Here is a list of some of my favorite quotes from some of my favorite movies:
1. “That one goes there, THAT one goes there!”
2. “You talking to me? Well I’m the only one here.”
3. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I break your concentration?”
4. “Someday – and that day may never come – I’ll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as gift on my daughter’s wedding day.”
5. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
6. “Medium-dry Vodka Martini… Shaken, not stirred.”
7. “Say ‘hello’ to my little friend!”
8. “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”
9. “You’ll shoot your eye out!”
10. “There’s, another example. See, here I’m now by myself, uh, er, talking to myself. That’s, that’s chaos theory.”
Can anyone guess which movies they come from? One hint: No two quotes are from the same movie.
Well in the last year or so, I have been able to find a Linux replacement for almost every single task that I use a computer for. I’ve even learned of many new apps that I didn’t know about before, but now can’t seem to live without. Lately, though, there has been one particular issue that I have been trying to find a solution for. Since I tend to travel to Europe form time to time, I like to be able to keep in touch with people back home. Skype seems to do the trick for most things, however there are some things that bother me about it, particularly their lack of a decent Linux client. They don’t support any video calls for Linux yet. I started to research alternatives, and found some promising stuff, like WengoPhone. It seems like an ideal solution to everything, but so far testing has yielded minimal results, as I haven’t, as of yet, been able to successfully place a call to my mom using voice, let alone video. I will keep them in the back of my mind for the future, but I think they are still in their alpha stage of development on their 2.0 version, which looks to be a very promising open-source Skype replacement that is cross-platform.
I purchased a Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX, keeping my fingers crossed and return postage handy, because I had no idea if it would work under Linux but I figured I would just take a chance. Well, I must say that I was completely shocked to open the package, plug it in and open up Kopete to see myself staring back at me. Props to Logitech for that one. So now that I had a working webcam with 100% less effort than installing the same device in Windows (requires driver CD or download, a few minutes of intstallation time and a reboot or two), I was ready to test out Kopete’s video chat features and attempted to connect to someone using MSN Messenger, which seems to have pretty nice Video Call features. This tried to work, but I think my über-restrictive firewall wasn’t allowing something to go through, so I canned that idea. Gaim unfortunately doesn’t support any video or voice stuff, and I didn’t want to try to convince everyone I know to start using SIP-based VOIP clients, because that is just another hassle for the non-computer-savvy folks in my life, and my goal is to be able to connect to them with all the effort on my end, since I am the computer geek.
So I had an interesting thought. My webcam works under Linux. I have an old Windows virtual machine floating around on my hard drive that I haven’t booted up in a while. Let’s see if my webcam will work inside of VMware and whether I can successfully call my girlfriend using Windows Messenger or Skype, since that is what she uses.
Step 1: Download VMware Server, register for a license, and install by un-tarring the tarball and running vmware-config.pl. I just accepted all defaults. Look for it on ubuntuguide.org. There are some dependencies like a C compiler and stuff. I’ll try not to get too distro-specific here, but for the record, I am using Kubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10
Step 2: Install Windows XP in Virtual Machine. This requires you to buy a license from Microsoft. If you don’t have one, I would recommend finding a different way to do video calls under Linux. Don’t buy Windows just for this reason.
Step 3: Install VMware Tools. Reboot the VM.
Step 4: Turn off VM and edit the settings and make sure that you install the USB controller and an audio device. Turn VM back on.
Step 5: Once the VM boots up, go to the VM menu>Removable Devices>USB Devices and select the webcam. Windows will detect the webcam and you can install the software for it (Note: the first time I did this, I had to shut it down and close VMware Server and re-open it before it worked.) Installing the logitech software requires a reboot.
That was pretty simple. The camera includes a built-in microphone, which also worked and I was able to install a virtual sound card in the machine, so that I could get sound. Both Windows Live Messenger and Skype worked almost flawlessly inside the virtual machine. And I was able to call my girlfriend and have a video chat without booting into Windows or messing with my firewall. Of course this is a huge roundabout way to achieve a small task, but I am very impressed that it works. Hopefully I can find a nice full featured open-source IM client that will do video with no hassle soon, but until then I have one last reason to keep the old VM around and have now made it unnecessary to ever boot into the Windows partition on my hard drive again.
Some friends of mine and I were discussing some interesting questions the other day over a game of water basketball. What does a wet Wookiee look like? For that matter, how does a Wookiee dry itself? Does it use a hair dryer, a large towel, or does it shake itself dry like a dog? Or maybe a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, they had some special technology that allowed for super-efficient Wookiee-drying? Maybe George Lucas should have included some more info on this topic in the newer movies, instead of adding that Jar Jar Binks thing to the mix. And the dreaded question is, what would a wet Wookiee smell like? Can you even imagine?
I usually just manually go to my favorite blogs and news sites to read the new stuff that has been posted, but a friend recently informed me of Google Reader, so I thought I would give it a shot. So far I am pretty impressed with how well it works and how easy it is to use. I even made it my homepage so I can get all the news right away. I think I’ll use this for a while. It has already grown on me, and now I can clean up some of my bookmarks. Make sure to subscribe to this one, no matter what you use: xkcd.com!
I heard a German tongue twister today that I thought was pretty funny. Try to say this ten times fast:
“Junge Burschen, die vor einem Schokoladenladen Laden laden, laden Schokoladenladen-Mädchen gerne zum tanzen ein.”
Ironically my Russian professor taught it to me. Here’s the English translation: “Young boys that are loading boxes in front of a chocolate store, gladly invite chocolate store girls to go dancing.”
Not quite as funny in English. Thanks, Dr. Samuel!
They opened up a new smoothie shop in my apartment building and for the event, they have had one of these Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Men outside for the past couple of days.
And since no one can get enough of this, here it is for your enjoyment. The commercial from the Family Guy movie:
