Happy Lunar New Year!
Mood:  celebratory
Happy New Year (Tet) to all of the Chinese, Vietnamase, and others out there Asian or not who celebrate. It is the year of the Rooster!

May all of you have prosperity and luck in the New Year!

Today's Post
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Site Info
Today's post can be found here at my new blog on my server. Again, a reminder that this will continue to be my blog through at least Sept and, for sentimental reasons, I may let this blog see its second birthday before fully migrating away. So don't stop coming to this site. Whenever I post on my other blog, I will link from here.

The Gospel of Tux
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Linux
I was listening to a book about hackers and the following excerpt from the Gospel of Tux was reproduced. I laughed so hard, partially because my study of the Old Testament allowed me to know that this is a parody of a real King. It took me about 10 minutes, but I found the passage.

2 Chronicles 10:12

"Three days later Jeroboam and all the people returned to Rehoboam, as the kind had said, "Come back to me in three days." The king answered them harshly. Rejecting the advice of the elders, he followed the advice of the young men and said, "My father made your yoke heavy, I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with wips; I will scourge you with scorpions."

Having read that, you are now more fully able to appreciate the parody found in this passage.


'Now it came to pass that Microsoft had waxed great and mighty among the Microchip Corporations; mighter than any of the Mainframe Corporations before it had it waxed. And Gates heart was hardened, and he swore unto his Customers and their Engineers the words of this curse:

"Children of von Neumann, hear me. IBM and the Mainframe Corporations bound thy forefathers with grave and perilous Licences, such that ye cried unto the spirits of Turing and von Neumann for deliverance. Now I say unto ye: I am greater than any Corporation before me. Will I loosen your Licences? Nay, I will bind thee with Licences twice as grave and ten times more perilous than my forefathers. I will engrave my Licence on thy heart and write my Serial Number upon thy frontal lobes. I will bind thee to the Windows Platform with cunning artifices and with devious schemes. I will bind thee to the Intel Chipset with crufty code and with gnarly APIs. I will capture and enslave thee as no generation has been enslaved before. And wherefore will ye cry then unto the spirits of Turing, and von Neumann, and Moore? They cannot hear ye. I am become a greater Power than they. Ye shall cry only unto me, and shall live by my mercy and my wrath. I am the Gates of Hell; I hold the portal to MSNBC and the keys to the Blue Screen of Death. Be ye afraid; be ye greatly afraid; serve only me, and live."

And the people were cowed in terror and gave homage to Microsoft, and endured the many grave and perilous trials which the Windows platform and its greatly bogacious Licence forced upon them. And once again did they cry to Turing and von Neumann and Moore for a deliverer, but none was found equal to the task until the birth of Linux.'

You can enjoy the entire Gospel of Tux by clicking here

Quotes are good for the soul
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Quotes
"Yeah, a nalgene bottle is indestructable, but I've never had a problem with my water bottle being destroyed." - Dan

(why it's dangerous to discuss sims w/o telling the other person first)
Danny: dude
Danny: stargazing is dangerous
Me: ?
Danny: I had Ian outside stargazing
Danny: and a satelite fell on him
Danny: and he died
Danny: and I bargained with the Grim Reaper
Danny: and I won
Me: oic
Me: I thought u meant in real life

"Google is awesome, but one can become so dependent on Google as to forget to check local sources such as books" - Eric Mesa

What will become of my blog?
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Site Info
I just put up another blog on my server. I talk about my plans and the pros and cons that page. Check it out! Why does technology excite me so? I think because my knowledge of technology frees me from the slavery of others. I can run my own server with as much space as I want on it. I can post any content I want (as long as the goverment doesn't shut me down q;o) and I can be free of paying for software that doesn't work right out of the box -> by switching to Open Source alternative. Also...I'm a bit of a geek. q;o)

Note: That link may not work in a few days or weeks because my apartment complex is switching from wired to wireless internet, as I have previously mentioned. Therefore you can be certain that I will continue to blog here AT LEAST until around September 2005 or whenever my server comes back up.

New toys
Mood:  chatty
Topic: computers
Just got a new 160 GB harddrive with my "thank you points" from my credit card. The sucker took around four hours to format, but it's up and running and I've been able to move a bunch of files onto there, saving my music hard drive for music and also being able have a lot more space for my photography. Since I now have two 512 mb cards for my camera, I can potentially download 1 GB per session if I completely fill up my camera. Since I only had 3 GB left on that hard drive, I was able to move my pictures over.

