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I've been using Ubuntu on my EeePC 901 since I got it last summer. I started out with Hoary and soon migrated to Intrepid. It's served me well for my limited needs on this little machine. A couple days ago I upgraded to 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope and first wanted to point out something that immediately caught my attention right there on their homepage. You see, the copy says "Desktop Edition" except they are showing an image of a laptop. This may seem like nit-picking, but there is a difference. I actually see this more as evidence of how the perception of what a PC is has changed. I don't have the stats, but I expect we're getting to that point where more people have laptops than desktops, so now the "desktop" is actually a laptop. Crazy.

Anyway, after the upgrade to Jaunty, things were pretty solid. Boot time has been improved and everything that I care about seems to work out of the box... EXCEPT for the graphics driver. I use compiz effects and I like them. The problem is, the performance in Jaunty is completely unacceptable. After searching around I discovered several reports and bugs posted about this horrid performance in the pre-release versions. Now keeping in mind that one of the major selling points of this release is its excellent usability on netbooks (like the 901), except that most of these netbooks use some form of the Intel integrated graphics chipset, and performance in Jaunty on these chipsets is unusable. So yes, Ubuntu works wonderfully on netbooks as long as you don't use it on netbooks. They need to add that to the copy. People don't really read this crap anyway...

This little rant wouldn't be complete without a way to actually fix the problem, which I have found. You can find instructions in the wiki on how to install the Intel graphics driver from 8.10 Intrepid, which I have tested and seem to work just fine. Go get'em!

I have an Eee 901 and due to the slightly less than 4GB boot partition (which is almost entirely full) doing any sort of major upgrade to a new version (as now, from Hardy to Jaunty) will always fail due to lack of space.

The solution I found is to use either the SD card or a USB stick as the apt cache. My steps to do this (though there is likely a better path) is the following:

• Format your USB stick (or whatever) to ext2 or ext3, whatever you're using
• Copy the contents of /var/cache/apt to to the USB stick. You'll have to use sudo.
• Mount the stick as the apt cache: mount /dev/sdd1 /var/cache/apt
• Now running Update Manager should work fine, though very very very slowly. It'll probably take upwards of 3 to 5 hours to download the files.

I am actually still in the download process, so if anything doesn't work, I'll update.

I am seriously a sucker for this sort of fascinatingly creative take on fairly basic art.

I bring you, a wolf loves pork.

A new discovery suggests the possibility that women might be able to remain fertile indefinitely! Uhm, yay? I understand the benefit to infertile couples (though really, do we need more people reproducing?), but I find it difficult to imagine there are lots of women clamoring to have periods clear into their 90s and who really want to give birth at 70. How realistic is that?

I actually think there's a (fairly vague) point when people should stop making babies. Just think, you're 70 and you or your partner has a kid. By the time that kid is, say 10-15, she's going to have to deal with at least one of her parents going off to a nursing home or just flat out dying at any moment. We're not talking a remote chance, like any other healthy early to middle-aged parent, we're talking about a certainty. It's pretty much a given that parent will be dead by the time that child reaches 25. How is that fair to the kids? Let's show some responsibility, folks...

As if it's any surprise at all, FOX has decided not to air the Dollhouse finale. To be clear, the episode they will be airing as final is the ending Joss had wanted with closure, but not a true ending to the whole thing. Plus, the final episode features both Felicia Day and Alan Tudyk.

Seriously, FOX can fucking taste it.

Found an article on Blues talking about the recent trouble Big Huge Games has been going through. THQ acquired BHG about a year ago, and now they're looking to sell or shut the studio down. BHG is mostly known for it's Rise of Nations games, but it also recently did the Settlers of Catan conversion. called Catan, for XBLA.

This is mostly a "how the mighty have fallen" type post. I visited the BHG studio several years ago for an IGDA meeting and found the place to be really nice. Everyone had an office and there were real wood accents everywhere. There were Razor scooters all over the place and a really nice common area where folks could play console games. It was a really nice set up. So, it's sad to see a formerly successful studio fall on hard times, but it seems to be more and more common these days. Good luck guys!

I saw on io9 that Sarah Michelle Gellar is ready to do a new Buffy project.

Of course, Joss would have to be attached to it for me to even consider it a true Buffy project, but were that to happen, then hells yeah!

/me is not getting his hopes up.

It sounds like things are looking good for the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie.

I'm excited. See, this is me excited. :|

The article's actual title doesn't state this, but the headline in the sidebar did and instantly gave me that "this was a mystery?" look of confusion on my face. No one was here to see it. Everyone loses. But srsly, are people not aware of this? The nervousness, depression, massive headaches... people weren't attributing that to caffeine withdrawal? Well folks, now you know. Thank you CNN.

On a personal note, I pretty much gave up caffeine maybe eight years ago, or so. I don't even remember anymore. Mostly because the withdrawal was hitting me too hard and too frequently. I figured since I don't really NEED the caffeine there's really no loss in cutting it out of my diet. So basically, only decaf coffee and tea and no caffeinated beverages. The only exceptions I make are for chocolate (both solid and hot), but those are very small amounts by comparison and I've never felt any reaction from consuming chocolate.

In other news, sugar makes kids hyper. It's TRUE!

At least, so far to date... There are all sorts of Flash Mob events these days. I thought one of the coolest was the great freeze in Grand Central Station. That is, until Susan passed on the most awesomest Do-Re-Mi flash mob ever conceived!

My list of thoughts on the subject:
A) Why are flash-mobs so frickin awesome?!
B) Techno Sound of Music is AWESOME!
C) Can you imagine what rehearsals for this must have been like?
D) I couldn't stop grinning all the way through, how AWESOME!
E) On the downside, not a song I want stuck in my head all day...