I personally don't use NVIDIA graphics cards in my machine, but since ATI/AMD have made the promise to create an open source driver for its hardware, it's only fair that NVIDIA do the same. If you would like to petition NVIDIA to open its drivers up to the FOSS community, please sign the letter.

While working on a project, my girlfriend, who was on the couch surfing the web, asked me for the address of something I found on the web. At the time I thought how helpful it would be to direct her browser right to the page instead of waiting for her to get on instant messaging and explaining how to copy and paste the URL into the browser. I snooped around with Google for a couple minutes and figured it out.

This method can be used for a number of things. The first one that comes to mind is helping a family member find the program they are looking for without bothering with VNC. Another reason could be to notify someone on the computer that you need to reboot it. There are a couple of requirements:

• The remote machine must be running an SSH server and it must be accessible
• You must have a user account on the remote machine with sudo ability
• You must know the username of the person currently logged in to the remote machine

If all those requirements are met, you can continue:

1. Log in using SSH to the remote machine
2. Enter this command (replacing username with the username of the person currently on the remote computer): sudo su username
3. Enter this command (replacing command with the command you want to run): DISPLAY=:0 command

That's it! Now, you will most likely want to follow the command with an ampersand (&). This will return you back to the terminal once you run the command. Otherwise, you will have to wait until the command finishes before you will be able to use the terminal again.

So, to open the remote browser to the site, I would have entered: DISPLAY=:0 firefox "http://www.google.com" &

Very cool!

Since the Ubuntu Brainstorm project opened up not two hours ago to Planet Ubuntu, 230 ideas have already been posted. It hit Digg and the servers slowed to a crawl. Now that it's hit Slashdot, it's nearly inaccessible. I have already posted two of my ideas, which I would love to see implemented some day.

For those that don't know what Ubuntu Brainstorm is, it allows users to submit their ideas on how to improve Ubuntu and have other users rate the idea to help developers decide which features are most desired by the community. Awesome idea in itself, if you ask me. 

Recently, I installed Ubuntu on my last Windows server at home. There are a couple Windows-only applications that don't run in Wine, so I needed to virtualize an XP machine for those applications. One of these applications needs to run all the time as a service, and since it would be running on a Ubuntu server, I needed a way to start the VM when the physical machine starts, not when I log in. I installed VMware Server, as it has an option to start a VM on system boot. But there's a catch, the server I installed it on is a headless server, and I want to be able to control the VM from another machine without installing a full-blown VMware Server on the client machine. Then, I saw that VirtualBox has the ability to run an RDP layer on top of the VM.

So, I uninstalled VMware and installed the non-open-source edition of VirtualBox. The only problem is, VirtualBox does not have an option to start a VM on system boot, so I went looking for a way. After reading the documentation, I found that you can start and shutdown VMs from the terminal and it works great. Now, I just needed to have it start on boot. Since I've never written an init script before, this proved to be a little troublesome, but in the end, I got it to work. Of course, I have no idea how good or bad the implementation is, but it works. Initially, I posted a question in the Ubuntu Forums for help and ended up posting my init script. I hope it can help someone, and I also hope that some of you elite init scripters can fix my likely horrible init sciprt .

Original post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=701735

I have an uncle that works for DreamWorks Animation. They did Shrek, Bee Movie, and Over The Hedge to name a few. They just won the Annie Award for thier use of open source software to produce these movies. The whole story is on Red Hat's site.

As a Systems Administrator, I build machines regularly. We have a couple of critical, Windows-only applications that we run, otherwise I would have had them drop Windows like that bad habit it can sometimes be. Recently, I was building a new workstation with two hard drives in it, which always means trouble when installing XP. The main problem you get when installing XP with more than one hard drive is improperly mapped drive letters. It seems that no matter which drive you install XP on, the second drive always becomes the C drive, while the system drive becomes E or F. This is a pretty big problem because many applications are hard-coded with the C drive being the system drive and will try to configure themselves on the C drive, regardless of what letter the system drive is. What makes this problem worse is, like anything else Windows-related, the only way to fix it is to format and reinstall.

Granted, I've had my problems with Macs and with Linux, but drive letters are so DOS. Has Microsoft not learned anything from the rest of the world? Drive letters are bad and restrictive. It makes mapping network drives a pain because you have to account for machines that have USB drives or card readers attached that can make local drive letters all the way up to J and beyond. Depending on the size of the network and the company, you can easily outgrow 16 network shares. It may seem like a lot, but when every department wants two or three of their own network drives and you as an administrator need to have access to all of them, you find yourself reaching Z quickly.

Bottom line, if we absolutly have to have drive letters, can we at least have a Windows that can make the drive it is installed on the C drive?

After reading this article from the New York Times, I now believe that TV as we know it is about to change dramatically. Already, internet TV is gaining ground, but even more so since the writer's strike began four months ago. Popular, prime-time, TV shows have been disrupted since the strike began, forcing most shows to cut their seasons short. Some shows, such as Fox's 24, have been delayed in defiantly. With nothing to fill the slots, the networks have been showing reruns and, in some instances, replacing the shows with some other show.

According to this article from CNBC, a deal has been struck and the strike is now ending. Of course, we've heard this before but hopefully this time it's true. Regardless, the damage has been done. The studios are now in an uncomfortable position. They were already in a budget crunch before the strike, and now they will do what they have to in order to keep making money

What does this mean for us as viewers? A near-complete takeover by sitcoms and reality shows. Since they are much cheaper to produce, the studios will likely end the prime-time shows we all know and love over a period of time in favor of less expensive programming. This would ruin Hollywood as we know it, as actors would only be needed for movies, and would inadvertently put many writers out of a job, in an already competitive job market. It would also further independent programming found on the Internet. The transition from TV to Internet will eventually happen, but the writer's strike may have just accelerated this transition.

Site is finally online. This blog will contain my experiences with different things in life, mostly tech related. So stay tuned, as I'm sure someone, somewhere, will find something useful here.