Found a roommate!

Looks like I might finally be moving back to something resembling civilization soon. It took what seems like an eternity but I've found a possible roommate[1]. I'm meeting with her on Friday to iron out all the details, but we both seem quite positive about the whole deal. If everything goes well I could be in my new place as soon as the 27th. This means I'll finally have the interweb at home again, too. It feels like it's almost been a year since I've been able to just sit down and check my email, or chat with people from across the globe. I've missed that a lot.

It's all so very exciting. Wish me luck!

[1]Depending on the friend of a friend recommendation system might be much more reliable, but god is it slow.

I LIVE

I know I haven't been the most active member of the arslinux community lately[1], and I never did get into this whole blogging thing (sorry Jorge, it's not my thing :p) so I'll have to ask everyone's forgiveness for making a very self-indulgent blog post.

I found out about two months ago that my company offers a degree payment program. While it's very hard to get (you need the approval of pretty much every manager above you and the director of HR just to get your name into the committee), I was pretty excited about it and applied right away. I figured my chances were slim, but it's fun to dream anyway, right?

This Monday I got an e-mail that I never expected. I was approved for everything.

I don't want to say exactly how much I'm getting, but suffice it to say I'm basically getting a BS in Mechanical Engineering at PSU[2] for pretty much the cost of books. ^_^

While there are some obvious downsides (working full time while going to school is a pain, only going to school part time is going to take forever, etc.), I think this is easily the best news I've ever gotten. I really can't put into words how happy I am now, and how much I appreciate my manager for really fighting for this. He's been going through almost two months of red tape with me, and most of the other managers I've had would've given up after a week.

Another downside is that I won't really have much time for arslinux even if I do manage to fix my existing problem. Can't have everything, I guess. I hope everyone understands. :/

Wish me luck!

[1]For reasons beyond my control at the moment, but I'm working on that. I'm sorry if I've disappointed anyone during my absence.

[2]Well, I won't be going to PSU right away. I've got to get a lot of pre-reqs out of the way at PCC first, as well as getting my freshmen/sophomore credits there to save money.

Like clockwork.

Meme's are fun.

Blogs are a crappy threaded forum replacement.

StoneTable, those shiny MacBook Pros use Radeon X1600s. If you're looking for better Linux support, you're going the wrong way up ATi's product chain.

(Hey, you wanted me to blog more. :p)

Return of the Blog

No, I'm not dead yet. I just never really "got" this whole blog thing, so I rarely find stuff I feel is worth blogging. Maybe it's time to try it again.

Mega-blog catchup ahoy!

Drivel
Using Drivel to post this. Love the HTML syntax highlighting and office-style squiggly red line spell checking.

So far, I like it better than GNOME-Blog.

Dapper
So, I've upgraded to Dapper Drake, the next development version for Ubuntu. Most notable changes so far are new versions of the usual stuff (GNOME 2.13.3, Firefox 1.5, Xorg 7.0), a simplified menu, better work network-manager support, a cairo-based clearlooks, and a much more complete tango icon theme for maximum bling.

More on this to come. :)

Xorg
Nice to see Xorg 7.0/modular finally released. I'm pretty confident in saying this is the biggest milestone since the X.org Foundation was created. It should allow for easier development and save packagers an extreme amount of pain.

Also nice to see Xorg 6.9 (simultaneously released with 7.0, just not modular) hit Debian/unstable just over a week after release. Great work gravityboy and the rest of the XSF! 7.0 is already in dapper, for us bleeding-edge maniacs.

GStreamer 0.10
Been playing around with GStreamer 0.10 and Totem 1.3.

Totem maintained perfect A/V sync no matter what I did. Really, I did everything I could to try and break its A/V sync. Even going as far as to seek all over a 3.2G xvid/a52 avi file over smb:// (using gnomevfs). It just wouldn't budge. :)

I was also pleasantly surprised to see how many formats it supported. I tested it with avi (xvid/divx and mp3/a52), ogg (theora/vorbis), mov, mpeg2, and wmv. Of those, only the wmv file didn't play (asfdemux hasn't been ported yet). Also note that the DVD plugins haven't been ported yet either. With all the talk of 0.10's lack of plugins I was worried it would only support theora/vorbis and xvid/mp3.

In somewhat related news, I'm having a tough time choosing between rhythmbox and banshee now that banshee has an rb-style artist/album browser. On the one hand, banshee has better ipod support. On the other, rhythmbox's built in podcast support is dead sexy.

I look forward to the coming music player war giving us two really kick ass players. :)

Sirius
So, I picked up one of those new-fangled Sirius satellite radios yesterday. Been listening to Howard100 and the rock/metal stations a lot. It's odd at first to hear the radio go on and on without commercials and to hear people talk like normal human beings, but you get used to that pretty quick.

Overall, I'd recommend it to anyone, especially if you drive around a lot like me. It's well worth the $12.95 a month.

This is your VFS...

... and this is your VFS on Freedesktop. I'm very pleased to see that, after months of the idea kicking around xdg-list, Sean Middleditch has taken it one step forward and launched the D-VFS project. The general goal is to kick ass and take names. I think there's a universal desktop VFS library thing in there too, but it's mostly about kicking ass. There's no code yet, but for a project that's only officially two days old it's incredibly well put together. KDE big-wig and xdg-list regular Waldo Bastian quickly weighed in very positively on Sean's ideas for D-VFS.

In other Freedesktop news, the common xpdf fork is on its way. Yay for shared infrastructure!

Hoary improvements

So, Jorge wants a meme, eh? Here we go:

Massive boot time decrease We went from 90+ seconds in Warty to roughly 30 seconds in Hoary. Plus GDM starts near the top of rc2, so loading all your services doesn't block you from getting to your desktop. Finally

A GStreamer-based totem that doesn't suck completely. Yay! gstreamer0.8-ffmpeg is even in universe.

Man/info support in yelp. I think this deserves special mention. Finally, an info viewer that doesn't suck massively. Shame it didn't make it into GNOME 2.10 (and thus, I'm technically not repeating :), but it's in Hoary.

And, well, I guess I have to give a "++" to everything he said. Bastard took all the obvious rocking things in Hoary.