Angry Cat Productions, Ltd.

Of MainMenus, MenuStrips, and Visual Basic 2005

2007-10-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

So today in class, we were doing a simple introduction to menus. My book said to add a MainMenu control to my form, which I had to conjure up from right-clicking on the toolbox and finding it in "Choose Items". The MainMenu control is distinctly different from the MenuStrip control - the MenuStrip is all new and has the fancy blue strip down the side, the MainMenu is decidedly more compact and old-fashioned (think Office 2000 vs Office 2003/XP). And my book said to use MainMenu. So I did, and I created my menu, and it was beautiful. And then I went to run it, and my menu disappeared. And no matter where I looked, or how hard I tried, I couldn't get my MainMenu to attach itself to my form. A MenuStrip showed up just fine, but the MainMenu refused to work. I tried adding new MainMenus and they didn't work. And I wanted to fix it. So I asked my neighbor, and it turns out his book (same edition, same ISBN) told him to use MenuStrip. Well isn't that just peachy. He tried his best, but to no avail. Finally, out of desperation, I right-clicked on the menu in the little tray below the form, selected "Cut", and then pasted it back in. And it worked.
Augh!
So stupid...so I just had to go through the event procedures I had written and re-add the "Handles mnuFileExit.Click" type thing to each procedure, and it worked like a charm.
So in summary, if you're ever using the MainMenu control in Visual Studio 2005, and it won't attach to the form, or disappears when you click elsewhere, just cut, paste, and re-add your Handles clauses to your event handlers.
I will be glad when I can get out of this insanity and go back to my nice, warm, comfortable Linux. How did I survive in this cold, hard, angry world of Windows for so long is beyond me.

An Animated Gif for the Tango Throbber

2007-08-09T00:40:00.001-07:00

So I've recently been using the Tango Icon Gallery, and have been very pleased with the stuff available there. But one thing that bugged me was that the throbber wasn't available in animated gif form. And I googled it briefly, but couldn't find it there either.

So, I whipped out my trusty GIMP and went to work. The result? A animated gif of Tango's throbber (they call it process-working). I made a slow version, a medium version and a fast version, for your pleasure. You can also download the GIMP XCF so that you can make it whatever speed you want - just make sure to get rid of the blank frame at the beginning if you want it to loop.

Enjoy!

Oh, and Tango Icons are Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. I've taken care of the attribution, hopefully this counts as sharealike...if not, someone let me know and I'll be happy to fix it.

Moving or Changing your Documents and Settings and Program Files directories to a different partition on Windows XP

2007-07-09T18:29:00.000-07:00

Otherwise known as "The next installment of my installation saga, tuned to search engine hits".

Well, I had this big fancy walkthrough on how to do this during the Windows install so it would be nice and clean and easy. And it would have been - but I couldn't get it to work. I may have been more successful if I had a floppy drive, but I don't. So I had to do it the messy way - which actually ended up pretty clean in the long run. Here's about how it went down.

First, I installed Windows XP normally - plain vanilla, standard install. The key to doing things the 'messy' way is to install as little as possible before you go around messing with things. I would highly reccommend grabbing John Haller's portable apps suite, putting it on your flash drive, and running what you need off of that (for example, Portable Firefox to bring up this blog, or any how-to pages or downloads). I made the mistake of installing Firefox and my wireless driver first - which caused some annoying problems, especially the Intel wireless, which I'll go into down below.

Firstly, if your wireless doesn't work becuase of a driver, I would reccommend plugging into ethernet somewhere for now. If your LAN port doesn't work (unlikely), use another computer to pull up the how-to pages. Copy any needed files over on a flash drive. Once again, the key here is to avoid adding ANYTHING to your computer until after you get this taken care of. A squeaky-clean windows install is what you want.

I started with a nice post over at WinForums that, while I'll be doing most of the replacing myself, gives a nice procedure on when to do it. Oh, and to do the replacing, you'll need either a lot of free time and a good measure of masochist tendencies, or a registry-replace program. I'd reccomend going with the second option. I used RegReplace, a C++ freeware program. I don't know of its merits versus other programs available, but it worked fine for my purposes. Don't let its command line interface scare you away, it's very simple.

So, to get this thing started, follow the first few steps on the WinForums post:

Create a backup copy of your registry - this is very important, you can screw up all kinds of stuff messing with your registry, and you'll need a backup in case you do. To do so, go Start->Run (Windows Key+R) and type 'regedit'. Click on "My Computer" and select File->Export. Save it somewhere safe, preferably off-disk, such as a flash drive. it will be somewhat large, my fresh Windows install was about 25MB, yours will probably be similar. Just make sure it's somewhere around there.

Create a new user (Start->Control Panel->User Accounts) as an administrator, call him (or her) "temp" - you won't need the account for long.

Log out of Administrator

Create your target folders - I did it the hard way and renamed my folders as well, so I'll be using D:\ProgDir for Program Files and D:\Profiles for Documents and Settings. You can use whatever you like. Just replace any mention of D:\ProgDir and D:\Profiles with whatever you chose. In any event, you'll need to create them wherever they belong - I went to D:\ and just created a couple folders and named them ProgDir and Profiles.

Now it's time to get our hands dirty. Bring up a command prompt and cd to the location that you downloaded regreplace.exe. For example, if it's on your flash drive at E:\Downloads, you would do something like the following:
```
C:\Documents and Settings\temp\>E:
E:\>cd Downloads
E:\Downloads>
```
Now, time to run the regreplace. You specify what to search for by adding /S "String to find" after the exe, and /R "String to replace with" after that. For example:
```
E:\Downloads>regreplace.exe /S "C:\Documents and Settings" /R "D:\Profiles"
E:\Downloads>regreplace.exe /S "%systemdrive%\Documents and Settings" /R "D:\Profiles"
E:\Downloads>regreplace.exe /S "C:\Program Files" /R "D:\ProgDir"
```
Now, there will be a bunch of status messages between those letting you know that it's replacing stuff. That's just fine - let it do its thing. There are a few things we did here:
- Replaced references to C:\Documents and Settings with our new path (D:\Profiles in my case)
- Replaced references to C:\Program Files with our new path (D:\ProgDir in my case)
- Most strangely, replaced references to %systemdrive\Documents and Settings with our new path (D:\Profiles in my case). %systemdrive% is an environment variable that contains the drive that the Windows dir is on. Environment variables are basically placeholders that can be used all over the system for various often-used paths, like the system drive.

Now that we've done most of the dirty work (that wasn't so hard, was it?), we need to go smooth out some rough edges. For instance, regreplace only replaces string values - not keys or other random things. So you'll have to do a little manual search-and-replace, but not too much. Also it's good to make sure that we got everything. But first, the next couple steps on WinForums.

Go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CONTROLSET001\CONTROL\HIVELIST\
you will see 2 SIDs at the bottom of that key similar to the following...

\\REGISTRY\\USER\\S-1-5-21-602162358-616249376-839522115-1001"="\\Device\\HarddiskVolume2\\Documents and Settings\\temp\\NTUSER.DAT"

"\\REGISTRY\\USER\\S-1-5-21-602162358-616249376-839522115-1001_Classes"="\\Device\\HarddiskVolume2\\Document s and Settings\\temp\\Local Settings\\Application Data\\Microsoft\\Windows\\UsrClass.dat"

See that number after "HarddiskVolume"? It may not be 2, it might be 1 or 3 or 17 (unlikely). Whatever it is, take whatever drive letter you want your directories to be on (D), count how many letters away from the drive it's on now (C), and add it. So if it's 2 right now, and you're moving from C to D, that's 1 away - meaning HarddiskVolume3 would be your new label.

Now copy the folders (except the temp user folder and all users folder) from C:\documents and settings\ to where you want it (D:\Profiles here).

Go ahead and search for "Documents and Settings" and "Program Files", replacing any wrongly-pointing entries to your new location (D:\Profiles, D:\ProgDir) by hand. In a fresh install, there shouldn't be many left.

Do a reboot - a complete reboot is always best when you're working with the registry, I've found. When it comes back up, log in as Adminsitrator.

Try to copy the All Users folder (inside Documents and Settings) over to the D: drive and rename (or delete) the C:\Documents and Settings. If succesful, You're done, otherwise, you may have to wrestle a bit.

If you have problems, you can just try finding and replacing any wrongly pointing entries manually again and rebooting, or try booting into safe mode - whatever you can do to get the settings to stick. In my case, I had my wifi driver running, and I had to go uninstall it (which was a pain), make sure it wasn't trying to boot up with Windows, and finally get rid of the folders on the C:\ drive.

If things went (somewhat) well, you should in the end only have a WINDOWS folder in your C:\ drive, and all your programs and data should be on the D:\ drive (or wherever you chose). New programs should install there by default, and it will be quite better for backup purposes and just a lot cleaner. You may still have some shortcuts and such on your hard drive pointing to your folders that were in the C:\ drive - I used the free ReplaceEm to root out and fix these various pointers.

So I scoured the web for a while, trying to figure out how to easily change program files and documents and settings to my data partition. There are all kinds of ways to do it, I found, but the easiest way I found just takes a USB Flash drive, an overly large (predictably, being HP) download - forty-some megabytes - and a computer to reinstall Windows on. Yes, I said reinstall - since I'm doing just that, and it's infinitely easier to do it this way, that's how I'm going to do it. Not keen on reinstalling Windows? Then keep Googling away, cause I won't be of any help.

So, thanks to the helpful folks over at WinForums, I've compiled a step-by-step guide to moving your docs and settings and program files folders to a separate partition. Here goes.

Stage 1: Preparation of Boot Media

Not as scary as it sounds, just getting a boot USB stick (easy) or floppy (dead easy) ready.

First of all, if your computer has a floppy drive, then download and run the DOS 6.22 boot disk installer, and skip to stage 2. Since most computers nowadays don't have one (thanks, Dell), you'll probably have to find a flash drive that you're willing to part with the contents of, at least temporarily. Smaller ones are better, since they'll have less data to backup, but anything will do. If you don't have one, go pick one of those 32MB sticks out of the candy jar at staples for $5. If they don't have them, you can get a 512MB stick for $10, in cute pink or slightly less effeminate blue, or a more functional 256MB stick. Whatever you choose, be ready to part with and/or back up the data that's on it.

Hop on over to National Instruments where they have a nice tutorial on how to
Hop over to HP's website (thanks to Damien Stolarz over at O'Reilly for the tip) and download their Bootable UFD utility. While you're at it, stroll on over to BootDisk.com (a very helpful site) and grab the zipped DOS 6.22 floppy image - you'll need it for HP's wizard to work.

Unzip the image you downloaded to a place of your choosing, and run the installer for the HP utility. You'll then have an "HP System Tools" folder in your start menu - find it and run the DriveKey Boot Utility.

Pick your drive letter, choose "Create New or Replace Existing Configuration" (check the Backup box if you need to - but a warning, it didn't seem to work for me and I'd already backed up my flash drive with John Haller's excellent backup utility, so I didn't worry about it.)

Choose the "Floppy Disk" option, and then select "Image from File". Browse to where you unzipped your DOS 6.22 zip that you downloaded earlier, and select the "622c.img" file.

Click "Finish", and then unplug the flash drive.

Stage 2 - Installing Windows

First, a little prep - plug the flash drive back in or put your floppy in, and paste the following into Notepad. Both sections are optional, and you need to replace "E:\Program Files" and "E:\Documents and Settings" with wherever you want your directories, of course.

[Unattended]
ProgramFilesDir="E:\Program Files\" ;Program Files
CommonProgramFilesDir="E:\Program Files\Common\"

[GuiUnattended]
ProfilesDir="E:\Documents and Settings\";Documents and Settings

Now save that as UNATTEND.TXT to your boot disk (USB or floppy)

Put your boot disk into the target computer and turn it on. You may have to press F2 or Delete or F8 or the Anykey or something to get it to boot from your boot disk.

If all goes well, you should boot into a DOS prompt. Make sure your Windows CD is in the drive, and type the following, where D is your CD drive lettter:

D:\i386\winnt /u:[UNATTEND.TXT path] /s:D:\i386

Continue installing Windows as normal. It'll be slower, but in the end it'll be just how you want it.

Well, that's about it. Let me know if you have any questions or problems, and I'll do my best to dig up some solutions and answers (respectively).

Until next time,

Randy

I'm tired, I think I'm going to go program now.

2007-07-08T22:04:00.000-07:00

I was going to write about trying to map Documents and Settings and Program Files to my D:\ drive, but I realized that I'm not in a posting mood, and the last two posts were excruciatingly boring. So, good night. I'm gonna go hack at some code.

