Edward Andrew Robinson

Democracy is now Miro, today I did my updates and was welcomed with the new Miro player, I must say I haven’t noticed any real changes, In fact they don’t even seem to list any real on there blog (just little things here and there), but the one thing I can say is the update was flawless and its great to see a for profit company coming out with great open source software people getting paid to make open source software.

Long live Miro!

I thought it was nifty when Jorge Bernal did a My top 10 commands, so here are mine. Funny thing was that Jorge Bernal command did not work for me so I added on a few extra commands to make it work for me.

history | awk ‘{print $2}’ | awk ‘BEGIN {FS=”|”} {print $1}’|sort|uniq -c | sort -n | tail | sort -nr

Note: wordpress seems to be messing up the single and double quotes, you need to remove them and retype them in

What are your top 10 commands?

I wrote about Democracy a month ago, back then the biggest comment that I got was that Democracy wouldent work for them. Democracy just released version 0.9.6 today and in the release post they claimed to have fixed support for feisty. Now I have been running the stock version that comes in the Ubuntu repository’s and I must say it is a product that once you use it you will never go back. I love coming home and having all of my vlogs downloaded for me ready to watch, I just wish I could find more Ubuntu vlogs, if anyone can find some let please post a link in the comments. I’m quite adventurous when it comes to Ubuntu and I will install anything weather or not I think it will break my system. So I backed up my ~/.democracy folder added the democracy repository, they have a great tutorial by the way, to my sources.list and upgraded.

First thing that happens when you run democracy is that it will “upgrade” the storage system for all your subscribed vlogs, this is why I backed up my democracy folder, and then it seg faults.

earobinson@NaN:~$ democracyplayer
/usr/bin/democracyplayer:87: DeprecationWarning: The dbus_bindings module is deprecated and will go away soon.

dbus-python 0.80 provides only a partial emulation of the old
dbus_bindings, which was never meant to be public API.

Most uses of dbus_bindings are applications catching the exception
dbus.dbus_bindings.DBusException. You should use dbus.DBusException
instead (this is compatible with all dbus-python versions since 0.40.2).

If you need additional public API, please contact the maintainers via
.

import dbus_bindings
/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus_bindings.py:5: DeprecationWarning: The dbus_bindings module is deprecated and will go away soon.

dbus-python 0.80 provides only a partial emulation of the old
dbus_bindings, which was never meant to be public API.

Most uses of dbus_bindings are applications catching the exception
dbus.dbus_bindings.DBusException. You should use dbus.DBusException
instead (this is compatible with all dbus-python versions since 0.40.2).

If you need additional public API, please contact the maintainers via
.

from dbus.dbus_bindings import *
INFO Starting up Democracy Player
INFO Version: 0.9.6
INFO Revision: unknown
INFO Loading preferences…
INFO Starting event loop thread
INFO Restoring database…
INFO Connecting to /home/earobinson/.democracy/sqlitedb
TIMING Database load slow: 0.463
INFO Recomputing filters…
INFO Spawning auto downloader…
INFO Displaying main frame…
WARNING Menu item action “CheckVersion” not implemented
WARNING Menu item action “FastForward” not implemented
WARNING Menu item action “Rewind” not implemented
WARNING Menu item action “UpVolume” not implemented
WARNING Menu item action “DownVolume” not implemented
WARNING Volume changed before videoDisplay created
WARNING Display updated before video display was created
INFO Creating video display…
INFO *** Launching Downloader Daemon ****
alsa
oss
pulseaudio
file
none
INFO loaded renderer ‘xinerenderer’
INFO Setting VolumeLevel to 1.0
TIMING gtkAsyncMethod: took too long: 1.483
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

This was what I had expected from a product that had gone since the 2 months without upgrading to support feisty. I posted in the comments about what happened hoping to warn users that this may break the version of democracy that they have installed.

What I did not expect was about an hour and a half later there is a response in the comments from Nicholas Reville, who i can only assume is a democracy employ, that says that they are working on it. Another two and a half hours later Ben (another democracy employ?) posts to say they have fixed the problem. The great part of this is that they had. All in all it took them about 4 hours to fix the problem and upload it to the democracy repository.

This makes me ask the question, is it worth the upgrade. The ubuntu MOTU, do a great job of ensuring that every package that makes it into the Ubuntu repository is a working and quality package. Not only did democracy leave the feisty version of democracy broken for months but they don’t seem to test that much before they release a new version, however they did release a fix quickly. The version of democracy in the Ubuntu repository was working for me (thanks to the ubuntu MOTU), but I love the bleeding edge.

I for one will upgrade to the new version of democracy, but I will do so knowing that in the future things may break and that I will keep a backup of both the install deb files and my ~/.democracy folder just in case things break again and they don’t provide an upgrade for another 2 months. What are you going to do?

Dear Ubuntu Users,My Patent, #5322346432, directly impacts all Ubuntu users. I am writing to inform you that each user owes me back-charges that will be waived if you agree to my licensing terms.

The relevant patent covers utilizing the human diaphram muscle to draw air into your trachea and ultimately into your lungs through cavities in your cranial region. This is including, but not limited to, the oral cavity and the nasal cavity. If the purpose of this method of drawing in surrounding gases is to utilize the oxygen contained in therein, you are subject to my patent…..

Full Story
lol I found that to be a great read!

Cd’s are pretty as always. It seems the shipping was really fast this time, about 6 weeks.

As always you can get your own cd as shipit.

I have never been a huge gamer, if a new game comes out I will sometimes play it for a day or two and then be done with it. Linux has always been a great os for me but if I was a hardcore gamer I’m not so sure that would be true. That being said there are many great ways to play games on Linux, Wine and Cedega being the two main ones.

The problem is that Wine (I have no experience with Cedega) is not perfect, however it has been able to do some great things. I have been able to get world of warcraft, Microsoft office, msdnaa (you need to download an exe in order to download the software and why not try out vista for free, and yes I’m still with Linux even though windows is free for me) and many other applications running under Wine. There have been many that I have not been able to get running also, evil genius for example.

Chances are none of this is new to you but stay with me. About a year ago, maybe six months. Google came out with two products for Linux, Google Earth, and Picasa. The really cool thing is that they did not rewrite the code they instead opted to modify there code and then use Wine to make it all work. Now while I’m not sure of the legalities of distributing GPL software and proprietary software in the same package I assume its all on the up and up, google would never do evil.

Yesterday on digg I saw an article about the latest release of Soldat, What I found interesting is that when you go to the download page they list there requirements as follows

“Requirements: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista or Linux + Wine; DirectX 8.1;”

Now I found this really nifty. I know that Unreal Tournament and a few other games have had Linux releases, but I’m not sure how successful they where. This really makes me wounder however, how hard it is to make a program that is wine compatible / works with Wine and secondly is this a viable option for game makers.

Is the cost of making your applications Wine compatible less than the extra revenue that companies would see if they made there applications work with Wine. I know this was touched on at Ubuntu open week ask mark session. Seeing wine as an option to play a game just inspired me to post about it.

I would encourage any software producer to at least make there applications run under wine even if they where to lose money if only to maintain product dominance in your market otherwise like Mark said we will just make open source equivalents. But thats just my two cents.

Edit: Oops it seems that Google Earth Linux port is a native Linux application built with the open source Qt application development toolkit. Thanks Everett.

• Desktop tower defence – a great flash tower defence game.
• Jott – Mobile Note Taking and Hands-Free Messaging

This post is a place holder.