Review: Mandriva 2011 "Hydrogen"

Before I begin, I'd like to say that the reason why there was no "Featured Comments" post this week was because there were no comments on last week's posts. That's probably because I didn't write a lot last week as I was spending time with friends and family. Anyway, let's get on with the review. Main Screen I don't think Mandriva particularly needs an introduction. Suffice it to say that it was among the original premiere easy-to-use Linux distributions,...

Read More

Resignation of the Jobs

If you look at the headlines of myriad technology news sources, you'll see that Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple. But he's not leaving Apple; he's going to become Chairman of the Board, with Tim Cook replacing him as CEO. It's basically the same thing that Bill Gates did at Microsoft many years ago, with Steve Ballmer replacing him as CEO, though this time, Steve Jobs did it because of his failing health making him unable to keep up with all the duties of being CEO.Given that Tim Cook has had large responsibilities in the past in the affairs...

Read More

2011 August 23: Earthquake!

Yup. We had an earthquake here! Even though where I live is basically smack in the middle of a continental plate, halfway between the nearest two fault lines, earthquakes do happen around here. I also happen to live near a quarry, so initially, I thought it was a normal quarry blast, but then I realized that compared to a 0.5 second long quarry blast, the shaking was going on for a good 19.5 seconds longer. Truthfully, 3 hours after the event, I'm still shaking slightly and warily awaiting the aftershocks.Even though I live far from established...

Read More

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 August 14

There were 2 posts that got a pretty large number of comments (one in particular), so I'll try to repost a few from each.Review: Linux Mint 11 "Katya" LXDEBecause this wasn't an entirely positive review (and for all that, my only suggestion was to go with the GNOME edition of Linux Mint as opposed to the LXDE edition, and for that people still somehow got up in arms), there were many comments, a few of them rather mean-spirited and baseless, but aside from that, let's get on with some of the more thoughtful (which doesn't mean no disagreements...

Read More

Movie Review: Source Code

My family really wanted to watch this movie, but we couldn't watch it until last night because it wasn't available until then.The premise of the movie is that a soldier who has died in war in Afghanistan has had his brain kept alive and the rest of his body on life support to participate in a program called the Source Code. Basically, it allows a person to relive the last eight minutes of their lives in different scenarios — essentially, parallel alternate realities. While it is initially established that said people can't change the past, they...

Read More

Revisited: openSUSE 11.4 GNOME

If you guessed again that there isn't much else to write about, you'd be right! That's why I'm looking at openSUSE 11.4 GNOME today. Slab Menu + GNOME Application Browser A few months ago, I took a look at openSUSE 11.4 KDE. Before that, I had compared openSUSE 11.3 KDE to other distributions that primarily used KDE. I found that version 11.4 was a dramatic improvement over version 11.3, to the point where I heartily recommended it to anyone who...

Read More

Review: Linux Mint 11 "Katya" LXDE

Main Screen This week, I again found myself in the position of not having much to write about here. Then, I saw that Linux Mint 11 "Katya" LXDE had been released, and considering that I had previously reviewed Debian-based Linux Mint Xfce, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to try Linux Mint's newest Ubuntu-based lightweight distribution.Recently, the various editions of Linux Mint have undergone much flux. The only certainties are...

Read More

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 August 7

There was one post that got a few comments, so I'll repost most of those.Revisited: CrunchBang ("#!") Linux 10 "Statler" Xfce r20110207An anonymous reader said, "shortcuts for menu. #! made me fall in love with shortcuts. thanks, good review."Commenter tshann had this tip: "Just FYI, you can pull up the xfce menu by hitting the windows key and the alt key. So you don't even need to click on the desktop @ all. Thanks for the review. I've been using Statler xfce for ... well since it came out. It's my main OS - awesome distro."Thanks to all those...

Read More

Reflection: 2011 Summer at NIST

I've mentioned a few times here that I have been interning at NIST this summer. Well, after 12 weeks, today was my last day, and for the next 3 weeks before I go back to college I get to chill out and bum around at home with family and friends. Yay!I am really, really happy that I got to be able to do my internship this summer. It almost didn't happen; it wasn't until a few weeks before I started that I got confirmation that I could start in the first place. (That's better than my 2009 summer internship at NIST, where I didn't find anything until...

Read More

Revisited: CrunchBang ("#!") Linux 10 "Statler" Xfce r20110207

Main Screen + Xfce Main Right-Click Menu When I've reviewed #! before, I've always stuck with the Openbox edition, because when #! started, it only had an Openbox edition. It wasn't until version 10 "Statler" that it gained an Xfce edition as well, but I always wanted to review just "the original" #! anyway. Fast forward to the last few days, and I haven't really been able to think of much to write. Then, I realized I had never checked out the...

Read More

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 July 31

There were a few posts that got a handful of comments, so I'll try to repost a few from each.Review: CentOS 6.0Reader MIchael J King had a clarification countering one of my gripes: "The Live DVD of CentOS 6 has the special effects you were craving plus many many more applications including kde ones. On my Thinkpad T61 it runs perfectly and is very stable with support to 2016 and beyond."An anonymous commenter supported my conclusion: "Except for a few nits, CentOS6 and Scientific Linux 6 should be identical. They have been in my testing (for...

Read More

Das U-Blog Turns 2!

Wow. It has been two years since I started this blog! I started it at my internship at NIST (where I'm working again this summer, though I feel like what I'm doing now is far more interesting that what I did then, and that's why I started the blog anyway) on a particularly boring day after seeing that one of my friends had started a blog too. Initially, I focused a lot on politics (aside from a few posts here and there about happenings in my own...

Read More

FOLLOW-UP: On the Current US Deficit and Debt Crises

I'm not even going to link to the original post, because so much has changed between then and now that it's frankly irrelevant.Well, I'm still in my house and not in a cave, so the US and the US economy have survived the debt ceiling crisis, with Congress passing and President Obama signing into law the bill to raise the debt ceiling, in exchange for fairly substantial cuts all along the way. I won't bore you with details, but the gist is that the debt ceiling will be raised by $400 billion immediately, $500 billion in a few months unless 2/3...

Read More

Movie Review: The Adjustment Bureau

A few days ago, I watched this movie with some family members who were over. I meant to write this before, but didn't because of the other posts I put out.The basic premise of the plot is that the main character played by Matt Damon is in love with the main girl, and an organization called the Adjustment Bureau which controls all human actions is tasked with keeping them apart at all costs. Their distinguishing characteristics are wearing hats and (while wearing said hats) being able to essentially teleport from one location to a totally separate...

Read More

Review: CentOS 6.0

Main ScreenRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 was released a little less than 9 months ago, while RHEL derivative Scientific Linux 6.0 "Carbon" was released a little less than 5 months ago. Yet, it took 8 months after the release of RHEL 6.0 for CentOS 6.0 to be released. Two weeks after that, the CentOS 6.0 live medium was released, so I'm trying it out and reviewing it now.So what is CentOS? Well, before I say that, it's important to know that...

Read More