April 2008

Computer Update
Submitted Thursday, April 24, 2008 - 1:58:49 PM by Klaitu

Prepare to get your nerd on, boys and girls.

1. Dual Monitors.

I've got them hooked up, and let me say that dual monitors are awesome. I'm not sure I could go back to a single monitor anymore, and it's only been a few days!

2. Ubuntu update

Randal told me there's a new ubuntu out, but truth be told, my experience with Ubuntu has been less than stellar. If you want to do anything advanced you have to go type commands into a terminal. If you want to do something basic, you can't use the standard tools.

Perhaps the worst thing about Ubuntu is that you can't use Internet Explorer, you're stuck with Firefox, which despite what people claim, does not interpret HTML correctly. Even basic HTML like tables is interpreted incorrectly. IE, Netscape, and Opera all do a better job of this than Firefox. Why do so many people swear by it?

3. I've moved the all computerbox from its old location the Klaitulair. It should prove a quieter envoirnment for my endeavors, and affords the ability to "rock out" without disturbing the peace. We'll see how it goes!

The View from Ubuntu
Submitted Wednesday, April 16, 2008 - 3:31:14 PM by Klaitu

So, I have an old computer just lying around, and it's got a lot of hard drive space on it, so I decided to throw ubuntu linux on it to see how it stacks up against ye olde windows.

For those of you who aren't nerds, Ubuntu Linux is an operating system. It's an alternative to windows in the same way that netscape or opera is an alternative to internet explorer.

As I write this, I'm typing on a functioning copy of Ubuntu. Amazing, huh?

The one thing this computer had to do was serve files to windows from any of its plethora of drives. So, this was my one task upon installation.

I slid the CD in and let it do its thing. Turns out if you install ubuntu, you're going to wipe part of a drive with some sort of linux operating system. In my case, my conversion to ubuntu meant that the previous version of windows that was on here was going to be toast.

I decided to go ahead anyway, because that's how I roll.

The website claims that installation should take about 20 minutes. Instead, it took about 5 or 6 hours, it's hard to say because I fell asleep in the middle of it.

When the installation was complete, I rebooted and got.. "operating system not installed".

Turns out you have to install a boot loader AND the operating system. Funny, I thought the whole reason for having an OS was so you could boot it up.

So, I installed again, this time making sure all the boot loader options were correct.

6 hours later, Ubuntu ahoy!

My first task was to set the data drives on this computer to be shared over windows. I found a handy guide on youtube and went to work. Heck, I've done this a million times on windows, how hard can it be?

Well, I'm glad I had a guide, I would have never figured it out. Here's the procedure as best as I can understand it..

1. Tell the OS you want to share files
2. Tell the OS you REALLY want to share files
3. install a program that tells the OS to share the files
4. open up the programming interface and configure the sharing program's configuration file with the linux version of notepad.
5. Tell the Os you want to share files
6. Open the programming interface and input some commands that tells the OS you want to share files
7. Set up a password and a username for anyone wanting to see the shared files.
8. Find the files you want to share and share them.. one at a time, individually. You can't just share a drive.

I finally got it working, and it works really well. In fact, I'd say it serves files better than windows does.

But you know, here's the process for windows:

1. Right click what you want to share, and click share.

Then you're done.

Is it worth all the effort? Probably not. Now that I've got it set up though, it's pretty nice.

I haven't used ubuntu long enough to give it a fair review, but I can tell you one thing. Those guys that say Linux is the "best OS" and "way better than windows" are completely off their rocker.

Heck, when your OS is harder to use than windows maybe you should look into the ease of use part.

Glug Glug in the UK
Submitted Monday, April 14, 2008 - 3:01:51 PM by Klaitu

So, I read this news article about a 14 year old girl whose liver failed because of her rampant alcoholism:

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=559589&in_page_id=1770

It's a pretty shocking article, but I noticed something strange to it.. the kid bought all her own alcohol.

Kids that want alcohol can get it, obviously, but this girl somehow got enough alcohol to kill her liver without being caught. You'd think after 2 or 3 years of it, someone would notice, right?

Well, I looked into it, and I was suprised at what I found. In the UK, the legal drinking age is determined by your physical location.

If you're a kid trying to drink in a bar, you have to be at least 14 years old.

If you're a kid and want to drink at home, you have to be at least 5 years old. Yep. 5 years old.

If you're younger than 5, you can still drink, but you have to get a doctor's note.

