Blasting it's way to your door, Scar Symmetry's third album Holographic Universe dropped on June 20th, and so far I haven't been able to turn it off. Following up on two already impressive albums, I was really hoping for something special, and for the most part they delivered. Unlike recent Soilwork albums, which is a sad rant for another day, this Swedish melodic death metal group can actually sing, shred, and growl, all while maintaining their core sound. Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of the title, but who really cares if the music is good, and this album delivers a solid set of twelve tracks with an awesome sixty minute running time.

Overall, the album is immediately catchy and hooks you hard. It's less aggressive than their older releases which gives me some mixed feelings, but I think they pull of this new refined sound well. Unlike past moments of brutal thrash, peppered with melodic highlights (a la Opeth) Holographic Universe focuses on melody and accents it with specific trash and growl moments.

Following up on Part 1 and Part 2, our camera switch worked great! Last night after putting together the latest version of our thief catching Linux machine, he completely fell for it. Around approximately 4:00 AM, you can see the door open as he creeps in and begins rummaging through the desk for goodies. To us it looks like he is definitely one of the third shift cleaning crew employees. Unfortunately, we only recorded it at 320x280, and he never turned the light on, so the quality isn't the best. That's ok though because we've changed the lighting a bit, bumped the resolution up to 640x480, and are waiting for his return. Considering he's been going into offices one or twice a week, it shouldn't be very long. Check out the video below and stay tuned for the next update. As Samuel L. Jackson would say, "Got you muthafucka!"

Following up on Part 1 of To Catch A Thief, we've had to make some adjustments for unforseen issues. First of all, our little dinky C-it cam just wasn't up to the task. We kept having random issues with freezing and intermittent loss of video. More than likely the combination of the drivers and UCView brought out some bad bugs, but we've since buried it and are moving on. Next, after a nightly test run with our new camera, the Logitech Orbit, we realized that the Fedora install was going to have to be 64-bit. If left on high quality the file would grow to larger than two gigs and die. Of course, you can recompile the offending libraries and program with LFS (large file support), but why bother.

Now with a spanking new camera and Fedora 9 x86_64, we were ready to rock, right!?! Not quite. Unlike in i386, a bunch of the camera capturing apps started having issues stemming from either no display, to empty menus, to no device detection. One thing that made some of the display issues go away was the RadeonHD driver. This excellent piece of code is still up and coming, but quickly becoming the best solution for Linux video.

For those of you that have tried installing Fedora 9 x86_64 on the latest Intel Quad Core chipset, you might find the kernel a bit pissy depending on your architecture. We recently got in a shipment of brand spanking new HP dc7800 workstations, only to find out that the kernel shipping with F9 is a royal pain in the ass. Earlier I posted this story about power management issues and the SATA drive not being found in the i386 install. Now with the x86_86 version, a new problem was found.

Upon loading the kernel in quiet mode (default install and live cd), it hangs after the loading kernel screen. With verbose mode on we found that it would hang indefinitely at this message:

IOMMU: Setting identity map for device 0000:00:1a.1 [xdefd6000 - 0xdefd7000]

Thankfully, there are two easy ways around this. The first consists of adding "intel_iommu=off" to the kernel boot line. For those of you that aren't Linux savoy, all you need to do is boot into GRUB and append that phrase to the end of the kernel line (or edit your grub.conf).

The second solution is even easier. Once you boot with the first solution, update Fedora 9 to the latest available packages. In the update will be the 2.6.25.6 kernel which has the proper code for this architecture! We didn't see anymore issues after this point, so you can remove the kernel append line if you still have it in your grub.conf

My favorite birdie just got a new pair of feathers! Songbird, the Internet's premier audio and web mashup, just turned another major milestone with their 0.6 release. I've been following this project closely since its inception and the 0.1 days ever since I saw a post on a random tech site about the concept. The idea is really very simple, and fucking cool as hell in practice. Take a bunch of seasoned developers, come up with an open sourced version of iTunes, throw in Mozilla's Firefox engine, and give it the ability to play anything anywhere! If that doesn't sound cool, maybe DRM is more your speed.

Since it's inception, Songbird has seen a huge amount of changes both on and behind the surface, regardless, it has done nothing but become increasingly better as time goes on. Running on Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows XP/Vista, with full MTP and Ipod support, this little birdie is without a doubt going on to a very promising future. Oh and did I mention it is fully extendable and comes with a ton of user community add-ons? To say it is an iTunes killer is only just the start.