TechgnosisWeb Prime

Is it just me, or is there something teribly, terribly wrong with a product marketed to children that shoots out some sort of white, sticky goo right into other kids’ faces?

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This is fair warning: in two weeks, it will be impossible to view this site using Internet Explorer. Hell, if you’re using IE now, you probably already noticed a bar along the top of your screen letting you know that you really should upgrade to Firefox. If you haven’t done so yet, seriously, what the hell are you waiting for? In any case, this is my personal site, and I can block IE if I want to, so I will. In two weeks, that banner at the top will morph into a full-page “Sorry, you suck, go switch browsers before I let you in.” deadbolt. Enjoy!

… Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew.

I’ve spent most of the day listening to Johnathan Coulton’s (of Skullcrusher Mountain and Baby Got Back fame) ultra-fine song, Code Monkey, and it’s quickly becoming my official anthem. I mean, with lyrics like:

Code Monkey get up get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting
With boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey seem to work a lot
But his output stink
His code not “functional” or “elegant”
What do Code Monkey think?
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy, just proud

Well,you can see why I like it. Hell, “Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself” has become my default response to all status inquiries on my current projects. Oh, and, yes, it’s a love song. Get the song here, or join the torrent, and then go to Coulton’s page and throw money at him!

My Kubuntu Desktop with XGL/Compiz

Originally uploaded by Katsushiro.

Finally got XGL/Compiz installed and running on my Kubuntu Dapper Drake desktop, and it is amazing! Neither MS nor Apple has anything out right now that comes close to this. Vista will supposedly bring some of the things in Compiz, but that’s still a year away, and will require special locked hardware. Meanwhile, I have it today, on a free, open source platform. Hurrah! (And, yes, that video in the middle is *actually* playing, on the border of the cube, as I move it around.) Click here to see a YouTube video showing off what this all looks like in action

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Finally, technology used for something actually useful: putting a real head on a can of Guiness:

Costs about $30, and is, of course, not available anywhere near to where you live, but damn do I want one. I mean, look at the video on their site and you’ll see how insanely cool this is: a device that uses ultrasonic waves for one thing and one thing only: putting a real head on a pint of can-poured Guiness. Brilliant!
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I SAID HELL YEAH!!!!

Touched by His Noodly Appendage

Originally uploaded by Katsushiro.

Proof positive that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is spreading His Noodly Goodness all across the globe! I thought I was the only person on the island with the FSM bumper sticker, but it’s not so: this is a picture I took today of our mailman’s truck as he dropped by to give us our mail. Truly, our mailman has been touched by His Noodly Appendage!

Allright, it’s rant time. I’ve had this one cooking for quite a bit, and I’ll try to keep it focused. My skeptical beef this week is with ‘herbal medicines’ and ‘all-natural’ supplements. No, I’m not saying they’re all useless. But do hear me out:

I’ve noticed a disturbing tendency among a lot of otherwise rational people to believe the old bugaboo that if something is ‘all-natural’, then it must be safer than those weird chemical drugs the doctors prescribe, with their scary side-effects. And, at first blush, it seems like a reasonable proposition. Medicine X claims to cure Ailment X, but it says, right on the bottle, that it has side effects Y and Z. Meanwhile, Herbal Supplement X also claims to cure Ailment X, and its bottle doesn’t list *any* side effects! Herbal Supplement X is clearly better and safer. My doctor’s a quack. Right?

Listen, folks, the only reason there are no side-effects listed on the bottle of herbal pills is because the herbal supplement industry is not regulated like the pharmaceutical industry is, and, therefore, there is no government agency that forces them to disclose their side-effects or any other dangers. The stuff on the herbal supplement bottle is not written by doctors or health professionals: it’s written by *marketers*, who have a *product to sell*.

“But Katsu!”, I hear you say, “These pills are made out of herbs and natural substances, not out of dangerous chemicals like pharmaceuticals are! They *must* be safer!” I hear you. But you know what *else* is made out of ‘herbs’? Poison Ivy. Hemlock. Death’s Head Mushrooms. And many more poisonous or deadly plants. And what else is made out of ‘all-natural’ substances? Snake venom, arsenic, mercury, lead. All stuff that could kill or make you very very ill, and all of it, ‘all-natural’. Just ’cause it says ‘all-natural’ on the bottle, please, for the sake of your health, don’t assume it’s safe!

Take, for example, the case of Sandi Stay, in the UK, who had to have both kidneys removed after going to a Chinese medicine store and being given a herb to treat her psoriasis. Turns out that herb was Aristochlia, a known cancer-causeing herb that is banned in the UK.

