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.

read more | digg story

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.

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.

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.

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!

• 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.

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?

From Sjöberg’s article, as promised:

Blogs and their ultimate perfect entry:

Boing Boing: Crocheted replica of subway map cracks DRM on collection of old video games.

FARK: Drunk frat boy in Florida has sex with underage donkey, sues Strong Bad for negligence. Still no cure for overused in-jokes.

Slashdot: AMD, SCO patent MP3 over TCP/IP, sue ATI, EA. Microsoft probably responsible somehow.

Kottke: Elwin Festerator is the unsung inventor of the curly telephone cord. “I looked at a straight telephone cord, and I asked myself, Elwin, why can’t that be curly? So I went out and got my brand-new curling gun, and I curled the hell out of it.” Related link: New Yorker article on the Olympic curling team.

Engadget: Samsung releases new cell phone/mp3 player/camera/web browser/GPS/game player/wireless hub. Now in gray!

Joystiq: Will Wright to design first-person Warcraft shooter for the Wii. Jack Thompson responds with aneurysm.

Groklaw: Transcript of SCO deposition on previous court order concerning applicability of evidence to last year’s motion to review earlier statements. Seriously, we love this stuff.

Daily Kos: Bush caught in three-way with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

Little Green Footballs: Bush enjoys triumphant three-way with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

Gawker: Paris Hilton does pretty much anything.

Cute Overload: A kitten licks a puppy while the puppy licks a bunny.

Fleshbot: Same as Cute Overload, only with coeds.

MacRumors: Apple is going to sue us for revealing that Apple is going to sue us.

MAKE blog: How to create a nuclear accelerator using a Flash drive, a Commodore 64 and a guy named Roger.

Metafilter: Unhelpful link text. Extra links added for padding that have little to do with the main topic of the entry. Are extremely loaded rhetorical questions the only thing that can save us now?

Digg: Hey, cool, someone wrote an article about Digg!

Technorati Tags: blogging, Wired, Slashdot, BIOC, phreaking, humor

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.

read more | digg story

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

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?

What is it that makes these social networking sites so popular? What is it that MySpace taps into that we’re all about? Is it the personality that we get to convey? Sure, geeks mock it, but we’re supposed to: of course these sites aren’t proper HTML, of course they’re obnoxious, of course they’re poorly designed, but they are some peoples’ only web presence. What about the good part of these sites? Behind the bling, behind the pseudonyms, behind the glittery GIFs and quasipornographic personal images lurk real people, people you and I used to know, and have forgotten. Isn’t that something?

But what good is it, and what impact does this have on the future, if any? I wonder if it doesn’t help de-romanticize our pasts. High school suddenly seems a lot less “back then” when you know what all your former colleagues are doing now, doesn’t it?

Technorati Tags: friendship, aging, psychology, social networking

Jan Johnstone from Kincardine, Canada writes: It is a huge ethical dilemma. Once the drug companies get a hold of it, it becomes marketed as a fix for everything. I remember reading advertisements in People Magazine for a popular antidepressant. Part of the script was aimed at getting rid of those pesky sad feelings of grief. Don’t feel blue, ask your doctor for this. But feeling grief and sorrow is a good thing, unless we all believe that certain emotions and states of being are more desirable. Dito for this drug. Our memories, no matter how painful, are important. This drug if marketed should be limited. I could see uses for it but it should not be the pancea for all bad memories. I think there could be uses for it, especially around people who have bad memories around torture.

Technorati Tags: medicine, memory, ethics, propranolol, anxiety

Quite useful, but SirDiggalot (from Digg.com) mentioned that perhaps the best way to get an archive from a remote machine that doesn’t have the resources (e.g., hard drive space) to make a complete tar backup is neglected:

cd /source/dir
tar -cf - . | ssh user@remote "(cd /destination/dir && tar -xpf -)“

Linux From Scratch. For the hardcore only: build your own Linux system, literally from the lowest level up. This isn’t like compiling your own distribution, though: this is like baking a cake by grinding your own flour. It might be the best cake you’ve ever eaten, and you’ll know exactly how to do it, but if you don’t have the stamina of an ultramarathoner and the patience of a tortoise, I can’t imagine being able to recommend this approach.

