In this political season of liberals trying to squash any media coverage of John McCain and Sarah Palin's bid for the White House, I am forced to push my Liberal to Conservative Translator to help Republicans interpret the media spin that is heaped upon us from all sides.

How does this work? If you run the FireFox browser, you can install the GreaseMonkey plugin and then install the translator. You'll have to restart your browser and then look to the bottom right of your browser window to change the little monkey face from sad to happy with a single click.

What does this buy you? Only many happy moments when you see the strange things it does to the terms that apply to the liberal world. As the political season advances, new versions will be added to help my Conservative friends make it through this election season.

A screen capture below shows the word "Democrat" translated to "Socialist" as a single example of the live translation abilities of this little script. Download today and share this story with other Conservatives today!



Go McCain/Palin!

No matter how well-meaning, politicians frequently fail to understand all the consequences of their laws. Real world costs, the costs and benefits faced by those who will actually have to live with the regulations, often elude those who pass these rules. Yet, even by those depressing standards, problems with the mandated that people will soon be forced to use stand out.

The advantages of compact fluorescent light bulbs are obvious. While the fluorescent bulbs can cost 10 times more than incandescent ones, fluorescent bulbs use 75 percent less electricity and last up to 10 times longer.

But longer life and energy savings come with a caveat — the fluorescent bulbs must be used for at least 15 minutes once they are turned on and ideally for at least several hours at a time. Turning them off quickly after you have turned them on dramatically reduces their life expectancy. Not being able to use light bulbs simply when it is convenient is a cost the consumers will bear even if politicians didn’t factor it into their estimates of savings.

My trusty VMWare server gave up the ghost when I upgraded Ubuntu to Hardy Heron. After reviewing a number of recipes that all were missing pieces of the real process, I took my own stab at documenting what worked for me after about an hour of beating the walls of Google for the best solutions. Here is my attempt at helping you to get VMWare running on your system once you begin your attempt to fix the problem.

Don't panic if you have an established VMWare server that got killed in the process of your Ubuntu upgrade. Things can be fixed easily to have your server running in no time. Remember, the Ubuntu community is vast and all-knowing. Help can be had at many quarters and if one recipe doesn't work, then keep looking for more articles and writeups. You will find the solution by being diligent and patient.

On to the fix!

• First, try downloading the latest VMWare server from VMWare's site and see if they have fixed this yet. If your install blows up, then the next steps need to be taken:
  • cd to lib/modules/source under the vmware-server-distrib where you extracted the original vmware source code.
  • tar -xvf vmmon.tar (This will create the vmmon-only directory).
  • cd vmmon-only/include.
  • Edit the vcpuset.h file in this directory, you need to change line 74 from # asm/bitops.h” to “# linux/bitops.h. (Yes - keep the "#" character just "as-is". Just change the "asm" to "linux" and all will be well.
    
  • cd ../..
  • remove the old vmmon.tar or rename it if you want to keep it.
  • tar -cvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only (This creates the replacement tar image with the file you just updated).
  • Re-compile the modules by re-running the standard "sudo vmware-install.pl"
  • Know that this probably will fail, but we are going through the needed steps to get through the entire process. This is how things work on a starship ;>). No worries. There is more to the process. If yours does work at this point, then more power to you, else... read on!