Or read the following, from this article:

Dr Mark Thursz, a consultant physician at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington said he had seen a huge rise in the number of patients being referred to him with liver failure or hepatitis after taking Chinese herbal medicine.

He said: “Many people believe herbal remedies are safe, but they should be seen in the light as conventional remedies in that they can adverse reactions.

“When you get a box of pills you get a long list of potential side effects.

“You don’t get that with herbal remedies because practitioners try to make you believe they are safe.”

Under current regulations Chinese medics are treated as shop keepers rather than traders, so in the same way a butcher prosecuted for selling bad meat would be allowed to continue trading so are they.

At the end of the day, it’s up to you to play it smart. I’m not saying all herbal medicines are dangerous. Some can work, and some may even be more effective than regular drugs. But when you walk into a Chinese medicine store, or into the office of a herbal supplement dealer, don’t leave your common sense at the door. Don’t be fooled by the myth of ‘all-natural’ safety. These are not doctors, they’re shopkeepers out to make a living. Do your research beforehand, and dont take the word of any website that sells the product if they’re claiming it’s safe. If I was selling, for example, a herbal pill for losing weight, it wouldn’t be in my best interest to tell you that it contains fenfluarmine, a substance so dangerous that it’s banned for sale pretty much worldwide, now would I?

Be smart out there, folks, and keep a skeptical eye on anything that claims to be ‘100% safe’ simply because it’s ‘all-natural’.
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So, the Techgnosisweb Blog Empire has a correspondent in Japan, and he does his best to present his vision of the island nation: pretty spring flowers and interesting buildings. But I’m here to show you the Japan he doesn’t want you to see! Behold:

That, my friends, is the real Japan. That’s what it’s like there ALL THE TIME. People in monster suits kicking ass, and then a pair of guys in horribly revealing oufits and helmets jump in. Ph34r Japan.

So, Google Calendar is finally out. Now, I’m a bit of a Google fanboy, but I checked out the Calendar and was nonplussed. I’ve been using Kiko for a while now, and it does everything Google Calendar currently does, in a nicer interface (at least in my opinion). iCal import and RSS subscription, flexible AJAX-y interface, etc. But the appointment creation interface is niftier to me: I can just write ‘Fill out reports’ and then add in catgories, locations, and contact invitations later as in the Google version, or I can write:

Fill Out Reports @Office +bob@mywork.com [Work]

And Kiko knows what to do, creates my appointment and sets the Location as ‘Office’, the category as ‘Work’, and invites Bob via email, with no extra clciking or form filling on my end. Also, I can create an appointment and write ‘Pay Phone Bill Every Month’, or ‘Call Accountant Every Week’ and it does the Right Thing and creates automatically repeating appointments with no extra work on my part.

It can also send appointment reminders via email, IM (AOL only at this point), or even SMS, which is handy as heck when I’m out of the office. Calendar sharing with contacts or the public at large is dead easy too.

Plus, there’s more features, such as syncing, coming. If you like Google Calendar, do yourself a favor and check out Kiko. It’s free too and I, at least, like it a lot better right now. (And, no I don’t work for them, but I have corresponded with a couple of the Kiko folks over email, and they are *very* responsive, quick, and nice, so I’m rooting for them. )

Update: played around a bit further with Google Calendar, and looks like it actually does a lot fo the same stuff as Kiko, including SMS reminders, natural language appointment creation, etc. Still prefer the Kiko interface, though. Still, the Kiko folks have their work cut out ofr them now to differentiate and add in new features, because I’m sure a lot of folks who discover GoogleCal first will erronously see Kiko as a ‘me-too’ if they compare features. This ought to be interesting.
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Update: Day’s over, I’m fine, rest of day was uneventful, omens proven to be crap. Back to business as usual.

I’m writing this out quick just in case I end up in the hospital or something before the day is over. I am far from a superstitious person, but, hey, in the interest of science, I might as well write down the events of this morning. I guess listening to the ‘prophecy and omens’ episode (33) of the Dragon’s Landing Podcast on the way to work didn’t help either.

So, I start my day by getting up, looking at my calendar, and realizing that it’s April 13, and I still haven’t done my taxes. Shit. Not the best way to wake up. So I head over to the PimpRig, bring up Firefox, and check out the local government tax website. A serious-but-friendly talking head informs me that I have ’till the 18th to send in my tax return. Whew. I was afraid I had till tomorrow. So I look around for the free e-filing app they have every year, and find it. Windows-only, of course. Not that I’d let a little thing like that stop me. One visit to the Adept package management system later, and Wine is installed on my system. Before my breakfast had even finished cooling, I had the tax application installed and working on my Kubuntu box. Nice.

