TechgnosisWeb Prime

FUEGO! Mis pantalones se arden!

I don’t know if this is real or not, but goddamn is it satisfying! Also, the guy is using a programming book.. go coders! w00t!

Continuing with the general theme: The good Rev. Mykeru has put up a viciously scathing rebuttal and point by point dissasembly and destruction of an incredibly idiotic article condemning gay marriage. Here’s a quote from the rebuttal (thanks boingboing!):

Sanford (quoting from the Bible): “And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.” — Revelation 20:12

How many times do you think Susan Sanford has been disgraceful in church? Do you think she ran this by her hubby?

Go read the full article here.

Wil Wheaton posted an entry on his blog today that is an absolutely spectacular defence of marriage, both gay and hetero, against the insanity that is the Bush administration’s push to have gay marriage outlawed in the US Constitution itself. I really don’t have anything to add to it, because Wil makes the most eloquent and impassioned case possible against Shrub’s idiocy, and I’m proud to link to it. Go, read it, please.

… I had the weirdest dream. It bears no relation to anything, really, but I figured I should share it. I’m there sitting on my couch playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, when who should sit down next to me, but ex Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean, who promptly states that he is a huge Final Fantasy fan. He proves this by showing off this cool imported Final Fantasy wristwatch/game that lets you play FF3-style battles on it. We chat a while and banter about who was the hottest FFX girl, etc. etc. Then I woke up. Odd.

I want one of these. I want it so bad my teeth ache. Yes, yes, I know, it’s yet another gadget that might turn out to be total vaporware, it’s a middle ground between a PDA and a laptop and who needs one of those when PDA’s and laptops work so well spearately anyway, yadda yadda yadda. Screw you. I want one. If I can’t have my flying cars, at least I want my fully fucntional, wirelessly connected, camera-enabled, full OS running computer that can fit in a pocket, goddamit. Save money, then give it to me so that I may buy myself one of these and therefore give some meaning to my otherwise empty existence. That is all. Thank you.

Ninja Golf. Do it, or bring dishonor upon yourself and your family.

So, some of you may have heard about the fact that hundreds and thousands of tech jobs arfe being outsourced every day to places like India and China, because it’s often considerably cheaper to pay an offshore company to develop your software than it is to pay the high salaries that homegrown programmers demand. This, of course, does not bode well for code monkeys such as myself. I’ve found myself having to sit down and seriously consider what career I’m going to choose within the next five years, because it’s quite unlikely that I’ll be able to get a job with any major or even medium tech companies in the future, no matter how many certifications I hold. The local techie job market will be flooded with other desperate programmers, many of whom will have more experience and better education than myself, all competing for increasingly scarce tech jobs. Not an encouraging prospect, let me tell you.

I’ve been considering what other areas I would like to dedicate myself to. What dreams, besides just goofing around on the computer. There was that bit about being a writer, but I just don’t have the mental stamina for it, it seems. I’m fine enough writing random short rants like this one, but I can’t bring myself to sit down and actually complete a narrative of any real substance. So what else is there? Well… one thing: chef.

I’ve always loved cooking, and not just for myself, but for others. I like making meals and presenting them to others, and as a Leo, I particularly enjoy the praise from others when something I’ve cooked comes out particularly well. I enjoy being in the kitchen, mixing spices and flavors, mixing and chopping and frying and boiling. It’s a lot like hacking: you’re given some base tools and raw materials to work with, and while almost anyone can cobble together a serviceable meal given the right ingredients/tools and some instructions, it takes someone with skill to produce something new and interesting from those same roots. Here at home, I’m the one who cooks 90% of the time, and not because I’m forced to, but because I enjoy cooking and preparing meals for Natalie and myself. And the times I worked at the hotel kitchen in Ithaca during my stay at Cornell were actually rather enoyable for the most part (although my job was mostly chopping veggies, mixing dough, and preparing chocolate covered strawberries, but it was still fun watching the real chefs in action).

So, while right now I’m gonna continue the code monkey bit, since I love my current job and my bosses r0xx0rz, and I have to pay the bills while Natalie finishes up her studies again (turns out she can go straight to a Master’s Degree in Graphic Design by piggybacking on her BA in Psych, so she’d end up with a Master’s and she would finish it in less than a yuear and a half (trimesters). Only bad thing is that they’;re all night classes), I’m taking time to oeducate myself more in the finer areas of cooking and food. I bought myself a decent cookbook a couple of days ago and I’ve been devouring it cover to cover, if you’ll excuse the pun. Once Natalie’s better settled in and we can afford it, it’s quite likely that I’m gonna drop out of work to study at a good cooking school to become and actual chef. Who knows, maybe eventually I’ll even be able to open my own restaurant. Now wouldn’t that be nice?

