Soccer: Australia vs Brazil update

Well my previous prediction proved wrong and it is just another good reason not to put a bet on anything that you are passionate about. It's a good thing I wasn't enticed by the potential 14:1 gain to be had by betting on my optimistic score.

Fortunately Australia still has a good chance of getting through to the next round. All we need is a win against Croatia or a draw against Croatia and for Japan to lose to Brazil.

Soccer: Australia vs Brazil

My optimistic score prediction for the game is a 2:1 win to Australia. According to Acttab if this does prove to be the correct score and I bet $1 I would get a return of $14. I'm not going to put any money on it though.

IT: Joga.com Companion for Firefox

Joga.com is a website created by Nike and Google to host online communities of football (soccer) fans. According to the site:

'... most of all, Joga is about "Joga Bonito" -- Portuguese for "play beautiful." Are you ready to start down the path of soccer bliss? Join us, and show the world what playing beautiful means to you.'

I joined up some time ago and haven't found it all that useful yet, but now with the World Cup they have released a companion for Firefox, shown below.


Key features include:

• Customised skin for your team in Firefox. I've got Australia selected for mine. Note that it doesn't look all that good with ForecastFox active at the same time. Fortunately you can turn that option off if you like.
  
• Scores for recent games on the left-hand side of the browser.
• Recent headlines.
• Videos.
• Live updates for the current game in the status bar.
  

Go the Socceroos, who play Brazil at 2:00 am.

IT: Google Earth for Linux

As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to try out Google Earth for Linux. Well, I did and I'm happy to say it was a very painless process. I just downloaded the .bin file and then ran it. It was going to install into my home directory so I re-ran the install as the 'root' user and it chose /usr/local/google-earth to install to.

The install completed quickly and kindly offered to launch Google Earth which I accepted. The screen took a little while to show a stable image but then I was offered a view of the globe. I entered 'Canberra, Australia' into the search and was greeted with one of Canberra's prime landmarks - Parliament House.


At first glance, this appears to work just as well as the Windows version.

IT: Picasa and Google Earth for Linux

I've been waiting for some time to use some of Google's free non-web applications with Linux. They recently released Picasa for Linux, which is a useful tool for visualising all your photos (it finds them for you automatically) and for making some basic enhancements to your photos.


Picasa runs using a custom version of Wine which is bundled with the application. My previous experiences with Wine have been mixed, but Google has gone to some effort, actually making more than 200 contributions to the Wine source to make things work. The only problems I experienced were during the initial scan to find all images on my hard drives. Since then, no crashes, no font or UI issues.

Google recently announced a version of Google Earth for Linux, which I'm downloading now to try out.

IT: Blogs

With my Linux frustrations well behind me and Kubuntu working like a dream, it is now time to get all my RSS/Atom feeds back into Akregator. Fortunately this is all that I lost in the update, since I was able to use my old Firefox and Thunderbird configurations and the rest of my data was backed up.

Before resubscribing to the numerous feeds I was subscribed to before, I've decided to prune the list of feeds back to something more manageable. In the world of magazine subscriptions, most people converge to their minimum set of most relevant magazines just because it costs money to get each mag. Every 12 months or so you need to either fork over some more money to continue the subscription or cancel it.

In the online world, RSS subscriptions are free (aside from storage costs) and there isn't a regular 'review' period where you are prompted to consider whether a subscription is actually worthwhile for you. As a result, my list of unread articles in Akregator was continually getting longer and longer. For about 30% of my feeds I'd read every article straight away. For about 20% more I'd browse every so often and then for the rest I'd rarely read any at all.

So I'm starting fresh. Unfortunately I can already predict that my list of subscribed feeds will start to increase again and things will only get back to the same situation. I've had a look at a few popular News Readers (Akregator, Google Reader, Bloglines) and there doesn't seem to be a good solution for this problem yet.

Blogs: The Mitch Says

After his previous journey to South East Asia, The Mitch caught the travel bug and is now off to India for several months. To quote from his first travel blog entry:

Will I find spiritual solace? An Indian Bride? Bollywood super-stardom? An ugly death at the hands of cholera? No idea. But hey - the world is my glittering golden oyster, and one way or the other, this should be one hell of an interesting experience.

Check it out - he tells some interesting stories.

IT: Kubuntu Linux 6.06 (Dapper)

After my earlier problems trying to upgrade from Breezy to Dapper, I decided to trash another Linux partition (FC3) and install Dapper there. The main advantage of doing things this way would be that I could keep all my data. I should of course have partitioned things differently so that '/' was on a different partition to '/home', but anyway, this was the way to go for now.

So I downloaded the 6.06 version, inserted the CD and booted up. Rather than the usual install process it booted into a Live CD version of Kubuntu which then gave me an option of installing while still having a usable Live CD distro to play with at the same time.

The install went smoothly and I restarted. Things appeared to be working fine, aside from MA111 Wireless Adapter. The solution was the same as for Breezy. I just had to install linux-wlan-ng (which was on the CD) and then change /etc/network/interfaces as follows:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless_essid MYNETSSID
wireless_mode managed
wireless_defaultkey 1
wireless_enc on
wireless_channel 11
wlan_ng_hostwep true
wlan_ng_key0 AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA

That was it. You'd need to change the wireless channel, SSID and WEP key if you're trying with the same adapter. I haven't tried WPA yet.

I fired up Adept and proceeded to install Firefox, Thunderbird and other useful programs. A few symbolic links from my old .mozilla and .mozilla-thunderbird directories and I was back reading mail and browsing the web.

Unfortuntely when I tried the same trick with Akregator my feeds got trashed. Not too much of a problem, although I did discover I hadn't backed them up recently other than in a translated form.

I installed the latest SMP kernel and rebooted, expecting my wireless adapter to stop working. Well I'm glad to say that it is still working perfectly. When I typed 'cat /proc/cpuinfo' I saw two CPUs which indicates Hyperthreading is working just fine.

I'm still deciding if the new features are worth the install pain. This is how my desktop looks.

IT: Linux Frustrations

I've been running Kubuntu Linux for a while (Breezy, 5.10) and it has been working great. It was a little bit fiddly to get my wireless USB Adapter (MA111) working, but I haven't had any other real problems to mention.

Perhaps it was because of this that when I heard the new version of Kubuntu (Dapper, 6.06) was out I decided to upgrade straight away. The magic of apt lured me into thinking that the upgrade process was going to be simple. I fired up Adept (package manager), changed the repositories from breezy to dapper, selected 'Fetch Updates' and then 'Full Upgrade' and then 'Commit'.

Well, this is where the trouble started. Adept downloaded a bunch of packages before crashing. I restarted the machine and KDE would no longer start. Knowing a little about apt, I tried 'apt-get install', but there were dependency issues. I tried 'apt-get -f install' as suggested, rebooted and then not even the shell would start. Many segmentation faults followed.

Now I'm faced with the prospect of reinstalling Linux (yet again). My dreams of seamless upgrades and only ever installing a Linux system once are shattered. Its just fortunate my Kubuntu partition was only one of four distros on my desktop so I can still use my computer until I bite the bullet and reinstall.

I almost wish for the long release cycles of Windows... The new Dapper features better be worth it.