So, with that bit of unpleasantness behind me, I got up, got ready, and headed off to work. First thing I see as I get out of the house is the Tree of Death. There’s a huge dead tree right in front of my house (I keep meaning to take a picture someday), and there’s a colony of changos (the puertorican version of crows), about 13 (!) of them, that have taken residence on it. They’re not there all the time, but when they are, it’s a fuckin’ creepy sight: big tree, bare branches, speckled with cawing black dots. They were all there this morning. *shudder*

I get in my car, and start driving off. No sooner do I get out of my neighborhood that I run into a traffic snarl. That’s weird, normally, the traffic doesn’t start until I hit the highway. The cause? Dead body in a gutter. No blood, no car tire skid marks, just some old guy keeled over dead in a gutter. Heart attack or drug overdose, most likely, as I didn’t see any obvious wounds as I nearly drove over him (the cars in the other lane were pushing me almost into the gutter in their urge to gawk at the corpse).

So, crepy-ass morning so far. On top of all this, the day is gray, rainy, stormy and dark, and as I got on the highway I witnessed birds flying erratically and fighting each other at least 3 times. And, again, as I hit play on my iPod, the show that comes up is all about omens and prophecies.

Updates as they happen, if I live through the day.
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So, a new study is out, claiming a link between video games and increased drinking and drug use. Pardon me while I call bullshit.

Alarmist headlines aside, the study actually claims that, among other things:

[Males who play violent video games] were also more likely to have permissive attitudes toward alcohol and marijuana use.

“Permissive attitudes’. Not actually smoking pot, just saying “Yeah, I guess drinkin’ and smokin’ ain’t so bad.” Did the study check whether the ‘permissive attitudes’ towards drinking and smoking among the 100 male undergraduates aged 18 to 21 that took part might have also been affected by, I don’t know, being in college, where all night keggers and smoking pot are pretty much a requirement to graduate? Or, say, the constant barrage of beer and alcohol ads in TV, movies, and magazines? No, it must be the video games’ fault. Right.

Listen, all I have to do to disprove these things is look at my good friend, Lord Absu. This is a man who is into his video games. He plays them constantly. He plans his monthly budget around the release dates for big-name titles. He has been known to play for a week straight, with no nourishment other than the life-giving stream of electrons pouring from his TV screen. He is so skilled at the art of trading in old games for new that, and I have this on good authority, he walked into an EBGames store with nothing but an old NES that wouldn’t even turn on, and left 10 minutes later with the first official PS3 prototype, and a crisp new $50 bill.

He is, in fact, a gamer.

According to every one of these studies, Absu should be a stone-cold and trained killer. Able to use his highly developed hand-eye coordination to dodge the bullets that FBI agents fire at him, he would, one presumes, rampage through cities, leaving nothing but devastation, chaos, carnage, and the wailing of newly orphaned babies behind him.

Last I checked, he’s killed 0 people. Been in 0 fights. Drug use? Nope. Drinking? Sure. You drink too. Pretty much all of us do, even if it’s just socially. But I’ve never seen him be arrested for public drunkenness, or destruction of public or private property, assault, batery, rape, killing hookers, kicking dogs, or anything of the sort.

Does he sometimes wish he could just mow down the people who annoy him? Sure. We all do. But, just like you, he knows the difference between games and reality. If anything, the games give people a place to vent their frustrations that’s safe and won’t hurt others.

There are violent people out there. Video games do not make these people, but it is only natural that violent people will gravitate towards violent video games. The problem is not the video games, it’s the person. Deal with the person, and let the rest of us game on.
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If you read my last 2 posts, then you already know the sad story of my pwning at the hands of Oblivion, and my subsequent fall and redemption by Kubuntu. I also mentioned that tonight would be the last test: I would set up Cedega 5.1.3, and try to install and play City of Villains.

I am here to report that the whole thing went through pretty much flawlessly. After some initial confusion on how to eject the CD-ROM’s out of the drive when the installer asked me to, the rest, including downloading and applying all the patches, went through without a hitch. I was soon logged into CoV on my freshly installed Kubuntu desktop, and sending my robot army to put the hurt on some Goldbrickers, pronto. I still have to tweak the graphics a smidge, as I can notice a bit of graininess at the edges of the image, but overall it moves just as well as it did on my WinXP desktop. In fact, loading screens seem to go by much faster now than they used to. Maybe it has to do with installing the game on a fresh and mostly empty ext3 partition rather than trying to load all that data from an old, heavily fragmented NTFS partition.