Some of the drinks with more alcoholic content are restricted to 18 and older. It's also technically illegal to sell alcohol to people under 18, but nobody is required to verify age before selling.

Now, the UK is a whole other culture, and I've never been there. I'm not gonna tell them how to do their thing, but it seems a simple measure for lawmakers to put a minimum age on all alcohol consumption and then back it up with enforcement.

It's not like the US has eradicated the underage drinking thing, but a 14 year old can't just walk into a liquor store and buy wine, either.

Good luck, UK friends!

I didn't think it was possible
Submitted Sunday, April 13, 2008 - 6:10:39 PM by Klaitu

Turns out, all music is compatible with all other kinds of music.

I didn't believe it either, but then I listened to this:

http://keaton-world.com/music/Funtastic_Power_-_barbie_girl_vs_ghostbusters.mp3

Those Wacky Keywords
Submitted Saturday, April 12, 2008 - 8:56:58 PM by Klaitu

What do you think of when you think Special K?

Light Sabers maybe?

Starships?

Giant Robots?

Well, you're all wrong. Here are the top 10 search phrases:

punky brewster 86 69.9 %
soleil moon frye hot 2 1.6 %
queen of darkness 2 1.6 %
channel lineup 2 1.6 %
ultima online soundtrack 1 0.8 %
[link removed] 1 0.8 %
high class ho 1 0.8 %
lexa doig 1 0.8 %
ultima virtue short stories 1 0.8 %
southpark characters 1 0.8 %

Yep, that's right.

Special K means Punky Power.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215
Submitted Saturday, April 12, 2008 - 2:48:04 PM by Klaitu

This is only the second Nintendo DS game I own, despite having the DS for over a year now. I'll tell you, it was a good investment.

Hotel Dusk is a detective story, a gritty gumshoe detective story, set in 1979. I won't ruin the plot for you, since a lot of it is crucial to the enjoyment of the game.

You hold the DS like a book, so it feels like you're reading the adventure.. which is probably true, you do a lot of reading.

I had a lot of fun playing this game, but at the same time I felt like it was holding my hand, solving the mystery for me. The game pretty much tells you what to do. Still, that doesn't take the fun out of trying to figure out how to do it.

A pretty neat game if you can find it.

Overall Score: 7 of 10

Juno
Submitted Saturday, April 12, 2008 - 2:41:22 PM by Klaitu

What's Juno about? Well, everyone's probably already seen it, but I hadn't heard anything about it, so I checked it out.

Juno is the story of a 16 year old girl and her pregnancy. I'd probably classify it as a drama, but sometimes it tries to be a comedy.

Juno is a little light on plot, not a lot of threads running here, its pretty much all about havin a baby.

The soundtrack is seemingly made up of independant artists, all of them mediocre.

Juno isn't a bad film, the acting is great, and the story is at least somewhat interesting. It would probably be of more interest to women.

Overall Score: 6 of 10

Conan the Musician
Submitted Saturday, April 12, 2008 - 2:53:37 AM by Klaitu

Have you heard about Age of Conan?

It's the new MMO featuring such controversial content like spewing blood and nekkid womens.

But aside from all that stuff.. somehow it has managed to have the best soundtrack I have ever heard an MMO have.. and that's high praise coming from me, I generally hate video game soundtracks.

Don't believe me? Well, I'm afraid I'm going to have to put the audio whammy on you, then:

Tables are Hawt
Submitted Monday, April 7, 2008 - 3:26:53 PM by Klaitu

I'm going to give you a link to a news story. You'll click the link and glance at it, and chuckle.. but the real treat here is the video, so make sure you watch it for the full effect.

http://www.kcci.com/news/15762329/detail.html?rss=des&psp=irresistible

The Wonderful World of Voicechat
Submitted Saturday, April 5, 2008 - 2:12:14 PM by Klaitu

Once upon a time, mankind typed to comunicate online. E-mail, chat rooms. type type type.

Then came a new method of communication, Voice Chat. Players with Microphones actually speaking with one another.

My experiences with Voice Chat have been mixed, so I thought I would share them here, for the few who have not delved into this brave new world.

My first voicechat experiences were with a program called Roger Wilco. It worked alright, but in those days you couldn't really afford to run a voice-chat client AND a game, so my experience was limited to "oh, isn't that neat, I can talk to people" I wasn't terribly impressed with voioe chat at this time, other than a novelty.

