I was watching Jimmy Kimmel last night and Rob Zombie was his 2nd guest. Rob says he is currently working on an animated comedy movie project for adults. Thee exciting stuff though is after that movie is complete he is going to begin work on a Halloween remake.

He says the remake will be half prequil and half “reimagination” of the original. I knew it would only be a matter of time before they redid Halloween. In one sense I find it sad to think that every good idea in horror has been done, and the only way to make another good movie is to remake a classic. However the Amityville Horror and The Hills Have Eyes remakes were quality movies that I really enjoyed. Amityville was actually better than the original in every way.

Well I am excited for this. I thought House of 1000 Corpses was really bad, and I struggled to get through the whole thing. However, I loved the Devil’s Rejects. So if Rob can make another movie like that, I’m with him.

Adobe released Flash Player 9 for Windows and Mac, but there is no sign of a release for Linux which is still stuck on version 7. What up with that? How is it that developers of applications like VLC and aMSN can release software for virtually every current OS, yet a for profit company like Adobe cannot?

I mean even Mozilla releases its products on Windows, OS X, and Linux at the same time. I was always under the impression that if you are using smart programming techniques this is not all that difficult. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it is absurd. Neglecting the Linux desktop community is just as bad as neglecting the Mac community would be.

My girlfriend spoiled me this birthday. My birthday isnt until the 28th, but hers is on the 25th, so we exchanged gifts last night. She got me much more than I expected and really spoiled me. Its all really great stuff too.

She got me towels and hand towels, baking sheets, stainless steel mixing bowls, both the original and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and a bottle of Tommy Hilfiger cologne. I kinda knew some of the stuff she was getting me, but I totaly didnt expect the cologne or to get he original and remake of The Hills Have Eyes. That was pretty pimp. They will be great in my DVD collection.

1. This article is outdated!
   I have written a new post with a better mounting method. Please read my new Mounting Windows SMB Shares v3 post before trying anything in this one.

After my move to Ubuntu I was finding the built in network browser very slow. I decided to see if there was a way I could mount my SMB shares to the /media directory so they show up as a drive on the desktop. Better yet, I wanted to make it so they mount automatically on boot.

First you have to install smbfs:

sudo apt-get install smbfs

Then create a folder inside of the /media directory to mount the share on:

sudo mkdir /media/Storage

then you can run the following command to mount a share manually:

sudo mount -t smbfs //fileserver/Storage /media/Storage -o uid=USER,gid=users

Note: Change USER to your linux username. The uid=USER,gid=users is important because if you dont use that, only root will have access to write files to the mounted share.

Or you can edit the mount list in /etc/fstab to have the drive mount on boot

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

And add this line to the bottom of the fstab file, but change //fileserver/Storage to the path to your share on your server.

//fileserver/Storage /media/Storage smbfs credentials=/home/USER/.smbcredentials,uid=USER,gid=users 0 0

In the above line change USER to your user account in both spots. Before this will work you also have to create the .smbcredentials file in the above users home directory.

sudo gedit ~/.smbcredentials

Add the following information to the file, but change Guest to your SMB username and add your SMB password.

username=Guest
password=

Note: My fileserver allows Guest access to the shares, so I just use the username Guest with no password. If your server requires a username and password put it in here.

To test if the auto mount works just run the following command

sudo mount -a

You should see a new mount show up on your desktop for the drive.

If you are worried about people who dont have root access being able to read login and password from the .smbcredentials file you can give only root and admin group access by typing

sudo chmod o= ~/.smbcredentials

Note: Do not try and mount a folder on a share, it wont work. The source for an SMB mount has to be a share.

Note: Do not put a trailing “/” on the share path or the directory path, it will cause it to fail.

SMB Shares with spaces in the names

If you have an SMB share with a space in the path you can replace the space with \040. For example:

//fileserver/Storage\040Share /media/Storage\040Share smbfs credentials=/home/USER/.smbcredentials,uid=USER,gid=users 0 0

Change USER to your linux username. This will mount the share “//fileserver/Storage Share” to the directory “/media/Storage Share” and give USER r/w access to it. If you are using the mount command you dont have to do this, you can just put the source share and the destination directory into quotes like this:

sudo mount -t smbfs "//fileserver/Storage Share" "/media/Storage Share" -o uid=USER,gid=users

So my girlfriend got tickets to the preview of Nacho Libre last Wednesday. I thought it was a pretty funny movie. It wasn’t quite as good as Napoleon, but Jack Black’s dialog and his facial expressions made the movie.