From Neil Gaiman by way of BoingBoing:

The five-secret-person Department of Education panel that allocates funding for closed-captioning will no longer provide assitive tracks for the deaf to shows that mention witchcraft, including Scooby Doo, Bewitched, and Justice League.

Witches of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your vertical blanking interval!

Go read the whole thing. And spread the word.

So here’s the deal: when I was handed this laptop for work, I was instructed to install Windows 98 SE on it. I need to be able to work on Visual Basic apps, which means Windows, and since the laptop was a bit limited in disk space and RAM, that meant 98. Now, I wasn’t about to install Win98 on this new toy. I wanted my beloved Debian to be the base system. But I still needed to be able to work on Visual Basic apps with it (and while Wine has improved quite a bit in the past few years, I don’t think it can run Visual Studio without a hitch yet. What could I do? Enter VMWare.

VMWare Workstation 4 is a software package that creates virtual machines that exist within your current (host) operating system, which cazn run almost any other OS, including all flavours of Windows, Linux, quite a few BSD’s, etc. By way of a technique known as ‘virtualization’ these ‘guest’ operating systems can work and access the same resources as the host OS, while remaining separate processes. Which means that if your windows virtual machine crashes, your Linux base remains just fine and stable.

I finally finished setting up the installation of VMWare on this laptop today, and set up Win98 as the guest OS. After a few configuration tweaks, it’s working absolutely flawlessly. I ran Windows Update within it and it downloaded all the neccesary updates and security patches without a hitch, updated IE to 6.0SP1, and installed Visual Studio 6… and it all just works. It’s kind of weird, seeing that window on my Debian desktop displaying the full Win98 OS, but there it is. I get to have my cake and eat it: Linux on my laptop, while remaining able to work with Windows-only technologies when neccesary. Really really nice stuff, itg works flawlessly, a tiny bit of lag, but I’m chalking that up to the limitations of the laptop itself, not so much the VMWare system. While it’s running, the other machines on the network actually detect the host Debian OS and the guest Win98 system as separate machines, listing them separately even though tghey;’re technically running on the same physical hardware. It’s spooky.

Point if this rant is: VMWare rocks. If you really need to run Windows, fine, but that’s no longer an excuse to not have switched to Linux. You can have your cake and eat it.

Hey all. Well, UT2004 continues to rock, Crystal Chronicles just keeps getting better and better, and I just installed the beta for NVU, a fork/recode of Mozilla’s Composer component. As some of you may know, the Mozilla project has been pushing for separating each of the applications that make up its core app suite. Firebird.. excuse me, Firefox.. is set to replace the main browser (formerly Navigator), Thunderbird is replacing the mail component… but I hadn’t seen much effort to replace the other components, namely the web page editor, or the IRC client (understandably, perhaps, since they’re the ones least often used). I don’t think anyone is working on the IRC client (which is fine, since the IRC client area is quite well covered allready under both Linux and Windows (and Mozilla’s offering in this area was sub-par IMHO), but it turns out that the Lindows folks took it under their wing, and are re-releasing it as NVU, a fully WYSISWIG HTML editor, in the vein of FrontPage and Dreamweaver on the Windows side. They’re releasing it for free under the GPL and plan to contrinute all their code changes back to the Mozilla project when it’s ready, so that’s good. Recently, they released the first beta binaries of it on their website, and I decided to download it and give it a try, mostly for Natalie’s sake so she can do minor web editing on HotNakedElfChicks.com and VoodooBunny.com without having to take a crash course in HTML, but also for myself, since sometimes it’s just handy to have a quick tool for dealing with tables and forms and the like.

Although it’s definetly unfinished, as a couple of raw edges shine through here and there and some of the featuje sets aren’t complete, it’s allready quite a bit of an improvement over the web editor it was originally based off of. The interface is clean and professional, with all the major buttons and areas you’re likely to have to deal with easily accesible. Thanks to its Gecko engine base, the HTML rendering in WYSISWIG form is excellent, and things like ‘Tag View’ make identifying different areas of the page quite easy. I do wish it had code highlighting for when I have to deal with the raw HTML, but then again, maybe it does and I just haven’t found the option to turn it on yet.

