Segin's Blog of Rantings And Ravings

Bypassing Gmail's Executable Attachment Restriction

2012-01-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

A few hours ago I tried to download a build of a program that was uploaded to uploaded.to, except that with the recent shutdown of MegaUpload, uploaded.to has ceased all dealings with anyone whose IP address originates in the United States of America.

So I had a friend overseas download the program and tried to send it to me, except for the fact that Gmail doesn't allow executable attachments, among others.

So, me and my buddy overseas cooked up an idea to bypass this. What if we just dropped the .exe extension and also used a simple XOR cipher to encrypt the data? Using a key of 0xFF, I came up with this program (after a few bug-fixing revisions, click for larger view):

The source is freely available on the text-snipplet site, Pastebin.com. View the source (updated 2012-01-27 01:32)

Computings

2012-01-02T06:05:00.000-08:00

First off, Happy New Year 2012!

Secondly, Portmaster for FreeBSD is funny. Let me just demonstrate:

===>>> Proceed? y/n [y] yes

===>>> yes is not a valid response
===>>> Proceed? y/n [y]

I'm not sure if it's a bug or not, but it still makes me laugh. :)

Paul Christoforo's Public Relations FAIL

2011-12-28T18:00:00.000-08:00

I have to hand it to this guy. I've not seen someone FAIL so spectacularly in quite a while. Paul Christoforo, president of Ocean Marketing has basically FAILed his way into Internet infamy with a scathing response to a customer of one of the companies Ocean Marketing was hired to provide PR services for.

I'm just going to take one of the nasty e-mails that Paul wrote, and dissect it for the sake of providing humor to all, and "free PR" to Paul. My commentary will be inserted, in italics. - Note: Some mobile web browsers do not support italicized text.

Here's the e-mail I'm dissecting (via Penny Arcade):

LOL Thanks for the Free PR (Wait, why is "Thanks" or "Free" capitalized? Looks like I'll be playing the Grammar Nazi card, considering this guy is supposedly the president of this PR firm, and claims to be a professional) I know the Editor N Chief of Kotaku , (Space-comma-space, you also FAIL at English, Paul.) IGN , (Where's the "and"?) Engadget (Not to mention all three basically told Paul to fuck off for being an unprofessional douchebag. See the IGN reply here) I’ll be meeting them at CES .The noise complaint was for people high up on the food chain in a corporate world of real estate you have no clue about. (What the hell does real estate have to do with game controllers?) Thanks for the Rice Rocket Compliment too love me some motorcycle . (Me so speedy, me rev you long time.) Send that over to Engadget you look like a complete moron swearing and sending your customer service complaints to a magazine as if they will post it or even pay attention (Ironically, it did get posted, but by Penny Arcade. Engadget wouldn't even want to tarnish their good name by even giving you the time of day, Paul.) do you think you’re the first or the last what are they going to do demand us to tell you were your shipment is or ask for a refund on your behalf … Really ... Welcome to the Internet ? (Welcome to the Internet, Paul, you've gotten lots of "Free PR", and not the kind you wanted.) Son Im 38 I wwebsite as on the internet when you were a sperm in your daddys balls and before it was the internet (Son, I'm 21. I also managed to pass my high school English course. I wwebsite as on the Internet when you were spilling your sperm on the carpet while watching crappy VHSes starring Ron Jeremy.), thanks for the welcome to message wurd up. Grow up you look like a complete child bro. (Grow up, you write like a complete child, bro.) I Don’t have my controller so im gonna cry to the world … Really ?? Hey take that free time and do something more productive. (He did. He wrote to the email address N-Control set up for customer inquiries, asking as to where the product he paid for with his money is.) All you had to do was check the like everyone else , people have inquired but you’re the douchiest of them all J (Actually, it seems that you are the doucheist of them all, Paul.)

To all our pre-order customers looking for information on the status of their orders after a busy couple of months The PS3 Avengers are on their way from our Manufacturing plant overseas. We are aware that everyone is anticipating having their Avengers under their Christmas Tree and were doing our best to get these orders shipped out as fast as possible. We appreciate you as loyal customers and for supporting our company. Customers will start receiving their products this week before Christmas and After Christmas and into the New Year. As a token of our appreciation we are offering all our pre-order customers and new customers 10$ off your next order with us just enter Avenger1001 at Checkout. Thank you and Happy Holidays! (Why did you even bother adding this boilerplate message to an e-mail sent to a single person, unless you were well aware the whole thing was going to get massive public attention?)

Oh and FYI When a street date gets pushed by a publisher on a video game you pre ordered do you cry to them too ? (No, because I usually don't pay the full price in advance for a pre-order. In the event that I did, then yes, I do complain. If you paid me today for a blowjob tonight, and I didn't suck your dick for a whole month, and did what I pleased with your money in the meantime, wouldn't you get upset?)

You just got told bitch … welcome to the real internet (You just got told, douche, welcome to the real Internet. We do not forgive, we do not forget.) check kotaku in 2 weeks when they are reviewing free PS3 Avengers we send them as well as G4 (You mean the G4 whose employee Kevin Kelly wrote this?) and all the other majors hell yeah , don’t forget to check Amazon, gamestop.com, play n trade , Myers , Frys and a ton of other local stores coming your way you think you speak for billions son your just a kid you speak for yourself no one cares (You speak for yourself Paul, no one cares anymore.) what you think that’s why were growing and moving 20-50 thousand controllers a month. We do value our customers but sometimes we get children like you we just have to put you in the corner with your im stupid hat on. (We do value our PR firms, but sometimes we get children like Ocean Marketing that we just have to put in the corner with their "I'm a douche" hat on.) See you at CES , E3 , Pax East ….? (The PAX East that you've been banned from?) Oh wait you have to ask mom and pa dukes your not an industry professional and you have no money on snap you just got told. (If he had no money, how did he order any of these controllers? Or is that a stereotype of the gaming industry's consumer? If it is, then why are you bothering, aside from making money?)

Well, there you have it. Douchebag Paul Christoforo has managed to successfully take his career Titanic, where it shall lie at the bottom of the great digital ocean of the Internet for all eternity, as a cautious reminder to all: Don't be a dick.
Oh, and here's a screencap of a Twitter message that Ocean Marketing posted and then deleted:

Quick Musing on Religion

2011-11-28T13:52:00.001-08:00

All religions I have encountered to date are all a load of shit. Most teach that there is a supreme being of some sort that created us intentionally for some reason that we are not allowed to know; is observing our every action, Big Brother style; and if we don't play along with it's demands, we shall be tortured after we die for all eternity. What a crock of shit.

Here's the truth: Your head is up your ass, you really are a hairless ape, your entire species' - entire planet's - existence is purely by chance, and that your life truly has no meaning, other than what you give it.

The reason people believe in these bullshit religions is because when faced with these truths, they just cannot accept it, and need an alternative "reality" to believe in, because, at the very least, the idea that they are alive for no good and real reason whatsoever makes no sense to them.

Christians, Muslims, both have many similarities. One, they believe in writings that, in the case of Christians, a number of ball-tripping dopeheads, or in the case of Islam, one ball-tripping dopehead, came up with after doing too many hallucinogens and believing that they are hearing "God" or some messenger thereof (say, the angel Gabriel, in the case of Muhammed and Islam, or the Metatron, in the case of Christianity.) They tinkered with these hallucinations until they figured out how to brainwash and control people. Mainly because people wanted a meaning of life, and Christianity and Islam both provide that there is one, 'cept we don't get to know it unless we play by their rules, and still then we must play by those rules 'til we die, and then once we're dead, the big man upstairs will finally spill the beans. Unless, of course, you don't play by the rules, then you get to enjoy an eternity of torture. Supposedly.

Oh, I could go on for hours about this. So glad I am an Atheist.

Why comments on Android Market apps are mostly useless.

2011-11-09T22:51:00.000-08:00

I've noticed that the rating and comment system on Android Market is mostly useless; it is full of pointless posts. An example of a pointless post would be something like "great app". Just "great app". Shit, people, they give you the ability to rate between 1 and 5 stars; the overall rating should be a reflection on whether or not an app is great. Saying it is great, on top of that, is outright redundant, and helps no one. Worse, is that you'll find dozens of such comments on an app listing. I honestly don't want to scroll through a page of "great app!" "five stars!" comments to find a comment that is actually useful.

More useless commentary comes in the form of "App does not work on [insert device here]". The comments list is not meant as a way to send feedback to the app developer. It is meant to convey your opinion to other (potential) users of the app. When you post a review comment saying "Please fix!", you are NOT saying that to the developer. You are instead saying that to other users like yourself.

Speaking of developers, do any of these users have any idea of the process of developing an application? Or testing one, for that matter? Fixing bugs? Developers are human. They aren't perfect, and on occasion, they make mistakes. And, like humans, they don't know everything. Just because you know how to program, does not necessarily mean you could write a program to identify a person by voice, especially if you know nothing about sound from a scientific perspective.

A lot of apps on the Android Market are developed by one-man shows. When I see comments like "Everyone post a complaint so that it gets fixed faster", I want to reach through my phone and strangle the pinhead that wrote that. First of all, as I have said, the comments system is not meant for communicating with developers, and as such, many developers do not read the comments. Developers usually leave an email address, and maybe a phone number as well, that are at the bottom of the app's Market page.

Users that rate an app down because it doesn't work on their particular phone aren't doing anything to help the developers get the app working on the phone. There are well over a thousand different models of Android devices; while a developer can try their damnest to make their app work on as many as possible, they cannot foresee every issue that will arise on every device, and most of them cannot afford to buy one of every Android device.

Trying out the Blogger app for Android

2011-08-24T04:16:00.001-07:00

This is a test of the Blogger app for Android. It doesn't edit posts already created on the web interface very well, with HTML code "bleeding through" into your edit box.

Test of bold content. At least that works. Oblique, anyone? And how I can link to useless crap. Amazing!

Seems to be a pretty good blogging tool, if you don't mind something so simple that you don't get proper numbered or bulleted lists.

Oh, and some picture thing.

I guess pictures are simply appended to the end, as they don't seem to be inline... Well, let me press "Publish post" so I can see how this looks on the blog...

Homeopathic Cranks

2011-07-08T23:32:00.001-07:00

So, I took about 15 minutes out of my time this evening, and did a little bit of Googling on "homeopathy". With just a quarter of an hour of research, I have learned that homeopathy boils down to three basic ideas:

The "law of similars". The idea here is that whatever is the cause of your illness, or is similar to it, is also the cure. Have insomnia? Give them caffeine. Radiation poisoning? Give them depleted uranium! Have AIDS? Give them sex with Freddie Mercury.
The "law of potentization". The idea that you make something stronger by diluting it with water. And 40% grain alcohol, making it essentially 80-proof vodka. And why water? That brings us to idea three, that
Water has memory. No, seriously, that's what these morons believe. That water maintains a memory of whatever plant or animal or chemical or turd it was once part of. Oh, and this is enhanced by shaking it around a bit. Sorta like driving down a bumpy road. Or setting it on the bed while you make sweet, sweet love. Or using a centrifuge. Funny stuff, this water. With that kind of memory, it's surprising we don't make hard drives out of it.

So, I got bored shortly after, and decided to confront some of these cranks face-to-face. I ran across the website of a group called "NASH", or the North American Society of Horseshi-, er, I mean, Homeopaths. They even have a fresh steaming load clogging up the 'tubes over at http://www.homeopathy.org/. Their motto is: "...dedicated to promote, represent and serve as the voice of all professional homeopaths in North America..." And I didn't know that horseshit had a voice. I thought it just stunk up the place and attracted flies. But I digress.

So, I fired them off this email:

I just saw your website. It needs a revision: "...dedicated to promote, represent and serve as the voice of all professional bullshitters in North America..."

Homeopathy is a load of crap. It doesn't work. It was invented by an idiot.

The idea of diluting a substance to make it stronger is a total load. The idea that water has memory is also a total load. If you think it works so well, why not use water to dilute the gasoline in your automobile's gas tank? Surely the water will maintain the "memory" of the gasoline, and the now-diluted fuel will offer a higher octane rating, providing better performance and fuel economy! But you won't, because you know that it's all crap.

Oh, what if that gasoline caught fire? Homeopathy's rule of similars to the rescue! Let's pour more gasoline on the fire; it will surely quench it. Oh, you have to dilute the hell out of it first with water? Well, why is it that you can put out the fire with pure water? Supposedly, because "water has memory of previously being gasoline". Or some useless shit to that end.

Water has memory? Really? So why the hell don't we make hard drives make of water?! Surely the principles of homeopathy must work outside the treatment of illness, as all validated scientific laws do. But, that is clearly not the case. Gravity works everywhere in the Universe. It doesn't stop working because someone tried to measure it out of context. Homeopathy doesn't work, even when you try to measure it in context.

So, I am awaiting a response from them (if they choose to respond, given the inflammatory message I sent them, it seems unlikely, but at least it's more truthful than the snake oil they are trying to sell us.)

Oh, and to anyone out there that believes that homeopathy actually does something for you, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I'd like to sell you.

New blog theme!

2011-06-06T00:28:00.001-07:00

After five years of the same old dingy theme, I have decided to change my blog’s theme to another dingy theme! At least this one feels 2011.

Some Diablo II Screenshots

2011-06-06T00:05:00.000-07:00

Someone showed me some items on Diablo II that made me shit myself... here's the screenies (click image to enlarge):

Oh, and here's one where Wine buggered up (and you now see that I play Diablo II in Wine, on Linux, Ubuntu 11.04 to be exact):

A quick test of AT&T’s HSPA+ network

2011-05-25T06:58:00.001-07:00

In Gibsonton, Florida, with all five bars, –57dBm signal, HSPA+ on the HTC Inspire “4G” with HSUPA enabled.

Enjoy:

The problems with a touch-only phone

2011-05-25T06:44:00.001-07:00

These days, more and more touch-only phones are sold, and while they have some benefits, and many remind me of the Federation PADDs in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but there are a few things about their design that have proven themselves detrimental in the use of the phones. I will list a few of these here, feel free to message me about others

The virtual keyboard eats your screen real estate. This is possibly the biggest issue I have with touch-only phones is that the large display is suddenly cut down in size as soon as you need to type in any text. This can be very annoying when trying to enter CAPTCHAs, because the sudden loss of screen space to the touch keyboard can cause the CAPTCHAs to scroll right off screen
Touch input is a poor imitation of buttons. There are several points I could make about this one. Ever used an SNES gamepad while playing Mario? You might hold down the run button while just rocking your thumb over ever-so-slightly to jump without letting go of run. On a touch display emulating a gamepad, this procedure is difficult, if not downright impossible. Secondly, you cannot feel the buttons you are pushing. Hell, as soon as you touch the thing, it is “pushed”, no actual pushing required!
Skin oils and fingerprints are not Windex. In fact, they are the exact opposite of Windex, making your display unreadable. What’s the fun in tapping your screen if you have to wipe your oils off the screen every so often to keep reading it clearly?

And with these, I leave you with the issues of touch-only phones. Of course, I’ll have someone argue at me for making this list and not simply accepting reality as it is, but, hey, I speak my mind.

SIM Lock Breaking Now Legal In The US

2010-07-26T10:38:00.001-07:00

Copyright is quite an interesting legal system, especially in the United States. Our copyright system is possibly one of the most intricate such system in the world. As you may know, one of my hobbies is to study copyright law; the encroachment of the extent of copyright law on the freedom of people to use copyrighted works for otherwise legal purposes has gotten to the point where it verges on the very point of being draconian. One of the most dangerous and impacting copyright law in effect today is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Public Law 105-304 (1998), added a new Chapter 12 to title 17 United States Code, and is commonly known by it’s initialism, DMCA.

For example, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent any form of encryption/content scrambling system, even extremely weak and obvious-to-decode ones. It makes it illegal to modify scrambled media/signed media systems to accept non-scrambled/non-signed media. Specifically, Title 17 USC § 1201 provides that "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." However, there are some exceptions to these rules, and today, the Library of Congress is required by 17 USC § 1201(a)(1) to publish a new set of exemptions to the DMCA every three years. Today, they published the new exemptions for 2010.

Now, before we get into detail, let me give you a little backstory that shows the effect of one of the new exemptions.

I recently purchased a Nokia 6620 off of eBay. When I got the handset, it was locked to the old Cingular/Pacific Bell network, which has since been acquired by of AT&T. I promptly took the liberty of using a tool called “NokiaFREE Calculator” to disengage the phone’s carrier lock, known as a SIM lock, which would prevent operation of the phone when a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card from any carrier other than the carrier it is locked to is inserted into the phone. I did not know this at the time, and if I had, I wouldn’t of cared anyways, but such an act was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. However, I need not worry, as the exemptions published today make such an act legal. For the sake of the legally-inclined reader, I have included below the official Statement of the Librarian of Congress Relating to Section 1201 Rulemaking, with the particular exemption that makes such SIM lock removal legal highlighted in bold.

Statement of the Librarian of Congress Relating to Section 1201 Rulemaking

Section 1201(a)(1) of the copyright law requires that every three years I am to determine whether there are any classes of works that will be subject to exemptions from the statute’s prohibition against circumvention of technology that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work. I make that determination at the conclusion of a rulemaking proceeding conducted by the Register of Copyrights, who makes a recommendation to me. Based on that proceeding and the Register’s recommendation, I am to determine whether the prohibition on circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works is causing or is likely to cause adverse effects on the ability of users of any particular classes of copyrighted works to make noninfringing uses of those works. The classes of works that I designated in the previous proceeding expire at the end of the current proceeding unless proponents of a class prove their case once again.

This is the fourth time that I have made such a determination. Today I have designated six classes of works. Persons who circumvent access controls in order to engage in noninfringing uses of works in these six classes will not be subject to the statutory prohibition against circumvention.

As I have noted at the conclusion of past proceedings, it is important to understand the purposes of this rulemaking, as stated in the law, and the role I have in it. This is not a broad evaluation of the successes or failures of the DMCA. The purpose of the proceeding is to determine whether current technologies that control access to copyrighted works are diminishing the ability of individuals to use works in lawful, noninfringing ways. The DMCA does not forbid the act of circumventing copy controls, and therefore this rulemaking proceeding is not about technologies that control copying. Nor is this rulemaking about the ability to make or distribute products or services used for purposes of circumventing access controls, which are governed by a different part of section 1201.

In this rulemaking, the Register of Copyrights received 19 initial submissions proposing 25 classes of works, many of them duplicative in subject matter, which the Register organized into 11 groups and published in a notice of proposed rulemaking seeking comments on the proposed classes. Fifty-six comments were submitted. Thirty-seven witnesses appeared during the four days of public hearings in Washington and in Palo Alto, California. Transcripts of the hearings, copies of all of the comments, and copies of other information received by the Register have been posted on the Copyright Office's website.

The six classes of works are:

(1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;

(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos

(2) Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.

(3) Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network.

(4) Video games accessible on personal computers and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully obtained works, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing for, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities, if:

(i) The information derived from the security testing is used primarily to promote the security of the owner or operator of a computer, computer system, or computer network; and
(ii) The information derived from the security testing is used or maintained in a manner that does not facilitate copyright infringement or a violation of applicable law.

(5) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace; and

(6) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

All of these classes of works find their origins in classes that I designated at the conclusion of the previous rulemaking proceeding, but some of the classes have changed due to differences in the facts and arguments presented in the current proceeding. For example, in the previous proceeding I designated a class that enable film and media studies professors to engage in the noninfringing activity of making compilations of film clips for classroom instruction. In the current proceeding, the record supported an expansion of that class to enable the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into documentary films and noncommercial videos for the purpose of criticism or comment, when the person engaging in circumvention reasonably believes that it is necessary to fulfill that purpose. I agree with the Register that the record demonstrates that it is sometimes necessary to circumvent access controls on DVDs in order to make these kinds of fair uses of short portions of motion pictures.

If you are wondering, the third exception, although worded quite cryptically, can be taken to read “If there is a software lock of any form on a cellphone that locks the usage of the phone to one operator’s network, it is now legal to circumvent this lock to allow the phone to be used with another cellular network.”

In short, if you don’t like AT&T’s service, you are free to break your iPhone’s SIM lock to use your iPhone on T-Mobile, but you may not be able to use their 3G UMTS due to frequency differences.

Edit: Although now with AT&T buying T-Mobile, it is likely AT&T will just retune all of T-Mobile's UMTS/HSPA+ network to AT&T's UMTS/HSPA+ 850/1900MHz system.

Introducing Facebook Like

2010-07-09T12:15:00.001-07:00

(Note to those reading this as a note pasted on Facebook: This is actually a blog post on my blog, NOT a Facebook note posting. Facebook automatically republished all of my blog posts as notes under my account. My blog is http://segin-rr.blogspot.com/ so go there before complaining that I’m talking about a feature that already existed. Being forewarned, if you elect to complain anyways, I take no responsibility for the consequences of your own stupidity.)

Recently, I added support for Facebook’s “Like” button onto my blog. As you can see from the top of the blog post, there’s a new “Like” button.

The Facebook “Like” button is not a standard Blogger feature. To add it, you need to edit your blog’s template. If you know what HTML and CSS is, or at least have enough brains not to get scared simply because you have to sift through a lot of cryptic text, then (hopefully) this will work for you. I’m going to assume you’re using one of Blogger’s standard templates, or a slightly modified one, as some fully custom templates are really different in design and these instructions may not work with them.

First, log into Blogger, and go to the control panel for your blog. From the “Design” tab, select “Edit HTML”. Under the “Edit Template” section of that page, there is a checkbox labeled “Expand Widget Templates”. Check this checkbox if it is already checked (The page will reload when you check it).

Now, in the template code box, locate a line of HTML that says “<div class='post-header-line-1'/>” – as a hint, press Ctrl-F and give Find “post-header-line-1”. Below this line will be a “</div>”. Create a new line between these two lines and paste in this code:

<iframe allowTransparency='true' expr:src='"http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=" + data:post.url + "&layout=standard&show_faces=false&width=100&action=like&font=arial&colorscheme=light"' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' style='border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:40px;'/>

If you cannot find the “post-header-line-1” code, look for a line containing “<data:post.body/>” and put the code above BEFORE it.

Volia! Now all of your blog posts on your Blogger blog will now have a Facebook “Like” button at the top of the post!

If you want to put the button at the bottom of the post instead of the top, place the button’s code after the line “<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>”. If you had to follow the instructions right after the button code, then it’s already at the bottom and you do nothing.

Now, it’s only time until people start “liking” my blog… Muhahaha….

A Discussion on Keyboard Layouts

2010-06-12T17:33:00.001-07:00

Recently, I've taken a look at my keyobard, and realized I wish it had more keys. More function keys.

First, let's take a look at the standard US 104 key QWERTY keyboard. This is the keyboard that virtually every American knows (and knows no other).

Here's a diagram of the standard US keyboard layout. Virtually every American keyboard looks like this, if not exactly like this (Click on the images to see more than just the left-hand side):

This is derived from the IBM 3270 terminal keyboard layout, here's a picture:

Notice the extra row of function keys at top, as well as the ten command keys to the left.

Sun's US layout of their workstation keyboard is extremely similar to your standard US PC keyboard, adding volume control keys above the number pad, as well as taking the 3270's lefthand command keys and adding a big "Help" key above it, to the left of the Escape key.

While these are good keyboards, as a programmer, I want lots of keys. I want to bind the leftover keys to various functions of my editor, or OS - for example, a dedicated key for search-and-replace, instead of a keystroke involving shift keys (e.g. Control-F or Control-Shift-F).

Also good would be more keys for typing in extended scripts, as to use Greek symbols, or advanced mathematical symbols. A good keyboard that comes close is the "Space Cadet" keyboard that was popular at MIT a long time ago; it was used on Lisp machines running MIT's "Incompatible Timesharing System", an early mainframe OS. The keyboard they used:

If you look at the Space Cadet keyboard, there are multiple shifts, labeled "Shift", "Greek", and "Top", enabling at least 5 symbols per key. The "L" key, for instance, could produce both upper- and lower-case Roman letter L, as well as upper- and lower-case Greek letter Lambda, and finally, a double-arrow symbol if used with the "Top" key.

Combining the extra typography features of the Space Cadet keyboard, with the familiarity of the US keyboard, and adding features of the Sun and IBM terminal keyboards, leads you to what I believe is the ultimate keyboard layout for programmers accustomed to the US keyboard layout:

If you look at this final layout, it have the left-hand editor keys of a Sun keyboard, as well as the shiftable modes these keys provide on the 3270 keyboard, as well as the Sun "Help" key, the full Greek and mathematical character set of the Space Cadet keyboard, as well as the Space Cadet's full shift key set - "Control", "Meta (Alt)", "Super", and "Hyper", as well as a "positive" and "negative" diamond key - usually used as "Meta" on Sun keyboards, the full 24 function keys of the 3270 keyboard as well as it's adjusted directional keys that no longer look like a Tetris piece, as well as your common PC editing keys - Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down are all in their typical places. Also, the number pad has extra keys to make entering formulas and other mathematical errata much easier. Also, of note, that this keyboard's keys have all the symbols for the various keyboards it is derived from - for example, the "Super" key - which is what X11 maps the Windows key - has the Mac "⌘" symbol on it's front side - which is also good because the Windows key maps to this key on Mac OS X (when using USB keyboards). Note that the left-side command keys have all the Sun command labels, as well as some of the 3270's labels on the front side of the keys, that there is an Alt Gr on the right, that the left Control is labeled "Reset" on it's front-side, matching the key on the 3270's keyboard, as well as other front-side etchings for 3270 compatibility.

One key that I find unusal is the angle-bracket key. I've seen it once on a French keyboard I once had, being between "Z" and the left "Shift", but it's addition here would be quite useful, especially when writing SGML-derived markup.

In all, this ultimate keyboard has 148 keys, and while I do not believe that it has ever been manufactured, I would be willing to pay for it if it were to be made. This is one impressive layout indeed.

Android Market: Security through Obscurity?

2010-06-10T08:07:00.000-07:00

While I haven't taken a good look at any Android devices that have the Android Market installed (instead using unofficial builds without it), I've come to the conclusion that the Android Market's client software probably implements part of the Market paywall - that is, were it open-source, it would be too easy to get software that costs money, without paying for it.

