-- William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties
Rather than bothering to come up with my own opinion, I'll just link to the sfgate.com article deriding all this Janet Jackson OMG WON'T SUMONE THINK OF TEH CHKLREN?!? nonsense.
Recently someone complained about how often American media uses the word "tragedy" to describe things that aren't.
Janet Jackson's rancid boob on the telly for half a moment isn't a tragedy.
How many Americans have died in this most recent invasion of Iraq? How many Iraqis were killed for no good goddamn reason?
We just can't be fucked to care until its in our face, on fire, and all 110 stories of it are collapsing.
If you die when there's no one watching
and your ratings drop and you're forgotten
If they kill you on their TV
You're a martyr and a lamb of God
So Microsoft Research has released the source to Allegiance, which was a great game. It combined aspects of RTS and typical space sims to form something that was altogether new.
The idea behind the game is that each team has a Commander who decides what to build, where to mine, and when and where to attack.
All the other players control space craft such as miners, bombers, fighters, and cap ships. Each class of ship requires a certain number of players to control: eg, a bomber requires one pilot and two turreters (if I remember right), and a cap ship requires upwards of half a dozen players.
The high-volume of players required to have an actual game is probably what really caused Allegiance to not work out in the long run. But it was a lot of fun.
Apparently if you actually check out the license, it appears that any derivative works are owned by Microsoft. Which is less than surprising though still sort of sad. :-)
Been looking for this for ages: virtual desktops for OS X.
Or I should say, decent virts for OS X.
Also: free.
Application seems happily configurable, hasn't crashed or caused my machine to start spurting blood in my face like some sort of horrible Hell clam.
This is always a plus.
The only major problem concerns more how OS X deals with applications than the virt manager itself, and really, it only has to do with applications that allow hotkeying to windows (eg, Terminal.app). You're going to be sharing hotkey space throughout all the virts.
Not a huge issue, mind you, but total segmentation of desktops is nice.
I haven't tested to see how well it works with X11, as I don't use X11 for anything since Terminal stopped sucking boatloads of poor refugees into its gaping maw of doom.
Doom.
update: rjbs is complaining about many crashes. Haven't happened here. I have noticed that it doesn't work so well with hidden applications, though. If you hide an app in one virt, it tends to show up in another.
I suppose I don't just want virtual workspaces, but actual desktops. I expect that requires purchasing something or other.
rjbs pointed this one out last week sometime.
Mostly I suspect only us UNIX to OS X converts will care (though solios seems to be enjoying it quite a bit), but Quicksilver is a nice little command launcher.
Tired of mousing around to open apps or bookmarks, or whatever? Miss the good old days of tab completion? Too damn lazy to use ``open'' from Terminal?
Well, QS is for you. command-space (or whatever you tell it to), type in the first couple letters of what you want, hit enter.
I don't even see the Dock anymore.
Ever seen Trekkies? It's a documentary about Star Trek fanatics. In it, there's this dentist whose practice is made up with all sorts of ST kit. They wear Star Fleet uniforms. I thought it was the most horrible thing I'd ever seen.
Like letting Dr Billy Bob Joe Donny operate on your brain, only with toy phasers and tricorders along with their stethoscopes.
This is worse. While I'm all about finding new ways to reach kids to make them interested in learning, Jesus fuck, those kids are never going to have normal social interactions. Ever.
Linkwhored from mdxi.
Nothing new here, for those of us who follow Gibson and his work, but a relatively interesting read anyway.
It's not like Rhode Island really matters, but it's good to see this crap get thrown out.
I think my favorite part is where he didn't even read the entire bill before submitting it.
Also, "Everything is terror now. That thing where you go outside and say how fucked up it is that there's all these homeless people, and abused, obese citizens sucking down their daily load of crap TV, suckling at the teat of Mother Distraction so they don't have to look at how inane, trite and horrible their own life has become", that thing. That's terror now.
Trying to find a better way to live is terror.
When your rulers want nothing more than for you to be static, living in fear, that's the final wake-up call.
Couldn't remember what the hell sea animal is that switches shells when it outgrows its current one, or finds a pretty one with better plumbing and hardwood floors.
Engler, of course, knew it was the hermit crab. A quick google search confirmed it, I got the stupid analogy I needed for this latest iteration of system, and I discovered a few amusing facts.
The foremost of these is that when a more aggressive crab comes across another, occupied shell it wants, they fight for it.
Not sure why this wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise, but dude.