Then I took one of my other hard drives and connected it with my Linux box. I learned how to format a hard drive for Linux and also how to make it available for use. So I'm glad I went through that process since I'll be building a Linux computer from scratch in the future. It's exciting and I love technology and stuff like that!

stick it to M$
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Linux
If you really want to give M$ the finger, install Linux on your Xbox. It's the cheapest way to have a computer - nearly half the cost of an emachine - and you have the extra "in your face" attribute of Linux running on Microsoft Xbox. This site has instructions on how to turn your Xbox into a Linux/Xbox or just Linbox. If you do the software modification you can still play all of your Xbox games as you normally do. If you do the hardware modification you can't use it for Xbox games anymore, but you now have a cheap PC.

Part 1: Why it's bordering on illegal that some websites only accept Internet Explorer
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "Farewell To Arms" - Five Iron Frenzy
Topic: internet
I was going to write about this topic independently when I came accross this news article. It really ticks me off that people are cooperating with MS to keep people from using other browsers. My post will follow in a Part 2.
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Jailed for using a nonstandard browser
A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx -- a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others -- on Sun's Solaris operating system. The site-operator decided that this "unusual" event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him. From a mailing list:

For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.

Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.

Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police....

So just goes to show if you use anything other than Firefox or IE and you rely on someone else to interogate access logs or IDS logs you too could be sitting in a paper suit in a cell :(

sometimes even linux people get a little crazy....
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "Close to you" - Cubic U
Topic: Linux
There are some people trying to get Linux to run on a Nintendo DS. It certainly has a good enough computer for this. At first I wasn't sure why someone would want to do this, but I began to realize how good it could potentially be. It has built-in wireless and is infinitely more portable than a laptop. Perhaps they aren't so crazy....I don't know....Here's a news story about it.
----------
from Eurogamer.net

DS Linux closer to reality

by Tom Bramwell

A group of homebrew development enthusiasts attempting to get Linux running on the Nintendo DS have made something of a breakthrough this past week, managing to get a homebrew demo running on the dual screen handheld through a pass-through.
Advertisement

Although this is not evidence of Linux running on the DS, as has been reported in a couple of places, it is nevertheless quite a breakthrough for followers of DS Linux, demonstrating that it's possible to display user-created content on both DS screens.

Anybody interested in learning more about the DS homebrew scene - a very enterprising collective of young and enthusiastic modders - would do well to check out MeGaBiTe1's blog, The Mod Gods and the various links listed

Wow, I'm amazing at predicting the future
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "Pardon Me" - Incubus
Topic: Linux
Just the other day
I mentioned that a Linux (or other open source alternative) computer could allow people in developing countries the ability to have cheaper PCs by bypassing the expensive price of software licensing. This story from Red Herring shows that this is a future that is very close to actually occurring. The world needs more engineers like this one pushing to help the world be a better place - that is what engineering is all about, after all.

The hundred-buck PC

MIT's Nicholas Negroponte pushes a cheap PC for the rest of the world.
January 29, 2005

The founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab wants to create a $100 portable computer for the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp.

The low-cost computer will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux (emphasis added) software, Mr. Negroponte said during an interview Friday with Red Herring at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. AMD is separately working on a cheap desktop computer for emerging markets. It will be sold to governments for wide distribution.

Mr. Negroponte and his supporters are planning to create a company that would manufacture and market the new portable PCs, with MIT as one of the stakeholders. It is unclear precisely what role the other four companies will play, although Mr. Negroponte hopes News Corp. will help with satellite capacity.

An engineering prototype is nearly ready, with alpha units expected by year's end and real production around 18 months from now, he said. The portable PCs will be shipped directly to education ministries, with China first on the list. Only orders of 1 million or more units will be accepted.

Mr. Negroponte's idea is to develop educational software and have the portable personal computer replace textbooks in schools in much the same way that France's Minitel videotext terminal, which was developed by France Telecom in the 1980s, became a substitute for phone books.

Mr. Negroponte has been interested in developing computing in the developing world for some time. He and his wife have funded three schools in rural Cambodia, helping outfit them with regular laptops and broadband connections.

Major companies from Hewlett-Packard to Microsoft to Dupont, facing saturated markets in the richest industrial countries, have shown an interest in developing less expensive products to sell in low-income countries in south Asia, Africa, and Latin America.