Anyway, asside from the point that its a good movie we had the lamest projectionist ever showing the film. I don’t know if everyone knows but the movies come on a few reels which the projectionist has to switch throughout the movie. That is their job. You know its time to switch the reel when you see that little black circle flash in the top right hand corner of the movie. So twice when the reel is switched, for about 10 minutes the screen was off center and everybody’s faces were cut off. Finally whoever was in that booth realized and fixed it. It really put a damper on the whole experience though. The lame thing was we couldnt really ask for our money back since the movie was free in the first place.

On a side note… I hate how going to the movies is really a gamble. You pay $10 at least to get in and more if you want a snack. Then depending on what movie you see and when you have to put up with dumbass teens who think its cool to talk through the movie, or you take your girlfriend to Madagascar at 10pm and there’s still little children who are clearly up 2 hours past their bedtime anyway. If there’s one thing I hate it’s when you go to an 18A movie and walk in to find the place is filled with 14 year olds who think its cool to talk through the entire movie. Then you have 14 year old A yelling at 14 year old B to shut up and then B’s boyfriend yells back at A telling her not to talk to his girlfriend, then A’s boyfriend yells at B’s boyfriend asking if he wants to start something. Basically the whole thing ends up in a bunch of other 14s yelling at the 4 of them to shut up until everybody feels like they got their last word in. If I want to talk through a movie I stay home. This is all if the projectionist is doing their job too…

Most people who want to try Linux arent ready to give up Windows quite yet. This is where dual booting comes in. By splitting your hard drive into two partitions you are able to install Windows on one partition and Linux on the other. When you turn your computer on you will be given a simple menu which will let you choose which operating system you want to use.

Before we get to dual booting you will have to get yourself a copy of Ubuntu Linux.

The Prep work:
1) Download Ubuntu. Ubuntu runs on i386, AMD64, and PowerPC (Mac). So first you have to find out which type of platform you are on. For the average PC user I would suggest i386. If you go for the AMD64 version you have to make sure you have the right CPU, also you may not be able to find 64-bit versions of every program. If in doubt use i386, and if you are on a Mac use PowerPC.
I highly suggest using the BitTorrent files to download it. It saves the server bandwidth and will probably be much faster. If you dont know how to use BitTorrent then just grab the ISO.

Download from a specific location:
http://www.ubuntu.com/download

Download from the Canada Server:
ubuntu-6.06-alternate-i386.iso.torrent
ubuntu-6.06-alternate-i386.iso

2) Once the download is complete open the ISO in your favorite CD burning utility and burn it to a CD. I use Nero on Windows. Incase you are brand new to burning ISO files, an ISO is a disk image. You do not want to burn the ISO file to a CD, you want to open it using the Open… command under the file menu of your burning tool. This will take the files inside the ISO and burn them to a bootable CD.

Dual Booting Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.06
Once you have your Ubuntu CD burned you can use this video guide to setup your dual boot. This video requires you re-install Windows. If your hard drive already has 2 partitions you dont have to re-install Windows, just delete your 2nd partition and start from the point in the video where they start to install Ubuntu.

If you get into any trouble you can feel free to post questions here, or visit http://www.ubuntuforums.org/.

I downloaded Kubuntu Linux 6.06 for my PC last night and installed it this morning dual boot with Windows XP. It took me a long time to figure out the partitions and then when it booted up I was just getting a blank screen. I figured out I had to also install the nvidia driver. Once I got it going it pretty much sucked. So I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu Linux for PowerPC and installed it on a 1.25 G4 eMac. Thats right, Linux on a Mac.