Next up: WoW, and I’m pretty much set for my immediate gaming needs. Looks like the switch to Linux is going very well!
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Due to popular demand (ie. one guy posted up a comment wondering when Linux was going to become a part of this equation), I present the continuation of this epic tale of technolust, betrayal, and eventual surrender to Open Source.

When we last left off, I was determined to at least redeem my geekness by doing something to the PimpRig. Preferably something less costly than buying a new motherboard/RAM/CPU/Flux Capacitor. So I took stock of what I really do with my PC these days: I surf the Internets, I listen to music and watch videos, almost invariably in open formats. What else? Light office work, downloading (torrents and emule, mostly), the occasional burning of a thing to DVD or encoding of a video to another format. Accessing the computers at the office over Remote Desktop. Programming in PHP, Ruby/Rails, MySQL. And, of course, gaming, mostly WoW and City of Villians. Hmmm…

An idea hit me: my Windows XP installation was getting pretty crufty.. It was almost time for the annual wipe-and-reinstall every XP machine invariably needs to go through. Maybe it was time for a change. Pretty much everything I’d been doing on XP, I could do just as well under Linux. In fact, it’s been over a year since I last had Linux on my PC.. by now, some of the annoyances that drove me away from The Penguin might have been fixed, or at least lessened. The only hitch would be the games. So I dropped on by Transgaming, discovered that WineX is now known as Cedega, and that it supposedly runs WoW and City of Villians quite capably, and my decision was made. It was time to entrust the PimpRig back to the loving embrace of Linus and the Slashdot crowd.

My girlfriend looked at me funny when I told her I’d be installing Linux on my box again. Perhaps she feared that as soon as I finished installing it, she’d vanish in a puff of logic, since everyone knows Linux geeks have no girlfriends. But I assured her that this wouldn’t happen, and started shopping around for a distribution to suit my needs. I won’t go into the details, but I finally settled on Kubuntu (because Gnome gives me hives). I torrented the Dapper Drake Flight 6 beta release (why settle for anything less than the bleeding-edge ‘this is where we keep the bugs’ edition?), backed up my personal files over to the iMac, and got crackin’ on the install.

One impresively easy install later, I had a live Kubuntu system running, and I’m lovin’ it. The KDE 3.5.2 desktop is very pretty and responsive, and I keep finding cool little touches, tweaks, and improvements over the last time I played around with it. I’m really liking it. The Adept package management app is wonderful, too. It’s made installign the extra stuff I want pretty painless. Still not as easy as it should be, but really, really close. So long as the program you want is somewhere in Kubuntu’s fairly massive software repository, it’s just a matter of searching, selecting it for installation, and Adept takes care of the rest, including dependencies and upgrades. Stuff that’s not in the repositories, however, can still be a bit of a pain. I’m still waiting for the day when I download a .deb or .rpm, double-click it to install, and if there’s any dependencies missing, the system doesn’t just say ‘Missing dependency, libfoo-2.3.4-0′, but actually adds in ‘Would you like me to download it for you?’. Granted, missing dll’s happen in Windows too (especially with VB apps), but it just doesn’t seem to happen as often as in Linux. Still, Adept really brings the software installation process up to a point where I’m almost ready to say it’s ready for the masses.

As for the rest, it’s been working fine. I installed Firefox (with Java and Flash plugins) and Skype, set up the nvidia-glx driver to get video acceleration out of my Geforce FX-5600 card, did some downloads over KTorrent, ran a full system update with Adept, I’m loving the latest version of Kopete for IM, and, overall, life is good, and I am now officially running pretty much every OS under the sun in my house: XP on the GF’s computer, Kubuntu Linux on mine, and OSX Tiger on the shared iMac. Dunno if Windows Mobile 2003 counts as an OS, but it’s there in Glitch too.

Tonight, howerver, is the big test. I got the latest version of Cedega, and I’ll be installing it tonight, then trying out City of Villians. That’s the make-or-break test. If I can play my games, I’m a happy camper. If I can’t, it’s back to the land of Bill. Wish me luck, and stay tuned for more updates.

And as for Oblivion? Can’t wait to play it, even if it means reinstalling Windows. But seeing as I can’t afford the massive upgrades, it’ll be a while before that happens. Maybe it’ll be playable under Cedega by then.
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Howdy-ho, loyal readers! Are you ready for another thrilling excursion into tales of high geekdom? I bet you are! Let’s not waste any more time, then, and dive right in.

