Founders Bank, Worth, IL
Millennium State Bank of Texas, Dallas, TX
The First National Bank of Danville, Danville, IL
The Elizabeth State Bank, Elizabeth, IL
Rock River Bank, Oregon, IL
The First State Bank of Winchester, Winchester, IL
The John Warner Bank, Clinton, IL

The above 7 bank failures brings our 2009 Total to 52, which is more then DOUBLE the 25 we had in all of 2008. The total cost to the FDIC of the 7 closures is $314.3 Million, and I can guarantee that the FDIC doesn’t have much money left hence announcing today they are mulling over changing the sales rules.

Things are looking bleak, and people have already called the recession “over”. Obviously again these continued closures show that MANY U.S. Banks are insolvent.

Good thing it’s a 3 day weekend and people will likely forget about the news come monday. This is a good sign for Mortgage Rates though (a collapse in the market would bring down Mortgage rates pretty good)

As always the openSUSE team has updated their openSUSE 11.1 BuildService with the newest build and it is available for download:

You can add the repository with:
sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Virtualization:/VirtualBox/openSUSE_11.1/ VirtualBox

You can mark the repository for auto refresh with:
sudo zypper mr -r VirtualBox

Install virtual box with
sudo zypper in virtualbox

I’ll do write up of VirtualBox again (I’ve converted from VMware Workstation even though I have a free license for since I’m a VCP).

Oh.. if you require features like USB support etc, you can download the closed source version of VirtualBox from:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

Do you have experience with VirtualBox? VMware Workstation? tell me about your experiences.

I recently installed Ubuntu on a test box to play around a bit, and was perplexed when there was no great structure of repositories like the openSUSE Build Service.

I think this is one thing that is GRAVELY over-looked and undervalued by new linux users, or linux users that want to keep up with “bleeding edge”.

There’s many instances where you’d want to install newer package like:

GNOME versions, Firefox Releases, VirtualBox releases and these are just not available at a single central location with Ubuntu as they are with openSUSE..

Guess this is just another “props” to the openSUSE team for keeping up with the jonses and keeping the distribution one of, if not THE BEST.

Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:
* Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
* Support for the HTML5

As always openSUSE gives you access to these new versions quickly through their build service.

You can install using (for 11.1)

sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_11.1/ Firefox
sudo zypper mr -r Firefox
sudo zypper up -r Firefox

Enjoy..

Also, during installation I got a “Grub Installation Failed” but all seemed to be just fine.

I’m going reinstall my test VM with a non LVM to test.. I have a bunch of screenshots that I’ll put up once I get a working DE up and more screenshots from there.

Stand by.. Thanks

You can get it here from en.opensuse.org

However, an official announcement hasn’t been released, I expect to see it on the 30th.

Follow the standard installation methods which can be found here from novell.com

I have not yet installed it (it’s downloading). I am hoping that the issue with booting to LVM’s has been fixed and I’ll check that when when I have some time (hopefully today or tomorrow).

Enjoy the heat for those in CA.. it’s a hot one.

The banks closed on June 26th were:
Mirae Bank, Los Angeles, CA
MetroPacific Bank Irvine, CA
Horizon Bank, Pine City, MN
Neighborhood Community Bank, Newnan, GA
Community Bank of West Georgia, Villa Rica, GA

If you didn’t know the FDIC is running out of money, and they couldn’t find someone to take over the deposits for Community Bank of West Georgia and will be paying out over $180M to depositors.

How many more will we have this year? Will we top 100?

