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Ferret math is a curious mathematical oddity whereby one ferret mysteriously becomes many. It can happen a million different ways, but almost certainly it will happen to most ferret owners. This is how it happened to me just this past weekend.

When last I wrote, my friend Benny had to be put to sleep. They think he had cancer and we knew for sure he had an enlarged spleen and a heart murmur. He sure was a great little fellow though.

Benny’s death left Stinkerbell all alone. Somehow, in the midst of mourning, my wife and I ended up at the local SPCA *just to look*, the idea being that ferrets are such social critters and we didn’t want Stinkerbell to be lonely. Well, it was probably that we were feeling pretty lonely too. Ferrets my be pretty small critters, but they have huge personalities and leave big holes in your heart and life when they are gone.

At the SPCA we found 2 little female ferrets who badly need a home. Unfortunately, my landlord was a little slow on the draw returning their phone call, and they have some other draconian adoption policies which prohibited us from adopting the 2 of them right then and there. The people at the SPCA have their hearts in the right place, but they obviously know nothing about ferrets whatsoever.

Somehow (ferret math here we come), a couple hours after that, I ended up looking at ferrets at the local PetCo with my wife and daughter. After a quick ferret-jedi hand wave, 2 of them were riding home in my car. Don’t ask.

The first of the 2 we called “Cake”. He was a beautiful cream colored ferret with a loving personality. We brought him home, introduced them all together for some good play time and, after the ferrets were finally worn out, we put them to sleep in the cage. They were all happy and getting along famously. Unfortunately, the next morning, Cake would not get up. He wasn’t particularly sick looking, just didn’t want to move. We took him back to the pet store who got him to their vet where he died some 20 minutes later. The vet believes that Cake died of insulinoma and had some tumors as well. And he was just a baby. It was sad.

The other ferret we brought home that day is “Teddy”. He is aptly named because he is just like a big cuddly teddy bear. He’s only 5 months old or so and very affectionate and REALLY soft and nice to hold. I think it is a ploy to get him a good home, and it worked. Although Teddy has not been to our vet yet, he appears to me to be quite healthy and exhibits normal youthful ferret behavior, ie he can’t sit still when he is awake. This is a good sign. He also gets along with Stinkerbell pretty well (although not famously yet).

If your counts are correct, that’s 2 ferrets down in less than 24 hours and 1 pleasant addition.

I had mentioned during this ordeal, I think when we were looking at ferrets at PetCo and picked up Teddy and Cake, that I had always wanted an albino ferret. Well, after I found out the bad news about Cake from the vet on monday afternoon, my wife was calling around to see what ferrets the other local PetCo’s in the area had and the next closest store had 1 ferret there. It was a 9 month (I think - old for a petstore) albino ferret which we learned later was born on my birthday. Of course I went to look at him and, you guessed it, he had to come home with us too. We named him “Puff” because he is SOOO soft, and white like a little powder puff. Although a bit older than Teddy, Puff has crazy energy. Initially I was hoping that he could keep up with Teddy, because Stinkerbell is getting old. I am quickly realizing that it’s Teddy that is going to have to keep up

I don’t know what more to write about my fuzzies here except I am happy to have them all. One dog, one cat and 2 ferrets. It takes a little patience and a lot of love to be owner of a fuzzy farm like I have, but the rewards are immense. Losing them really sucks, but not having had in my life at all is surely worse.

Now go and pet *your* fuzzy.

Summary: Us Linux users aren’t too high on the Adobe priority list and the even smaller niche of us 64-bit Linux users are even lower. Adobe is getting better, though, and the Alpha release of Flash 10 for 64-bit Linux today is very much welcomed I run Ubuntu Linux and have been since somewhere around 6.06 [...]

This past weekend I made sure I saw the first possible showing of the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, not so much for the movie… I wanted to be sure I caught the new Star Trek trailer on the big screen as soon as I possibly could. Being a huge Star Trek fanboy I have been waiting for the first “real” trailer for what feels like, well since I walked out of the theater after the last Star Trek movie.

I thought I’d get my obsession on, and talk about some of the new things I noticed with the new “revisioned” movie version of the Enterprise.

