Is it 100% Perfect?

No.  But, after spending all day trying to get Fedora installed on my laptop, I’m happy to report that it’s 95% awesome.  And it’s hella faster than running off a live CD.  Right now, I’m running Fedora 9, installed on my laptop, in its own partition, and it’s FAST.  I chose the 64-bit install, which I’ve read perhaps doesn’t really do that much for me.  But I bought this laptop a couple of years ago because it had a 64-bit processor, and dammit, I’m going to do something with it! Anyway, likely due to the fact that there’s hardly anything installed, from power on to login, it’s probably, what, 90 seconds or so?  Maybe less?  That’s a far sight better than my bloated XP installed.  Even after I uninstalled all the bloat I could.  Anyway, what a nice experience.

Are there problems?  Yes.  Screen resolution continues to be an issue.  I get 1600×1050 on my external monitor, but I also get the same thing on my 1280×800 laptop screen, which obviously isn’t cool.  If I try to turn off my lappy’s monitor, the external monitor actually shuts off.  Also, Fedora thinks my external is only 19″, when it’s 20″, and it’s not like size matters, but… And I haven’t tried to deal with my external devices, like my printer, my external HD, my external DVD burner, or my webcam…

Cool things tonight, though: sound’s there; wireless mouse and keyboard work flawlessly (haven’t tried multimedia capability yet) (even scroll wheel works pretty well); bootup is super fast; GUI is already way slicker than XP; Firefox works no problem; satisfaction of knowing that I am doing something on a non-MS rig is waaaaayyyy high.  But, as I’ve spent pretty much the entire day doing this, and it’s almost midnight, I’m calling it quits for the night, and will continue to play with it tomorrow.  I’m looking forward to seeing if I can get OpenOffice 3.0 installed and then duplicate my table of authorities “hack” using Linux, and moving one step closer to being an open source office.

Using Linux This Evening…

Those who already use Linux are probably rolling their eyes this evening, but I think what I have done this evening is really quite impressive.  I downloaded a Live distro of Fedora, and after making about 4 coasters, I finally found out that buring the ISO directly to the CD doesn’t help–I had to find a program that would write the image to the CD.  Go figger.  Anyway, after I figured that out, I was able to boot from the CD-Rom.  And I’m just astonished that I am able to run what is apparently a 64-bit OS off a CD-Rom.  On my laptop.  Which isn’t super current.

The experience is a little sludgy, but I’m really surprised things work as well as they do; my wireless keyboard and mouse are fine, and my external monitor works just fine as well, though switching screen modes on the laptop doesn’t seem to be working too well–I have high resolution on the external monitor, but the laptop screen stays on and looks pretty terrible.  But, I’m sure there must be a way to fix that somewhere.

Anyway, the thing comes with Firefox, which works just fine, and so far everything renders just fine, if a little different.  And like I said, things are a little slow to load, but that’s probably because I’m running off the CD-Rom.

Pretty cool.

Table of Authorities and OpenOffice–How-To

This morning I was griping about operating systems, and I mentioned that I would like to use Linux, but OpenOffice seemed a limiting factor in that decision, because of the near impossibility of easily generating a Table of Authorities. Well, after playing around with the latest version, 3.0, available here, I can firmly state that I have generated a Table of Authorities, and it wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be. It’s not quite as simple as using Word or WordPerfect, but, let’s be honest, it’s not like those programs were really that easy to learn and use; we’re just more used to them.  The “How-To” is after the jump.

What am I missing?

Houston’s Katy Freeway is fully open for business, I guess.  18 lanes of concrete glory.  Kinda boggles the mind, really, but I can vouch for the drive into downtown being much quicker.  And that’s not necessarily a good thing, in my book…

Elected officials attending the celebration included Gov. Rick Perry and U.S. Rep. John Culberson, who, with former County Judge Robert Eckels and county infrastructure director Art Storey, had pushed the idea of including toll lanes and using county toll road revenue to speed completion of the work.

Culberson said the job was completed in five years and four months, compared to a likely 10 years or more with conventional funding.

“And without a single federal earmark,” he added.

…

Before the ceremony, Eckels said he still hopes commuter rail can be built along the route, possibly in one of the strips between the main and frontage road lanes.

…

But Culberson, whose ability to get federal dollars was crucial to the widening project, pledged not to give up a single freeway lane for Metro rail.

