Random: The Ugly Stick

The Ugly Stick is an Aussie show that The Mitch mentioned a while ago. Its now up to the third episode and its starting to grow on me. Fortunately this episode introduces some new characters and gets rid of Damo's World. Its worth a download, although each episode is more than 100 Mb.

IT: Ideas for Firefox

The Scenario:I've just installed a new OS on my computer and I fire up Firefox and want to get started browsing the web.

The Problem:
All of my favourite extensions are gone. Even worse, all of their settings are gone.

What to do:
Fortunately all of the extensions are available from Mozilla updates. Unfortunately that's not the end of the story, because now I have to set up ForecastFox to be positioned in the menu area, to show the weather for Canberra, etc. etc. I also have to setup Foxclocks again etc.

A Solution:
Wouldn't it be nice if:

1. I could have all of my extensions available from a server. This could even just be a list which can then use the Mozilla Updates site to actually download the extensions. Many PCs could sync the set of extensions installed.
   
2. I could also sync my extension settings from this server.

In this way, my work PC, home PC and any other PC can be setup to work with Firefox just the way I like it, very quickly. A new extension installed at work would automatically show up on my home browser after the next synch.

Of course, this could extend to other software on the PC as well, including Thunderbird. Privacy features could involve separating private (passwords and mail accounts) and public settings (Forecast for Canberra). By default only public settings would be synched.

Other: Locusts?

The Mitch asked where the locusts were earlier. Well Canberra has almost enough grasshoppers to call a plague at the moment. They're the same order of insects as locusts...

Travel: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

We did a little sight-seeing while we were there. The Menara KL (Kuala Lumpur Tower) has some nice views of the city and is also a good landmark to navigate by. Apparently it is the third highest tower in the world, with the CN Tower in Toronto ranking number one. I was surprised to see Telstra Tower mentioned a little lower down the order in the display of tall towers shown at the top.

It was only 20 RM (~7 AUD) each to go up to the top via elevator and this included an Audio Guide and a small movie showing the unique methods used to construct the tower.

We tried to go and see the other big towers in KL, the Petronas Towers, which are shown below. Unfortunately tickets are on a 'first-come, first-serve' basis and they are typically sold out before 10 am every day.

The Wedding: Photos

I haven't written a post about the wedding because it is hard to capture the essence of the day in just a few paragraphs. Instead of trying to do this, I'll just post a few pics here:

Flowers on the bridal table:

Photos on Federal Golf Course:

Cutting the Cake:

IT: Million Dollar Homepage Update

I reported earlier that the Million Dollar Homepage owner was pretty close to selling all of the pixels he had available. Well, he came up with a smart way to make even more money by auctioning off his final 1000 pixels on Ebay!

At the moment the bidding is up to $152,300 and there are still 4 days remaining. At this rate he may even make an extra quarter of a million dollars! This is just one more great idea on top of the original idea.

As you would expect, shoddy copies of the original have already sprung up, including an Australian version creatively called The Australian Million Dollar Homepage. This site is a shameless rip-off of the original and it has already dropped its price from $1/pixel to 10c/pixel, leaving me wondering when the name will change to The Australian Hundred Thousand Dollar Homepage. Still, there are already 81000 pixels sold, giving a nice return of about $8100.

IT: LSongs on Kubuntu/Ubuntu

I was using Linspire for a while and found Lsongs quite useful for managing music, so I decided to get it working with Kubuntu Breezy, using KDE3.5. Here's some of the steps I followed:

1. Install the Debian version of Lsongs from the Lsongs website as follows:
   - Add the source to /etc/apt/sources.list or use Adept:
   deb-src http://mentors.debian.net/debian unstable main contrib non-free
   - Make a directory e.g. ~/lsongs_stuff
   - Change to this directory
   - Run sudo apt-get source lsongs
   This installs into the current directory.
   
2. Install libxine-dev using Adept or apt-get
   
3. Make sure you have Gcc and G++ V3.x installed
   
4. Install PyXine by downloading the package into ~/lsongs_stuff, unzipping and then running:
   sudo python setup.py install
   
   If the install can't find gcc or g++, you just need to make a link from /usr/bin/gcc-3.x to /usr/bin/gcc and similarly for g++
5. Try running ~/lsongs_stuff/lsongs_version/Lsongs/lsongs
   I had problems finding the Python interpreter, so I just had to change the first line of lsongs to #!/usr/bin/python -O
   
   I also had a problem with KUniqueApplication:
   TypeError: insufficient number of arguments to KUniqueApplication()
   
   This appears to be caused by a dodgy ifdef in the PyKDE bindings, which explicitly checks for KDE3.3. The solution is to change line 28 of Lsongs/LApplication.py to:
   KUniqueApplication.__init__(self, 1, 1, 1)
   

After making these changes, I was able to run Lsongs. There still seems to be a problem with CDRecord, but that would only affect burning CDs/DVDS. I was able to play web radio and also import tracks from a CD:

UPDATE: See this post for installation on Kubuntu Edgy (6.10).