Here’s a snip-it of just the Unix fixes:
Updated Japanese font settings on request
Fix system tray update issue in Qt3 when switching to/from Unite
Fixed Bug DSK-234230 (JavaScript page freeze, causing excessive CPU usage on Solaris)
Fixed Bug DSK-252068 (Modifier keys on DOM key events not being reported properly)
Fixed Bug DSK-254431 (Crash when using Flash in widgets)
Partial Fix of Bug DSK-255278 (New skin does not support dark native themes)
Fixed Bug DSK-255831 (Implement Unite notification in tray icon on UNIX)
Fixed Bug DSK-256020 (Cannot drag and drop attachements from Nautilus)

You can get the whole list here:
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/

You can install using for openSUSE:
for i386 running QT3 Shared:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4449/intel-linux/opera-10.00-4449.gcc4-shared-qt3.i386.rpm

for i386 running QT4:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4449/intel-linux/opera-10.00-4449.gcc4-qt4.i386.rpm

for i386 running QT3, but you need static libraries:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4449/intel-linux/opera-10.00-4449.gcc4-static-qt3.i386.rpm

for x86_64 run:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4449/x86_64-linux/opera-10.00-4449.gcc4-shared-qt3.x86_64.rpm

I’ve made some rpm’s to make it easier for you to install on openSUSE:

The files are located here:
http://www.benkevan.com/upload/software/google-chrome-unstable-3.0.190.2-1.i386.rpm
http://www.benkevan.com/upload/software/google-chrome-unstable-3.0.190.2-1.x86_64.rpm

You can install using:
x86_64:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://www.benkevan.com/upload/software/google-chrome-unstable-3.0.190.2-1.x86_64.rpm –nodeps

i386:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://www.benkevan.com/upload/software/google-chrome-unstable-3.0.190.2-1.i386.rpm –nodeps

You may still have to do:
for i in libsmime3.so libnssutil3.so libnss3.so libssl3.so; do sudo ln -s /usr/lib/$i /usr/lib/$i.1d; done
and
for i in libplds4.so libplc4.so libnspr4.so ; do sudo ln -s /usr/lib/$i /usr/lib/$i.0d; done
(I had done this previously.. so didn’t test.. sorry people).

Here’s a nice pretty screenshot:

I have an Ubuntu test box here at work that I test with and play with and I have Lotus Notes 8.5 installed on it (installed via .deb package), and yesterday it started running at 100% on a single CPU.. I couldn’t quite put my hands on the issue since no packages were installed, and nothing major had changed.

Then I remembered that 2 days ago I changed my theme from the default theme to “New Wave”, just to liven up the look of the ugly default. I decided for yucks to change it back to the human theme and all was better.

I believe it’s an Eclipse bug (which Lotus Notes runs no top of) and something with gtk-rc but I am primarily a KDE user so this issue was completely new to me with this test Ubuntu box.

However, I don’t have an issue with any Themes that ship with openSUSE 11.2 or 11.1.

But here’s what I had to do:

Add:
66.163.181.173 scs.msg.yahoo.com

into /etc/hosts

have fun, hope it helps someone

UPDATE

Also see the comment below from James, you can also upgrade to Pidgin 2.5.7 which fixes the issue.

You can upgrade using the following repository:
sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/Community/openSUSE_11.1/ GNOME\ Community

sudo zypper mr -r GNOME\ Community

sudo zypper up -r GNOME\ Community

Thanks for the update James.. do you know what caused it at all?

The World Fighting Coalition & 9 Force Support Squadron Presents “Beale Beatdown”
10 bouts of full contact MMA fighting, right off the heels of “Travis Fury” Coming June 20, 2009 @ Beale AFB
(Tracey’s Karate/ FTCC) Ron Carillo vs. Virgil Ortigas (Team Black)

(Rapacon) Rob Witlock vs. Elmer Idolor (Humble Dragons)

Light Weight Grand Prix

(Unlimited Kickboxing) Tristan Arenal vs. TBA

(Cesar Gracie) Justin Blair vs. Chris Deluna (Rapacon)

Preliminary Bouts

Welter Weight Bout
(Team Black) Juan Quesada vs. Idres Rahmani (Miletich)

Bantam Weight Bout
(Team Black) Tyler Cronin vs. Josh Pavia (Humble Dragons)

“Senator Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, introduced a bill today that would increase the tax credit to $15,000 and remove income and other restrictions on who can qualify, according to his spokeswoman, Sheridan Watson. The Treasury Department declined to comment on the proposal.”

