Comic – Too much time on the Internet

http://xkcd.com/comics/bored_with_the_internet.jpg

Web 2.0

A lot of people dislike things that they don’t understand. This may be why I hate the term “web 2.0″. When the automatic transmission was invented in cars, they weren’t called cars 2.0. When TV got color, it wasn’t called TV 2.0. So why web 2.0?

Blogging on Politics

I have decided to remove all of my posts that discuss politics for the simple fact that I don’t read them on other people’s blogs (with the exception of blogs that are dedicated to just politics).

Arch Linux – 1st Time; Prime Time

Oh my goodness, I’m in love. I have finally found my ideal Linux distribution. Since the fall of 2000, I have been using Slackware, and it’s been really great to me. Pat, slackware’s founder and maintainer, is an excellent guy and does a really good job at maintaining stability and security. As a developer and someone who likes to play around with bleeding edge software, I get excited over “the new stuff” and want to play with it right away. Because of slackware’s slow package releases and my distrust in linuxpackages.net, I was forced to create or edit slackbuilds for everything. The process can be slow, but is very worthwhile, because you get to control over how the packages are being assembled and thus get to set your own configurations.

Ultimately, I wanted something new; a linux distribution that would provide me with the bleeding edge. So, I started with debian and didn’t like it. I tried ubuntu and didn’t like it — it felt bloated, I couldn’t su, and I couldn’t get xwindows to stop locking up on me. I tried Arch Linx and… it was frickin awesome!

Arch Linux booted faster than any linux distro I’ve tried and installed almost as fast. Plus, the installation allowed for an FTP install of the packages in current, which slackware cannot not (as of 10.2). The init system is also great (seems to be BSD, with the use of rc.conf to enable what gets run on startup). Best of all is abs and pacman, the package management tool. Arch Linux makes it so fast to install pacakges, simply pacman -Sy packagename. The program abs allows you to edit and view the PKGBUILD (similar to slackbuilds) for installed packages; in addition, it allows you to maintain your own packages in the /var/abs/local/ directory. So you get the new packages which I was looking for and the control as I described above with the slackbuilds.

Earlier today, Chris made a comment about me not blogging enough, because he is right I will extend this post and provide you with a list of things I did during the setup:

• - First, I happened to lose my Internet connection during my FTP Install and thought I was screwed. But no. Arch Linux allows you to resume your FTP downloads by exiting the install step (ctrl-c) and redoing the install step.
• - Courtesy of slackware, I added this to my /etc/fstab so that I may read my windows partition, but only for users of the group windows (group id 101): /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows ntfs ro,gid=101,dmask=0227,fmask=0337 0 0
• - For the above to work, add the group windows (groupadd -f windows) and then modify your user’s groups to windows (usermod -G windows,users germ)
• - xorgconfig (or in my case, I just copied my /etc/xorg.config over from slackware)
• - pacman -Sy nvidia (drivers for my geforce 6800gt)
• - pacman -Sy xfce4
• - pacman -Sy xfce4-goodies
• - pacman -Sy numlockx
• - edit ~/.xinitrc to add “numlockx on” (numlock on for xwindows)
• - edit /etc/rc.local to add “for i in $(seq 6); do /usr/bin/setleds -D +num < /dev/tty${i} >/dev/null; done” as a bash script (numlock on for console)
• - added alsa and my mini firewall to the DAEMONS in /etc/rc.conf so that it would remember my alsamixer settings on boot
• - added MOD_BLACKLIST=(pcspkr) to get rid of that annoying pc speaker
• - the list goes on, and it’s nothing unique. you can find most of this stuff by searching through Arch Linux’s wiki.

So, if you want to try a new linux distro, and are looking for something lightweight and fast, then try Arch Linux.

Control Your Hiccups

My younger sister constantly hiccups, which happens to annoy the heck out of me.  It’s turned into more of a comedy now, because I tell her, “you know you can control that.”  She laughs — possibly out of furstration — and replies that it’s impossible for people to control their hiccups.  In fact, everyone I’m around claims that hiccups cannot be controlled.  They are wrong.  I can control my hiccups within one to two hiccups after my first attempt to stop them.

I describe my technique for controlling my hiccups below.  To respond to this lawsuit-happy nation I live in, I would like to provide this disclaimer:  I am not a doctor and take no responsibility for any damages that this hiccup control technique may cause.

My method for stopping hiccups is quite simple, but may sound ridiculous:  I concentrate on the organs in my “tummy” and alter (slow down) my breathing as I feel the need to hiccup.

That’s it.  It’s that simple.

I just had the hiccups and stopped them immediately.  This triggered my desire to post a description of my technique so that other “brothers” in this sistuation can have a website to show their “sisters” for proof.

Cell Phone Advertising I Could Live With

Initially, the idea of receiving any form of advertising on my personal cell phone does not sound grand at all. But, what if this advertising could be controlled. And what if it would reduce the price of your cell phone’s service plan.

The current approach to cell phone advertisements sounds like more of annoyance to cell phone carriers than anything. The aim is to do target advertising via text messaging. For example, the advertiser could send out a text message to all known female cell phone users between the ages of 21-30 and inform them about a designer purse sale at some local store.

Being bombarded with text messages would drive me nuts and I would ignore 98% of them. My solution for a more effective, less intrusive alternative would be on-cell-phone-event advertising, and would most likely require an agreement between a cell phone service provider and manufacturer. An example of its use is as follows: the cell phone rings; the user picks up the phone and immediately looks at the caller id, but instead of just having some blank background, it will now have an image of a product’s logo. Another example could be a screen saver that shuffles through various ads. Or a breakfast ad that pops if your alarm goes off in the morning.

This form of cell phone advertising seems to be very unintrusive. Moreover, the ads could be controlled. Users would be allowed to turn them on or off, with an incentive of a lower service fee for leaving the ads on.

More Art

Since I brought up art in my previous post, I thought I’d share another online art find that I found a while back.  This girl turns unreal tournament player/bot coordinates into art using the Processing langauge.

Here’s some of her art.

p.s. If you haven’t checked out the Processing language or some projects that use it, I recommend you do so.  It seems very cool.

Paper Art

I just found this website while going through a few of del.icio.us’ hotlist for today:

Peter Callesen
… and almost immediately I was looking for a link to obtain pricing information.  Very neat stuff.