(Emphasis added.)  Why is that something to brag about?  It’s such a blatantly obvious rail corridor, far more obvious than UH-D to Reliant Stadium, and yet Culberson brags about keeping it from happening?  Even Eckels, a Republican, sees the utility in having rail down the Katy Freeway.  What is the antipathy to having rail in Houston?  Don’t you think the people who already ride the buses from the Hwy 6 Park and Ride would rather ride a train to work?  I do, and I know I’d rather ride a train than those buses.

In any event, I guess it’s not surprising that the Chronicle, in a string of rather stunning endorsements (Obama and Cisneros (durrr, I got that wrong) Noriega), has endorsed Culberson’s challenger, Michael Skelly.

The Redmond Underdogs?

Well, I guess it’s happened.  The conventional wisdom in the OS world appears to be that Apple has truly won the OS wars.  Not from a distribution standpoint, of course, but from a “who makes the best OS?” standpoint.  (Of course, Apple fans will say that this has been the case since before OSX came about, but I would definitely not agree with that.  In fact, I would say that it was only after Apple decided to use Intel that the true power of OSX was apparent; PowerPC chips were pretty pitiful.  Would I have preferred Apple use AMD?  Yup, but you can’t have everything you want in life.)

Anyway, my point was that Vista has been a marketing failure, and a technological disappointment.  There are things under the hood in Vista that make it more than Windows XP SP4, but they are incremental changes that didn’t really change the way that people interact with the computer, the way that using OSX is such a change.  And the new “features” in Vista, such as always asking if you really want to do that, are just annoying as hell.  (Of course, if you’re running an aggressive firewall on your machine, you essentially get asked that question all the time, too, so….)  So, Vista as a brand is gone:  “Microsoft introduced what it said would be a slimmer and more responsive version of its Windows operating system on Tuesday, while unceremoniously dropping the brand name Vista for the new product.”  So sayeth the New York Times.  And the tone of the article definitely suggests the folks in Redmond have essentially conceded the best-OS argument, and now see themselves as the underdogs:

Mr. Sinofsky took the stage and issued an apology of sorts for the problems and frustrations associated with Windows Vista. He said the company had listened to and was responding to the feedback.

“We got feedback from reviews, from the press, a few bloggers here and there, oh, and some commercials,” he said, with a nod to a lengthy Apple advertising campaign that has mercilessly poked fun at Microsoft’s woes.

I don’t know if Windows 7 is going to be any good.  I happen to not mind Vista all that much, where I’ve worked with it, but it isn’t very interesting.  By the same token, I’m not that big a fan of OSX–it’s pretty and all, but there’s just something about it that doesn’t satisfy me, though if the OS were sold on its own, without being tied to the hardware, I might be tempted because of BootCamp and/or Parallels.  I’d be really interested in Linux distros–and since I don’t really do much gaming on my PC, that’s an option that could work for me–but there’s one thing that would be much more difficult if I went that route: having to use OpenOffice, which is a really good program in so many respects, but there’s one crucial flaw.  Do you know how difficult it is to make a Table of Authorities in OpenOffice, and how easy it is in Word?  From what I’ve seen, there may be a way to do it using the bibliographic function, but I don’t think it’s the same thing.  The best thing would be a triple-boot system where I could play with all three whenever I wanted.

Update:  I figured out how to do a Table of Authorities in OpenOffice. The How-To is here.

Oil-for-Food Sentence Over

Back in the run-up to the Iraq war, and in the period following it, one of the minor rallying cries on Fox (and elsewhere, especially the White House, which drew up a briefer on a “Decade of Deception and Defiance” (or a “Decade of Denial and Deception,” depending on which logo you look at) was that Saddam Hussein was abusing the Oil-for-Food program, and that alone would have justified invading Iraq.  Favorite boogeymen included Kofi Annan and his son, and less-well-known figures such as Benon Sevan, Vladimir Kuznetsov, and Alexander Yakovlev.  But then Oscar Wyatt, head of Coastal, found himself indicted, and the cheerleading largely went quiet.

He pled guilty last year, and the Houston Chronicle is reporting that he just got home from a half-way house to finish his sentence. It’s a largely uninteresting story, really, except for one salient point: his sentence was for 12 months and 1 day.   (Note that the Chronicle article stated he was sentenced to a year, but that isn’t technically accurate; as the AP reports, the sentence was for 12 months and 1 day.) This is because, were he to have been sentenced to only 12 months, he would not have been eligible to receive credit for good time.  That’s just one of the many quirks of the federal sentencing system.