I started playing Star Wars Galaxies, and the RP community there was all on Ventrilo. I was used to the days of ICQ, but everything I would have used ICQ to do, they used Ventrilo, it was a strange experience, but it worked.

Ventrilo ruined me on Voice Chat.. not because it was terrible, but because it was so good. Ventrilo offers crystal-clear voice transmission with no interference. It uses VoIP technology, so the people you are speaking to are just as clear as on a traditional phone line.

If someone is on Ventrilo, and they are quiet, I can go in and adjust the volume on that one person to be louder. so, even in cases where I can't understand someone, I can fix that.

After Star Wars, I didn't get back into voice chat until I started playing Eve Online. The community in Eve has a predominance toward Teamspeak, a program much like Roger Wilco. They use Teamspeak because it has mac and linuz clients. However, Teamspeak is horrible in comparison to Ventrilo. There's no way to adjust people you can't understand because they are either too loud or too quiet, and the voice transmissions are often garbled or just plain static. Many times some people can hear the person fine, and others get only static.

Voice Chat.. I believe it's the way of the future. It's where games are going. How readily will gamers adopt voice chat? It depends on their experiences with it.

Right now, in the PC market, there are 3 voice chat competitors: Ventrilo, Gamespy, and Teamspeak.

Gamespy is almost always integrated into the game itself, and it can work alright assuming the game makers have done a good job integrating it.

Ventrilo is primarily a Windows setup, it requires a dedicated server to run (and usually costs money) but offers VoIP, and is clearly the superior voice chat product on the market in terms of quality. Skype and Vonage (the big internet phone people) use the same kind of technology.

Teamspeak is available on most Operating Systems, but it doesn't matter, because Teamspeak should not be used by any human person that has ears. It is a poorly designed program that is very good at creating a frustrating and difficult experience for anyone who uses it.

So there you are, my experiences in the wonderful world of voice chat.

Top 5 "WTF?" Moments in Television
Submitted Friday, April 4, 2008 - 4:22:36 PM by Klaitu

Or, if you prefer "When good writers get bad crack".

There is some matter of taste with any form of art, such as television. Then there's stuff that just doesn't make any sense at all. It's usually because the show has jumped the shark, and instead of going out on its own terms, it has plodded along and been milked for all it was worth.

Here then are my top 5 examples of writers just sorta going crazy with their various TV shows.

5. The X-Files

Most people have heard of the X-Files. FBI agent and paranormal investigator Fox Mulder tries to track down evidence of the supernatural with his skeptic sidekick, Scully.

By nature of the show, strange things happened. Scully was abducted by aliens at least 2 times during the show's run, but still remained a skeptic. The x-Files led us through a world of government conspiracies, and aliens lurking around every corner.

During the 8th season, David Duchovny decided he had spent enough time on the X-Files, and started reducing his commitment to the show. During the 9th season, he was completely absent.. except for the series finale.

So, what's a writer to do? The star of the show isn't on the show anymore.. and you don't have an ensemble cast, you've got two main characters. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself, as the show had already gone and jumped the shark.

Scully was pregnant. Being the X-Files, she can't JUST be pregnant, it's got to be an alien, or something. It doesn't end there, though. Throughout the series it is established that Scully is infertile and cannot produce children. She becomes pregnant anyway because she was implanted with an alien device that apparently "triggered" and made her pregnant.

Yes, its weird.. NO, it doesn't stop there! They went for the gold! The father is Fox Mulder! WTF!??!?

Fox Mulder has somehow impregnated an infertile woman (without his knowledge, mind you) via the use of a biological implant from aliens.

Scully spends the 9th season looking for Mulder, the father of her.. alien baby?

WTF indeed.

4. Dallas

I wasn't a big Dallas watcher, but they created such a colossal WTF moment, that everyone has heard of it. Not only did this show "Shoot J.R." it also killed Patrick Duffy.

Patrick Duffy had decided not to stay on Dallas. Apparently people actually liked Patrick Duffy in 1985, because the viewers didn't want him gone. The people desired Patrick Duffy! The ratings proved it, when Duffy left the show, the ratings plummeted. They begged Duffy to return.. and eventually Duffy agreed.

Slight problem: Duffy's character had died.. and not just any questionable death. He had died in a hospital, with little monitors going "Beep beep... beeeeeeeee", and to top things off, he was shown in a casket, dead.. in a funeral attended by just about every other character on the show. There's no way around it, he was dead.

