A day with Twitter Vote Report.

Being home from the day today, I thought I'd try out Twitter Vote Report. What you do is tweet with "#votereport" after you vote to see how good or bad things are at the polls. One of the volunteers actually is a Maryland resident, the founder of Toad.Net and Toad Computing (a Atari ST computer store -- bought a replacement mouse there).

So? A small quirk later, my butt is now planted on Freenode IRC's #votereport channel, watching as said volunteers handle Slashdot-effect sized load. They get it stable and they get it working well. I throw in my minor bug report (audio needs a plugin for Linux which doesn't exist), and sit back incase they need a Linux client tester.

Of course, there's some problems with voting machines. CNN and NPR (who's using TVR's feeds) is reporting that.

30 day delay, but how about some carnage while you wait?

Folks, stop partying. Just, stop.

Jack Thompson's not disbarred yet. The court order landed Sept 25th, and he's to close up shop by Oct 25th when the disbarment takes effect. He's got an appeal available, and he's taking it to the federal courts.

Meanwhile, I hear some mergers are cutting up the gaming arena. With Vivendi snatching up Activision and Blizzard, you'd think that alot more games will come out. Unfortunately, three made the cut:

Crash Bandicoot: Mind over Mutant
The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon
PROTOTYPE

Out of those three, I think only one is a PC running game -- PROTOTYPE.

Everyone else? Left for dead. Here's a short list from Gameplayer Austrailia:

World in Conflict (Massive Entertainment and Swordfish Studios)
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (Swordfish Studios)
Bourne Conspiracy (High Moon Studios)
Sierra Online and all Sierra games

Google Chrome

So Google is jumping into the open source browser biz with Google Chrome. What's so different with that compared to Firefox and Safari?

Instead of following Google's comic done by Scott McCloud (at http://blogoscoped.com.nyud.net/google-chrome/ since the regular site's being Slashdotted), let me try to tell you about it this way.

Remember back in Netscape 4.x that you didn't have tabs. You had a ton of windows. IE up to 6 has this too (7 introduced tabs, as did Netscape 6). What a mess! Tabs helped, but it was still controlled by one instance of a program.

Now, instead of one instance with multiple tabs, make every window be a seperate instance of that program, and swallow all the instances into the main window. Each instance is accessed by tabs. Popups are swallowed and put on the bottom of the tab until you ask them to. Close a tab, close the instance. Memory is handled by the OS, not by the browser, so slowness is a fault of the OS or an external program not handling it's memory. Security gets enhanced because no site can futz with another site -- infact, the instance is reset when one domain is swapped out for another.

Intresting, no?

Check the comic out. I just hope they make the omnibar optional.

Lost 2P: Mmmmm Tofu....

I was going through my files, getting them organized and cleaned out... when I found that I was really five down on published articles. But I had five written ones that I did submit, but wasn't published.

Let's publish them now. This one dates back to when Tofu Linden took up the helm for Linux client development.

---

Second Penguins: Mmmmm... Tofu...

As in the case of news, when something changes or breaks, you have to interrupt to bring it to the masses. Sometimes it's just a local police involved car chase. Other times it's a shooting near the White House. Or a plane hijacking near the US border. And then you have September 11th, which is comming in a week, but most everyone knows the events by heart now.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about my creation of the Second Life Linux Live CD. It's purpose was to show the world (and a few Lindens) what the Linux client was like. In itself, it removed one escuse from anyone with a Nvidia card. After uploading it to libsecondlife.org/sl, I pointed Torley and Karen Linden to it.

The results? I can only summarize what SL's favorite watermelinden said. Torley's posted in her blog (at torley.com) about taking the train ride to Linux via the CD. She's got it working fairly easily on her old Pentium 4 (there's a few bugs on her dual-Opteron rig), logged in... and got to see the problems first hand. She had alot of feedback about the client, which prompted Don Linden to bring another Linux developer on hand. Initially it was Icculus Linden who did the client. Now, Tofu Linden is developing the client, porting everything over and fixing long standing bugs.

Those bugs were big ones. Audio not playing? We can hear you now. The mouse pointer switching shapes depending on where it was? Got 'em now. Crashing durring emailing postcards? Fixed. Minimizing not working right? Fixed. Gamma settings keep screwing up? Fixed too. Affinity for the Mac client? Some sexy girl penguins later and he's back to chasing 'em. Cut and Paste? In version 1.12.1 which should be out by the time you read this. Spamming the system's main logs? Cut down to a trickle in 1.12.1. Can't resize or full-screen windows? Fixed, although full-screening on my odd-ball dual-head setup doesn't let me move the mouse over to the other monitor.

Of course, with new releases you get new bugs, and this one's a biggie: half the libraries that did get shipped with the old 1.12.0(14) client... don't ship now. This wouldn't be a problem, but as I've told before, Linux has as many versions between it's different distributions as beer has varieties and brand labels. What may be built for one distro doesn't work for another. To work around this, you need to find the old client, as well as the new 1.12.0-r51742 client -- it's numbered differently than from the origional clients, for Don said they're going to use the internal release numbers for the Linux clients. Unarchive them, and in the 1.12.0(14) client's “lib” directory, find these files:

libSDL-1.2.so.0
libboost_regex-gcc-1_32.so.1.32.0
libcrypto.so.0.9.7
libcurl.so.3
libdb-4.2.so
libexpat.so.1
libogg.so.0
libssl.so.0.9.7
libvorbis.so.0
libvorbisenc.so.0
libvorbisfile.so.0

Copy them over to the -r51742 client's “lib” directory. Switch to the destination directory again, because you need to “alias” or “simbolic link” or “simlink” some of the files with these commands:

ln -s libboost_regex-gcc-1_32.so.1.32.0 libboost_regex-gcc-mt-1_33_1.so.1.33.1
ln -s libcrypto.so.0.9.7 libcrypto.so.0.9.8
ln -s libssl.so.0.9.7 libssl.0.9.8
ln -s libvorbisenc.so.0 libvorbisenc.so.2
ln -s libvorbisfile.so.0 libvorbisfile.so.3

There, that'll allow you to run the new client... and what a gorgeous thing! It's almost perfect. All we need now past 1.12.1... is shiny prims. Everyone likes their shinies.

Now wasn't that a refreshing pace of news? I thought so, although we still have one thing to cover – installing Kubunto on a PC. We're getting there. I just have to buy some new CD blanks, because I'm out. SL Linux Live CD. You understand, don't you?

No iPhone post this time around.

Fortunately, there's enough news that pushes it right out. So...

Gentoo 2008.0 is out, with an installer.
Hans Reiser leads police to his wife's body.
Jack Thompson faces permanent disbarment.
Texan computer techs need private investigator license to work?

Excuse me, I need to renew my Information Superhighway Drivers License...

Nightmares ending...

I'm not horsing around here. Three major headaches will be over.Politically, the electorial math is on Obama's side with the elections. If the reports come in accurately, he'll cross the finish line fair and square in two weeks. (Of course, the migrane that is Bush will end next year)With Linux, the trial of SCO v Novell turned Novell v. SCO has rapped up, and it's looking more and more like SCO has to face liquidation soon so Novell can get paid.But more importantly for everyone, Jack Thompson's about to be disbarred. The overseeing judge in his case has drained the swamp of Jack's filings and come up with the report that he's guilty of 27 out of 31 charges. It's up to the Florida Supreme Court to decide his fate now,

Great. Hans Reiser (ReiserFS fame) got himself convicted of murder.

So the father of the Reiser file system (v3 which is in use in Linux, v4 was in development) was convicted on circumstancal evidence... and how badly Hans performed on the stand.

Google News will have the coverage from Wired, Ars Technica, and some discussion Slashdot.
I mentioned this on my personal LiveJournal (http://strredwolf.livejournal.com), and got some input already.

I'm kinda mixed on this.

[LINKDROP] International Pixelstained Technopeasant Day

http://filkertom-itom.blogspot.com/2008/04/international-pixel-stained.html

LINKDROP: WatermeLinden demonstrates Spacenavigator3D

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/04/14/4-fun-spacenavigator-3d-mouse-video-tutorials/

False alarm...

I have been reassured that it's all been a joke. It better be.

Shaky times on the ice...

I don't know what to say. I don't know what to make of it.

As folks know, I write for the Metaverse Messenger as a columnist and occasional correspondent. It's publisher is Katt Kongo (of Rose From Ash Productions) and it's main editor is Phoenix Psaltery. The M2 covers Second Life, and bills itself as "A real newspaper for a virtual world."

Word comes in via the Linden Blog on March 31st that the SL forums will have a new person, Katt Linden, to man the helm and control them along with volunteers. Okay, kinda suspicious... but the silo's of salt I have on hand for the next day are nicely stocked.

April 1st comes in. Rick Rolling seems to be the theme, although there's a nice mash-up of Beaker from the Muppets to Rick Ashley's "Never going to give up on you". It's not half bad, but you've probably seen it. I kinda like that, actually -- I'd like my Rick Rolling to be enjoyable. Blunts things nicely. Ether way, I'm mostly offline...

...and when I hit the internal communications, I get a confusing combination of two plans of pulling my leg... enough that I'm currently a hextaur now so I can stay standing up.

Did P2 just get fired?
Did Katt get hired by Linden Labs?
Is my new boss Phil Rosendale?

...is my move to mirror my articles a good thing, in this mess?

I'll know more tomorrow, April 2nd. From there, I put my reporter hat on one more time, and start making inquiries.

All's fair in Linux and War...

So I'm rebooting the Second Penguins blog again, this time on Blogger instead of WordPress. Blogger itself looks to be much more like LiveJournal than WordPress is. Hopefully, it'll play nicely with Deepest Sender, unlike WordPress. Ether way, I'll have to tweak things a bit as I continue on.Meanwhile, come over to Shotgun Shells at Furnation Vista. It's borders the north-east corner of "The Litterbox" or sandbox. The beer's cheap and I'm rebuilding the Penguin room into a small office and stage.

Livin Lavida Linux...

A test post, if you like. Alot more to come here.