Senator Stevens Convicted

The New York Times, and at least 1,400 other news sources, are reporting that Senator Ted Stevens of Alaskan (and Bridge-to-Nowhere and “The Internet is a series of tubes”) fame, has been convicted on all charges of making false statements on his disclosure forms.  Though conventional wisdom may have assumed that Senator Stevens (who does not automatically lose his seat due to the conviction) would be convicted, it was actually pretty dicey for the government, as the judge scolded the AUSAs trying the case a number of times.  Additionally, there will probably be a lot of second-guessing about whether Senator Stevens should have rushed to trial as he did.  The Speedy Trial Act states that an individual has the right to be put to trial within 70 days of his initial appearance before a federal magistrate judge.  He could have “waived” that deadline, however, and tried to push the case off for a number of months in order to have more time to prepare.

In any event, Senator Stevens will no doubt file a motion for a new trial, or other post-conviction relief.  In the meantime, however, a presentence investigation report will be compiled by a United States Probation Officer, and sentencing will probably be set for at least three months from now.  After that point, the final judgment will be issued, and Senator Stevens will have ten days from that day to file his notice of appeal with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which may prove to be useful for him.  As everyone knows, the Ninth Circuit is CRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZZZZZYYYYYYY.

Azure Not Registered

A little glee out there in the world, as it appears that Microsoft hadn’t gotten ’round to registering “Azure” with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  “According to searches conducted by Computerworld, Microsoft has not applied for a trademark for either ‘Windows Azure’ or ‘Azure Services Platform’ with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.”  There aren’t any details, though, as to how Computerworld did its search.  If it simply went to TESS and entered “Azure” in the search box, it won’t find registrations that were filed after October 16, 2008.  As the USPTO states on its News page:

Last complete paper filing date: 13 Oct, loaded 21 Oct.

Last complete electronic filing date (TEAS): 16 Oct, loaded 22 Oct.

These dates should be used as guides and do not imply that all Trademark applications carrying these filing dates are available in the system as of the load dates. Updates are scheduled to occur Tuesday through Saturday prior to 5:30 AM.

Now, I’m not going to quibble with the notion that Microsoft probably should have already secured trademark registration for Azure before having it hit the market, but I think it speaks to a larger point here: one should not assume that registration does not exist on a mark simply because it isn’t found in TESS.  There is a lag, of about a week or two.

Microsoft Wants Some of the Cloud

The Wall Street Journal, among other sources, tell me that Microsoft is jumping on the “Cloud” bandwagon, trying mightily to tap into a market that Amazon, Google and others think will lead to BIG! BIG! stuff.

FTA:

Dubbed Azure Services Platform, the new technology is designed to allow large and small corporate customers to dramatically cut their information technology costs by centralizing their IT infrastructure on Microsoft’s “cloud.”

Microsoft is that latest tech giant to join this trend – and attempt to capitalize on it – by building huge data centers that will provide computing services to customers on a pay-as-you-go subscription basis.

I dunno, though.  I’ve talked about Cloud concerns before, especially about data sensitivity, and I can vouch for the fact that drafting briefs and motions is very difficult, formatting-wise, using GoogleApps.  Furthermore, given Microsoft’s massive target on its back, and its notorious security problems, I have a hard time thinking this is ultimately going to be successful for Microsoft.

Getting Netflix on a Mac

As time goes on, I may begin to seem a little more critical of Macs than non-Macs.  Macs are gorgeous machines (if a little blah in the color-scheme; a guy can take only so much Bauhausian asceticism) and OSX is a very nice piece of work.  It certainly has a hell of a lot more bells and whistles than XP.  But, on the flip side, though Vista has its problems, it is a graphical improvement over XP, and as time has gone on, my experience is that the OS has sped up, not slowed down.  Probably an anomaly.  (In any event, does anyone really think that Microsoft couldn’t program a hell of an OS if it only had to worry about two or three pieces of hardware, was allowed to lock its OS to one hardware platform, and not offer it to the rest of the computing population?)

The point is: Macs aren’t perfect, and despite their touted advantage in A/V capabilities, watching streaming video on the internet has been difficult for Macs.  That has been especially true when it comes to watching streaming movies from Netflix.

The New York Times, and others, have reported that Netflix has found a solution for its Mac customers: Microsoft’s Silverlight.  That’s because Apple’s DRM positions got in the way, according to Netflix: “Apple does not license their DRM solution to third parties, which has made this more difficult, but we are working with the studios and content owners to gain approval for other solutions.”