LearnLINUX: On the other hand, I can heartily recommend this for the novice! This is like a whole class in Linux, for free, online. Everything from Linux history to system administration and shell scripting. Bookmarked!

I’ve been trying to download a series of files for quite some time now; “old fashioned” means work, but not nearly so efficiently. So, being a die-hard Azureus user ever since I discovered BT a few years ago, I cranked up my copy again to try one last time. (Azureus is an outstanding, cross-platform, Java-based BitTorrent client, and the winner of the SourceForge Community Choice Award, Best Overall for 2006!) Now, previously, I had tried to crank up Azureus and had had limited success in even getting the program running.

I added the torrent I wanted, and waited for the notification icon to turn from “no peers” to seeds and peers connected in a healthy torrent swarm. I waited….

And waited.

And waited some more.

Eventually, I was getting Remotely established connections, but not any locally established. Safepeer wasn’t blocking any connections, for one thing, which is unusual: there are always a few miscellaneous IPs that fail the blacklist checks just from network error, if not from malice. My NAT was routing fine, everything was green, the tracker was returning an OK signal. Nothing. I couldn’t connect outward.

This time, I was on a mission. I was not giving up on this. So I opened up the built-in Azureus IRC support channel and started asking around. No leads.

A little Googling turned up nothing on the matter—until, a few hours later, I sat fuming at the console. What was going wrong? And since when did Azureus spout this many debug messages to stdout when running in the background in non-debug mode?

—That was the tip-off. I looked carefully at the console, freezing the output to allow me to examine the following:

DEBUG::[date]::[specific call that caused the error]
java.net.SocketException: Permission denied
at [snip much more debug nonsense here]

So the problem was in one of the 64-bit libraries in this copy of Azureus; Java was throwing an exception at the socket level: it didn’t have permissions to access the network. Furthermore, I had been using the GNU Java Compiler [roughly] equivalent to version 1.4.2 of Sun’s “official” Java. But Googling this turned up unhelpful results.

Then I tried downloading the latest Java from Sun for the AMD64 platform in an RPM file (wrapped in their license agreement, of course). But when I installed and ran “java -version” or “whereis java” at the console, the system didn’t even see the new install—it was still linked to the GNU compiler! Frustrated, I Googled again, this time for a way to hard-delete option for the GNU compiler, a way to remove it if not with yum or rpm then by hand and reassign the $JAVA_HOME variable….

Then I ran across this invaluable post on the Fedora Forums. The relevant part I’ll echo here to mirror the data, but the credit goes to bytesniper; this version is edited for typos and some emphasis:

There is a link in /usr/bin/java that actually starts java so it needs to be pointed to the correct java installation. The easiest way to do this (to presserve both or all installations of java) is to use alternatives.

if you type alternatives --config java you will see a single entry pointing to something like /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj/bin/java.

all you need to do is add the link (path) to the new installation of java from sun

alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /pathto/sunjava/java 2
(usage is alternatives <link> <name> <path> <priority>)

once you add the new java configuration to alternatives all you need to do is activate, to tell the system this is what should be run as /usr/bin/java:

alternatives –config java
this will give you a menu of java installations. choose the second option (hence, priority 2) and hit enter. now when you type something like java -jar filename.jar it will use the sun java instead of the inlcuded gcj.

Note: You can also delete /usr/bin/java and make a new symbolic link to the java binary of the new java installation, but I do not recommend this.

When I set up Sun’s as my default Java installation, the problem then became the error when trying to load Azureus, “Wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64.” I was running the latest 64-bit installation of Azureus with the latest version of 64-bit Java on an Athlon64. Given that in this context, ELF stands for “Executable and Linking Format,” this error would be somewhat comparable to getting a “Wrong or Missing DLL” error in Windows when you’re absolutely certain that’s not the case. In short, it was infuriating.

After some more conversation and some more Googling, cyb2063 in the #Azureus-Support channel linked me to this workaround for Mandrake and Azureus on the AMD64 platform. Even after following the instructions to a tee, it still didn’t work.

At this point, I’ll be honest with you, I gave up. If the 64-bit class of my executable format is “wrong,” I figured, I’d just try the 32-bit version. Doing a clean install of 32-bit Azureus corrected all of those problems, and now it’s running like a dream.