Ubuntu is waaay better than Kubuntu. It just has a better software package. Basically it just comes with Firefox instead of Konqueror for a browser. Only drawback that I am discovering is a lot of software isn’t written for PPC Linux. Basically I just tried to install the flash plug-in so that the YouTube videos on my blog would work and I discovered there wasn’t one. So that is sort of a disappointment.

Anyway, I am pretty excited about getting into Ubuntu, my only concern is that maybe I am so used to XP that I would miss it. I have been using XP almost exclusively for over 5 years now and I know it inside and out. Although Windows has never been considered much of a “user friendly” OS, it is something you grow used to. Although I do want to learn Linux more, but I don’t want to have to do research every time I want to install a new piece of software or hardware. I think I’ll give Ubuntu a chance in a dual boot setup on my PC for a while and see if I can get to a point where I’m not using Windows. I may also look into using Wine for any Windows apps that I cant find a Linux replacement for.

On a side note, I’m also thinking of installing The PPC server version of Ununtu on my Mac Mini. Does anyone have any cool ideas for what I could use a Linux server for in my house? Or even on the net, I do have 80k up speeds that mostly go unused.

It’s simple… because I know how to use my computer. OH SNAP!!!!!

But seriously… I don’t need any kind of Adaware, Spybot, anti-spyware software because I follow a few simple rules. These rules are as follows:

1. I do NOT use Internet Explorer, I use Mozilla or Firefox. There are only three exceptions to this rule. One is when I press the mail icon on MSN Messenger it opens in IE because that’s the way Microsoft rolls. The second is when doing Microsoft Updates. You can do them in Firefox, but its no big deal to use IE for this. The last time is if there is no possible way the page will load properly in Mozilla (or Firefox depending or your preference). Some pages are like that if they are poorly written (using IE-proprietary non-standard markup).

   I bet 50% of spyware comes from just using Internet Explorer. If you are ever asked “do you want to trust site X, YES or NO” if you say YES you are giving that site the ability to install or run software (or spyware) on your computer. Sometimes this is a good thing, like if you are giving Adobe the OK to install Flash player in your browser. It is usually a bad thing if you visit a site that you aren’t expecting to install software.

2. I do not install fancy browser toolbars. Chances are if you are using Firefox, Mozilla or Opera as a browser in the first place it has every pop-up blocking Google searching feature a toolbar would ever be able to offer. Do yourself a favor, don’t install any IE toolbars, just go download Firefox. It looks cooler and works and protects you better. And if it makes you feel better, download Firefox from Google with the Google toolbar pre-installed.
3. I don’t install cool screensavers, desktop wallpaper rotating applications, free games, or pretty much anything that offers free fun!! It may not cost you money, but it will cost you the speed of your computer.

   If a company doesn’t charge money to use it’s software sometimes they embed spyware into it so they can sell the information it collects (usually about people’s web browsing or computer use habits). In a lot of cases a company will create a piece of software and market it as free. The software is actually used as a front to get spyware on your workstation. Usually the company will tell you this, but most often it is buried in the terms of use agreement where you will never find it.

4. I always choose CUSTOM options over TYPICAL when installing a program. If you choose custom you can just click next, next, next, finish because most of the time the default settings will be the same as typical. If you choose custom you may catch it saying something like “would you like us to install spyware app x on your computer”. If you chose typical, you would never see that.

   Here’s a basic rule, if you have to pay for a program it probably won’t have spyware in it. If a program is open source and free it is probably also spyware free. If a program is commercial but free, you can probably find out if it contains spyware by doing a search on Google like “program-name-here spyware”. If you get some hits that sound like it contains spyware, don’t install it.

As for firewall programs, they aren’t worth it. Do yourself a favor and buy a small 4 port router if you don’t have one. You should NEVER plug your Internet connection from your cable/DSL modem right into your computer. That pretty much opens you up to every Microsoft bug out there. Spend $49 on a router and put it between your modem and your computer. That combined with the software firewall that is integrated into XP, you’ll have nothing to worry about.

By following these steps not only will you preserve the performance of your XP installation, you will also be a lot cooler. You wont have a computer that’s bogged down with spyware or with anti-spyware apps or firewalls.

all I have to say is BAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Doogie Howser, M.D. – Pilot Episode