Installing Windows (definitely not the energy-efficient kind)

2007-07-08T21:39:00.000-07:00

After making sure my data was securely backed up, time for Windows. I was ready to see how a fresh Windows install stacked up with a fresh Linux install, since Windows usually comes preinstalled and perfect. So I popped my Windows XP Pro disc in and booted up. Okay, I admit, I've installed Windows from scratch numerous times before...but for the story's sake, we'll pretend I haven't.

Oh, maybe you want to know what my plan is. I've got an Acer Aspire 1640 with a 120 GB hard drive. Intel integrated video and wireless, anyway, I plan to do an 8GB partition for Windows XP, with the Documents and Settings dir and Program Files on my data partition, which will be 60GB. Both of those will be FAT32/vfat for easy access from Linux. My Linux will be on about an 8GB partition, with whatever's left over being allocated for Linux data. Hopefully I'll have an external hard drive soon for music and pictures and the like, but that's getting ahead of things. Okay, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

So, I boot up, and am presented with...an ugly text-based horror? Eew, what is this, Debian? Hmm, figured that Windows being so user-friendly, it'd have a decent installer like, say, Ubuntu. Oh well, I manage to find the right keys to get a 8GB system partition for my Windows XP, after a few tries to get it FAT (so I can access it nicely from Linux), I hit the "Create Partiton" key and go occupy myself while it does its thing. I come back several minutes later to find my computer rebooting - what? I just created a partition...yargh. Oh well, the graphical installer came up, I suppose I'll create my 60GB data partition when I do my Ubuntu install. So I click through the installer (which annoyingly is stretched on my widescreen), which goes pretty smoothly.

After Windows starts up, I find out that my video card, wireless, and who-knows-what-else don't work right. So this is what it feels like to not have Windows preconfigured for you. Since I didn't want to bother hooking it up to Ethernet, I download it to the desktop and scoot it across with my flash drive. After choking through the 43MB (?!?!?) download, I install my wireless and get down to business.

I go to access my shared folders to burn my backups. First thing, I have to run the glorious Network Setup Wizard if I want to change ANYTHING, and I click through, and realize how much I hate some things. Like the "Disconnected Hardware" box. The second step of the Network Setup Wizard informs you that your network cable is unplugged (well, DUH, I'm using wireless), and INSISTS that I not only look at the list of disconnected harware, but check the box that ensures them that I'm okay with ignoring it. Now the vast majority of laptop users are going to have disconnected hardware, since you generally only use one interface at a time. So what's the point of informing them that their hardware is disconnected - argh, I give up. It just rubbed me way the wrong way. So I set it up right, and found out my files didn't want to copy over correctly. Fine, I'll share my CD drive, I thought. After realizing that I had to have it empty to do so, I went to my desktop to access it, and couldn't. Ugh. Fine, I'll leave this for later. Let's get on with installing Windows.

First thing, I went to getfirefox.com to download Firefox, the first and only time I'll use Internet Explorer. After getting Firefox installed, I navigate to the Acer driver downloads site to get my video drivers. And I find out that they recently made it all-flash. Dang, I hate all-flash sites. After watiting for three years for it to load, I'm mildly pleased by the interface, until I realize that it's not working. I click "Notebooks" in the first box, "Aspire 1640" in the second, all the while muttering about how this could be done with a bit of javascript, and then wait for the list of drivers in the third box to come up. And it does, but...it lists the drivers for EVERYTHING. I have six kajillion video drivers to choose from, none of which are for my laptop. "I HATE YOU!!!" I scream, and my father gives me a strange look. After assuring him that I'm talking to Acer's website, I decided to deal with it later. I just want to get this thing going.

Down the Rabbit Hole: My adventures installing my computer from scratch

2007-07-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

So I finally got around to actually redoing my entire computer from scratch. The first step, of course was backup, which I'll cover in this post.

First, I picked up a 2.5" enclosure, which I highly recommend - it makes the process way easier. I had a desktop available with about 20 gigs of free space to play with, so I could just copy my files to that, 7-zip them up, and worry about burning them to DVDs and such later. The enclosure I got was pretty straightforward, I got it for free after rebate from Buy.com, rebates are a hassle, but they're worth it if you're a poor college student like me.

Copying my files was a pretty painless process, but to get at my Linux partitions from Windows, I first tried what I've previously used, ext2 ifs, but it didn't seem to like copying files over. So instead I found Explore2fs, which was very easy to use, worked like a charm, and eventually copied my Linux data to my desktop. I zipped up the home dir (since that's all I wanted) in a few chunks, and deleted the originals. Then I copied my Windows files over (which, annoyingly, didn't have a home dir to work with), and zipped them up in a few DVD-size chunks. After deleting the originals again, I moved all the zips over to my shared directory so that I could burn them (since my desktop didn't have a DVD burner).

Since my files were safe on my desktop, and I didn't want to mess with burning them on my old system, I took my hard drive out of my enclosure and put it back in my laptop. Next up was installing Windows XP.

Why I hate U3

2007-04-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got a new flash drive - they were on sale at OfficeMax, and I needed one. So of course I got a SanDisk Cruzer, because I love them. But I also had to get the u3 removal software (http://www.u3.com/uninstall/) so that I could rid myself of the grossly unnecessary u3. In their little survey for reasons I was removing it, they didn't have the "I hate U3 and think it's the stupidest idea in the history of flash drives" option. So, I wrote them a little note in the "Other" section, and this is how it went:

I hate U3 because it pops up whether I want it to or not, did not have my permission to be there, and takes the messy and unfriendly step of adding another CD drive to my computer. I don't need a proprietary platform to run my portable apps on, a guy named John Haller has already provided me with a quality, universal, and free solution, with a launcher and a bunch of nicely-bundled, well-done apps over at Portable Apps. There's a multitude of other compatible apps at Portable Freeware that are also free. And if John Haller's launcher isn't your style, there's PStart as an alternative. Note that none of these solutions require adding an extra CD drive to my computer, a simple ini file will have them ask when I plug it in (note the asking) if I want to run it, and they are free. I have choice - I don't need to use either launcher if I don't want to, or if for some reason I wanted to, I could use a couple of them. Notepad++, Firefox, Gaim, OpenOffice.org/AbiWord, FileZilla, Gimp, Nvu...the list goes on of quality software that I can have portably without U3. Oh, by the way, SanDisk is my brand loyalty. All five of my flash drives that I've purchased have been SanDisk, and when I recently bought my first mp3 player, I went with a Sansa. I love all my flash drives. I grew out of the first one, and washed the second one three times before it gave out. With the third one, I dropped my computer on top of while it was plugged in, which cracked the casing open, bent the connector 45 degrees, and knocked the innards out of the casing. I bent the connector back, put the insides back in, and snapped the casing shut. It worked fine. My fourth one died inexplicably after a fairly short time, and I am working on seeing the possibilities of RMAing it. I just got a fifth, a 2GB one. As a poor college student, I generally just get the cheapest, but SanDisk is the exception because I trust you guys so much and have had such a good experience with you. But U3 is where my loyalty ends. It's not what's next, and it's not smart. It's stupid, badly designed, and will not remain on my flash drive after the first time I plug it in.

What's more, PortableApps works just fine under Wine. What more could I ask?

My first Vista experience, and I'm still waiting for the Wow

2007-03-06T18:36:00.000-08:00

Being a CS/EE major, I'm often asked to look at the computers of various friends and classmates, and yesterday was no exception. So tonight I stopped by to check out my friend's friend's computer, and lo and behold, it's got Vista. So I was inadvertently plunged into my first Vista experience.
And, unsurprisingly, I wasn't Wowed. Or even pleased. First of all, it is slow. It's an HP Pavilion dv6000, as I read it off the label, with Vista Home Premium (whatever that means). At any rate, it's dual-core something or other. I would look up the details, but I'm currently uninstalling the trial of Norton (in favor of AVG) and running a virus scan, so it's really sluggish (as in frequently can't keep up with what I'm typing). I suppose that's acceptable, but definitely not Wowing.
Anyway, to the beginning. As the computer logged on, I was bombarded by Norton and Windows Security Center (or whatever they call it now), screaming at me to "fix" it, meaning buy Norton Internet Security. Little did it know, I was planning on fixing it in other ways. About a dozen security popups (probably an underestimation if anything) and pretty-bordered windows later, I had succesfully determined that a) Windows Updates needed to be installed and b) Norton wanted me to buy it.
So I promptly found my way to the Control Panel to uninstall Norton. I instinctively moused over to the Add and Remove Programs item, which I quickly discovered was no longer there. After some searching, I found something about programs and uninstalling, and another half-dozen security prompts later, managed to start Norton uninstalling. I say start, because it was taking a long time. Really long. In fact, it just finished, and I started typing this post well past the halfway mark. In the meantime, I downloaded and installed AVG, updated, and started a virus scan. Jolly good.
Well, AVG is installed and scanning happily, and Norton is waiting for a restart to give up the ghost. My work here is done. And my first experience with Vista?
Quite negative. It's kind of pretty, but not really. And it's slower than I think it should be for the computer it's on, as well as being generally obnoxious and unneccesary. Overall, pretty much what I had expected. Pardon me while I go and hug my Ubuntu.

Step 1: Backup, backup, backup!

2007-01-15T03:32:00.000-08:00

So, here is the first of the series of posts chronicling my adventure of installing Edgy Eft and Windows XP as a dual-boot system on my Acer Aspire 1640 laptop. I specifically ensured that my machine would have plenty of hard drive space, as I anticipated dual-booting, so I've got 160GB to play with - not too shabby for a notebook.

Now, as I am planning on wiping my hard drive and reinstalling from scratch, the first step is backup. A lot. Last time, I ended up backing up my entire Windows partition (some 20-something GB) to 4 DVD's, with a little help from 7-zip and some file splitter, which proved to be unnecessary. So, after going through great lengths to reunite my file from 4 DVD's, using a Windows-only program, and save it to my Linux partition (Ext2 IFS was of incalculable help in this process, allowing me to access my linux partition from Windows), I decided to do it better this time around.

The first time, it was only after I had spent 24 hours straight compressing my files, and some more time splitting them, that I noticed that 7-zip had file-splitting built in - and it would work across operating systems. So this time, I took my reunited backup file (a 15GB 7z file), and zipped it using 7-zip, in "Store" mode for speed (compressing the already-compressed file wouldn't gain enough to matter anyway), with the option to split it into 4GB chunks. That worked great, and would work across operating systems.

So I went to burn my DVDs. And things went badly. The CD burner built into Nautilus (Windows Explorer of Gnome) refused to write at any speed other than 24x, and I only had 16x DVDs. So I found GnomeBaker. It allowed me to burn at slower speeds, but refused to add any files to my DVD project. After trying to get it to work, I relented, and installed k3b, which is built for KDE, but still works under Gnome, via Synaptic. And it was good. I definitely reccomend it, even if you're running Gnome like in my case. It worked flawlessly, and gave me all the options I would expect, in a very easy-to-use interface. It even gives me a little progress indicator on all four of my screens that I can switch through very fancily using Beryl. Really. Well, almost flawlessly. For some reason, it wouldn't let me add files over 4GB, which my files were (slightly). But no problem, I just re-zipped my backup, and split it into 2GB chunks. Problem solved.

As I type, the first DVD (of four) has finished burning, and the second is working on it. I set it to verify, but the first one didn't, and the person who decided that the spacebar should push the "OK" button, just like the enter key, should be slapped. Preferably with a smelly trout. Because it told me something, but I was typing, and so I spacebar-ed out of it. It gracefully said "Error!" and made a fun noise. After evaluating the situation, I realized it just hadn't validated - nothing too critical. I gathered that the box I OK'd out of had said to put the DVD back in so it could test it. So next time, I'll be more careful when I'm typing and burning at the same time. For now, I've got some burning to do yet.

Edgy Eft, here I come!

2007-01-15T03:10:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, news came out that Ubuntu 6.10 had come out. As a sidenote, "6.10" means it was released in October of 2006 - 6/10. It doesn't mean it's version 6, sub-version 10. In case you were wondering. And this release was nicknamed "Edgy Eft" in keeping with Ubuntu's tradition of assigning each release some cute name involving some kind of animal paired with an adjective, both with the same letter. As this is their 5th release, it gets the 5th letter, E.

I really liked the release that I'm typing this on, Dapper Drake (or 6.06, if you're boring about it.) Not only did it have a cool name (ducks are way up there on my "best animals" list), but it's worked pretty darn well. And I've beat it to death, too.

So along comes this Edgy Eft. And I was excited, because efts are neck-and-neck with ducks on the aforementioned lists. For those of you who don't know (probably many; it would be interesting to look at the stats for the keyword "eft" at places like Google and Wikipedia after the announcement of 6.10), I'll enlighten you. Contrary to popular belief, efts are not in and of themselves a creature. They are a phase of development for the newt. You could analogize them to chicks, if you so desire - an animal, yes, but just a phase of a more general animal - the chicken.

According to Wikipedia, strangely enough, newts were originally (way back in the old days) called efts. But as the word progressed, it became euft (which I can only imagine pronouncing as if I had just been knocked off my feet, or kicked in the gut or something), then ewt. Then people got tired of trying to say "An ewt" and just decided to rename it "Newt" so they could just say "A newt". And after all that, we still call the littluns efts. This would be a good time for a picture:I thank the people at butterflybarn for this picture, I doubt they'll mind the trickle of people visiting my blog using their bandwidth. If you're from butterflybarn and don't like it, let me know. Anyway, as you can see, they look kind of like miniature dinosaurs. I like them.

But on to the actual matter on hand. I'm planning on installing this Edgy Eft, and since I've heard horror stories of upgrading, and it's always better to get a fresh start anyway, I'll be wiping my hard drive clean and starting from scratch. I will be keeping my blog updated with my adventure in doing so, perhaps from the school library as necessary. I learned a lot in my first time around, and messed a lot of things up. So this time around, I'm setting out to do it right. Or at least better.

Ubuntu and my new Sansa

2007-01-04T11:05:00.000-08:00

I just got a Sansa m250 (2GB) mp3 player, and naturally I wanted to see how it would work with Ubuntu. So after getting all excited about actually getting my mp3 player (3 days early, I might add), I plugged it in to my computer, and...Ubuntu didn't do anything. I was disappointed, but not surprised, as the manual made a big deal about Windows Media Player and using other stuff to work with it. Then I looked down, and figured I should turn it on first. So I did, and viola, Ubuntu recognized it as a usb disk.

Unfortunately, most of my music is in OGG, and Sansa doesn't like OGG. So I had to convert it to mp3. After some quick googling, I came across SoundConverter - a very handy program to do (almost) exactly what I wanted it to do. If it's not in your package manager (under "soundconverter" - "soundconvert" is different, and not the right one), you can just download it. After unzipping, you can just run the soundconverter.py file - no compiling or installing necessary. After setting it up to preserve my filenames (I'll explain why later) and just put them in the same place, only mp3, I pointed it to my music folder and let it work. It took quite a while, especially since I kept interrupting it to restart.

It worked - almost beautifully. It didn't, however, recognize a lot of my tags (the song info that my Sansa uses to categorize my songs - very important). So I turned to another handy program (one you should have anyway) called EasyTag. It's a very handy utility to edit and assign tag info for any number of file formats. I think it should be in the package managers, if not, download it from the website. I simply pointed
it to my music folder, and it scanned the files, automatically filling in the tags from the file structure (which is why I told it to keep the mp3s in place). That was easy! I exited EasyTag, telling it to save the tags, and then simply did a search (Places->Search for files) for *.mp3 in my music folder. I selected all of the ones it found, dragged them onto my Sansa (in a "Music" folder, just for organization's sake), and it worked! Actually, I had to figure out that the trash (from all the OGGs I had tested) was still on the flash drive, and I had to delete it first - do see the trash folder (and other hidden folders), hit Ctrl-H. I was excited at how easy that was - not laborious like in a certain other OS.

I discovered another nifty thing during this process. I had noticed that when I moused over the sound files, the icon changed, and I thought nothing of it. But when I held my mouse over a sound file for a while, the song started playing! Amazing! Mouseover sounds = play sounds, without any player or clicking or any such nonsense - just that sound file, coming out my speakers. Beat that, Bill.

./configure is MAKEing me libcrazy!

2006-11-04T17:31:00.000-08:00

I reinstalled Ubuntu tday after breaking it, and decided to try to compile BZFlag from source, since the most recent version in Synaptic is 2.0.4, a couple versions back. So began my adventure.
I had heard tell of vague references to .autogen.sh, ./configure, make, and various cryptic commands. "I can do this," I thought. "I know my way around DOS pretty well, and I've been playing with linux for a while. Let's put it to use." So I downloaded BZFlag-2.0.8-qxzxyr-mawg-efa.tar.gz, unzip-er-un.tar.gz-ed it to my desktop, and navigated to the desktop in the Terminal pretty easily.
So there I was. Staring at the flashing cursor, I figured, "OK, I'll do ./configure, I hear that's the way to do things." So I do. And words start flashing across the screen madly...for a couple seconds. Then it came to a screeching halt. "c++ compiler cannot create executables." Well then, what good is it? Who wants a compiler that can't create executables? Nevertheless, I call out to my trusty friend of all things technological, Google. It tells me that I don't have the gnu c++ compiler installed. That would explain things. So I fired up Synaptic, and installed gcc and ./configured about ten times, and then finally realized that c != c++. So, I found the gnu c++ compiler and installed it.
Back to the Terminal. ./configure. And it gets considerably farther. But still isn't happy. Turns out it needs libcurl. Of course, the libcurl in Synaptic didn't help, so I went to the address the error messages pointed me to, and there was a very helpful questionaire that led me to the curl I needed. Turns out it was libcurl-dev, a package I had seen in Synaptic, but the description sure made it sound like I didn't need it. So, I check libcurl-dev, and once again, ./configure.
Farther, but still isn't entirely happy. I notice some WARNING's flash by, so I go back and find out something called SDL isn't installed. So, I go find SDL in synaptic, install anything that has "SDL" and "dev" in it (remembering the libcurl-dev fiasco), and once again ./configure.
Now there are only some minor warnings. It asks me to please consider installing an updated version of a program whose name came out of the zodiac. So I try to find this library. After some fiddling, I decided that it was not worth the effort to satisfy ./configure's every whim.
So now what? Oh yeah. Make.
So I type make. "Make not found." Well, that's peachy. What does the readme say? Hmm, it says something about ./autogen.sh, maybe I should try that first. So I type it in. And it dies. Whines about some autosomethingorother. So I install it via synaptic, and now it whines about autoyetsomethingelse. So I install that one. Run it again and guess what? It whines about a third autowhatever. So I install the third autothing, and it finally consents to work. Then it tells me to ./configure again. So I ./configure, and everything goes fine. So I'm very excited, and type "make" and...same thing.
Once again, I consult my trusty friend, Google. As it happens, I have to actually install something called "make." Fire up Synaptic once more, find make and make-dev, and, as Emeril would say, Bam!
I type make, and something happens! Lots of something! After a while, it finally ends, saying a lot about directories. So how do I run the thing? Hey, I remember something about make install - let's try that. Eew. [install-recursive] error 1. Oh! Permission problems, I can deal with that. Sudo make install. Hey, that's working better! More stuff about directories...
Hey, there's a path that looks promising. /usr/local/bin/bzflag, let's see what's in there.
Hey! There's a BZFlag in there! Double-click, and...YES! BZFlag!
I AM MAN!!!!!!
Who knows if it works, but it runs. That's all I care about. I'll keep you posted.

Get it?

Happy as a hill of beans

2006-10-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

I'm writing an essay, and looked up synonyms for "jovial" in Word 2003. There are your standard fare, like cheerful, jolly, cheery, happy. And then there is "full of beans." Full of beans? I've never heard of such a phrase, and it sure seems like a strange one to show up in Word's thesaurus.
So yeah, that's all. It made me laugh.

Of Wrong Things and Red Ink

2006-10-20T11:52:00.002-07:00

So I got my first college essay back today. Of course, the teacher told us we were all wonderful people and got us all anxious and expecting our papers to be a flood of red ink. So after reassuring us for a good five minutes, he handed our essays back, and sure enough, there was a good bit of ink scattered about the paper. But there was one problem: it was blue. Blue ink. Blue? I thought, blue ink? This would not do. Correct my mistakes, tear my paper apart, disparage my writing, but please, do it in red! Being disparaged by blue ink is a crime against humanity! I don't want some subconsious good feeling because my incorrect assertions were kindly pointed out with a peaceful, good-feeling blue. I want them shouted in red ink that says "Fix this! It can be better!" Now, perhaps the professor simply had used up all his red pens on the essays before mine, or threw his last red pen at the wall in disgust. But somehow I doubt that such problems could be the case. Red pens say "this is wrong." Blue pens say "well, this might not be the best...but I don't want to hurt your feelings." Please, tell me I'm wrong. I don't need a blue pen to make me feel better about myself. The red pen helping me become a better writer will make me feel better about myself. So would profs please break out the red pens and let them flow? Of course, if you like blue pens, that's okay. I wouldn't want to damage your self-esteem.

Google Checkout at Buy.com

2006-10-11T01:38:00.000-07:00

So I was trying to redeem an awesome deal at Buy.com, and it involved the $10 discount with Google Checkout. So I get ready to check out, and there's no way to get to Google Checkout. I scoured the FAQ's and Google's site, and nothing! Finally, I noticed somewhere it said that Google Checkouts would be treated as guests. So I log out, find my stuff again, and there's the button, hiding below the little sidebar shopping basket. So I log back in, and sure enough, there it is.
So the moral of the story is: once you've added your last item, DON'T click the big "Proceed to Checkout" button. Click the Google button that may be hiding farther down. If you've already gotten all your stuff, add something and then remove it so you get the sidebar cart, because that's the only way I can get it to show up.

ShinyStat rocks!

2006-10-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

After checking out my new counter, I have decided that it's pretty awesome. Really easy to navigate, lots of information...it's great. So I definitely reccomend ShinyStat - here's the shameless plug. Check out http://www.shinystat.com/en/, their basic counter (what I'm using) is free, you have LOTS of options, and it's easy to do. And no, they're not paying me to do this.

Almost perfect...

2006-10-04T01:32:00.000-07:00

A couple things:
First, I added a new, better counter. It's pretty sweet, and I like it a lot.
Second, as an indirect result of adding said counter, I was inspired to try to get the design looking better. So I attacked the last major glare spot: the comments section. It's a pain to work with for various reasons but now comments look 150% better than they did (they were quite an eyesore previously), and there are a couple other tweaks that make me happy. So, a more perfect blog now greets your eyes. Now, leave some comments and look at them, and bask in the wonderfulness that is CSS.

Just my luck...

2006-09-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

Great.
I finally get Mod points on /., and so I get all excited and click the link to see how I'm supposed to work this thing, and I get:

The moderation system for Slashdot is currently down.

Just my luck. Sure hope they hold them over for me or something.

Google Spreadsheets: Impressive at first glance

2006-08-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

Today I was sending timeclock stuff via e-mail, and I had all my hours in a crazy complicated spreadsheet that took the raw data and made it pretty, collapsing the various sections of the day into one day, automatically discarding lunch and travel times - it was a pretty fancy Excel file. While I was typing, I noticed the relatively new Google Spreadsheets link in the upper-left corner of my screen, and decided to throw my spreadsheet at it. So I brought up Google Spreadsheets, after finding out that it did support a wide array of functions and fuddling around for a couple seconds, found the File button. So I hit File->Open, uploaded my spreadsheet, and after a bit (it's a relatively big file), checked it out. To my surprise, Google Spreadsheets handled it impressively, and everything was as it should be. That was very impressive - no complicated conversions, no fiddling, just open, and it works. Pretty sweet, especially for an online service.
The only minor drawback - I can't find a way to hide columns, which I want to do to get rid of all the intermediate calculations. But at first glance, GS is a powerful, well-built app. Dare I say, welcome to web 2.0?

Redesign almost there...

2006-08-12T23:49:00.000-07:00

Well, Phase I of the redesign (defined as "getting it looking pretty, original, and pretty much all my own stuff") is that much closer (and that's pretty close) to finished. I finally got it centered on both Firefox and IE, many thanks to Alexander Shabuniewicz for his trick on the Diary template for CSS Zen Garden.
Also, some minor (and not-so-minor) bugfixes - for example, the font size I set wasn't doing anything. Fixed that, if it's too small, you can hit Ctrl with the plus and minus keys to change the font size.
I was also very nervous, as somehow all my sidebar disappeared, and rendered my template unusable. Thanks to Google's Cache, however, a crisis was averted, and I now have a backup of this template on my computer. So enjoy, and post any thoughts.

