a good Gnome theme

Today I bumped into a great Gnome theme called "newbuntu" while i was aimlessly searching the web and went into the artwork section of the Linux Mint website. Unlike most dark theme, this one combines perfectly Ubuntu's default Human theme and some dark colours for task bars and menu bars. Menus are black and half transparent, which adds a sense of elegance to the overall feeling. The best thing about this theme is the black & white contrast doesn't hurt eyes at all; they are combined, as I said before, perfectly.

I strongly recommend this theme to those who use Gnome as their desktop environment. It couldn't be better! This theme can be downloaded here:
http://www.linuxmint-art.org/content/show.php/Newbuntu+?content=113221.

For better overall effect, there's the twitter wallpaper I'm using:
http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/twitter-wallpaper.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/nice-twitter-wallpaper/&h=300&w=480&sz=31&tbnid=MifjmIAvCqlaOM:&tbnh=81&tbnw=129&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dtwitter%2Bwallpaper&usg=__-e7hGUmLJj4ThMSyoWAKFPdVCC0=&ei=ck_LSteAJoTasgObu9SOAQ&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=5&ct=image

By the way, if you enable some 3D effects from Compiz Fusion, with the theme and wallpaper I provided above, your system will look just... magnificent.

New World

Half the holiday has passed but I still haven't started doing the 3000-word essay and the programming project. I don't know what makes me keep procrastinating, but I just keep doing that. Whatever, I decided to wipe out everything on my hard drive and install only Ubuntu on it. This seems a great fresh academic start. Yeah, it does.

Having gone through the normal installation process, I followed two articles on Ubuntu configuration. They are,

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Gutsy#How_to_get_Mouse_over
_preview_of_MP3_files_working

and

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Edgy

The reason why I used the second reference which is an out-dated version of Ubuntu is that it's more detailed than the first one and most of the tricks still work on the lasted distribution. I've been through heaps of configs, but I just want to note some of them which I reckon are worth noting.
I followed a post to get all my hardware up and running last time I installed Ubuntu 7.10. So I scouted it out again at http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=107505. Two tricks in this post helped me a lot. One is how I can get rid of the black screen when I use Alt+Fx to switch to console screen. The way is to change the parameters 'splash quiet' in grub config file into 'verbose'. As you can see, this sacrifices the great boot screen, so i reckon sooner or later I'll solve it in a perfect way. The other thing valuable to me in this post is how to set my Ati x1700 graphic card up. It'll be a piece of cake when you follow the easy steps described in there.

When I was installing mplayer and another user application whatever the name is, I got an error message from apt-get:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
mplayer: Depends: libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.18.3) but 1.18.2-0ubuntu1 is to be installed
E: Broken packages

What confused me was that i've got a newer version of libpango(which is 1.18.2-0ubuntul here) but but it didn't work and did require the older one. Well, this wasn't just for mplayer. Wtf, what's the point of having a newer version of libpango? I didn't bother downgrading the package because I didn't know how to do it. I googled it and found someone resolved the problem by directly installing the specified version after finding out that he couldn't remove the current package. Okay, why not give it a try? I downloaded 3 deb files and installed them but it was fucked up when I installed the .dev package for libpango. However, the other two files were installed successfully. I tried installing mplayer again, this time I got a massive output which made me feel really shitty. Okay, I aimlessly opened Synaptic Package Manager and it popped up a window saying that there was a broken package on my system(must be libpango). Then I located it and removed it without any difficulty. Excited, I visited apt-get again and this time it didn't complain anything and mplayer install is ongoing while I'm logging this. So in conclusion, don't take everything in other dudes' posts for granted because you have different system setup and things may differ when running on two different operating systems.

And at last, here's the instructions on how to install mplayer and the corresponding codecs:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/install-mplayer-and-multimedia-codecs
-libdvdcss2w32codecs-in-ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibbon.html

However, this doesn't work with .rmvb files. Last time I installed Ubuntu, I tried all the possible packages to make it working with .rmvb files but I forgot to wirte it down. But right now, I can't be bothered to scout it out, since I don't have any new movies download at the moment. LOL!

