Firefox crashing in kubuntu, and nepomuk

Well, I've been having a problem for a couple of days now with firefox abruptly crashing. I typically have a window or two open, maybe 15 tabs in total, and everything was fine. Then it wasn't. For some reason, firefox would crash at arbitrary times, with different sites open -- I tried many different sites, different configurations, no luck -- after a few minutes, at seemingly random times, firefox would disappear with a segmentation fault.

Well, I think I've got it. The incredible bug-fest that is kde 4.1.4 ships with something called nepomuk on by default, and when I poked around in the System Monitor, it was often using a lot of CPU time. My curiosity was piqued: what is nepomuk, and do I need it? Well, I went online to find out, but it turns out they don't want you to know, apparently. Unless, to use their words, a "Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge" means more to you than it did to me. Or how about, from the first paragraph of their synopsis, "NEPOMUK aims at empowering individual knowledge workers to better exploit their personal information space and to maintain fruitful communication and exchange within social networks across organizational boundaries." (http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/)

Uh, ya. Whatever...

Anyway, I tried to use some (actually one) of the features of this networked environment, in dolphin, tagging a video file. Dolphin froze. Ah ha -- nepomuk is buggy. And, nepomuk attempts to connect things like downloaded files and the URL they came from, so it peeks under the hood of firefox. System Settings -> Advanced -> Nepomuk, disable nepomuk and all is rosy.

Life is good again.

The Retun of Alan

Good news for the millions of NUFC fans out there -- Alan Shearer has agreed to return to the club as interim manager for the rest of the 2008/09 season. Hopefully we won't get relegated now. Hopefully.

While this is the fourth manager this season, after Kevin Keegan's walkout, the appointment of interim-turned-permanent journeyman manager Joe Kinnear and the hapless Chris Hughton, I'm optimistic we won't need another manager for years. Maybe a decade.

Howay the lads!