Google Earth for education and science

2006-08-11T22:02:00.000-07:00

Okay, I admit it. My title is search engine bait. I'm not really advocating Google Earth. That's because Google Earth is eye candy. It may have better images in some places, so yes, you can see your house. But I am getting sick and tired of everyone fawning Google Earth as the globe viewer. If you've read my blog before, you know what's coming next.
NASA World Wind is a program with the same basic premise (3D globe) that is built from the start for science and educational purposes, not for pretty eye candy. It's way more extensible (get over KML), it's actively developed, full of a very helpful community that bases some of its developments around requests. Much of the functionality is community-driven. Correct me if I'm wrong, but every planet avaliable (and there are plenty) other than Earth and SDSS (that's the universe) began as community add-ons. In fact, I think SDSS was brought up by a community member.
All well and good, you say, "But what's in it for me? Yeah, you get the warm fuzzy feeling, but I just want to get stuff done." Okay, here are a few good things about World Wind (referred to spastically as WW):

Community. Sure, Google Earth has a community, but I don't feel the friendliness. Not to mention World Wind's community is very helpful. For an example, check out the exchange I recently had with a WW user. It's a good example of how things can work. By the way, I'm not done with that scale.

Building on that, the plugin and add-on structure. That's what enables normal community members (like me) to do cool stuff. KML may be cool, but it has limits. With WW, the Plugin API is a lot more flexible - and will continue getting better

Flexibility. It doesn't just have one set of imagery - you can pick from several layers. Forget GE's patchwork, pick what you want to see.

It has stuff first a lot of times. It just doesn't get the hype. Examples:
- Mars. WW had Mars almost a year before Google did. But no one heard about it. And, see the item above, there are plenty of choices for how to view it. Choice.
- GPS Support. Through a, once again, community-developed plugin, GPS support has been in World Wind for a long time - far before GE, and it's free - unlike GE.
- Our moon (standard). Jupiter (standard). Venus (standard). Saturn, with rings. The Death Star, Tatooine, Endor and Coruscant. Moons for all the above (except Star Wars). The universe. There may be more that I'm missing. Get the point? Notice that ALL of these, with the exception of the moon and possibly SDSS, began with the community.
- Existence. World Wind came out way before Keyhole became Google Earth. Incidentially, that's why we have KML - K for Keyhole.
Rapid and constant development. World Wind is updated pretty frequently. And that brings more benefits.

Such as the fact that World Wind is also good a adding things that they don't have. Like KML support - it's there now, and is being improved for then next version. Also, Polygon support - it's here through KML support (yes, that is World Wind). That means buildings. Also, it's supported (and increasingly well) through plugins. People are using it. And there's more, like shapefile support (which is supported, and being improved). I'm too lazy to think of more.

Probably the #1 reason World Wind is better:

It's Free.

Not only financially (like GE crippleware edition is). Free as in freedom. Meaning you can use worldwind wherever you want. Anywhere. A credit to Nasa is asked for courtesy. That's it. No licensing, no $400 fee to do anything (not that I'm pointing any fingers...). It's free. That means people can use it for brodcasts, documentaries, whatever they may use it for.

Teacher interaction. A few teachers are using World Wind in their classrooms and updating us on how they're doing. And there's been work on a student-teacher interaction system, and it will probably be fully here soon, thanks to (ironically enough) Google Summer of Code. Also among those projects you'll notice a couple other things I've mentioned that are "in the works" - shapefile improvements, integrated browser, and other cool stuff.

Animations/data. This is a big part of the science/research support - SVS and WMS (built in) provide awesome animations and visualizations. For example, the earth at night - those cool pictures you see with all the lights visible from space - try Human Dimensions. Under Atmosphere, there's a really cool sequence of the ozone hole and its changing size over 2000 - 2003, with pictures every week or two. You can see the hole grow during the winter (summer down there), and see it grow back.

Hopefully I've pointed out some of the advantages, as an end user (that's you), of World Wind. Sure, Google Earth has better imagery in places. But that comes at the cost of freedom. Yeah, Google Earth has 3D models. World Wind does too, now, just not as many. Oh, and want to link to a World Wind location for those who have World Wind? Just hit Ctrl-C when you're looking at what you want to look at, and then Ctrl-V where you want to link it. So if I wanted to show you, say, Niagra falls (hint: turn on USGS 1m and especially ZoomIt!, if it's not) or a cool galaxy, it's that easy. None of this placemark rigamarole that Google Earth does. Oh, and movies - they're free (still a little buggy, I must admit) in World Wind.
So, at least give it a try. You may not be able to see your house, but it's a lot more powerful, flexible, and extensible. And I can tell you one thing - Google Earth is most definitely NOT the 3D globe. Not by a longshot. Flame me if you want, or even better, comment with constructive criticism that fosters discussion. Personal feelings aside, I'm not saying Google Earth is evil. It's good for eye candy. But I am fed up with people blindly accepting it as the only one out there.

Pardon my dust...

2006-08-01T13:17:00.000-07:00

I've tweaked the site design a tad, and it's a little more to my liking. Bigger stuff (like centering the thing) later...little things now. So if you don't like it, it'll get better. Really.

Firefox doesn't load images from a specific site

2006-07-27T22:19:00.000-07:00

And how to fix it. So if your Firefox doesn't show images on a site or a website, or firefox blocks images from a domain, or something like that, here's a tip. I found that my favorite forum's images were being blocked. Since I happen to be a Mod, it caused problems. But it was only on that copy of firefox. And I noticed that off-site images loaded. After disabling all my extensions (the first step when troubleshooting Firefox), the images still didn't show. So I delved into the options, where I had been before. But I found a button this time. Under Tools->Options->Content, next to the "Load Images" box, there was an "Exceptions" button. I clicked it, and somehow, my forum site had gotten in there. I removed it, and all was hunky-dory. Who knows how it got there, but it was. So I'm happy, and I thought I'd share it with the world, since the internet wasn't much help in solving my dilemma.
Randy

Erm, Redesign...not good...

2006-07-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

Well, if you're looking at this in IE, it probably looks sort of like what I want it to. If you're looking at it in Firefox if probably looks mostly like what I want it to. Except that everything is left-aligned, thanks to IE's worthless box model. Bad. Definitely not how I want it. If you're looking at it in something else (like Opera or Lynx some Mac browser), who knows what it looks like. Hopefully you can read it. If you couldn't, you wouldn't be reading this, so I'll assume this page is at least readable to you. To those of you who can't read it, you can't read this anyway, so you don't know that I am talking about you. That's kind of funny, in a strange, circular kind of way. Oh well. Now that I'm done with this quite pointless post, I'll sign off.
Randy
(By the way, this site is still under construction.)

Pink Panther: A tour de force in humor...or something.

2006-07-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

I had my doubts about the new Pink Panther movie. Sure, Steve Martin's funny, and he managed to rescue both Cheaper by the Dozens (reccomended, by the way) from certain comedic death at the dainty hands of Hilary Duff, but the Pink Panther? I always say, let classics be classic. So I was afraid.
I watched the DVD menu animation, and wasn't comforted. The pink panther, bouncing around, peering into bubbles. Were they going to ruin the Pink Panther, too, like they did Looney Tunes and Lady and the Tramp? Heaven forbid!
So the movie started. I found myself laughing. Steve Martin was funny. So far, no sight of that strangely colored feline at all. The movie kept going, and the panther kept not being there, and Martin kept being funny. The movie ended, and still no pink kitties, Martin had succeded in continuing his funniness, and the supporting actors even did their part.
I was dumbfounded.
How did they do it? Evidently, Steve Martin, joined with Len Blum, who just emerged from a 9-year hibernation, and managed to write a good script. And Steve Martin was just the guy to not ruin it.
So what was so great? The humor! It was constant and fast. Something funny happened, and the characters didn't sit there waiting for you to laugh before going on. If it wasn't so funny, nothing lost. There was another laugh just around the corner. If nothing else, Martin's accent - just over-the-top enough that it was funny, and not just overdone - was sure to elicit a laugh.
Another thing - the villians weren't stupid. I hate it when they are. The abominable (that's equates to not recommended) Home Alone 4 is a classic example. But the "villians" were intelligent. They had a good case. They seemed to be on the right track. And then Martin blows it all away. MAN! That was AWESOME! For once, the bad guys (antagonists, for you fellow English freaks) were intelligent!
And the humor was subtle at times, just enough to pick up on - such as when the Tour de France riders collided with the giant globe (don't worry, that doesn't give anything away), the faces of the riders behind the main group were subtly hillarious - as if they were saying, "Ugh, not another globe in our way. This is the third time this stage."
All in all, it was a fantastic movie. The cheeziness meter barely budged, the hilarity was constantly pegging it, and as a bonus, language-and-such barely got past empty. It gets a 4 7/8 out of 5. Congrats for a job well done.
Randy

Sorry about that...

2006-07-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

I got onto my site today and noticed a popup from some ilead.itrack website. As I was reasonably sure there was no spyware on the compy I was viewing it on, so I investigated. Turns out one of my counters, from webstats4u, was causing it. So I now have one less counter, and a lot less popups. Sorry to any viewers that experienced popups - for future reference, there should be NO popups on this site, so let me know if you notice one. Thanks,
Randy

Cars: a lazy review

2006-07-09T21:12:00.000-07:00

M'kay, so I saw cars. It was a good movie. It was funny, and that was good. I'm tired. I use sentences. They're short. Anyway, see if I can muster more energy to write longer sentences. That was a good effort. So - on to the review. It was the kind of movie that had a lot of jokes, and didn't dwell on them (too much). The laughs were many and quick. The plot wasn't as slow as some say, and be sure to stay afterwards to watch the credits. Wow, I'm really tired, so this review will be short, fortunately for you. I'll do pink panther later. But the plot was totally overused - a redone Doc Hollywood. Big star gets stuck in a podunk town, hates it, has to stay, finally gets to his big event, finds out he misses the podunk town and probably a key female in it, and goes back to stay there. So there. I still like it. The tire guy was the coolest, and there arent too many over-touchy-feely parts, and above all, very few cheezy stuff. So enjoy.
Randy

Port forwarding with and/or through two (or multiple) routers and/or modems for Azureus (or stuff like World of Warcraft)

2006-06-12T16:31:00.000-07:00

I need to work on my SEO'ing...anyway, today I discovered, with much relief, that it is quite easy to get port forwarding working with two routers if you know how, and thought I'd share it with the world. I was trying to download Xubuntu with Azureus for my old 266 (that's mHz, i.e. 1/6 the speed of a half-decent computer) in my room and was disappointed to see the yellow smiley face, indicating that once again, my port forwarding/NAT wasn't working. So I decided to take another stab at it. And I found a help page from Slingbox that I was able to modify to work in my case.

Basically, you have the first router (probably your modem, the one between your comptuer and the second router) forward to your second router, and then set up the second router normally. So here are some step-by-step, simple instructions. For help on how do to some of these steps, check out PortForward.com, a very helpful site, hopefully you can figure out what for.

Go to the first router's setup page. Set the DHCP server to serve only one address (in my case 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.2)

Now, on the same modem, set up Port Forwarding to forward your port (any random number between 0 and 65536, such as 12345) to the same address - 192.168.0.2 in this example, on both UDP and TCP. (Please, set your port to something more random than 12345).
Tip: I set my first router to forward a range of 10 ports (i.e. 12340-12349). You'll see why later.

Save/restart/whatever to apply those settings. Then go to your second router settings.

Now, there are two ways to do it from here. Way One is best if your compy has a static IP. If you don't know what that is, or your compy doesn't, Way Two is best for dynamic (opposite of static) IP's, it uses the 10 ports mentioned above, and is my own invention.
Way One:

Go Start->Run and type "cmd." Press enter.

Type "ipconfig" and not what is under "IP Address"

Configure your second router to forward the port(s) used in the first section to the IP address you looked up in step 2.

Hopefully, once you apply the settings, all should be well. If not, try the slingbox page for more elaborate directions.

Way Two:

In the settings for your second router, find the DHCP settings, and note the range of IP's being assigned (jot them down, if necessary.) The example here will be 192.168.0.100 - 192.168.0.255.

In the port forwarding section set up each port with an IP address as follows:

Map the first port (12340 in the example) to the first IP being assigned (192.168.0.100 in the example). 12341 to 192.168.0.101, and so on for the next 10.

Once you apply the settings, you can adjust your port as your IP changes without resetting the routers. If your port isn't working, do Steps 1-2 of Way One. If your IP is 192.168.0.104, use port 12344. 192.168.0.106 = 12346. Get it?

