Sergei Mutovkin’s Rumbling Mumbling

Again, just after finishing watching another Blu-ray disk - “Road Warrior” I was greeted with a message that a new update is available, this time it was 2.42. No details available, though I really hope that it will resolve choppy MP4/AVI file playback issue that plagued my Playstation ever since I’ve installed long awaited 2.41.

Other than that I still have to inform the great Internet why I was out of blogging for so long…

Today, Trolltech has released Release Candidate 1 of the featurefull Qt 4.4. Downloading it as I write this and I hope to play with its new Help Module, ultra cool feature removing the need to launch external assistant.

Now KDE 4.1 will be even faster and more stable.

It has been almost three weeks as AMD has announced the new chipset - 780G and a new power efficient CPU - X2 4850e. Motherboards are available for a couple of weeks already and are quite cheap. I’ve put my eye on this combo as my new server rig (with ASUS M3A78-EMH motherboard that features 6 SATA2 ports - feature that should be standard these days, but it is not). 4850e should be approximately as fast as 4800+ but only at 45W. Great? Isn’t it? But the CPU is nowhere to be found. Is this a paper launch again? Too frustrating…

All I want is a power efficient rig to run Ubuntu 8.04 Server LTS.

April 6, 2008 Update: What a disaster. I want to get AMD CPU first time in a VERY VERY long time and I can’t do it ANYWHERE on the internet one month after it has been announced. I totally miss the point of announcing it at all… It seems Dell is using it already in its business line, but nowhere else. If only there was any Intel based 6 SATA port motherboard I would have dumped AMD idea altogether. Then AMD complains that it can’t occupy its fabs enough… Now I know: it is because CPUs are not available at all, nobody can buy them to require any manufacturing at all. If only there was a cheap G33 based 6 SATA port motherboard except the expensive Supermicro board…..

One amazing piece of hardware, just put 6 SATA connectors on it and it is a perfect Linux server. Just 4 Watts (plus 3×10W for HDDs) instead of 100+ will make my hydro bill go down quite a bit.

Month after month I was checking Dell’s Canadian online store to see if Ubuntu pre-loaded laptops and desktops are available, but as everything here, ultra-conservative canadian Dell office refused to offer any cheaper and safer computing solution, instead forcing people proven expensive, proprietary and virus-laden Microsoft Windows systems. But…

The wait is over!

Now you can order Ubuntu 7.10 based laptops and desktops for approximately $50 cheaper then their Windows pre-loaded brothers and sisters. My favorite is M1330 which is the first slick laptop from Dell.

Get yourself a Dell!

Good buy consumer friendly but technically challenged (only 30Gb on two layers) HD-DVD. Toshiba is has discontinued its High Definition disk format! Good to know that HD-DVD only movies will be soon available in Blu-Ray on my PlayStation 3.

I think this is one of the greatest news of 2008: Nokia is buying Trolltech! Not only will it let Qt through some previously closed corporate doors, but also will introduce Qt and Qtopia to many more people on many more devices. Finally people will not be afraid that toolkit may belly-up one day.

What’s more I’m hoping that the next Internet Tablet OS will be based around QTopia 4.x which is much more appropriate then XServer + GTK.

Way to go for my favourite C++ GUI Toolkit and amazing Jambi. Now I wish Trolltech will acquire Riverbank Computing and make Python’s PyQt API bindings official and bundled by default. May be I’m dreaming….

It seem that the final blow to HD-DVD is almost here, according to Financial Times it might come as a result of Paramount leaving HD-DVD only camp like the Warner Home Videos just did.

… Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD-DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.

It is a bit sad that the war ends in such a way without concessions from the Blu-Ray camp like removing everybody hated region locking. I really thought that this was the thing of the past, apparently not. I also wanted somewhat more relaxed rights to copy movies (transcode on my own) for use in portable gadgets like my Nokia N800 without getting a DVD and putting it into DivX or MPEG 4 AVC/H.264. In addition to that I want SONY to relax license fees from the media producers like Ritek and CMC, so that they can drive of the blank media somewhat down.

Good bye HD-DVD, I did not think it would be over so soon.

Okay, I guess 24th was a crazy day after all…

At 8pm Futureshop wanted to open their Microsoft Server + ASP (active server pages) online store for boxing “server crasher” deals. Unfortunately the same thing happened as always, only a few seconds after 8 the site was down. It resumed around 10pm. The two deals I was hunting for were almost in my pocket. I was hunting for PS3 bundle and HD-DVD Toshiba D3 player for $99. Thanks to a very nasty thing called Visa Verified, I’ve lost Toshiba deal. I had passed the queue and had both items still “in stock” clicked through the payment pages and in the end found myself on a Visa Verified page which expired in browser and once I refreshed it threw me back to the shopping cart. But Toshiba HD-D3 HD-DVD player was already out of stock. I guess, this is my last time I’ve used Visa online, thank you Visa, thank you TD Bank. I will be using only my AMEX from now on. I repeated the process and bought the Playstation 3 80GB + Blue-Ray Remote + 2 Games + 5 Blue-Ray movies via mail in. I’m still hoping HD-DVD player will return tomorrow for a short time, though unfortunately nobody knows when. But I’m definitely not standing in line for it at 6am in the morning (though it might be fun, I would say even extreme fun).

After all this experience I’ve also left a comment on Futureshop website that next time they should deploy their servers on Linux/Solaris boxes with some load balancers… instead of Microsoft crap they use. Rogers heard me and now they are powered by a very nice Java server. I always ask myself, why do I dislike Microsoft technologies so much, today I’ve got a new ground to stand on for my believes system.

All in all, congratulate me, I’m the proud owner of Sony Playstation 3, the machine that will change the future of entertainment.

The results of the Linux Foundation Client Survey were published a few days ago, but I’ve just discovered them.

The results are amazing. Interesting bits are that Ubuntu/Debian distribution lead distribution of choice in any category. I’m sorry for Fedora and OpenSuSe guys. For some reason a lot of people want Photoshop ported to Linux, my question would be if those people plan to legally purchase it for almost $1K USD. I don’t use Photoshop myself, but I would have wanted other image editors ported to Linux much more, for example Corel’s PaintShop Pro, which costs $69 from time to time in our local electronics stores. A funny bit part is that quite a few people want Skype for Linux, I don’t know what they mean, probably those who responded live under the rock or use distributions from three years ago, but there is a very nice Qt4 based Skype client for Linux with amazing Video and Audio support…. My wish is for it to be a 64bit application, but I don’t think this will happen. Others also wanted some anti-virus packages ported, while it is understandable that they can be used to check sanity on Samba shares for all the Windows folks, the goal should be to get rid of the viral operating system altogether and not to use anti-virus packages.

I’ve also enjoyed that only a few use Novell’s Mono C# port to Linux, imho, a totally useless project that should stop its existence. There is an open source Java that can cover all bases. C# should stay where it came from - Microsoft and their beloved Windows. On the other hand Eclipse and Qt rule the world :).

In related news KDE 4.0 Release Candidate 2 was published and I’m downloading both Live CDs (Kubuntu and OpenSuSe based) as I write this post, it should be amazing year this 2008…. Just a few days left before KDE 4.