The trip to Los Vegas was very quick and I spent most of the time sick. The Tablet PC Gathering on Sunday night made the whole trip worthwhile. Comdex itself is such a small event. The real stuff occurs by appointment and in the Venetian. In fact, on Tuesday, we spent the day in the Venetian talking with Abit, ASUS, and several other companies. It's hard to believe that there will be another Comdex. It's just too expensive and most people probably don't get anything good.
Before registering my truck, the state was requiring a smog certificate. However, an engine light appeared last year and so it needed to be fixed before being able to pass the tests. It turns out a sensor was bad on the camshaft. After getting the certificate it was time to stand in line at the DMV.
Ugh. What a nightmare. It seems that the local DMV is not doing any adjustments for the fees. Instead, a resident must mail in the fees and hope they calculate it correctly. Of course, if you get it wrong then they'll penalize you (add a fee) and you'll still not be driving a registered vehicle. So, instead of being able to pay approximately $102, I had to pay the $306 to get the tags. Time was running out and so there were no options but to take a risk. I didn't feel like taking a risk ... yuck.
As I was standing at the counter, I told the woman that this convinced me that all the thieves in Sacramento definitely lost my vote and from this point forward my vote for any incumbent is to wave them goodbye. Adios. Good luck in your future job. Take a hike. Go away. Don't let the door hit you too hard in the rear as you exit. The door is to your left and we'll even make one for you on the right. Ta Ta !
Grr. I can't stand politicians who take money and do nothing with it but spend it on their own pet projects.
News.com is running a very interesting story on computers and public schools. I love the picture with the student asleep on the laptop. Can you imagine his parents as soon as they learn about their child being asleep? And what is that teacher doing? Why didn't the teacher wake the kid up? And the photographer -- what is THAT all about ? Show some kindness and don't humiliate the kid by having thousands of people now see the kid sleeping. Anyway, most of the story is rubbish. The issue with public education is not about money. Show some class -- and quit trying to pick the public's pocket. Instead, at LAUSD, fire the top people and save millions of dollars. There is no need for all the waste that goes on at LAUSD. It's criminal.
You aren't going to believe this post but it is real. After all of these years, I'm going to attend Comdex. Yes, it's true. Despite not being able to go to LinuxWorld, I've just finished paying for the hotel and will be in Las Vegas Sunday and Monday. Getting my ticket for Comdex and paying for the hotel were all done over the Internet.
Now how cool is that?
The VectorLinux Review is now published and I'm ready for everyone to complain. Interestingly, I didn't add anytihng about comparing the installer to Peanut Linux. After all, if someone has installed Peanut then they'll recognize the VL installer. Even the LILO times are set the same. Heck, even cdset is there ;-)
This doesn't matter though. VL has the newer kernel and it's own way of doing things. In fact, Peanut doesn't even install as well on one of my systems. I get I/O error on the floppy -- because there is no floppy attached !
The upgrade to 0.84 was done the other day and then I started to actually put content into the database. The template system is much easier to work with relative to the news / article system of postnuke. However, I'm not happy with the save/edit feature. In order to add a new section the work must be saved; otherwise, the information is lost. There isn't a way to just simply save and then continue editing. Version 0.90 is in beta and maybe it will have better save features.
The first article published was really just a test run. It was an opinion piece regarding the current state of the Linux community. It looks like I'll be able to use the PagEd module for keeping the hardware configurations available as an article. For example, I added the motherboard specification for the Gigabyte motherboard used in most of the tests.
The three iso images were downloaded from mirrors yesterday and then the CDs were burned. I used prozilla and attached to several different mirrors so that the download speed was consistently over 120 KB/s. It's the only way to fly.
Choosing the installation for personal desktop only required the first two CDs. I'll upload the images to the gallery some time today but most of the installation routine is the same as redhat 9 with the replacement of the words Red Hat with that of Fedora.
Voyager 1 has reached a distance of approximately 90 AU -- one Astronomical Unit is the distrance from the Sun to Earth. Solar Shock may be reached and soon we'll have some great data about our Solar System. And then we can all wait patiently for 2020 when the space craft reaches heliopause.
In 1995, I wrote a little blurb that Intel boxed processors were empty. Tens of thousands of reads later, Intel reacted. Now, Microsoft is in the light with their firing of a blogger for posting a picture. Slashdot and MSNBC are among the linkers to the site. Will MS react in a positive manner or just ignore the press?
Amazing.
This morning I was showing Birdie different things about VectorLinux. It dawned on me that the young lady didn't know her birthday and Linux's birthday are in the middle of the same month and year. She then appeared to be a little bit more interested in VectorLinux again ... so I showed her how to launch gdm in a terminal so she could switch between KDE and GNOME easily.
Start KDE
Launch Konsole
su
enter password
gdm
press enter to accept going to new display
enter user id and pass with session set to GNOME
Ta Da ! Now you can easily switch between desktops Cltrl-Alt-F8 and F7. She's having fun over at her computer now ;-)
If you love the Sun, then here is a picture updated every few minutes.
Now that is cool !
