equivocal ramblings

For Google and my forgetful self:

To merge two contacts in Kopete into one, right click on the contact you wish to be added to the other, go to the protocol menu (usually last) and choose *Change Meta Contact*. Now search and pick the one you want to add it to.

I’ve had to redo my contact list a few times, and I’d been doing it to most braindead of ways: Removing contacts and readding them under the right meta-contact… Still this isn’t the most obvious of workflows.

Dear Windows Live,

Windows Live Messenger took 1 hour and 30 minutes to install thanks your installer deciding my offline package (downloaded just this afternoon) was too old. Apparently there was a minute version mismatch with the latest one in your repository.

Installing software on Windows in general is an already slow process, but you seem to think that it’d be awesome to slow me down further. Please bear in mind that not everyone has a T3 connection.

Please fix. Kthnxbai.

Sincerely, Kevin.

The installation process for openSUSE 11 is quite impressive. LVM, package selection, desktop selection etc. were all top-notch without any hiccups (unlike my past experiences with Fedora). Post-installation set up was quite smooth as well, except for the part where I wanted a static IP — took 15 minutes to figure the GUI for that out. Seems more geared towards network administrators than end users.

I can’t say I expected the green to be pleasant, but I can’t complain — looks very nice. Overall, solid stuff.

Vista Service Pack 1. I put music on, walk away and come back a while later. My screensaver is active. I click the mouse once to deactivate it, and what happens? Audio playback skips.

Vista Service Pack 1 Audio: Fail.

P.S.: I can’t help but notice that everything I write about Vista tends to the negative. About the only positive thing I can say is that It’s quite pretty.

After many years, finally GNOME, KDE, and legacy applications can co-exist without attempting to kill each other everytime one of them needs to make use of sound for whatever reason.

I feel good.

Thank you Ubuntu, thank you pulseaudio.

Heron comes with all sorts of newfangled stuff including PulseAudio support. This is very nice, but there’s something that not everyone seems to be aware of — PulseAudio and Flash 9 don’t work together by default. You’ll have to install libflashsupport to get audio working in Flash:

sudo apt-get install libflashsupport

Best part of all this? Flash audio mixes in perfectly with any other audio without the usual hickups :)

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu’s new release — Hardy Heron (8.04) and I am impressed. From start till end it seems so much more polished than anything else I’ve tried (including Windows Vista).

From the new File Operations dialogue to the weather applet/clock/calendar integration it all just fits together so well. One thing in particular which I really like is this:

All this while it’s required the use of apt-spy or trial and error testing of repository speeds (Australia’s awesome on Streamyx^WSlowmyx) it’s nice to have automated tests against 200 mirrors. I can actually use the GUI tools rather than falling back to the CLI all the time…

Of course I’m sure there are niggling issues, especially for the laptop users among us. Thankfully I don’t have to deal with that pain yet :P

Much like jhall’s problems with the office 2007 trial, I downloaded the Office Standard edition 2007 Trial. Now, on the website it has this to say:

Trial programs contain the same functionality that you get when you buy the perpetual versions — but only for a limited time.

Well, something is seriously wrong with their activation process because even after activation, and getting an expiry date (sometime in July), I couldn’t do anything but view files, email etc.

How can they get something like this wrong? This is a really bad experience for anyone evaluating Office 2007 for their company (like I am).

Update: Well, it works now. Uninstalling it and reinstalling fixes the problem. Same thing on another machine. This is most odd. I quite like it so far though…

If you use a high resolution display, like me you might find your eyes starting to water as you read all these trendwhore websites that use tiny tiny body fonts, like Verdana at 10 pixels. I’ve always solved this by Ctrl + Mousewheel up or down, but doing that for each and every site is a tad bit tedious.

Enter No Squint. I’ve fallen in love with it. No Squint allows you to select a default zoom level (I chose 110%, a slight bump up) and also remembers if you changed the zoom level while browsing a website. So now pages with ridiculously large fonts, or ridiculously small fonts are tolerable.

The best part? I’ve not noticed it at work except that my eyes are less tired now.

Thank you Jason Tackaberry. You did a good job on this one — so much so that I had to add a new category to this journal to post this in: Brilliance.

Anyone managed to get Outlook to do email threading (like we get in Thunderbird etc.) at all with IMAP?

Despite following several guides online, enabling threading on my IMAP server, reading the help etc. I cannot for the life of me figure out how it works. Sigh