Review: Edubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal"

GNOME Main ScreenBefore I get on with the rest of this post, I need to apologize for not having posted anything this week. It turned out to be a good deal busier than I anticipated, and even otherwise, there wasn't a whole lot to write about, at least at the beginning of the week. I did say in the latest "Featured Comments" article that I would review the latest release of Ubuntu — version 11.04 "Natty Narwhal". That is still happening, but for reasons...

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Featured Comments: Week of 2011 April 17

There were two posts this week that got a handful of comments, so I'll try to repost most of them.Joking Around with ProfessorsReader Abhijith said, "You're absolutely right about the state of this in India. Let alone school teachers; teachers/lecturers in undergrad were still uptight about having a good chat with students. But then again, not all were. We have attended marriages of lecturers, teased them about it, had pointless chats with some lady teachers(they are more approachable any day). But I still don't think the relationship goes beyond...

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Grades When You Want Them, Not When You Don't?

One of the nice things about freshman year at MIT is the grading system of Pass/No Record. Letter grades are recorded, but they are for the student's personal records only, and if the student gets at least a 'C', the grade is recorded as 'Pass', while if the student gets lower than that, the grade is not recorded at all (though no credit is earned). The big benefit to this is that it helps new freshman proverbially get their feet wet at MIT and explore different areas of study without fear of getting poor grades. For the second semester, however,...

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Adobe Flash Troubles: 64-Bit or 32-Bit PAE?

I am a big fan of both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, though unfortunately I haven't been able to watch full episodes of either show in a while because of college work. I have, however, been able to watch clips here and there on their respective websites, but I cannot do the same thing on Hulu, the awesome website that aggregates segments from different TV shows and supports it through advertising. The reason for that is because I supposedly don't have a valid working version of Adobe Flash, and that is probably because I'm running a 64-bit...

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Joking Around with Professors

This was something that I meant to write a few weeks ago, but I haven't been able to get around to it until now.A few weeks ago, the Society of Physics Students (SPS) along with the Undergraduate Women in Physics (UWIP, and it was actually mostly organized by the latter, though of course men were allowed to participate as well) held an event called "5-Minute Lightning Physics Lectures". I actually gave the 5-minute lecture on the slightly more advanced version of the first physics course, as I took that class last semester and did pretty well.All...

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The Wonders of Communicating over Computers

A few days ago, I was talking to my family back home on Skype. They were actually helping me fill out college financial aid forms for the next academic year, but we were also chatting about random things at the same time. This was far from the first time we had talked on Skype since I came to college, so why was I particularly amazed with it now? Well, the phone at my family's house rang at one point during our conversation, and I had the video call set to full-screen on my computer. The phone nearest my family's computer is just to the right of...

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Featured Comments: Week of 2011 April 10

There were two posts that garnered a handful of comments, so I'll try to repost all of those.Review: GNOME 3An anonymous reader had this tip regarding my complaint about the number of steps it takes to shut down: "You get that option if you hold down the alt key after selecting the profile menu. Can't begin to guess the thought process that went into that design decision."Another anonymous commenter had this counterargument to my overall criticisms of GNOME 3: "I don't agree with your idea that GNOME is for netbooks - I have a 24" monitor and...

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Wireless Electricity: I Could Have Thought of That

A couple days ago, in my Physics II - Electricity and Magnetism class, our professor was teaching us about mutual inductance, and he was telling us how it never seemed very interesting or useful until it became very important in his own research. He, another professor who was a recitation leader for my physics class last semester, and a few other people created a company called WiTricity which sells equipment for wireless power transmission through magnetic fields, which is sort of like the magnetic counterpart to the Tesla coil, which transmits...

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Review: GNOME 3

Shell Main ScreenAbout 2 months ago, I previewed GNOME 3. At that time, it was many weeks away from the final release, so there were still many things to be done. Since then, many things have changed, and a few days ago, GNOME 3 was finally released for the whole world to see.The biggest change in GNOME 3 is of course the GNOME 3 Shell. This has gotten several changes, updates, and other revisions through its development. Since then, however,...

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Featured Comments: Week of 2011 April 3

There were a whole bunch of comments on this past week's posts, so I'll try to repost most of those.Ditching KDE ApplicationsAn anonymous reader said, "As a kde user, I feel exactly the same about gnome apps - they start slow and perform badly- so the only gnome application I have is firefox, though konqueror with webkit is what I use more and more. I will add that I prefer KDE over gnome because a) KDE apps are MUCH better integrated with each other b) gnome is tightly controlled by RH and ximian and their agendas as opposed to KDE which...

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Review: Linux Mint Xfce 201104

Main ScreenJust over 2 weeks ago, I wrote about how Linux Mint is moving the Xfce edition to a Debian base. Well, a few days ago, they released the official Linux Mint Xfce 201104.For those of you who didn't read that post, in short, Linux Mint Xfce is now Debian-based instead of Ubuntu-based. The developers had a few things to say about this: (1) the desktop will be faster and lighter on resources (114 MB of RAM at idle, 177 MB of RAM with Mozilla...

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Ditching KDE Applications

Exactly a year ago to the day, I visited Caltech, and we visited some old family friends; one of the guys there is my age, and he's also a free software enthusiast, like me. Yay! We got into a discussion about free software and the applications we prefer. I mentioned that I prefer using Okular, GwenView, and Amarok compared to the default GNOME counterparts in Linux Mint. He told me that mixing and matching GNOME and KDE applications hurts performance. I remembered that since then, but I never really gave it a second thought until recently. That's...

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Featured Comments: Week of 2011 March 27

There were a couple posts this past week that got quite a few comments, so I'll try to repost most of those.Apple's Stupid Trademark Cases: Now Including EmacsBefore I get to the comments themselves, I would like to say that I wanted to write this article last year, but I decided not to in order to better build up a particular writing style and reputation. With readers coming from LXer, Linux Today, and Tuxmachines to read the articles in this space, and having written this blog for over one and a half years, I think both are now pretty much set.Reader...

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Review: Elementary OS 0.1 "Jupiter"

Main ScreenWell, after quite a long wait, it has finally happened: the first official release of Elementary OS is here! Codenamed version 0.1 "Jupiter", it's based on Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat", so you may be thinking to yourself, "Why should I care about yet another Ubuntu derivative?" I'll admit that I had (and still have) slightly bought into the hype about Elementary OS, but there are plenty of reasons to care about Elementary OS. Let's...

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Apple's Stupid Trademark Cases: Now Including Emacs

Apple has become progressively more aggressive about its products' trademarks lately. The more talked-about example has been its aggression regarding the term "App Store" The problem is that Apple itself would refer to "app store" generically and even talked about other companies' possible "app stores", yet now, when Microsoft wants to make an "app store" for the Windows Phone operating system, Apple is claiming that "App" is short for "Apple". This is truly disingenuous because practically every app developer on the face of this planet and many...

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