Hero Inc.

Lately I’ve been hearing many rumors concerning an Arrested Development. These rumors range from it is almost here to Will Farrell will finance the whole movie (I highly doubt this last one).

For those that don’t know, Arrested Development is one of the greatest comedy TV shows of all time. It only lasted 3 seasons on Fox. It gained unbelievable reviews, but no one watched. I even remember seeing a few minutes of a show and stating this show rocks, but then not watching it. All of that changed a year ago for me when a co-worker told me I should check the show out because I might like it. Well, I liked it too much. I can’t even begin to explain all of the looks I received on flights while watching the show. I don’t know of any other show that made me laugh out loud like that. And when I came to the final show of the series, it was picture perfect. Everything was rolled together nicely and it ended. The only thing I was left wanting were more episodes.

However, a movie is not what I want. I just don’t think this show can survive a movie format. One blog listed 8 things that were necessary to relive the greatness of the show. I agreed on all of the items, but I would much rather have more episodes and seasons than a movie. The movie would probably gain mediocre reviews that mention how it can’t relive the TV show and no one will see the movie. Then the TV show will never return because the movie failed.

Just give me more of the Bluths. They just make my family look perfect and help me get through this cruel mixed up world. Man I miss that show. I might start watching the seasons again soon.  Where’s “Final Countdown” when I need it?

Great little image I wanted to share after seeing it on digg.

computer at risk

NTFS file system is Windows based and not for Linux. However, I had an extra internal hard drive that housed my media that would need to be read by Linux. The first thing would be to mount this new hard drive so that Linux knew that it existed.

From the konsole, I used the following command to mount the hard drive:

mount -t ntfs /dev/[LOCATION] /mnt/[HD_NAME]

This worked perfectly, but I still had two issues.

1. The drive was not mounted after restart
2. The drive was read only

To fix the first problem, I had to modify the fstab file located under /etc. Add a line similar to the following to allow the drive to always mount on startup:

/dev/hdb1 /[LOCATION_TO_MOUNT] ntfs-3g defaults,sync,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

NTFS support does not usually come with Linux oob, but you can download a simple program to take care of this. ntfs-config will allow write priveleges through Linux. Additional configurations may also be needed, but this should get you 90% of the way to writing to an ntfs formatted drive.

UPDATED 02/26/2008: Use optional parameter text above instead of the strikethrough that was previously used in the post. Thanks Stuart for the suggestion.

I had the chance last night to go see Be Kind Rewind with a few friends. I was looking forward to this movie due to Mos Def and the fact that I enjoyed the visuals of Eternal Sunshine so much.

Be Kind Rewind is basically the story of two guys who erase all of the tapes in their rental store by mistake. In order to keep the business alive, they create their own versions and sell those. The movies slowly become popular in the town and suddenly everyone wants to be a part of the movie making scene. At the end of this movie, I was really reminded how much fun movies should be. I believe most of us have created mini movies with friends, if not for fun then at least for a school project. This movie goes to show that you can make funny, interesting movies with minimal effects. I sometimes believe that special effects can get in the way of true movie magic and creativity (see Star Wars for good and bad samples).

Overall the movie was a funny and entertaining experience. Most people might wait for DVD and that’s fine, but still make sure you see this movie. The trailer does not even come close to showing all of the best parts.

[rating:3]

Well, well, it looks like I’ve returned again. Hopefully this new WordPress system will allow me to post quickly and often. Also, I’ve created a new blog (A Penguin And Me) which I should keep updated as well since it is a journal of my Linux experience.

Yes, I know we have all heard this “back” talk before. Many times actually. Oh well, this time I felt like there were things I could say and I was tired of paying the money for my site and it just sitting there.

When first moving to Linux, first things first. I need a distro to use.

There are many popular versions available currently. The popular choices are Ubuntu, openSUSE, Red Hat, and many others (DistroWatch contains a huge list of types). I actually tried Mandrake previously on an old machine I had (probably 2 years ago and that only lasted for a week before I got bored/aggravated). The most popular currently seems to be Ubuntu due to its ease of use and brown coloring (maybe not so much that second reason).

Before I installed the current distro I am using, I tried Red Hat Fedora 8 for a week. It seemed very business oriented and didn’t work with my wireless card oob (out of the box). That was irritating and I didn’t have the time to truly troubleshoot it so Red Hat was a bust for me. I did some searching and found that the old Mandrake I had used before had been renamed Mandriva. From the website, it looked like many improvements had been made. My choice was now down to Ubuntu and Mandriva. I’m not a fan of what’s popular most of the time and I had prior experience with Mandriva so I decided to give Mandriva another shot. I tried the live CD for a few days and decided this would be it for me. I ran the install and it seemed that 90% of my hardware worked out of the box with this distro. For those interested, my current machine is a Dell Dimension 4500. The only thing not currently working is my TV Tuner, but that just needs my time and attention to work (it is currently supported).

Mandriva runs the KDE environment by default. GNOME is my other option, but I’ve always liked KDE (seems to be like Windows which eases my transition as a user). Now that I’m installed and set, it is time to play around and learn Mandriva Linux.