ThinkBlog

Back in 1999, when I had practically no money anyway because I was a young student, I actually paid for WinZip. You know, those click-here-if-you-acknowledge-it’s-been-thousands-of-days-and-hundreds-of-thousands-of-archives and so forth. I actually paid for it because I felt a conviction that I should be honest and forthright about my dealings online. At the time I was knee-deep in researching C++, hacking culture, and what it really meant to “crack” a piece of software with serial number generators—but I wanted to make sure that it was kept strictly academic. So I paid whatever they were asking for a single user license.

This was supposed to guarantee free upgrades, right?

Wrong. Now, WinZip has changed their tune and will only allow you to use your old registration key for the new 10.0 version if you pay 50% of the brand-spanking-new license, both of which are ridiculously exorbitant for mere compression capabilities.

If you, like me, have been stung by this and don’t care to search for a WinZip crack and descend into the dark halls of computing’s arcane underbelly, you can still find WinZip 9.0 via FTP searches (forget Google, it’s uselessly pointing to version 10.0). See specifically here, for instance.

Interesting how when we read books that are typeset in pleasant fonts the text itself seems to be crisper, brighter. I’ve been looking for some good, unique fonts for the logo of this site (it’s been up for several years—it’s about time, right?), and a couple of good links are as follows: Googling “historical fonts” and specifically Lord Kyl’s Medieval & Fantasy Fonts.

This is a no-nonsense Perl script that can be cleverly inserted into a cron job or just run from the commandline at any time on your Linux or Windows box (assuming you have Perl). As I said on John’s post, people on Digg are downplaying it because WordPress “automatically” does this, but what about if you want to use something other than Ping-O-Matic (another option is Pingoat)? Especially useful if you have multiple blogs or are administrating a multiple-platform blogging community.

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If you’re running Gaim under Windows and it hangs, remember to check to see if the TCL/Tk DLL might be the offender: I spent fifteen frustrated minutes uninstalling or disabling everything from codecs to antivirus software before I remembered that tcl.dll (under %GAIMDIR%\plugins\, where %GAIMDIR% is by default “C:\Program Files\Gaim”) causes Gaim to hang on my machines consistently for some reason. Renaming it tcl.dll.NO made Gaim skip it.

If you start Gaim and the process is running without complaint and without crashing, but never appears, it has likely hung on the TCL DLL; you can check this by opening a command prompt (Start -> Run… -> “cmd” [Enter]) and running gaim.exe with the –debug option on.

[EDIT: In the interest of gratitude, I should mention that it was my wonderful father who took pity on my non-mobile, technologically deficient state and offered me multiple hundreds of dollars more than I had asked him for to put toward what was initially supposed to be a crappy < $400 machine that would just barely cough through the ‘net with Firefox and maybe do some word processing on OpenOffice. It was a great blessing to have had him offer enough to purchase a machine that I’m certain will last me happily for several years. Thanks, Dad. ]

I didn’t want to pay hundreds of extra dollars for a name brand laptop, so I went with an Acer Aspire AS5102WLMi, and couldn’t be more pleased. Sharp, high-contrast screen, dual-core AMD64 proc, and 2GB of RAM … they even kindly pre-partitioned the 120GB hard drive off in halves for me, so I can slam a little Gentoo when I’m able to reward myself for finishing the GRE!

On the other hand, UPS lost my package for almost a week. That was a remarkably infuriating experience, but I learned a little patience: when I finally gave up six days later and took a nap mid-day, it arrived.

I don’t have much else to report on this, other than that I’ll be taking detailed notes when I do put Linux on it, and let my readers know of any and all problems, solutions, regrets, and other such nonsense.

I attempted in vain for an entire night (until the morning, naturally) to do everything in my power to get the RaLink RT61 chipset on this Linksys card running. I’d bought it at a local Wal-Mart for $50 because I was too impatient to do my homework like a good little geek and go to NewEgg like I had for the new laptop. (More on that later!)

RaLink provides drivers for this chipset, but the three options—NdisWrapper, compile the driver natively and install as a module, and the beta software available out there is apparently so beta it should be considered alpha to most who don’t want to pull their hair out.