While this is just speculation, I see no reason that Google doesn't open source their Android Market client software - after all, many other companies have good and solid paywalls that haven't been defeated by fully modifiable software - I can still buy things on Amazon using a modified copy of Firefox, with a patched Gecko engine, and I still have no access to the content until I pay.

Yet, why can't Google do the same? Is it because of the multiple Android Markets, one per nation? Are they afraid that someone's going to simply patch the part of the code that says to connect to, oh, the Belgian AM server to instead connect to the US AM server? Google runs AM, so why the hell don't they solve THAT issue by using IP-Geolocation? It's difficult to fake an IP address. Of course, Google will argue that people will go to different nations to get apps only available there.

In that case, take a hint from the Portal developers. "In the case that skipping ahead arguably takes more skill than solving the puzzle proper, we let the ninja solution stand." - that is, if someone would fly overseas just to get apps from the US Android Market, just let them do it - they already spend $1000 just to get here.

McDonalds Don't Want To Hire You

2010-06-09T13:17:00.001-07:00

Today, I tried to apply for a job at McDonald's, as I'm fucking desperate, I have no real qualifications for anything, and my computer skills are self-taught (read: as far as an employer is concerned, I don't have them, as I have no certifications to prove it.)

However, McDonald's outsources their electronic employment system to a company called Aon Corporation. Going to their website, I find their self-description, which reads as follows:

Aon Corporation is the leading global provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, and human capital consulting. Through its 37,000 professionals worldwide, Aon readily delivers distinctive client value via innovative and effective risk management and workforce productivity solutions.

The only one of their listed services that would have anything to do with employment is "human capital consulting", which sounds quite ill-defined to me.

Anyways, McDonald's has a main landing site that you start off your job search at... it's mcstate.com, which lists all fifty states in a list, each one being a link to a new site, with names like mcalaska.com and mcflorida.com, each proving essentially the same page, just tailored to each state - that being a list of municipalities for each state listed in the bottom-right. On an interesting note, they list both "Gainesville" and "Gainsville" as cities in Florida - the second one is merely a typo of the (correct) first. Goes to show that they don't even do basic fact-checking when compiling these lists.

After finding the location matching where I am at, I am taken to a page listing all the openings in my area - sadly, only a crew member position at the only McDonald's in the area - but that's fine. Clicking on it brings me to a page where I am also shown that openings for crew member are also at locations in areas right next to but otherwise outside my own (and my own area is only about 6 sq. mi. - 10 km²).

Each store shown on this page has two links - the store home page (which is just a generic info page), and an "Apply Here" link. The "Apply Here" link for each store contains an extra identifier to uniquely identify the store at the end of the URL, and takes you to a page that automatically redirects you to Aon's application system. The problem here is that the same identifier is again passed via URL token, and sometimes the Aon system doesn't even get the store-identifying token. This leads me to a page where I'm asked to enter a promotional code, which I was not given, and nor is one pre-entered into the entry box provided.

After going through the system a few times, I finally got to a page where I can actually fill out an application, which didn't last long as poor JavaScript on the page caused Firefox to hang and peg the CPU with 100% constant CPU usage, leading to me eventually killing it.

Worse of all, the Aon site is extremely slow to load, on the order of nearly 30 seconds per page. I am not using mobile broadband or a poor internet connection - I have a good broadband cable connection, with 10 megabits down and 1 megabit up - and nothing is using the network aside from the browser, as my router has a page where you can monitor network bandwidth in real-time, and it indicates less bandwidth usage than available on any dial-up connection - the slow Aon site loads slower than dial-up's max speed (56 kilobits per second).

I can see no real reason for this. This is 2010, I'm using Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3, and I cannot possibly see 10,000 HTTP requests against their server each and every second - nothing less than this would slow a decent redundant server system with a 100MBit symmetrical connection - the minimum standard for medium-ticket websites.

Obviously McDonald's doesn't care at all about potential customers, nor does it care to find a new business partner to handle their employment application system, since their current one is providing unacceptable service. I guess they'd rather me work at, oh, Burger King or Taco Bell, instead of at McDonald's.

The End of an Era

2010-05-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

Well, guys, looks like this is it. As many of you are well aware, it is next-to-impossible to purchase an x86 PC that is purely 32-bit. The only success you will have in this endeavor is if you buy an older, used PC or a netbook/nettop.

Which brings me to this point: The next major releases of the big two OSes, Windows and Mac OS X, will more than likely have dropped support for 32-bit hardware.

In a way, that's not too bad, the last time 32-bit only x86 hardware was sold as a serious desktop was three years ago, back in 2007. Pure 32-bit x86 processors these days are limited to Atoms and embedded chips. But, there's a downside. For example, Asus is selling a nettop based on the Eee PC netbook hardware called the Eeetop. It contains a 32-bit processor, and although it sits shiny on store shelves today with a fat $699 pricetag, when Windows 8 comes out around 2013 or so, forget about upgrading to it - you'll find the Eeetop's 32-bit Atom unable to run the 64-bit Windows 8, which for all likelyhood won't be produced in a 32-bit flavor.

Before you say that this seems unlikely - think again. Microsoft's server and enterprise OSes have always set the trend for their consumer-class releases. Windows NT eventually replaced the classic Windows line starting with Windows XP, and as another sign of things to come, Windows 2008 Server R2 has already dropped support for 32-bit x86 processors, being available exclusively for 64-bit x86. Microsoft has been providing 64-bit versions of Windows since Windows 2000 for the Intel Itanium processor, however, it wasn't until Windows XP that 64-bit x86 builds were shipping.

And don't think that the Hackintosh will save you. I don't expect Mac OS X 10.7 to ship with 32-bit support, aside from user-mode backwards-compatibility (although it's likely that it can be hacked to run on older 32-bit hardware, since it will without a doubt contain 32/64 universal binaries of pretty much the entire operating system for the sake of backwards compatibility.)

However, I highly doubt that any of the major open-source operating systems will be dropping 32-bit x86 support anything within the next 15 years. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the announcement that support for i386 branch is being dropped in Linux arrives sometimes after 2070, with NetBSD following suit sometime around 2100.

Compare that with Microsoft, who, as I said before, seems to be dropping 32-bit x86 as early as 2013.

Quick Note: Information about Aerial TV reception

2010-05-26T05:26:00.001-07:00

I was recently looking the 'Net over for information about receiving broadcast television, and the best type of aerial antenna to use. After a bit of searching, I found the information at ATV (Aerials and Television) to be quite in-depth on the matter, as well as full of rich British humor that I can't get enough of.

Although their information mainly caters to UK residents, such as the terminology used, the information on choosing an aerial antenna and how to place it, etc., will remain valid everywhere on Earth - the laws of physics do not observe your local laws, no matter how fucked up they might be.

"Name changing bollocks," I can't help but to laugh while I learn...

Why RuneScape's Graphics Suck

2010-04-20T00:04:00.003-07:00

If you ever wondered why RuneScape's graphics sucks, it's because it's graphics engine can easily be made to do this:

If you ever wondered why RuneScape sucks, it's because it's graphics engine can easily be made to do this:

Maybe There's Something Better Than The iPad After All

2010-04-11T08:40:00.001-07:00

Well, when everyone found out that the iPad was NOT going to be Mac OS X on a tablet, they were hugely disappointed. Hell, even Hitler was disappointed. Instead, they're given the same iPhone OS that on the iPod Touch and the, well, iPhone. But to us that were looking for OS X on a tablet, don't fret, it might be possible after all. A German consumer electronics start-up named Neofonie has announced a new tablet called the WePad.

And here's the bit that will really get your hopes up. This bad boy comes with an 11.6" display (1366x768), a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, GMA3150 graphics... wait, stop right there... An Intel Atom? But that's an x86 chip! And, earlier versions of this chip (N270, for example) has been known to run Mac OS X and Windows XP - The Acer Aspire One AOA150 can run Mac OS X and it has an Intel Atom N270 and the Intel GMA950 GPU, a predecessor to the GMA 3150. Well, back to the specs... It also features a built-in webcam, two USB ports, a SD card slot, integrated 3G, and a a battery that'll last long enough to watch Stephen King's The Stand without interruption - A full six hours.

Aside from that, the tablet runs Google's Android operating system, which has popularity as the OS of the HTC Hero, the Motorola Droid, the Samsung Galaxy, and even Google's own Nexus One. The WePad has integrated stereo speakers, 16GB of flash memory built-in with an optional upgrade to 32GB, a SIM card slot, access to Google's Android Market and the WePad App Store, and the major deal-breaker, full Flash Player and Adobe AIR support, bringing thousands of popular Flash web apps and games to the WePad - a big plus for, e.g. Facebook users that play FarmVille, who found out that they can't tend their farms from the iPad due to a lack of Flash.

Since this tablet is not too far off from a netbook, in terms of hardware, it is more than definite that the OSx86 crew will get Mac OS X running on this tablet, possibly even make Hitler happy. If Mac OS X isn't your thing, well, I can't see any reason why you couldn't run Windows XP or Windows 7 on this thing - Especially with Microsoft's push of Windows 7's new Windows Touch APIs for tablet computing, which isn't actually anything new, since Windows 3.1 had an optional API, Windows for Pen Computing, as did other Windows releases.

Finally, remember, that the Android operating system uses the Linux kernel at it's very heart, and is more-or-less fully open source, so if this thing runs Android, you bet it'll run Linux like a dream.

Primary source: http://hothardware.com/News/Neofonie-WePad-Is-An-116-AndroidBased-iPad-Killer/

Upgrading the Pentium 4

2010-04-03T13:12:00.000-07:00

Well, here at whatever organization this is, we run on a slim technology budget. To be more forthcoming, we get $0 plus whatever spare equipment we can dumpster-dive for.

So I decided to see how far I can upgrade my desktop. It's my newest machine and it's still too old to be useful. It's an HP dc5000 SFF, and it has an Intel Pentium 4-HTT Processor @ 2.8GHz. This rig is old, so it has a Socket 478 processor.

For what Google tells me, I can try to get a slightly faster Pentium 4. Like that's going to boost my PassMark scores much. But wait, what's this?

A Core 2 Duo that will run in my machine?

I don't know what to make of this, but according to the product listing, and the photography, this appears to be a Core 2 Duo that I can drop in a Socket 478 motherboard, although it costs almost the price of a good low-range PC.

But at the same time, then my desktop would perform about as well as a good low-range PC. Except the graphics, of course, there's no real fix for the onboard Intel 865 chipset. There's only PCI slots, and my PCI GeForce 2 MX 400 isn't going to help.

Blizzard and the iMac G3

2010-03-23T15:18:00.001-07:00

I managed some time ago to get a iMac G3 Rev. B machine from my neighbor, who was simply going to junk the machine. I thought that was a horrid idea, so I took it off their hands.

After getting the machine, deciding what to do with it was a little tricky. It's more than a decade old. It has less than 2.5% 2010-era RAM. It's processor runs about 1.25% the speed of a modern processor. And I don't mean processor clock speed. Let me explain this:

The iMac processor is a 233MHz PowerPC 750 (a G3). This processor is about 10% the computational throughput of a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 HT (before "HyperThreading technology" was initialized as HTT). Same P4 chip is about 10% the computational throughput of a modern Core i7 processor, ergo, the iMac is 1/100th the speed of today's machines

The machine, when I got it, only had one upgrade from stock. It had an additional 32MB RAM card installed, which I replaced with a 256MB PC133 card. too bad only 128MB is detected, leading to a current usable total of 160MB. The machine is meant for PC66 RAM, which may explain the partial RAM incompatibility.

Now, I tried to install Mac OS X 10.1 a few months ago. As I had lost my Diablo II CDs, I instead gave Blizzard my CD-Key to enable digital downloads for that title. After downloading the D2 netinstall for Mac, I was prompted by the Installer to run 10.2. Ok, no big deal.

Wait a few months, decide to try again, and now I find out that Blizzard updated their netinstalls for their digital downloads. Now, the bare minimum is 10.3.9 (as their installer depends on libstdc++.6.dylib). The games themselves likely have much lower requirements, but the installer went from minimum of 10.2 to 10.3.9 in just a few months.

According to this article on Low End Mac, I should stick to Mac OS X 10.2.8 (what I have now). But this means no Blizzard games! I can easily pirate the game .iso discs, but I want to try to do this 100% legal.

Currently, I'm burning Mac OS X 10.3 CDs, and in a little while, I'll upgrade to 10.3.9, and see if the Blizzard Downloader will work then.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Beta

2010-03-07T12:39:00.000-08:00

So, a couple of days ago, I received an invite to the StarCraft II Beta. I thought the whole thing might be fake, but the email said that I would have StarCraft II on my Battle.net page.

So, I go to check my Battle.net account, and sure enough, I'm invited.

1943 Walking Liberty Silver Half-Dollar

2010-03-01T09:03:00.000-08:00

I was recently sorting amongst some materials in my home, and I came across this coin: A 1943 Walking Liberty silver half-dollar.

For your enjoyment, here are some high-res scans.

Head side:

Tails side:

Microkernels vs. Monolitic kernels - What's The Difference?

2010-02-28T06:57:00.000-08:00

I was recently asked to explain the differences between a monolithic kernel and a microkernel. Here I will discuss the pros and cons of both. I neither advocate one or the other, so those of you who are looking for support in your holy war (yes, that means you, Andrew Tanenbaum).

To start things off, let's discuss monolithic kernels.

A monolithic kernel is the traditional kernel of the days of ole. All the drivers and system services exist in one big binary blob, sharing code and data.

Now, the pros and cons of this are:

Pros: Code runs much faster. Most, if not all, system services run in kernel mode, so there is no need to perform costly context switches between user mode and kernel mode. Only two context switches are needed for most syscalls, one from user to kernel on invocation of the syscall, and another context switch from kernel mode back to user mode on syscall return.
Cons: Bugs in the kernel have a high chance of bringing the entire system down. Also, some kernels must be recompiled to add or remove drivers.

Common systems with a monolithic kernel would be Linux and FreeBSD. Note, however, that more specifically, these systems have a modular kernel, that is, a monolithic kernel that supports having parts of it loaded sometime after kernel boot, and possibly also removed as well. Also note that it is also possible to configure the Linux and FreeBSD kernels to be fully monolithic, without module support.

Microkernels, on the other hand, only have a very small portion of their code that runs in kernel mode, that is, has unfettered access to the full system hardware. For the most part, the portion that runs in kernel mode is a mere message marshalling system. All other system services, such as the filesystem, network stack, tty driver, etc., all run as user mode daemons known as "servers".

The pros and cons of this approach is this:

Pros: If a bug crops up in a system service, and crashes that service, it is very unlikely that the system will crash with it. Usually, the system will merely restart the service. Depending on the system, there might be slight side effects from the service crash. For example, if the network stack crashes, applications might find all of a sudden that their socket handles are all now invalid. Sometimes, this can be made transparent to the applications, e.g. if the filesystem driver crashes, the libc could transparently detect this and reopen all file handles that were made invalid in the crash. Also, adding new drivers and system services to the system is as simple as starting the respective servers for them.
Cons: Your system runs terribly slower than a monolithic kernel. A write() syscall to a tty, for example, will go to the filesystem driver first (as /dev/tty is filesystem), and then the file system driver would then call upon the teletype driver, and so on and so forth. It may take hundreds, if not thousands of messages to complete one traditional syscall, each message requiring two context switches each, one to kernel mode and one back, and each context switch may take thousands of CPU cycles to complete.

Common examples of microkernel-based operating systems include QNX and Minix. Note that QNX's microkernel architecture is advanced enough to allow network-transparent message passing - allowing you to, for example, directly access hardware in another machine as if the hardware was in your own, much akin to Plan 9.

In short, each type of kernel has it's advantages and drawbacks. I am not trying to say that one is better than the other, or anything like that, but each one has it's merits, and I leave it up to the reader to determine which is better for any given situation.

FreeBASIC on FreeBSD

2010-02-05T11:16:00.001-08:00

A few days ago, I built a full installable package of FreeBASIC, for FreeBSD 8.x. The pacakge includes a FreeBSD-tailored install.sh, modified from the Linux one.

It seems to work good, except I forgot to add in the graphics library!

Either way, you can read about it, and find download link at http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15046

PsyMP3 1.2-RELEASE is, well… released!

2010-01-29T16:51:00.001-08:00

I am proud to announce that I have finally gotten the PsyMP3 codebase to a point where I am proud to announce a new stable release that is suitable for mass consumption.

You can get it at the PsyMP3 project page, always at http://code.google.com/p/psymp3/.

Also, I’ve decided to use a new high-color icon. While the classic Windows 3.1-esque icon is nice and familiar, it’s not in modern style and I’ve decided to upgrade to a new icon.

Here’s what the new icon looks like:

Kudos to Agamemnus of Freenode’s ##freebasic for making the icon

Devices in Review: Augen Eclipse 2GB

2010-01-27T18:41:00.001-08:00

Today, I was given a new mp3 player made by a company right here in Florida, called Augen. This device is called the Eclipse, and it is rather much a simple, cheap ho-hum Chinese-build player with Chinese-coded firmware.

This is an cheap Chinese knock-off of the iPod Nano with a video camera, circa 2009.

The first thing I did when I first got the Eclipse is tried out it’s FM radio. After a few minutes figuring out the controls, I managed to get it to work. The control set is rather annoying, and leave a lot to be desired, and can be at times be difficult to use.

As for the FM radio, it’s piss-poor. I was only able to pick up 4 stations which I could understand the sound being broadcast, and only one station out of all those being broadcast in my area was even coming in clear as day. I get better reception with a cheap 50¢ micro FM radio.

The device does support displaying text files stored in it’s memory, but the feature is an utter joke. It does not understand newlines, nor does it know how to intelligently wrap text. Also, the text display is a monospaced, bitmap font that is very similar to the classic Courier font. Worse yet, it only has a text display that is 15 characters wide. If you are imagining this in your head, this must look rather hideous.

A close-up of the screen, giving you an idea of how the interface looks. That spectrum analyzer display is fake as fuck.

The Eclipse has the capability of playing back your common audio formats, such as Windows WAVE format, ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio (commonly known as MP3) and Windows Media Audio.

But what’s this? Look closer at this icon.

No, you’re not misreading that, that plainly does say “OGG”. In the cheapest and utter shittiest of mp3 players, the Augen Eclipse boasts support for the patent-free Ogg Vorbis format.

For video, this device supports the wholly shitty AMV video format. AMV is a cheap and overly simple audio/video format, designed to be decoded by firmware for S1 MP3 players, which are powered by an 8-bit Zilog Z80-compatible processor.

AMV is basically 12 or 16 FPS Motion JPEG video with a fixed quantitizer and a crappy IMA ADPCM variant for audio.

Well, that it. If you want to find more information on this device, I can’t help you. The company that makes this thing doesn’t even have an email address.

My rating: 4.1 / 10 (and 2.5 of that is purely because it supports Ogg Vorbis)

The Porn Of PETA

2010-01-27T17:49:00.001-08:00

It’s time again for PETA’s “State Of The Union Undress”! That’s right, our female narrator will strip down to nothing, leaving both the hoo-hoo and the ta-tas exposed bare for all to see, all in the name of animal rights!

Check out the video at http://www.peta.org/feat/stateoftheunion10/

And the embedded version below:

PETA's 2010 State of the Union Undress

Of Window Managers…

2010-01-21T21:59:00.001-08:00

I have always been a nomad, going from window manager to window manager, across systems and networks, from the classics, such as twm, fvwm, mwm, to more modern and contemporary WMs such as Enlightenment, KWin, Metacity, IceWM, Fluxbox, BlackBox, Openbox, AfterStep, Ion (and Ion 2 and Ion 3), etc., and I have not found a WM that works quite like what I want without all the extras that I didn’t.

Until matwm.

I know this Belgian guy names Mattis that wrote a window manager named matwm. Originally, it was a fork of evilwm/yeahwm, but that didn’t last. Only one release was ever made, matwm-0.0.1. Enter matwm2. A from-scratch, brand new window manger that is EWMH-compatible and ICCCM-compatible.

For several months now, Mattis has been working hard now, refining matwm2 to a wonderful state. Only recently has he declared a 0.1, after almost 100 0.0.x releases, and even the 0.1 prereleases feel like a stable 1.0 release!

UPDATE! Screw what I said about prereleases, 0.1.0 stable has been cut out, and you can get the code from http://www.squidjam.com/matwm/.

It is known to work on the following OSes, and should work on far earlier releases than tested:

Linux 2.4 / glibc 2.3 or later on x86

Linux 2.6.27 / glibc 2.8 on PowerPC

FreeBSD 6.2 and later

NetBSD 5.0 and later

OpenBSD 3.6 and later

Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Unix-based Application version 5.2, 6.0, and later. Should work on earlier Interix 3.5. Unsure about 3.0 and earlier.

Minix 3.1.3

Solaris 10 (from the Solaris Express Developer Edition 09/07 DVD)

Since I took too much of your time with useless details above, here’s a video of a fat boy running into a fence and knocking it down:

MySpace purchases IMEEM

2009-12-11T19:58:00.001-08:00

On Tuesday, 8 December 2009, MySpace announced that it has completed a deal to buy off certain assets of online music service imeem, in an attempt to bolster the music offerings of the struggling social network site.

Former imeem logo, courtesy of Wikipedia

The deal was disappointingly valued at less than $1 million USD, according to someone close to the deal.

“MySpace Music and Imeem share a common vision and commitment to further enabling the socialization of content across the Web,” MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta said in a statement. “This deal will allow us to leverage Imeem’s industry leading technology and over time, meaningfully integrate their products into the MySpace Music experience.”

MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal, as well as Fox “News”.

MySpace is trying to change direction from longtime rival Facebook, by remaking itself into a destination for people to connect with friends over entertainment content, such as movies, music, and video games.

imeem was founded in 2003 by Dalton Caldwell (of VA Linux, currently Geeknet, Inc.) and Jan Jannink (fomerly of Napster), and many of the company’s core engineering team came from the original Napster file-sharing service.

In 2007, imeem became the first-ever online music site to secure licenses from all 4 U.S. major music labels to offer their music catalogues for free streaming and sharing on the web.

Sources:
Wall Street Journal – MySpace Buys Imeem Music Service
Wikpedia – imeem

Windows Update Has Too Many Updates

2009-12-05T14:03:00.001-08:00

Well, I decided to take a look at just how many different updates have been installed on my Acer Aspire One netbook since I first got it on January 7th. So, I went and checked the “Update History” on the Windows Update site, and I notice that I have installed, in just 11 months, 152 updates.

If Microsoft had actually gotten their shit straight the first time, maybe all these updates wouldn’t have been needed.

Introducing Google's New Music Search

2009-10-31T17:56:00.000-07:00

On October 29, 2009, Google rolled out a new feature to their current web search technology - music search.

To take advantage of this new feature, all you have to do is type in the name of a song; this sometimes is not enough if the song title is a common word or set of words; in this case, add the name of the artist.

For example, let's say you want to hear the song Ironic by Alanis Morissette.

First, go to Google. Since the name of the song is a dictionary word, the title by itself will not be treated as a song: You need to include the name of the artist as well.

Search for "Alanis Morissette - Ironic". (For the truly lazy, this link will do the search for you)

Do you see the little blue play button? Good! Click it and the song will play!

But after the first play of the song, you only get 30-second previews after that. iLike, Google's partner in this music search has this to say:

How come when I play music from Google search it doesn't always play the full song?

For most songs, the first time you play the song, it will play in full, but if you play the same song again, it will subsequently play it as a 0:30 second sample clip. If you want to hear the full song many times, we encourage you to purchase the MP3 using the convenient "Buy" link.

For some songs, due to our contracts with record labels, we can only play them as 0:30 second clips for now.

Well, now you have it. But there is a way around this: Use imeem! If you see a little iMeem link available, you can hear the full-length song as many times as you want - the only catch is that you need a (free) imeem account.

SCO Finally Gives McBride The Boot

2009-10-20T01:24:00.000-07:00

After many years of raping and pillaging so many companies, under their laughably false claims that Linux contained code stolen from SCO UNIX and given by IBM, SCO has finally seen the light and fired their shit-spewing leader, Darl McBride, before the county water department starting billing them extra for the high volume of McBride's total bullshit that kept clogging the county sewers.

Darl McBride, as seen here in this 2004 edition of Fortune, has cursed the Linux kernel and community for years, claiming up and down that Linux contains stolen code from his company's UNIX operating system, to the point he was forcing corporations to buy IP indemnity licenses - basically an agreement that SCO won't assrape them which wasn't even worth the paper it was printed on - or he would sue - which is what he did to IBM and DaimlerChrysler.

Well, SCO bit off more than they could chew, and McBride drove the company into the depths of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. However, the other employees could only take so much of his utter bullshit, so they hired this guy to have him terminated:

I hope that criminal charges come up against Darl McBride, and that he ends up being put in prison, where he'll do good as Bubba's "McBride".

Microsoft Fucks Over XP Users

2009-09-15T20:45:00.001-07:00

Well, no surprise this time, but Microsoft has managed to fuck over a significant portion of the userbase for their Windows operating system. Three vulnerabilities in Windows Vista and Windows 2008 were fixed in a patch released by Microsoft on September 8th, but no such fix was provided for users of Windows XP or 2000.

While only two of the three holes affect XP and 2000 (and go to show just how much swiss cheese Vista really is), Microsoft has stated that they can't be fucked to plug the holes.

In a webcast release September 9th, which is probably edited to include 10% more lies, Microsoft insecurity program manager Adrian Stone, and his fellow ass pirate and program manager Jerry Bryant, stated that the code that they blatantly ripped off from BSD is around 15 years old, and that they were too lazy to bother fixing the code, thus users of Windows XP and 2000 were shit out of luck. (Webcast transcript here)

Microsoft's pitifully lame excuse as to why they weren't patching Windows XP was this: "By default, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 do not have a listening service configured in the client firewall and are therefore not affected by this vulnerability," the bastards said. "Windows XP SP2 and later operating systems include a stateful host firewall that provides protection for computers against incoming traffic from the Internet or from neighboring network devices on a private network."

To make matters worse, Microsoft even tried to downplay the impact of their swiss cheese security. Their claim is that the attack would just cause a machine to stop responding because the network stack would suck RAM like there's no tomorrow, and that the attack would require that someone send specially crafted TCP packets (probably with a payload of Viagra spam) in a sustained mass flood, much akin to the the flood of shit that spews from Steve Ballmer's mouth every time it opens, and that the machine would return to normal once the attack stopped.

