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It is appropriate to introduce the mascots representing the UEFA Euro 2008 tournament due to start in a week’s time. The twins Trix and Flix had their names selected by an Internet vote and are attired in red and white kit to represent the host countries Austria and Switzerland.

The numbers 20 and 08 on their jerseys spell out the year in which the championship takes place. The twins are supposed to represent the values and characteristics of a true team: one is serious and self-controlled, the other more rebellious and creative.

Not content with playing with a 32-panelled orb, the twins have found time to record the official hymn of the tournament with no one other than Shaggy.

Like a superstar is an electro-funk track featuring the unmistakable Jamaican accent of the reggae artist. Watch it on YouTube.

Trix and Flix are probably doing backing vocals, thinking It wasn’t me…

My recent exploits with the combination Linux and graphics drivers have been disastrous to say the least. Fedora 9 on katana is in an absolute state of disrepair. No Compiz for starters and no window title bars. Basically a system that is hell to work with. I know: the upgrade from F8 was my own doing.

On G2S, I’ve had no joy with Mandriva 2008.1. There, the nVIDIA driver is in no mood to load either. Compilation into the kernel fails because of various dependency issues. I cannot iron them out. I don’t want to try anymore.

Currently, I’m in the process of getting down the 2008.1 Mandriva PowerPack that will hopefully bundle everything I need. In the meantime, some relief may be at hand from another source: hot off the press is the announcement of a new Linux driver from nVIDIA. The version is 173.14.05.

I haven’t tried it out yet, just downloaded the 19MB installer. Most exciting are the following comments in the feature list:

• Added preliminary support for X.Org server 1.5
• Restored compatibility with recent Linux 2.6 kernels

As important as those two are to everyone considering a newly released distro, they appear rather far down the list…

Will it be possible for me to resurrect katana and make F9 work the way it should? Stay tuned to find out…

Jooce is another online desktop or Web OS you may want to investigate if you frequently spend time on the road or are forced to use a shared computer. Flash-based, Jooce is very fast and runs in a standard browser. Registration is presently free. The cartoon-look is everywhere on the website and is quite pleasing to the eye. Before commencing with a quick look at Jooce be aware that saving anything online is risky. Of course, most everyone has a GMail account, so three-quarters of our lives are already available to virtually anyone online. Once important documents are stored on a web-based OS though, the chance of compromising important data increases. Corporates may not like the idea of their employees storing sensitive information in this way. Even more important: Jooce does not utilize https for the connection to the backend. That is advantageous for speedy access but less so for overall security.

The sign-up process is speedy and uncomplicated. Enter a user name and password and an email address.

There is no verification of the email address, so the sign-up is quickly completed. Enter your credentials to log on to the personalized desktop. Jooce supports a variety of IM clients (AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo) with the exception of GTalk. The application requests details for your IM accounts and sets them up automatically. That’s it: a clean desktop with the obligatory trashcan awaits:

The icons may be moved around and a custom desktop background selected. Create new folders and upload documents. Multiple windows? No problem:

Right-click on the desktop to perform common functions. It’s all very much everything one is accustomed to on a dedicated desktop.

To work with a file, Jooce relies on local applications. In other words, the format of the file determines which application on the client system is required to open it. Provided the system one is using has the necessary applications installed, there should be no problem. Download and open with the integrated browser’s download manager and get to work.

It’s very important to remember to save the file back to Jooce. The copy one is working on is not synchronized back to Jooce automatically. Forgetting to save a local copy, editing it and then saving it back to the web OS desktop is required. Even worse than leaving sensitive documents on the web, you could now start strewing sensitive documents onto shared machines the world over! The convenience of having access to the required content is probably the most important benefit. Tools like Jooce provide alternate means for us to access our data. How we choose to use these tools is entirely up to us.

Hopefully future versions of Jooce will include better integration with Google’s suite of applications. It would be great to have direct integration to Google Docs to edit directly online without having to rely on local storage, for example.

A command many of us have issued.

As usual without thorough consideration of the long-term consequences

Click on the image for a better view.

We had a great time recently building the Technic Ferrari F1 racer. The overall build time was spread over a period of a week, probably totaling five or so hours of construction. The result is well worth the effort:

The suspension works perfectly even though I had my doubts during the construction. It’s a heavy model that is the size of a 1:10 scale remote control car.

Today, I was fortunate enough to spot the 1:10 scale 599 GTB Fiorano prominently displayed in the window of the local CNA.

This set currently retails for about USD 110 on the online Lego shop. I would have been unable to resist even at that price – the price of ZAR 499 made this purchase a no-brainer. If you have an interest in this one, I suggest you seek out your closest CNA to check availability.

It’s a similarly complex build to the F1 model. The display-worthy model features moving cylinders in the engine block, functional steering and opening doors.

A great addition to the 1:10 scale Technic collection and another week of building

The mechanical hard drive is just about extinct. With prices of flash memory falling and capacities increasing, notebooks will soon be a lot lighter and thinner, a la Apple. They’ll consume less power too and be far less prone to damage from accidental bumps and drops. Samsung has just taken the capacity of the humble solid state drive (SSD) to new heights. 256GB fit onto the shiny rectangle, measuring 10cm by 7cm and less than 1cm thick.

Of course, low power consumption and crash-resistance are just part of the deal. It’s in the performance department that this SSD really shines: it has a sequential read speed of 200MB per second and sequential write speed of 160MB per second. That makes the solid state device more than twice as fast as a conventional hard drive. Current prices make this technology prohibitive for mass consumption at present. Give it a year or even less and it is likely that SSD’s with even greater capacity will find their way into most new computers.

