What's the difference between a bank and a swing band?

I was reading a new article today on the Telegraph which I find absolutely crazy.

It's about a swing band called Wills Fargo being harassed by the bank Wells Fargo.

I don't know about you, but unless the band starts asking for deposits and gives you a cash machine, it starts using the same red box with yellow letters and includes the stage coach as part of their logo, then WTF!

I hate this type of stuff. There is absolutely no overlap in ANY way. Next we'll get sued for using the letters W and F because they're part of the name.

I can understand brand dilution (Wills Fargo Bank), I can understand fraudulent use, I can understand a lot of stuff, but this goes beyond what should be allowed.

Gaaah!

-P

Ubuntu 9.10 issues and solutions

One of the major issues I have had with my Macbook Pro and Ubuntu 9.10 relates to virtual machines and Virtualbox. My virtual machines would freeze for a few seconds (10-15 seconds) then do some more work, then freeze again for 20-30 seconds, then some more, then freeze, then go, then freeze...

This drove me nuts! I run XP every once in a while and it was so quick on Virtualbox prior to the upgrade that I thought VB was the culprit.

I messed around with the settings, I turned things on and off; all to no avail.

Then I remembered a post somewhere that mentioned the video drivers. Not the virtual machine's virtual video driver, but the actual driver of the host machine.

So I looked at what I was running.

Nvidia's driver version 183 - which was suggested and recommended by Ubuntu 9.10 after the upgrade. It worked fine with everything I did... could it be the culprit?

I then swapped the driver to version 173 which I was running previously (that reminded me I tried 180 and had problems with virtual machines then too) and my XP virtual machine was happy once again.

I did experience an issue or two with my machine freezing (the whole thing, not the VMs) after doing this and thought it was the Nvidia drivers again.

However I noticed something interesting. The freezes occurred only when I had Firefox running. If FF wasn't running, everything ran smoothly.

So I went into the FF add-ons and thought about how a "new" add-on I had installed and almost never used would actually use cool 3D effects. I'm talking about FoxTab. I disabled that after 20 minutes and guess what?

My virtual machines are happy, my Macbook runs smooth as silk!

Now to troubleshoot something else... OpenVPN on NetworkManager.

-P

Mythbuntu 9.10

I finally managed to update my MythTV server up to 9.10 of Ubuntu. Although I didn't install it from a Mythbuntu CD when I did the first install - it's now a Mythbuntu installation.

What can I say about this?

MythTV 0.22 (the normal app is 0.22RC2, I think in ubuntu it's 0.22+svn fixes)

The new MythTV is NICE! I still have some issues. I'll document them here and any solutions that I find. There are several things that I need to do to get them working right according to the MythTV wiki.

For now, I'm updating the graphics of the videos and I'm trying to tune all the different settings that you can use.

All in all, I think it's great!

-P

Visio and Linux or what I call "Want SVG, use PDF"

I tend to get Visio diagrams from people every once in a while. Most of the time it's the vsd type, not even the xvsd (or xml based) version. Even if I had the xvsd, I'm not sure what exactly I could do with it.

Visio does have the capabilities of exporting to SVG (at least the latest release does) but I find that they don't import properly into Inkscape. It's strange but they seem to display properly elsewhere.

The answer to this issue? Another intermediate step -- use PDF. Visio can also export to PDF directly. (Or maybe you need a plugin?)

This PDF renders correctly and when you import it into Inkscape it shows up correctly too.

Now to test another file type... Visio can export into Autocad format!!!

I just recently discovered that you can convert DWG to SVG. I haven't tried the Cad2SVG tool yet, but I'm hopeful it will also provide an SVG that's usable in Inkscape.

By the way, if you're wondering why I'm so eager to go with SVG? It's simple -- it looks good and you can zoom without losing detail (very handy with an iPhone!) And if you don't believe that there's a lot of SVG out there, check out http://svg.startpagina.nl/.

-P

Ubuntu 9.10 on MacBook Pro

So Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is out and in the usual way, I went ahead and did the upgrade from 9.04. Did I have any issues? Not really, the servers were a little slower than I'm use to which I'd expect.

After the upgrade I discovered that my O2 USB data card (a Novatel Ovation) wouldn't work. However, I manged to get it working after a reboot. (Not sure why.)

Wifi works, keyboard + multitouch pad worked, bluetooth keyboard + mouse worked, sound worked. What seems to not work? Well, when I put the machine to sleep and it comes up, I ALWAYS get a crash report which says that there was a kernel crash of sorts and that the system would be unstable.

Does this annoy me? Yes. Does it stop me from still using the system (i.e. is it really unstable?) No.

I haven't finished trying out all the usual apps that I use, but so far, I'm happy with the result.

Now, I can't wait to upgrade my Myth Server at home! I have seen there are a LOT of really cool things in that arena!

-P

Organising when you don't have time...

Do you seem to not have enough time in the day to do everything you need? I know I do and it's a pain to try to juggle everything, prioritize, and then do the things you CAN do and leaving those things you can't for another day.

That's one reason I wish I could have a clone... or a mini-me! :-)

But, it seems that there's another way.

You can use a service like My Home Personal Assistant to help you do the tasks you don't have time to do. It may sound lazy, but I've started with the ironing. I also know my car needs to get serviced soon and that means I don't have to take a day to do that too. What else is there?

-P

P.S. Cloning myself would be a bad idea, I'd probably argue over which one of me would get to do what! We'd fight over going on vacation, and we all would have to eat too, imagine the food bill.

Amazing headphones; amazing service

As a requirement for work we wanted to get some headphones.

After looking around we found some: Sennheiser PC166.

They seemed decent, had good review and so the search for a reseller began. I look at the usual places, Amazon, Froogle, etc. and ended going to http://www.best4headsets.co.uk/

The order was placed for 1 to test and to my amazement, we had them the next day!

We then "tested" them and found the headphones to be really good. Excellent!

We're now going to purchase 8 more. ;-)

It's nice when things go smoothly.

-P