Ironically, Microsoft tried to pull the same shit back on 2003 in regards to Windows NT 4.0. They argued that they fucked up the code for Windows 2000 and later too badly for any fix to be backported to Windows NT 4.0.

How To Call Landlines With VoIP... And Not Pay For It

2009-08-31T23:23:00.000-07:00

Update: 2009-11-13

Yesterday (2009-11-12), Google acquired Gizmo5. Downsides: The bit about configuring a Google Voice number below is no longer possible (this configuration part is completely gone), and more importantly, Google has closed Gizmo5 account sign-ups for now.

Read more at Google's Gizmo5 page at http://www.google.com/gizmo5/, and you can read the official Google Voice blog post at http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/google-welcomes-gizmo5.html.

Original blog post, unmodified, is as follows:

Well, I hate paying for phone service, as does everyone else. For the longest time, my only phone was a shitty TracFone, and for $20/month, I'd get a whopping 60 minutes of talk time.

How fucking impressive.

The worst part was that SMS is also expensive, costing 0.3 minutes of talk time per message sent or received, coming to about 3 minutes of talk time for every 10 messages in and out.

Until I found Google Voice.

Google Voice was originally something I used to replace the SMS on my phone, as you get unlimited and free SMS to any phone in the US and Canada. However, this did not solve the phone issue, as Google Voice requires a real phone to use the service.

Well, one day, I got bored, and decided to see if I could use my Gizmo SIP number with Google Voice. To my utter amazement, it works, and since then, I have had nothing but free, FREE, unlimited calling from and to any landline in the US and Canada, using a simple VoIP app.

You want to do this? You want to tell your phone company to take a hike?

Read this article.

There's one thing that's not mentioned in that article. Read that article before you continue below.

Read the article? Good. Now, you may notice that it says that to PLACE calls, you have to use the Google Voice web page, and have Google Voice call your Gizmo.

Not anymore. Gizmo5 now supports calling though Google Voice in the same free manner, directly from Gizmo5. You place a call from within Gizmo5 as if you had paid for Gizmo5 call-out credit.

But to do this, you need to change some account settings.

There should be a new option there, labeled "Google Voice", and should look like this:

Click the "ON" radio button, type in your Google Voice number, and that's it! You no longer need to go to the Google Voice site to call out using Google Voice.

The idiocy of YouTube

2009-06-24T01:04:00.001-07:00

When I saw this video, I fucking lul'd so hard.

This kid is retarded, and yet another example why sex education needs to emphasize on "not fucking your brothers and sisters" cause this kid is obviously the result of incest.

Death To Cloud Computing, And Why Gmail's IMAP Access Sucks

2009-06-08T11:21:00.000-07:00

NOTE: I did not finish this post, I decided to post it as-is two months later.

First of all, let me start this off with a very clear message: FUCK CLOUD COMPUTING.

While, yes, I'll admit I really have no idea what this so-called "cloud computing" is, it sounds like a load of useless shit to me.

A good friend of mine pointed me at a cloud computing project called Eucalyptus (http://eucalyptus.com/), which is an open-source cloud computing implementation, which supports the Amazon S3 and EC2 APIs. They also have a public-access cloud setup for people to demo the software in action (presumably for users like me that lack the infrastructure to host my own cloud). So I go and setup a new account, download Amazon's EC2 API tools, and the X.509 certificates I need for the cloud.

OK, let do this thing... not so fast!

They give you an automagical shell script to setup your environment variables (aside from EC2_HOME; this is for the EC2 tools themselves, pointing the directory they are installed in, and this is an aesthetic choice, left for the user to decide when she installs). However, (and this is my fault for using Micro$hit WinDOS) the script is only of use to UNIX users, so you have to manually set your environment variables (although having the script on hand will prove useful). Now, I setup all the environment variables, following the UNIX shell script as a guide.

The shell script looks something like this:

EUCA_KEY_DIR=$(dirname $(readlink -f ${BASH_SOURCE}))

export S3_URL=http://128.111.45.118:8773/services/Walrus

export EC2_URL=http://128.111.45.118:8773/services/Eucalyptus

export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=${EUCA_KEY_DIR}/euca2-segin-xxxxxxxx-pk.pem

export EC2_CERT=${EUCA_KEY_DIR}/euca2-segin-xxxxxxxx-cert.pem

export EUCALYPTUS_CERT=${EUCA_KEY_DIR}/cloud-cert.pem

export EC2_ACCESS_KEY='2UC-AbUnChOfRaNdOmNeSs-A'

export EC2_SECRET_KEY='SoMeMoRe_RaNdOmChArAcTeRs_FoRaCrYpToChAlLeNgE'

alias ec2-bundle-image="ec2-bundle-image --cert ${EC2_CERT} --privatekey ${EC2_P

RIVATE_KEY} --user 000XXXXXXXXX --ec2cert ${EUCALYPTUS_CERT}"

alias ec2-upload-bundle="ec2-upload-bundle -a ${EC2_ACCESS_KEY} -s ${EC2_SECRET_

KEY} --url ${S3_URL} --ec2cert ${EUCALYPTUS_CERT}"

Roughly translated into NT cmd.exe syntax, you get this (computing the top line by hand)

set EUCA_KEY_DIR=C:\Documents and Settings\Segin\.ec2

set S3_URL=http://128.111.45.118:8773/services/Walrus

set EC2_URL=http://128.111.45.118:8773/services/Eucalyptus

set EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=%EUCA_KEY_DIR%\euca2-segin-xxxxxxxx-pk.pem

set EC2_CERT=%EUCA_KEY_DIR%\euca2-segin-xxxxxxxx-cert.pm

set EUCALYPTUS_CERT=%EUCA_KEY_DIR%\cloud-cert.pem

set EC2_ACCESS_KEY=2UC-AbUnChOfRaNdOmNeSs-A

set EC2_SECRET_KEY=SoMeMoRe_RaNdOmChArAcTeRs_FoRaCrYpToChAlLeNgE

All right! So you should be set. Notice that in the above blocks, all cryptographic keys and IDs were removed, so if you try to copy and paste from the code abone, it will not work as-is. Fill in your own (real) details.

Now, let it be known that, yes, I did RTFM. I made sure I had both the Amazon and Eucalyptus documentation open in Chrome throughout the experience.

So, I finally get the the magical bit, where they tell me to me

Intel's Laptop Gaming SDK Sucks

2009-06-08T11:16:00.000-07:00

Well, fuck me.

I have an Acer Aspire One, and I decide I want to play Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock on it. A quick search of Google tells me that, before I get started, I am going to need to use 3DAnalyze. It also reveals YouTube video of it working on this very laptop.

Well, fuck, it doesn't seem that hard. All I have to do is set "Emulate Hardware TnL", and set a VendorID and ProductID to that of a nVidia card (and the 3DAnalyse window gives some ID values for nVidia cards to use, making that non-trivial).

Sure, whatever, should work. It works for other people, should work for me. Do exactly what they do, it should work.

Right, nothing in life is ever that simple.

So I go start up 3DAnalyse, I set the options, and start the game. But, when you go to actually

But why? It's a pretty random crash, and there seems to be no documented cases of this bug. Worse off, most gamers that have computer expertise, that expertise is usually in hardware, and some basic Windows troubleshooting. Sadly, the only way I was even able to pinpoint the problem is because I know the inner workings of software.

I can start the game, get to the main menu, set settings, etc., but anything that tries to show shiny 3D graphics causes a crash in the Intel Laptop Gaming SDK DLL (IntelLaptopGaming.dll), which sucks ass. Particularly, go to Quickplay, select a difficulty (any will do), select a song (any will do), and wait on the "Loading" screen. When it's done loading, say "Hello, desktop!" as the game crashes and dies.

I have the GNU debugger setup as my system debugger. GDB shows that the crash happens in the Intel DLL, about 2-3 functions deep from GH3.exe. What is going on, I can't tell, due to the black-box nature of commercial software.

To date, I have no idea what's wrong.

If it matters, I am running Windows XP Home Edition, Service Pack 3.

Terminator: Salvation - The Game - Gameplay Video Trailer

2009-05-06T02:31:00.001-07:00

Morality Subverted

2009-03-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

I obviously have no idea how to title a blog post, but, whatever. I start here by typing away unimaginativly on my keyboard, listing to the like of Avenged Sevenfold and 30 Seconds To Mars. I feel pathetic, useless, and stupid. I look around me, there is a friend of mine, 20 or 21 or so, just opening and closing his clamshell mobile. There's a fat woman in the lounge chair that could be the cryptkeeper, and is utterly and totally blind to how the real world works (or rather, how it has worked since the 1980s). There is an old guy sitting next to me, in his mid 50s. These three people talk, nearly oblivious to my presence. On top of that, the woman is the mother of the 50-something man sitting next to me, and he is the father of my friend, who is sitting by the window.

I am bored. I want to leave, go somewhere, and shoot myself. My laptop's battery is almost dead, the TV is set to the TV Guide Channel, with an never-ending scrolling TV guide rolling along the bottom of the screen.

Friday Night Lock-In

2008-09-22T09:35:00.001-07:00

This image is from a school event held Friday September 19, 2008.
My school's theater department held a little party in the school auditorium after school
where we sat around for 6 hours and played Rock Band (you see me there in the red striped polo shirt with the RB guitar controller). I have to say it, but I am addicted to this game as if it were crack cocaine. Yes, it is that addicting.

Note: However, they had me do the vocals to "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race". Please, pity me.

Frets on Fire and OpenGH...

2008-01-18T08:46:00.001-08:00

I have recently had the itch to get an open-source Guitar Hero clone for the PC. However, as I had no Internet connection at the time, I had no idea that Frets on Fire existed, so I decided to create my own open source clone, called OpenGH. As it sits, OpenGH is a pre-alpha-non-working technical demo, however, the interface is there and such as displaying song info and getting joystick input all works. It is written in FreeBASIC and uses the built-in graphics library so that the Linux framebuffer is supported at no expense :)

Post unfinished, more to come...

Elightenment for speed? Not really!

2007-11-15T04:12:00.001-08:00

I have, in the past, used KDE 3.5 on a AMD K6-2 machine at 420MHz. The system has 256MB of RAM and was my DVR. It had an original ATI All-In-Wonder for video and TV, and a 20GB HD. KDE would start in less time with more features enabled than on most modern machines. This was usually around... 20 seconds.

It should be noted that I used NetBSD as my core OS, though I don't think that the difference should make a difference. If Linux is too slow or the GNU libc is too slow to facilitate starting KDE from "startx" to fully loaded in 20 seconds, then we got a serious problem.

IRC Shannigans

2007-10-26T04:23:00.001-07:00

<cirkit> lmao

<segin> lol i know

<segin> cirkit: did you get your dose /. today?

<cirkit> im drunk

Where is your god now?

2007-01-07T13:14:00.001-08:00

Burger King's stupidest marketing ploy yet: Video games featuring their main advertisement character -- the King.

The stupidity of such a marketing ploy is obvious. Burger King is desperate, and they seek to attack us from otherwise untouched marketing ground potential -- video games.

Wal-Mart has crap for security.

2007-01-07T13:11:00.001-08:00

I have successfully managed to steal 2 512MB USB 2.0 flash drives from the local Wal-Mart "superstore". The fuckers are generic as hell, though. Most flash drives come inm a completely-plastic package, while this was in a cardboard back with a plastic bubble package (think Hot Wheels cars in their package, except the car is a USB drive). It's identifiable with P/N:8PWM040001C-R00 on the reverse side.

These things has no manufacturer info save that a company mnamed "CRS" made the drive or it's controller. The only identifying string is "JET007 DISK 2.0 USB Device".

This thing is fucking cheap. I don't know why I even stole it, aside from I could use 512MB of storage apiece.

Intresting Javascript snipplet

2006-11-08T01:48:00.000-08:00

Copy and paste this bit of JavaScript directly into the Address/Navigation bar of your browser:

javascript:{var R=0, x1=.1, y1=.05, x2=.25, y2=.24, x3=1.6, y3=.24, x4=300, y4=200, x5=300, y5=200, I=document.getElementsByTagName("img"), L=I.length; setInterval(function (){for(var i=0; i-L; i++){var S=I[ i ].style; S.position='absolute'; S.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+"px"; S.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+"px"}R++},5); void(0)}

or click here to try it on this page.

It's best to try this in Opera 9.

Minature media player has crap for battery life

2006-10-20T17:41:00.000-07:00

This cheap little 128MB mp3 player I got recently (comes with a FREE! cracked LCD screen) fails it at battery life. How much battery life do I usually get out of it? About 30 minutes (on cheap batteries, though), and even with shitty dry-cell batteries, that's damn low. Most batteries should provide about 8-12 hours of play time, and a nice rechargeable battery should approach 15 hours.

Although I haven't mentioned it, the mp3 player uses 1 AAA sized battery.

It supports failure. I can't store my /b/ folder on it, it got ate. Why? Dunno, maybe it WANTED to eat my /b/ folder.

Or maybe it was just FAPPING.

The Great Habbo Raid Video Series

2006-09-30T00:37:00.000-07:00

So, I've been on YouTube looking for videos on the Habbo raids. I found a series of videos that just kicks ass, so I'll post them below.

The great Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4 (final part):

Ship's Closed (omake):

War on Drugs? Try War of Stupidity!