Over all I’d say it looks sleek, modern but has a big retro-feel to it. The few things that really jump out at me is the addition of the phaser emitters and the photon launcher that better matches what we see on  the Enterprise re-fit from the original movies.

There’s no denying the great classic design of Matt Jefferies’ NCC-1701. Sure it does have a dated feel and look to it. Specifically with the main deflector dish, and the warp nacelles. We all grew up with this ship, but the truth is, it’s a dated (awesome dated, but very 60s). Even though I’ll always love it, I can see the areas a movie would want to modernize for today’s audience. It’s a fine line they have to walk between modernizing and keeping the classic retro look for the fans.

Let’s talk about the bridge for a few minutes. Always the nerve center of the Enterprise, and probably where we will see the bulk of on-ship scenes take place.

Here is a shot of the new bridge, obviously very flash, and much much larger than any bridge we have probably ever seen, even in the previous movies. Note the white arm-rests on the  captain’s chair… Not sure how I feel about the look of those.

Just for some perspective, here is the classic bridge that we all know, obviously a much smaller set, as was their budget back then.

Also note the new big fancy 16:9 big screen action upgrade the Enterprise bridge is getting in the movie.

And of course, what was big for back in the day, the classic 4:3 main viewer:

The last thing I’ll make note of, at least in this post, is what I suspect is the new “warp effect”. I think we might be trading the streaking stars for a more “subspace tunnel” graphic. Here is the new, at least that I suspect. Notice that effect appears in the main view screen shot above as well.

There’s plenty more that I’ve noticed in my 100 viewings of the trailer, new transporter effect, Kirk driving a car off a cliff as a kid, new shuttles, some notes about the building of the Enterprise, etc etc. As the movie approaches and we hopefully get some more trailers I think I’ll vent some more pent-up geek energy by writing a few more posts that touch on those things.

Guys,

After a great 13 months with Alan Pope at the helm, it’s time to choose a new Ubuntu UK PoC.

I’ve enjoyed Alan’s time as PoC, and have been able to work with him in his role on one project.  No doubt his contributions will continue even after he steps down as PoC.

There was discussion a while back, about what being a PoC is about.  In my opinion, a PoC defines his or her own role on the Community - but at the end of the day is seen as a figurehead for his or her Localised Community.

The Ubuntu UK community is a happy and well balanced one.  Under Alan’s tenure, we have held together end enjoyed some grand release parties.  With Canonical residing in our Locality too, we even got a visit of Mr Shuttleworth.  Alas, I have not yet been there (time for me to setup events to areas outside of London).

I seriously considered running for the post myself, however, I don’t feel like I have yet been active enough to consider a promise to be ‘more active’ to be anything more than use IRC _three_ times a day

However, I have a good relationship with one of the three runners, and am therefore going to endorse him running as Ubuntu UK PoC.

Dave Walker

I’m sure the other guys have a lot to offer too, but Daviey is someone who I’ve worked with in the past, and who I can see being a great walking advertisement for ubuntu (and that’s not just down to the extra real-estate available on his t-shirts)…

Please take time to vote, for whoever you wish here:

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-uk/+poll/teamlead09/+vote-simple

The bad part of being a pet owner is that, in eventuality, you have to deal with the death of a friend.

Today I had to put my friend Benny to sleep. He had been quite ill much of his life with some undiagnosed illness and mass in his lung, not to mention his heart murmur. Today my wife noticed his rear end was paralized. It was time.

Benny was a great ferret. Jubilant in his youth, he was a happy and loving companion for his whole, short life. We’ll miss him.

There has been a lot of flak these past few weeks over the supposed failure of Linux on netbooks. Articles claiming returns are 4 times higher than those running windows, some vendors recalling netbooks to replace linux with windows, etc. But what I notice is there are a lot of inconsistencies with the “facts” with one article contradicting another. It’s almost as if someone is feeding fud into this environment. But that could not be right, could it?

Hmmm…. A year ago Asus dropped the eeePC on the market and the netbook exploded hailing the “demise of the desktop/laptop” as oem’s made a mad dash to the bottom of the hardware stack. What was scoffed at by MS resulted in them, in conjunction with the failings of Vista, to revive XP after they attempted to end the life of this way out dated os a few scant months earlier. Apple has gone record calling these netbooks “crap.” And that we will never see such shoddy products from Coopertino. Yet, they are lowering the prices and functionality of their low end laptops to compete.

