3 in a row??  Seriously guys…

About a week ago, you might have noticed (if you follow my little digg widget on the right religiously) that I digged a story about Joe ‘outing’ Dumbledore.  At the time, I thought, “that’s cool and seems to make sense.”  Then, today, I was talking to a friend, and she told me about how this thing has exploded in controversy on all the fansites (and many media outlets) – apparently there were many comments often to the effect of - “Think of all those times he and Harry were alone together. What if he molested Harry???!!!” 

Then there is this silly video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAhYPOoVrh – where the guys argument seems to be, “it is not good for kids…” because they might start thinking gay people can be wise and kind.  I think that by living out here, I have forgotten that things like this are still an issue in much of the country.   Ah well, I guess the crazies will now two reasons to hate Harry Potter (because the promoting witchcraft argument must have been getting dull even for them).  

Additionally, I have replaced the firmware (operating system) on my iPod with the open source firmware RockBox.  It is really awesome, something like linux for the iPod.  It is fully themable and open to a ton of 3rd party apps (games (chess, doom and 100s others), calculator, recorder, dynamic playlists creation etc..).  More importantly, it comes with the ability to play more file types .ogg and .mpg videos for example.  It is almost like I got a new awesome mp3player and it was completely free!  The best part is I don’t have to use iTunes to sync it; you can add and manage files either through libraries in many music jukeboxes or simply dragging and dropping files (you can also delete and move songs in the device itself now).  You should check it out if you want to reinvigorate your iPod.

We were technically number one in the country for 15 minutes . . . Ah well . . .

In other news, I built a bunch of a new computers for my group this week. Then, I built a beowulf cluster out of the old ones. It is pretty awesome – my own personal supercomputer next to my desk It was actually rather easy using the RocksClusters Linux distro.

I finished listening to the LOTR at night. It was a bit exhausting to be honest, because I had to keep getting up and going to wikipedia to look up all the names. It is amazing what a huge and complete world Tolkein created that is only touched upon in the movies. It is pretty incredible and perhaps the best part of his stories; however, I stand by my earlier statement that this is the one case where the movies are actually more enjoyable than the books.

Ooh, and next week Fedora 8 is released – dances around anxiously.

Seeing as by far the most viewed entry I have on here is the one containing the packages I built for screenlets, I thought I’d let google do its magic again and write a howto for getting espn360 to work in linux.

espn360.com is a site where you can watch live video from all the espn/abc channels.  This is particularly great for Saturdays of College Football.  It seems these days that pretty much all websites/apps are completely cross platform.  However, epsn360 currently only offers their firefox plugin for windows and mac.  I have written them saying that both firefox and flash exist for Linux (duh), and it would be trivial to add support (and I recommend you doing the same).  However, the point of this article is to show it isn’t to hard to get it working now anyway.  I hope this saves someone some time.

The solution to getting espn360 to work is to simply install the windows version (not the native linux version we all use) of Firefox through wine.

I am using Fedora, so I first install wine like this:

yum install wine  (as root)

Of course you could also use the gui package manager by selecting – “add and remove programs” from the main menu.  Then, download the windows version of firefox from here (2.07 when I wrote this):  http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

Then install it with wine:

wine Firefox\ Setup\ 2.0.0.7.exe  (as regular user)

Now that it is install, you will have a new icon on your desktop, or run the new windows firefox with

wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/firefox.exe

Head over to espn360.com.  It will prompt you to install flash player for your wine setup.  Agree, and then it will make you restart firefox.  When you restart firefox and get back to espn360.com, click to install the plugin (you will likely have to allow espn360.com to install in firefox by clicking the yellow warning bar above the page).   You are now good to go.

I haven’t found any other sites where I would need to do this (again most things are cross platform these days), but it is good to know that there is a relatively simple solution if any more sites have this problem.

http://imager.cc/page1/thereisanelephantintheway/

I would almost never considered supporting a republican… and it may help that this guy is more libertarian than republican, but I really like Ron Paul a bit more each day.  He has taken a very philosophically and academically dependable  position and is at least true conservative without the unnecessary religious and anti-freedom rhetoric so common in the elephant party.  That said, I would still think Hillary or Obama being elected as a step in the right direction – even if not the smartest overall.  See, video from digg on the righ.