Saturday, October 30, 2010

2nd Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Film Listed

Nanoha
Image By kodomut

"The retailer Mangaoh reports that the November 23 fan event 'Lyrical Party IV' will announce a second theatrical film and second game for the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha anime franchise. According to Mangaoh's description of Kadokawa Shoten's Magical Girl Lyrical Nanohatype publication, the second game will have characters from the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid and Mahō Senki Lyrical Nanoha Force manga (both also published by Kadokawa Shoten). The Nanohatype book is also listed as having original comic work by Lyrical Nanoha creator Masaki Tsuzuki."

Source: Anime News Network

NY Judge rules 6 year old can be sued

The Internet is not a newspaper



Justice Paul Wooten, a New York Supreme Court Justice ruled that a 6 year old can be sued over an incident that occurred when she was 4 years old. The incident involves the 6 year old (with a friend of hers, both 4 year old at the time) running over an elderly woman (87 years old) with her training bicycle.

The elderly woman suffered a fracture hip which required surgery, she died three months later.

I still can't believe this. Because of this article I'm creating a new WTF News Tag and this article will be the very first.


For the full details visit Reuters

Friday, October 29, 2010

Default Applications In Ubuntu 11.04


As UDS-N wraps up we have some news on what could be some default applications in the upcoming release of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.

Heres a partial list of software (at least what is important to me):
  • LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice
  • Firefox 4 will still be the default browser. I've finally been full converted to Chrome/Chromium thanks to the update to Sync.
  • Evolution will still be the default email client. Thunderbird still lacks a calendar.
  • Banshee will probably replace Rhythmbox
  • OneConf will be included which allows you to sync installed software on all of your Ubuntu One connected machines
  • Nautilus Elementary is still a no go since it's considered a hack.
I'm exited about LibreOffice, Banshee and Oneconf, too bad Nautilus Elementary didn't make the cut. Anyway, just about every distribution requires customization to a degree. In my case, Chromium, Nautilus Elementary, and for 11.04 I'll need to get Gnome up and running since it looks like Unity will be the default shell.

Source: News On The Default Applications In Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal [Updated] ~ Web Upd8

Additional Resources:

The Black Library - Free eBook Fridays!

Today marks the last giveaway for The Black Library Free eBook Friday.

Trollslayer by William King is today book which is also part of the Warhammer 40K seriers of books.
After fleeing the authorities in the Imperial city of Altdorf, Felix Jaeger swears a drunken oath to dour dwarf Gotrek Gurnisson to record his death saga. In the cold light of day, Felix's worst fears are confirmed as he learns that Gotrek is a Trollslayer - a dwarf doomed to seek out a heroic death in battle to atone for an unknown personal disgrace. Their travels throw them into a string of extraordinary adventures as Felix tries to survive his companion's destiny. 
Book description taken from Amazon .

You can download the book from The Black Library or if you prefer a physical book you can purchase it from Amazon.

Ubuntu: Full Circle Magazine #42


Full Circle is a free magazine dedicated to Ubuntu Linux and it has finally reached issue number 42. If you don't know what makes this issue significant, then you're definitely not a geek. Anyway content wise this issue has a lot of knowledge to share.

This wonderful knowledge I speak of includes:

  • Command and Conquer.
  • How-To : Program in Python – Part 16, Virtualize Part 5 – Arch Linux, and Organise Your Photos.
  • Review – MoonOS and Kubuntu 10.10.
  • Top 5 – Alternatives To Gnome.
  • Readers Survey 2010 Results!
  • NEW: Linux Lab
  • plus: Interviews, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and much much more!"

This issue also includes a new section called Linux Lab which will focus on testing different distributions on old hardware (e.g. AMT Athlon 1.79 w/256MB RAM).

Evolution of Halloween

Halloween Infographic
Source: Online Colleges

The Visual History of HALLOWEEN



[Via: FrightCatalog.com: The The Web's #1 Halloween Costume StoreView Larger Image and Get the Embed Code to Add This Infographic to Your Site

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Drag out files like Gmail

Google has added a nice feature to Gmail allowing us to drag and drop from Gmail to the Desktop bypassing the Save Dialog.

The [CSS] Ninja has written up a great article describing the process of not only how to do it (in javascript), but also show us how to actually track down the information. Tracking down the information on a certain feature especially in Google's case is very important since they obfuscate all of their javascript.

We also get a Live Demo of the Drag and Drop feature along with the source files.

The [CSS] Ninja is a great resource to have in your toolbox, make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed

Read Post over at The CSS Ninja - Drag out files like Gmail

The Black Library - Free eBook Fridays!


