Fun with Ecto
Kelly makes Ecto work with Mandrake 10 and WordPress...feeding his inner Geek along the way.
What the heck is this?
Blogging…I’m pretty sure that term was invented by the same group of irritating people who more recently came up with “podcasting”.
I’ve had what I call a “vanity” website for about 9 years now. I have been posting stuff about myself, that interests me, or that I wanted to experiment with all that time. But I’ve never really called what I do “blogging”, even though my most recent website incarnation has looked an awful lot like a blog.
Lo, I have sunk into the depths of consumerisim…
I am far from being a "trendy" kind of guy. I tend to be either ahead or behind the curve in terms of whats cool and whats not. Case in point: I had my first "website" before the Internet existed...okay, it was a BBS, but it was up and running in 1980. Arguably it was a blog, since I posted opinion pieces, and it was as close to the 'web' as you could get in 1980. And it had a forum of sorts. I was 16 at the time, and in those days no one except a real loser had a computer. Flash forward to 2005. Everyone is on the Internet. Blogs are the "new" cool thing. Years ago, all the trendy folks started buying iPods. I was pretty skeptical, and even recently I stated some rather negative opinions about the gadget itself. But I finally went out a couple of weeks ago and bought an iPod. I was seduced... ...the little gadgets carry gigabytes of music around. In the case of the one I bought, 20 gigabytes. My entire existing digital music library is only about 3 gigabytes. But worse than that...a couple of months before I bought the iPod, I connected up to iTunes. And that was what did me in: quick and easy access to music the way I want it. I pay my $0.99 per song, I can pick and chose the songs I want from a library of something like a million tunes, I can burn them on CDs, play them on my computer (up to five different computers), or play them on...an iPod. I found iTunes hit the magical "sweet" spot for me: I want to legitimately pay for my music, but I don't want to be robbed of my right to choose how and when I want to play it. Sure, I'd rather pay a more reasonably $0.49 a song or something, but iTunes seems for me at least to be a reasonable compromise between what I want and what the music industry seems to demand. Why not go the subscription music route, like Napster or whatever? That way, you get as many songs as you can squeeze onto your hard drive, all for one monthly fee. The whole "subscription" music idea bothered me: paying a monthly fee to pick any music I want sounds good on the surface, until you realize the music stops playing when you stop paying...all of the music. And to make this "it disables when the fee runs out" work, the music is encumbered with a ton of digital rights management stuff. Sure, you can hack that stuff out by re-recording, but I have no desire to feel like I'm "cheating" or "breaking the law": I figure the music companies should either offer me music the way I want it, or I simply won't buy the stuff and I'll listen to the radio instead. I bought the iPod because it works and plays well with iTunes. I can't say I'm overly impressed by how well it works: Apple seems to have some problems dealing with the Windows XP environment, and I've had a couple of "hiccups" when transferring music to my iPod. The worst so far was when it started "pretend" synchronizing- the "syncing your iPod" message would appear and then the "safe to remove" message, but nothing was being transferred. A full reset/re-imaging of the iPod fixed that, but the average user wouldn't have had a clue what was going on. iTunes itself is great, but the Windows iTunes to iPod experience isn't perfect...maybe a 7 out of 10. But the "iTunes accessories" experience is awesome and more than makes up for the "iTunes under Windows talking to iPod" problems. Just for the existence of a huge selection of add-on gadgets, cases, connection kits, speakers, and so on alone...I would say the iPod is worth the premium compared to other comparable portable music devices. Find a 20 GB mp3 player: it will probably cost you about $300. An iPod of the same size will cost you $350...I'm saying that difference is probably worth it. Netting it out, am I happy with my iPod? Yes, for sure. Has it transformed my life, taken existence to a higher plane, made me want to have Steve Job's children? Hell no. It's a well designed gadget, which is good. I still think Steve Jobs is an arrogant prick with a grossly over-inflated reputation (most of his "genius" was stolen, quite literally, from much smarter people like Steve Wozniak). And Apple has no one's best interests at heart other than their own...so the fact that some of the stuff they make is good does not elevate them to some sort of religious and philosophical greatness.
Computer upgrade 2005…
Well, its that time of year again...time for me to break my computer in the name of geekdom...
