I am using a Mac, so I got a .dmg installer. After a very quick and easy install step, the Google Music Manager shows up in my System Preferences Pane, when I open it, it shows something like this.

You can either select your iTunes library or give it your default Music folder or specify which folders to look through. There are advanced settings that let you throttle upload speed, and the frequency of  synchronization etc. I found that when I have it on unlimited speed it tended to eat up my upload bandwidth.

To be honest, I found the uploads a little on the slow side, despite the fact that it ate up my bandwith, it seemed to take forever to upload songs, and if you’re like me you’ve got a rather large music collection you want to upload (here I’m just giving it a part of my music that I listen to most frequently). Finally comes the player:

The music player opens exclusively in your browser, there is no application on the desktop for it, but I guess that is kind of the point of all this. It’s very fast, smooth, easy as hell to use. It also has no advertising (ala Grooveshark), however it seems that Google Music is not going to be free forever, it stated that this is a limited free beta, so eventually I am going to have to pay to stream my music. Another positive thing is that its not using any flash, it’s all pure HTML5 and CSS based, meaning that iPhones and Blackberry phones can open this via their browsers and stream too! They do of course offer an Android app which I have not tried.

So overall, it’s looking like a great product for it being in a beta stage, the design in terms of the diagonal lines etc, I’m not too fond it, I do believe at one point you will be able to sort of customize it like Gmail etc. Hope you enjoyed the screenshots, let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Xbox Live + Kinect

Microsoft wants to bring Skype to its Xbox Live network using the very popular Kinect system. Now you’ll be able to skype with relatives and loved ones using Kinect in your living room and theirs, this will seemingly change the way we skype with our loved ones. I think this is exactly what is needed, bringing Skype to the living room.

Windows Phone 7

The new Windows phone platform is new, and growing but has no huge market share like Android and the iPhone does. You already have video communication services on those platforms, be it Skype, or FaceTime. The only one missing some kind of Video Chat is Blackberry and Windows Phone, and so it has been already announced that with the aquisition, Skype will come to the Windows Phone, also Windows Phone will likely get the latest updates faster than the App Store and Android Marketplace, bringing more value to the Windows Phone.

Office Communicator + Live Messenger

Windows still continues to dominate the corporate market, and they can see that the use of telecommuting and video teleconferencing is on the rise as bandwidth continually gets cheaper, faster and fuel costs continue to increase. They will be implementing Skype into their own products such as Office Communicator and other consumer services like Live Messenger as they seem to have lost popularity in recent times.

Are there any other services Microsoft offers that you think they could make use of Skype in? Please let a comment below with your thoughts.

Installation

The first problem you might realise is that your netbook has no CD/DVD drive to install from. For this part of the process you will undoubtedly need, a USB thumb drive and another machine (or use the WinXP system currently running on the MSI Wind).

You need to get a program called UNetbootin, install it and then run the software, connect your USB thumb drive and select the Linux Distrobution and version that you want to install.

In my case it was

• OS Type: Fedora
• OS Version: 10_NetInstall

My thumbdrive was only 512MB so I opted for the NetInstall, this simply means that the installer will download the packages off the net and install them to your FC operating system. It is not the fastest way to install, but it sure works. Now the first time I did this I made the mistake of using UNetbootin’s advise of using the fedora.redhat.com install image, however for better speed (and possibly no bandwidth usage at your ISP) try to see if your ISP hosts a FC10 install image and packages. Most ISP’s do and you will find it downloads a lot quicker and does not go towards your monthly bandwidth usage, depending on the packages you select this can be upwards of 5GB!

Now the UNetbootin software will download the NetInstall image onto your USB drive. They tell you to clear out your USB drive and make you assume that it will be reformatted, however I realised that it is not the case, it simply adds the installation kernel to your USB drive.

So once you’ve done that, remove the USB drive and put it in your MSI Wind and boot up the netbook…

You may need to press F11 for bootup options incase it doesn’t start booting up the Linux installer. Now at some stage in the installer you will be asked for the installation medium, this is either CD/DVD, Network, or URL. You will be using the URL option. UNetbootin gave you a URL earlier to use for the installation medium, however as I said it’s better to check if your ISP has the installation images. If they don’t, then at least try to find an ISP close to your location or country that has it. You can find the more known list of FC10 mirros here.