If you want to do your own research, check out NdisWrapper, the above RaLink URL, and Google “Linux RT61“.

(Be sure to check your version number, though; v4.0 of this card uses the older, more stable and more community-supported RT2500 chipset.)

Round two? The EDIMAX EW-7325IG from NewEgg, with a Linux-compatible Atheros chipset. We’ll see how it works out.

ThinkForums has been taking up too much CPU time on the server by a long shot. It’s suspended indefinitely until I can find a viable free-or-cheap solution that is NOT phpBB. Any ideas will be most appreciated.

Check this link.

64 Studio is a special Linux version for creating digital contents. It is a software collection based on Debian, containing many 64-bit audio and video editing applications.

Linux specialized for a 64-bit proc with applications for editing sound and video? Wait, isn’t that the Mac department?

Not anymore!

Get more out of your Linux experience, and don’t be afraid of the command-line interface (CLI). Here are a few good references of late:

• CLI Magic: Searching with [the] find [command]. It’s more flexible than you thought.
• A Simple Linux Backup Method. An in-depth yet highly readable HOWTO for making backups that can be fully automated. If you’ve been putting off backing up your data because it’s too complex, your excuses end here.
• Enlightenment 17 QuickStart Guide. Everything that’s good about beautiful open-source software can be summed up in this Linux window manager. Beautiful.
• Data extraction via built-in text utilities. Do you know grep, awk, head, and tail like the back of your hand? Then click and learn.
• Linux Shell Scripting Basics. An excellent reference for the scripting n00b.
• Mastering wget. A great little article with pictures about wget. Remember when I crashed my home-grown server trying to mirror CCEL.org? Oh, no, you wouldn’t have remembered that part … but it happened!
• Regular Expression cheat sheet. This is a single PNG file you can print out or save to your local machine.

Right here. It warrants a short post, since they explain it more concisely than I’d ever care to.

On Slashdot a couple of days ago there was a post about Lore Sjöberg’s ‘Ultimate Blog Post‘ at Wired News. It’s witty and bitingly sarcastic, but according to the folks at Slashdot, he didn’t go far enough. To his list, which will appear beneath the “more” tag below, user doxology added the following:

LiveJournal: So, in my desperation and eternal angst, I created another piece of art to put on Deviant Art. Also, Puffy had kittens and I saw a green Volvo on my way to college. I dreamt about horseradish last night.

MySpace: OMG! T0day, me slit wrists again. i so emo! it cuz i make video for knew my chemical romance song! watch it [here]! comment me plz! thx bai!

Xanga: i scraped knee today when goig to kindergarten. dreamt about pony. hope toof fairi gives me $$ so i can bye lickorish. dreamt of ponies lsat night!

To this someone responded that, in fact, INAPPROPRIATE CAPS was the Ultimate Blog Post, with which I’m forced to agree because anything that smacks of recursion and meta-ness gets my top vote.

But however funny and/or insightful these good-natured jabs might be, what of the real backlash? A handful of my friends have expressed disdain at “Internet culture,” meaning in large part “blog culture,” insofar as that’s a meaningful designation; some while sober; and a few with such vehemence I’m asking the question here. Blogs aren’t new. “WebLogs” as such have only arisen with the advent and burgeoning popularity of the Web itself, but the ones that are personal are no newer than journals, diaries, and friends passing notes in class; and blogs that are technical are just a new take on old news feeds from manually-updated websites—and independent newspapers and esoteric magazines before them.

When e-zines hit the ‘net back before anyone would have known what “the ‘net” meant, they were the greatest thing since sliced bread for everyone who knew about them. Remember THE BOOK OF BIOC? No, probably not, because you either weren’t old enough to care—or too old to care. (My sincere apologies to those of you who were curious adolescent delinquents back in the very early ’80s learned all about phreaking from this venerable old publication which you would have downloaded from your local BBS at 300 baud and read on a green-and-black, caps-only, 40-column screen and then put into action via the supplies you picked up at your local Radio Shack.) But this was hot stuff back in the day.

