Operating Systems

While doing other things, I frequently enjoy playing with operating systems. My latest trial was with Arch Linux. I was trying to get this set up on my laptop. It seemed like a reasonable request. Installation was annoying. It failed half way through installing the packages the first time. Second time Grub wasn’t right. Third time I won. For some reasion, it doesn’t load network on boot, but that was an easy fix by adding b44 to rc.conf and rebooting. I followed that up by using pacman to install xorg and then gnome. Well, that’s about as far as i ever got. It seemed there was something up with xorg. First i got the mouse wrong (it’s /dev/input/mouse0 not /dev/mouse). I also forgot my refreshrate on my laptop so i had to do that again. After all this, it couldn’t find the window manager. GAH. Now I’m installing gentoo there. I’m going to have a fun operating system there. I demand it!

Gentoo:
I’ve always loved Gentoo. Some of the things that others dislike (and at times they can bother me) I can truely enjoy. I love installing Gentoo, the worst part about the operating system. It makes sense and you don’t ever have to just trust what’s going on. You are doing everything. I don’t have a gui yet, but that’s being built. I hope this works out well, like really well. If it works out well enough, I can keep it on my lappy all the time, but… something is always not compatible. We shall see how this turns out… in several hours

Death of a Fanboy

This isn’t some humorus happening in my life, so those looking for that should go find that time the bird attacked me.

First let’s define some terms. I’m going to refer to two major types of program users throughout but let’s define 4 just to be robust.

The Ignorant User

This refers to the users who don’t know almost anything if anything about the program they are using. They are the people who tend to use software because someone showed it to them or it’s the only one they have and/or know how to use.

The Apathetic User

These are the users who look for features and out of the box (otb) value. They have no problem dropping one program and using another because it is supposed to be better. They tend not to customize much and don’t want work or questions.

The Loyal User

These are the users who like to support their software. If they like it, they will say it. They tend to be willing to customize to a greater extent than the apathetic user, but they won’t change so much in the program that it is more or less the original program anymore. They will accept certain limitations and tend to be ok with waiting for a patch for some time. They have their limits though. If someone can logically convince them to try other software, they will trial this and see if it is indeed superior and switch if it is. They also will not wait forever for things to be fixed.

The Fanboy

These users (this can be male of female, but it is an old term that simply has not been updated. The term does not discriminate about age, sex, and all that politically correct crap) are basically obsessed with the software. They frequently will not only say it is the best, but they don’t listen to reason as to why it is not. They have no problem applying many add-ins and customizing for hours to get what they want. They also are known for bashing other products frequently without logical backing.

Now that I have defined the terms, I have a confession: I used to be a fanboy for three things: Google, Fire[something, the browser, currently fox], Games from Hideo Kojima. As of today, only the last holds true. There is good reason why i stopped being a fanboy. The first and foremost has held true for basically all time: i really don’t like being a fanboy. It tends to make you ignorant to the truth of the world. That didn’t stop be from being a fanboy though. It just made me not like it. But what stopped it? Reality setting in, as in the errors could not be ignored anymore.

1) Firefox: The entire firefox claim to fame is retake the web. This is a slogan against Internet Explorer from Microsoft. I am not a big Microsoft supporter, but I do have to give credit where credit is due. IE is a very extensive product that fell behind the times. From a security standpoint, IE used to have a much lower OTB value than Firefox was so keen to harp on. After the last service pack, it is much more secure. I admit the popup blocker is underwhelming and some features are still behind the times, but IE 7 is looking very good. Back to firefox though. If you look it up, this “more secure” browser isn’t quite as secure as you might think. not only are security patches frequent, they are also frequently very major. Firefox for linux (you know, that more secure operating system [which is truely is]) suffered from a security exploit that allowed for shell command execution through firefox for all versions up to 1.0.6. It was patched in 1.0.7. The bug was documented 15 days before this patch. Speaking of documenting bugs, this raises another interesting concern. the bugzilla for firefox (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/) is a great resource for ways to trick and break firefox. this was mentioned on the development blog of the IE team (in a comment one of the posts). The comment suggested just searching for SSL (tip: the first two s’s are for Secure Socket. that’s an important thing. it’s used for https connections and the like). it turns up some devistating results.

