Hugh's Worthless Blog

Argh, summer in St. Louis! This was one hot weekend. The only things that weren't hot were the Cardinals losing 2 of 3 to the dreaded Cubbies. Everyone's air conditioners were running full blast, including our neighbors who had to go three days last week without theirs when their old one went belly up. Any HVAC engineering folks designing new HVAC systems for buildings in St. Louis should make sure they design them for these nasty consecutive 100 degree days. You could call up Coad Engineering and use their innovative new on-line HVAC design software at ESI Programs (Engineering Software International) to design an optimal system on-line! Was that a shameless plug? You bet it was!

I have recently posted my family's review of many children's and science museums we have visited over the years. We had just returned from Memphis a few days ago after visiting the very nice Children's Museum of Memphis , and we realized we have visited so many of them that we were starting to mix them up. So what a better way to keep straight our highlights of our visits then on a museum review web page ! We will update it as often as we visit more such museums!

It looks like Patrick Kolla has finally released the official 1.4 release. I had been using the beta and then release candidate of 1.4 and they were working great, but it is good to see he now considers it ready to roll. With this new release, I think SpyBot is definitely the slickest anti-spyware product out there, although I do like AdAware and even "Microsoft"'s product (if you can call it really theirs). You can grab a copy from the official site or from my mirror site . There is also a new version 3 release of KANOTIX (KANOTIX-2005-03.iso) which is available at ftp.wustl.edu . This includes the new 2.6.11.11 kernel, KDE 3.4.1 among other updates. KANOTIX continues to be the bleeding edge live Linux CD out there.

Well the Cardinals have beat the Red Sox two in a row. Too bad they couldn't do that last fall during the World Series!! The Cards are currently 38-20, wow! Of course they had a great regular season last year before collapsing in the Series. Who knows what will happen this fall...

Wow, I haven't posted anything in a while! Today's latest news is the 3.9 release of KNOPPIX, available from wuarchive.wustl.edu . This release finally includes KDE 3.4 and also updated wifi drivers. The next 4.0 release will be available both on DVD and CD versions. More news includes a "lite" version of MEPIS, but that is only available by subscription for now. The latest SimplyMEPIS is 3.3.1 which I have installed on a couple machines here at the university, and it works just splendidly.

The ISO images for the new Mandriva "Limited Edition" are now available on the public mirrors, including my own . I have seen a pretty high level of traffic there for the three CD set, so it appears to be quite popular. I also put the small LiveCD produced by the MandrakeClub Netherlands (MCN), MCNLive "Brugge" there as well. It is based on the Limited Edition release and runs as a LiveCD that also allows you to install the full Mandriva release. Pretty neat.

Time for some baseball commentary. Despite losing after converting a triple play last night, the Cardinals are having a great early season. The starters look pretty amazing so far, and the batters are starting to come together led by, who else, Albert Pujols. It is equally fun to watch what has become of the overpaid, full of themselves Yankees. They share the basement with Tampa Bay after getting beat by them last night. What fun!