TechgnosisWeb Prime

I know y’all have missed me this week, I need to make up for it somehow. I think that the fact that this site, AniGaming, and the others, will be down all day on Sunday and a good chunk of Saturday due to the PimpRig going with me to a LAN party is probably not the way to make up for it, tho.

On the plus side, check it out: buttons!

… about people, the world, and everything in it, can be condensed to what is found in this comic strip.

Well, I seem to remember rambling on about trying to get Second Life, that Metaverse-esque online game, to run under Linux by using Wine or WineX. And the conclusion on those ramblings was that, no, it would not run. So while Natalie’s been engrossed in the game on her Windows box, I’ve done without it over on mine. Until now. With Natalie’s box being dead and in need of replacement parts, I had to find a way for her to play SL on my machine. I looked for ways but didn’t find anything too worthwhile, and was starting to be resigned to the fact that I would probably have to install Windows on a separate partition and dual-boot between Win and Lin so she could play, which would have meant that this site, along with my other sites and their respective emails, would have been down completely while she was playing. But then I ran across an interesting forum thread where someone claimed to have gotten SL working under Linux.

I followed the thread, and it turns out that SL runs almost flawlessly under Linux, but you have to do some very minor source code hacking on WineX in order to get it working. WineX is usually available only as a prepackaed binary, which means, no source code, just running program. These prepackaged binaries can’t run SL. However, WineX is also available thoruhg CVS (Concurrent Versioning System), which does give you access to a large chunk of the source code, which you can compile for yourself if you’re so inclined. So, you download the source code for WineX and you change one single line in one of the source files, and then compile WineX, which takes a short while. And then you use this hacked version of WineX to install and run SL, and shazam, it just works! In fact, it seems to work a tad faster than it did on Natalie’s old box (although that could be related to the fact that my box is simply a lot more powerful than hers used to be). I created an account for myself (we used to share an account, but that old account is Natalie’s by now, I really wouldn’t feel comfortable stepping into her skin like that, as it were), and spent some time today just goofing about and exploring. Good stuff. There are some minor glitches, but the folks in the forums over at SL seem to be working on workarounds for all of them, and in the meantime, until Linden Labs releases an official Linux client, this is good enough for now.

Just a couple of quick entries tonight, mostly thanks to Memepool. First off, there’s The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army, a rollicking collection of the good times you’re not really allowed to have in the Armed Forces. Next up is the Accidental Video Game Pr0n Archive, which is a thing of beauty (and booty). You owe it to yourself to check it out, I’m sure there’s a couple in there that old gamers will recognize.

Today, the ETA, a terrorist organization based in Spain, launched a devastating and cowardly attack on the capital city, Madrid. A series of bombs in several train stations have left nearly 200 people dead and more than 1,000 wounded. The image below, created by an illustrator named Forges, is placed in memory of the slain and wounded, and in solidarity with the Spanish people.

So, yeah, I suppose meta-blogging (blogging about blogs) is so passe it’s not even funny, but I can’t not share this with the world. I suppose you allready know about the twin Mars rovers, up on the red planet, grinding away at rocks and looking for water (which they found, by the way!)

Well, those rambunctioous rovers have their own blogs, on Livejournal.com. But that’s not even the fun part. The fun part is that the blogs are written as if the rovers were a pair of teenage sisters! Opportunity’s blog shows her to be a peppy, happy, slightly snobbish teenage girl, and it’s colored in pinks and reds, while Spirit’s blog has more of a gothic vibe, with sad poems about the rocks on mars and black and grey colors on the design. They’re abolsutely hilarious to read, and they serve a dual purpose by keeping you up to date on what’s going on up there… Great fun.

Sweet monkey Jebus.. I will become the willing personal slave of whoever buys me one of these when they come out: the Motorola MPx, a “very different type of phone that offers the user a horizontal or vertical alignment when being used and will include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Tri-band GSM/GPRS, SD slot, 320×240 2.8 inch screen, 1.3 MP integrated camera and a QWERTY layout keyboard. We hear it might also come equipped with a built in hand/hair dryer to squelch any perception there was a feature left out.”. Yummy. Here’s a picture. Go gawk. Gawk, damn you, gawk!

Finally, someone has put together the official rules for the greatest sport of all time, Calvinball! Here’s a snippet:

1.5. The Calvinball Field (See Calvinball Equipment - 2.3) should consist of areas, or zones, which are governed by a set of rules declared spontaneously and inconsistently by players. Zones may be appear and disappear as often and wherever the player decides. Zones are often named for their effect. For example, a corollary zone would enable a player to make a corollary (sub-rule) to any rule that has benn, will be, or might be declared. A pernicious poem place would require the intruder to do what the name implies. Or an opposite zone would enable a player to declare reverse playibility on the others. (Remember, the player would declare this zone oppositely by not declaring it.) (Figure 1.5a and 1.5b)

Just found this lovely little article titled “Caring for your introvert”. It’s beautiful, you really need to go read it, all of us introverts beg you to do so. Here’s a choice quote:

‘We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say “I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.”‘

So most of you may have noticed that I’m quite a bit of a Linux fan. I use it on my desktop, I use it on my laptop, I reccomend it to people, I use and install it almost every day at work, heck, this website runs on it. However, a conversation I had with my girlfriend today did make me see some things that I’ve been a bit of an asshole about.

Linux is good. It’s better, faster, and more stable than it’s been in years. The level of quality on existing applications has gone up considerably, and new applications are being worked on everyday. You can use it as an everyday desktop as easily as you can use it for web/file/print serving. Systems such as Debian, Gentoo, and, yes, even Red Hat, make installing applications and keeping them updated a breeze. You don’t have to worry about viruses, and spam and pop up fighting is integrated into most available web browsers and mail clients. However: it’s not perfect. And it still caters to a different type of person than what Windows usually caters to.