For 2005, my objective was a bit different- stick mostly to upgrades that can be transferred to the next "version" of my computer- things that I don't need to throw away in a year. Because the next upgrade will be large- in 2006, I expect to move to a new motherboard supporting PCI Express slots, which means a new video card, and while I'm at it, an new processor...ouch. So, for this year I'm replacing my monitor, my memory, and my hard drive subsystem. In some respects, I wish I'd stuck to just those things but, since I had to reformat the hard drive as part of the upgrade (see later in this posting), it seemed like a good time to upgrade the OS... The big news in the past few days was that the 64 bit version of Windows XP was released to manufacturing. What this means is that the code is basically "finished". Since I'm an MSDN subscriber, I was able to get the RTM (release to manufacturing) version and install it as part of my 2005 computer upgrade. Yes, don't worry: I'll buy a full "normal" license later. As an aside, I understand Microsoft will be offering free upgrades to Windows XP Professional 64 for people who bought Windows XP Professional: I'm not sure about that, though. Why care about 64 bit Windows? The immediate benefits from 64 bit Windows versus 32 bit Windows boils down to memory addressing, both real and virtual. Big applications, and games are a prime example here, have been butting up against all sorts of memory space limits. This isn't just the 4 GB RAM limit: there are much smaller limits for certain types of paging objects that, with XP 64, are blown wide open. What this means is that applications that use lots of memory should be faster and more capable. Other benefits start to accrue once more and more applications are written natively as 64 bit apps. 64 bit processing, done right, should be faster: on the order of 10-15% faster. However...initially, when running 32 bit applications under a 64 bit OS, there will be some potential performance degredation...from what's been tested thus far, from 0 to 5%. Both AMD (Athlon) and Intel (the new Pentium 4s and the rather unpopular server processor, the Itanium) now have 64 bit processors. Its probably inevitable that most users will be using one sometime in the next 3 to 5 years. But if you don't upgrade your computer often or at all, don't play large/complex games or run memory-hog applications like image or video editing...really, you won't see much need for a 64 bit OS. Oh, and by the way: a 64 bit OS only works on a 64 bit processor- I'm probably stating the obvious, but... My upgrade this year...Note I make several references here to "EQ2" (EverQuest 2) performance. Thats a game I play a lot and, thus far, is the only game I've installed. I'll add some other performance comments later once I've had time to install several more games...yes, I play a lot of computer games :-)
- part #1: a 20" LCD 1600x1200 flat panel monitor (ViewSonic VP201s). I got this a month or so ago. Its working out great: no visible "trailing" and fast refresh, very sharp and bright with "rich" colours, viewable from wide angles
- part #2: memory upgrade from 1 GB to 2 GB (Corsair Platinum series paired high speed 1 GB DDR); installed without a hitch Thursday night and made a noticable but small difference in EQ2 performance
- part #3: a RAID 0 array using 2 x Western Digital "Raptor" 10,000 RPM SATA drives; a little challenging to install because you have to use supplemental drivers during the XP install; the performance increase was immediately noticable. Zoning in EQ2 still takes time, but its probably half as long (guessing) and just seems smoother. Exiting the game no longer results in a minute or so of disk thrashing...
