I tried Opera this morning, briefly. I wasn’t impressed with it at all. First off, it didn’t render my CSS button on the left pane correctly (it loads fine with IE and Firefox). Also, I really didn’t much care for the way that it handled RSS feeds. What’s the point of Opera anyway?

I successfully connected to Google Talk with a patched version of Bitlbee 0.92 today. You can download my RPM (for Redhat 9) here:

• http://www.uberh4×0r.org/~hoyhoy/rpms/redhat9/bitlbee-0.92-googletalk.i386.rpm

After a full week of Fed Ex snafus, I finally got my Apple Mighty Mouse today. It’s absolutely fantastic. It feels much smoother than my old Microsoft Optical Mouse for some reason… Perhaps it’s psychological.

How do I stop it? I’ve tried all kinds of Apache rewrite rules, applying various patches to awstats, etc, etc. Nothing seems to work. Anyone got any ideas?

I just called mitya000 with Google Talk. It adjusted the volume automagically, had unbelievable clarity, and worked ridiculously well. Absolutely amazing.

I like the Google Desktop Search sidebar a whole lot. I just wish it could index network drives on XP SP2. Pretty much every necessary file that I have at home is on a Linux box, and I can’t index any of these files with Google’s Desktop Search from a mapped network drive. It doesn’t specifically say that I can’t do it, but when I add the network drive, GDS flags an error right away on my Windows XP SP2 machine. My laptop running Windows XP SP1 seems to be crawling a network drive now. Weird. I guess this is “beta” software.

I just installed Ubuntu on my main computer at home. I’m amazed at how fast and snappy the interaction is with the desktop. Then, I ran apt-get on some totem plugins, and was able to play DivX and Xvid movies straight away. The only problems that I really found with Ubuntu was that I had to uncomment the “universe” lines in the sources.list file to dowload the shiny packages. Then, I had to seriously hack my xorg.conf file to make Xinerama work on my ATI Radeon 9800’s DVI and Dsub ports. Despite that, I really like Ubuntu a lot. It runs my desktop like the clappers, apt-get absolutely freaking rules, and the default Gnome install is way more sane than any other distro that I’ve seen. Remember, this is coming from someone who has actually compiled RPMs, and has been Redhat fan boy since 1996.

OK, if anyone has any Ubuntu/Debian wisdom to send my way, please comment on LJ, or email me. Also, does anyone know how to get a full package list of what’s available in the Ubuntu universe repositories? The other thing that I questioned was why Ubuntu didn’t ship with the bootsplash package pre-installed. I loved teh bootsplash sauce ever since it was popularized by Gentoo.

Apparently, my Antec Neo Power 480 power supply was only pushing 11.17V to the 12V rail. I pulled it and put in an older Enerrmax 365 power supply (not as swanky), and now I’m reading 11.80V on my 12V rail. I hope this helps as my system has been fairly unstable since I built it in March…

I decided to give up the coffee this week. As a result, I’ve been getting severe headaches each afternoon around 2. Last night, I went to sleep at around 7 PM to awake this morning at 7:45 AM. I had been drinking 16 to 32 ounces of coffee a day for the past six months or so. I quit last year for about three months, and then slowly got back into it again in Fall of 2004.

floAt’s Mobile Agent is the great OSS enabler of Bluetooth functionality under Windows XP. The basic functionality for syncing contract lists, pictures, and sms messages to my Windows XP SP2 machine to my Sony Ericsson T637 phone via a Linksys USBBT100 USB Bluetooth dongle worked flawlessly. I saw something about a “remote control” that allows you to control various programs like iTunes, Winamp, and WinDVD with the phone. It took a little bit of effort, but I finally got it to work, and was absolutely amazed. My T637 actually shows the current iTunes playing track name on the phone display. I can control next track, volume, select playlists in iTunes, and even shut the computer down, all using my phone. My computer kind of sits out of arms reach of my drumset. So, I can actually use the phone to start and stop recording at practice. I love finding programs like this that allow me to use stuff that already have in ways that I wasn’t able to before.