Hopefully, I've made sense and been helpful. 'Cause this was making me crazy, and I finally got it working.
Randy

A story about HP

2006-06-11T19:55:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have rediscovered how much I despise HP. Yeah, Hewlett-Packard, the company that swallowed up Compaq in a deal that got their big-shot female CEO fired. Anyway, I'll start with a little side-story.
Several months ago, our computer just up and decided to not work. It would get halfway through startup and just shut off. Not good. So by holding F8, ctrl, delete and the Anykey, I finally got to a point where I could boot up into safe-debug-this-is-stupid mode. First, it said something about missing boot.ini. Next time it restarted, it flashed something about mup.sys before it promptly shut off again. So for the next couple days, I searched for high and low and tried numerous methods of getting my computer to start up again, and finally, desperate, with no other hope, decided to try a far-out, strange suggestion I found lurking on some forum. So I started the computer, counted to 27, unplugged the mouse and keyboard, stood on my head for 12 seconds, and plugged them back in. Miraculously enough, it worked. (OK, I didn't stand on my head and I didn't count, but I did just unplug them and plug them in at key points during startup.) So after scratching my head about how that had ANY effect at all, I was content to have a working computer again.

Now, how does this nice story have anything to do with HP? Well, plenty, it turns out. As I went to scan something for the bajillionth time with the HP All-In-One, it once again barfed and decided to not work. So I finally decided to do something about it. I went to their website, a tad apprehensive. (As I type, the scanner randomly decided to move. Spooky.) So I waded my way to the Software Issues section. Amongst all the problems with Macs and HP, I found a way to get around the HP Software. Sweet, I thought, this'll work. Turns out it involved using a Windows Wizard. Nice and simple, like I like it. But as I soon found out, too simple. I can't even figure out how to zoom in. So much for that idea. I'm stuck with HP's almost-worthless piece of software.
So I went back to the site, and there it was: PLEASE INSTALL THIS CRITICAL UPDATE. Figures, they shipped me faulty software. So I follow the link, and amongst the problems like making your CD burner not work was this, and I quote:

Resolves an issue where if you install the software that came with an older peripheral product, such as a printer or camera, onto your new computer or in conjunction with an All-in-One, when you try to run the HP Memories Disc Creator program it may fail. In addition, the following issues could occur:

* Hal.dll error message
* Boot.ini error message
* Missing applications and/or files

Wow, I thought, that sounds familiar. So now really angry that HP nearly cost me all the data on our main computer, I try to figure out how to download the fix. So does it provide me a link at least? No. Quote, again:

#
Go to www.hp.com (in English).
#
If needed, select your language from the language selection field in the top right corner of the page.
#
Enter sp26273 into the search field.

And it goes on for three more steps. So I have to go back to the home page, type in a cryptic code, and hopefully stumble across the right files? Surprisingly enough, I did, and downloaded and installed the fix. Then it gave me one of those annoying boxes that says "shut down everything your doing and we'll kindly restart your computer for you." No option to restart later or anything. So I grudgingly follow their command, and once it's back up, FINALLY am able to scan something. Of course, it still tries to reinstall itself and whines about not having the CD until I finally convince it that it doesn't need the CD by clicking the same OK button four times. My pictures finally got scanned, and I still despise HP. But at least my scanner works - for now.
So a few days later, I pick up my new issue of PC World. And what do I find? In their usual bugs and patches article, a patch that was supposed to fix a - guess what - HP program that went awry and basically crippled Microsoft Office. Shocking.
So what's the moral of the story? How about avoid HP when at all possible, kind of like I------- E------- and Yahoo!. On second thought, Yahoo's gaining on my good side with their Yahoo Widget Engine - more on that later. So it's just the two letter acronyms, IE and HP, that are on my bad list. Grr.
Randy

Ooooh - eeevil!

2006-06-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

Check the date - it's 6/6/6. No, I don't think the world's going to end any more than I think demons are hoarded in room 666 at school. But it's still an interesting date, and figured I should note it anyway.

Who I'm not

2006-05-24T11:59:00.000-07:00

For those of you wondering, there seem to be several Bowmans and even Randy Bowmans in the world. I assure you that I'm none of them, I'm just a normal person (in some sense of the word, anyway.) I'm not the cyclist, a member of the Subhumans, the other one on blogger, the linux one, and I'm not related to the template designer. Just to settle your wondering minds.
Randy

Under Construction

2006-05-18T20:11:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to let you know, I'm trying to get original with the design. It's not extremely pretty right now, but it's my own. So please bear with me while I tweak continuously.
Randy

Ask Randy!

2006-05-11T09:51:00.000-07:00

I've noticed a lot of readers are reaching here through Google looking for stuff like how to get Launchcast in Firefox. I recently posted directions on how to do that. But if I blog about something, chances are good that I can help you with it. So if you get here trying to fix something, go ahead and ask, if just for the benefit of others. Just leave a comment on one of my posts with a question, and I'll answer it to the best of my ability. So ask away!
Randy

Computers != Magic

2006-04-28T20:53:00.000-07:00

One phenomenon that I hate, and have recently seen grossly played out, is that on most TV shows/movies/radio shows/whatever, computers are portrayed as being magic. They can all of a sudden do anything, and read your mind as to how to do it. The comptuer has every software package known to man, and some that aren't, pre-installed and already running. A prime example:
The other day on Numb3rs, there was scene that contained example after example of horrific examples of this phenomenon. Some house blew up, and it turned out it belonged to a drug dealer/child abuser. Go figure. So they recovered a hard drive from the wreckage and sent it to the lab to scan it for data. Real enough.
So they cut to the lab. The tech says something to the effect of "I've got the hard drive hooked up to this computer; it's the same model that it came from." First red flag popped up. What? It's a hard drive. A hard drive's a hard drive's a hard drive. They've been the same practically since they were invented. It doesn't matter what system you plug it into, other than hardware barf, but if you're just recovering data, that *shouldn't* matter. But I figured, whatever, they can play it safe if they want.
Then the next sentence came. "It's not booting, so I'll have to open it up." WHAT? Rule one in recovering a hard drive: You don't try to boot it! Good gracious, people, throw it in as a secondary hard drive and try to read it. If just the boot-critical files were damaged and everything was fine, you would declare the hard drive a lost cause and open it up. That's just plain stupid! Even if it does boot, who knows what parts were knocked out that might be critical. And if you didn't have it in the same system (which they were, uh, prudent enough to do), it would do hardware barf.
So I barely recover from the shock and outcry of trying to boot a damaged hard drive, and the tech unscrews the cover (quite quickly and easily, I might add. Having taken a few hard drives apart in my time, it's not near that easy, but it's TV). She then takes her magic magnetic wand that looks like a blunt silver pencil with a black tip, and waves it over a small pie slice of the hard drive. I was amazed - I don't know what data recovery is really like, but that can't be how they do it. Considering data is stored in a spiral, waving the wand around a small pie slice is going to get a bunch of fragmented files.
Despite the technical impossibilities of the quick, brief, and random sweep, file names magically appeared on a console-like screen. First, I highly doubt they would be using a console, but I'll give them that. But I was again shocked that the simple wand could work so efficiently. Coming up with gobs of filenames from a single sweep? That's amazing!
Then it really went downhill. Charlie (the star) recognized a .jpg on the screen. That's fine, pictures are good. So he exclaims, "Look! JPEG!" To which the tech adeptly replies "Oh, that's probably a digital image." I was amazed by her technical prowess. Determining that a JPEG is a picture takes years of college and postgraduate study to fully comprehend.
So, using their magical program and the sparse data recovered from their magical wand, the tech opens up the picture. It turns out to be a house. Charlie babbles something about enhancing edges by tweaking the colors by negative one degree. It seemed somewhat plausible, but negative one degree kind of made me wonder. So he types half a line into his magical console that magically appeared, and the picture changes a tad. Indeed, edges seem more defined. Then he says, "What if I do this..." and types another half a line into the magical psychic command prompt. Magically, a picture of a girl (presumably the guy's victim) appears.
So I know that data can be hidden inside a picture, and pictures inside of pictures. Indeed, steganography is pretty cool. But to be able to reveal it that quickly, with that little effort, without knowing anything for sure about how it was encrypted/hidden, kind of seemed a little far-fetched. I'm no expert in the area, but it seemed quite impossible. Once they get the picture, they're all shocked for a minute and then get back to business of finding the guy and now the victim.

So there's my example. Don't get me wrong, I love Numb3rs and watch it regularly. It's a great show. I just used it as an example of this pervasive phenomenon because I remember it from last Friday's show so well, and it was so incredibly horrible. I know some readers will say, "It's TV, it's not supposed to be real." And I like some good fiction (War Games, anybody?). But when they pretend to be all techie and "wow, we're cool because we can do fancy stuff on our computers" and are way beyond any realm of reality, it bugs me. Another classic example for me is from Adventures in Odyssey, when a common misconception is demonstrated when a police officer bursts into the room and demands "The CPU and all the components." CPU is the processor (see my other rant). A chip and the mouse and keyboard won't do you much good. Leave all the good stuff - the hard drive, for instance? It's another good example of trying to be techie (it sounds cool), but failing miserably. Again, good show, bad computer reference. It's way too common, and I despise it.
Randy

World Wind - Better than ever (which is pretty magnificent)

2006-04-22T22:07:00.000-07:00

NASA World Wind, which I...*gasp!* *sputter!* *splutter!* I haven't! Well, let's fix that right now. I thought I had already blogged about World Wind, but I've only mentioned it! The horror!
Well, NASA World Wind is kind of like Google Earth. Only a lot better. As one of the contributors analogizes, Google Earth is like AOL - eye candy, seemingly user friendly, but in the end, pretty lame. World wind is like, oh, Firefox. Still pretty, maybe a bit less dumbed down, and incredibly more powerful, extensible, useful, and just better. Besides, both WW and FF (that's World Wind and FireFox) are open-source. Funny how this works, huh?
In its most basic form, World Wind is a 3-D globe. Grab it, move it, spin it, tilt it, look at your house (presuming you're in the US or lucky enough to be special other places), soar over the Alps, dive into Hell's Canyon, climb Mount St. Helens...it's super cool. And it's only getting better.
It's so much more, though. Not only can you look at the Earth, but you can crawl through Valles Marineris and scale Olympus Mons on Mars, gaze into Jupiter's red spot and survey its various moons, check out the landing sites of the Apollo missions on that rock we call the Moon, ogle our cousin planet Venus, gaze into the sky and zoom in on colliding galaxies with SDSS, and even cruise along the Death star!
The best part is how all of these extra planets came into existence. It was the community. People working together to make something they enjoy better, and then sharing it with the rest of us. That's what Open Source is all about. And with World Wind, the spirit is alive and thriving. World wind is incredibly extensible, through plugins and simpler add-ons. It has an awesome community behind it that it would be lost without. Thanks to the community, we have not only planets, but World wind can read GE's KML files and shape files. You can overlay your own images. You can measure to see how long your route walking to school is.
World wind is also more science/education oriented, than oriented to Joe Blow looking for his house. Several teachers are using World Wind to enhance their classroom and make it much less boring.
First, download World Wind. If you've got questions, or you want to look for add-ons, check out the forums, where many helpful volunteers (including me) are ready to answer your questions. The community-run site, World Wind Central is a great place to start your troubleshooting, and to browse the many add-ons that are avalaible.
So start your journey to a better Earth-viewing experience. As somewhat of an "insider" (which in Open-Source is anyone who wants to be), I can tell you that World Wind is far from idle. Things are moving, shaking, and turning upside down. Big things are happening. There is now a non-profit organization, the Free Earth Foundation sprung from World Wind to aquire and serve free images of the earth, Saturn, rumors of Google's Summer of Code, and cross-platform on the horizon. It'll be a wild and awesome ride, so hang on.
Randy

DOS Box: The classics are alive again!