This story begins last Wednesday. After a long day at work, dealing with the stereotypical clueless clients, frustrating phone calls, and all else, I got home at night with a hankering for some gaming. “How sweet,” I thought, “it will be to sit down now and play that hot new game that all the kids are talking about, Oblivion.” So I sat down, inserted the disc in the drive, and began the install process. This took a bit of time, but, finally, it was done, with no errors, hangups, or other wierdness. Time to play! Except.. the PimpRig couldn’t hack it. After loading up the game, when I finally started to play, it was like watching a very pretty slideshow. When ‘frames per second’ becomes ’seconds per frame’, you know something’s very wrong.

One trip to Google later, and it turns out I really should have looked at my computer’s stats more closely before embarking on the whole ‘Oblivion’ kick. This game requires, ideally, a computer that has yet to be built. Its maximum graphical beauty can only be achieved by the next generation of GPU’s, which are still only a gleam in some engineer’s eye. Until that day, we mortals will have to do with a pale approximation of Oblivion’s true glory. However, even this requires a computer capable of enslaving the human race, should the whim strike it. The PimpRig, alas, while still a powerful computer, is capable only of enslaving a small, third-world country. Ghana, perhaps. And so, no Oblivion for me.

I started looking into upgrade options, and, much to my chagrin, found that the world had moved on without me while I was busy grinding pansy elves into paste in WoW (Tauren shamans for teh win! Horde rules, Alliance drools!). Where I had once prided myself on my machine’s wide and spacious AGP 8X video bus, video cards capable of running Oblivion at acceptable framerates use PCI-E connectors, which make the once-mighty AGP bus look like a tiny backwoods trail compared to PCI-E’s 5-billion lane MegaHighway. So this would require a new motherboard. Fine. I look into motherboards. There’s lots of them, but none would deign to touch my now-pathetic little AMD Athlon 2200+ CPU. It’s all about the FG-Whatevers and the 64-bit processors now. So a new CPU to go with it. And forget about using that dinky DDR-333 RAM you’ve got. The cool kids roll with the DDR2 these days. Oh, and you’re still using an IDE hard drive? How quaint. SATA’s where it’s at, baby.

So, my computer is now, officially, in every sense of the word, obsolete. Or, to quote the h4×0rz: “j00r put3r is 0bs0l33t!!!!1 LOLWTF!1!!one. nub!” And I don’t exactly have the cash to go out and snag a new one. Fine then. I’m gonna make the most of what I have right now.

To Be Continued…
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Technorati Tags: geekdom, Oblivion, computer, WoW

Katsu: the comic!

Originally uploaded by Katsushiro.

I just discovered StripGenerator, and my creativity is flowing, as you can see. Will I be the new webcomics phenom? Only time will tell.

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Technorati Tags: StripGenerator, creativity, webcomics

This one goes out to Evo:

Behold the ultra-blurry phonecam video! But that’s okay, it’s not the video that matters.. it’s the audio. Turn up the volume to hear the dulcet tones of Mr. Samuel L. Jackson letting us all know what he thinks about those motherfucking snakes on his motherfucking plane.
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Technorati Tags: Evo, phonecam, video, Samuel L. Jackson, snakes, plane

What if Ronald McDonald was a hot anime chick?

Originally uploaded by Katsushiro.

Found on a random machine at a cafe near the office.

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Yeah, I know.. I owe you guys some real updating. It’s coming, soon. In the meantime, just dropping a quick note to let those of you intrigued by my previous article on the ‘Web Desktop‘ know of something pretty cool that just popped up today: Netvibes now has tabs! This is pretty insanely great, as your Netvibes page could get pretty damn crowded once you added some widgets and a few feeds. Now i have a main tab that holds my search, wether, and important news and email widgets, and separate tabs for all my technology, fiction, and just random feeds. It also shows you how many unread items are in the feeds within each tab right in the tab itself. Tre neat. To top it all off, there were a few other updates and bug fixes, they’re calling it ‘Netvibes anise’, and the update is automatic: just reload your Netvibes page and the tabs and other goodies are there. If you haven’t played around with netvibes yet, seriously, go check it out. Good stuff.
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Technorati Tags: Web Desktop, tabs, Netvibes

After much soul-searching, I’ve decided to finally dump Google as my official search engine, and move completely over to MSN Search as my day-to-day search thingy. Let’s face it, Google’s cool and all, but they just don’t have the kind of resources to dedicate to this sort of thing that a mega-corp like Microsoft does. MSN Search has better search results, plain and simple. But you don’t have to take my word for it, click here to see the results for an MSN search on my name, and you’ll see what I mean: MSN Search for: Daniel Rodriguez.
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