A little confusing thing here is that you can ommit the /images/install.img from your URL as FC10 installer picks this up on its own, putting it in will give you an error saying <install-URL>/images/install.img/images/install.img was not found… So for an example if you are using BigPond, use:

http://ga14.files.bigpond.com:4040/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/

On to package selection, I advise you stick with the standard default and customise later, I got all giddy and started selecting and customising my packages, this not only made installation slower as it had to fetch a lot more packages, but the installation actually failed when it was unable to fetch a certain package and I had to start over. So take my advise and go for default, once your netbook is set up you have all the time to sit and play around with package management.

Next > Next > Next etc. You know how it goes…

Install Updates

Now your FC10 is up and running, you will need an ethernet connection at the start just to run the initial updates. We will install your wireless card drivers soon. So, simply open up your Terminal.

[carl@wind ~]$ su Password: [root@wind carl]#

Now that you are root, install some nifty yum repositories for your OS updates.

Livna

This is a very good repo to have, usually a lot of fixes, updates and extras can be found at Livna. To install it type:

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm

RPM Fusion

Another very good repo here with a lot of extras, this is a very popular repo for Fedora and RedHat derivatives in general, installation below:

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

So now you have some nice repositories added to your system, you can begin the upgrade, but just before that, you can take a look to see where the repo’s are and how to enable/disable them. This is important as sometimes a repo may be unavailable and will cause yum to fail on you..

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/

ls -la

This will show you a list of all your yum repositories. You can edit the files and check for the enabled=1 or enabled=0 to see if it is active or not, this is what you need to change to enable/disable the repo if it is giving you problems.

There are many kinds of repos you can install, however it is wise to ommit rawhide and testing repos and their packages tend to be quite unstable. For the sake of this update, enable:

fedora.repo

fedora-updates.repo

livna.repo

rpmfusion-free.repo

rpmfusion-free-updates.repo

Running yum

simply,

yum update

This will take a while so go do something while it downloads and installs the updates, note that it is likely that your kernel will be updated too.

Wireless

Now that Fc10 is installed and updated to the latest version possible, you will quickly notice that wireless networking is not enabled on your netbook, which sorta sucks because a netbook without the net is pretty much a book, and thats pretty useless in this day and age. The RPM fusion repos we added earlier have the answer and so you simply need to install the wireless card drivers:

yum install kmod-rt2860

Then reboot and you will notice that your NetworkManager now has an ‘Enable Wireless’ option next to it. For most of you, this will be the end of the tute, however I will go into some specific fixes I had to do to get everything I wanted working…

UTS Wireless

That’s right, my university’s wireless network has no support for linux (or so they say). This basically took me a few days to get around and I came very close to giving up altogether and going back to the horrible XP, however I prevailed and am a happy fedora user.

The first thing you will notice is that you can connect to the UTS WIRELESS connection that shows up when your on campus, then whenever you browse to a website you will be redirected to something like: https://wireless.net.uts.edu.au/ and will be asked for a login (UTS student ID and password).

The next page will say “Loading Network Connect…” this will take forever and finally your Firefox will crash.

The problem it turns out is the fact that Fedora uses an open source implementation of Java called OpenJDK, this unfortunately does not work as well as the real J2RE and will crash a lot.

You can test the java version your browser is using by going to http://javatester.org/version.html

You will need to go to http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp and download the latest version (at the time of writing this, it is update 12).

Download the .rpm.bin version and extract the rpm by doing:

sh jre-6u12-linux-i586-rpm.bin

This will extract the rpm, now install it

rpm -Uvh jre-6u12-linux-i586.rpm

So the latest real (Sun) Java is installed, but you need to tell the system about it:

/usr/sbin/alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/bin/java 1612

And now you need to select it as the default java to be used:

/usr/sbin/alternatives –config java

There are 2 programs which provide ‘java’.

Selection           Command

———————————————————————————–

+ 1                        /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.6.0-openjdk/bin/java

2                            /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/bin/java

Enter to keep the current selection [+], or type selection number:

Once you have done this the last step is to get Mozilla to use the real Java plugin and not the horrible IcedTea implementation

/usr/sbin/alternatives –install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so 1612

This will install the real Java browser plugin, and to active it:

alternatives –config libjavaplugin.so

There are 2 programs which provide ‘libjavaplugin.so’.