As I mentioned in a previous post The Black Library is releasing free eBooks starting October 8th and continuing for the following four Fridays.

This week we have Hammer and Bolter Issue 1 from the Warhammer 40K series.
Looks good, doesn’t it? Even more impressive is the line-up we’ve assembled for our giant-sized debut issue. Not only do we have a brand new Dan Abnett short story but we’re also giving you a sneak peek at the first Chapter of Prospero Burnsa good three months in advance of its publication date. Ben Counter and the Soul Drinkers storm back onto the page with the first two chapters of Phalanx – the Black Library’s first ever serialised novel that will be published in its entirety over H&B’s first year of publication. Anthony Reynolds contributes an entire novella continuing the adventures of Calard from his Bretonnian Knight novels while Sarah Cawkwell makes her Black Library fiction bow with a tale of the Silver Skulls chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. And Nick Kyme is finally hunted down by The Inquisition and forced to answer questions about his current and forthcoming novels.
As with the previous releases you can download a .mobi or .epub (which can be imported into iBooks via iTunes). You can download this and the previous eBooks from The Black Library.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Asterisk 1.8.0 Now Available with Google Voice Support

Asterisk Open Source Project

The Asterisk Development Team announced the release of Asterisk 1.8.0.

What is Asterisk?

Asterisk is an free and open source telephony project that turns a computer into a voice communications server. Asterisk supports the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces and VoIP protocols.

Asterisk can be configured as an IP or hybrid PBX, switching calls, managing routes. It can also be built as a media gateway, bridging the legacy PSTN to IP telephony. Full list of features.

Asterisk is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).

What is version 1.8.0?

Asterisk 1.8 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release.  A Long Term Support (LTS) release is supported for 4 years. Regular Asterisk releases are made every six months, these include a year of security fixes and a two year End of Life. For a list of support timelines visit the Asterisk versions page.

What's New?

Here are some of the features included in version 1.8.0 since version 1.6.2 (the previous LTS version):

  • Google Talk and Google Voice support
  • Calendar integration (Microsoft Exchange, CalDav and iCalendar)
  • Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (or SRTP). Provides encryption & message authentication.
  • IPv6 Support in the SIP channel driver
  • Connected Party Identification Support
  • Channel Event Logging (CEL). A mechanism to provide fine-grained event info that can be used to generate billing information.
  • Distributed Device State using Jabber/XMPP
  • Multicast RTP paging
  • High-resolution timestamps for call data records (CDR) which allows users to track call times to the microsecond.

Need more info?



Friday, October 22, 2010

The Evolution of the Geek


"When one hears the word ‘geek’, images are conjured of pocket protectors and nightstands made out of old comic books. That old notion of geek-dom has since evolved into a new, tech-savy, and dare we say ‘cool’ geek’"

via: The Evolution of the Geek / Flowtown (@flowtown)

Near Earth Objects - Power of Data Visualization

Near Earth Objects infographic by Zachary Vabolis

The data is actual data gathered from NASA's public records. Displayed are known near earth objects greater than 1000 meters in diameter and the dates that they will come closest to earth.

After seeing this inforgraphic can't help being reminded of Armageddon.

Near Earth Objects via: Power of Data Visualization

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Opera 11 [Alpha] Now with Extensions

Opera 11

Opera 11 alpha has just been released and it comes with extensions. For me this is a big deal since none of the major browsers offer what I need out of the box, I depend a lot on extensions or add-ons.

Opera has a small cautionary note on their landing page "because this is an alpha version, it is not feature complete—there are still many more features to come", but it does include extensions which merits a test drive.

Before going into the test drive, lets go over what's new in this release:


Extensions allow you to add new features and functionality to Opera. Extensions support HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.

Opera offers a new extension catalog which allows you to install the extension by clicking on them. No restart required (similar to Safari and Chrome) which is one of my biggest problems with Firefox.

The alpha release of the extensions platform supports injectable JavaScript, callouts, certain UI items and a basic Tabs and Windows API.


Opera 11 alpha supports HTML5 server-sent events and websockets which allow a server to push notifications and new content to the browser.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Google Chrome 7 in the wild

Google Chrome 7

On Tuesday (Oct 19th) Google released a new stable release of their browser Chrome. Google has been releasing a new stable release about every six weeks with bug fixes, improvements and new features.