2006-04-22T21:24:00.000-07:00

Now, if you're like me (few people are, but I'm sure many share a few characteristics), you LOVED the old DOS games. Commander Keen, Prince of Persia, Bowling, Adventure/Colossal Cave, Tom & Jerry, Paperboy, Skate or Die, Catch the baby thrown out of a burning building and bounce it into the waiting ambulance, Donkey Kong...I wax nostalgic just thinking about it.
Alas, many such games (the baby one, for example) go too incredibly fast to even begin to be playable because the games were built for really slow computers. Besides that, the command prompt in Windows XP (since they did away with the real DOS) doesn't even work right all the time, and it crashes my copy of XP anyway.
So we're all left to suffer without our daily dose of Keen? I don't think so. I still want to stun slugs, squish those pesky dragon flies, and free a bunch of old guys so they can save my planet! Thankfully, I'm not the only one, and some nice people got together and created DOSBox. Of course, it's open source. And the great thing about that is that yet another really nice person ported it to Mac OS X! So now, you can play all your classic DOS games not only in Windows XP, but even when you're stuck on an icky Mac! You don't even have to sacrifice them when you make the switch to the best OS of all, Linux! How great is that?
But wait, there's more! You can run it all off of a flash drive! All you have to do is install it to a directory on your flash drive, and it takes up less than 3MB. I've got DOS Box installed on my flash drive, along with a whole bunch of classic games (including the entire Commander Keen series) and I can play them ANYWHERE! That is just too cool.
DOSBox can be a little confusing at first, but to simplify it, here's how mine is set up to make it nice and simple. First, I've created a folder just called "C" in my DOSBox directory, because DOSBox works by mapping its drives to a folder on your computer (or flash drive). I put all my games (remember, use the 8.3 format - 8 letter filename with a three letter extension) in that C folder, then told DOSBox to map its C drive to that folder. To do that on startup, open up your Dosbox.conf file in the DOSBox folder in notepad. Scroll all the way to the bottom, find the [autoexec] section and add a couple lines after it so it looks like this:
[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
mount c C
C:
You can then play old games to your heart's content. There's lots more configuration you can do, but if you want to figure it out you can.
Lastly, you need somewhere to get your games. Some of my favorite sites are:

DosGames.com, featuring Keen himself

DOS Games Archive, with some buyable titles as well as free ones

Abandonia. Really great site, with a nifty index that lets you know where you are on the legal side of things. The name comes from the term Abandonware, which is software that is not supported and no longer sold, so gamers (rightfully, in my opinion) take it as freeware.

Best Old Games, I think, is the best overall site. Nice little writeups, cool screenshots, great interface, and they have every Commander Keen.

Just download and install games into your C folder you created, and play away. At the risk of being redundant, I love open source.
Randy

LaunchCast in Firefox! (Mostly)

2006-04-22T20:49:00.000-07:00

OK, first, some blatant search engine optimization, to make sure those who need help can find it:
How to play launchcast in firefox playing launchcast in firefox firefox launchcast yahoo launchcast firefox firefox launchcast play in firefox DEATH TO IE How do I use launchcast in firefox ActiveX in firefox internet explorer only pages in firefox internet explorer firefox firefox ActiveX fish apples bananas.
Now that that's done with, here's the super awesome news. I noticed (via my supercool Webstats4U counter) a few people have gotten here looking for a way to get launchcast in firefox. Others have gotten here by googling "i hate macs," but that's a different post. Well, now you're in luck (you LaunchCast people, anyway), because some team over in Taiwan (great country, from what I hear) has created an extension that lets you run Internet Explorer. Not too exciting, except that this extension lets you run it inside Firefox! So you can have one tab using I------t E------r to render its pages, and all your others still using Firefox. I've tested it with Launchcast and am happy to report that it works flawlessly after a little configuration. So here's how:

Download and install IETab.

Once Firefox is restarted, IETab gives you a little success message.
There will now be an icon in the status bar (that's at the bottom) that is a little Firefox logo.

Left-Click on the icon and it will turn to an IE icon, and your page will re-load through IE. Quickly click it again, lest you unecessarily defile your browser.

Now that you have seen the fancy tricks, it's time to set it up for launchcast. Right-click on the icon.

In the "URL" space, type "*.launch.yahoo.com*" (minus quotes, of course, and make sure to get the diddlys otherwise known as asterisks in) and make sure to click "Add."

That's it. Now, whenever you go to launchcast, IETab will automatically kick in. You'll still have to deal with IE, but within the comforting environment of Firefox.

In my Firefox, the player opens in a new tab instead of a new window. I'm not sure if it's other extensions I've got installed (there's a lot of them) or IETab, but it's fine with me anyway.

Sometimes the Filters window will be shrunk to just the title bar. I fixed it by restoring and shrinking the main Firefox window, then it came up fine.

That's about it. Now all you Firefox devotees (or at least users) can use it for those annoying IE sites (yes, including Windows update. Come to think of it...
How to use windows update in firefox windows update firefox firefox windows update windoze update firefox update windows in firefox winblows update in firefox teeth using windows update in firefox windows update within firefox pears pomegranates.)
Anyway, as I was saying, any IE-only site is no longer IE-only. Pretty cool, huh?
Randy
P.S. Tip of the day: always remember to close your <ul> and <ol> tags.

Happy pi Day!

2006-03-14T23:49:00.000-08:00

Happy pi day, all! It's Einstein's birthday, too. So here's the first few digits of pi, for your enjoyment:
3.1415 9265 35897 93238 46264 33832 79502 88419 71693 99375 10582 09749 44592 30781 64062 86208 99862 80348 25342 11706 79821 48086 51328 23066 47093 84460 95505 (I've memorized it to here) 82231 72535 94081 28481 11745 02841 02701 93852 11055 59644 62294 89549 30381 96442 88109 75665 93344 61284 75648 23378 67831 65271 20190 91456 48566 92346 03486 10454 32664 82133 93607 26024 91412 73724 58700 66063 15588 17488 15209 20962 82925 40917 15364 36789 25903 60011 33053 05488 20466 52138 41469 51941 51160 94330 57270 36575 95919 53092 18611 73819 32611 79310 51185 48074 46237 99627 49567 35188 57527 24891 22793 81830 11949 12983 36733 62440 65664 30860 21394 94639 52247 37190 70217 98609 43702 77053 92171 76293 17675 23846 74818 46766 94051 32000 56812 71452 63560 82778 57713 42757 78960 91736 37178 72146 84409 01224 95343 01465 49585 37105 07922 79689 25892 35420 19956 11212 90219 60864 03441 81598 13629 77477 13099 60518 70721 13499 99998 37297 80499 51059 73173 28160 96318 59502 44594 55346 90830 26425 22308 25334 46850 35261 93118 81710 10003 13783 87528 86587 53320 83814 20617 17766 91473 03598 25349 04287 55468 73115 95628 63882 35378 75937 51957 78185 77805 32171 22680 66130 01927 87661 11959 09216 42019 89380 95257 20106 54858 63278 86593 61533 81827 96823 03019 52035 30185 29689 95773 62259 94138 91249 72177 52834 79131 51557 48572 42454 15069 59508 29533 11686 17278 55889 07509 83817 54637 46493 93192 55060 40092 77016 71139 00984 88240 12858 36160 35637 07660 10471 01819 42955 59619 89467 67837 44944 82553 79774 72684 71040 47534 64620 80466 84259 06949 12933 13677 02898 91521 04752 16205 69660 24058 03815 01935 11253 38243 00355 87640 24749 64732 63914 19927 26042 69922 79678 23547 81636 00934 17216 41219 92458 63150 30286 18297 45557 06749 83850 54945 88586 92699 56909 27210 79750 93029 55321 16534 49872 02755 96023 64806 65499 11988 18347 97753 56636 98074 26542 52786 25518 18417 57467 28909 77772 79380 00816 47060 01614 52491 92173 21721 47723 50141 44197 35685 48161 36115 73525 52133 47574 18494 68438 52332 39073 94143 33454 77624 16862 51898 35694 85562 09921 92221 84272 55025 42568 87671 79049 46016 53466 80498 86272 32791 78608 57843 83827 96797 66814 54100 95388 37863 60950 68006 42251 25205 11739 29848 96084 12848 86269 45604 24196 52850 22210 66118 63067 44278 62203 91949 45047 12371 37869 60956 36437 19172 87467 76465 75739 62413 89086 58326 45995 81339 04780 27590 09946 57640 78951 26946 83983 52595 70982 58226 20522 48940 77267 19478 26848 26014 76990 90264 01363 94437 45530 50682 03496 25245 17493 99651 43142 98091 90659 25093 72216 96461 51570 98583 87410 59788 59597 72975 49893 01617 53928 46813 82686 83868 94277 41559 91855 92524 59539 59431 04997 25246 80845 98727 36446 95848 65383 67362 22626 09912 46080 51243 88439 04512 44136 54976 27807 97715 69143 59977 00129 61608 94416 94868 55584 84063 53422 07222 58284 88648 15845 60285 06016 84273 94522 67467 67889 52521 38522 54995 46667 27823 98645 65961 16354 88623 05774 56498 03559 36345 68174 32411 25150 76069 47945 10965 96094 02522 88797 10893 14566 91368 67228 74894 05601 01503 30861 79286 80920 87476 09178 24938 58900 97149 09675 98526 13655 49781 89312 97848 21682 99894 87226 58804 85756 40142 70477 55513 23796 41451 52374 62343 64542 85844 47952 65867 82105 11413 54735 73952 31134 27166 10213 59695 36231 44295 24849 37187 11014 57654 03590 27993 44037 42007 31057 85390 62198 38744 78084 78489 68332 14457 13868 75194 35064 30218 45319 10484 81005 37061 46806 74919 27819 11979 39952 06141 96634 28754 44064 37451 23718 19217 99983 91015 91956 18146 75142 69123 97489 40907 18649 42319 61567 94520 80951 46550 22523 16038 81930 14209 37621 37855 95663 89377 87083 03906 97920 77346 72218 25625 99661 50142 15030 68038 44773 45492 02605 41466 59252 01497 44285 07325 18666 00213 24340 88190 71048 63317 34649 65145 39057 96268 56100 55081 06658 79699 81635 74736 38405 25714 59102 89706 41401 10971 20628 04390 39759 51567 71577 00420 33786 99360 07230 55876 31763 59421 87312 51471 20532 92819 18261 86125 86732 15791 98414 84882 91644 70609 57527 06957 22091 75671 16722 91098 16909 15280 17350 67127 48583 22287 18352 09353 96572 51210 83579 15136 98820 91444 21006 75103 34671 10314 12671 11369 90865 85163 98315 01970 16515 11685 17143 76576 18351 55650 88490 99898 59982 38734 55283 31635 50764 79185 35893 22618 54896 32132 93308 98570 64204 67525 90709 15481 41654 98594 61637 18027 09819 94309 92448 89575 71282 89059 23233 26097 29971 20844 33573 26548 93823 91193 25974 63667 30583 60414 28138 83032 03824 90375 89852 43744 17029 13276 56180 93773 44403 07074 69211 20191 30203 30380 19762 11011 00449 29321 51608 42444 85963 76698 38952 28684 78312 35526 58213 14495 76857 26243 34418 93039 68642 62434 10773 22697 80280 73189 15441 10104 46823 25271 62010 52652 27211 16603 96665 57309 25471 10557 85376 34668 20653 10989 65269 18620 56476 93125 70586 35662 01855 81007 29360 65987 64861 17910 45334 88503 46113 65768 67532 49441 66803 96265 79787 71855 60845 52965 41266 54085 30614 34443 18586 76975 14566 14068 00700 23787 76591 34401 71274 94704 20562 23053 89945 61314 07112 70004 07854 73326 99390 81454 66464 58807 97270 82668 30634 32858 78569 83052 35808 93306 57574 06795 45716 37752 54202 11495 57615 81400 25012 62285 94130 21647 15509 79259 23099 07965 47376 12551 76567 51357 51782 96664 54779 17450 11299 61489 03046 39947 13296 21073 40437 51895 73596 14589 01938 97131 11790 42978 28564 75032 03198 69151 40287 08085 99048 01094 12147 22131 79476 47772 62241 42548 54540 33215 71853 06142 28813 75850 43063 32175 18297 98662 23717 21591 60771 66925 47487 38986 65494 94501 14654 06284 33663 93790 03976 92656 72146 38530 67360 96571 20918 07638 32716 64162 74888 80078 69256 02902 28472 10403 17211 86082 04190 00422 96617 11963 77921 33757 51149 59501 56604 96318 62947 26547 36425 23081 77036 75159 06735 02350 72835 40567 04038 67435 13622 22477 15891 50495 30984 44893 33096 34087 80769 32599 39780 54193 41447 37744 18426 31298 60809 98886 87413 26047 21569 51623 96586 45730 21631 59819 31951 67353 81297 41677 29478 67242 29246 54366 80098 06769 28238 28068 99640 04824 35403 70141 63149 65897 94092 43237 89690 70697 79422 36250 82216 88957 38379 86230 01593 77647 16512 28935 78601 58816 17557 82973 52334 46042 81512 62720 37343 14653 19777 74160 31990 66554 18763 97929 33441 95215 41341 89948 54447 34567 38316 24993 41913 18148 09277 77103 86387 73431 77207 54565 45322 07770 92120 19051 66096 28049 09263 60197 59882 81613 32316 66365 28619 32668 63360 62735 67630 35447 76280 35045 07772 35547 10585 95487 02790 81435 62401 45171 80624 64362 67945 61275 31813 40783 30336 25423 27839 44975 38243 72058 35311 47711 99260 63813 34677 68796 95970 30983 39130 77109 87040 85913 37464 14428 22772 63465 94704 74587 84778 72019 27715 28073 17679 07707 15721 34447 30605 70073 34924 36931 13835 04931 63128 40425 12192 56517 98069 41135 28013 14701 30478 16437 88518 52909 28545 20116 58393 41965 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51881 90973 03811 98004 97340 72396 10368 54066 43193 95097 90190 69963 95524 53005 45058 06855 01956 73022 92191 39339 18568 03449 03982 05955 10022 63535 36192 04199 47455 38593 81023 43955 44959 77837 79023 74216 17271 11723 64343 54394 78221 81852 86240 85140 06660 44332 58885 69867 05431 54706 96574 74585 50332 32334 21073 01545 94051 65537 90686 62733 37995 85115 62578 43229 88273 72319 89875 71415 95781 11963 58330 05940 87306 81216 02876 49628 67446 04774 64915 99505 49737 42562 69010 49037 78198 68359 38146 57412 68049 25648 79855 61453 72347 86733 03904 68838 34363 46553 79498 64192 70563 87293 17487 23320 83760 11230 29911 36793 86270 89438 79936 20162 95154 13371 42489 28307 22012 69014 75466 84765 35761 64773 79467 52004 90757 15552 78196 53621 32392 64061 60136 35815 59074 22020 20318 72776 05277 21900 55614 84255 51879 25303 43513 98442 53223 41576 23361 06425 06390 49750 08656 27109 53591 94658 97514 13103 48227 69306 24743 53632 56916 07815 47818 11528 43667 95706 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Yahoo! Launchcast: Your music, anywhere (well, almost).