Opera is a veteran browser. It has much higher OTB value than Firefox (containing a better interface and many features only simulated through extensions) and now also is free. The only extension Opera does not successfully recreate is the adblock extension (neat trick: look up on google how to write your host file to block ad servers. it takes care of most of what you want in most applications). I find it to be a superior browser. It has more functionality and ease of use. Best thing is the people aren’t fanboy assholes (i’m blunt). The only other feature that would be nice would be something like the trusted zone in IE so you can disable javascript and flash in all other places and enable it for select sites on a site by site basis. Opera can kind of do this by turning it off in the preferences and changing the quick preferences, but this holds true for the tab not the site. I still suggest checking out opera.

2. Google: don’t get me wrong, I still love google very much. I just don’t blindly love everything from them anymore. the cause: the google sidebar. It seemed so nice at first. As I used it more, I got to see where this lacked a fundamental of programs: stability. It seemed to have memory management problems. It would hang at times and then just crash all the components of it simaltaniously. it was good for searching and indexing but it sucked for the rest.

GoogleTalk also released somewhat recently…and I was worried. I have talked about how the google messenger would put all other messengers to shame… but it seemed to be put to shame. It missed fundamental features that everyone took for granted from other messengers like group chats, sending files and much more. The only reason I liked it so much was the simple interface and the status messages to show what someone had said when the window was minimized. This i still hope for. In the meantime, if anyone wants a more functional voip chat program, skype is popular, but the gizmo project is the most feature rich currently. It does not support file transfers though. aim/msnm i believe support voice at least somewhat so they also would work.

Hopefully by reading this, you can see why you shouldn’t be a fanboy of anything really and particularly why these two situations are not really the best.

todo for me

this is more of a reminder for me to write stuff probably after my ZCE exam on friday:

• discuss rockbox and getting into an iAudio M3
• create template engine

well… that’s about all i need to remember for the moment… so … yeah. i’ll do that probably this week end

and just got the Longest Journey. it’s very good but you can’t save if you’re in Vista. that sucked.

Life gets even

Well, i’ve always said that i deserve when things go wrong… so i’m just trying to remember what i did for this…

Health: blood was found in urine -> many unpleasant tests -> no firm diagnosis, but at least they have an idea and it doesn’t seems serious. Solution: have some drugs.

I actually cleaned up around my desk… it’s really quite amazing. Saw Castle in the Sky: pretty good although it seems as though the lack of violence makes it kinda corny like the A-Team. I also finished all my php study guides. My test if friday…

Well, on a lighter note, Studio Trophis brought my love of adventure games back to life (like the old Lucas Arts games Full Throttle, Day of the Tenticle and so fourth) with their short but sweet game called “the white chamber.” It’s a very nice adventure game with a violent but good story. The puzzles were a bit easy, but it would be great for anyone just starting adventure games. Because of that, i just ordered The Longest Journey, an older adventure game from Funcom, a Norwegian development company as far as i know. It was only $20, so it should be worth it.

On the tech front, I updated some of the apache error handling on my site and organization. Since I like using directories as organization, i set up http://quad341.com/projects/ to redirect silently to the projects page i added to WordPress, this blog. Also, if you type in any wrong directory/file name, it will just take you back to the index instead of giving you a 404. I like that better hoping you can find what you were looking for that way (although it does make error handling more challenging… i’m thinking of setting up the headers so that it will send the 404 status code but display this page. that makes it so that automated link checkers will still see the 404 response code instead of 200 but users will see the homepage which I may append a note that the requested page was not found. That’s a todo)

Also for the todo (maybe tomarrow…that could be fun), i thought of an interesting way to make a site nicely up to date using AJAX for data, but still allowing it to be spiderable and directly linked to. it would do this by having an onClick behavior that returns false but changes a div section in the center. This would make the site cleaner and allow for a better background without reloading. essentially it would simulate an iframe without the actual frame (which serves several advantages, mainly not bothering the people who dislike frames in general). The actual link, though, would be another “page.” I put quotes on that because it would look like a legitamite page to search engines and by inspecting the link, but in reality, it would be using apache’s mod_rewrite to have the page be created by php on one template engine. this lets it still be spiderable and you could directly link to it. here’s my delema though: it could be directly linked to through the links on the side, but using ajax, the url bar would not update. also, the links would not show that they have been accessed. for accessed, i was thinking of manually changing the colors to simulate this, but again, it isn’t quite right especially if the user returns (when you have a lot of links, it is nice to know which ones you have visited). what i need to find is a way to have the javascript grab the browser after it thinks it has clicked but before the page goes to change (so the url bar would change and the link would be clicked but the page didn’t move). as of now i don’t know how to do this and i’m tired. i’ll look tomarrow to see if i can figure that out. if anyone has any ideas on how to accomplish this, that would be greatly appreciated (just add a comment to this post or contact me how you know to).

and now i’m out.

oh, the Zone is having their second extreme night out. you can go to both shows for $30. it soulds cool, but i need to find someone to go with.

