Just another useless personal blog
AMD has actually been around for quite a while, but it’s their line of Intel-compatible processors that they’re now most famous for. Now however, Intel will be making AMD-compatible processors…
What happened? Basically, Intel lost the 64-bit race.
Continue reading “Is This Irony Or Silicony?”
You just know it’s going to be a bad day when you keep getting woken up in the middle of the night by the wind howling at your window. And it’s already -30C outside…
Dramatic statement about how much life sucks. Complaint about how I just cannot take it anymore.
Description of events of a trivial nature, exaggerated to appear to be of monumental importance. Implication of wrongdoing by an unspecified friend, with blatant clues dropped as to the person’s identity. Vindictive derision of friend’s flaws and lack of loyalty. Gratitude that other friends are not like that person.
Unrelated comments about new element of personal appearance, minor complaint about some other aspect of same. Closing note about how I’ve made up with friend X from last week. Promise to be more upbeat in the next entry.
(Yeah, it’s an old joke, but a goodie.)
Markov chain generators are interesting; given a body of source text, they analyze the statistical correlations between words and can generate random phrases in a similar style, almost intelligible in some cases even though they’re completely made up.
What happens when you feed it both religious discussion and UNIX development chat? This.
Some highlights:
This is supported by Jesus’s use of low cost eight bit micros and small amounts of RAM.
I have modified the “standard” Berkley ftpd to allow for various types of
failures in Scripture.On a SVR4, I am interested in building a list of names and
addresses to be in the name of Martin Luther, who led the religious
reformation of the HP LaserjetI know at one point Jesus said “no one may come to grips with the cpio header blown away”.
(found via the Linux kernel mailing list)
All I wanted to do was convert some clips… I’ve collected a number of little bits of video over the years, but they’re sometimes a bit of a pain to deal with. They’re in a zillion different formats, have to be played back on the computer, are often too small on the monitor and don’t look good when blown up to full screen, and need something a bit faster than my 400 MHz Linux box anyway. (The other, faster one’s often in XP for games.)
Fortunately there’s an easy solution: Video CDs! Simply convert everything to MPEG files, burn them to CD, and I can play them on my DVD player instead.
It turns out that video is a bit more complex than I had anticipated…
Continue reading “Vidiot”
There needs to be a word for that situation where you’ve pressed the monitor power button in but haven’t let go and you just realized there was one final thing you needed to do but you don’t want to stress the monitor by powering it off and then right on again so you’re standing there still holding the power button in with one hand while working the mouse and keyboard with the other trying to get those final few clicks in…
Us geeks are a weird lot, and perhaps this helps explain some of it: Five Geek Social Fallacies
I can definitely see aspects of what he describes occuring in places like EverQuest. The whole notion of a guild in these games is an artificial construct put together by people rife with these sorts of problems, so it’s not surprising to see them occur within the guild as well.
Continue reading “You Are All Deranged”
Alas, goatse.cx is no more. See this thread for more information on what happened behind the scenes. (Warning, disturbing inline images.)
What was it? If you don’t know, then consider yourself lucky. And do *not* visit that link above… If you really still want to know, well, it was a very candid look at a particular man’s rectal elasticity capabilities, to put it delicately (nothing to do with goats)…
What was the big deal then? In short, it was a focus of Internet mischief. It was a common volley in wars between people trying to gross each other out. Pranksters of all types would try to trick people into visiting it, through everything from simple direct links to fool newbies who’d never heard of it, all the way up to elaborate scripting to hide the true url to catch the suspicious and wary. In many circles people are now so suspicious that they carefully check each URL they see posted several different ways before daring to click on it. It was a form of punishment, something you would direct people to after you caught them stealing your image bandwidth. It was also a test of mettle, to see just how jaded you’d become to seeing shocking things on the net.
And now it is gone, at least officially. It will live on in various forms, of course. Many, many people have already ‘experienced’ it and it is one of those images that once seen, cannot be un-seen, and will be forever burned into their minds. And certainly some people will have the image cached away, ready to strike from their own private servers. It just won’t be the same, though.
Oh well, there’s always tubgirl…
This is a stack of CDs. CDs containing games. Games which I STILL HAVEN’T FINISHED YET. Some of them I haven’t even *started*.
I never meant to fall so far behind, of course, but then something called EverQuest happened. I still managed to sneak in some time to play other games too, but the vast majority of the time my first impulse was to log into EQ, see if anything was happening, if anyone needed me for a group, etc. All these other games weren’t going anywhere, they’d still be there in the exact same place I saved, but getting things done in EQ often meant being online at the right place at the right time.
