rotten bananas

I try to keep political rants off of here for the most part. I’m not really sure that I’m saying anything new or exciting, but sometimes it really gets to me. After that little outburst, I thought we needed something positive, and this is definitely a good sign of things to come (edit: link is now dead apparently, but Dell is going to be offering Ubuntu on new machines!).

Something is going horrifically wrong in this country. We have a president that’s supposed to represent our population but ignores its majority. 50% of the officials in the national government are in some kind of trouble. A number of them can’t seem to keep it in their pants.

And now this. Suddenly people on the front lines, those who are face to face with our country’s greatest challenge are being silenced. A drastic change needs to take place, and soon. No one cares about the rules anymore, and apparently there’s no way to stop it.

If you haven’t read 1984 or Brave New World yet, you had better so you know where we’re headed. Or maybe Cat’s Cradle is more appropriate.

Like I said, I’ve started a niche blog. Everything is set up and I’ve already made a few posts. I think it definitely has potential. The niche is somewhat unfulfilled right now, which is a bit of a double-edged sword. Obviously, there’s a hole that has the potential to be filled (profitably). On the other hand, there’s a small number of blogs to link-exchange with and feed off of via trackbacks and comments. What I need now is ideas.

I proposed this question over at Green Llama, and Leroy had some good suggestions including directories and trying to get some hits off social bookmarking sites (Digg, StumpleUpon, Delicious, etc). These are great suggestions, but I’d like to know what other ideas people have, so have at it. Let me know what I should be doing to get my site out there and start making some money.

As you may or may not know, there was a Google PageRank update that took place over the last couple of days. Apparently, I’ve been assigned a PR of 2! That’s infinitely times higher than my previous PR of 0! This was a much welcome boost to my ego. Who else got an increase?

I finally did it. I set up a niche blog. It’s a blog all about guitars. I’m pretty excited. I would like to, once again, briefly state my disgust and rage with domain squatters.

I hate them.

Ok, that’s all.

I’ve been playing with a number of different adsense plug-ins. I’ve finally settled on one, MightyAdsense. It’s an excellent plug-in that allows you to set up different adsense code and place them based on post number.

The only thing that didn’t work was using the built-in php function to display an ad code set in the sidebar. It wasn’t a big deal though, as I just had to copy/paste the code into a text widget (I’m using the sidebar widgets plug-in. It’s amazing. Check it out if you haven’t.). Here’s to gettin rich.

Over at Deep Jive Interests Tony asks why the Firefox people haven’t addressed the issue of memory hogging yet. I’ve been wondering this myself. There have been a number of optimization articles written to cut back on the problem, which really just proves that it exists. Tony also proposes that there’s an opportunity there for another browser to step in. He questions the ability to compete with the huge theme and extension collections already available for Firefox.

Firefox is open source. There’s no reason that a spin-off couldn’t be built to fix the memory leak problems and still support all the community extensions. Swiftfox is a good example of this.

Honestly, I don’t think this is the way to go though. Once you have branching off, things can get confusing, as there’s a delayed update trail that can lag behind for quite a while depending on how much branching has taken place. I love Firefox, but there’s definitely a problem with my memory getting gobbled up. I think it’s time that someone at least addressed the issue and worked on a resolution so that it can beat IE in every category.

For those of your that use GMail religiously like myself, I’d like to point you to this Firefox extension. It’s released by the people at LifeHacker. It’s essentially a compilation of a number of different Firefox extensions for GMail. There’s a ton of awesome options, and I’m loving it. It doesn’t even require Greasemonkey if you’re donning a tinfoil hat.

They actually just released version 0.5, but I haven’t seen an official announcement on their site yet.

I recently wrote a guest post on Green Llama entitled The Importance of Choosing a Niche. It’s really gotten the ol’ brain chuggin away on the topic. I’d love to start another blog that can bring in some cash. There’s a conversation going on in the comments about choosing the right niche. One important part is choosing something you’re interested in as to maintain activity. Unfortunately my forte is tech/computers, which is a very saturated market.

I’ve been thinking of some other ideas. I have a number of them, and there’s one that I’m particularly interested in. I was planning on starting to set it up tonight, but I got distracted with friends/booze. I don’t want to drop my idea until I’m up and running, as I have a habit of over-hyping things that don’t happen. But on a related note, I’m rediscovering how freaking annoying it is looking for a decent domain. Squatters piss me off.

Ok, after a bout with upgrading WordPress and getting my sidebar widgets to work again, I’m back in action. I’ve been using Feisty Fawn for a few hours today. Here’s a basic run down of what I’ve seen so far.

It just works - a list of things that impressed me

• Wireless. The wireless network support is much improved. All available wireless networks are now auto populated. With Edgy Eft my card wasn’t supported in Network Manager. Now it works flawlessly.
• Trackpad Scrolling. This was something that I had never bothered with in Edgy, but it’s supported with no configuration in Feisty.
• Speed. Damn it’s fast. I imagine a large part of it is simply that I’m running a fresh and shiny new copy of the OS, but it seems much faster than Edgy was.
• Search. The standard search actually works. I could never get any results for anything in Edgy, but in Feisty it works splendidly, though I’ll probably still stick with Beagle.

It should just work - a list of things that aren’t yet up to par

• Resolution. I still had to finagle to get my native 1280×800 resolution working. It should be supported out of the box, especially since it’s only a matter of adding it to the xorg.conf file. On the up side, I was able to successfully get it working by doing just that, whereas with Edgy, every time I tried to manually add a resolution to the xorg file, it ended in X11 failures and headaches - never figured out why.
• CPU Scaling. A late Edgy update broke CPU scaling for me a few weeks ago. I had to manually set it up at each boot and enable it. So far it has been working well on Feisty except when my machine returns from hibernation. I only tried it once, but the scaling stopped altogether and my machine was pumping away at 1.6ghz endlessly, which made my lap very warm.

Another step in the right direction

There are still improvements to be made, but Feisty Fawn is a gigantic step forward. I’m rating it as an all-round desktop operating system. I’m not comparing it to Windows. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but for a platform that wasn’t really a viable option in recent history, Ubuntu has brought Linux into the fight for a standard-user operating system. I’m excited to see what the future brings.

Well I intended to post tonight, but I got distracted with installing the new version of Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn). I’ve only been up and running for about 30 minutes, but so far I’m very impressed. I’m gonna give it some more time before I say anything officially, but stay tuned for an upcoming entry of my thoughts on it.

On a separate note I’ve been approved to do some guest posting over at Green Llama, so keep an eye out on there for some blogging-related posts from yours truly (and I guess some other ‘talented’ bloggers).