I finally took the plunge and installed Hardy Heron on my Ubuntu system. Having waited the couple of weeks for any critical patches to appear, my read was that Hardy was indeed a stable release and I went for it.

A number of packages vanished in the process, including my prized xmms, so do be ready with a list of packages to install if you find them missing. I'm not quite sure where to grab a list of the installed packages, but it should be easy enough to find for future reference.

The upgrade for Hardy could not have been smoother. Ubuntu, as usual, did the quality job they always do and the process was rife only with a few surprises, easily fixed. For the perfectionists who choose to complain, you really have nothing to b****h about, but that is personality which often does not mirror reality.

For the xmms fix, visit Sartek's blog with a very nice instruction set that does the job beautifully. I was back with xmms in 5 minutes after a quick compile and install. Seamless, quick and well written. Hats off to Sartek! XMMS is a nice player that doesn't deserve to be kicked out in the cold just yet!

My Gateway laptop has always been a bit crusty when it comes to wireless support for the built in broadcom wireless card and this upgrade was no different from the rest. So, I connected up to my trusty ethernet port and searched Google for a solution. Up came the Penkin wordpress article with great information on how to easily update your broadcom driver, since the download version from the official sources does not seem to work for beans on my setup.

However, on following the instructions, things didn't quite work until I ran a few changes to the script... Read on for the fix I used.

A man heckling First Lady Laura Bush and daughter Jenna outside the 92nd Street Y was arrested after he punched a wheelchair-bound girl whose parents had told him to shut up, authorities said Wednesday.

German Talis, 22, was shouting obscenities at the Bushes, who were leaving the building Tuesday, when he crossed paths with Wendy and John Lovetro and their daughter Maureen, 18, who has cerebral palsy.

They had been in the audience to hear the Bushes talk about their children's book, "Read All About It."

Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun.

He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. "If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."