Apparently, there was a vote on FaceBook for a worldwide facebook president and I missed it. The interesting thing is that a young frenchman who won the “election” rose to fame in his country for being the actual president of facebook when in fact it was nothing more than another plugin for the popular social media platform.

So much for dreams…

Picture Julie Andrews running through a mountain meadow, twirling around in circles singing about the hills being alive. Now picture that same “hill” covered with snow and skiers and other people out experiencing the fresh powder. This christmas album is unique as its by the real von Trapp Childeren (well, the new generation anyways) that was the source for The Sound of Music and on this release they please us with some really cool Christmas Tunes.

From PRWeb:
The TuxMobil project covers all aspects concerning Linux on laptops and notebooks. The number of free guides and how-to’s has more than doubled in less than three years, and more than 7,000 links to Linux laptop and notebook installation and configuration guides are now listed at TuxMobil.

Berlin, Germany (PRWEB) December 12, 2007 — TuxMobil recently announced the publication of 7,000 Linux installation and configuration guides for laptops and notebooks on its Web site. The number of free guides and how-to’s available through TuxMobil has more than doubled in less than three years.

In the Linux community, it’s common tradition to help other members by publishing free guides on many different aspects of the open source operating system. These guides and how-to’s are suitable for newbies as well as experts. Most of the guides are in English, but special TuxMobil sections are dedicated to other languages.

TuxMobil indexes the guides by manufacturer and model as well as by processor type, display size and Linux distribution. Almost any laptop manufacturer (more than 220) is covered. All major Linux distributions (Redhat, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Novell/SuSE, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Knoppix) and many not-so-well-known distributions are present. Besides Linux, the site includes sections that cover other Unix derivatives like BSD, Minix and Solaris.

Tablet PCs or WebPads are special types of laptops that are built either as slates without a keyboard or as convertibles. Both kinds require a sophisticated configuration. Linux installation guides for Tablet PCs and a survey of suitable drivers and applications like handwriting-recognition tools are described in a separate section.

A great number of accessories and gadgets for laptops and notebooks are compatible with Linux. TuxMobil provides details about Linux hardware compatibility for PCMCIA cards, miniPCI cards, ExpressCards, infrared, BlueTooth, wireless LAN adapters and Webcams.

Laptop development paces quickly, and new approaches to WLAN standards, power management, graphics chipsets or CPU features come up every few months. Linux development also is fast, so the need for current Linux laptop installation guides will not diminish in the near future. TuxMobil encourages its users to write their own guides to help.

Laptop manufacturer support for the Linux operating system is still in its early stages, although some third-party companies offer professional support or allow users to purchase a laptop with Linux preloaded. TuxMobil provides an international survey of vendors dedicated to your free operating system of choice, which offer pre-installed Linux laptops, notebooks, mobile phones and PDAs for sale, as well as accessories that are compatible to Linux.

About TuxMobil
Starting with an installation report about Linux on his first laptop, published by founder Werner Heuser, TuxMobil has been online for 10 years. It has become the biggest online resource about Linux and mobile computers. The name TuxMobil is an abridgement of the words “Tux” and “mobil”. Tux is the well-known name of the Linux mascot and “mobil” is just a shortcut for mobile.

Shhhhh. Listen to Mia and her band. Listen as they play and take you to another place and time. Sit back and enjoy. They’re a UK band with a really, really cool sound thats nice to just chill to.

So when I had ‘rented’ (yes, rented, I don’t own the box this site sits on, I mearly lease it…) this server I ran apt-get upgrade to take care of updating several items on the server and I could have sworn that I masked out the kernel packages. Apparently, i didn’t and apt removed the kernel images and stuff needed to boot. Yar. Not good.

As would happen, I had to reboot and the box would not come back up. My wonderful host looked at it and told me what was wrong, offered to copy my data to a slave drive and reinstall the system from scratch. You would have thought that since this server was up for less than a month, this would be a freebie, but no, they wanted me to pony up $69 for this wonderful service. Mind you, they couldn’t get a kernel on there to get the system booted again to what it once was.

Me, being remarkably resourceful, and knowing a thing or two about admining a debian install (three years as tech support for a web hosting company I figured I could do what they couldn’t, so I had them boot it with a live cd and give me an ip address I could access the box from.

So armed with the ip address, the root password they created and knowledge of google and apt-get I logged on to the box on Saturday morning and ran a simple command:

apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.18-i386

and with in less than ten minutes the kernel had been replaced and I was ready for them to reboot the box minus the cdrom.

