Under a Gibbous Moon

It’s been almost a year since Geocities went dark. Now, for all of you who miss that tacky goodness, you can convert the web page of your choice into the artistic meme that was Geocities.

Here’s mine.

WARNING: May Be Hazardous to Vision and/or Sanity

I’m not a big fan of Apple. They make some good (if over priced products). The problem I have with them is their obsessive control over pretty much everything. Apple isn’t so much a product as it is a lifestyle. Hell, even one of their magazine is called the Cult of Mac. At the head of that cult sits a man named Steve Jobs who is brilliant and could teach Howard Hughes a thing or two about being crazy.

In Apples latest attempt at world domination, they have an editor over at Gizmodo house raided (because of the leaked new iPhone) by the police after he returns the phone to Apple. I guess that they were afraid he had quickly cobbled together a duplicate before he returned it. Anyway, I could go on all day about it, but I won’t because Jon Stewart is funnier.

Along with a change in operating system, I decided that I would give a new browser a try. Opera was on the list for Mint’s repository and so I figured what the hell.

Big mistake.

I used it solely for about a week before dumping it. I’ll start with the minor complaints. First off, the UI is a cutting edge if you’re still a big fan of Netscape. Of course, eye candy isn’t everything and I will have to admit that Opera has the fastest renderer that I have ever used, too bad it doesn’t render about 2/3 of the web pages I visited correctly. Most of them were minor with overlapping or oddly sized elements but a few pages were completely unusable as the menus did not display right.

I find it odd that a modern browser would have this much trouble. Apparently the people at Opera haven’t heard of web standards. In lieu of that, they put in a context menu for you to report a broken page.

In short, if you like the modern web, use a modern web browser, if you still only use Usenet and long for Geocities then Opera is for you.

Yesterday, after installing the latest upgrades to Ubuntu, I restarted the computer only to find that the file system was completely borked. After using a LiveCd to repair that, I found that Gnome was hopelessly corrupted leaving me playing around with the command line.

So, once again I go back to the LiveCD and attempt to mount my personal directory. Now I encrypt my personal directory using ecryptfs (this being conviently built into Ubuntu for the last couple of versions). I went to mount it and no dice. I had the passphrase and the files all went back to the right places but they did not decrypt.

Another setback, but OK. I go back into the command line and mount my external storage, but no, it, for some reason does not want to mount sdb1 due to and I/O error. Odd since it mounted fine on the LiveCD. Now I have to track down a Windows version to do a file system check on the drive, since it is NTFS. Luckily, my wife still dual boots Windows and Ubuntu. There were some errors with the file system and now repaired, I go back to the command line.

It mounts but that’s about it. I try to back up my files and it gets half way through and tells me that there is an I/O error and sdb1 is unmounted. Finally flumoxed, I use the LiveCD to make sure that at least the most critical files have been saved and I wipe the system.

Since I’m doing a fresh install, I figure that I’ll try something different. I’ve heard some things about Mint so I figured that I’d give that a try. Mint is an off shoot of Ubuntu (as Ubuntu is an offshoot of Debian). As far as I can tell the biggest difference is that Mint eschews “pure” open source in favor of usability. Basically, this means that it runs Flash and DVDs and MP3 right out of the box without installing the restricted extras packages in Ubuntu. Other than that, I haven’t found that there is too much of a difference.

So basically, Ubuntu destroyed my system and so I took my ball and went crying to a different flavor of Ubuntu. It’s not a codependency issue, is it?

When a man loves a computer like Mark loves a computer, well he probably shouldn’t be allowed within a 1,000 feet of anywhere that computers usually congregate.

P.S. The horror, the horror.