Bonkel Bizzare

Dear > 50% of Americans,

You supported your governments war on terror. Bush had 90% approval when he went to war. You even voted him back in again after he went to war.

The pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison came out in early 2004. You still re-elected the same government in Novemeber 2004. Everyone knew the Americans held prisoners in secret prisons and tortured detainees.  You choose to turn a blind eye.

Democracy comes with responsability. You can’t elect a government knowing they torture and “dissapear” people from the face of the earth without taking responsability.

Torture is done in your name, Everyone of you who voted them in knowing that they torture is guilty of torture. This god in whose name you commit your crimes will be the one to judge you.

The comic strip plasmoid had xkcd but was missing questionable content!

Fortunately it was easy to code up support for it.

The big problem is that QC is way too big!!

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote

Its almost alive!

Source Code: http://www.kared.net/konsole-plasmoid-0.1.tar.gz

Konsole Bug: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163178

I really think what KDE is doing with Plasma is revolutionary. The desktop is the most valuable piece of real estate on a machine and at the moment its just an image that you can dump files on.

It can be so much more!

I have been writing up a konsole plasmoid. As I thought it would be great to have a terminal embedded into my desktop. I could then embed any old terminal program I liked into the desktop itself.

You can also see in the screen shot two folder view plasmoids. One is pointed to ~/Desktop giving me all the functionality I had before as a random place to dump files. The other plasmoid is pointed to a samba network share with all my media, giving me easy access to it from the desktop.

And just for good measure some rotated konsoles =)

And what the widget looks like without some changes to the konsole kpart to make it display properly.

I encountered this error on a Windows 2003 Server trying to access files shared on another computer in the domain. I could copy files and then run them but I couldn’t run any executable straight from the cifs share.

Windows cannot access the specified device, path of file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.

The error occurs because Internet explorer ( including windows explorer ) is set to not allow the running of executables from the “internet” zone.

Windows Server 2003 also doesn’t have the option of automatically adding local intranet addresses to the intranet zone.

The solution is to simply open up Internet Options in control panel. Select security, Select local intranet, select sites and add your intranet domain.

You can tell what zone windows explorer thinks you are in by showing the status bar and looking in the bottom right corner as you browse.

I think microsoft were way ahead of their time with active desktop on Windows 98.

You probably remember Active Desktop as that crash you used to get in Windows 98 when you would start your computer and be shown a white screen instead of your desktop background with a button to restart active desktop.

I know I just switched it off on every machine I used.

What they were trying to do is very similar to what KDE is trying to do with Plasma. Make the desktop more useful. More then just a dump of files on your screen. Instead what if your desktop (under the icons) was active, programmable and could access the web?

No one liked it. They scrapped it in XP.

WEB 2.0 is a reality now however. I wonder how Active Desktop would fare today.

KDE4 is being designed with multi touch interfaces in mind. Its fascinating stuff. I think open source is going to do amazing things with this technology when it goes mainstream.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7615673&postID=4063138588683319581&pli=1

From the comments on aseigo’s blog.

“One great feature would be if the the files on the desktop where show as tumbnails that can be resized, rotated and moved in a way that can be easily used in multitouch interfaces.”
when we get multitouch devices in the hands of developers, i’m sure this will happen quite naturally. one of the main reasons we have rotate in there right now is in preparation for such developments, actually.

Microsoft with their money are going to be the ones who make multi touch go mainstream however. If as promised Windows 7 includes multitouch functionality we may soon see multitouch hardware on new machines. I can’t wait
If you don’t know what multi touch is have a look at the video at the bottom of this post. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/29/microsoft-announces-surface-computer/

Exciting stuff!

I have been a fan of Debian for a long time. I think it’s biggest positive is that it won’t compromise on quality. Everything is tightly controlled by policy.

One tiny example is man pages. If there is a command in Debian there is always a man page. There are countless other examples. Packages in Debian are always of very high quality.

This makes an awesome system to build on. It’s flaw is that because of it’s very strict rules the community can seam very elitist and exclusive. I think the barrier to contribute to Debian is quite high.

Thats where Ubuntu comes in. A flood of enthusiastic users.  Lower barrier of entry for contributions. Ubuntu can focus on the desktop user while Debian continues to create a great base system.

All these contributions flow back to Debian anyway. And the momentum can only help Debian.