Miscellaneous Ramblings....

The US entered their third and final group match needing to beat Ghana and also have Italy beat the Czech Republic in order to advance to the second round. One of the two aforementioned objectives were accomplished - can you guess which one? Again, in this game, the US put up a valiant effort (although I will be wondering until the 2010 World Cup why Eddie Johnson wasn't brought on earlier, especially with the US needing to score at least two goals). That very dubious call (which resulted in a penalty kick for Ghana) at the end of the first half certainly didn't help matters, but you certainly can't blame losing the game on that. One of the immediate fallouts from the US World Cup exit was the official retirement of Claudio Reyna from international soccer. I liked Claudio very much as a captain (very nice passing skills, something the US has really needed) and will miss seeing him in the US national team uniform.

After much sitting on the proverbial fence, I finally broke down and purchased the USA-Spec PA11BMW iPod-BMW adapter from Crutchfield. I wanted a iPod adapter that would still let me utilize the native iPod controls. I had been looking at the Harmon-Kardon Drive & Play, but in the end, I decided that there really wasn't a good place to put the display in my car (as well as having a virtual advertisement that you have an iPod).
Since I have a 1998 BMW with a factory stereo, getting an iPod adapter that would work seamlessly was a major pain (especially since my factory stereo didn't have any auxilary inputs).
After getting this installed, my only regret is that I didn't have this done earlier instead of trying to make do with my cassette adapter (which would start to make an annoying grinding noise once it heated up after 15 minutes of play time).

The latest Linux kernel is out (version 2.6.17) which boasts better support for WiFi as well as some kernel enhancements that should boost performance.

It looks like the first season of Boondocks is due to arrive on DVD on July 25th, 2006.

I used to use Hummingbird eXceed to emulate a local X-Server on my Windows platform, but with it being somewhat of a resource hog and expensive, it made a lot of sense to look for a better alternative. Enter Cygwin, which is a *nix-like platform (including an X-Server) which installs on a Windows Platform. You can install as much or few of the *nix utilities as you like through the easy to use GUI interface (it will resolve dependencies as well). To run X, you just need to install the X packages, and then (from the Cygwin prompt) execute: X -clipboard -query boondocks or if you have multiple monitors: X -multiplemonitors -clipboard -query boondocks. (There is a Cygwin/X page and a handy Cygwin Utilities page as well). Note: For those who use GDM, there is a slight tweak that you need to make in order for the -clipboard (cut-n-paste) between Windows and the Cygwin X-server to work properly. In the /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf file, you need to set the following: KillInitClients=false and then execute gdm-restart so that the -clipboard option will properly. This news thread has a little bit more info on this issue.

Needless to say, I was very proud of the spectacular effort that the USA team gave during the match with Italy. They showed tremendous heart and fighting spirit, especially being down to 9-men versus Italy's 10-men (the less said about the referee during this game, the better). Now if US can only play that way against Ghana this coming Thursday...... {Of course, it didn't help matters that I was watching this match while the central air conditioning was out in my house - not to worry; the temperature only got up to 88 degrees }

What goes up, must come down.... At least that statement goes part of the way to describing how I felt about the results of the USA vs Czech Republic game today. Unfortunately, the US came out very flat. There were some good attacking chances for the US, but most of them came after Eddie Johnson was introduced as a substitute. The Czech Republic didn't play particularly well either, but they were able to capitlize early on two mistakes by the US which put them up 2-0 at the half. Probably the most entertainment that I got out of the game was reading the World Cup Blog match play by play. Unfortunately, things will not get any easier for the US as they face Italy next - let's hope the US energy level dramatically increases in that game.

Yet another tool emerging from Google Labs (thanks for the tip C-Man); this one is Google Browser Sync (customized to work with Firefox). It lets you keep your Firefox browser settings (i.e. bookmarks, cookies, browser history, etc) in sync across various computers (some of the caveats that I have heard about so far is that you can only have Firefox up on one computer at a time {which is supposed to be addressed in later revisions}, and that it significantly lengthens your browser startup time). There are reviews of the tool at various sites, including iTWire, Earthtimes as well as at DeskLinux. Update (6/19/06): According to FireFox Magazine, there appear to be some technical issues with the extension, one of the main issues seems to be that this extension promptly disables the SessionSaver extension (since it needs to be the only extension that is backing up a session).

Thanks again to my brilliant co-worker, I am now aware of two handy data recovery tools:

Note: Going the other way, DBAN is handy tool to scrub all of the data off of your disks (before RMA'ing your disks for example).

Update (8/20/06): Thanks to a Digg article, I found another good article over at Extreme Tech comparing three different file recovery tools.

Today I had my first opportunity to view a soccer match in HDTV and in the words of my British friends: it was "feckin' beautiful"! To add to the charm, it was the very excellent Germany vs. Costa Rica match; a very well played attacking match with some superb goals scored (my personal favorite was the Torston Frings 40 yard rocket).

After months of waiting and anticipation, the world's biggest sporting event gets underway tomorrow, with host Germany playing Costa Rica in the opener (unfortunately, it looks like Germany will be without one of their top players, Michael Ballack). The USA doesn't start their cup play until June 12th. In the meantime, here is a nice slideshow from the BBC showing the World Cup fever sweeping England. (For the more IT-inclined out there, here is a group of interesting articles on what is needed, IT-wise, to run the World Cup).

Firefox 1.5.0.4 has been released. The main purpose of this release is to fix several security vulnerabilities.