Today, Adobe released 64-bit Flash for Linux. Finally, I can waste time watching ugly, pixelated Internet video on my 64-bit Linux desktop and laptop, just like all of my 32-bit-confined brothers and sisters on the Internet! (Yes, I know about npviewer---let's not go there.)

What's really interesting is that this is Adobe's first 64-bit release of Flash. That is, Linux users got it first, before users of Windows Vista x64 and and MacOS X. It probably does not mean anything, especially since Adobe has mentioned 64-bit flash will be released at the same time across platforms, but you can't help but feel good inside.

Go download it now and remember to report good bugs.

Update: Some quick notes...

• The tarball provided on the labs website is not the conventional Adobe Flash installer--it just contains the plugin. To use the plugin, drop the .so file into your ~/.mozilla/plugins/ directory.
• Make sure to uninstall your npviewer-powered 32-bit Flash completely (disabling the plugin within Firefox is not enough). I personally uninstalled it from my system to prevent any conflict.

Dell Ideastorm is a Dell-run website where users can post and vote (anonymously) for ideas for Dell products. What's the number one thing people want...?

People want Linux on their Dell machines. Remember to click the "promote" icon and make your vote count.

Peter Gutmann, a cryptography expert at the University of Auckland, has written a Cost Analysis of Windows Vista, where he discusses how the "content protection" and trusted platform features described in the Microsoft Windows Vista "security" specification will destroy reliability and innovation in the computer hardware industry, as well as make life miserable for us, the users.

Doomsday scenarios like this were brought up when Microsoft Windows XP was about to be released, and though it was enough to make me switch away from Windows to Linux, most of the concerns did not materialize. I don't know if Vista will be any different of a situation, but if the notion that they definitely want this kind of control (irrespective of whether they can actually do it, or whether the market will let them) doesn't make anyone who enjoys using their computer want to switch, I don't know what will.

Former id games mapper, and creator of the classic 3rd person game Alice, American McGee has switched to Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu Linux only gets more and more popular...

Over at the Plone Blog is the article Death and Taxonomies; it reviews Drupal's taxonomy (aka category) system.

The author basically comes to the conclusion I have, a conclusion that is shared by many in the Drupal community but not so much outside of it: Drupal's taxonomy system is amazing.

For most people and their uses, it is completely overengineered and complicated to use. This fits into Drupal's marketing stance that it is a content management framework rather than just a CMS. It is very generic, and with some custom programming can be adapted to anything--the possibilities are limitless. With many web development projects (that I don't want to write in PHP) I think about, I wish I had the facility of Drupal's taxonomy system.

Of course, there are problems, which the review goes into: there are too many hierarchal relationships in Drupal, all competing with each other. There is the menu system, the book module, and hierarchal taxonomies. The key to being a Drupal master is know when to use which and how to use them, something I've definitely not mastered. And that is part of the problem--why should you need to?

I've outlined some of the design decisions I made when designing Sands, including why some links are black, the use of a em-relative layout, and why I think they are more usable, in a post on Drupal's forums: Any theme with high usability?

Beyond Unreal has some ridiculously high-resolution Unreal Tournament 2007 screenshots from E3 2006. Well, they're not that high resolution--the images are just large.

The vehicles look cool. I was excited about Epic's Unreal Engine 3 before, and right now it's safe to say I'm excited by the Unreal Tournament 2007 title too. Yes, graphics is not everything... but if Unreal Tournament 1999 and Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 are any indication, Epic certainly understands how to deliver gameplay.

Gentium, called the "typeface for the nations," is a nice serif font. It does not look particularly great on-screen, but on paper, it is absolutely beautiful.

The Gentium samples page includes some pictures, as well as a a PDF containing a history of Gentium. Again, they don't do the font justice on-screen: print the PDF and just stare at how beautiful it is.

One of it's nice properties is that it's approximately the same size as Times New Roman, point for point. That is, a document typeset in Times New Roman and one typeset in Gentium will be the same length when printed. Because of this, Gentium is a great alternative to Times New Roman, because even with similar sizing, Gentium's glyphs appear bigger, and are much easier to read.

Did I mention it is Unicode? No, it doesn't have the entire Unicode character set... but no doubt it one day will.

I was watching CNN today, and they displayed some interesting poll numbers. 66% of Indians consider President Bush a friend of India. This statistic is higher than all numbers of President Bush's approval rating in the US, which is around 45%.

At the moment, there are only two semi up-to-date x86-64 (that is, for Athlon-64, Intel EMT64, and Opteron) Debian-based live CDs.

• Knoppix-64, based on Knoppix 3.4 (somewhat out of date as Knoppix 4.0 is out)
• Ubuntu, which is kept up to date and is available tucked away on their FTP site

I'm getting Ubuntu now to try out on my new workstation.

So I came across a piece of code that looked like this:

if (fork() != 0) exit(0); setsid(); if (fork() != 0) exit(0);

What each individual system call can easily be looked up and understood (well, maybe not setsid), but what the entire block of code is doing is not clear at all

...and I really can't say I understand the mechanics of it all to explain myself. But this python code segment's comments does a good job of what the entire block of code is trying to do--daemonize a process completely.

For some odd reason, NVIDIA gives the power requirements for their video cards in watts. Watts aren't a very good quantitative measurement for this--there are both "good" and "bad" power supplies that have the same wattage rating, however they usually measure differently.

An article over at Spode's Abode measures the power requirements of the 6800 Ultra. His consensus is that a 6800 Ultra requires a current of 5 amps at load, and can use a max of 124 watts power.

My 6800 GT is probably not far off. Along with the consideration that a modern high-end CPU will need 8 amps, and hard disks require ~2 amps each, I can plan my power requirements for a new system I'm building. More on that later.