2005-12-19T21:25:00.000-08:00

Using Yahoo!'s LaunchCast requires using the "as little as possible" clause in two of my web browsing rules, namely:

§ 101, Paragraph 3, line 2:
Use Firefox whenever possible, use Internet Explorer as little as possible. Others such as Opera are permissible.

§ 56, Paragraph 5, line 7:
Use Google whenever possible. Use Yahoo! as little as possible, run from MSN like the plague. Others are NOT acceptable. An honorary exception is made for Excite, due to its part in the forementioned blogger's early internet experience before Google came along.

The site's awesome capabilities and range of music, however, redeem it and allow my use of it. In fact, largely due to § 101, my IE homepage is set to LaunchCast, since that's about the only thing I use IE for. The problem is that Yahoo! Launchcast is not compatible with Firefox (another example of the reasoning behind § 56).
But on to LaunchCast. It's great, because I can set what music I want. I can set it broadly by Genre, narrowly by Artist or album, or even specific songs. And I can use it anywhere I have web access - it doesn't require special software. I go to www.launchcast.com and sign in. I have my preferences set for two genres, Christian and Oldies, and a few other songs/artists (say, Las Ketchup). It's great when I'm working, I turn it on, and when the song is winding down, I rate it. If I really don't like it, I can send it to the land of never-playeds and skip to another song.
If I hear a song I really like, I'll rate it high. Not only because I want to hear it again, because this is where the true beauty of the system comes in. Since I rated that song high, it'll play other songs from that artist. If I like what I hear, I rate the artist. It will also play songs that are reccomended by fans of an artist I rated highly, as long as it's within my genre settings. So I've rated Switchfoot high already. As a result, it played a song by a band called PivitPlex one day. I liked t, so I rated it. I heard another PivitPlex song, and I liked it, so I rated the song and the artist. Since then, I have heard many other PivitPlex works and have added a new band to my "likes."
This is why I love Launchcast. It expands beyond my CD collection, but not outside my prefrences. All for free. How great is that?
Randy

Open Source Pick of the week: Audacity

2005-11-29T09:44:00.000-08:00

With a clever pun in its name and some awesome functionality, Audacity is the next Open-Source utility I'm featuring. Somehow I neglected to mention in it my initial list, probably because I found it before I found the rest of my favorites. But it is not any less great. Audacity is an Audio Editor and Recorder, and of course it's free. With it, you can record pretty much anything - Wave out mix (that's whatever your speakers are playing, recorded in an mp3, wav, whatever on your computer), Microphone, Line in (basically a high-quality, stereo microphone jack on most desktops), CD audio. You can also open many files, of course.
Once you have your audio, you can apply any one of a long list of filters to make it sound like you want - fade in, fade out, laser wah, and noise removal, for example. One of my favorites is its ability to easily change pitch or speed independently without adversely affecting the other. Normally, when you increase speed, the sound gets higher and you get the chipmunk effect, or the sound gets lower if you decrease it. In Audacity, you can change the tempo (using any number of units, from RPMs for records to beats per minute for metronome measurements) without affecting pitch, and you can change pitch using not only percentages, but note names - if you have a piece in C, change pitch from C to F, and you've got a nicely transposed piece of music, that easy.
Its slicing and dicing tools are also helpful - I've created my own Switchfoot sound scheme for Windows by slicing up my Nothing Is Sound CD. I've also used it to transpose or slow down the audio recordings I have for my piano practicing so I can play along (useful for, say, Phantom of the Opera). So if you're an audiophile, or just like playing with sound and music, check it out. As always, you can't beat the bang for the buck.
And if Audacity happens to crash, don't fear. You can recover it with the also free Audacity Recovery Utility to get your sound back. How cool is that?

CD Burning is stealing

2005-11-23T09:28:00.000-08:00

I'm on the newsmagazine staff at school, and I wrote an editorial on, guess what, CD burning. I figured I should put it here. So without further ado, here goes:

As long as you aren't selling it, it's legal, right? That may have been true when you were in grade school, but we're in the twenty-first century now. It may get you a lesser sentence, but giving your copied and downloaded music away won't keep you on the right side of the law. Burning CD's, dubbed piracy after the late Blackbeard, has become rampant, and is nearly to the state of becoming normal and acceptable. Many times I've heard friends plotting to swap CD's, each burning a copy of the other's, without the least worry of prosecution. Their lack of concern may be justified – very few people are prosecuted for burning CD's, especially in small quantities. But that's not the problem.
The fact that it is illegal just establishes that the government looks down upon it. Despite what some may think, our senators and representatives don't make laws just because they get bored of lighting up their fellow legislators' phones. There are reasons behind the regulations. Not every artist is a Coldplay or U2. According to the RIAA's web site, less than ten percent of albums ever make any money at all. With all the established artists taking a sizeable hunk of that ten percent, that makes it awfully hard to get into the music business, even without piracy. The fact that fans of up-and-coming artists are burning their music instead of buying it doesn’t help matters at all.
As I see it, the problem with burning CD’s isn’t just that it’s illegal. The problem is that it is stealing. Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s okay. “Yeah,” you say, “but they’re ripping us off. A CD costs what, two cents, and they’re charging us fifteen bucks!” Not so fast. The CD itself costs practically nothing, yes, but it costs a lot of money to produce a CD.
The money that the artist makes from a CD goes towards paying for their studio, instruments, equipment, salaries, and bills. And it’s not free to come up with the art and layout for the album. They pay someone a lot of money to figure out what the CD case will look like and what it says. They also have to pay thousands in advertising so that the consumer (that’s you) knows that their album actually exists, so that you’ll buy it. And, of course, they don’t just make up songs for fun. They need some kind of payment for coming up with and playing the songs. It’s called a salary, and it really helps out when it comes to living everyday life.
So when you burn a CD, or download songs without paying for them for that matter, you are depriving the person who made the music of their payment for doing so. And if an artist doesn’t get paid, he’s not going to stay in the industry very long, because even if they want to make music and are excellent singers, they can’t support themselves doing what they love to do.

10 things I hate about Macs

2005-11-18T10:49:00.000-08:00

OK, I don't think I've made this clear before, so here goes:

I hate macs.

There. Done. But for your benefit, here are ten reasons off the top of my head that I do.

10. They're expensive. So what, the mac mini's only $500. I can buy or build a decent PC for that much, and not have reason #3 taken to the extreme.

9. That stupid apple key - What is an "open apple?" where is the "closed apple?" And what's with this up-arrow-funny-t-looking-symbol-squiggly-line-x-G supposed to do for me? Is that supposed to be a shortcut? How am I supposed to remember such craziness?

8. The home/end keys don't work like they should. For instance, I press home now and what does it do? Take me to the beginning of the line like a good home key? Nope, it tries to page me down. What use is that? And the delete key. Why does the backspace key say delete? And why does the other delete key do it the other way? And my favorite, why can I delete, say, a file with backspace, but not delete?

7. Numlock - why doesn't the numlock key exist on most macs? What if somehow the number pad got switched off, and I want to do some 10-keying? All that's there is the "clear" button? What happens if I press that? I want to type, not destroy!

6. They don't have a decent office suite Office for Mac? That's just wrong. Microsoft and mac should not mix. And who uses AppleWorks?

5. They're crash-happy. So PC's crash every now and then. I've seen a lot more macs crash. Growll.

4. They're cute. Sure, having it all-in-one makes it easy to move and cuts down on clutter, and I have to admit that I even like the look of the funny ones with the monitor on a swivel rod coming out of a domey computer. But mostly, I don't need cute. I need functional. Also, as a result...

3. They are hard to modify. Not that I don't like a challenge now and then, but I like to be able to make my computer like I want it, not like some designer in a big puffy chair wants it to be.

2. They are so incredibly incompatible. Does Windows 2000 have to start up Windows 98 to run SkiFree? No. It just works. Whereas if I want to run, say, SimpleText in OS X, I have to wait five minutes for the classic environment to start up. What a pain!

1. For goodness' sake, they've still only got one button. Sorry, Ctrl-Click just doesn't cut it.

OK, now that I've said that, I have to say, I can tolerate OS X. It works OK, and it's pretty. I especially like the dock. But it's still mac, and I still don't like how it works. And there is #2 to worry about. I've got the super-awesome (not to mention free) ObjectDock on my PC, and that's all I need.
Oh, and all this doesn't mean I'm a Microsoft fan. As you can tell from my previous posts, I'm a fan of open source, the epitome of which is Linux. I like Linux better than anything. I came up with analogy for this phenomenon. Mac is the H2 of my world. I hate them. I'd take them only if I didn't have a choice. Windows is the original Hummer. Far better than the H2 and definitely a choice, I like it. Linux is the Humvee. The best, by far, but kind of hard to switch to with others in the house who aren't as geeky as I, just as the Humvee is difficult to use anywhere except the middle of the desert, where everybody else is fighting as well. So, alas and alack, I have to settle for the Hummer. But I'm not crying about it.
Randy

Have Firefox, will travel

2005-11-07T08:49:00.000-08:00

Something I've come across and been using lately is the Portable ______ suite (if you want to call it that, which I do). John Haller has created versions of several cool apps like Thunderbird (the firefox version of Outlook), OpenOffice, Nvu (Mozilla's - that's the Firefox people, in case you didn't know - web design app), Sunbird (Mozilla's (who else?) calendar app), and of course Firefox itself. I have Portable Firefox on my jump drive, for those oh-too-often occasions when I encounter a computer with only *gasp* Internet Explorer! Pardon me while I scrub down my keyboard...done. But the far more useful place I have found for these apps is at school, where we each have our own network drive. Since I often can't install anything on the computers (permissions and such), I have installed portable firefox, Nvu, and OpenOffice on my network drive. That way, I can simply open up my network drive and have three very useful applications. I especially like it with firefox, because I like my firefox all themed and extensioned up (maybe I'll list all my favorite mods later), and it annoyed me that I couldn't have my firefox like I wanted it. Then I found Portable Firefox. And it made me happy. Because I can load up firefox with whatever I want, and no matter what computer I run it off of, it is the same. And I am happy. Unfortunately, I am writing this in just normal firefox, because I'm on a computer where it's a pain to get to my portable firefox. But I can install stuff to my network drive (like Portable Open Office) that require administrative privileges, so it's all good. So if you want your browser/office suite/web designer/calendar/email wherever and however you want it, check out Haller's work. It's good stuff.
Randy

A pixel's worth a thousandth of a letter

2005-11-02T10:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was thinking. (Yeah, I know. That's dangerous.) So a picture's worth a thousand words. The average picture nowadays is about 5MP. That means that 1000 words = 5000000 pixels. Dividing, I get that 1 pixel = 1/5000 words. If the average word is 5 letters long (which it is), that makes a letter worth 1000 pixels. That's not much. Given the that a good cheap pixel is about 5 cents, that's still a $50.00 letter. sendatelegram.com charges 90 cents a word. Using the value of 5 letters per word, that's only 18 cents per letter. Not too bad, eh? (No, I'm not Canadian. If I was, I would care a lot more about hockey.) Consider SMS. Given the rates of various companies, the average SMS has a maximum of about 150 characters. At ten cents a message, that's 10 cents/150 characters = .0666666666 cents per letter. That makes SMS seem pretty cheap, doesn't it? So considering our digital world nowadays, I think that $50.00 a letter is drastically overpriced. We need a letter to cost a lot less. You know what? I want to define a new number of words per picture. Let's say .06666666 cents. And a pixel costs 5 cents. That way, we can calculate: 1 picture(5000000px/picture)(5 cents/px)(1 letter/.0666666 cents)(1 word/5 letters) = 75 million words per picture. Ah, I think "a picture is worth 75 million words" is much more appropriate for our digital age. And it's just simple math.
Randy

Central Processing Unit. Period.

