John Scalzi - Old Man's War

I've just finished reading Old Man's War by John Scalzi - a science fiction novel in a similar vein to Joe Haldeman's Forever War.

SotD: John Hammond / Tom Waits - Shore Leave

Today's Song Of The Day is a cover version by John Hammond of the Tom Waits song Shore Leave, from the latter's excellent album Swordfishtrombones. The song is off Wicked Grin, a collaboration between Hammond and Waits and is IMHO one of the few songs where the remake has just as much character as the original even though the arrangement is quite drastically different.

Flash in Opera on Linux shows grey boxes

The Flash plug-in for Opera in Kubuntu has been FUBAR-ed and it seems that it's caused due to an Opera bug w.r.t Flash player 9.0.115 which is fixed in the 9.50 betas. However, since Kubuntu etc. are still using 9.27, the only way to fix this issue is to go back to 9.0.48.

Kubuntu upgrade to 8.04 Hardy woes

Yesterday, I decided to upgrade my Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 install to the latest 8.04 Hardy Heron. While I didn't have any specific feature that I thought I might need, I really wanted to see if an upgrade would help me access my digital camera which isn't terribly well supported in 7.10.

Enabling WPA2 support for Windows XP

WPA 2 is pretty much the default encryption standard for wifi networks nowadays. However, standard XP installations do not support it by default. To enable WPA2 support, an update - KB893357 - needs to be downloaded and installed.

If you are not keen on going through the whole Genuine Windows (sic) crap, googling for KB893357 should provide you with a direct download link for the update.

United abominations contragolpe from the UN

While checking the link to United abominations in my previous post, I came across a link to a "rebuttal" from the UN to the title track of the album.

The UN blogger, Mark Leon Goldberg, takes the song apart and exposes all of Mustaine's drivel for what it is. An excerpt:

Poverty in their kitchens
Held hostage by oil-for-food
Yet their own plates are full off the fat of their lands
There's no blood on their hands, right Kojo?
They promised to tell the truth
Without leaving a fingerprint, but
They will lose the UN one way or another
The victim, I fear will be us, sisters and brothers.

Assuming the antecedent to the pronoun "they" refers to the UN Secretariat, lead singer and guitarist Dave Mustaine (whose voice we now hear) seems to be implying that UN staffers are enriching themselves while the poor in their country suffer. His evidence is the alleged corruption in the Oil-for-Food program, which allowed Saddam Hussein's government to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian items. The rarely stated truth about the Oil-for-Food program is that it did what is was intended to do -- prevent a humanitarian crisis in Iraq while exerting economic pressure on Saddam Hussein and keeping weapons of mass destruction out of his hands.

SotD: Megadeth - Black Swan

Today's song of the day is Megadeth's Black Swan, a bonus track from their last album, United Abominations. The song, even though it didn't make it to the album per sé, is one of its strongest tracks and reeks of some vintage Megadeth class.

Opera and downloads

It's a bit unsettling how Opera (9.25) starts your download even before you've clicked "Save". For e.g., just now I wanted to download the Windows version of wget and visited the appropriate site and clicked on "download". I didn't click "save" and specify a download folder etc. and switched over to a video I was watching. There was also another download progressing at the same time.

The joys of the Eclipse update manager

The Eclipse 3.3.1.1 update manager has to be the most annoying updater ever fucking written. What a pile of refuse :/

I'm sure that the Eclipse developer community has their own private updater as I am certain no sane man can stand working with it.

Issues:

  • If I want the update to run in the background, I should also be able to run it in the foreground.
  • If I cancel the update, it should be cancelled immediately. It should not be "cancelling" for the rest of eternity and require a restart of Eclipse to get done.

SotD: Rie fu - Tsukiakari

Today's song of the day is Tsukiakari (moonlight) by a Japanese singer / songwrite named Rie Fu. The song is also the ED for the anime Darker Than Black which is how I came across it.

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