- part #4: re-install OS...this is where I decided at the last moment to go with Windows XP 64. If I made a "mistake" in this upgrade, this was it
- Before: Maxtor 7,200 RPM SATA drive (single drive): Drive index of 40 mbps
- After: Western Digital 10,000 RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 pair: Drive index of 105 mbps
Halflife2 Memory error/Direct X error ”fix”
I've been playing Halflife2 recently. Its a great game, fully deserving of all the praise its been receiving. Unfortunately, it was crashing a lot for me. And I was seeing different symptoms, making it hard to try to debug Sometimes a level would "corrupt" itself, which showed up as not being able to move on to the next level. If this happened, I'd also suffer from the fact that the save/load game interface would be "garbled": basically, the menu would sort of collapse in on itself into an unreadable/unuseable mess. Sometimes the game would "crash" to the desktop, with a "memory read" error dialog box. And occasionally, I'd end up back at the desktop with a dialog box saying something like "Internal driver error in IDirect3DDevice9::present()". It was all very frustrating I did some digging around on various forums, and found a fair number of people who seemed to be experiencing similar problems. The general recommendation: upgrade video drivers, test memory, make sure you have the latest DirectX9 (dx9c). None of it seemed to help me. I should note a bit about my configuration. I'm running an AMD 64 3400+ processor on an Asus K8V Deluxe motherboard. I have 1 GB of Corsair paired DDR memory. And I have an ATI X800 Pro video card. I'm running Windows XP SP2, fully patched and up to date. My ATI drivers are version 5.3, and Direct X is the latest version: 9.0c. My Via chipset and Creative soundblaster Audigy drivers are also fully up to date. I finally "fixed" the problem. I put quotations around that, since I can't claim that this is an absolute fix since it seems like so many other users of Halflife2 are finding different solutions. In my case, I went into BIOS and changed the video aperture from 128 MB to 256 MB. I came across the suggestion to try this at the World Overclocker's website. Before making this change, I was crashing once or twice on each "level" (between each load...there are usually several "loads" per level, so this was ugly). After changing my video aperture from 128 MB to 256 MB, I didn't have a single crash through a dozen or more "loads" worth of play. In fact, I managed to finish the game- so it was definitely worthwhile for me!
Product Warnings
Product warnings are getting silly. "Warning: product in this container may be hot!"...on a cup of coffee or a hot apple pie. Or how about "Warning: side effects of this product include drowsiness" on a sleep aid. Its all about litigation: someone sued the product manufacturer once, and probably won, so the warning on the container is intended to prevent other idiots from saying they weren't smart enough to figure out that coffee might be hot. Its all part of the gradual dumbification of our society...the assumption that we must all be freaking idiots, because there is so much evidence to prove it. I was reading a little "joke" posting on Slashdot today, which lead me to the Enchanted Mind site, which I found has some interesting humour. But the thing that got my attention today was their list of warnings based on modern physics, which I shamelessly repeat here. NEW CONSUMER LAWS The combination of modern physics and consumer protection laws leads to a new wave of product labeling. NOTICE: Due To Its Mass, This Product Warps Space and Time in Its Vicinity. WARNING: This Product Attracts Every Other Object in the universe, Including the Products of Other Manufacturers, with a Force Proportional to the Product of the Masses Divided by the Square of the Distance Between Them. CAUTION: The Mass of This Product Contains the Energy Equivalent of 85 Million Tons of TNT per Net Ounce of Weight. The Manufacturer warrants that this product is to be used only as matter and will not be responsible for injury or damage if it is converted into energy. HANDLE WITH CARE: This Product Contains Minute Electrically Charged Particles Moving at Velocities in Excess of Five Hundred Million Miles Per Hour. CONSUMER NOTICE: Due to the "Uncertainty Principle," it is impossible for the User to know precisely and simultaneously where this product is located and how fast it is moving. ADVISORY: There is an Extremely Remote Chance That, Through a Process Known as "Tunneling," This Product May Spontaneously Disappear from Its Present Location and Reappear at Any Other Place in the Universe, Including Your Neighbor's Domicile. The Manufacturer Will Not Be Responsible for Any Damage or Inconvenience That May Result. READ THIS BEFORE OPENING PACKAGE: According to Certain Suggested Versions of the Grand Unified Theory, the Primary Particles Constituting this Product May Decay to Nothingness Within the Next Four Hundred Million Years. THIS PRODUCT IS 100% MATTER: In the Unlikely Event That This Merchandise Should Contact Antimatter in Any Form, a Catastrophic Explosion Will Result. The Manufacturer cannot be held responsible for resulting injury or damages. PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW: Any Use of This Product, in Any Manner Whatsoever, Will Increase the Aggregate Amount of Disorder in the Universe. Although No Liability Is Assumed Herein, the Consumer