Short of zombies (which might actually have been interesting) how do you get the actor back in when the character is dead? Do you make him an evil twin? Do you make him a long lost cousin? Dallas came up with something different: Patrick Duffy's death (and also, the 31 episodes after his death) were revealed to be the nightmare of his on-screen lover.

Essentially, the writing rendered an entire season of Dallas to be nonexistant, and the story was reset at a point just before Duffy died, leading Dallas fans around the world to exclaim "WTF?!?!?!"

3. Magnum P.I.

Tom Selleck had a similar problem. People just couldn't get enough of HIM either. He decided he didn't want to continue with Magnum P.I. In the 7th season Finale, Tom Selleck was shot and killed by mobsters.

Before the episode aired, word leaked out about the plot and America want crazy-go-nuts. They had to have more Tom Selleck, so they threw a buncha money at him, and Selleck agreed to come back.

Season 8 of Magnum PI practically ignores the whole death thing, though his death was not as elaborate as that of Patrick Duffy, and they also didn't "reset" the show. They just sort of pretended it never happened.

As much as I'd like to say WTF here, not many people really noticed the death thing, and ir just sort of remains unsolved.

2. Star Trek: Voyager

I'm a big Star Trek fan, and even I can't come up with a remotely plausible reason for this one.

Star Trek Voyager's premise was that a Star Trek crew was stuck in the distant reaches of the galaxy, stranded far from home. The story arc of the series had them trying to get home in pretty much every episode.. and in the finale, they actually do get home. Twice. Sort of.

Now, the Voyager finale has a lot of writing problems. At least two dozen of them of differing degrees of severity. It's got a time travel element that renders the first 45 minutes of the episode irrelevant, for instance, but that's not the WTF moment.

Voyager's return to Earth involved it flying inside a "transwarp conduit" controlled by the Borg. The Borg don't like Voyager all that much, so they want to blow it up. Voyager is racing down the conduit, a borg ship in hot pursuit.. it's going to catch them at any moment!

The next scene shows this borg ship emerging from the transwarp conduit, where a bunch of Starfleet ships promptly blow it up.. and out of the explosion comes Voyager... WTF?!?!?!?!

How did Voyager get inside the Borg ship? It hardly seems large enough to hold Voyager. Aside from which, how did Voyager withstand the explosion of the ship around it? Why was it that close to begin with? Why make it so confusing?

WTF, Voyager people?!?

1. Andromeda

All of those shows above make perfect sense when compared to Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. Its writers were obviously on some sort of drugs. The plot of Andromeda is something that might make sense to someone stoned out of their mind.

Andromeda is another case where it was Cancelled and then saved from cancellation after the finale.

Season 4 ends with ALL of the major characters dying. Not just dying a little, dying "for reals". Things like being decapitated.. piloting a ship that explodes.. One of the characters literally EXPLODES. The Andromeda (the ship) is engulfed in a sun and explodes, and destroys the bad guys ship. So, all main characters dead, ship destroyed.

The Captain doesn't die, he escapes to a place called the "route of ages". It's a dark room where he sees himself, smiles, and turns around and walks the other way.

Then the credits roll.

WTF?!?

Oh, but I'm just beginning!

Season 5 makes even less sense! You know how everyone died? They're not dead anymore, and the Andromeda ship is still around (after being engulfed in a sun) and the big bad guy ship it destroyed, turns out it was only "damaged" (despite the fact that it exploded into a bunch of tiny pieces on the screen). Also, the Captain is now some sort of supernatural God being, and Earth explodes for apparently no reason.

WTF??!!?

Maybe it's best not to dwell on such things.

Awesome Background Deployed
Submitted Friday, April 4, 2008 - 3:12:19 PM by Klaitu

It's April, that's my birthday month, so all of you have to suffer through my awesome colorful swirly background!

HA!

Advanced Search Features Available
Submitted Friday, April 4, 2008 - 2:56:00 PM by Klaitu

I've installed a pretty cool google-like search thingy over there on the right. It doesn't look any different than it did before, but the results are now displayed google-style. It's a lot more accurate than the old version.

Still working on other aspects of improving the site, including RSS. It's not as easy as it might seem at first glance!

If you want to try out the search engine, use the search button on the right, or you can also use the search engine's own page!

http://ds180.net/specialkbin/searchnews.pl