Luci Sandor’s blog

For those never heard of him, Voiculescu is a kind of Berlusconi of Romania, except that he is suspected that his money came from the operations of communist political police, his TV station has long way to go to the supremacy of the Berlusconi’s channels and, although member of the ruling coalition, his party was never voted by a significant group, because it is way below the threshold for entering the Parliament and it never participated in national elections without an alliance with the ruling ex-communists.

You may also know that the Romanian hostages are still in Iraq and that Friday the kidnappers have sent the demand that the Romanian troops leave Iraq until Tuesday.

Politicians are split, some say we should call our boys back, some that we shouldn’t.

Voiculescu made a weird statement. Maybe he was trying to avoid the real issue, but still, it proves an unbelievable stupidity. He said that he is ready to go to Iraq to take the place of the hostages, if the terrorists are kind enough to accept the swapping.

I fail to see why the terrorists will exchange 3 prisoners for one, even if he is a party leader. (And anyway, Voiculescu’s party does not really exist).

I fail to see how the swap will solve the problem. Let’s say the swap takes place Monday. Still the troops will have to retreat. Or, if the swap takes place on the next Friday, why would someone alive would be exchanged for three dead bodies?

I fail to see why he looks for an answer from president Basescu. His hatred for Voiculescu is well known and I don’t think the president will waste even 5 seconds for this jerk.

My wish is that Basescu will swap him with the three kidnapped journalists. Then, we keep our troops in Iraq as long as needed, hoping that the terrorists will have mercy on us and will kill the man of Securitate.

Voiculescu, if you google for yourself (I saw Mischie and Van Goethem doing that), learn that I fail to see how any Romanian will vote for such an crook, because he says things that should put him committed in a mental institution. Lately I failed to see any sign of your intelligence.

I tried to install Linux on my PC. Nothing unusual, the failure was to be expected.

I tried SuSE if that really matters. In fact I hoped it matters, given the money that were pumped into SuSE by IBM and Novell.

Before anything I tried to run Skype. There were a lot of things to be fixed, the most awkward being the fact that the mic was defaulted to mute. Other fixes included: adding the user to the "audio" group, giving full writing right to the audio device to the user (chmod-ing it) etc.

Then the printer issue came to be fixed. Almost everything ran smooth with the open-source driver "hp-oj", except the fact that CUPS server started before the initialization of the device (a script called "ptal-init"). After a reboot, CUPS needed to be restarted in order to see the printer. A definitive fix was possible, but I decided I’ll do it later.

The TV tuner, AverMedia’s AverTV GO 007 Plus, was not running. I googled for solutions and I learned that the Taiwanese jerks don’t reply to inquiries regarding their hardware in conjunction with Linux, even when driver developers write them. There was a patch to apply to the source code. A recompilation of the kernel was scheduled, so I postponed it too. (later edit: here’s a hint)

I’ve noticed that the video card was not correctly identified. Even when I manually set its model, the SuSE driver denied that it has dual head capabilities. I downloaded the ATi driver which was a pain in the posterior. Right after installing it, I couldn’t log on as root with KDE’s logon manager, because KDE crashed and I was returned to the logon window. Now, avoiding logging on a root is a good security practice, but I don’t need a video card driver to enforce that policy. After googling, I’ve learned that NVidia is even better at drivers and software on Linux than ATi. OMG, if you want Linux, you should really buy a NVidia-based video card! The situation run for years by now and the ATi hasn’t fixed it. Probably they will never fix it and I should change the video card before running Linux.

It was just a small step before removing Linux for now. I inserted a file DVD written with Nero, with ISO9660 and Joliet. It just crashes, worse than a Windows 98, but without an obvious BSOD. An orthodoxy bug probably prevented it from reading my DVD, because probably the DVD fault, because it should adapt to the software and the standards . In no way should the software adapt to the situation on the field. I pushed the reset button and I watched it constantly crashing after login. It just hated my DVD.

Hey, the DVD is my friend, and the enemy of my friend is my enemy. FDISK.

I love to see how peace is spreading through the world. It is called consolidation and it sometimes comes after wars, lawsuits and almost-swearing-the-other-CEO.

After suing them over the dockable menus and hurting them big time (Macromedia had reissued Studio MX series due to that patent infringement), Adobe seems to find a better attitude. After quasi-monopoly position over Portable Document File format, Adobe will get the total monopoly over one more used format, SWF Flash. Both giants are lazy when talking abut their Linux software, Both provide editors for Mac and Windows and only a player for Linux.

It is a sad peace because Macromedia was one of the Microsoft slaves (and Microsoft ditributed their software in a way no one else got) and because Macromedia used real Programmers. With each version, their software was faster, occupied less hard drive space and was really including new features, while Adobe, au contraire,…

On his blog you can find a download link for the latest gadget in making the web a free place. This Firefox extension adds to the capability of JavaScript popup block. Now the popups from plugins such as Java or Flash are blockable too.