Nancy Pelosi was on Meet the Press today. She said we need to embrace natural gas as a cheap, abundant, and clean alternative to fossil fuels. What is up with this energy vision? She pounds her fist and proclaims, “I believe in natural gas.” This is crap. She name drops wind, solar, and biomass, but trumpets natural gas.

While natural gas does burn clean, we need someone pushing solar and wind. We need incentives to change our homes and our cars and the way we live!

Last point about MTP. After Pelosi lays out all this natural gas and other energy, Brokaw throws out under his breath, “Sounds like we’re going to have off shore drilling.” Pelosi fades out saying, “no no no” but not really refuting it. Weak.

I know everyone was dying to know if Warcraft 3 would actually play on a first generation EEE PC 701 with its 900Mhz Celeron processor.  I’m using Intrepid on my EEE and I upgraded the RAM to 1GB, but I bet it would start with 512MB.   Since I only have the 4 GB SSD, I had to install Warcraft to a 4 GB SD card.  The verdict:  It started up and I was able to navigate menus enough to start a campaign but it was unplayably slow even on a resolution of 640×480@16.

Anyone know if a newer Atom based netbook can rock this classic game?

Watch your Senatorial candidates answer the same questions in a youtube debate.

http://www.youtube.com/user/YouChoose08

My quick summary:

1. Energy

Al Franken - Oil companies have 68 million acres of land leases they are not drilling on.  He is against opening the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.  Crackdown on oil speculators as they are artificially inflating the price.  Release oil from the reserves to immediately bring down price to the consumer.  New drilling doesn’t reduce demand for years to come.  Reduce demand through efficiencies.

Norm Coleman - he spouts some thing about foreign dictators.  drill drill drill.  nuclear!  more drilling.  oil shale!  I hear nothing of renewables.  He almost says “sustainable” but catches himself.

2.  Industrial Midwestern Jobs

Al Franken - Rights to organize.  Universal health care.  Tax credits for higher fuel efficiency.  Invest in R & D in renewables.  Let’s build wind turbines and plug in hybrids.

Norm Coleman - The world is flat.  Compete by lowering corporate taxes.  Lower input costs of energy.  Drill Drill Drill.  Health care bill to pool together.  This is where he says wind energy and solar oddly.  Medical technology.

3.  Increase voter participation

Al Franken - Vote on the weekend.  Instant runoff voting.  Same-day registration, which MN has.  Paper trails.  Campaign finance reform to take out influence of large donors.  Put more government records online.  Prevent former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists.

Norm Coleman - MN rules, butter people up.  He worked with Youth Vote, whatever that is.  Keep voting days on Tuesday.  He says something about things to make it easier, but doesn’t detail them.

4.  Employee Free Choice Act

Al Franken - He’s a member of 4 unions and supports them.  The battle of management vs. labor has been tilted toward management.  He supports the Employee Free Choice Act.

Norm Coleman - He is a strong believer in collective bargaining.  He says Employee Free Choice Act takes away secret ballot process to becoming a certified union.

Background on Employee Free Choice Act: Under the EFCA, an employer would no longer have the opportunity to demand a secret ballot election when a majority of employees have signed union cards and there is no evidence of illegal coercion.  Norm Coleman makes this seem like a bad thing for workers, but he doesn’t address the practice of companies firing workers on the grounds of organizing.

5. Personality question?

This is stupid, so I’m not addressing it.  We vote people to legislate, not to hang out with on the weekends.

While I’m not a huge fan of closed source flash, I do appreciate updates that make my browser more stable again.  Key things from changelog (thanks penguin.swf)

• Software fullscreen performance is vastly improved
• Important stability fixes (fewer crashes)

How to install it:

1. close firefox
2. wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
3. tar xvfz flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
4. sudo cp ./install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/
5. open firefox and rock out as last.fm’s streaming player works again

I know some may say linux sucks cause this is so complex, but I just write it like this so everyone can copy/paste. In essence, we’re simply plopping libflashplayer.so into the right place.

or How to Set Up Bridged Networking in VirtualBox

I use Windows XP to connect to work sometimes.  Using the Default VirtualBox 1.6.2 installation on Ubuntu 8.04, you’re unable to connect to a Microsoft VPN server.  I’ve found out that this is because virtual machines in VirtualBox are, by default, behind a NAT that converts GRE packets into IP packets.  One way around this is to not use a NAT, but to use bridged networking.  Now with VMWare and Parallels and all other virtualization software, this is a simple checkbox in the GUI.  For VirtualBox, it’s a little bit more work to set up, but it’s just as functional in the end.

1.  First we create an virtual network interface (vbox0)

sudo VBoxAddIF vbox0 username

*where username is your actual username

2. Open a Run Dialog <alt+f2> and type “gksudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces”
Edit the file to look as follows:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
up ifconfig $IFACE 0.0.0.0 up
up ip link set $IFACE promisc on
down ip link set $IFACE promisc off
down ifconfig $IFACE down

auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0 vbox0

*Promiscuous mode ensures that all traffic passed on the bridge is accessible.  The second part sets up the bridge.

3. Open a Run Dialog <alt+f2> and type “gksudo gedit /etc/vbox/interfaces”
Add a line:

vbox0 wilsdx [br0]

This will add the virtual interface you created to the br0 bridge. You might only need to add the [br0] part, as the previous command will add the interface and your username.

4. Restart your network interfaces:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

5. Set VirtualBox to use “host interface” and type vbox0 as the interfaces name.

6. Lastly, change some permissions on the virtual interface

sudo chmod 0666 /dev/net/tun

Credits to this forum post

Issues:

1: This setup breaks Network Manager’s ability to connect mentioned PPTP VPN server.  So it’s pick or choose.  Access through virtual machine or access through Linux.  It’s rather cumbersome to switch back and forth.  I’ll see if I can remedy this soon.