Selection             Command

———————————————————————————–

+ 1                         /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.6.0-openjdk/lib/i386/IcedTeaPlugin.so

2                             /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Enter to keep the current selection [+], or type selection number:

So enter 2 to change to use the real java plugin.

Now that everything is set up correctly. You need to start Firefox in safemode, to do this either create a shortcut for this or launch from Terminal:

firefox %u -safe-mode

Then go to https://wireless.net.uts.edu.au/ and login with student ID and password.

Once you have done this you will see the Network Connect working properly, however it runs for a split second and then quits. We’re almost there! Now if you look in your home directory /home/username/ you will notice subdirectories called .juniper_networks/network_connect/, now what you need to do is

cd ~/.juniper_networks/network_connect/

There should be a number of files in there

The ones you will need to get this working are ncdiag and installNC.sh

./ncdiag

will run a diagnostics test for your Network Connect installation, now I saw that it did not install properly.

What you need to do is

chmod +x installNC.sh

./installNC.sh

This will actually install the Network Connect software, then run firefox in safe mode again, login and it should pop up with the Network Connect window and your on your way, happy surfing!

Bluetooth Travel Mouse

Another problem I found was my V270 Bluetooth Travel Mouse would basically need to be re-set up each time I booted up. Basically what happens is you click on your Bluetooth Icon > setup new device… > then when your done, reboot and try to use the mouse, nothing. Then when you repeat the above steps you get Bluetooth Pairing Failed.

To fix this yo u need to do the following things:

cat /var/lib/bluetooth/*/lastseen | cut -c 1-17

00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

This is to see your mouse’s bluetooth address. Save this address somewhere.

To connect simply do:

hidd –connect 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

Now we need a linkkey to pair the bluetooth mouse to the netbook, you can enter any value, I have used random numbers:

echo 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 64917050156063818749852764598064063 >> /var/lib/bluetooth/*/linkkeys

The number can be anything random, so don’t worry too much about it.

The last part is fixing a handshake issue with linux’s bluetooth stack (BlueZ)

vi /etc/init.d/bluetooth

start()

{

echo -n $”Starting Bluetooth services:”

daemon /usr/sbin/bluetoothd

RETVAL=$?

[ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/bluetoothd

[ "$HID2HCI_ENABLE" = "true" ] && hid2hci –tohci > /dev/null 2>&1 || :

touch /var/lock/subsys/bluetooth

echo “”

sleep 1 && hciconfig hci0 reset

return $RETVAL

}

You need to add the line in bold to the file, this will reset the pairing so that you can use the bluetooth mouse on other devices as well. I share the mouse between my HP laptop and MSI Wind netbook and find this very useful.

In order for Windows not to ask for another linkkey you can write it to the mouse itself by doing:

hciconfig hci0 putkey 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:X

This should do the trick and your bluetooth mouse will work perfectly now.

Now I’ll admit not all these ideas are my own and I had to do a lot of research into getting everything working perfectly, but this is a compilation of everything I had to do to get my MSI Wind and Fedora 10 to play nice.  I will reference the blogs used below as they deserve the credit.

• http://www.ryanduff.net/2009/01/25/fedora-10-on-msi-wind-with-wireless/
• http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f9-tips.php
• http://www.kirpininyeri.com/2009/01/bluetooth-mouse-on-linux/

So It’s no wonder why Linux hasn’t become very mainstream yet, It took me a few installs, re-installs and a lot of searching and head banging to get my FC10 to work optimally. I hope this helped you in one way or another, please leave some feedback in the comments.

Firebug

This tools is mostly used for one thing by a System Administrator who is not concerned with any design elements of a website, to see how fast the website loads on the client. Some times clients will call and say that somethign is wrong with the server because their website is taking 25 seconds to load, well this little tool will show you each element being called from the webpage and how long it is taking to load. To use it, click on the icon that looks like a bug in the lower-right hand of your browser and click on All then click on Net.

So if some images are loading in 8ms and others are missing and holding up for a few seconds, or if there is some horrible JS doing something nasty, you’ll pretty much nail it down and point out to them that the server is not slow but it is infact their poorly designed website which just has way too much client-side elements loading. I’ve used this in the past and my clients simply loved me, they saw the screenshots I sent them and passed them on to their designers!

