downloads/initrd.gz /media/disk/install'
• Now, just copy the iso file onto your USB disk and you're ready! 'cp -a /home/dirk/Temp/xubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso /media/disk'

There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

In the UK you'll find busses with this advert on it driving around. I like it, however is this really needed? Am i just naive in thinking this is unnecessary? It will probably also get a lot of comments from all types of religions. I also believe that as an Atheist you need to allow other people to have their own belives. By pushing our 'agenda' on others we're not any better then they are. freedom of choice is an important aspect for me. And if some people deicde to ignore sience it's their choice. And that is OK by me, as long as they don't push their ideals.

Lets keep an eye on this to see how it turns out.

Already old news, but it's still good news; Atheros open-sources its drivers. Currently i have two machines that have Atheros wifi chipsets, my Mac mini and an Asus eee-pc.

In fact the Mac mini doesn't need any proprietary drivers, except for wifi. With the opened Atheros drivers the whole machine is now able to run with all components covered by open source.

For the eee-pc, the Atheros is a real killer, it's not hard or impossible to work around the issue, but anything enabled out of the box is always a win. It's a pain to not have decent network access on a fresh install.

I'm getting rather tired of the anti Blu-Ray comments you'll find on some sites. Really, if you have a 1080p setup and have seen some Blu-Ray movies there is no way you can deny it being superiour to DVD. The images are so sharp, colorful and smooth, it is what every movie lover wants or needs. I can't believe the stories of people that spend tens of thousands of euros on a receiver to get great sound, have special chairs, rooms and expensive projectors but don't see the need to get Blu-Ray. Those people are idiots, no other word for it.
Best way to compare it is when we moved from stereo to Dolby Pro Logic, it sounded great, there was noise comming from the back, the front and from all sides. Then Dolby Digital (and DTS) came and it was even more amazing, it blew everything away in sound quality. BD is to DVD as Dolby Digital is to Dolby Pro Logic.

For some real life examples, just check out the shots in these pages, i think the images speak for themself.

Some of the arguments are as followed:

Blu-Ray is expensive
True, it is still expensive currently, which i find normal. BD is still new and it will take a few years before the prices lower. I remember my first DVD player, it costed 500 euro (and it was a promo!). However the player still works and produces a image still superiour to most players available today. The disc those days were not any better, easily costing 20 euro or more.
It's clear, when DVD was new, it was just as expensive as BD is now, the price will come down.

I will have to rebuy my DVD collection to BD
I don't see you want to do this. In case of VHS to DVD, it did make sense, after all video is a seriously bad medium to keep you movies on. DVD is a digital medium and certainly deserves preference. If you have a decent DVD version, just keep it, and enjoy the movie in upscaled quality.
Unless the BD deliveres more, there is no real reason to replace it.

Blu-Ray is full of DRM
And so does DVD, nobody (well almost nobody) is complaining about DVD use restrictions anymore.
Agreed BD has a little more rights limiting measures compared to DVD but nothing really serious.

I agree that they dropped the ball with the Iron Man release of late with the BD-Live debacle. I hope they have learned a valuable lesson, if it happens only once i guess i can let this one slip.

So, if you like movies, do yourself a favour and go HD, go Blu-Ray!

The news about Mozilla wanting to have their EULA displayed when starting up Firefox for the first time on Ubuntu, has spurred some reactions.

Really, i think this can not be allowed, at least not for the default browser. You also get a EULA when installing Opera, but it is not the standard browser you get upon initial install. The basic, clean-install Ubuntu expirience should be EULA free. There are some solutions perhaps to get past this;

• Add a global EULA during install, which would cover all (default) installed software, but that would be hard because almost no 2 EULAs are the same.
  

• Add the EULA to the default home page of firefox in Ubuntu , just expand it with the EULA or a notice about it.

What if it's not possible to do one of the above? Well, i think Ubuntu currently is big enough of a brand to not need Firefox as a default browser. There are a batch of alternative browsers available, mostly based on webkit.

The browser is for a lot of people the one-and-only application these days, it deserves to deliver the best expirience, and there are good alternatives available that do not impose restrictions on use.