Normally that would have just meant that the couple others I was playing at the time would have been the ones to suffer, but of course there’s more than that now. New games were still coming out and I’d hear about them through the usual reviews and word of mouth and felt like they were worth checking out. So, I’d pick up new games, install them and fool around with them for a bit, but…whoops, time to log in for that raid on Chardok tonight. Before long they too would fall to the wayside.
So, now I’ve got this mountainous pile of unfinished games. I haven’t spent as much time in EQ lately so I do have some more time to spend on them, but it’s still going to be pretty slow going. I also still like going back to some of the highly-replayable games like the Civ series and Diablo 2, which doesn’t help work through this pile any.
I’m tempted to say ‘screw it’ to my usual gaming approach and just grab walkthroughs and whip through them all as fast as possible, just to at least enjoy the stories, dialogue, victories, etc…
A RAID array may save your data from drive failure, but it won’t protect it from brain farts.
heide:/media/video/anime$ mkdir tmp ; cd tmp
heide:/media/video/anime/tmp$ cp ../bagi_part*
heide:/media/video/anime/tmp$ ls
heide:/media/video/anime/tmp$Wait, what did I just do…
I just copied the part 1 file over top of the part 2 file, that’s what… Gotta be careful with those wildcard expansions, especially when ‘cp’ and ‘mv’ are involved. (In this case I forgot the ‘.’ parameter at the end to tell it to copy the files here instead of over each other.)
Fortunately I hadn’t wiped the Linux partition on the old system yet and could recopy it back from there. Laziness pays off sometimes…
Lotus Notes must die. It was pushed onto us when we got bought out by our parent company and we had to integrate with their e-mail system, and it’s come to be universally loathed around the office. Outlook/Exchange had their own fair share of problems, but at least they were well-known and livable.
Continue reading “How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count The Ways…”
Wouldn’t you like to cruise around town in one of these babies?
A little late, but oh well…
I took a couple weeks off in December and spent some time in Edmonton visiting family and friends. It was good to see everyone again of course; I have to take an occasional break from going nuts by myself down here in Cowtown. :-) I ate, and read books, and ate, and watched TV specials, and ate, and watched movies, and ate, and chatted, and ate, and visited my grandfather, and ate… Maybe I was premature in buying a smaller belt.
It seems like Edmonton changes more and more drastically every time I visit, too. This time, as I passed by Old Scona, I noticed huge differences. One whole section of buildings had been demolished, new construction was underway in spots, and numerous old shops were gone and replaced by rather low-budget operations. Calgary Trail keeps stretching further and further south. The malls downtown have almost been entirely overhauled. There’s been more activity in the last few years than in most of my youth spent there.
I am also an idiot. After carefully packing up everything I needed for the trip, I rushed out at the last second and forgot a whole pack of items sitting on the kitchen table, including my CDs and Discman, Gameboy, batteries, adapters and chargers, and other miscellaneous accessories.
“Aw, isn’t that sweet,” you might say. “His separation from modern technology taught him the value of basic, plain living and how we shouldn’t rely on blah blah blah…” Screw that. I don’t depend on most of these gadgets; they were bought specifically *for* travelling, and if they get left behind then they were a waste. I did take books with me; if I had left them behind instead would I have been expected to have learned how to get by without books and just enjoy simple electronic pleasures instead? :-P
Anyway, back to the grind…
Looking around at a lot of people I know, it seems like I’m the only one *not* using or at least praising the Mac. Why haven’t I taken the plunge yet? Well, it’s not any “OS A sucks, B rulez!!1!” mentality; OSX sounds just great from most reports so far.
I already have two working systems, a full-time Linux server for ‘work’ and a dual boot XP/Linux system for gaming and other CPU-intense tasks, and between them I have pretty much all of my needs covered. Whenever I upgrade it’s almost always to get better gaming performance, not for experimental systems. I don’t really have the room for a new system and I’m not about to *replace* a whole system with a relatively unknown (to me) one. I just don’t have any big incentive to switch or add in a Mac yet.
Except maybe in one spot… The one thing I’m still missing is a laptop. It’s always been a fairly low priority item for me since I don’t travel much, but there’s the odd time it might be useful. Since the tasks it would need to be able to handle would be pretty basic (store files, access USB devices, basic net connectivity), a Mac would cover those basic tasks pretty well while still letting me have one to tinker with.
Will I? Eh, depends on how lazy I’m feeling when/if I ever get around to it. :-P It probably wouldn’t even be a top-end model; something like the 14″ iBook would likely suffice. I’m certainly not about to shell out $4300 for this one…