Hugh's Worthless Blog

I find it interesting that there are two undefeated #1 ranked basketball teams just a few hundred miles apart right here in the midwest. One is the more well known Fighting Illini team in Illinois, but the other team actually is running with a longer unbeaten record. That would be the Vashon Wolverines out of St. Louis, the number one ranked high school team in the country. They have currently won 57 consecutive games including going completely undefeated last year in winning the class 4 state championship. This year they have been moved to class 5 but continue to beat every team in their path. I believe they are much more likely to go completely undefeated for the year than the Illini, but the Illini are facing much tougher competition from aroudn the country. The Wolverines now just have to win 4 more games to win another championship. It should be fun to watch!

Well, a lot of new things happened since Friday. On Friday the 25th the long awaited MEPIS 3.3 Final was released and I put it online on wuarchive almost immediately as SimplyMEPIS-3.3.iso . Already over 2.7TB of it (yes, that is TB) have been downloaded from wuarchive, so it is a rip roaring popular success. I will have to check the new MEPIS forums to see if there are any issues with the final release. The Mozilla folks also released version 1.0.1 of Firefox to address some security flaws that had been found in the browser. It is good to see them so responsive (as opposed to the developer of the most popular web browser in the world.) I have upgraded all my personal machines and the new version runs flawlessly. There have also been new releases of SAM and Featherlinux. The SAM release is version 2005-1SE which is primarily a bug fix. The Featherlinux release is version 0.7.4 which mainly updated some packages.

Since there is no exciting new Linux news today, I will just say that we finished up ours and my mother-in-law's taxes this weekend using TurboTax online. Anybody can file there for free by using TaxFreedom.com , and then you either pay for the state, or just do that one by hand. The online version is almost identical to the standalone version, although we did find it annoying not having an "Open Form" option like in standard TurboTax to go straight to Schedule D or whatever specific form you want to view. Overall though, it worked well and our taxes are now completed. After completing my mother-in-law's taxes it amazed me to realize that even though our family of 4's gross household income is substantially higher than hers, she is paying over twice as much federal income tax due to a myriad of factors (our before tax retirement contributions, itemized deductions, child credits, her capital gains and interest income). Is it fair? Who really knows.

It sounds like the final 3.3 will not be ready until after LinuxWorld, but they did release test03 this past weekend for the conference. Other new releases this weekend included a finalized version 2005-01 of KANOTIX and a finalized 2005-1 version of SAM. Isn't is interesting how many different distros are using the same naming convention now? It does make it easier to date a release if the date is actually in the name. The funny thing is that MEPIS went the other way -- they used to have the year in the release number but now they switched to 3.3. Go figure...

With the Super Bowl over, I am now concentrating on more exciting matters like what Linux distros are being released. The top two on my list are the final release of MEPIS 3.3 at LinuxWorld (probably right on Feb. 14), and the release of the GamesKnoppix 0.3 , reportedly at the end of February. To keep up I like to read DistroWatch Weekly every Monday morning.

It was a good game, with the outcome uncertain until the last minute. But as they have done all year, the Patriots defense did what was needed to stop the Eagles and win the game. After beating the Colts, Steelers and finally the Eagles in the playoffs, you have to admit they are the best team in the NFL and deserve once again to be champions. So much for the NFL this year! Now my blog will have nothing to talk about except geeky matters until the baseball season starts....

Warren has just released a second test release of SimplyMEPIS 3.3 and you can find it on wuarchive and all the other mirror sites. This latest version includes Skype preinstalled as well as new pulldown menus on the grub page to make it easier to select languages and screen resolutions. MEPIS will have boot 1512 at LinuxWorld in Boston next week.