Is Warned That This Process Will Ultimately Lead to a state of "Warm Death" of the Universe. NOTE: The Most Fundamental Particles in This Product Are Held Together by a "Gluing" Force About Which Little is Currently Known and Whose Adhesive Power, therefore, Can Not Be Guaranteed Indefinitely. No responsibility is therefore assumed for the structural integrity of this product. ATTENTION: Notwithstanding Any Listing of Product Contents Found Hereupon, the Consumer is Advised That This Product Actually Consists of 99.9999999999% Empty Space. NEW GRAND UNIFIED THEORY DISCLAIMER: While the Manufacturer is Technically Entitled to Claim That This Product Is Ten-Dimensional, the Consumer Is Reminded That This Confers No Legal Rights Above and Beyond Those Applicable to Three-Dimensional Objects, Since the Seven New Dimensions Are "Rolled Up" into Such a Small "Area" That They Cannot Be Detected. PLEASE NOTE: Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That, When Unobserved, This Product May Cease to Exist or May Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State. Therefore all warranties are in effect only while this product is under the direct observation of a human being. COMPONENT EQUIVALENCY NOTICE: The Subatomic Particles (Electrons, Protons, etc.) Comprising This Product Are Exactly the Same in Every Measurable Respect as Those Used in the Products of Other Manufacturers, and Competitors' Claims to the Contrary are neither Justified nor Legitimate. HEALTH WARNING: Care Should Be Taken When Lifting This Product, Since Its Mass, and Thus Its Weight, Is Dependent on Its Velocity Relative to the User. The manufacturer cannot be held liable for injury or damage resulting from relativistic mass increase. IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The Entire Physical Universe,Including This Product, May One Day Collapse Back into an Infinitesimally Small Space. Should Another Universe Subsequently Reemerge, the Existence of This Product in That Universe, and its performance and suitability for any purpose, Cannot Be Guarantee
”Star” releases Staggering amount of energy…
The natural universe is an amazing place. Our sun, which warms us at a distance of 96 million miles for billions of years. Black holes, with gravity fields so intense that light itself can not escape. And neutron stars… (more…)
Psychic random numbers..
I read a story today about some interesting observations being made using simple random number generators.
In a nutshell: some scientists developed a simple little box that is supposed to be a pure random number generator. This box design was used a couple of decades ago as a control system to see if people could somehow influence randomness with their minds. It was shown that ordinary people could apparently do so. A number of other scientists began coming up with more elaborate experiments to get to the bottom of this effect. (more…)
New planets discovered…
I was reading a news blurb in Astronomy magazine the other day about some new planets discovered around distant stars. Some of these planets are pretty weird. An important couple of points need to be made first before I talk about the planets. I've got to mention that IANAAOAA (I am not an astrophysicist or an astronomer), so everything here is just a lay-persons perspective. From what I understand, scientists are not discovering these weird planets because they are the only type of planets around distant stars. They are finding them because the techniques they currently have will *only* find weird planets. Basically, the only methods they have at the moment to detect the existence of a planet boil down to detecting variations ("wobbles") in the rotation of the star they are looking at. To make a star wobble enough to detect currently requires an extremely large planet (Jupiter sized or bigger) or a largish planet that is very close to the star. Future detection methods will hopefully allow detection of more typical planets That said, some of the weird planets they are finding are really weird... The latest batch are very close their stars...like about 0.028 astronomical units...or about 2.5 million miles. And they are quite large- something like 15 times the size of earth. And they complete a "year" (a full orbit around their sun) in a matter of hours: two to three days. For comparison, Mercury (the closest planet to our Sun) orbits at a distance of 0.38 AU (53 million miles), is a third the size of Earth, and completes one orbit in something like 90 days. So, here we have a planet 15 times the size of earth that is orbiting its star ten times closer than Mercury does to our Sun. Its travelling around its orbital path at something in the neighborhood of 250,000 miles per hour. If you were on an "earth" in this distant solar system, you'd be seeing the equivalent to the transit of Venus across the sun every few months (I'm guessing on this- the math is a bit beyond me). Except this "venus" in this case would be huge...I can't quite imagine what it would look like seeing a planet that large that close to its sun as it passes between you and that sun, but I imagine it would be spectactular. This planet is a freak... But here's the really weird part. So far, scientists have found three planets pretty much just like this. What this says to me is that there is a huge range of weird and wonderful planetary systems out there, and we have a ton more to learn.
Catwoman…or why are people such sheep?