Squish

My head hurts thus short recap of why you should laugh at me:

For once it actually was raining here. it wasn’t hard, but enough for me to keep my windows mostly closed on the way to work. after a little while of being there, i’m walking around and notice the sky is quite dark. while standing in my bosses office, it starts to pour. i comment that i hope that no one has their windows down. after grabbing what i have to work on, i walk into my office… only to exclaim, “oh, crap! mine are down!”. out of the building i hurriedly hobble and into the downpour. well, i closed my windows… and ended up very soaked. well, my boss was worried that maybe being absolutely soaked in an air conditioned environment would produce negative results so she was even nice enough to go and track down some dry clothes for me (hell, that’s more than my mom would do…). it was very nice. so i found the dryer and dried my clothes and was dressed as a janitor in the mean time. it seemed to entertain the people around me. after clothes were dry, all was good again. Moral: don’t be a dumbass and run into the rain without an umbrella without a dry set of clothes.

Um… my head hurts a bit… i hope that wednesday is a good day. Friday i go to a specialist because i aparently don’t have kidney stones… i have something probably very rare and worse… damn it.

and i gotta get to studying more for my php exam. it’s next friday… we shall see.

brain pains drive me away.

That exhausting fun

Since I just finished fighting with mod_rewrite, it was time for me to have all the fun in the world: scheduling my php exam. August 5 @ 9:00 am. that’s a friday. this is probably going to be the hardest test i’ve taken thus far. must study.

On the lighter side, i became a mod on the digital-burn forums . The people there are great.

um… i send healthy thoughts to one… uh… i can’t remember any more… i need sleep.

So many projects, so little time

Well, I can’t say i’m bored in the least bit. hell, i’d go for making days longer.

At work, me and the female-geek (it’s a strange combination to find such a true and awesome geek and female in one) have some cool projects to get to. It includes some web dev, some modding, and some registary hacking. Go NDA so i can’t be any more specific than that.

Home, I’m getting ready for my PHP exam. It’s going to be interesting. Also, reading php|a has made me want to try out OO php (object oriented) but I really want to use php5. not enough people use it… growl!!

i’m so tired… must…finish….. oh screw it.

DISCLAIMER to spammers:
It didn’t bother me for you to spam my site when your site made me laugh, but now that there is no php error, it’s a lot less funny. You can (as of this moment at least) put a link back to your site in the website for your url in a seemingly honest or decent post. no comments that are direct advertising will be permitted as is. They require you to contact me. My email is available on this site if you want to try to set something formally up. Just look a little harder.

Ok, i think that takes care of it…

PHP for me!

I finished my study guide for PHP today. Now all i need to do is remember all that i’ve ever come across about php and… why is it that now is when i start learning so much more? it would have been nice to learn this much all along… but it’s all so wonderful to know.

So i had to get my subscription to PHP|Archetect today. now i really feel like a php geek. i’ll take my exam early august if i have the choice… in the mean time, i need to find someone’s site to develop… well, the back end for it.

oh and great news, whoever actually read this, my site is officially starting to be spammed. yup. the only comments come from a debt consolidation site. they’re using a hotmail account for email of which i’m not going to bother to try to contact yet. until it gets annoying they can post ads because they made me laugh. on their homepage, i got greeted by a php error. how awesome is that?!? laughed for like 3 minutes, then got to see their really crappy table based layout that renders horribly in any decent browser. don’t wory, it was made in imageready (adobe product). i’m curious if they even have a liscense to use it, but not my concern. made me laugh so i’m ok with them making fake posts just to put up the link.

cheers!

Quick update

If people didn’t avoid me i wouldn’t have to write this… that’s not true but whatever.

Sleeping on a bed seems to be helping… but i need a vacation from argonne… and a car would be good too…

ah…*sigh*.. i did find out my ap test result. I took the AB Computer Science test (the one that tests like 2-3 semesters of colledge cs knowledge or something like that… the hard one) and got 5/5. that’s satisfactory.

i found this out because i talked to one of my friends who found it out from a teacher at my school. i still have yet to recieve the letter…

i must sleep now.

I’m up for the moment!

If you were interested in blogger template, it’s been fixed so it’s correct now (especially for IE).

Blue man was very fun, as can be expected. uh… my foot still hurts from where i sliced it pretty good. Now i’m off to test out Simple Machines Forum. Seems like it has many many features and good support yet is still free. I’ll see how it is.

That’s all for now.