The feature set is nice, though not complete. Think FrontPage, pre-2000, rather than Dreamweaver. It’s definetly a tool for the lone web designer or HTML newbie, rather than for a team of web pros, at least so far, but as the feature sets get fleshed out in line for a full release, this program could definetly be a contender on Linux, giving some competition to other Linux HTML editors such as Quanta and Bluefish. Keep an eye on this one.

So here I am, tap-tap-tapping away on my work laptop, which was recently hand-me-downed to me by my boss after he finally broke down and bought himself a new one. I get to do pretty much whatever I want with it, so long as I use it for work primarily. Needless to say, I immediately cleared it out and installed Debian on it, and I’m having a blast with it. It’s a bit beat up, but it works, and it lets me carry around my Linux again since the Z died. Stats: Celeron 650Mhz, 320 MB RAM, 6 GB HDD, 14″ screen, Toshiba Satellite 2850, with built in Ethernet and modem, USB slots, and CD/DVD reader. A fairly decent little workhorse, plus it lets me curl up on the couch or in bed and type, which I find infinitely more conducive to ranting and creative endeavors in general than sitting down at a desk. So for ranting, I’ll mostly be using this one as long as I have it. For gaming, there’s the PimpRig.
A couple updates: UT2004 is t3h r0xx0rz, j0. Fo’ shizzle. I tried out the other game modes, and they rock. Even good old deathmatch is more fun, methinks. The vehicles in Onslaught mode (which is a lot like BF1942, but with hoverjets) are great, they’re fun to use and well-balanced. The other game modes are as fun as ever, and with the improved graphics and animation, it looks set to completely dethrone UT2003 for me. Can’t wait till the full version is out.

Also, Natalie gave me the bestest Valentine’s Day gift: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. We hooked up our GBA’s to the GC and played for a while today, and I gotta say I’m rather enjoying it. It’s a bit strange, doesn’t quite feel like an entry in the Final Fatnasy series, and the control scheme and gameplay have more in common with Kingdom Hearts than with FFX, but it’[s still a bit of a blast. You can wade in and pick it up pretty quickly, butg just over the few hours that we played, it hinted at a level of depth that might not be immediately apparent if you let yourself be guided by the somewhat cartoony graphics. Spell Fusion is interesting, and requires cooperation from your fellow players and excellent timing to pull off, but the results are well worth it. Having to handle the Chalice (or ‘Bucket’, as the Penny Arcade guys call it) is a bit of a chore, but the actual action is both franctic and surpriiingly tactical, especially when you and your friends want to pull off advanced combo attacks. I still have a lot of playing to do before I deliver a verdict, but so far, it’s looking very, very promissing. I hope I get a chance to play with the full 4 people at once and see who well the game treats us then.

As some of you may have heard, the demos for Unreal Tournament 2004 were released yesterday and today. The cool thing about this is that it wasn’t just the Windows demo that was released, it was also the native Linux and Mac versions. I found a good Bittorrent link to the demo and gave it a spin on my main Debian box (Athlon XP 2200+, 1GB DDR RAM, GeForce FX 5600 256MB) and it runs like a dream. I haven’t gotten to give all the different game modes a try yet, but so far it looks every bit as good as UT2003 (which I’ve been playing natively on Linux for a while now), and then some. The character models are more detailed and better animated, the animation in general and frame rate is solid, and the maps are every bit as good, and for some game modes, like Bombing Run, much better in my opinion. I’m looking forward to giving the other modes a test run over the weekend, since I’ve heard they’ve got vehicles and BF1942-style gameplay, and that can only be a Good Thing ™.

In less cheery news, turns out that Star Chamber doesn’t work as well under WineX as I thought it did. I finally got through the main tutorials, and then tried to get online with it to create an account and play a few practice games, but as soon as I try to connect, the game immediately crashes out. I tried a few different ways of approaching the moment of connection, but it makes no difference: click to login, game crashes. It’s a damn shame, ’cause I was hoping to get to play it a while, but I’m not about to let Windows corrupt my system once more just over a game. I’ll keep trying to find a way to get it to run, and I’ll let y’all know if I find one.