Here’s the deal: a lot of things in Linux still require you to know about your computer, and the things that go in it. They require you to at least understand a lot about the inner workings of your machine and the software on it. This, however, means that your average Linux user must spend some time and effort learning these things and fiddling about with them, dropping into the command line, etc. etc. This is fine and good if you, like me, enjoy messing about with the guts of your OS. But most people, frankly, don’t want to learn about their computers. They don’t want to have to know anything about their system, its commands and file structures and methods and formats. They just want things to work, simply and with as little hassle as possible. And, for the most part, Windows provides that hassle-free day to day experience much better than Linux does.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean it as an attack, or in a condescending way, when I say most people can’t be bothered to learn more about their computers and spend time learning the format of some arcane commands. It may seem strange to geeks like me, but most people do have better things to do. If you’re, say, a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or, hell, even a housewife, there’s a thousand things in your day and in your life that are more important than trying to figure out just what command paramater will enable you to finally view that picture of your grandkids that your daughter in law emailed you. These people, most people, in fact, want convenience. They want to sit down and have their machine work hassle free, and they dont’ want ten billion options and configuration parameters, they just want a button they can click that will do what they want, or close enough to it that it doesn’t matter. And I can’t say I blame them.
(more…)

Well, I did my good deeds for the day. I helped Liza install Windows 98SE on her computer, due to the fact that her old install was so riddled with virii and spyware that it was simpler to just blow away the old install and start again from scratch. I did at least leave her with a few tools installed to keep too much badness from happening again: installed Firefox, Trillian and Ad-Aware, which should at least keep her out of trouble for a few days.

The other good deed is that a friend of a friend gave me his laptop to install and update Debian on.. good stuff. It’s not every day I get someone asking me to install Linux on one of their boxes without me having me try to evangelize them a bit. I should have it ready to go by tomorrow. In exchange, he pledged to get me a pet rat. those damn rodcents have proven particularly elusive here on the island, as almost no pet store carries them. Hope the guy comes through on his promise.

Just a quick post to try out something new. I downloaded and installed BloGTK 0.95 on the laptop, it’s a little free program for Linux that lets you connect to your blog and work on entries in a much more comfortable way. I can edit posts offline, compose them and post them later, insert tables, images and the like much easier. Of course, this is at least what the program says it can do. I’ll be using it for the next few days, and if I like it, I’ll keep it. Heck, I might even stick up their button on the sidebar over there. So far, it seems to be pretty good.

Just a couple of quick entries:

First off, the good news: apparently, Macromedia, maker of Flash and the Dreamweaver HTML editor, is thinking of making its apps run under Linux. This would be absolutely great for Linux adoption by companies and individuals, as I know many many people, and have heard of many more, who say that the only reason they haven’t moved to Linux is because of Flash MX and Dreamweaver MX, which I understand, as I’d give my right arm for an HTML editor as good as Dreamweaver for Linux… well, now it looks like we’ll be getting the real thing! Eagerly waiting for this, Macromedia!

Then the bad news: Godzlla is retiring, or at least taking a ten year hiatus. Apparently due to flagging interest in the big reptilian bruiser, Toho is making a push to shelve its star for the foreseeable future. There’s maybe one more movie with the big guy coming out, and then no more Gojira. We’ll miss you, big guy…

If anyone has an old, outdated machine, no monitor needed, just an old box with a CPU, hard drive, and network card, that they’re willing to part with for free or for very cheap, I’ll take it off your hands, no problem. I’m looking to set up a simple ‘lil server/proxy to take the load off my main box, so I can dual-boot my main box for gaming purposes.. let me know.

You know, I spend a good chunk of my day every day fighting spam. I’ve become something of an expert (or at least, an ‘experienced user’) of tools such as SpamAssassin, the Razor and Pyzor distributed spam clearinghouses, and others (and let’s not get into the whole antivirus thing). So it’s with a bit of shock that I return to my blog one night, and realize I suddenly have many, many more comments than I used to have before, and that all these new comments tend to deal with offering me prescription drugs and enlarging my penis. I suppose I’ll need the drugs to dull the pain that a grossly distended penis might cause me, but I digress. I was a victim of comment spam. Me, who spends hours each day ensuring that my company’s clients can enjoy their email spam-free, I had become a victim of spammers on my very own personal blog. Crap.

Well, I did some quick searching, and found a few solutions, but none seemed too convincing. I was starting to become resigned ot the idea that I would have to delete all those spams manually, until I ran across this: MT-Blacklist, a handy dandy free plug-in for Movable Type that combines the joy of Perl regexes (that’s regular expressions for the uninitiated) with intelligent URL based (rather than IP-based) blacklists. It blocks pretty much all types of comment spam by looking at the URL’s of the links included in the spam, not keywords or IP addresses. While spammers can quickly change their messages to avoid keyword filters, and post using dynamic IP ranges to bypass IP blocklists, they can’t change the url of whatever product they want you to buy so easily, and that’s what this plug-in takes advantage of. On top of that, it can scan your old comments, delete those that it detects as spam, and add their URLs to your blocklist. And on top of that, it publishes the blocklist as an RSS feed, which becomes part of a distributed spam blacklist, so that as soon as one person finds a new spam site, everyone who chooses to subscribe to that blacklist benefits. Sweet. It works beautifully, too. Haven’t received a single new spam since I installed it, and it cleaned up all the old spams brilliantly (and added some 10 new entries to the blacklist while it was at it). Good stuff. I installed it on my web root, so anyone who wants a weblog of their own under Techgnosisweb will be covered too. Enjoy!

God Hates Shrimp!

For all your H.P. Lovecraft searching needs!