Shelljacking.
For those of you with enough cash to get a new PowerBook, and hate touchpads, MacMice.com brings you the AL mouse. Because, really, what's another 40 bucks?
Via Danelope.
I want this.
Also, keep in mind that the Invader Zim DVD set is out May 11th. So much yay.
Via binary.
Yeah, this brings back some memories.
Hell, I bought my second piece of computer equipment (a 14.4 modem!) off one of the local BBS sysops (Dreamsomething or other), and they ran Renegade.
I remember staying up all night playing LoRD and Tradewars (and Pimpwars), or playing X-COM until I had to go to school (rinse, wash, repeat all week).
My first piece of kit was for my parent's 486: A 4meg RAM chip.
$120. For four megs of RAM.
Yeah, man, the bad old days were pretty bad.
This is just fucking astounding.
I can't wait until prisons in the U.S. get privatized and corporations start trying this shit on for size...
So a while back mdxi and solios decided to do a comic strip based on our zany antics in #tildedot.
The latest strip, which involves me bitching about not knowing how to code, apparently amused the CDBI list somewhat.
It's pure wankery, I realize, but it keeps us amused, out of trouble, and increases your stamina in bed.
That last bit is only true if you're snorting fiberglass.
OldVersion.com, a repository of old versions of common software.
Can't count the times I've heard someone bitch about needing a certain version of $thing to test @stuff with.
[via aab]
This article from Stanford details some more complex attacks against their own UNIX machines. Apparently a concerted effort, as well.
Many good links in this one (some of which I've seen before, others not).
Wildly shifting foreign policy. Sending eighteen year olds to fight men trained by fifty year olds fifteen years ago. Using empty moral justifications for pointless violence.
I'm so tired of this bullshit. Isn't everyone else?
Thank the gods FilePile is back up. I was actually being productive this week.
So you go to the coffee shop with your brand new PowerBook. This gets you teh looks as it is, because it's a sexy machine. And the girls, they like the sexy machines.
Then you bust it open, with the true transparent terminals running BackLight and MatrixGL and all of a sudden you gotta beat 'em off with barrels of monkeys.
Or anyway, that's what's should happen. In any sane world.
"Each and every one of the products we build isn't just an application; it's also an extensible piece of software," Ballmer said. "The cheapest piece of code is one I don't have to write myself but one I already have and can reuse and repurpose."
That sounds really very familiar...
Justice Must Be Seen To Be Done.
If you haven't book-marked The Agonist I highly recommend it.
Scholars plan to espouse merits of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'
It's well-known I'm a big Buffy fan, but these sort of things are kind of silly. That college course for Matrix for instance.
How meta can you get?
On the other hand, anything that gets Joss Whedon more attention is fine with me. Maybe someone who won't cancel his shows will pick him up.
Perl6 Operator Periodic Table. Pretty awesome. I'll have to see if I can't get one of the pre-press guys to print me out a copy.
CVL: Concurrent Versions Librarian.
Looks relatively nifty.
After I get lever (Factory dev box) back up, I'll have to play with it some.
Non-Vulnerability Security Information for woody
Spammed on deb-sec, and as someone mentioned there: The link for that is unfortunately hidden down at the bottom of the security page, which is why I mention it. Many humans whinging on about "OMG ITS INSCUER!"
(Of course, for those of us using non-Debian packages, that's uh, true.)
Here's an excerpt of the new book.
A few images from it as well, via Lilja's Library.
Found off the Dark Tower orkut community: Song of Susannah review.
Assuages some of the fears I was having about King writing himself into the story, and reminds me I need to add June 8th to iCal. :)
Also, Amazon's "Best Value"?
Buy Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower, Book 6) and get The Sex Lives of Cannibals : Adrift in the Equator... at an additional 5% off Amazon.com's everyday low price.
Bloody odd, that.
I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't link to the official Dark Tower site. :)
Oddly, I've never seen TorgoX talk about that in #perl, and he's there almost every day.
[link via coraline, who DID talk about it in #perl]
<kitten> Do you have anything to do with this?
<kitten> I think you do.
Tutorial: Creating an OpenBSD Package
Andrew asked about this so he could easily install OpenVPN on multiple OBSD boxes, and mjc spammed that. Looks trivial.
Huh. Ian Murdock has a weblog.
17:15 < john> who's that?
17:16 <@bda> DebIAN.