ShowIP

Now this little tool is what I was referring to before when I was speaking about being able to resolve issues quickly while over the phone and not wanting to take ages to do the smallest tasks. This little tool will show you the IP address of any webpage you are currently viewing. It will display in red on the bottom right corner. Not only that but if you left or right click it will give you a list of handy little tools at your finger tips. You can do a WHOIS lookup, traceroute, ip2country etc. This will save you a lot of time!

HeaderSpy

This one is similar to ShowIP, except it actually shows you the Server headers instead of the IP address and domain information. In fact having both is the best as you get all the info you need right there and then. A right-click will also open up some more options for further investigating. Now how is this useful you might ask? Well first of all it gives  you a quick glimpse as to what OS this system is using, and any sort of modules that may be installed. The example below is of my server, which simply shows the Apache version and the OS distro name. If you use this while viewing a site on a windows machine it will say something like Microsoft/IIS6.0.

IE Tab

Ever wanted to see what a webpage looked like in Internet Explorer without having to actually open Internet Explorer? That is what IE Tab does, it switches a specific tab to render a page with IE’s rendering engine, all within your firefox browser. Now in terms of support and system administration, the only time this is handy is to see if an SSL certificate is functioning correctly under Internet Explorer. When you install this plugin it will show you a little Firefox icon on the bottom right hand side, you click and it refreshes the page, rendering it in IE.

Screengrab!

This add-on will let you qickly take screenshots of webpages, it has a few options which let you simply copy or save the entire page or frame, the visible portion, or only what you have currently selected. You don’t need to sit and crop anything out of your screenshots any more, and you don’t need to sit and take a few screenshots and try to line them up together to get the complete page.

Tab Kit

Now this is the latest firefox extension I’ve installed and am pretty impressed with the results so far. I am a clutter bug, I open everything in tabs and end up with 20 or 30 tabs on my browser, arranging them so they make logical sense is not something easily done. This little tool colorizes your tabs so that tabs that link to each other have the same color, it even does tab grouping. There are a lot of options in this and I haven’t explored them all just yet. But I think it allows you to pretty much customise a lot of the aspects of tabs to help keep your stuff organised.

Anyway I think that about does it for now. First blog post in a while and just needed SOMETHING to write about. If you think you have some other Firefox extensions you use please leave a comment!

And at the end you see it all coming from a Coca-cola bottle, very smart and visually it looks brilliant

Why should a government of the same old men be in control of an industry which they do not fully understand? Their short term greed in keeping prices high and giving poor service has a negative impact on the country’s economic abilities. They do not get the fact that by allowing companies to establish new infrastructure and develop a proper IT industry, that other industries will also benefit from more business opportunities, the chump change they are making today is holding the entire country back from economic growth.

Unfortunately the RIAA has cracked down on Pandora’s licenses and a while ago, they were forced to stop letting you listen unless you lived in the US. Pandora played dumb and all you had to do was give them a US zip code in order to listen to music, I put 90210 not knowing any other valid US zip codes. Yesterday I received an email telling me that although I provided a valid US zip code, my IP address was traced to be from Australia, so now they are going to block me from listening.

Pandora was definitely forced into this, as a move like this is definitely going to hurt their rivalry over Last.fm, a competing internet radio site which brought social networking into it. Pandora answered this by developing similar features, however Pandora still tops it with their very intelligent rating system. Unfortunately a lot of people around the world are not going to be able to listen to their favorite internet radio site anymore due to shear US Government greediness in their pathetic fight against free music.

What the US fails to see is that internet radio was actually helping them eliminate pirated downloads, many people turned to Pandora for great music which they would listen to right from the site, and Pandora paid for the licenses to play the music. Now there is large retaliation against this move, and hopefully Pandora will be able to overcome this. In fact I think it is going to make them stronger, the same thing happened when ThePirateBay.org got shut down by the Swedish government, they moved their hosting to a country that does not have such tight laws, and that little blow they took gave them immense support by BitTorrent downloaders from all over the Internet, today they stand as one of the most popular BT sites in the world.

The way I see it, the internet is slowly but surely taking out industries that exploit their consumers and producers that overcharge for their products. However the industries that chose to embrace the internet and adapt to fit within it have not suffered at all. Do you see the NY Times banning blogging? No way. TIME magazine’s person of the year is “You.” depicting their appreciation for the new era coming in global news, this era is described as “We, the media” where the consumer is no longer just a passive reader but a commentator and even a producer of media.