The Bond franchise is ticking steadily and constantly reinvented to capture new fans. The upcoming Bond movie presently being produced in Europe bears the title Quantum of Solace and is based on a short story by Ian Fleming.

Of course, Bond existed first on paper, not on celluloid. Since Fleming’s death, a number of authors have attempted to recapture the magic of the original novels. Often with little success. The latest in line is Sebastian Faulks. The new novel launched in the UK this week is Devil may care and is inserted into Fleming’s original continuity following on to The Man with the Golden Gun. That puts it somewhere in the year 1967 and the Cold War, a great place to be for any spy…

I had little regard for Gardner’s books and, based on my opinion of those, have little hope that anyone other than Fleming can ever pen a real Bond novel again. Maybe Faulks will be able to capture the original feel of the character and his world. This is the first time that a new novel will be inserted into the original timeline of the character, which is a positive.

Of course, Penguin Books is salivating at the though of capturing ardent readers and selling an entire set including the latest novel to fanboys. Penguin 007 is the new imprint launched by the publisher that will once again provide a full set of Bond novels with new cover art to collectors.

Quite some time ago, really. NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft landed in the northern polar region of Mars roughly 15 hours ago and will spend the next three months or so on that planet to scout about for traces of frozen water.

With radio signals taking more than 15 minutes to reach earth, this little dude is really on his own! Most interesting is the use of Twitter by the project team at the University of Arizona and NASA. Follow the progress of the Phoenix on Mars at its very own Twitter page – currently a world record for the most remote entity to utilize such a web service. All the project team must hope for is that the Phoenix survives the three months. The earth-boundTwitter has already crashed…

The official mission page is here.

My usual euphoria at running Linux on any machine I can lay my hands on has been radically diminished. To start off, this is probably my own fault and the fault of those like me. Let me explain: as geeks and fanboys, we are constantly thriving to run the latest and greatest. If a new distribution is made available, we can’t wait to download the ISO, burn it to a disc and install. Then, we start fiddling to make things that worked properly before work yet again. I am constantly amazed at the support the community offers. I am constantly gobsmacked by the hard work developers put in to advance the software technology in the operating system and the features it provides. But, at the same time I am disappointed that very few things that matter run out of the box. Primarily, my disappointment is directed at the release of new kernels that have no support for existing graphics card drivers. If there were thousands to choose from, I could understand the problem developers would face. But there are really only three. Of those, Intel has open-sourced their driver. That leaves nVIDIA and ATI. Why then must an upgrade from Mandriva 2008.0 to 2008.1 break the dependency of the kernel to the driver for both ATI and nVIDIA? Surely someone has tested that the upgraded operating system will function? Surely it can’t be too much to ask that a bit of quality assurance is done?

Then, there’s the inclusion of software that has no chance of working because core components haven’t been finalized. I’m directing this one at the Fedora team. Why on earth would any project team choose to include an XServer for which no proper drivers exist yet? Why make something available that cannot work in the mode I am accustomed? Yes, I don’t need Compiz and its fancy effects. But I like them. They worked in Fedora 8. Why should Fedora 9 be a downgrade from a usability and eye candy perspective? An upgrade has me struggling with windows that have no main title bar and cannot be moved. Can I fix the issue? Probably. But I don’t want to spend hours fiddling to get things back to the way they were. I want the damned thing to work. I spent uncounted hours over the weekend to try to get the nVIDIA driver working in Mandriva 2008.1. It works with the power pack. I can’t get it to work by hand because there are kernel-dev dependencies, X11 dependencies and goodness knows what else. It’s just too much effort to regain the status quo.

Why ship Firefox in its beta release, Fedora and Ubuntu teams? It is the latest and greatest. But it’s not proven and not released. Why foist it on unsuspecting end users?

So the long and the short of this rant is the following: unless distros make an effort to get the basics to work easily and stop providing experimental software, there is no way Tux will find his way onto desktops the world over. There is no chance penguin will compete with commercial offerings unless the overall package is functional. That means shipping something no quite on the cutting edge, but in a working state. Provide bleeding edge software in special experimental packages and distros, clearly marked. I understand this stuff is free and it’s a question of choice. I consider myself technically savvy enough to make, yum, yast, urpmi,  gcc and rpm at will. Unfortunately, not many computer users have the interest in gaining those abilities. I cannot blame them.

Make sure the choice stays Linux and that there is no reason to veer away to the dark side!

Old bats is certainly in the spotlight over the coming few months. Of course, the highlight is the Dark Knight movie to be released at the end of July. Never shy to cash in on their franchise, the good folks at DC have ensured fans have something to chew on while waiting for the motion picture.

Batman R.I.P is the rather ominous comic book storyline that is set to kick off in issue #676 of Batman and continues all the way through to the movie’s release.

For the full detail of which issues contain the storyline, refer to this PDF. My hope is that this doesn’t turn into the unmitigated disaster Superman had to endure during his brief death a few years ago. Artwork on the covers by Alex Ross. That’s good. Readers to judge the content and value of the story, I guess. The tagline: Who will live? Who will die? Who will be Batman? The answers are sure to shock you in “Batman R.I.P.

Yes, there is a new Batmobile in the opening issue of R.I.P.

But, stories of Batman’s impending doom are probably far from the truth. You simply can’t kick a brand like this in the teeth. For those with a love of those shiny Danish plastic bricks there’s the promised release of the ‘Tumbler‘ Batmobile as seen in the last movie and to re-appear in The Dark Knight.

More than likely, the products to be brought to market by Lego in June will include some other highlights featured in the bat universe.

Whatever the outcome of Batman R.I.P., the Batman is sure to live to fight another day.