Well, that was really cool of him. Andy Jeffries, the lead developer behind the absolutely excellent GPL’d PHP Editor, gPHPEdit, sent me an email thanking me for mentioning his program way back in August when I was ranting about the whole European Software Patents hullabaloo. Nevermind that that particular blog entry has an embarrasing number of typos, or that I got the link to his homepage wrong (I fixed the link now, but I left the typos as a testament to my not-so-l33t typing skillz), here’s a pretty accomplished programmer thanking lil’ ol’ me for giving his program a mention on my humble blog (which is read, far as I can tell, only by me and my friends, the search engine spiderbots). That’s damn cool.

So, to Andy Jeffries, l33t h4×0r responsible for gPHPEdit, which I use pretty much every day at work and beats the pants off Crimson Editor which I used to use when I was stuck in Windowsland, I salute you. Not only are you an excellent programmer who’s created a solid piece of code that I’ve found extremely useful, but you took time out to thank a random blogger like me for mentioning your program. Thanks. I definetly appreciate the work you’ve put into gPHPEdit, and the guys at my office who I’ve helped move over towards Linux also appreciate it. Now go bug that guy who wanted to put gPHPEdit into Debian, my distro of choice.

So, I downloaded Star Chamber, which the guys over at Penny Arcade have been extolling the virtues of for a few weeks now. It’s a space empire game, mixed in with collectible trading cards, and that sounds like a fine recipe for doom to me. I have a fascination for collectibe card games (CCG’s) that borders on the unhealthy. Once upon a time, yes, I was a Magic: The Gathering geek. There’s just something about tuning your deck, honing your strategies, and waiting patiently until you can pull off a massive combo whereupon you play a card that enables you to sacrifice your opponent’s largest guardian for mana points, and use those mana points to cast a spell that puts all his lands under your control, thereby activating the conditions of a third card which entitles you to have sex with his sister, that just makes me feel like more of a man.

Anyway, going back to Star Chamber, I haven’t had much chance to play it yet, I bascially just went through the tutorial, but so far it looks good. For my fellow Linux geeks, you’ll be glad to know that it installs and runs fine under Linux by way of WineX (3.2.1). Of course, I haven’t gotten a chance to try the online play yet, so I don’t know if that works under Linux, but as soon as I know, so will you, dear readers.

Good news for the ultra geeky among us: Stephen Wolfram, the rather controversial mathematician who’s work has spread ripples throughout the entire scientific community (not least of which due to alegations of plagiarism in his most influential work) has released the full contents of his behemoth book, Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science for free online from WolframScience.com. I’ve been wanting to buy this book for a while now because it sounds fascinating (he tends to explain everything, from the simplest molecules to life itself, through simple computer algorithms), but have been turned off by the high price of the gigantic hardcover edition. Maybe now I’ll finally get a chance to read what all the hubbub is about.

Well, the server move has gone as well as I would like. There’s still a couple of minor bugs I’d like to work out, but everything seems to be in order generally, people can access this site and AniGaming again, and except for a bit of slowdown due to the bottleneck that is my DSL line’s weak upload speed, all seems to be working.

In other news, Jan, a.k.a. Jancelot of AniGaming fame, has started his own weblog. His first entry (and his second one) mainly deal with how he’s never liked the idea of a blog much, and finds the very concept illogical and strange. But still, he’s keeping one himself. Fun stuff, go read it, I placed a semi-perma-link over on my blogroll over there on the right. Enjoy!

And, finally, before I head out for tonight: Some of you may have read me more or less endorsing Howard Dean as the man to take down the travesty that is Bush. I have now recanted that decision, and I throw my full weight behind this candidate:

Sorry about the posting delay. Been busy dealing with the details of the Big Move, setting up a mail server that can handle 4 virtual domains, setting up Natalie’s new domain, VoodooBunny.com and emails for that one, and doing the transition on AniGaming (you’ll notice AG is down, hopefully it should be back up tomorrow when the DNS servers catch up again). To top it all off, Natalie’s computer died, and Telefonica switched my number (and my DSL service) with someone else (who has a sower DSL service than I do… bastards.)

However, since I figure I do owe you a little for not posting for the past couple of days and for the intermittent site accessibility problems that have happened from all the configuration changes I’ve been doing, here’s a rundown on my experience with hosting 4 domains on my home computer, and a little bit on moving Natalie’s Windows apps and capabilities over to my Linux box so she can keep doing things and creating while we get her replacement pieces for her box.
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