One of my fav bands in 'Foo Fighters', the man behind this rocking beast is Dave Growl, previously famous as the drummer of Nirvana. There is now a 1 page interview available with Growl from Time Magazine. One of the questions deal with piracy, this is his answer;

I don't have a problem with people downloading music. To me the important thing is that people come to my shows and see the music live and have that personal experience with the band. I've made a decent living making music. I'd feel greedy if I asked for anything more.

Our Red Hat Account Manager came by one day, she brought some cups along. I adore the JBoss one, I'm calling this post - One girl two cups.

Is your clock running way to fast for a guest VirtualBox system? There is a long standing open bug regarding this problem reported. There is a solution available in the means of adding some kernel boot parameters. Edit your grub config file (normally '/boot/grub/menu.lst') and add the following;

divider=10 nolapic_timer clocksource=acpi_pm

after a reboot of your guest, your system time should now run at a normal pace.

Karmic Koala is one of the best Ubuntu releases so far. Some reports might say otherwise, but my personal expierience says otherwise. It's not perfect, and some things are not fixed yet, at least the development is open en every 6 months a new release comes along improving upon the previous installment.

There are some things that bothered me, luckily fixes are available. First, when using the latest Eclipse some button clicks are not registered. This can be fixed by defining the following environment before starting eclipse;

GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

Second, on 64bit the flash plugin also sometimes doesn't register mouse clicks, this is even more bothersome. In Eclipse at least you could still use the keyboard, not so in flash. To fix this you need to add the above line at the beginning of '/usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/noarch/npviewer'.

There are a lot of adds for mobile internet on Belgian TV the last month, but there is one that makes me almost mad. I'm very anti-belgacom, mostly because of the olden days when all we had were modems and used it to connect to BBS's - i even had my own 2 node demo scene oriented board.

Anyway, the add goes something like this. 'Pick mobile internet from Proximus (the mobile provider of Belgacom), it's great and we were the first to have a mobile phone network in Belgium'. They sure did, not because they are this innovative, but because the market wasn't open and Belgacom had a monopoly on anything phone related at that time (fixed & mobile). You wanted a phone? great, pay through your nose for outdated fixed phone technology and their mobile phone pricing was ridiculously high to put it mildly.

After a while, the market got open and competing companies were allowed to enter with their products. The first to do so was Mobistar, their price was half of Proximus. The very next! day Proximus slashed their prices in half as well.

The ad gets me mad, because they try to convince the people they were the first, while the truth is that there was no other choice and they were certainly overpriced at the time.

Chrome OS, I'm not sure what to think about it. Going from what we know, it sounds like Linux booting the Chrome browser, because where Google is comming from, the browser is the OS. Nothing stops you from creating a similar expirience with any decent linux distri currently available. On my 4G Surf i did just that, basic Linux (Ubuntu minimal) and then adding several packages to make ACPI working for example. It boots up lighting fast and all you get is a browser, no other apps. I have build in a terminal though (who can live without?) by installing tilda, which is excellent in this scenario. I have now something you could call Firefox-OS.

What else is great? It is still linux as we all know it. It uses X and as a result i have all excisting toolkits available. In case i do need some app, i can still quickly install it, and it will work. For my netbook i won't do this too often, but Google is targetting Chrome-OS towards desktop/laptop systems, and they do not regular X and not any regular toolkit which will break compatibility with any current linux app. That for me reduces the functionality of that system consideratly.

Every Ubuntu release before 2008, i has the custom habbit of switching totem with its gstreamer backend to the version with the xine backend. Xine is a really good player, which i have used intensivly before switching to Ubuntu. Why did i change to the xine variant, simply because the gstreamer backend wasn't able to play everything, it got better each release, but each time there were still some files that didn't play well (or at all). About at 2008 gstreamer got to the point it did play everything i threw at it, so there was no reason to switch anymore, i think nobody does these days.



After upgrading to the latest 9.04, everything worked as expected, no problems on my home-pc. At work i don't play a lot of movies and it wasn't until we got a videocast of one of our c*o's that i noticed video didn't work anymore. Everything worked just fine at home, so there had to be something else causing the issue. One of the major differences between my home and work-pc was the video card, at work it uses the radeon driver. I solved it by starting up 'gstreamer-properties' from the command line, which allows you to configure some minimal aspects of the audio and video output/input of the gstreamer framework. In the video tab there is the option to adjust the output mechanism, after selecting 'X Window System (No Xv)' everything worked perfectly. The disadvantage of this approach is that no acceleration is done, this means playing a video takes seriously more cpu, which could give problems on older system (but it's still better then no video i suppose).