If you have Chrome installed you should get the update automatically, or you can download the latest version from the Chrome site http://www.google.com/chrome

Jeff Chang (Product Manager), mentions in his blog post the following:
In this stable release, we’ve focused primarily on hundreds of bug fixes. We’ve also included a few other things that may be of interest to developers, such as full AppleScript support on Mac OS X for UI automation and implementation of the HTML5 parsing algorithm, the File API, and directory upload 

This is great news for Mac OS X users since you will now be able to script chrome with Applescript and Automator.

Chrome 7 includes 83 new features which include:
  • Daily Auto-Updating Google Chrome Build (22158)
  • Support apps in incognito mode (49232)
  • Support the HTML5 FIle API (37785)
  • Enable GPU-accelerated composition for WebGL (48621)
  • Linux implementation of app tabs (45540)
Chrome lists 598 bug fixes for Milestone 7 (732 if you include bugs taged as "Won't fix" or "invalid"). For the full list of bug and features address in this release click here

Resources

Monday, October 18, 2010

Installing the Dropbox Linux Client under KDE


Dropbox is a file hosting service which enables you to store and share files across the Internet. Dropbox offers clients for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux which is great except that the linux version depends on Gnome/Nautilus and if you use the rpm to install the Dropbox client on a system with only KDE you will end up with most of Gnome installed on your system.

Here is a brief walkthrough on getting Dropbox installed without bringing most of Gnome into your system.

As for dependencies you will need wget (or whichever http downloader you prefer), at least version 2.4 of glibc and python 2.5. You should be able to get these using the package manager included with your distribution.


Sunday, October 17, 2010

Fix Grub after Windows Re-Install

I have a machine with Windows 7 and openSUSE 11.3 and for a few weeks now Windows has been acting up. So I decided to re-install Windows 7 and completely forgot that it replace grub with bootmgr.

Here is a quick HowTo using a Linux Live CD to get grub re-installed.

First of all you'll need a Linux Live CD, I used Parted Magic since I have it on a USB Thumb Drive which boot fairly fast.

Once you've booted into your Live CD of choice you'll need to mount your root filesystem, in my case it was /dev/sda6. Next we will need to bind /proc, /dev, and /sys to the root filesystem where grub resides, to acomplish this we will be using "mount -o bind" which re-mounts a subtree somewhere else so that its contents are available in both places.

mount -o bind /proc /ramdisk/media/sda6/proc/
mount -o bind /dev /ramdisk/media/sda6/dev/
mount -o bind /sys /ramdisk/media/sda6/sys/

Parted Magic mount its drives under /ramdisk/media


Saturday, October 16, 2010

Move to Blogger Completed

I've finally finished moving into Blogger. The final setup is a little different from what I planned initially.

  • Blog migrated from self hosted WordPress to Blogger [http://siliconchaos.blogspot.com]
  • Created Launch Pad on http://siliconchaos.com
I initially planned to use a custom domain setup and point it to http://siliconchaos.com, but it turned out to be a nightmare trying to setup especially once you take the Google Apps and Sites setup on the same domain. This setup reminded me why I hate messing with DNS (I don't have the patience to wait for replication).

Next step is to create seamless themes/templates for Blogger, Tumblr and Twitter to match http://siliconchaos.com

Friday, October 15, 2010

The Black Library - Free eBook Fridays!

I'm always looking forward to post from "La Cueva del Lobo" which is brought to us by Vladimir Vasquez aka @Lobo7922 on Twitter. If you love Sci-Fi, Mechs, and Gamming this site is a must read (site is in Spanish).

Today he shares with us a Gem of Sci-Fi goodness called The Black Library who is celebrating the launch of Black Library Digital. Staring October 8th and the following four Fridays they will be providing free eBooks for us in epub and mobi formats.

As of today they have two free eBooks ready to download set in Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe.

The first eBook (posted on October 8th) is First and Only by Dan Abnett


The second eBook (posted today) is Nightbringer by Graham McNeill



This will be the frist time I read anything related to Warhammer 40,000, but I'm looking forward to it since it is recommended by "La Cueva del Lobo"

To download these eBooks visit Black Library Digital


Or You can also purchase the books on Amazon

Move to Blogger

The move to Blogger is almost complete. I was able to import my posts from WordPress to Blogger and had to modify a few because of images hosted within WordPress itself.

Now just waiting on DNS replication of the CNAME and A entries to have this blog hosted on http://siliconchaos.com

I should now have more time to write since I won't spend most of my time exploring what WordPress can do.

Update:

Looks like it's going to take a while longer since I have my google apps on the same domain and I had sites and start page turned on. I've disabled them now and just need to wait for the DNS changes to take effect.