2006-09-28T14:49:00.000-07:00

The following is quoted verbatim from http://www.serendipity.li/wod.html

How long has there been a "War on Drugs"? Seems forever. (It was announced by Richard Nixon in 1971, but goes back millennia, as we saw above.) And year after year, it just gets crazier and crazier, ruins more and more lives, and drives the U.S. further into the pit of social disaster. How is it possible that this insanity persists (even though intelligent and rational people have been pointing out for many years how crazy and evil it is)? Read this page (and page two) for an understanding of what lies behind this monstrosity.

America, with less than 5 percent of the world population, has a quarter of the world's prisoners. There are six times as many Americans behind bars as are imprisoned in the 12 countries that make up the entire European Union, even though those countries have 100 million more citizens than the United States. Our jails and prisons have become the 51st state, with a greater combined population than Alaska, North Dakota and South Dakota. — Editorial, San Jose Mercury News, 1999-12-31.

In August [2000], the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that the number of men and women behind bars in the U.S. at the end of 1999 exceeded two million and the rate of incarceration had reached 690 inmates per 100,000 residents — a rate Human Rights Watch believed to be the highest in the world (with the exception of Rwanda). ... The unrelenting war on drugs continued to pull hundreds of thousands of drug offenders into the criminal justice system: 1,559,100 people were arrested on drug charges in 1998; approximately 450,000 drug offenders were confined in jails and prisons. According to the Department of Justice, 107,000 people were sent to state prison on drug charges in 1998, representing 30.8 percent of all new state admissions. Drug offenders constituted 57.8 percent of all federal inmates. — Human Rights Watch World Report 2001: United States

At this time the Gulag Archipelago, the scattered islands of prisons in which hundreds of thousands of non-violent people are locked away for half their lives for their opposition to the disgraceful and immoral policies of a tyrannical and dictatorial state, is not in Russia, rather it is in the United States of America. This is a crime against humanity by which the government of the United States, which trumpets itself as a defender of liberty and democracy, makes itself into an object of contempt in the eyes of the world.

MSN Conversations Part 1

2006-09-08T20:03:00.001-07:00

[22:10:03] matman: probally its way too expensive for what it is but it are great coffee
[22:10:25] matman: the good thing is i didnt pay for it
[22:10:53] matman: and still some poor nigger kids in africa now are rich cause of it
...
[22:12:14] matman: i think i got better things to do then chat on them MSN
[22:12:20] matman: he gots lots of weed
[22:12:45] matman: hes dad is a real gipsy with a trailer and lots of weed
...
[22:39:54] matman: i once almost fell out of my window when i peed trough it when i was drunk
[22:40:05] matman: thats why i dont pee there anymore
[22:40:10] matman: id fall 20 meters
[22:40:31] matman: hm maybe only 15 or so
[22:40:38] matman: duno how high my house is
[22:40:53] Lord Segin the Hacker: more like 15 _feet_.
...
[22:46:05] Lord Segin the Hacker: so you pee on your kitchen roof?
[22:46:21] matman: no theres some thing to catch rain under it
[22:46:27] Lord Segin the Hacker: it's called a gutter.
...
[22:47:06] matman: and can be get out with a manual pump down here
[22:47:22] matman: so my pee can be reused if needed
...
[22:55:05] matman: i am smoking cigars that taste like coconuts and other stuff
[22:55:40] matman: i been smoking weird things today
[22:55:53] Lord Segin the Hacker: like what, some guys pole?
[22:56:01] Lord Segin the Hacker: just kidding
[22:56:27] matman: hops, aplle tobaco, spanish filter cigarettes, them coconut cigars
[22:56:40] Lord Segin the Hacker: you've been _smoking_ hops?
[22:56:46] Lord Segin the Hacker: How do you do that?!
[22:56:46] matman: yep
[22:57:36] matman: dry them egg shaped things on the plant, get teh yellow powder out and roll it in a joint
[22:57:55] matman: it makes you slightly high and euphoric for a short time
[22:58:10] matman: its quite subtle but realy nice
[22:59:21] matman: or you can cook them filter the stuff, vaporize all the water and smoke the sticky brown leftovers
[22:59:28] matman: but dunno if it really works
[22:59:57] matman: only did it once and i didnt feel really much but i was high and drunk already
...
[23:01:40] matman: i tend to use my kitchen as a drug lab
...
[23:07:02] matman: i use some device my mom uses for grinding herbs for teh food as a grinder for weed
[23:07:19] matman: thats one of them things why my mom gets stoned every now and then
[23:08:09] matman: my mom even got stoned from 2nd hand smoke once
[23:08:51] matman: i smoked for like 10euros of weed in my living room in one joint
[23:09:17] matman: and after a while my mom wondered why she got that dizzy
[23:10:00] matman: i puked that day
[23:10:29] matman: only one of my friends was smoking from it too
[23:11:24] matman: it was really strong weed bough here in belguim
[23:11:38] matman: so very probally other drugs where on it
[23:12:00] Lord Segin the Hacker: *coughcrackcough*
[23:12:03] matman: they always put things like crack or dmt on weed here to make it addictive
[23:12:26] matman: if i buy weed in holland its really different
[23:12:47] matman: from belgian weed i even started hallucinating
[23:13:25] matman: a girl i know once was brought to them hospital after smoking weed with speed on it
[23:14:36] Lord Segin the Hacker: hmm
[23:14:46] matman: she was on some scouting camp
[23:14:49] Lord Segin the Hacker: I once smoked so much weed that like I wasn't high no more.
[23:15:31] matman: i smoked that much weed once i was looking for the toilet in tristans house on the couch in my room
[23:15:40] matman: i really believed i was in his house
[23:16:24] matman: and somehow i suddenly remembered i was in my room
[23:16:32] matman: i tried to stand up
[23:16:32] Lord Segin the Hacker: and peed out the window?
[23:16:57] matman: nah i didt even have to pee it afterwards
[23:17:07] Lord Segin the Hacker: probably pissed yourself.
[23:17:12] matman: i stood up and the normal world faded back in
[23:17:19] matman: nah i didnt
[23:17:44] matman: i suddenly remembered i just smoked weed in my room
[23:18:04] matman: and took a good look around
[23:18:11] matman: and realized i still was there
[23:18:53] matman: when i smoked them 10euro of weed in one joint me and my friend started moving our legs
[23:18:57] matman: and couldnt stop
[23:19:03] matman: for like half an hour
[23:20:03] matman: until some girl dont remember who sat on them after i asked to help stop my legs
[23:21:25] matman: i once found white powder wich looked like little crystals in my weed after i smoked all normal stuff
[23:21:38] matman: and them powder made me stoned too
[23:21:47] matman: it really looked like coke or so
[23:22:13] matman: maybe just stuff from the weed too
[23:22:30] matman: like teh stuff sticking too the bags usually but lots
[23:22:44] matman: and more shiny and transparent
[23:23:07] matman: it could have been coke
[23:23:39] matman: them guy who sold me it sometimes uses coke so it wouldnt be weird
[23:24:30] matman: some stupid kid actually but i asked someone to buy for me and he didnt find his dealer
[23:25:59] matman: that kid lost them damn good expensive bike friends of me stole
[23:27:13] matman: he had just put it outdoors in the middle of the city
[23:28:01] matman: if hed sold it he could even got a few hundred dollars
...
[23:32:05] matman: my sister says damn weird things when you wake her up
[23:32:28] matman: she just said eaawie ie or so
[23:32:34] Lord Segin the Hacker: quote them to me
[23:32:51] Lord Segin the Hacker: what are her name?
[23:33:04] matman: once she said like but mom didnt you gave me relatin didnt you write that on the board
[23:33:07] matman: jana
[23:33:12] Lord Segin the Hacker: hmm...
[23:33:21] matman: she even never took relatin
[23:33:29] matman: i tried it once, and it are sucks
[23:33:34] Lord Segin the Hacker: go up to her and say "konichi wa, jana-neechan"
[23:34:02] Lord Segin the Hacker: but you gotta pronounce it right
[23:34:15] matman: konichi wa i can pronounce
[23:34:20] matman: but whats neechan means
[23:34:41] Lord Segin the Hacker: neechan : older (nee) girl; sister (chan)
[23:34:54] Lord Segin the Hacker: it's a ae sounds..
[23:34:58] Lord Segin the Hacker: like hay
[23:35:12] Lord Segin the Hacker: it prnounce same way as nay
[23:35:16] matman: she knows what konii tsei wa means btw
[23:35:21] matman: i think so tho
[23:35:35] Lord Segin the Hacker: you knowwhat it are mean, though?
[23:35:50] matman: something like hi or good day
[23:35:57] Lord Segin the Hacker: it is "hello" in japanese
[23:35:59] matman: and harikato i know too
[23:36:07] Lord Segin the Hacker: ?
[23:36:11] matman: its goeiedag translated to duch
[23:36:14] Lord Segin the Hacker: ahh
[23:36:17] matman: harikato is like thanks
[23:36:28] matman: goeiedag is different then just hello
[23:36:28] Lord Segin the Hacker: it's arigatou
[23:36:32] matman: but about the same
[23:36:43] Lord Segin the Hacker: romanization is kinda hard to preform
[23:37:14] matman: i write how its written in them japanese to dutch book i have
[23:37:17] matman: somewhere
[23:37:38] matman: i once had a japanes gf
[23:37:42] matman: longg ago
[23:37:46] Lord Segin the Hacker: it are written that way to help for pronounce
[23:37:50] matman: but she whent to japan
[23:38:04] matman: but i didnt really care
[23:38:13] matman: i didnt like having a gf back then
[23:38:18] matman: i was like 10 or so
[23:39:28] matman: now i got a pic of my gf hanging behind my pc here
[23:39:50] matman: she gonna be back in about 10 days
[23:40:01] matman: i gona open some bottle of damn good wine then
[23:40:02] Lord Segin the Hacker: gonna fuck her?
[23:40:08] matman: that too
[23:40:11] matman: of course
[23:40:12] Lord Segin the Hacker: gimmie pics ^^
[23:40:40] matman: hmm damn then i heve to look for pics again
[23:41:18] Lord Segin the Hacker: well, hmm get more when she come back
[23:41:56] matman: i think she was on some pics i sent you recently

Segin's "xdcc send pr0n" saga, ch 4.

2006-08-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

So, out of sheer bordeom, I did another one.

[12:19:29] <segin> xdcc send pr0n
[12:19:29] <zolo> I'M NOT AN XDCC BOT FUCKER!!!
[12:19:30] <zolo> Im ignoring your dumb ass now.
[12:19:45] <segin> xdcc send pr0n plz

How to RTFM

2006-08-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

RTFM is a common IRC and chat term which means "Read The Fine Manual", with varations on the meaning of the "F". (most commonly it means "Fucking").

RTFM'ing is not hard. I shall detail the steps you must preform below.

1. Locate the fucking manual.
2. Read the fucking manual.

If this task is too difficult for you, please ask someone to hold your hand while you re-attempt the task.

Segin's "xdcc send pr0n" saga, ch. 1!

2006-08-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, Finally! qdb.us is back up and I finally have our original quote.

Here goes:

xdcc send pr0n

OH GOD

I KNEW IT

xdcc send pr0n plz

I AM NOT A FUCKING BOT

Segin's "xdcc send pr0n" saga, ch 3

2006-07-31T15:29:00.000-07:00

Ahh, no chapter one yet, qdb.us is still down.

But to kick things off anyways, here's the latest quote:
[18:20:51] <segin> xdcc send pr0n
[18:22:32] <ninjavsself> ninjavsself is sending pack #13 BigCocksXtreme 69 Anal Pounding FTW

IRC is fucked up.

2006-07-31T15:06:00.000-07:00

Why you should stay away from #sponge on Rizon...

[18:03:00] IgneousPrime [igneou@one.supreme.bukkake.plz] is now known as SuperMario

[18:03:09] OMG

[18:03:12] SUPERMARIO

[18:03:14] <@Ginnethon> lol

[18:03:19] JokerXgg [~jokerxgg@says.you.smell.bad] is now known as Luigi

[18:03:42] Query-Message from SuperMario

[18:03:49] WHEE

[18:03:51] LUIHI

[18:04:01] segin [segin@Rizon-54FEC721.tampabay.res.rr.com] is now known as Wario

[18:04:05] <+Wario> DIE!!!

[18:04:12] <%SuperMario> THE FUCK

[18:04:15] LUIGI

[18:04:24] MY GOD

[18:04:27] <+Micho523> FFT3dGPU where do i get that iggy

[18:04:29] SuperMario [igneou@one.supreme.bukkake.plz] is now known as CarlMarx

[18:04:36] <%CarlMarx> gimme a sec micho

[18:04:37] Luigi [~jokerxgg@says.you.smell.bad] is now known as JokerXgg

[18:04:50] <%CarlMarx> http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=89941

[18:05:06] CarlMarx [igneou@one.supreme.bukkake.plz] is now known as InvaderPrime

[18:05:22] <+Micho523> get newest ver right?

[18:05:28] <+Micho523> i hate manual installs.....