When I first heard the claim that Linux based netbooks were being returned 4 times more than windows based netbooks my first response was: “How many Linux netbooks were sold compared to those running XP?” Those statistics have not come out yet. But why is it that I consistently see Linux based netbooks sold out on Amazon and NewEgg? Why is it I see such glowing reviews of these Linux based netbooks? And why have I heard not to stellar reviews of XP on these things claiming they are sluggish and stripped of features?

I agree with the sentiment that many people don’t understand what a netbook is. It’s not a replacement for a desktop or laptop but an adjunct. They are ultra-portable systems you can take to the can, the classroom and on the go for simple tasks that make up 90% of what people do with their systems. They are not really suited for gaming or video editing or even graphic design, even though I can do all these with my eeePC if I wanted. It seems those people who want to nail them down to replacing their laptop or desktop are the ones crying foul the loudest.

As for carphone recalling their linux netbooks, it appears that is not the case at all
, even though they may have stopped selling the linux based systems.

I have heard it commented that this is a new market not only for consumers and Linux, but for consumers and netbooks. A market I suspect will come into it’s own shortly as consumers begin to understand what a netbook actually is and they get more comfortable with Linux. Some have posited that it is incumbent upon the manufacturers to better educate the consumer on these products and while I can agree that better instruction cannot hurt, I thought that the documentation and the configured home page all about the eeepc was a great start.

We shall see what the future holds, but I still see more success for both netbooks and Linux. Both have worked to change computing as we know it.

I saw Germ's earlier post about using /dev/urandom to make a big text file and I was wondering if I could use the same command for something useful like generate passwords. I asked in the #lugradio channel on the Freenode IRC server and I was told that if I use the fallowing command to make passwords.

Mez created a bash script using urandom to make passwords.

To install it use the following commands

cd /usr/bin

sudo wget http://slightlyunstable.org/files/genpwd

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Episode 2 is recorded and I am in process of editing. It is probably going to be something around an hour, with 17 pages of show notes. I will be working on it this weekend and hopefully get it out the first part of next week.

I was bored yesterday so I decided to mess around with the command line. Found out about /dev/urandom. Urandom is a true random number generator that works by collecting noise and gibberish from device drivers. So what happens if you try and read this data?
This..

cat /dev/urandom

This is a TINY sample of what random data you receive in less than 1 second.

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I’ve officially been Podcasting one year as of November 14th. It has been good for me, albeit hard. Podcasting tends to be my outlet. I’ve always been an entertainer in one way shape or form. I sang all the way up through college, I’ve been in several bands, and even a few show productions. Linux Basement fills my need for both tech and performance. I’ve officially written 29 songs since the show started a year ago, and although most of them are ridiculous, and some are downright awful, some, have been gems. Linux Basement has forced me to document my technical findings, present them in an educational manner, and continually drive forward with the things I love to do.

The people, of course, make it all worth while, and sometimes are the hardest part. I tend to wear my emotions on my sleeve, so at times I can become extremely frustrated. However, this is the exception. Overall, the people who listen and contribute and give me feedback are amazing people of whom I would have never met without this type of outlet. This of course, has to do with the subject matter of the podcast. The open source community, in general tend to help eachother out, and don’t mind spending a little extra time going the extra mile. Sure, there are exceptions and people passionate about what they do sometimes get heated, but from what I’ve seen, Open source embodies what is good about the world.

So where to from here? Well, I continue podcasting of course. I have goals in mind for the show that perhaps will change linux basement, or perhaps they will never be fullfilled, but most of all, I know that the time and effort is worth it, because people are learning more about linux and open source. Hopefully the convergence of skills that I am using at work, and in the podcast, and in my spare time, will some day benefit not just listeners of Linux Basement, but perhaps move towards a higher cause of Open adoption within Governement and Enterprise entities. One can dream right?

I leave you with one of the recent songs I wrote, that has been ringing in my head.

http://www.linuxbasement.com/audio/download/308/Cause+I%27m+Free.mp3

Because I’m free, to make my own decisions.