Disney On Ice - The Big Red Button what shouldn't be pushed

Today with our family we were at Laszlo Papp Sport Arena in Budapest to watch Disney On Ice - Journey of Mickey & Minnie which was quite good (however it has a very long part about the tale of Peter Pan what we don't know too much), the kinds were amused and enjoyed the skating Disney characters. It was full of colours, the performers were talking and singing and the choreography was nice.

We had a cheap ticket from where we could see everything suprisingly. I'd recommend almost any place especially from the upstairs.

One thing what I did not understand: what was that Big Red Flashing Button when we were about to leave the building. Any idea about its purpose and this alarming state?

What's in the Picasa for Linux?

I just wanted to put my new pictures somewhere so I was looking a good site to put - and here we go, I gave a shot to Google Picasa since it has a native linux client. I though.

At the first glance it's slow. And not handy since it import all my folders without any question. I checked, and what I found?

~/.google/picasa/3.0$ ls -la
total 648
drwxr-xr-x 4 toma toma   4096 2009-12-24 22:57 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 toma toma   4096 2009-12-24 22:54 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 toma toma      0 2009-12-24 22:54 .firstrun
-rw-r--r-- 1 toma toma     16 2009-12-24 22:54 .gnomehal
-rw-r--r-- 1 toma toma     11 2009-12-24 22:54 .update-timestamp
drwxr-xr-x 2 toma toma   4096 2009-12-24 22:54 dosdevices
drwxr-xr-x 5 toma toma   4096 2009-12-24 22:54 drive_c
lrwxrwxrwx 1 toma toma     39 2009-12-24 22:54 generic.ppd -> /opt/google/picasa/3.0/wine/generic.ppd
-rw-r--r-- 1 toma toma   2867 2009-12-24 22:59 picasa.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 toma toma 549622 2009-12-24 22:55 system.reg
-rw-r--r-- 1 toma toma  68072 2009-12-24 22:57 user.reg
-rw-r--r-- 1 toma toma   2275 2009-12-24 22:54 userdef.reg

Wow, what? drive_c ? Doesn't ring the bell? It might be related to wine..
And unfortunately it is. So google is using wine for porting picasa for linux.
I have no comment ATM.

Installing packages on external storage device on OpenWRT

I've just put a flash memory stick into the OpenWRT device (Asus WL-500g Deluxe) to be able to run bigger application on it. So I formatted to ext3 and mounted. But for some reason however the opkg (the package manager) has been instructed to use this new destination

toma@OpenWrt:~# cat /etc/opkg.conf
src/gz snapshots http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/8.09.1/brcm-2.4/packages
dest root /
dest ram /tmp
dest opt /opt
lists_dir ext /var/opkg-lists
option overlay_root /jffs

This way:

opkg -d opt install tcpdump

Then I got this nasty message which refers to the root fs instead of the external storage however the -d used to put the package there:

# opkg -d opt install tcpdump
Installing tcpdump (3.9.8-1.1) to opt...
Collected errors:
 * Only have 352 available blocks on filesystem /opt/, pkg tcpdump needs 652

To resolve the issue, I cheated:

option overlay_root /opt

to the /etc/opkg.conf mentioned above already.

Everything went fine with:

# opkg -d opt install tcpdump
Installing tcpdump (3.9.8-1.1) to opt...
Downloading http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/8.09.1/brcm-2.4/packages/tcpdump_3.9.8-1.1_mipsel.ipk
Connecting to downloads.openwrt.org (78.24.191.177:80)
tcpdump_3.9.8-1.1_mi 100% |**************************************************************************************************************************************************************|   251k 00:00:00 ETA
Configuring tcpdump

Just a foot note, this is pretty handy tool anyway...

The Irony of Flash Blocker Firefox plugin

I just wanted to check the http://storyofstuff.com/ site, right after I just installed the great Flash Blocker plugin for Firefox (read: Iceweasel) when I got this:

Well, I can understand now how can we live without Flash. :)

Year of Linux Desktop?

I just wanted something not too special - listen On-Line radio stations with my favorite media player jukbox application called Rhythmbox, to watch (read: see) and listen (read: hear) flash videos in Icewasel browser on my Debian desktop, record and play back audio files and getting a working GTalk client which is the recent Pidgin IM software.

So I found myself in trouble - the chaos of ALSA, OSS, PulseAudio and many other (ESD, Jack, aRTs, PortAudio, etc.) sounds systems. However I was quite sure that since Ubuntu as the leader of `Linux Desktop' adopted the PulseAudio I have no choice, unless I'd like to hack all days.

Playing with them and figuring out that I completely don't understand the intentions of the different designs, I found the best documentation at http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup where I could find all I needed. Just a note: check the page and decide - Is this the Year of Linux Desktop?

Cheers