Just wanted to share this great resource with folks. My brother has recently gotten into linux and he’s trying to stick it out because of the difficulty factor. He got very confused, as did we all, about installing applications and understanding how things are separated in open source and not all bundled together like Windows - where in windows your OS/Desktop/Kernel are all known as Microsoft Windows - compared to linux where your kernel, desktop, distributions, applications are all different applications working together.
OK; I’m ranting. Linux Reality is an awesome podcast, which was retired at episode 100. I’ve downloaded all his files and I listen to it periodically. A good replacement would be Going Linux. This one that I’m sharing is about compiling linux application from the provided source.
A GUI is a very complex piece of software and there could be any number of reasons why it would lock up on you. If you need to kill your x server and then restart it, here are some tips:
Restarting X server
Simply use the keyboard combination CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE. Some times this will help, but this combination will explicitly restart the X server.
Working with a Console
If the previous keyboard combination did not work then try CTRL+ALT+F1. This will not kill X server, it will simply open a full screen console. I believe Red Hat and Fedora Core have F1-F6 as options. If you want to switch back to a GUI environment use the keyboard combination CTRL+ALT+F7.
I scrolled through my Google Reader to and saw a post on WoW Insider by Daniel Howell about a RAID he was in and he did a great job explaining what hunters to, or did, in a particular RAID. I have OMEN installed, but I don’t know the first thing on how to make it work. It pops up when I party, but I usually turn it off.
For some reason I seem more optomistic than I did before. I really hope this movie turns out well. What’s so funny about this is when move studios started to butcher.. ah I mean produce comic-book movies and other shows from my generation I vowed that I would make a GI Joe movie. They could mess up everything else, but no one should touch GI Joe. I was very afraid when I heard they were thinking about doing a live action Joe movie. After watching this - the casting seems reasonable, I will pray for good scripting and acting.
While at work today I got a call, on my cell, from a job agency. She spoke with me in the past when I was looking for work and she periodically checks up on me to see if I’m looking for work. She told me of a position that was available, but I kindly told her that I’m still employed by the same company and they renewed my contractor for another year.
With her extensive sales training, she then asked me what she could offer to get me to leave my current job. I replied, “Well… ironically more money and less responsibility.” We fleshed it out a bit, but what I meant was certainly more money, but to assign my job duties to a single category and not “manager” and “web developer” and “consultant”. In the end I told her I don’t want to waste any more of her time because I am happy where I am. And in deed, I am happy where I am - it’s tough wearing so many hats, but the people are nice, the perks are nice, and they my time is very flexible - you can’t beat it!
Companies now-a-days are doing great things in their marketing department. I just learned today that my epsonality rating is CX9400 - what a number right? Well it’s really a clever way of trying to match your needs with Epson’s products. I think they did their job - if I had the $149.99 to purchase their printer I would have done just that. Since I don’t, right now, I will certainly think of Epson when I’m ready to purchase my next printer. I normally go with Brother because of their durability and price for laser printers, but we’ll see. Check out their site take the test yourself. They put a lot of thought into this marketing campaign and I deem it successful!
This game looks like lots of fun. I’m a big Battlefield 2 fan, and I recently found out that this game will be free. Can’t wait to get my hands on it. Visit www.battlefield-heroes.com for more information.
I’m toying with the idea of using a virtual machine inside of linux. It’s been about two+ weeks or so since I last logged into my windows partition. And to be honest it’s mainly because my activation is up and I just don’t want to try and figure it out anymore. I learned the other day that I can run VM software inside of linux (other OSs too) and actually save a particular state (just like I used to with video game emulators) and if anything goes wrong - just load from my last save. This can probably work as well, in regards to activation. I don’t plan on installing or using heavy applications - so in theory, if I get my installation fine and immediatly install the apps I plan on using. Then I can save that state and whenever things go wrong just reload my last state and I’ll have another 30-days of bliss windows usage. Just a thought.
I found this very interesting article doing a Google search on “Vista Activation”. I had to put on this site to help keep this idea/article alive. I took excerpts and posted them here. You can find the full article here, http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070315/ I would suggest that everyone read this article; it’s a bit long, but it gives you a good insight to the slack these computer companies have. It does benefit us, though. Overall; the process didn’t work for me, but it did give me some hope - at the time. The good that came out of that is it forced me to switch to linux and I’m now, proudly, running Fefora 8. 
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Ha-ha, I’m joking this picture is what my temporary splint looks like. My wife says it looks like I’m a hockey player of some sort. I think it looks cool anyway. I see a hand therapist twice a week and my ortho once a week (so far). I have hourly and bi-hourly (is that even a word) hand exercises to get the motion back. They are working, but it’s a pain in the arss to do them every hour. I guess that’s what I get for busting up my hand. Well, enjoy the laugh.