17:16 < mdxi> married to DEBian
17:16 < john> oh that Ian Murdock
17:16 < john> :P
Pretty nuts no one mentioned this fact to me, seeing as his archives go back a year.
Bloody duh.
I hate when people break off talking to me, or pull out of a conversation, to answer a phone call.
I especially hate when they don't even bother excusing themselves.
19:17 <@semi> debian can't compete with gentoo because they have different
goals - one wants to be a productive distro and the other wants
to be bsd.
19:19 <@bda> Like a little girl wanting to grow up to be a princess.
Gentoo does some good work. But that page is pretty freakin' great. :)
Americans step up to the plate and prove you wrong.
I want to set you all on fire.
< bda> alsdkjfla;sdjf;lajsdkf
< rjbs> I'm surprised they let that photo leak.
< rjbs> Usually, candidates don't like their secret identities to be known
[via adamk]
If you have not read Jennifer Government, I highly recommend doing so now, just so you're ready...
[via porkchop]
[via ralfiboy]
09:38 < mdxi> i agree with the tutorials bit
09:38 < mdxi> the rest is clearly from some bizarro world where software is "finished" and "ships"
09:39 < mdxi> probably involving C++ and Windows
A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys is awesomely incorrect on almost every point.
If it were called "A Girl's Guide to Fucking Losers", I would care much less.
[via rjbs]
If you only see one fabumazing piece of Finnish theatre this year, make sure it's Star Wreck.
You must watch the trailer.
[via kitten]
Pete has been spamming at me to read the Fire and Ice series for a while now, and I suspect I'll eventually get around to it.
Nothing that Martin says in the FAQ is anything I haven't heard before, but repetition enforces understanding, and might eventually breed habit...
[via Pete, whose domain I will never be able to spell, or pronounce.]
The Secret Source of Google's Power.
A pretty awesome article about the tech google uses to do what google does.
I wish I had the big shiny toys, and the brain to use 'em.
While I may not be an engineer, I suspect this will be very useful in the coming weeks.
[via kitten]
Surely everyone but me has been subjected to the squirrely wrath, but whatever.
Most of the toons are extremely amusing, and quite a few made me laugh aloud.
Goddamn squirrels.
Here's some Pumpcon 2004 shots. If you missed it, you suck.
And here's lots of pictures of Steve and Keri's wedding.
An entertaining, informative piece on why the cities should tell everyone else to fuck off. While it obviously wouldn't actually work, I still envision things like Anhk-Morpork (Discworld) or Midgard (FF7).
[via dengler]
< Base10> Has anyone read the news about the human/animal hybrid?
< Base10> I for one welcome our new mutant bunny overlords!
I've been watching this Canuck scifi/drama called ReGenesis for a while now. The show focuses on a team of biotechs working for a ficticious entity called NORBAC, who deal with bio-terrorism and various other bio/disease-related issues. Great stories, awesome acting...
The series just ended, so I went to check out the imdb forums for news on a second season.
Pretty happy to see that a good majority of the music in the series, which I enjoyed, is available for download.
If you get a chance, you should definitely check out ReGenesis. It is awesome.
Lucky I got through it just as The Shield is set to start back up, too. I only have so much time to waste on media. :)
Is this a news article or a jerkcity comic?
GUI Administrator for MySQL. For those of you who... care, I guess.
I don't, particularly. I don't admin databases so much as install them, start them, and walk away. But hey, for you "DBAs"...
[via Lasar]
Debian drops various arch support.
15:14 <@bda> Dropping SPARC is weird.
15:15 < mdxi> not as weird as *keeping* itanium
My only remaining Linux machine will be gone by the end of the month, so I can't say I care much either way. Not that I have any SPARC hardware laying around that I'd put Linux on anyway.
Speaking of. I need to steal that damn E4500 out of Andrew's cube...
Modding your MacMini to lessen the likelihood of it getting knicked.
[via ejp and aab]
Shitty reporting strikes again... ZDNet "reports" on the whole del.icio.us/de.lirio.us thing, totally ignoring the fact that this Steve Mallet person did not write the software that runs his site.
Rik wrote Rubric, which is what de.lirio.us runs.
I don't know if this moron is representing himself as the author or what, but wow, ZDNet. Good job there.
Well, here's one acronym no one ever attributed to me.
[via dengler]
< mdxi> PC Magazine: Dell's new dual-core PC *rawks* because you've got a whole other processor to run your firewall/antivirus/malware stack!
