Joseph Brower

Apparently Ubisoft has some problems, not just with deploying bad DRM, but with keeping it running. There have been many discussions about their new DRM schema (it requires a live internet connection to play). Apparently, only the pirates are allowed to play currently as Ubisoft is sorting out their downtime. The pirates are once again having a better gaming experience than those that legally bought the game. Hopefully Ubisoft learns from this, and if not, they don’t really deserve to stay in the market. Until they remove DRM from their games, I won’t be making any more purchases from them.

If you are in my area (southeast idaho), contact me and ask me about the Lan Party on the 6th. My birthday is on the 7th, so my wife is letting me do this. We’ll be playing the following games:

Battle for Wesnoth
Tremulous
Nexuiz
Warzone 2100 (latest stable release, not the beta)

Those are all excellent FOSS games that I’m sure we’ll all enjoy.

F-Spot is included by default in Ubuntu as a photo management tool. I’ve done quite a bit of photography and felt like my images in their separate directories were starting to get out of hand. I figured that if Ubuntu includes it by default, it’s gotta be good, stable, and at least worth using. So let’s just get the point.

The Good: You can tag photos, manage revisions, view a nice timeline, export to various sites, without much trouble at all. You spend 30 minutes with the interface and you’ve got it down pretty well.

The Bad: What is this F-Spot View thing and why would I want to use it? Opening up an image with F-spot skips the importing (which I’ll get to later) bug doesn’t provide really any usable tools.

The Ugly: Speed is a major issue, especially when importing, and even moreso when importing raw imagery. I would love to talk about how well it handles raw, but honestly, it’s still slowly importing. Apparently it runs dcraw over the file (for some unknown reason) and that takes a while when you have thousands and thousands of raw files. It isn’t multithreaded either, so my fancy multicore machine doesn’t help with the speed at all.

Overall though, F-Spot is a much needed project. Hopefully these rough edges can be smoothed out. For people with smaller, or nonraw driven photo collection, I can see this being very useful for maintaining galleries. I’m still deciding what I think. I guess I’ll know once this import finishes. Oh, and if you know a way to speed it up, please let us all know in the comments.

I really like it.  It seems to boot much quicker and the new ATI driver really works better with my machine.  It can actually do full screen video while running compiz without needing to do any tweaking.  That really relieved me.  It was a long standing issue that was starting to frustrate me.  I’m still setting up all of my apps again and restoring backups, but I’ve gotten everything vital done and so far haven’t run into any issues.  We’ll see how it holds out, but right now, I would strongly suggest anyone using an older version of Ubuntu to upgrade.  The only thing I wish could be better is Empathy.  It’s a great app, but seems to lack the overall polish of Pidgin.  At least it works better with webcams and mics.