[18:05:34] Wario [segin@Rizon-54FEC721.tampabay.res.rr.com] is now known as CheGuevara

[18:05:39] <+CheGuevara> lol

[18:05:42] CheGuevara [segin@Rizon-54FEC721.tampabay.res.rr.com] is now known as segin

[18:05:53] [PRIVMSG >>> nickserv]: identify weed4.me

[18:06:05] InvaderPrime [igneou@one.supreme.bukkake.plz] is now known as Sexygurl91

[18:06:11] <%Sexygurl91> who wants piiccsss~~

[18:06:17] <+Micho523> oohmeee

[18:06:17] <+segin> ROFL

[18:06:25] <+Micho523> lol

[18:06:43] O.O

[18:06:58] Sexygurl91 [igneou@one.supreme.bukkake.plz] is now known as Sexygurl97

[18:07:00] <%Sexygurl97> here we go

[18:07:16] <%Sexygurl97> arent I smart, teehee

[18:07:45] OMG

[18:07:48] Hey there sexygurl

[18:07:50] ;-D

[18:07:58] <%Sexygurl97> hello! ^o^

[18:08:12] What u wearing

[18:08:13] :-D

[18:08:31] <%Sexygurl97> clothes! ^o^

[18:08:36] <%Sexygurl97> or am I

[18:08:38] <%Sexygurl97> teehee

[18:08:42] <%Sexygurl97> use your imagination big boi

[18:08:50] <+Micho523> ok

Segin's "xdcc send pr0n" series, vol 2.

2006-07-31T14:09:00.000-07:00

This is the first volume posted in chronological order, but not created in chronological order. Expect episode 1 when I get the quote back off QDB.

Here's the thing. I go to IRC channels on irc.rizon.org, and message people "xdcc send pr0n", after the popular way of downloading anime and manga (which is by messaging "xdcc send #", where pack-number is a number linked to a file, rwhich th bot sends to you via DCC).

Anyways, enjoy!

(by the way, all of these are from private messages, which my client makes to look like a normal channel conversation.)

[17:08:34] xdcc send pr0n
[17:08:48] ...
[17:09:01] i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am
[17:09:05] xdcc send pr0n plz
[17:10:01] i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am
[17:10:18] "a bot i am" you say? Well, where's the pr0n?
[17:11:01] ...
[17:11:01] i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am
[17:12:01] ...
[17:12:02] i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am
[17:13:01] ...
[17:13:02] i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am
[17:13:50] stfu.
[17:14:01] ...
[17:14:02] i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am
[17:14:08] SHUT THE FUCK UP DAMN!
[17:15:02] ...
[17:15:03] i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am not a bot i am

The gooberment's idioticy has no bounds.

2006-07-27T09:14:00.001-07:00

The gooberment has passed a law recently which makes images which are stylized as child pornography (but aren't actually child porn) illegal. They said that they are doing so "To protect childern everywhere". Yeah right, that;s the biggest load of crap I have ever heard. what this law bans is called "lolikon", which is Japanese-style drawings of the underage in explicit (or not so) sexual acts/positions. They aren't pictures of real people. Now, you might be wondering why Iam complaining about *this*, it's real simple: The gooberment is making *DRAWINGS* that look like child porn illegal. Fuck, the gooberment's logic is that if these people look at this crap, they automatically want to fuck kids. Oh my god, that is a load of horsecrap. Does that mean that everyone that buys porn wants to rape women? Should we make porn illegal outright now? Come on, there's got to be a limit as to how stupid the gooberment can be... err, I guess there isn't.

If you are wondering, I got a bit of my source from a 4chan post on /b/ (although I think this guy is nuts):

It's not that I would ever entertain the thought of doing anything with children. The biggest thrill of looking at lolicon stuff for me is that it reminds me of sexual fantasies I had when I was young. I mean, seriously, are you saying you never had "nasty" thoughts about the kids around you when you were young?

Isn't it natural to think of little girls as cute, delightful, pretty, etc? Don't those qualities carry a sexual nature about them? Isn't it possible to have sexual thoughts that include children without ever having an urge to actually do something sexual with kids? Does looking at pictures of adult women automatically make someone want to go out and rape a woman against her will?

I've had several relationships (including my current one) with women of legal age. I have no need to do anything sexual with a child and know that it wouldn't be very satisfying. Looking at drawn lolicon pictures and the fantasies involved seem to me like a nice temporary escape into my own childhood sexuality... reliving thoughts I had back then and adding upon them.

Do we automatically have to think of everyone who looks at lolicon the same way as we would a child rapist or pedophile? Can't someone play with fantasies without desiring to actualize them?

And now I'll go wait for the gooberment to ban computer monitors with built-in power cords.

Goatse is illegal, NOO!!!

2006-07-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

Those goberment hasshats up in Washington finally fucking did it. They made a tradition of the Internet illegal. Now, linking to pages such as Goatse and LemonParty.org without telling the reader that said site(s) contain obsene material is illegal. An excerpt from the bill (permalink: http://segin.no-ip.org/2252C.html):

(sorry if this looks like shit, I copy-pasted the HTML from my site's copy linked above)

SEC. 7. DECEPTION BY EMBEDDED WORDS OR IMAGES.

(a) In General- Chapter 110 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by inserting after section 225B the following:

`Sec. 2252C. Misleading words or digital images on the Internet

`(a) In General- Whoever knowingly embeds words or digital images into the source code of a website with the intent to deceive a person into viewing material constituting obscenity shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not less than 2 years nor more than 10 years.

`(b) Minors- Whoever knowingly embeds words or digital images into the source code of a website with the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material harmful to minors on the Internet shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not less than 5 years nor more than 20 years.

`(c) Construction- For the purposes of this section, a word or digital image that clearly indicates the sexual content of the site, such as `sex' or `porn', is not misleading.

`(d) Definitions- As used in this section--

`(1) the terms `material that is harmful to minors' and `sex' have the meaning given such terms in section 2252B; and

`(2) the term `source code' means the combination of text and other characters comprising the content, both viewable and nonviewable, of a web page, including any website publishing language, programming language, protocol or functional content, as well as any successor languages or protocols.'.

(b) Table of Sections- The table of sections for chapter 110 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by inserting after the item relating to section 2252B the following:

`2252C. Misleading words or digital images on the Internet.'.

Orignal blog post link: http://shii.wordpress.com/2006/07/26/goatse-now-illegal-in-the-united-states/

Sony Playstation 3 versus the Microshat Xbroke 360

2006-07-15T16:22:00.000-07:00

Ahh, the rich sweetness of another flame, another chance to just totally bitch at the world.

Or maybe to myself.

Anywho, let's get this show on the road! It's time for Segin's Blog of Rantings and Ravings!

Today, I slander the Microsoft XBox 360.

Now, the first thing you think about when you buy a new game system is "Does it have any good games out for it?", not "Will it catch my house on fire?". But that second question is what you are forced to ask yourself with the overheating Xbox 360. Of course, Microsoft still cannot make a decent product, and now our country is littered with game consoles whose poor design have costs many innocent (or maybe not) Americans their lives, or at least their houses, err, I mean, their trailers. Anyways, you're asking me, "Well, I'm going to go get the PlayStation 3! Hah!", and my reply to that is "Good choice.". Why? Because of 2 main reasons that stick out like an ugly, old, woman in a rave club: Number 1: Backwards compatability.
The Playstation 3 owners everywhere can enjoy all the classics fom the Playstation 2 and old Playstation right on their PS3, and even in true hi-definition (old PS1 games may be very pixelated). The number two reason is that the PS3 will ship from the factory with Linux preinstalled. Folks, this is not a rumor. It's straight from the horse's mouth (Sony). With the PS3, you will be able to enjoy many games that current Linux users enjoy, such as Quake 3, DOOM, Abuse, Enemy Terroritory, and some others. You can use console emulation programs such as VisualBoyAdvance, ZSNES, Snes9x, Mupen64, and iNES, allowing you to play virtually any game ever made on your Playstation 3. This feature is already enjoyed by owners of modded original Xboxes, but this is without mods, using programs that are designed to run on the PS3, because the PS3 runs Linux! And what of the XBox 360? Well, at least it makes a good toaster oven.

Ahh, another asshole.

2006-05-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

Today, we discuss another asshole. Gerald Lopes is the biggest idiotic moron in the JROTC program to date. He acts like I am a walking plauge! I hope this asshole get thrown in prison for being gay.

Republicans are Marxist bastards.

2006-05-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have read the biggest piece of bullshit, hyperlinked by this post's title (that means, click on the title at the top of this post to see what I am talking about).

Anyways, here's the email I sent to Shelly:

=============8<=================
No no no, you got it all wrong, George Bush is communist. He's with the oil companies, whose corporate headquarters are in countries full of... Arabs! That's right! George W. Bush is siding with them, and you are a naive idiot to think otherwise. He became President so that no one would question him in any wrongdoing, and guess what, IT'S WORKING. Just look how he sits all innocent, while his oil stock goes up with gas prices. Purely evil, I tell you. His best friend is probably Osama Bin Laden.

Now, back to this "Linux is evil" issue. It's a total crock of shit, and you know it. Linux wasn't created to take SHIT from anyone. It wasn't created to attack Windows (which was a horrible piece of 16-bit shit in 1991, with cooperative multitasking (which causes bad things to happen), whereas Linux has had pre-emptive multitasking and a modern 32-bit kernel and userspace since it's inception), it's original reason to exist was to provide a nice, free (as in freedom, not price) alternative to Minix. Not Windows, Not UNIX (which was owned by AT&T at that time), not anything else. Sure, you could get a free (as in freedom, not price) UNIX from the University of California's Computer Research center at Berkley for $800 dollars. It was called BSD -- the same BSD as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. But no, Linux wasn't created to attack Windows. The people that Linux was made for would rather die before using Windows.

You make idiotic claims that there is no anti-virus fron Norton. Actually, there is no Norton anymore. It's just a name used by Symantic, which bought out Norton, Inc. YEARS ago. There is anti-virus for Linux, made by Grisoft.

If Linux is so comunist, why will Sony ship it with their PlayStation 3? Why did NASA (a government orgnization) just spend some big bucks on a high preformance Linux cluster? Why? cause Windows is a inferior joke. It couldn't be clustered if you wanted to cluster it.

The entire idea of using Linux to beat Windows was created by IBM, Red Hat, Inc., Novell, and a few other companies. The creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, couldn't give a flying fuck if Linux was ever used by anyone. He honestly doesn't care. He doesn't care if Windows is number one -- Remember, Linux was technologically far superior to Windows from it's inception.

Thirdly you say there is no decent office suite for Linux -- I fail to find the lack of an offering from Microsoft a total lack thereof. Microsoft isn't the end-all be-all of the computer industry. Hell, all they are is a ad-hoc company that just steals shit from Apple all the time, in fact, they got sued in the 80's over that. There is a office suite for Linux, in fact, there is a good few of them. OpenOffice is totally free, and can read Microsoft Office documents with ease. If you have KDE, you can use KOffice, and Sun offers their StarOffice product for Linux as well.

Fourth, you claim that there is no Frontpage. Get over it. If you can't make HTML code by hand, what the fuck good are you? I'll tell you: You are as worthy as a web designer as you claim the Democrats are. (My political stance is Independent, I refuse to take sides). Either learn HTML by hand or shut the fuck up already. Ever heard of Nvu? Probably not, because you have this idiotic, completly Socialist ideology that the only good things are those produced by companies. I know that Karl Marx held the same ideas. You claim to be so democratic and freedom-loving, but you have proven yourself a Marxist all the way.

Fifth, you have the idea that anything non-American is inferior and should be eradicated. I know a man that had a similar idea, his name is Adolf Hitler, and he only had one testicle. Ohh, and he killed 6 million Jews, but that's not important, because they weren't Americans, they were just European Jews, right? That makes it right that he killed them, in your mentality, right, right? In fact, this ideal of yours is the most Marxist, Communist, Socialist, idiotic piece-of-shit mentality ever made.

And I can prove there is no God; if He existed, he wouldn't have allowed you to exist. May your Marxist self rot in hell.

-- Segin, proud American (which you aren't)
=============8<=================

Debian, Overdose, And NetBSD

2006-04-14T01:07:00.000-07:00

One sensible post a year won't kill my record as a troll, of course this may not stay sensible for long. Recently my NetBSD box has it's last straw and threw up it's filesystem :(, and so I installed Debian on it. I am starting to wonder if that was a good idea... No matter. I have also been writing a chat client, whose website is http://overdose.sourceforge.net/

=== EDIT ===
That particular box now runs Windows 2000 Pro. I installed Services for Unix cause I just can't live without a UNIX enviroment.

The Downfall of Microsoft

2006-03-27T11:53:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is dead.

Really.

The huge beast that has thrown nothing more than an evolved DOS, and then an evolved VMS (have you ever used VMS? come on, it makes Linux and UNIX looks like it was designed for newbies!) down our throats for the last 21 years is dying. Evidence of this is desperate accusations of Steve Ballmer, CEO, over multiple patent infringments (total horseshit if you ask me.), FUD, lies, and absolute bullshit.

Can't we just turn their entire campu into a smoking glass sheet?

Microsoft cannot pay employees well

2006-03-10T20:19:00.000-08:00

Lately, I have read about how Microsoft is unable (or unwilling) to actually pay it's employees well. The pay system is simple, it's not about preformance, it's about popularity. Unless everyone and their grandmothers know who you are, you're pretty much fired. Check the blog at minimsft.blogspot.com for links to news articles.