I just finished watching Catwoman on DVD. This is the movie that Halle Berry starred in last year, and which received pretty much universally terrible reviews. And you know what? I liked it. I liked it quite a lot, actually. And now I'm a bit angry... I originally wanted to watch the movie when it came out in the theatre. But it received such bad reviews that I couldn't convince anyone to go with me, and I started to doubt that it would be fun anyway. I mean, it was rated by viewers as a 2 or something on the Internet Movie Database. How could so many ordinary viewers be wrong? As I say, I saw the movie last night, and again today. It was fun: an interpretation of the Catwoman myth brought to life with a very sexy star (Halle Berry) who really seemed to "click" with the right cattitude. The main love interest felt real- the duality of the fragile Patience Phillips/dominant Catwoman character realistically attracted the male lead. The "evil" in the movie wasn't ridiculously over the top like the Joker in the original Batman- it was an almost believeable kind of corporate evil, played out well by Sharon Stone and Lambert Wilson. I can see where comic book purists would dislike the movie: it lept off into a different story line entirely from the comic books. Mind you, the comic book Catwoman has had a ton of different "lives" over the years...as has the Dark Knight himself. But I've talked enough to comic book "people" to realize that they develop their own mythology about their favorite characters, and violating "canon" is the ultimate sin. But rating this movie as a 3 out of 10? Rating it lower than the Hulk? Good freaking God, no! I watched the Hulk, and charitably it is at best nearly as good as Catwoman.... And Matrix: Revolutions rated higher than the Hulk! The Hulk at least didn't take itself seriously...there were people who wrote PhD thesis on the Matrix! Yet Catwoman rates barely half the score. Why? Frankly, I believe its a culture of "cool". Its cool to rip into something, and its a lot easier to be over the top when you don't like something. And its really cool to sit around and bash a movie with your Latte sipping, iPod listening wannabe "friends" than it is to form your own opinion. Interesting fact: of the 6000 or so people who rated Catwoman on IMDB over 2500 rated it as a 1 out of 10. Rumour has it that many of those "1" votes came in before the movie was released. This review by "Unemployed Critic" (thank god he's unemployed) came in a full *week* before the movie even released. What the heck is up with that? I guess even unemployed assholes can get into advance screenings... How would I rate Catwoman? That's somewhat meaningless without some context...so let me give you some context by looking at my rough personal ratings for similar "fantasy" type movies. I'd rate the first Matrix as an 8 out of 10. The third Matrix as 5 out of 10. Spiderman as an 8 out of 10. Spiderman 2 as an 8 out of 10. X-Men as an 8 out of 10. X2 as 6 out of 10. Batman (the first movie) as 8 out of 10. Batman Returns as 7 out of 10. Batman Forever as 6 out of 10. Batman and Robin as 5 out of 10. The Hulk as 5 out of 10. Princess Bride as 7 out of 10. I'm admittedly not a harsh reviewer. And I place particular importance upon the use of that word: review. Notice I don't say "critic". I don't go to movies to "Critique" them: I go to enjoy them. Critics, as a breed, are pathetic and worse than useless for the purpose of helping me form an opinion. Their role in life is to sound smarter than they really are, smarter than the movie producers, the actors, and all of the viewing audience. The reality is that they are, generally, useless wastes of oxygen: they weren't good enough to direct, produce, act or write. No one even thought they were good enough to edit. So they criticize. If I were dictator, I'd line up the lawyers first in front of my firing squads, then the movie critics. A movie that I give a score of 5 to is one I could have seen or not seen and not felt one way or another about- it didn't make me retch, but I wouldn't strongly recommend it to a friend. 8 out of 10 is a movie I'd recommend even to someone who doesn't like the particular genre. Very few movies I've ever watched rate higher than 8. A fair number list lower than 5: movies like Krull, or Dungeons and Dragons fall into that category, movies that I'd actually tell people *not* to see. Catwoman...I'd rate as 7.5 out of 10, although I should make that 10 out of 10 because of the sheep effect. I'd recommend it to people who were turned off by the negative press but who generally like movies based on cartoon mythology. I'm angry because the negative press generated before the movie even released made enjoying it in a theatre with a friend difficult. I'm also angry because I imagine Halle Berry will be resistant to future roles playing a comic book character, which would be sad: she's good. And I'm disappointed because, frankly, I'd like a Catwoman 2. All you folks who honestly disliked the movie...you are entitled to your opinions. The rest of you who formed your opinions based on the "buzz" and then parroted those opinions as if they were your own...I'm sure there is a special place in hell for people like you.