Some things just beg for a blog post. Like the stupidity of telling malware and virus writers exactly how to load their programs in safe mode. Thanks, McAfee. That was brilliant. Safe mode is typically the last resort for removing stubborn viruses, and I’ve only ever seen one that did this. Expect to see a whole bunch of new malware with this ability in the future. This makes me glad I only run ESET’s NOD32 on my computers.
Author: nosilver4u
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bloat
Many of you probably already know that I use Linux. One of the awesome things about linux is choice. It was also the mantra of the first Linux distribution that hooked me on Linux–Gentoo. One of the choices that I made early on, was to use GNOME for my ‘Desktop Environment’. Of course, this begs a definition of ‘Desktop Environment’ for anyone who doesn’t use Linux. It consists of the icons, toolbars (dock, taskbar), wallpapers, desktop, widgets, menus, etc. Perhaps the best way to explain this is by comparison. The biggest noticable difference between Windows 98 and XP (or between XP and Vista or even Mac OS) is the Desktop Environment. It’s what allows you to launch programs, and manage your files, and even determines how it all looks to some extent.
Now, back to linux. For those of us that use Linux, we get to choose between a hundred different Desktop Environments (and that’s probably underestimated). To the less eccentric, there’s typically only two choices though: GNOME and KDE. As I said before, I’ve chose GNOME pretty early on, but I actually tried KDE first, since it was what I had used when I bought my SuSE 7.2 discs back in the day (I subsequently sold those discs on eBay, and gave up on Linux for about 2 years). KDE has always been the eye-catching option, but as I’m a bit of a minimalist, GNOME struck my fancy. It seemed easier to customize, and had a leaner feel overall.
Every once in a blue moon I’m tempted by the allure of KDE once more, and today was one of those days. I’ve been sick, and bored, so I started installing Gentoo (I’ve used Ubuntu for the last 5 years) in a virtual machine (it’s like taking a chunk of your hard drive and making a spare computer out of it). I wasn’t going to do much more than that, but then the bug bit me. So once I had everything else working, I started preparing to install KDE on Gentoo. It was going to install 3.5.9, but I had already tried that version, and wanted to check out version 4. I found a nicely done tutorial, and wanted to see everything that would be installed. That’s when it happened. It smacked me right in the face. I almost fell over. It wanted to install MySQL. MySQL is a full-fledged database application commonly found on servers. This is a Desktop system, running Desktop applications. What could possibly require MySQL?
It turns out that Akonadai, part of the PIM (personal information management) set of packages is the culprit. Apparently, some people have so much personal information (contacts, calendar data, email, etc.), that SQlite (the former choice) doesn’t cut it anymore. That just boggles my mind. Of course, it shouldn’t, when I’ve seen college presidents that have over twelve thousand emails (just in the Inbox), several thousand contacts, and calendars that could choke a hippo.
In KDE’s defense, at least they don’t require you to actually setup the mysql server. However, KDE will have to be pretty slick to convince me that the extra little bit of fat is worth the switch this time. I’ve always found it to be bloated, and adding extra icing just adds more calories.
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fedex
Dear FedEx,
The lovely country selector you’ve implemented is broken. See, not everyone has the Arial font (yes, I use Linux, and Arial is a proprietary Windows font, so I’m out of luck there). This causes my browser to choose a different font that happens to be slightly larger than Arial. What happens next, is that the selection box doesn’t fit in the container you’ve made for it, and it gets hidden behind the map.
Oh, the map. Let’s click on that. So I did, and then the country selector for North America has a similar issue.
Ah, but I’m resourceful, and notice the link at the bottom that says, “If you are having trouble viewing this page, click here.” I’m from the United States, and it defaults to that since I’ve already tried North America from the map on the original page. Fantastic, except that there is no submit button, because your web designers were too smart for that, and made the page accept whatever value is chosen, except that you can’t select United States when it’s already selected.
Since I’d like to be able to use your website, I decided to try and give you some feedback. However, there’s no readily apparent way to do so. So I clicked the Customer Support link. I particularly like the part on the Customer Support page that says, “Just e-mail, write or call us at 1.800.GoFedEx 1.800.463.3339.” Hmm, I can call that, but I’m not sure how to send email to your phone, or especially how to get postal mail to your phone. I do realise that if I keep going down the page, I will find ‘Call or Write Us’ links for each department. If I’m lucky, I’ll pick a department that has an email address listed. But if I pick the relevant one (FedEx Ground), I’m out of luck right there.
All that to say, please fix your website so that I (and the growing number of linux users) can use it. Lest you think I’m a nut on the fringe, think of all the poor netbook users running Linux that can’t use your web site. Think of them, and repent of your ways…Respectfully Yours,
Dissatisfied Customer -
flit
Earlier, I was reading how Facebook almost bought out Twitter. I know I’ve seen some people adamantly proclaim ‘Facebook is not Twitter’. Sure, but have you looked at the two side by side? Facebook is organized tweets. That said, I’m still not quite sure how it makes sense for Facebook to acquire Twitter, except that they can expand their already-established advertising network to another venue.
Otherwise, it seems a bit random for one social network to acquire something they already have. It makes even less sense when you look at how poorly run Twitter is. It seems like everytime I go to check on twitter, it’s broken in some way or another (like right now). Not that my preferred micro-blogging tool is perfect, but at least identi.ca is open-source, and that counts for quite a bit. I’ve also never seen it completely down like Twitter is right now, and it integrates nicely with Facebook status updates. Just in case you’re totally hooked on Twitter, Identi.ca even will cross-post to Twitter as well. -
roo
As some of you probably already know from Facebook, we have a new addition to the family. It’s a girl! She is a 3-month old Labrador/Border Collie that we adopted from the Eastern Montana Humane Society. At three months, she’s obviously not as well-behaved as Scooter was when we got him last year, but she’s picking things up quickly. It seems pretty amazing that we’ve only had her a week.
Her name, as you might have guessed, is ‘Roo’ of Kanga & Roo fame from Winnie the Pooh. Watching her and Scooter interact has been quite fun, and they are certainly getting plenty of exercise too. We’ve had to give her a couple baths, as she has some sort of skin infection. When she comes out of the bath, her scent is masked by the shampoo, and Scooter always thinks there’s a new dog in the house. Eventually, her scent comes back, and he figures out that it was his sister all along.
As always, there’s pictures in the gallery, and I’ve even uploaded a video for your enjoyment.
