Miscellaneous Ramblings....

Thanks to my friends at MNSpeak, I came across the Enron Explorer Tool, which lets you search through all of the Enron emails that were used in the Enron indictment case. Putting in the names of some of our local politicians certainly produce interesting results.

Ubuntu 6.10 has been released and here is a guide to help upgrading from 6.06 to 6.10.

It looks like I haven't been paying close attention to the Serendipity release cycle (yet again), but fortunately for me, my co-worker has and informed me that Serendipity 1.0.2 has officially been released. The only bump that I have noticed so far is that some of my sidebar plugins will no longer display - not sure why yet.

---

Update (10/29/06): I suspect that somehow some of my plugins got corrupted during the upgrade - the first time that this is happened. At any rate, after re-installing the plugins, things started showing up (in the sidebar) correctly again.

Update (10/31/06): It seems that the new Serendipity version has some performance enhancements; at least my entries seem to be saving much quicker.

The trailer for the upcoming Eragon movie is now online at the Apple website. I remember picking up Eragon, Christopher Paolini's first book by accident and enjoying it very much (and being quite surprised to find out that the author was only 15 when he wrote it). Despite the genre of Fantasy being fairly crowded, he managed to find a unique niche, introducing the concept of the dragon riders. I hope that this adaption of the book to the big screen is done with the same care that the Lord of the Rings Trilogy was done with. (FYI: Here is the official movie site page).

At last Firefox 2.0 has been released. For those ready to make the plunge, here are a couple of tweaking guides from the Lifehacker and TweakGuides websites to help ease the transition (translation: renable all of your extensions and themes to possibly work with the new firefox). Also, the Digg comments section has some good tweaks as well. I just loaded on my work desktop and will putting it through the paces..... Update (11/05/06): TechRepublic has some nice screenshots of the new Firefox 2 browser and News.com has a nice review of it as well.

For one who doesn't watch a lot of TV, I am finding myself stuck in the phenomena of finding yet another series that has sucked me in (that makes three this year, surely a record ). It is the NBC series Heroes. And of course, it has it's own Wikipedia page up. Update#1 (11/15/06): Thanks to one of my (blogless) office-mates, I have discovered the NBC offic website for Heroes, which has links to the online graphic novel as well as being able to view most recent episode online. -- Thanks Dennis! Update#2 (11/15/06): I was gently reminded by another one of my co-workers that he had actually suggested the Heroes series to me (only to have my conscious mind give him the brush off). Fortunately, my unconscious mind must have been looking out for me -- Thanks Matt! Update#3 (11/23/06): As a result of my late Heroes addiction, I missed the first three episodes but fortunately I found a website that has the past episodes online. Enjoy!

According to the Register, Microsoft is finally releasing Internet Explorer 7. Needless to say, I will be sticking with Firefox, which has had for a long time all of the features that IE7 will have. Update (10/29/06): Surprise! It seems that the newly released version of IE7 is buggy according to this thread. Update (10/30/06): In typical Microsoft fashion, it seem that if you have "Automatic Updates" enabled, your computer will be upgraded to use IE7 (whether you like it or not ).

This is probably the publicity storm that Apple didn't want, but evidently some of the new iPods come bundled with the Windows RavMone.exe virus. Not surprisingly, there is a thread regarding this on the Apple forums as well as a thread over at the HardForums. For the record, here is Apple's official announcement.

With all of the rumors swirling around regarding this deal, the announcement that Google purchased YouTube for 1.65 billion almost seems anti-climatic. At ForeverGeek, there is an article on six reasons why this deal makes sense.

Straight from the TechCrunch Blog, Google's latest offering is a code search engine. A nice feature of the search engine is that it will take regular expressions (here is the announcement from the Google Blog). Also (thanks to anansi-web), O'Reilly also has a search engine where you can search through all of the code examples from their books.

According to SearchEngineWatch, SearchMash is a new site that Google is using as a testing area for new features.

I was all ready to take the plunge this past weekend and plop down my hard-earned cash on the Sony Blu-Ray BDP-S1 player, but when I went to purchase it, I found out that this model will be delayed until late October (October 25th, 2006). !! Update (10/31/06): Just checked the SonyStyle site and found out that the new date for Blu-Ray player is now December 4th, 2006. !!!! Note: On a somewhat related note, Fox has a special website for announcing their Blu-Ray releases.

Despite all of the personal stress currently going on, I took a slight breather and went to the Bruce Hornsby concert at the newly remodeled Guthrie Theater. Strange as it seems, even though I am a huge fan of his music, this is the first time that I have seen him in concert. It was a 2 1/2 hour acoustic set with just him and his piano. It was a throughly enjoyable concert (although that sounds almost like an understatement); yet another reminder of what a truly accomplished pianist he is. It was very intriguing to hear both the jazz and classical music training winding its way through his various songs and piano solos. Not many artists can successfully pull off a strictly acoustic set, but Bruce managed to do it with both ease and a very active sense of humor (it was quite entertaining to see his interplay with the audience). As an added bonus, the ticket price included a free copy of his 4 CD/1 DVD Intersections collection (alone worth $50.00). I have already throughly played out disc_4 of this collection and am busy working on discs 1-3 (I had all the discs ripped and installed on my iPod as soon as I got home from the concert ). Also, here is the website where you can (legally, of course ) purchase previous Bruce Hornsby concerts.

It looks like Synergy just came out with a new version (1.3.1), which looks like it might correct some bugs including X11 emulation as well as some minor win32 hot-key issues among others.

For all those unfamiliar with Synergy, it is nice freeware software that allows users with multiple computers to use just one keyboard and mouse to control them all.
It is trivial to setup, supports cut and paste between screens, and best of all it works on Mac OSX, Linux and Windows platforms. I use it at work to control my laptop and desktop (and wonder how I lived without it).
(You can still use the "slave" machine's keyboard and mouse as well while Synergy is running).

X-Men: The Last Stand was released on DVD today and of course I had to pick up my copy. However, I didn't go for the Special Edition version that included a previously un-released XMen comic book by Stan Lee. (see, I do have some restraint).