With the major increase in mortgage rates and the flood of foreclosures coming our way, I think the $15,000 credit revival is a necessity and not a nicety. March, April and May were the top 3 months ever in foreclosure activity and with summer already on its way those “pre-foreclosures” look like they’ll start coming out in seasonably slower times for selling.

Add on-top of the increase of foreclosures the near 1% gain in interest rates we have a perfect storm brewing to curb the entire housing recovery plan and sideline many first time home buyers.

Here’s some highlights to the 15k plan that is being pushed:

* Removal of Income Limit
* Increase time to qualify (1 Year from the day signed, it would not be retroactive). (Don’t ask what day it’ll be signed, because no one knows, and the treasury declined to comment)
* Would lower your tax liability, and would not be refundable if it was over your tax liability, and would be spreadable across 2 years.
* Remove first time home buyers restrictions (although this would be interesting, because would people who buy back their own short sales though internal bank processes be eligible for this? if so, that’d be bad).

It’d pretty much be allot like the previously senate approved $15,000 credit that I wrote about here

What would this bill do to the housing market? It would spur more interest in buying and have more people on the side-lines get up (myself included). It would better target the Jumbo loan market since the people that are in that market can take advantage of the full 15,000 drop in liabilities where as people in the lower range wouldn’t take advantage of the full 15,000, even over a 2 year period. (again re-read my original home buyer tax credit for description of how it works).

I can tell you one thing, the day I posted the $15,000 credit the number of hits on that compared to the $8,000 credit was 20 to 1, and even now with that bill long shut down i get FAR more hits on 15000 tax credit from Google then 8000 tax credit (just a thing to ponder, it really seems like that could be the amount people are looking for).

Lets hope.. that this gets approved since well we know the administration won’t let free market determine correct supply and demand pricing.

-Jose Aldo (14-1) vs. Cub Swanson (13-2)
I haven’t seen too many of Jose Aldo’s fights, but I think he’s going to give Swanson a really hard time with his reach. I think Cub would have to bring it to the ground and submit Jose to win this fight, and I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’m going to say Aldo by (T)KO.

-James Krause (10-0) vs. Donald Cerrone (9-1)
This should be a Jiu-Jitsu clinic. Both are highly skilled Jiu-Jitsu fighters, but I think the strength advantage will overcome the limb length advantage of Cerrone and Krause will either Eeek this out with a Split Decision (if they get to sweaty the 3rd round may be a funky looking stand-up round), or by submission. I think he’ll be able to stay out of the long legs of Cerrone.

-Josh Grispi (12-1) vs. Jens Pulver (22-11-1)
I wouldn’t want to stand in front of a determined Jens Pulver who has dropped 5 of his last 6 fights. Pulver has re-dedicated himself to the fight game, and I hope it shows tonight with a TKO win. He better watch out of Grispi’s submission game though.. but I’ll still go with Pulver by (T)KO

On the undercard I hope Manny gets pummeled. I hate the little shit, and his cousin Karo.

-Robbie Lawler (16-4) vs. Jake Shields (22-4-1)
-Nick Diaz (19-7) vs. Scott Smith (15-5)
-Andrei Arlovski (15-6) vs. Brett Rogers (9-0)
-Joe Riggs (29-10) vs. Phil Baroni (13-10)
-Kevin Randleman (17-12) vs. Mike Whitehead (23-6)

Actual Results:
Jake Shields def. Robbie Lawler via submission (guillotine choke) – Round 1, 2:02.
Nick Diaz def. Scott Smith via submission (rear-naked choke) – Round 3, 1:41.
Brett Rogers def. Andrei Alorvski via TKO (strikes) – Round 1, 0:22.
Joe Riggs def. Phil Baroni via unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 30-27).
Mike Whitehead def. Kevin Randleman via unanimous decision (29-28, 29-28, 29-28).

As you can see all my predictions were correct except for Whitehead vs Randleman, and even then in my original post I said my instinct said go with Mike Whitehead, but I wanted to believe in Randleman. Good thing is if I had to put money on it, I would have went with instinct and not emotion.