The RIAA however has refused time and time again to adopt strategies to help their artists, record labels, and listeners and for this ignoranc, they have and will continue to lose heavily. Their first win was against Napster in the late 90′s, they won the battle but the war rages on, and the RIAA are now helpless to stop global music downloads. It is very evident in that now iTunes are considering removing DRM from their music and charging only monthly fees to their subscribers, Microsoft’s Zune is soon to follow suit. Eventually the corporate giants will have to bow down to the people, and I foresee a bright future for Pandora and Internet Radio if people keep on voicing their opinions and continue to act on them.

For the time being, if you are outside the US and wish to continue to listen to Pandora, you can try using some proxy servers in the US, through which you will be able to listen, or you can go through your listened to history and go off and find that music on torrents. If you do, have a listen to some of my stations visible on the right, I will not be taking them down even though I will no longer be able to listen to them for the time being.

I hope someone in the US finds a loophole where they can create open proxy servers which allow everyone to listen to Pandora through. Music is a part of life and no one should take away that freedom from us. Resistance is futile

It is common knowledge among web designers that IE sucks, basically it is one of the least W3C compliant browsers, and renders designs very poorly where other browsers (namely Firefox and Opera) do so splendidly. IE7 was supposed to be Microsoft’s answer to the thousands of designers’ rage, however it too has proven itself to be marginal in its improvements since version 6.

Firefox is a designers dream come true, and it is quickly eating up the browser market share from IE, due to its security, innovational and intuitive interface. However Firefox is a long way away from becoming the mainstream browser we all want it to be, and so until then, many designers still have to work very hard to make their websites cross-browser compatible.

I personally despise IE for the countless extra hours I have to put into my designs just to get it to work with IE6, I have to sit and tweak my CSS code for ages and have had to even scrap some designs altogether due to the fact that it just wouldn’t work properly in IE. Fortunately, many have come up with answers to IE’s infamous flaws, these are called IE Hacks.

SoldStateGroup.com have come up with teh ultimatewhitepaper for IE hacks that will let you modify your styles on a per-browser basis, allowing you to come up with the solution to making your site behave and look the same in all browsers, Firefox, IE7, IE6, Opera, Safari and others. Their white paper on CSS hacks and issues, is something no web designer should be without, it gives tips on creating cross-browser websites, fixing issues with IE6 rendering transparent PNG’s, and removing the dotted outlines from hyperlinks in Firefox — which is not without its issues, although very minor in comparison to the hideous monster IE is.

Here is a link to the IE hacks: http://www.solidstategroup.com/page/1592

Here is a link to a PDF document of the same hacks: http://www.solidstategroup.com/document/33

Now that paper is absolutely great for tweaking up an existing design to make it more cross-browser compatible, however if you are building a new design from scratch, I do recommend you visit this page: http://www.search-this.com/2007/03/12/no-margin-for-error/ — No Margin For Error, title says it all. It gives you a step-by-step guide to eliminating default styles from all browsers thus eliminating the problem right from the start.

Here’s a more recent one I’ve found: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/, you can use this to start any design with. It will reset all your stylesheets and you can go ahead and begin to create more defined CSS tags, this will work really well. It’s the simplest one and I haven’t tried it out myself, but it looks like it should be great.

I hope these documents will one day become obsolete when the W3C comes up with stricter standards for browser rendering, and all websites and browsers can co-exist in harmony.

Anyway It’s good to see Novell step in and take a jab at both of them with these neat parody adds… Not anyone can run Linux but still cool to see it out there. I’d say between the 3 there’s a good balance of pro’s and con’s each offer for different kinds of people. Mac’s are for people with no tech knowledge, and want to play with their iTunes and iMovie and all that gay crap. Windows is pretty much for everyone, can run anything you want on it, and do anything you want. Linux is for more tech savvy people and programmers and developers, it also runs servers a hell whole of a lot better and that’s why most servers around the world run it. Anyway here are the clips…

Mac, PC & Linux – Novell Commercial

Mac, PC & Linux – Novell Commercial #2

Shift Happens – Click Here for more great videos and pictures!