Mind you, it must have worked because you’re reading this today… and I still have my $69.

I came across these guys while listening to tracks at amie street and I liked the sound that Breaking Laces brought to the scene. Reminds me a little of Jack Johnson and his bubble toes (the beginning does anyway).

Have a listen and enjoy!

The google hand has dropped and its come down hard on most people who post for profit it seems. One of my other blogs was hit hard dropping from a 4 to a 3 and then a 0 and according to some places I’m not alone. This comes on the heels of the earlier update when several larger sites (including the washington post) lost their PR as well. When it first happened, I figured it wasn’t too bad as the drop was only one point.

There are several theories floating around the sphere today about why this is but to be honest no one knows. It might be googles reaction to the popularity of other means of advertising in an attempt to retain the online ad space. It could just be the math has changed or it could have something to do with the number of google scammers that have popped up and started scraping sites in an attempt to create content.

The problem is no one knows except google. What can be done? Some have suggested selling google stock (which seems to be happening), others have suggested using nofollow in the links or stop selling links through other means. Some, like John Chow are taking Winston Churchil’s words to heart and “Never Giving Up!”

A helicopter with a pilot and a single passenger was flying around above Seattle when a malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s navigation and communications equipment. Due to the darkness and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position and course to get back to the airport.

The pilot saw a tall building with lights on and flew toward it, the pilot had the passenger draw a handwritten sign reading “WHERE AM I?” and hold it up for the building’s occupants to see.

People in the building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.”

The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.

After they were on the ground, the passenger asked the pilot how the “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER” sign helped determine their position.

The pilot responded “I knew that had to be the Microsoft support building, they gave me a technically correct but entirely useless answer.”

Hullo all, We’re in the process of starting up a new online tech magazine (ISO Today). The main focus will be Linux and Distribution releases/updates/reviews, however we’re also looking to offer content on Mac OS and Microsoft OS’ as well.

If anyone would be interested in becoming a contributor for the site, please let me know. To begin, contributors will not be compensated for their articles, however, we expect that to change in the not to distant future.

Please note, its pretty barebones right now and things may change slightly.

Some of you may have purchased systems that came with vista pre-installed. If you want to run an older operating system such as XP or win2k [and you do not want to have to reinstall vista] then you might be interested in this guide. Note to do this you must have a MS vista install DVD; a recovery type disk is not going to work.

Prior to beginning this task, make a complete backup of your system. In addition do make sure that win2k/xp has drivers available for your hardware. This is especially important if you have a laptop. If there are no drivers available, you are wasting your time.

To start we need to create a partition in which to install win2k/xp. Open disk management; start>run and type in “diskmgmt.msc” without quotes. Hit enter; this brings up disk management. Right click your drive and choose shrink from the menu. I would make the partition approx 10gig for win2k and 15-20gig for XP [depending on how much software you are going to install] Once you have completed the shrink process, create a partition and format with NTFS. [Using disk management] At this point your new partition has been assigned the next available drive letter. I like drive letters in order so I use disk management to reassign the drive letters for the optical drives so I can assign drive letters sequentially for the hard disk partitions. With the new partition now labeled D and optical drives following, it is now time to install our older operating system.

Boot with your win2k/xp CD [CD set as first boot device in the bios] Select the “D” partition as to where you will install. I will not go into detailed instructions as to how to install win2k or xp; there are many guides on the web for this purpose. Complete the install. At this point, vista will no longer boot; we need to repair the boot sector and vista’s boot configuration files. Boot into win2k/xp and open a command prompt; start>run>cmd and hit enter. We will now use Bootsect.exe to restore the Vista MBR and the boot code that transfers control to the Windows Boot mgr app.

Insert your vista dvd into the drive; cancel window that may autorun. Type this in
Drive:\boot\Bootset.exe /NT60 All hit enter
In this command drive is the drive where the Vista install DVD is located.

Next we will use Bcdedit.exe to manually create an entry for win2k/xp

Type Drive:\windows\system32\Bcdedit /create {ntldr} –d “Description for earlier Windows” hit enter.
Note in this command drive is where you have vista installed; most likely “C” The description can be whatever you want ie Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc.

We now will set the active partition. Note in this command drive is the letter for the active partition; again most likely “C”
Drive:\Windows\system32\Bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=X: hit enter Again this is most likely C not X.

Drive:\windows\system32\Bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr hit enter
Drive:\windows\system32\Bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} –addlast hit enter.

Now restart the system and you will have the vista boot menu giving you the choice of operating systems.