Joe Riggs impressed me by showing me he’s still in the game, and his head seems to finally be in it.

Nick Diaz again peppered the fight into his direction the submitted Scott Smith after it seemed like he just gave up.

Andre Arlovski looks like he’s done as a mainstream fighter until he can figure out how not to get hit.

Brett Rogers has some freaking power. Can’t wait to see his next fight. Hopefully it’s the very next Strikeforce.

Jake Sheilds showed a nice killer instinct. I liked seeing the crisp stand-up. Also nice to see him show some of his submission skills which are quite under-rated.

#1. Consumer Confidence has been following the stock market:
When the markets were going down and peoples 401k’s were getting depleted consumer confidence was at record lows. Peoples views on their job prospects were also diminishing, but some of this has subsided, but has it been for good reason? The markets have been rallying at a historic pace, and lately has continued to do so on some very sketchy volume. However, this increase has seemed to spark an increase in positive consumer confidence, and the thing I question is the reason the rally started. Lets go all the way back to March 9th when we hit the lows in the markets and “Gloom and Doom” and the banking sector was being viewed as cancerous. 3 months have passed and some amazing earnings have curbed these views, but has anything really changed? Yes, they have and those things are called accounting methods, and not banking fundamentals. Banks did get a nice profit from positive investments, and also a major surge in refinances, however, with the current 10-Year Bond Yeild prices the average rates for 30-Year fixed mortgages are flying. This has nearly curbed the refinancing activity, and there are clear signals that the market is ready for a correction (my guess is 10% – 15%). So with decline in the markets, do we see another round of poor consumer confidence?

#2 Too Big To Fail
The whole too big to fail mantra, will make inflation too big to handle. The US government at this time is trying so hard to curb deflation and negitive growth that they are shoving money into the markets (quite possibly even the stock market with the help of the PPT (Plunge Protection Team, which I believe is a fact and not a myth)). This influx of money will cause inflation, just the amount of over correction is done will show how much inflation we’ll have. Sure they say “we’ll take the money out of circulation and burn it” when correction in the markets have taken place, but that has many other negitive factors that if you care about can be dug deeper into.

#3 Jobs Jobs Jobs..
Ok.. the jobs data was the ever so famous “better then expected”, but it really depends on how you viewed it. If you looked at the headlines, it was fantastic, but if you broke down the rapid rise in the unemployment numbers, and checked out the decrease in average work week and real unemployment numbers, you would have realized that many of those jobs are considered temporary (I think a major portion was Government Census jobs that were considered private sector). These jobs are typically low paying, and have fewer hours (which is supported by the decrease in average hours worked to 33.1%). Now when you look at unemployment at 9.4% (which is above the 2009 worst case scenerio painted by the government “stress test”) and the “real” unemployment of 16.4%, you have to wonder how many more houses will go into foreclosure (the housing and financial crisis put us into the recession, how can we get out without the housing crisis being cured?).

#4 Housing
How could I have done a write up like this without talking about the dreaded housing crisis. People believe we’re at a bottom, which I don’t agree with. I believe we are at a false bottom which was put in place by the bill SB1137 which was passed last Sept which curbed many foreclosures via foreclosure moritorums. This combined with many banks slowing foreclosures to find out what “Obama’s Housing Rescue Plan” was going to do, really slowed foreclosures. But now it’s all in the open and the ONLY think keeping the housing market somewhat stable is the banks. Yes, the banks. They are holding houses, why? because they are worth more on their books then if they realize the losses, thanks to the suspension of M2M (Mark to Market). March / April had record / near record foreclosures, notice of defaults and notice of trustee sales. These record NOD’s and NTS’s will turn into record foreclosures in coming months, and it seems more banks are adiment on getting their houses back and hurrying up with the reposession process after the notice of trustee sales have been carried out. I live in a city that realtytrac reports is 8th worst in the country in foreclosures, so the 60% housing price drops in my area have brought in some buyers, but the price per square foot is still not at 1999/2000 levels which I believe we will hit. Now put on top of this the rising mortgage rates and we have some buyers being sidelined until things settle down and are cleared.

