Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2010

The Big Kahuna and his Yarn Ball

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law) English physicist & science fiction author (1917 - 2008) Checking the morning random Internet info and I clicked on http://www.quantumjumping.com An interesting concept, I have read about the work of Dr. Brian Greene on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi-Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point. The whole 26 dimensions thing. Interesting ties into the teachings of Max Freedom Long @ http://www.maxfreedomlong.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory Your local Calabi-Yau manifold ;)

Why Sugar ?

Why lifeinthesugarbowl?  My wife and I and the cats live in Sugar Land, Texas.   Sugar Land is a city located in Fort Bend County in the U.S. state of Texas within the Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown metropolitan area (about 20 miles South of Houston).  It is one of the fastest-growing cities in Texas, having grown more than 158% in the last decade (scary).  Sugar Land is home to the headquarters of Imperial Sugar and the company's main sugar refinery and distribution center was once located in this city. As a nod to this heritage, the Imperial Sugar crown logo can be seen in the city seal and logo. The city also holds the headquarters for Western Airways and a major manufacturing facility for Nalco Chemical Company. In addition, Sugar Land has a large number of international energy, software, engineering, and product firms. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Land,_Texas My Linux experience started on the kitchen table with Red Hat Linux about 2004, when I took an old P3

crazy about Conky

Ok, I am crazy about Conky, editing Conky code is a great way to learn a bit about programming and your hardware. Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. Conky is licensed under the GPL and runs on Linux and BSD. Conky Hardcore http://conkyhardcore.com/ The Conky Links http://conkyhardcore.com/beginners/conky-links/ The Conky PitStop http://old-cps-do-not-use.wikidot.com/ Many thanks to code from Conky by Hanna, The Conky Queen!

Conky - code is never done!

Tweeking the conky code for my Mini 9 (Fedora 14 Xfce) - thanks Hanna ! # Use Xft? use_xft yes xftfont Trebuchet MS:size=8 xftalpha 0.8 text_buffer_size 2048 # Update interval in seconds update_interval 1 # This is the number of times Conky will update before quitting. # Set to zero to run forever. total_run_times 0 # Create own window instead of using desktop (required in nautilus)     own_window yes     own_window_transparent yes     own_window_type desktop     own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager # Use double buffering (reduces flicker, may not work for everyone) double_buffer yes # Minimum size of text area minimum_size 180 0 # Draw shades? draw_shades no # Draw outlines? draw_outline no # Draw borders around text draw_borders no # Stippled borders? stippled_borders 0 # border margins border_margin 5 # border width border_width 1 # Default colors and also border colors default_color white own_window_colo

Salix Xfce and Twitter maintenance

Linux activity I loaded Salix Xfce 13.1.2 to my Panasonic Toughbook (CF-72). Salix uses a text based installer that is fairly simple to follow if you have some Linux experience. Salix is a Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast and easy to use. Salix is also fully backwards compatible with Slackware Linux, so Slackware users can benefit from Salix repositories, which they can use as an "extra" quality source of software for their favorite distribution. Like a bonsai, Salix is small, light & the product of infinite care. http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.php/Home A great website for keeping up with Linux and UNIX releases.. http://distrowatch.com/ A good Twitter App After hitting the following 2K limit in Twitter, I checked out http://manageflitter.com/   An excellent app for filtering out how is not following back, no profile image (a pet peeve), inactive, talkative or too quiet users.

Fedora 14 Xfce on the Dell Mini 9 - Sucess !

I got Fedora 14 Xfce installed on the Dell Mini 9. After the typical Fedora install, I had head over to RPM Fusion with Firefox to load the Free and Nonfree Repositories, but this was very easy just click-and-load and authorize as root. I loaded the “non-free” kmod-wl driver due to the Broadcom wireless card in the Mini 9. After a restart, we got wireless LAN. If you run Fedora, the RPM Fusion Repositories are at: http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration My Mini 9 has had so many distros on it, but the SSD is holding up well. It came with the Dell tweeked Ubuntu remix, I updated to the latest immediately, ran with Kubuntu for awhile till I ran into the KDE 4X issues (too wiggy for me). I tried #! Crunchbang Linux and that was a winner. It’s dark and ran very well but my “hackerness” brought me back to Xfce. IMHO, it seems Ubuntu is getting a bit wiggy. First it was the menu buttons on the top left, which I promptly fixed back, and Kubuntu is ok but always held back a bit., now th

Roku TV

I have been watching the Roku box often. TV is moving away from cable and satellite to internet based distribution and Roku is a great deal. I love the Roku box and service and at under $70, it is a great deal =-=-=-=-= Powered by Blogilo