Isolationism

By now you’ll all have heard: The OLPC is available for sale on a “buy one, donate one” basis, for $400 USD, which worked out to about $430 CAD for me including the shipping.

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I’ve purchased four 19″ TFT monitors from Samsung over the past three-or-so years (two for parents, and two for in-house use), and have recommended them to others without reservation. The honeymoon with their LCD display product line just ended after returning a recently purchased SyncMaster 931c to Best Buy because it had two dead pixels—only to return with another monitor (also factory-sealed like the others) which displayed … Another dead pixel. Fuck.

I know LCDs were plagued with problems in their early days, but come on. You’ve had over a decade to get your act together.

My conclusion: After having had three of these in my house so far, and only one that didn’t ship with any factory defects, unless you want to take a 66% chance of having one or more dead pixels on your new monitor, don’t buy the Samsung SyncMaster 931c. If you have had spectacularly good luck with a line of monitors in the past, please post a comment and let me know. I don’t think I’ll be buying Samsung again.

P.S.: Yes, I have tried the two common “folk wisdom” tricks for fixing the defect, but to no avail. I suspect these hacks may help fix some users’ aging monitors, but they can’t help rectify production defects.

Anyone watching the news has no doubt long-since encountered the news of Novell entering a “protective covenant” with Microsoft to essentially line Novell’s pockets in exchange for “protection” against patent infringement suits from Microsoft, because according to them, Linux infringes on many of their patents, and Ballmer has made a lot of noise (read: FUD) about how Microsoft is going to start to pursue legal action to protect them. It smacks more of posturing tactics to me; kind of like how they got caught red-handed lining SCO’s pockets through investment intermediary BayStar Capital, except this time they’re operating overtly instead of covertly.

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Judging from the few posts I’ve already made, you’ve probably already figured out for yourself that this is hardly a celebrity news blog. But when the news involves (the termination of) Britney Spears’ marriage, I can hardly contain myself from exclaiming my deligh relie deep sorrow at the news.

Poke fun all you want, but K-Fed’s a totally talented musician, man. And now Brit-brit’s gone and announced that she wants out just when he needed her love the most.

Hope you didn’t get any of that sarcasm on your tie. Anyway, so long, K-Fed: your fifteen minutes were a bit longer than most. Don’t worry, I’m certain they aren’t quite over yet: you’ll be sure to be raked over the coals for prior relationship failures, lack of singing talent, and something about riding on coat-tails before your name is happily forgotten the world over.

I had thought by now I would have inflamed someone sufficiently to post a comment—even of the rude or derogatory variety—but apparently that isn’t the case. After examining the link to add comments, which used to read “No Comments”, I decided that perhaps the fault was my own as this might be being interpreted as meaning comments are closed when they are, in fact, open.

Please don’t be afraid to register for an account to post comments—The process takes a few seconds and you only have to suffer through it once (unless I screw up and wipe the database, in which case there will be nothing worth commenting on anyway, except maybe my stupidity. You can make a pre-emptive strike now if you like).

Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can tell me if my poor turn of phrase confused you into thinking comments were unwelcome or not; you’re also welcome to trackback to any articles you like—the permalink to do so is the same as the URL of the article in question.

A recent article on Digg.com suggests that a number of Ubuntu users are experiencing difficulties upgrading from Dapper Drake to the recently released Edgy Eft.

I took the plunge myself yesterday, and spent a hair-pulling day coaxing Ubuntu to install all the packages by apt-get, then by the GUI upgrade tool (several times), then by apt-get again. Eventually, after a number of tries (including one user-aborted attempt because of ridiculously slow downloads and several installation failure aborts), apt-get didn’t want to install anything else and I rebooted and—gratifyingly—everything came up fine, and all the upgrades appear to be present.

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In case you’ve been living in a dungeon (a particularly crude dungeon without internet access) and have just stepped out into the daylight, Firefox 2.0 has been officially released less than a week after MSIE 7.0 went gold.

You can download it now from Mozilla’s official server. You can also check out the Slashdot discussion on the topic, which is bound to be both extensive and entertaining.

Allow me to join the celebration in congratulating the Mozilla team on another milestone release of their fantastic product. May the best browser win.

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? You just know someone had this one waiting in the wings to announce as soon as the final release made it out to piss on Microsoft’s parade.

The only flaw I see in their logic is that the Wednesday morning after Patch Tuesday would have been an even better day to announce this little flaw, as MSIE 7 will be rolled out automatically to a large number of users automatically as mentioned in an earlier post.

Well, here goes nothing. I’ve only had this domain name since March of 1999, and here’s the first attempt I’ve ever made to run a site on it. Why not? Well …

There are a few reasons. Topping the list has always been that thing about enjoying what you do for a living as a hobby—most people don’t.

That’s not all, though. Maybe the bigger issue is, I don’t know if I have anything worth saying. Well, with friends abroad now and few enough of them as it is, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to reconnect a bit with them and others, in my own little way. I have several little ongoing projects at any given time, too; I’ll post about my experiences here and hopefully help others out (and maybe get helped a bit, myself, too).

I’ll be adding more content sections and a bit more functionality as time goes on, so bear with me. Thanks for stopping by, and here’s to hoping there’s something worth reading every now and then to bring you back.

Cheers.