WAHIL.net

Bias warning: Author of this article is one of the founders of Filmaster. At the same time he’s the founder of PolishLinux.org.

Filmaster — Main page

Why create yet another movie site?

That’s a valid question. And the answer to it can be summed up in the following points:

• Film rankings are useless!
  Have you ever checked out the movie ratings at IMDB or RottenTomatoes and wondered “how on Earth could this crappy movie have such a high score?”. Wonder no more as Filmaster suggests you the movies that you will enjoy. It personalizes rankings using a custom recommendation algorithm, so that the Top 100 is prepared for each user individually based on their weird tastes.
• Movie websites are not social enough!
  On Filmaster you can blog about movies (and you’re getting a cool URL for your blog like michuk.filmaster.com), discuss movies on forums, make friends and follow their activity, check your and their ratings and compare your movie tastes using the taste comparison indicator, share your movie libraries or wishlists and much more…
• All movie sites are proprietary
  You don’t own your data at IMDB or Flixter. The companies behind those websites do. And they can disconnect you from your data at any given time. It’s all in the convoluted terms of use. Filmaster is free as in freedom. You own your data. You control your data. And you can do whatever you want with it. What is more, you can also use the code that runs the service as it’s fully free as well, being a mixture of BSD licensed stuff (mainly borrowed from the Pinax project guys) and Affero GPLv3 (all the original Filmaster code including the recommendations engine). What can you do with it? Well… sky is the limit.

Planet Filmaster aggregates all user activities

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Notifications

The system tray of KDE4.3 finally supports notifications fully. Also the configurability has changed there. Now we can select the group of icons that are to be shown at all times – e.g. the Hardware group, containing i.e. KMix – if not enabled, the KMix icon won’t be shown in tray. The notification icon is shown at all times, unlike the earlier KDE4 versions. The notifications can now be grouped together and also they can e.g. display the Kopete contact avatar. Also the possibility to choose whether the notifications are to be hidden after some time, or to be always visible, has been added – when the mouse pointer floats over the notifications icon, a Notifications and jobs tool-tip is shown.

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They say first love never dies, and I guess there is a degree of truth in that. Mandrake the predecessor of Mandriva was my first Linux, and despite the fact that over the years our ways parted, I have a sentiment for this distribution and I come back to it every now and again to check what’s new. This time round I decided to have a look the newest addition to Mandriva family; Madriva One 2009.1 Spring, boldly promising to bring the best of the latest cutting edge technology to your desktop. As promises go this is a big one, and after reading the release note on the Madriva website I wondered if this once probably the most popular distro is ready regain the leaser position.

First Impressions and Installation

After popping the live CD into the drive, rebooting my laptop and waiting for a couple of minuets for the system to load I was welcomed to new, shiny KDE 4.2.2 desktop. The default theme is aya with a light blue background and Mandriva logo on it, even though I’m not an aya lover I have to admit, things were looking very good indeed.

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