One of the complaints we've heard from readers is that "protection" programs, like Norton Internet Security, are useful for safeguarding their systems. but slow their computers to a crawl. Dual-core Hyper-Threaded processors, such as the Pentium EE 840, can help, improving your computing experience because the processor's dual cores can process tasks simultaneously. While most of the system is "concentrating" on making sure your Internet or gaming experience is fulfilled in the foreground, the reserve power that the dual cores provide protects you in the background, running Norton or other antivirus or firewall programs.
I was complaining about nmap being so slow on unisog and Hughues mentioned amap. Pretty nice tool. Grabs banners a hell of a lot faster than nmap, but the output looks like it won't be a lot of fun to parse.
Just need to write a wrapper for it.
I'm working on grabbing banners from machines we see S/ACKs from. Pretty okay fun stuff, I suppose.
Professor explaining the kind of trouble a student is in after stealing his laptop.
Hell, I'd shit myself right then and there.
[via javaman]
And y'know, I didn't think it was that violent..
Hell, I think that site's design is more offensive than Sin City was.
...so going to hell.
What's funny is, Pete was explaining, at Sophy's birthday party, to this British guy, what teabagging [NSFW, I guess] was.
Well, not so much explaining as "Er, you don't know?" and the Brit, being only British and not a moron, figured it out soon after.
[via hhoffman]
Nice. Just another example of Google isn't exactly like most companies.
[via jcap]
George Lucas fears "Sith" will flop
"Lucas went on to say that it's okay if the movie fails, as he has more money than God, and can continue to make crap films with no thought to monetary concerns or issues of quality.
"In fact, his next film is "going to be a re-make of a huge crap I took twenty years ago after a drunken binge and filmed. It will have all the bells and whistles, ILM will replace the actual turds with CG and the water will be rendered using six thousand dual G5 XServes we're using liquid nitrogen to cool. Whoo-hee, you can get a serious high off huffin' that stuff!"
"ILM could not be reached for comment."
I've always hated trying to spec out rackmount equipment. But eh, it's necessary crap. And generally, it's expensive crap... but these new Tyan rackmounts seem like pretty decent boxes. Here's a review, via jcap. I need to replace crowley's current chassis with a pizzabox, and this looks like a good way to go about it.
Updated: Hmm... or one of these SuperMicro boxes.
Four hot-swap SATA drives is certainly nothing to sneer at.
But this is at least somewhat clever. And really rather well-written...
[via kitten]
Of course, this is also the show that uses GNOME as the workstation desktops, iirc.
Entertaining, regardless.
[via javaman]
Review of the Dell PowerConnect 2724.
I wouldn't mind having me a little gigabit switch action on my desk. There's currently rebate action going on as well.
Tempting.
Good review of Haunted, Palahniuk's latest book.
I agree with all the points of the review, save that I think the final story, Obsolete surpasses Guts on its own merits. I am biased towards sci-fi-ish things, however, so...
Damn, that was a good story.
[via danelope, and yes, ew "podcasting"]
Goddamn mdxi was talking about freshmeat.net last night so of course I spent 30 minutes going through the last few days entries. Here's the wheat. The chaff is still covered in shit somewhere.
- ddrescue
- Nano Hive
- console password manager
- remosync
- tunnelblick: OS X OpenVPN 2.0 widget
- tcpreplay
- Bicycle Repair Man Python "refactoring" browser... I don't pretend to actually understand what this is.
- fish: A friendly, new-user-oriented shell. CLI syntax highlighting!
Adam O'Donnell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script
Adam O'Donnell: The Cuneiform script has been accepted for inclusion in a future version of Unicode:
(883 characters) "Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform"
(103 characters) "Cuneiform Numbers"
Bryan Allen: ....That's fuckin' great.
Bryan Allen: I can't wait until Unicode supports hieroglyphics. That'll be really useful for all the ancient Egyptians I need to write localizations for.
Women's Brains Really Are Blown By Orgasms
Explains why the crazy ones always got off the best, I suppose.
[via ejp]
For anyone who missed it the first time around: Super awesome uekele playing in Central Park.
Way leet.
Furries descend on Philadelphia, populace curses when it is learned that they could have ordered a locust swarm instead.
Really disturbing article if you know nothing about furries, or fringe communities in general.
I won't be going outside unarmed... as draven points out, I can probably get away with claiming it was a hunting accident.
(Of course, the furry CSI ep -- one of the few I've managed to sit through -- was pretty close to that. But.)
