InfiniteTides

With the benefit of hindsight and poor short-term memory, Wednesday flew right by.  Kept busy making inspection cards and tweaking the inspection card template allowed me to ignore the clock.  Jeff was nice enough to remind me of break times. C

Before work, I read a little bit about Google’s Chrome OS that won’t be released until this time next year.  To this point, I have been less than impressed by Google’s Chrome browser.  It lacks support for extensions, little applications that extend the abilities of the browser.  For instance, there is no way in Chrome to block all advertisements, and why would there be?  Google makes most of their money through online advertising, so they would be reluctant to give people the ability to eliminate their main source of revenue.  I like the idea that Chrome OS will be opensource (read: FREE), but until Google has released an alpha build of Chrome OS, I think it’s far too early to speculate on how successful such an operating system will be.  Remember, Chrome OS will compete with Windows 7, OS X, and the many flavors of Linux.

So far tonight, I’ve slept about 6 hours.  I expect that I’ll take a short nap a bit later, probably around 3am.  First, I have some TV shows to watch, including Stage 5 Tour de France highlights, the Warehouse 13 premier, Big Brother UK, and Torchwood: Children of Earth Day Three.  I just watched That’s Impossible, and that show straight up sucks, mostly padded with obviousness, speculation, and conjecture.  Oh, did I mention it’s on The History Channel?  I should have known!

Two more days of 1st shift, followed by a short weekend, then it’s back to the anti-social vampire sleep cycle of 3rd shift.  Yay!

In my never ending quest for making minor tweaks and small improvements to my Linux experience, I decided I should add the OpenSUSE 11.1 KDE 4 factory repository to my repo list and use it to update my install.  When I ran the online update, after “fixing” the few conflicts that popped up, I found that I had 2 GB of updates.  It’s going to take all morning to download and install these updates.  When they are done, I understand that there’s a risk that my install could possibly be messed up in some way.

So for the rest of the morning, I’ll be sipping on coffee and catching up on episodes of Stargate: Atlantis.  I can’t help but believe that in some alternate reality, some other me has something better to do.

Google has announced that it will release a new open source internet browser this week.  It’s called Chrome.  Personally, I hate chrome.  It’s shiny and gaudy, and it makes things look tacky and cheap.

In all seriousness, do we, the internet consumer, really need another browser?  The browser market is saturated already with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Flock, Safari, Avant Browser, Maxthon, and I’m sure there are others I haven’t heard of.

Perhaps this is the future of the browser market, splintering to the point where people have a browser tailored for their needs.  I’ll admit to having multiple browsers on each of my computers.  They each have their strengths and weaknesses.  Maybe someone feels that they NEED a social network browser that aggregates all of their social network sites, but it seems that this might be doable in a website rather than on the browser.  Supposedly cloud computing is the future, not software running on your computer, but software running on a server online.

On the bright side, perhaps having so many different browsers will force web developers to follow standards (do you hear me, Microsoft?!).  When it comes to the World Wide Web, standards are definitely good.

At this moment, I’m attempting to update my OpenSUSE 10.3 install on my Playstation 3 to 11.0.  I inserted the DVD into the drive and told the PS3 to boot to the other OS.  It’s loading the installation screen right now.

I just agreed to the license agreement without reading it.  Hopefully there’s nothing in there about 11.0 tending to brick your PS3.  Now I’m choosing “Update” from the Installation Mode screen.  I sure hope this is as painless as it was on my notebook!

I clicked Next and took a sip of coffee.  Now it’s asking me to choose the system to update.  I’m selecting openSUSE 10.3 and clicking Next.  It’s mounting the partition.  It’s now initializing the package manager.  This is very good so far!

9:01am It’s showing me the previously used repositories.  I disabled the 10.3 DVD.  I don’t even know where it is any more.  All of the other repo’s listed were already disabled. Clicking Next.

9:07am I seem to have hit a snag.  The screen is telling me that it can’t read the installation media.  That’s odd since it’s been reading it to this point.  Maybe it’s got something to do with my disabling the 10.3 DVD as a repository.  I’m rebooting and beginning again.

9:12am It was my fault.  I shouldn’t have disabled the 10.3 DVD repo.  Everything looks ready to begin the update.  Nope!  Scrolling down I see that under Packages it cannot resolve all conflicts.  Manual intervention is required.  On the bright side, everything on screen looks gorgeous!  I’m gong to try resolving the package conflicts.  How hard can it be?

9:16am That was easy!  All I had to do was change the vendor for three applications, and I’m good to go!  Clicking Update!  Clicking Start Update!

9:19am 2.72 GB worth of updates.  This is going to take a while.  I believe the hard part is done, and the waiting begins.  The estimate is 2 hours!

9:26am Why am I going to back to Linux on the PS3 now that I can stream media natively via Tversity?  Because too many files still do not transcode (.mkv).  Also, I’m getting a little tired of using the PS3’s menu system to dig down through folders to find things.  Then, I can’t delete anything from my server via the PS3’s system.  Through Linux, I’ll have a lot more control over remote files.  The big unknown is what resolution I’ll be able to use, and whether I’ll be able to get 1080p working in openSUSE 11.

11:47am The update went great.  Now I’m working on making the resolution better so I can actually read the text on the screen.

12:28pm It was inevitable.  I screwed up the resolution and now I can’t view the PS3’s video output.

2:52pm Turns out that all I needed to do was edit the command line from the boot menu.  Everything looks wonderful using video mode 165.  So nice!  After the updates are done, I’ll work on streaming some video from my server.