Kevin Becker dot net

For a while now, despite the fact that I’m not a fan of Mac OS X, there’s been one thing I’ve been envious of. Parallels Desktop… or more specifically, its Coherence Mode. Parallels is a virtualization server that allows you to run one OS in another. That alone isn’t very special. There’s tons of programs that can do that in linux, like VMWare, VirtualBox, KVM and of course QEMU. The special thing that the Mac OS X version of Parallels has is coherence mode. This mode allows you to not show the entire Windows desktop. You can view individual windows as just windows, so it is as if they are running natively under Mac OS X. This is an excellent feature that makes virtualization even easier and quicker (less processing of unused desktop space and windows). Parallels has said for a while that they’ll update their linux version to add coherence mode, but it doesn’t seem like they will do so anytime soon.

Fortunately, that no longer matters. With a little trickery of QEMU, the kvm paravirtualization drivers in the latest linux kernel (2.6.20 as of this writing), and a little program called rdesktop, linux can do the same. The Ubuntu Wiki details setting up Windows XP in QEMU (for the creation of the virtual machine) and then setting up rdesktop (for the creation of our very own “coherence mode”). It must be noted that these walkthroughs on the Ubuntu Wiki are designed for Ubuntu 7.04 only, because it is the first version to include kernel 2.6.20 and its paravirtualization support.

I can’t say yet how well it works, but I plan to set this up once my projects are over next week and I’m “studying” for exams. I’ll report back on how it went.

I usually don’t get involved posting these types of things, but because the legislators (as influenced by the RIAA) seem very intent on destroying internet radio, and time to save it is quickly running out. If you haven’t heard about the rulings, Ars Technica and SaveNetRadio.org have the story.

What can be done? Well spreading the word helps. The biggest thing is to petition congress through the easy web form on savenetradio.org. It’s also good to show that there’s a lot of people behind this, so I’d recommend joining the facebook group.

Hopefully these campaigns will be successful because it will be a sad day if almost all internet radio broadcasters (including the excellent Pandora) are put out of business due to these absurd royalty increases.

I just noticed a milestone in my Gmail account. For the first time ever, my spam count (the number that shows how much spam Gmail has blocked in the last 30 days) passed 10,000! It’s currently at 10134. I’m glad Gmail’s spam blockers are as good as they are. I rarely get spam anymore.

I was talking with Jonathan about search keywords in Firefox today and said I’d send him my search keyword bookmarks file because he hadn’t used them before. This is one of those things that is too valuable to not share, so I’m posting the info here. The Firefox search keyword is an excellent feature that unfortunately few people know about. It’s basically an extension of the bookmark. Here’s how it works: You can assign bookmarks a keyword. You can then type this keyword into the address bar and the browser brings you directly to the bookmarked URL. In addition to that, there is a special identifier, %s, that you can insert into the address of the bookmark. Then if you put text after the keyword in the address bar, the text will be inserted into the URL where the %s was.

Here’s an example: If you have a bookmark of “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s” and give it a keyword “g”, then typing “g linux” into the address bar will bring you to “http://www.google.com/search?q=linux”, which is a Google search for linux. That’s it.

Here’s a bookmark file that includes the search keywords I use: Kevin’s Search Keywords

Just import that into Firefox to use them. After the cut is a description of each included search keyword.

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After discussing with Jonathan about how little so many people in our major (Computer Engineering) actually understand programming, I was reminded of the great website Worse Than Failure. It features examples of bad design in computing. Like really bad hacks or unintuitive ways of doing things. One good example is about a guy who got around his lack of knowledge about string concatenation in an interesting way. Check it out, there’s lots of laughs all around the site.

I probably should have done it sooner, but I finally did it today. I deleted my MySpace account. I’ve never been a big fan of it. It’s ugly, unintuitive, slow, buggy and stale. The new update to facebook released today puts MySpace so far behind that it’s pathetic. There’s just nothing going on at MySpace anymore. I log in occasionally to see if there’s anything new, but there’s nothing new that’s worth looking at. The only thing i ever find are friend requests from fake accounts or tons of annoying chain letter bulletins that I don’t want to read. It feels like the slums of the internet. Besides, most of my friends are on facebook too, so it’s not a big loss. For those of you that I abandoned on MySpace that aren’t on any other service, I welcome you to join facebook. You’ll enjoy it. Promise.

When I made the change to this new website a month ago, I also made the move from my previous web host, Hoststock, to Dreamhost. Despite lots of complainers who whine about occasional announced downtime overnight on selected servers (that I find better than other hosts’ frequent unannounced daytime downtime), I signed up with them. I couldn’t be happier. I now have more space and bandwidth than I could use, with slightly faster response times, and a great control panel. The main reason I’m posting about this is because of the great one-click install system Dreamhost has. When setting up the website I had a one click install of Wordpress. Today I had a one click upgrade from Wordpress 2.1.2 to 2.1.3. It went flawlessly. They warned I that I may have to reinstall themes or plugins after the upgrade, but I had to do neither. It was perfect. Upgrading web software is typically a nightmare so this is a very nice change.

While on the topic of Dreamhost, I think I’ll point people in the direction of the other projects I currently host… Dash Studios, Diefuchsjagden and The LAN Station. Have a Happy Easter everyone!

This post is mainly for myself, but I think others could benefit as well. For my music listening needs (on Windows), I always use Winamp. But not just any Winamp. I’ve found that Winamp has become quite bloated with feature creep over the last few years. Winamp 2 was the peak of Winamp-y goodness. Winamp 3 and now Winamp 5 just add too much extra junk I don’t need. So this post is just a way for me to keep a little archive of the bare essentials I need from Winamp. This includes the installer for Winamp 2.81 and the skin Receiver by Fli7e. Both these files are now hard to find. Places like Winamp Heaven and Old Version have the installer and I found this website with the skin, but I don’t know how much longer they will be around, so I’ve decided to make an archive of my own. Plus it’s easier for me to find than googling! Enjoy the old school Winamp goodness!

Direct Downloads:

Winamp 2.81

Receiver Skin