Chris Johnston

Looks like us Canadians got dupped again on this iTunes Music Store thing. It was suppose to launch today, but so far it is a no show. So much for listening to rumours.

It finally happened, iTMS has finally launched here in Canada. The rumors were almost true. And the price is amazing - $0.99/song. When you factor in the currency exchange, that is cheaper then the US store. It also has lots of Canadian content right on the homepage. I am not sure how many songs iTMS Canada is offering though.

Apple, CRIA glad you got everyting worked out and I for one am very happy to finally be able to browse iTMS Canada.

I have two computers on my desk - 1 windows desktop and 1 Linux server. As such, I have two monitors, two mice, and two keyboards. This is a real pain. What I wanted was to be able to use a single keyboard and mouse across two monitors running very different operating systems. This is what Synergy does. I run it on my windows computer as the server and on the Linux server as the client (somehow that seems a little backwards, anyway). Then I can simply move the mouse from desktop to desktop across the two monitors.

This is very cool.

If you have a similar setup, you have got to check this little tool out. It can work with an unlimited amount of monitors. The only restriction is that each computer must have its own monitor.

For the past little while I have been searching for a really good Java forum/community. I haven’t found one yet.

For the longest time I was a regular member at MandrakeUsers.org, an excellent community forum for Mandrake Linux and other Linux distros. If you ever need help with Mandrake, this is the place to go. There are some very smart people on that board. I am now looking for the same thing for Java. Specifically, I am looking for a board that covers J2EE and JBoss along with various Java tools such as Ant, JUnit, Log4J, and others.

There is so much to learn when it comes to Java and J2EE and an active community forum can go a long way to helping newbies come to grips with that learning curve. Therefore, I am asking all of you out there if any of you know of any good Java communities? A Java community can be an email list, a forum, a newsgroups, whatever. Just some form of newbie friendly community that doesn’t mind the odd dumb question.

After way too long, I have finally uploaded the new design, fuzzyLizard Reloaded is finally live. There are still a few rough patches and a lot of content that needs to be added, but it is a beginning. If I waited for everything to get done, this poor site would never get its face lift. Let me know what you think. And also let me know if you find any bugs with the new layout.

This is probably the best that fuzzyLizard has ever looked.

I just did something incredible. I installed the Flash 7 plugin into Firefox with all of 3 clicks from my mouse on a Linux computer. That’s right, I installed the Flash plugin with all of 3 mouse clicks on my Mandrake Linux box. In the past, this was one of the harder things to accomplish. I can remember when a new version of Mandrake would come out and people would upgrade. The forums would be filled with people trying to figure out how to get the plugin installed and working with their browser.

Me, I just clicked my mouse a few times and it was done. I did not even have to restart the browser. Firefox is absolutely amazing. Whenever, it detects that you do not have something that you should, it displays a little warning at the top of the screen with a button to download it. This was the case with Flash. So I clicked the button. This gave me a dialog box where I could choose the plugin that I wanted. In this case, Flash was the only. I then clicked on the install link. This brought up the Macromedia EULA, which I accepted, and the whole thing was finished. The browser reloaded the page and Flash was installed. Simply amazing.

Bottom line, if you are not using Firefox, what are you waiting for? This is just one more example of how Firefox kicks IE’s but.

I recently put together a new Linux server, after my old suffered a major meltdown (the drive decided to go south in a very big way) . I installed Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official Edition on the computer. This was about two weeks ago. The install was rather boring, all hardware was recognized and after about 30 minutes the whole process was over. Installing Linux is really getting to be insanely simple.

Once the OS was installed, I spent the next several weeks getting everything up and running and configured just the way that I like it. It is a server so there are a few services that need to be configured. These include setting up: PostgreSQL, CVS, MySQL, Apache, Java, and Samba. None of these take a lot of time to do, but together, they do make up a significant amount of time. Also considering I am less than completely proficient in each one. I think the majority of the setup time is spent looking for sources for each one on the web (I really need to write this stuff down somewhere, oh yeah, my website, hehe).

Anyway, the point of all of this is that I had a completely configured, working server that I did not really want to mess with. However, I did want to install Mandrake 10.1 Official on the server. I have heard nothing but good reports about this release and I wanted to try it out. However, trying it out meant either upgrading or reinstalling. As already stated, I had spent too much time configuring everything to do a reinstall. Therefore, the best course of action was to upgrade.

Small problem with upgrading though. Everything I have heard in the past regarding trying to upgrade Mandrake was negative. Basically it came down to one word: “Don’t”! With that in mind, I went ahead and upgraded. I did it at night knowing that I had the entire next day to fix things if it did not go as hoped.

Well, I put in the DVD, selected upgrade and sat back and watched. About 20 minutes later, the DVD was ejected and the computer rebooted. That was all there was to it. There was nothing to click, nothing to select, the entire process just ran on its own. The computer rebooted and everything worked. I was astounded. In 20 minutes I was able to upgrade an entire installation of Mandrake 10 to Mandrake 10.1 without any major problems. Mandrake is incredible.

Now I say that there were no major problems because there were two very small problems. I had installed the NVidia video drivers and I had some small problems in upgrading those. I tried to use the ones on the DVD, but they did not work. Eventually I found that by issueing the command nvidia-installer –update, I could update the drivers. This fixed that problem.

The second problem was with Apache 2. Somehow the test SSL certificate got lost during the upgrade. This prevented Apache from starting. I tried to restart the services using the command line and that is how I noticed what the problem was. The error message contained a directory in which the certificate was suppose to be found. Looking in the directory I found the instructions for generating the file. Once this was completed, everything worked perfectly.

Moral of the story: don’t be afraid to upgrade Mandrake Linux 10.0 to 10.1. Although, keep in mind that your mileage may vary. I had a very standard installation of Mandrake. All I had done between installing 10 and upgrading to 10.1 was to do the standard updates and install Java. I had not installed any programs that could not be found on the original install media. This probably explains the ease of my upgrade. Most systems are not this bare bones.

Try doing an upgrade in Windows with this few complications.

As tyrany grew, the strong took a stand and bought us the freedom we enjoy with their lives.

Thank you.