I have some other views, but don’t have time to share them right now, and will see what I can do later.. hope you enjoy this.. let me know what your views of the current condition of the US economy is.

(not to mention next week is HUGE with the 10 / 30 yr bond sales, which may lead the correction in the markets which would organcially lower the 10-year bond yeilds which is used to guage many consumer based loans).

-Nick Diaz (19-7) vs. Scott Smith (15-5)
Both the guys are local, and actually live pretty close to each other. But I’m going to have to go with Nick Diaz by picking Scott Smith apart with his reach and peppered punches. One thing Nick Diaz does well is utilize his speed and reach to irritate the hell out of his opponents with the letter pepper punches, which usually seem to do little damage until they met the face of Frank Shamrock in the last Strikeforce on Showtime. Nick Diaz by Unanimous Decision.

-Andrei Arlovski (15-6) vs. Brett Rogers (9-0)
This one is hard to guage since we haven’t seen Brett Rogers fight someone at the level of Arlovski and we haven’t seen Arlovski in action for a while (although we know he’s been working on his boxing a whole lot lately). I will say this could be the upset of the night, and either way I see this fight NOT going the rounds.

-Joe Riggs (29-10) vs. Phil Baroni (13-10)
Having trained with Joe Riggs I know the power he holds in his submissions, takedowns and his punches. But if anyone can match him in power it has to be Phil Baroni (Baroni was a former Body Builder and Joe Riggs was previously 300+ lbs, and both are strong as hell for the weight). For this fight though the experience that Joe Riggs has should eek him out a KO / TKO win as long as his head is in the game. The poor guy has had a very very rough patch in his life, and I’m hoping he’s overcome all these obsticales and is not back in the top of his game.

-Kevin Randleman (17-12) vs. Mike Whitehead (23-6)
My instinct says go with Mike Whitehead, but I’d love to see another Randleman slam (ala Fedor). We haven’t seen Randleman in a while due to varios infections (including Staph and Lung) but here he is, and hopefully he’s better then ever. I’ll go with Randleman by determination.

The Wine development release 1.1.23 is now available.

What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Support for registering MIME types with the Linux desktop.
– FBO mode is now the default for Direct3D.
– Support for COM proxy delegation.
– Improved support for the Mingw cross-compile.
– Proper fullscreen mode for the virtual desktop.
– Various bug fixes.

You can upgrade to the newest wine on openSUSE using the following repository:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine/openSUSE_11.1/

Here’s the information:
http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

You see they include a .deb format, and this can easily be installed on openSUSE by either extracting the contents of the data.tar.gz or converting it to rpm (which I have done and are provided below:

Google Chrome i386 Version
Google Chrome x86_64 Version

So here’s how you can install it:

Download the RPM above
Install using: (assuming you’re a normal user)

(for i386) sudo rpm -Uvh google-chrome-unstable-3.0.183.1-1.i386.rpm --nodeps
(for x86_64) sudo rpm -Uvh google-chrome-unstable-3.0.183.1-1.x86_64.rpm --nodeps

note that the -’s infront of nodeps is actually a DOUBLE dash, but wordpress combines them

Then you have to give the required libraries:
(note these are single liners, and include sudo as if you were logged in as a normal user)

for i in libsmime3.so libnssutil3.so libnss3.so libssl3.so; do sudo ln -s /usr/lib/$i /usr/lib/$i.1d; done

and

for i in libplds4.so libplc4.so libnspr4.so ; do sudo ln -s /usr/lib/$i /usr/lib/$i.0d; done

Once you’re done you can launch chrome with
google-chrome

Here’s a nice screenshot for you:

My personal experience has been limited with it, and since it’s developers super unstable alpha (possibly pre-alpha) status, I don’t think it’s fair to judge it.

But I recommend using it, reporting bugs and helping it develop to spice up competition in the browser arena (we all see what happens when someone gets to comfortable in the browser space, we get stuck with IE5 / 6 for a long while).

Is GMAIL next?

Then

Now