This blog post looks a bit of mess. But...well, screw it! This is just for self reference.

60 Earth Hour, take part in it!

On March 31 2007, for one hour, Sydney made a powerful statement about the greatest contributor to global warming – coal-fired electricity – by turning off its lights. Over 2.2 million Sydney residents and over 2,100 businesses switched off, leading to a 10.2% energy reduction across the city. What began as one city taking a stand against global warming caught the attention of the world.

In 2008, 24 global cities will participate in Earth Hour at 8pm on March 29. Earth Hour is the highlight of a major campaign to encourage businesses, communities and individuals to take the simple steps needed to cut their emissions on an ongoing basis. It is about simple changes that will collectively make a difference – from businesses turning off their lights when their offices are empty, to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby.

Stay passionate! Stay awake!

I'm determined to use Java in ACM this year, so it's probably going to be tough for me because i have to learn a brand new programming language as well as doing heaps of bloddy assignments. Well, this could be called an appetizer since i haven't relaly done anything meaningful since i graduated from high school. And i really want this to resurrect myself and start doing what I always dreamed doing. By the way, it's nice to know Laurel, who is most probably going to be my co-worker or partner henceforth.

Stay Passionate! Stay awake! Stay creative! I think the criteron for becoming successful is that one ends up finding himself the kind of person he would like to be.

revelation

Many Chinese people are fucking weird!

about phil essay

Having wasted two weeks' time, now I'm getting to my philosophy essay. After tossing around a bit, I finally decided to focus on philosopher Berkeley's ontology.

But what I'm not sure about is whether Berkeley's idealism is right. His theory is an attack on materialism, and holds that all sensible things exist only in human minds - they are not corporeal substances. For example, heat and cold exist only when we feel them. They don't exist without our minds. Do you guys think it true or not? I agree with him, at least in this heat & cold case, because heat and cold are what we feel. I think there exists kind of relativity. For instance, what you feel cold in summer could make you feel warm or hot in winter. Yes, Berkeley did explain it using the relativity argument.

However, as for light and sound, I prefer the materialism theory as what we have learnt in physics in high school. Light is acutally a massive sequence of particles in the air. This is all that I can remember about light. And sound is the motion of air under some frequency (this is my own reflection, if there's any mistake, please help correct).

So don't know if I could split it up - going for the heat & cold argument and against the sound and light ones. But what would the ultimate opinion on Berkeley's ontology be? I think I should have a main topic, and analyze its fissiparous effects later on.

What do you guys think? Please feel free to put forward your opinions. That'd be more than appreciated!

A letter to The Age by someone

Prime Minister Jobn Howard's commitment to work towards a long-term aspirational goal for climate change continues to frustrate many concerned young people such as myself. We are the generation that will have to deal with the dangers that are to come if we do not act now on climate change. The science is changing every week - not for the better - and is increasingly telling us we need to do more immediately. Most of the science suggests that to fully prevent climate change catastrophe we must aim for zero carbon emissions by 2030 (www.beyondzeroemissions.org/). We cannot afford to the complacent, and long-term goals should start straight away. We want real policy action on climate change, not vague assurances nor contrived rhetoric. Please listen, Mr Howard and APEC political leaders, we are the future generation.

My comment on this:

In your dreams man! This is really stupid because as i said in my prevous log, APEC never makes decisions. What they can do at most is to make some agreements. At the moment, the Kyoto Protocol is one such agreement committing nations to take some 'baby' steps along the road to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But a post-such-agreement is desperately needed. I think that's what this man wants because it seems impossible to put it on a policy level.

Also I want to add another humble opinion. To solve the global warming problem, we can't rely on promoting a particular technology to tackle the problem. What we need is to reach an international agreement on that instead of solving it by devoting a great deal of effort individually. Someone has proposed a framework called 'contraction and convergence', for crafting a new protocol. We will see.

PS: We are a generation of extravagance, the awareness of water and waste is the prerequisite to solving the problem. This might not be correct, or totally irrevalent. This is just a thought of mine anyway.