Is it that the hoi polloi are in on the “blog scene”? Is there just too much rampant incredibility? What’s your gripe with the blog scene, if any? Why?
(more…)

• The Connection between Coding [Software Programming] and Roleplaying.  I’ve been sitting on this one for ten full months for no apparent reason, but I thought the comments and the article were insightful.  Seems like a psychological phenomenon worth investigating.
• From the thank-you-mom-may-I-have-another department comes, Videogaming Keeps the Brain from Aging.  A study of 100 Toronto undergrads shows that gamers outperform their game-ignorant peers in certain mental tests.  There was a comparison drawn between results on these tests and the difference between people who were bilingual versus not (results were similar).
• Flashback NES.  Relive the wonder, the magic, the excellence of the Nintendo Entertainment System.  February marked the twentieth anniversary of the venerable gaming platform.  Despite the name and the fact that I haven’t been a real gamer since the SNES, I’m looking forward to the Wii.
• Stop-Motion Video Gaming.  Classic games animated with physical objects (and even food items) in a way that seems uncanny.  The good old days, even before the NES!
• Tremulous: Free Software Phenomenon.  I quit gaming, among other reasons, because I couldn’t afford it.  (It was either video games or books and cigars and hardware back in my early college days, so, you know, the choice was fairly obvious.)  Tremulous, however, is a free game based on the Quake 3 engine.  I might give this a shot if I can ever get my new apartment cleaned up enough to move around freely without shifting papers, boxes, and baskets of clothes.

WikiMapia [recently] announced the creation of the 1,000,000th place. This place is Upper Room Apostolic Faith Church situated in Kansas, USA. WikiMapia is a free, multilingual, online wiki map, it allows people to mark physical locations on a map and add description in wiki style.

Check this out. WikiMapia is a collaborative map site where you can add tags to Google maps like to Flickr photos; I’ve added a few links to the Greenville and Columbia SC areas, and you can too. You just have to prove you’re human by typing in a four-digit number to confirm a Captcha verification, and you can add sites to your heart’s content.

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Protect your privacy from Google.

This simple HOWTO will keep Google from logging your search history by routing all Google searches through a proxy.

Why is this necessary or desirable?  Because Google has recently agreed to keep records of all searches by its users.  Google is an awesome, powerful search engine; but should they decide to “turn evil,” and sell your data, they’d have all your searches saved by IP or Gmail username or both.  The kinds of statistical data that could be analyzed here stagger the mind, but all that aside, you can keep them from tracking you by following the above HOWTO (I would echo it here, but the author deserves the credit).

Technorati Tags: Google, blocking, firewall, proxy, Tor

I was intrigued by a recent Slashdot article asking why we don’t see any high brow video games. There’s pop music, and then there’s the classics— not just classical music per se, but even music that just sticks with a generation or several generations. Are video games able to be judged by the same criteria? Can we say that X game is really artistic and truly speaks to our generation, or can we only say that games are for entertainment, QED?

Probably the most insightful comment was by Opportunist, who said the following:

Let’s face it, though, that the computer culture is, so far, a short one. It’s a very new medium, unprecedented by anything it developed from that could be viewed as the “heritage” of it. Music developed during the ages. Even movies had their roots in theatres and plays. Computer games have nothing to draw from.

Thus they are not taken serious as a cultural element. One could argue that the junk that’s currently sold as music is at best what fast food is to cooking, but there is “good” music, maybe it’s a bit dated, but there are pieces of music that can be considered true art. And it needn’t be something along the lines of Mozart or Beethoven. A lot of “pop music” is very capable of moving people, inspiring them, it had some serious impact on our life and it even had influence on politics and the way people see the world. I’m especially thinking about music from the peace movement in the 60s, for example. Most of it can be considered pop music, but it had a “message”, it contained elements that are thought provoking, it’s not just easy listening and entertaining.

Such precedents are missing in the computer games history. And now is maybe one of the worst moments to try something like that. Making games is costy. It’s not like you can sit down in the basement with your friends and you strum your guitars ’til something with a message comes out. You need good people, with a lot of math and physics in their brains, and I do take a serious background in computer languages as granted, who spend a lot of time working out the game.

And then, nobody will buy it. It doesn’t carter the fast food generation gamers, who want a quick, fun game to rush through and then go on to the next. And, as stated before, people who are looking for entertainment with depth, meaning and message are not looking for it in computer games.

Your thoughts?