2005-11-01T08:02:00.000-08:00

This is one of my pet peeves. As long as I've been around, CPU has always stood for "Central processing unit", meaning a little chip inside the computer. Thankfully, according to Google, this meaning is mostly still intact. But increasingly, CPU has been used to refer to the tower as a whole. When I first heard this (in one of the Novacom Adventures in Odyssey episodes, I believe), I simply scoffed. "Gee, I hate that when they pretend to be all technical and stuff and end up sounding like a bad line from some techie horror movie." The line was "Give me the CPU and all the components!" Still a bad line ("and all the components?" Come on!) but the CPU part made me laugh. "So you only want the processor? That's gonna get you a long ways," I chuckled. But since then, I have often heard CPU used in a similar way. And it makes me want to carry around an AMD chip and whenever I hear someone refer to the tower as the CPU, whip it out and say, "(Pointing frantically) THAT is not a cpu. (revealing the chip) THIS is a CPU. Any QUESTIONS??" As I tore at my hair, I would then put the chip back in my pocket and let it lie dormant until the next misuse of this formerly geek-exclusive term. Because as far as I am concerned CPU is NOT shorthand for computer.
Ever so calmly yours,
Randy

Ooh! Ooo two!

2005-10-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

I was planning on posting about this a few days ago, but I finally got around to it today. OpenOffice.org is an open-source (see a pattern here?) alternative to Microsoft Office. Version 1.1.4 was comprable to Office 97. Not real great. So I tried 2.0 beta. It was drastically improved, and made leaps and bounds towards Office 2000/XP. Much better-looking, has a better feeling to it, and is just plain better. But it was buggy. Since it was a beta, that was expected, but it still made me sad. Now, finally, Ooo 2.0 is released. Same thing, less bugs. Try open office out - click the button down there on the right. I'm beginning to like Sun Microsystems more now.

Blender + Wikipedia = Awesome

2005-10-12T10:06:00.000-07:00

First of all, to the guy (or gal) who looked at my blog with linux, congrats for using the best OS out there. But on the topic of the day, I've been playing around with Blender some more. And I'm still impressed. I've been finding all kinds of awesome tricks, much thanks to the tutorial on Wikibooks. I've been having so much fun, in fact, that I've ventured deeper into the world of Wikipedia. Wikipedia, run by the same people as Wikibooks, is the open-source encyclopedia. Despite the fact that its open nature makes vandalism easy, it's not much of a problem thanks to the many administrators who watch out for issues and fix them. I've been a member of wikipedia for a while, and I've edited a few articles and cleaned some up. But recently, I found the requested illustration. Hooray, I thought, I can help. So I found a request for a picture of a burette. "I can do that," I thought, "we've got those at school." So I took a picture, and now you can see them in the article. That made me happy. But then I found the image recreation requests page. I was elated! Wow, I can really do this! So I set out to illustrate and recreate. I found a request for a nucleosome. Looking at the previous illustration, I realized it would be a perfect thing to do in, guess what, Blender. So that's what I'm working on now.
I'm glad to be able to contribute to the greatness of wikipedia, and I'm really glad that I found Blender (and GIMP) to help. Isn't open-source the greatest? Anyway, y'all should check out the wikipedia and see how you can help. Look at the Community Portal for ideas. Or you can just go and throw rocks at stuff. Just make sure it's not alive, and measure how far it goes.

A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

2005-10-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

All right, it's been a good week and a half since I've posted. But now that my life is a little more normal, and I'm waiting for my competent cells to chill for a while, listening to my new Switchfoot album, I'm in the mood for a good post or two. But first, I should finish the review that I started writing almost two weeks ago.
I recently watched A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as one might guess from the title of this post. The movie revolves around Arthur Dent, a hapless John Doe who finds out that his best (and probably only) friend isn't even human. While Dent (a name strangely familiar to Adventures in Odyssey fans) is distraught over his house being demolished, his friend ensures that he and his friend get a ride on the alien ship that is demolishing Dent's home planet. Eventually, against (literally) all odds, they get picked up by the most technologically advanced ship in the galaxy within 30 seconds of being ejected into space. The movie is MPAA rated PG for "thematic elements, action and mild language." The language, as I noticed it, consists of a few instances of misuse of the Lord's name, and the movie pokes fun at religion in general a couple times. Other than that, we breifly see Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) in a large towel, but surprisingly, nothing worse.
I can't compare this movie to the book, since I haven't read it. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are madder than a, um, caged yellow jacket, about how this film destroys and defiles the book. But the fact that the author of the book wrote the screenplay (a scenario that has happily been played out in several movies recently) should have kept the spirit of the book. Overall, it is a hilarious, relatively clean movie. There's also something in there for you poltical junkies, as there is plenty of symbolism. And, of course, there is the answer to everything. It makes for a great movie night, and an awesome laugh. 4¹/₂ stars from me.

Switchfoot - Nothing is Sound

2005-09-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

All right, I bet all the sixteen of you who have looked at my blog are wondering, "OK, I've read about his crazy life, but what about the reviews and bible things?"
Well, here's a review. I recently got Switchfoot's new album, Nothing is Sound in the dual CD/DVD format. I, being a fan of their previous Beautiful Letdown, found their latest album to be somewhat of a departure from Letdown. I read in the latest issue of CCM magazine (Christian Contemporary Music, I think) about how Switchfoot is going through their "branding," where they want to be more mainstream, which is OK with me - reaching out is good. But I hope they don't forget their Christian fan base once they get where they want to be, because I liked them before. On the new CD, my favorite track is Stars, a song that is more similar in sound to Letdown than to a lot of the others. Others that I like are Politicians, Happy is a Yuppie Word, and The Shadow Proves the Sunshine. It's another great album from Switchfoot, even if it is departing a little from their previous work to reach out to the secular world. But there is still plenty of awesome material, and it's a CD worth getting if you're a Switchfoot fan. The DVD version contains all the songs in 5.1 surround sound, but I, not having surround sound, was more interested in the commentary and such. I watched quite a bit of the behind-the-scenes section, and found out, among other things, that at least Jon Foreman (I think) drinks Sam's Club bottled water. Cool, huh?
Randy

Can't forget the Blender!

2005-09-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

Well, in my sort-of roundup of supercool open-source projects, I realized I left out a very important member. The other day, I finally tried out Blender3D. It is an open-source 3-D model editing program. I don't know how it compares to others like 3D Max and Maya, but I know it blows the socks off of my CAD-3D program I was working with. Once you get the hang of the controls (which takes some doing), it is very intuitive to make some awesome 3D models. I had fun making a man with claws and a tophat for starters. If you're into 3D modeling, or just want to play around with making 3D objects, check it out. And make sure you go along with a tutorial, otherwise you'll probably get lost pretty quickly. I reccomend WikiBooks' online book Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. Check it out!
Randy

In case I forgot to mention it...

2005-09-16T08:07:00.000-07:00

I'm into computers. Especially programming. Which somewhat explains why I'm very much into Open-Source software. If you don't know what that means, look it up in Wikipedia (another adherent of the open-source spirit), then come back.

OK, now that you all know what open-source is about, I can continue. Some awesome exapmles or this are GIMP (www.gimp.org) and Inkscape, both drawing programs, GIMP leaning towards raster (like paint) and Inkscape (www.inkscape.org) on the vector side (like, uh, Word's drawing stuff?). Another super-awesome example is NASA World Wind, a program kind of like Google Earth (World Wind is more functional, less eye candy. Kind of like AOL vs Firefox). "But," to quote a great Geico commercial, "I digress." My main purpose of mentioning open source is not only to spread the word on awesome programs and developers, but also to brag on what I was able to do with them. With the help of the FREE Gimp and Inkscape, with no assistance from other more expensive programs that shall not be named, I created the design for our boy's tennis shirt and e-mailed it to the printers. (For anyone interested, I had to send them an .eps, instead of the open-source SVG, but Inkscape handled it beautifully.) I used GIMP to import a bitmap of the Air Jordan logo so I could loosely base my work on it. I then created a vector outline of my design, tweaked it, exported it from GIMP, opened it in Inkscape, touched it up, and viola! I had a nifty shirt design. We got our shirts today, and they turned out pretty well. I may not be able to draw, but I can trace pretty well. So if you're into that graphics design kind of stuff, or if you just like to draw, check out GIMP and Inkscape. And of course, if you want to read about them, check out their articles in Wikipedia (GIMP and Inkscape). I was going to end with some clever line from Shakespeare (or whoever wrote the stuff), but I can't come up with anything off the top of my head. So for now, adios.
Randy

Rubik's Cube? Next!...

2005-09-13T08:05:00.000-07:00

All right, call me a geek, but I'm happy because I finally solved my Rubik's cube yesterday. Hooray. I'll get some pictures in later of my finished cube. I won't be a speed cuber any time soon, but I'll soon be able to do it without directions. Maybe if anyone wants it, or maybe just because I want to, I'll post directions on how I did it. In other news, expect some movie reviews in the future. I just watched The Adventures of Ociee Nash, and will be reviewing it soon. I also want to review The Incredibles and Finding Nemo. But for now, I'll be content with my Rubik's cube, all solved. It's not quite as gratifying as it could be, since I picked it up probably at a garage sale years ago and just recently picked it back up, so several stickers are home-made, particularly the center red one. Maybe next time I'll have a "real" cube. So think happy thoughts, and until next time,
Randy

Ooh! A shiny new counter!

2005-09-09T20:28:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't posted in a while, but it's been real busy with school and all. If you didn't notice, I have a shiny new counter there on the right, so I know how many of you are out there. I picked that particular style mainly because it didn't clash horribly with the silvery background. If you think it's garishly ugly, and want me to change it, go ahead and browse through the counter style options and let me know which number you like. I noticed (with some excitement) that a grand total of 8 people (or bots) have viewed my profile. That's like, twice what it was last time I checked, and that was twice the time before! If it keeps doubling, I should reach a million in, like, a month or something. But anyway, nothing to dreadfully exciting has happened recently, so I think I'll just leave it at this. Except to say that I still think my cat is the best. So toodles,
Randy

Edit 8:34: Hey, after a little searching, I found Webstats4u. Much cooler. So I have now officially added a new, more detailed counter, but kept the old, more visible one.

A Stone's Throw Away from Insanity

2005-09-02T23:58:00.000-07:00

Augh, I'm tired. But I guess I'll let you in on my random thought of the day. I was thinking, we always say something is a stone's throw away. How far is a stone's throw? How far can you throw a stone? Maybe we could average our stone-throwing distances and round it off to a nice even number, and call that a stone's throw. Then when someone said, "That rock hyrax isn't even a stone's throw away," you could whip out your measuring tape and (assuming the little critter doesn't run away) say, "Nuh-uh. That rock hyrax is precisely 154 feet, 4 3/16 inches away. A stone's throw is only 150 feet." Your companion would probably look at you strangely and then slowly back away, but at least you would have the satisfaction of knowing you defined a previously nebulous distance.
Like I said, I'm tired. And my thoughts are pretty strange. But at least it's a post, right? Hmm. I need more sleep. Goodnight,
Randy

Hello, World!

2005-09-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

Being a programmer, I have to start everything with a "Hello, World!" It's just gotta be that way. So now that I've gotten that out of the way, I can get started. What I'll be doing here is posting movie reviews, what I've gotten out of my daily Bible readings, and of course things from my normal life that I deem worthy for the blog. Read my profile for a little more detail. What's with the title you ask? Well, I am totally a cat person, and my favorite cat is moody, and will quite often try to swipe my head off. So I decided to name the blog after my wonderful kitty. The "limited" thing is just 'cause it sounds so much more exciting that way. I'd say that's about enough for my first post. I should get back to my programming. Signing off,
Randy