Monday, March 30 2009, 04:32 am

Surrounded by Annoyances


Four year olds cannot edit photos. How do I know this? I used to be four years old. When you are that age computers are not on your mind let alone using a laptop and moving photos from a camera to the laptop, opening them in an image editor, doing complicated image touch-up, and printing out to a printer. Not going to happen folks.

How about a monthly music plan that's "awesome yo!?" Microsoft is hitting a double whammy with a series (read: one) of commercial that has been playing non-stop for over a week in-between any show on TV about the Zune monthly music "awesomeortunity" that some poor girl gave 30 seconds of her life to act like a normal person. Yeah, the economy is hitting rock bottom (don't let the 2 hour waits at restaurants tell you otherwise) and $15 music plans are just too "awesome" to pass up. Oh, what's that? Your music is DRM'd and in a proprietary Microsoft format? I'm just Joe Consumer though so I'll buy anything if it's "awesome." Awesome. What's that? You wanted to keep that music you just listened to? Be careful, you can only save 10 of them. $15/month for 10 highly compressed and degraded songs or $15 for a CD-ROM of uncompressed audio with more than 10 tracks. I'll pick the awesome buy.

Back to Windows: How about a 7 year old?


Has three years allowed us the ability to print now? No. How about a 9 year old instead? Maybe after 2 more years instead of just editing a picture they can connect a laptop to a HDTV and edit and play movies! Yea^H^H^H No.

I'd like to meet the parents of these poor children. Was the money worth it? String your child up for a cheap buck? Status of parenting on planet Earth: Non-existent. I'll save this thought for another time.

It may seem like I'm picking on Microsoft, but don't worry there are some Blackberry commercials I'm not fond of. The most annoying one's I've seen lately made my blog today. Today, my hatred for the entire marketing world is rising to even higher levels. Come on "Marketing Majors" post in my comments. I dare you.

Saturday, February 28 2009, 07:45 pm

Chug, chug, chug, chug...

How on earth does the world use Vista? Yes, Microsoft Windows Vista. Backstory: I received a new laptop two days ago. An ASUS N80Vn-X5. It came with Vista Home Premium 64-bit. This is my first copy of Vista as I run Linux on all my machines. I did have a copy of XP but I stopped using that a few years ago. Why did I stop using XP? Because I wanted something more out of my computer. XP is fine and all, but I can accomplish more with Linux - not just because it is free.

Unpacking:
I unpack it from its box and I plug in the AC adapter and boot the thing. Vista starts to load - and load - and load. 10 minutes later I get to the desktop. Why on earth did it take that long to get to my desktop? Wait a minute... the hard drive is still chugging. Why?

Configuring:
The first thing I do is kill the hideous sidebar that takes an extra 5 minutes to load on startup. Gone. The second thing I do is disable automatic updates. Now, I realize some readers will think better of themselves and call me an idiot, but I rarely use Windows and I know how to update it so I'm quite OK running updates when I should instead of having Windows do it for me.

Updating:
It came with SP1 so I figured it should be pretty harmless. Where to update this thing? Hm, I don't see anything. Ah, I'll just use IE's "Windows Update" link. Oh what's this? There's an update to Windows Update. Oh! It requires a reboot. *Reboot* Ah, that was a nice 10 minute reboot. Windows update has about 30 updates for me. Fine. Downloading/updating takes about 15 minutes thanks to the attrociously large 100 meg .NET update. I'm on 20 megabit Internet mind you. Rebooting again. Seems that I'm up to date now, or am I?

Playing:
The only thing loaded on this thing is about 5 ASUS utilities for the fingerprint reader, webcam, and some software that looks like it encrypts files. Grand total of hard disk space in use? 20 gigabytes. That alone is enough for me to be offended permenently because what does that 20 gigabytes net me? A video player, picture viewer, a web browser, and a movie maker. The features don't match the disk space requirements. It's also using 1 gig of RAM with no programs running. Yes, I uninstalled the Office 2007 trial.

Why would I be offended? Example: My default Fedora install cost me 4.5gigs. What did I get besides the stuff already in Vista? Full office suite, photo manipulation, SELinux, bittorent, GPS mapping, SIP phone, Pidgin, GCC, and a few other of my programming utilities, not to mention Wine, which will allow me to run Windows apps.

Time to reboot just to see that reboot time again. *clicks Restart* "Configuring updates stage 2 of 3..." What's this? WHAT'S THIS? I have updates turned *OFF* and Windows is installing updates. Stealth updates - w00t. The little trust I had with Microsoft is completely gone at this point.