[linkwhored by solios, javaman]
Deconstructing TPM, including a nice ripping-apart of some Doctorow nonsense.
My favorite part of this is that we've already been through it, from the FOSS perspective. When DRM first went into the Linux kernel, there was a huge uproar, and Linus essentially told everyone to shut the fuck up.
I guess the "circles" Doctorow travels in aren't hip to it. Or perhaps they missed that day's /. front page...
[via lasar]
Steve and Keri popped out a kid. Ava Elizabeth Mack.
So did jcap and Michiko. Joshua Kosei Cappeillo.
Adam finally got around to upping the pictures from his PhD defense. Fear it. (Adam insists that he and Sophy won't be having a kid any time soon. It'll be entertaining when they have triplets. Suckers.)
OnLamp has a biggish interview with many OBSD devs about thebig changes going into OpenBSD 3.8.
Lots of cool stuff!
(Of course everyone is mainly commenting on the inclusion of stat(1), haha.)
Ikaruka madness. This is freaking insane.
[via javaman]
So this is what Cronin has been working on.
Technical correspondent for the Revolution Dan Engler was heard to say:
From what I read if democratic elections were held in Saudia Arabia the biggest votes would go the the Saudi Nuke Israel Party followed by the Burn Israel Party and running a close third would be the Drive the Jews into the sea party.
Pity there's no "Drive the Jews to the Sea and Party" party. Jewish girls in bikinis. Mmmm.
Again, I'm all over democracy, within reason. But full-frontal democratic governments, reflecting the will a majority are fine in theory but in practice it's scary as hell. I'm sure that's why we've done away with it here in the United States.
[via bostik]
OpenBSD server hardware compatibility list
Pretty much anything without broken SCSI/RAID support is going to work. Which is uh, lots of machines. Including newer IBM servers they don't list (anything IDE or SATA-based obviously; the SCSI/RAID cards in most IBM boxes are unhappy).
Soldiers lose death benefits if they die wearing privately purchased armor..
How about we buy them some armor that doesn't suck?
Talk to your representatives, assuming it matters anymore.
[via timmy]
Forth-coming documentary on American imperialism.
Or, as Ghost in the Shell: Stand-alone Complex took to calling us, the American Empire.
Google's explanation of why it agreed to filter a portion of search results for their Chinese site.
It's sad, but I agree with it. Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away.
And while you may not buy into the cowboy mentality, there are technological responses to oppressive, networked censorship.
* Add support for tunneling arbitrary network packets over a connection between an OpenSSH client and server via tun(4) virtual network interfaces. This allows the use of OpenSSH (4.3+) to create a true VPN between the client and server providing real network connectivity at layer 2 or 3. This feature is experimental and is currently supported on OpenBSD, Linux, NetBSD (IPv4 only) and FreeBSD. Other operating systems with tun/tap interface capability may be added in future portable OpenSSH releases. Please refer to the README.tun file in the source distribution for further details and usage examples.
Hmmm!
Take pictures of crap people are throwing away, spam it to an email addr, and they use the Google Maps API to point it out, along with the picture.
I think this is the first time anyone has done this. The tech to do it quite this simply certainly wasn't there before now.
[via digg]
A class at Bell Shoals Baptist Church embraces an alternate history that advocates the United States as a nation by Christians for Christians.
Aaagh. Agh.
Each class starts with a prayer, for guidance. For wisdom.
He says that, through prayer, George Washington made himself bulletproof during the French and Indian War.
?!?!;lkjasdf
Studies show, he says, that 97 percent of Americans believe in God. Only 3 percent are atheists.
"We've been robbed," Barton says. "Robbed by the 3 percent. The 3 percent has taken away our heritage. We've got to get involved and take it back."
Aaaaagh. Agh!
Engage bitching about homosexuals raising kids! About little kids in bed with gay men! About lesbians not being able to TEACH THEIR DAUGHTERS how to LOVE A MAN!
"Father," he begins as the students bow their heads, "We want to be clothed with grace. We want to be clothed with humility. . . . There is nothing in us that should be self-righteous, that should be judgmental."
Wrrrrrgh!
"There has always been debate over whether the government is a secular institution or a divine institution," he said.
Separation! Church! State!
This gov't as a divine institution?!
< mdxi> if non-conservatives would do something besides whine into their blogrolls, things might change
< mdxi> venting righteous indignation onto the cybernets is not political process, people