I let it reboot and go back into Vista just to find that after I log in the hard drive is chugging - and chugging - and chugging. 10 minutes later it finally quiets down and I decide to reboot to get into Fedora. *Clicks Restart* "Configuring updates stage 2 of 3..." Yeah. I'm done with Microsoft.

Friday, February 20 2009, 04:24 am

Small Worlds Collide

Surprises come electronically these days. I received one a few days ago when out of the blue a childhood friend of mine e-mailed me. Vincent was my first best friend growing up, but since I moved away just after elementary school we had no realization of the situation. Remember this was before the Internet. I was just getting on AOL (ugh) and surfin' the keywords. Cell phones were still carried in bags. Anywho, it was cool to get in touch and catch up.

If any more of my childhood friends or enemies find me, be sure to write!

Saturday, January 17 2009, 09:43 pm

Recreational Programming

Usually the best products come about when someone is fed up with the current process of operation. Something like that happened when I was fed up using the command line interface for "uvcdynctrl," which is a tool to manipulate the settings for my Logitech QuickCam 9000 Pro. Fortunately Logitech was kind enough to provide a developer for building an open source library called "libwebcam" that would allow me to build my own interface using GTK+2. Here's the result:

Download: uvcdynctrl-gtk-0.1

I used the git source code management tool for this project so you can grab the latest source (LGPL'd) from my gitweb interface. You will need libwebcam, GTK+2, and gstreamer development libraries and headers to build it.

Please feel free to add any feedback. I also have RPM spec files for Fedora to build libwebcam and my program if you want them. Thanks should really be given to the GTK, gstreamer, and Logitech folks for making this possible.

Wednesday, December 31 2008, 07:06 pm

Christmas Time at Last

An awesome friend of mine has made me a scarf. It arrived just in time as the weather is turning colder next year. I should be very warm indeed.

In other news, Dr Pepper came through on their free drink offer. I can finally quench my thirst. Since the US economy is "so bad" a free drink may be the only way I can afford one.

Happy New Year!

Sunday, November 23 2008, 04:38 am

Words Cannot Describe Such Incompetence

Whoever thought the zone defence was a good idea should be shot. Everyone that believes it in today should be shot. Football plays are decided in milliseconds not seconds. When a defender is in a zone, it takes him seconds to react and move in to a tackle. By the time they react, the offensive player is gone. In other times, multiple defenders are standing around helpless because they had to stay in their zone to defend the precious grass that no offensive player would ever enter.

I do not think I could even be sarcastic about how awful zone defence is. Any football team, college or pro, who continues to use zone defence as their strategy will never have my support. Sure, I may have never coached a football team, or even played a game, but one does not need such experience when it boils down to common sense.

Wednesday, November 5 2008, 02:36 am

Presidents are for Suckers

Aye, another election passes and it's quite decisive instead of controversial this time around. While I liked neither Hussein Obama or McCain, Obama seems to want to turn our country into one big handout. With his win today, and all of his democratic party winning control of the House and Senate, he, and his party, will have complete reign to do whatever they wish. With all this free money coming from the government soon, what will happen to the national debt? What will the value of the dollar do?

How did BO win? It seems ACORN was a deciding factor. They pushed registration in areas Republicans did not. Voters turned up to vote blue, possibly twice, and that's how it's done. Hopefully the next four years are quiet, smooth, and successful for us, but somehow I fear that will not come to pass.

Saturday, October 11 2008, 04:42 am

New Family Member, Rawr


Long story short, I have a new cat.

Sup, Chloe.

Tuesday, September 30 2008, 05:37 am

Ancient Computers Recycled


Usually I have a piece of computer hardware that I must have, but usually I don't get it right away. I wait until it's marked down from MSRP. Sometimes that wait is five years long. In that case, I upgraded my main server from a 1.13ghz Tualatin to a 1.4ghz, which was the fastest made. This process required me to also upgrade the motherboard since all but a few supported anything beyond a 1.2ghz Tualatin. Why would I do this? First off, the entire upgrade cost me $40 without shipping. Secondly, I was always facinated by the Tualatin CPU line, as nerdy as that might sound. So after having to dust off my floppy drive in the closet (because I also had to upgrade the motherboard BIOS), I finally got the computer upgraded. Then I tried booting without a keyboard. While the Intel motherboard I had previously booted without a problem, this ASUS motherboard will not. "Keyboard error. Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue." *sigh*

Wednesday, September 3 2008, 05:57 am

Google Does Evil

Yeah! Yet another browser. If you haven't heard, and have been fortunate not to, Google has released a new browser called Chrome. I'm going to keep this post short and sweet: Google is saying that this browser is not to compete but to help. My belief is that it will have indirectly hurt Firefox by pulling away possible developers to Chrome unnecessarily. We don't need to reinvent the wheel, again.

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