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

2006-01-28T19:55:00.000-08:00

In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's You !!
Cats: How are you gentlemen !!
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Cats: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Cats: HA HA HA HA ....
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every 'zig' !!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'zig'.
Captain: For great justice.

Microsoft is the antichrist and I can prove it!

2006-01-15T18:04:00.000-08:00

You may think I am nuts when you look at the title of this post. First of all, I am neither religious, or of any religion. I know that some christian scriptures depict of a great evil which controls all. Well, my friends, I would like to tell you that this 'great evil' is no other than Microsoft.

I aint joking.

Their Windows software runs on 90% or so of all computers. It is because of this that our government tried to stop them... AND FAILED. You guys don't remember the Microsoft trials? Well, don't go away yet, there's more.

For them to rule over all, they need to expand from just PCs... and they have. Cell phones, PDAs, ATMs, hell, even gas pumps run Microsoft's Windows OS. Even the XBOX runs Windows (XBOX360 uses a highly modified form of Windows). Hell, just about every dreamcast disc ever made has Windows CE on it. You may look at me and say "I don't care, just as long as it works." GUESS WHAT PEOPLE: NEWS FLASH: EITHER YOU GET SOME UNDERSTANDING ON HOW EVERYTHING YOU USE WORKS OR JUST DON'T USE IT. IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE MUCH, JUST ENOUGH TO FIX IT IN SOME CASES. There, did I rant enough? Maybe not.

The Xbox360, Microsoft's penultmiate gaming platform, is shit. It suffers from bad design, poor wiring, and a cheap cooling solution which has already cost people their lives. People have DIED over the faults and improper design of the Xbox 360. Businesses go under due to the unreliability of the Windows operating system, which causes widespread unemployment. Microsoft has a track record of creating inferior products, shoving them down the collective throats of the American people, using social engineering, no doubt, and then they claim NO responsibility when their shit fucks up. Why? Because, like I said, Microsoft is trying to control the entire planet. Don't belive me? I'll get into something you cannot avoid - The Windows EULA. First of all, you DO NOT "own" your copy of Windows like you "own" a CD. You can take your cD you got and lend it to a neibourgh, make some personal copies, make a mix CD (for personal use), and a few other things. Not really restrictive, concidering that you are actually LEASING you copy of Windows from Microsoft. You do one thing wrong, and Microsoft can LEGALLY wipe your hard drive spotless. How can they do that? Read the EULA. It is a contractually-blounding legal agreement which you must uphold or face the consequences. Hell, the EULA even allows ofr Microsoft to do ANYTHING, and I do mean ANYTHING, with your PC. They can do as damned as they please with your system that you paid good money for. And you are bound in a LEGAL contract with Microsoft which states you must let them do it, or find a new operating system.

And it seems that Linux just started looking even better... and I wonder why?

That's my view, and the dumbed-down version of the EULA.

Take a peek into the Microsoft Source Code

2005-12-29T15:54:00.000-08:00

Today, I did something illegal. I took and recieved the source code to the 'Solitare' game in Microsoft Windows. Now, it won't compile (missing headers), but I can tell you that there is more than meets the eye.

For example, there is 2 different '3 of spades' images in the bmp/ directory. The second design was obviously never used (does the fact the Microsoft named it 'foo.dib' have anything to do with it?)

I have come forward to comment on this blunder.

Let's take a look in cards.c, ok...

While there isn't anything really intresting in the code (although this seems to be the basis of CARDS.DLL), there is this one function which seems a bit odd:

void SaveCorners(HDC hdc, LONG FAR *rgRGB, INT x, INT y, INT dx, INT dy)
{
if(dx != dxCard || dy != dyCard)
return;

/* Upper Left */
rgRGB[0] = GetPixel(hdc, x, y);
rgRGB[1] = GetPixel(hdc, x+1, y);
rgRGB[2] = GetPixel(hdc, x, y+1);

/* Upper Right */
x += dx -1;
rgRGB[3] = GetPixel(hdc, x, y);
rgRGB[4] = GetPixel(hdc, x-1, y);
rgRGB[5] = GetPixel(hdc, x, y+1);

/* Lower Right */
y += dy-1;
rgRGB[6] = GetPixel(hdc, x, y);
rgRGB[7] = GetPixel(hdc, x, y-1);
rgRGB[8] = GetPixel(hdc, x-1, y);

/* Lower Left */
x -= dx-1;
rgRGB[9] = GetPixel(hdc, x, y);
rgRGB[10] = GetPixel(hdc, x+1, y);
rgRGB[11] = GetPixel(hdc, x, y-1);

}

Now, if you are a programmer, you can obvioulsy tell that Microsoft does shit the same as everybody else. They ain't God, they ain't special. Their shit stinks too.

Here's a better one:

BOOL APIENTRY cdtDraw(HDC hdc, INT x, INT y, INT cd, INT mode, DWORD rgbBgnd)
/*
* Parameters:
* hdc HDC to window to draw cards on
* x, y Where you'd like them
* cd Card to be drawn
* mode Way you want it drawn
*
* Returns:
* True if card successfully drawn, False otherwise
*/
{
return cdtDrawExt(hdc, x, y, dxCard, dyCard, cd, mode, rgbBgnd);
}

The irony of this is that Microsoft has to write one completely pointless function to save programmers a few keystrokes down the line... jeesh no wonder they're bloated! pointless functions for pointless code!

Here's another bloated fnction we could have lived without:

VOID MyDeleteHbm(HBITMAP hbm)
{
if(hbm != NULL)
DeleteObject(hbm);
}

If the Microsoft programmers actually took tiem to go through their code, this would not be nessessrary. Damn Microsoft idiots!

That is my view.

Roland Bouman's blog: Linux for Human Beings - AND Roland too!

2005-12-28T20:01:00.000-08:00

Roland Bouman's blog: Linux for Human Beings - AND Roland too!

Microsoft Sucks!

2005-12-28T18:53:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is possibly THE shittiest company around.

I have recently tried installing their operating system, Microsoft Windows 2000. The first two times, it failed to put the bootloader anyplace useful. After the third time, it was up and running. Now, I have to make a comment on it here: People bitch and while like little girls cause Linux doesn't automatically come with a magical driver for their video card and hey get VGA mode. Guess what? Neither does Microsoft Windows! It booted right into a 640x480 mode with just 16 colors! hell, it even did this when I upgraded my mom's machine to 2000! People say that "Windows is great cause it comes with al the drivers." Wrong people. Windows DOES NOT come with all of the drivers. Your OEM and computer retailer installed them for you. I didn't even have sound or a Ethernet card after the install. Luckly I had prepared for this by downloading the drivers and saving them to my FreeDOS partition (Windows is D:, FreeDOS is C:). Once I had a argument on a private IRC network with a person named Joe Everett. He made the argument that Linux drivers SUCK. Well, let's contrast and compare: If you install a new graphics driver in Windows, you have to reboot THE ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM. In Linux, it's as simple as restating X11. Usually restating X11 takes about 15 seconds, maybe more if you use KDE or GNOME. I use Fluxbox so it takes me a whole 10 seconds. I would rather wait 10 seconds to restart X than 10 minutes to restart Microsoft bloatware.

Joe also made the argument that Linux is completely unsupported by ISVs and any companies. He also made the argument that there is NO (as in 0, zero) commercially produced programs for Linux. This is laughable as I am using Opera right now *ON LINUX*. Opera is made by a company. It is NOT open source. And for ISVs? I guess he doesn't consider Intel, or IBM, or even Red Hat, Inc. to be ISVs. Even Google, which has almost the highest stock price (at over $420 (NOT A TYPO!) a share, Microsoft is just $35/share) has produced Linux software. Google themselves run on nothing but Linux. If Linux is such SHIT like everyone claims it is, why does Google have a stock price which is one of the highest on the ENTIRE FACE OF THE PLANET??? If Microsoft even hopes to exist in the future, Bill Gates better learn to suck a lot of dick at the Google Campus.

But I digress, and really need to get back on topic. After installing Windows, rebooting, upgrading, rebooting again, etc. I decided I wanted to play a game. Well, that game didn't work too well with DirectX, so I had to use software rendering, which isn't bad cause the game doesn't do much 3D anyways. I wanted to play StarCraft, another game, and I had to edit the hell out of the registry for it to work. I cannot find a decent graphical debugger, there isn't even a decent development system! Windows is full of incompatabilities. I say, just delete it and use Linux.

That is my view.

Fuck the goverment! They fucking suck!

2005-11-28T15:16:00.001-08:00

No, I ain;t no fucking islamic ass, I ain't no camel jockey, and I am sure the fuck not from the middle east. however, I hold the goverment in as high regard as much of us hold the middle east, and that isn't much. What is my beef with the goverment? They are incompetent, ignorant, slow, stupid, innefficent, and also, full of brueacrats.

First of all, I am no rich person. I ain't even middle class. I live BELOW the poverty line. As many of you are aware, I am still in high school. In fact, I am going to go ahead and account for all the times the goverment has fucked my ass over.

During the 9th grade, i was going to Riverview High. I was there only 2 or so months. Why? to quote, I "was not in the proper demographic district to attent Riverview High School". This is true, but I was there on special assignment. That means I had paperwork downtown to be there.
But the fucking goverment in all of it's incompetentness, lost that paperwork. So they dis-enrolled me from that school, and left me out of school for 9 months. They didn't try to relocate me to another school. This is NOT my fault. This is the goverment's fault. They run the school system, therefore the school system's fuck-ups are also the goverment's fuck-up because the school system and the goverment are one and the same. And to note, this has really fucked up my education, and I may not get a diploma due to this bullshit, unless I repeat the 10/11/12th grade. Fucking lame as fuck.

Here's another account:
During some bullshit several years ago, a judge decreed that I was to have what is called "Medicaid" (goverment-funded health insurance) until my 18'th birthday. Well, I ain't 18 yet, but they sure the fuck cut me off. The goverment is not only incompentent here, but they broke their own damn laws. Whose at fault? dunno, but it's probably indirectly George W. "Cocksucker" Bush's fault. I say, Fuck them.

And you want to know where the payroll of these very stupid people comes from? YOUR TAX DOLLARS. Every time they cut the 10 dollars or so in taxes out of your paycheck, it goes to a goverment workers paycheck. You do *NOT* work for the goverment. They work *FOR YOU*. *YOU* pay *THEIR SALARIES*. It is your hard earned money upon which these ignorant fucks get paid from. Remember, next time a cop pulls you over an gives you a hard time, you might want to remind him that it is your tax dollars that pay his paycheck.

That is my HONEST view.

Links links and more links

2005-11-27T21:38:00.000-08:00

This isn't my usual bitch session. No, it's a chance to show you some of the material i read almost daily.

I read the online comic User Friendly. It's great. Darl McBride is made out as a crazed CEO that is hellbent on stopping Linux to the fact he says that everything that goes wrong in his life is the fault of those "damn Linux hackers".

Recently I read an article on how the DMCA is much like prohibition in the 1920's. It's asbestos. And you know, it's just like they say. Asbestos, it'll kill ya.

Here's an excerpt from Slashdot (which I also read):
mkraft writes "A gamer fed up with his new Xbox 360 crashing every 20 minutes has fixed the problem by raising the power supply off the ground with some string. Goldeneyemaster over at the GameSpot forums indicates that the main reason for his Xbox 360 freezing up is the power supply overheating. The solution is to lift the power supply off the floor and allow the air to circulate better around it."
.
And here's another excerpt from Slashdot, mainly about a 3D FPS game in javascrpit.
axonis writes "Benjamin Joffe has developed Canvascape - "3D Walker", a simple javascript browser based 3D first person game engine that shows off the capabilities of the Canvas tag found in Firefox, Safari and Opera. " Don't expect much except a proof of concept ;)

here's a article about Mapquest and it's technologies

A article on Reuters Oddly Enough about cars being hijacked in a forigen country and the citizens doing way more to stop it than the police could dream of.

And finally, don't talk on your cell phone when driving. It's just stupid, and if I cath ya doing it, i'll kick your ass.

One hundred and one ways that Windows crashes...

2005-11-24T13:48:00.000-08:00

So I am sitting in my business sys & tech class, in front of a computer... The computer runs Windows 2000. The only tasks running were those deemed needed or nessessrary by either the sysadmin, or the School Board of Hillsbourgh County. Basically anti-virus, ethernet card config,
and a small tray tool for the onboard Intel video card, much like the nVidia tray tool, and core system tasks, nothing else. Not Word (yuck), nothing else. Not even the World's Worst Web Browser. All I am doing is wiggling the mouse around the screen, and out of the blue: CRASH!
I get this in a box:
The system service LSXSS.exe has unexpectedly exited with return code 127. The system will now shut down in 0:01:00. This shutdown was initiated by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM.
If I called up Microsoft and reported this, they would say I did something wrong. How the fuck is just moving the mouse around wrong? How the fuck is it?!?!?! I didn't click anything. Just moved it in circles. WHAT DID I DO TO CAUSE IT TO CRASH?!?!? NOTHING!!!

Of course, this is why they are going to install Linux on 2 spare iMacs found collecting dust and roaches in a corner.

See, it is not my fault that Microsoft cannot create a product that actually works correctly. If moving themouse around is wrong and warrants a system crash, why doesn't Mac OS, Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, IRIX, AIX, Solaris, ReactOS, Acorn, BeOS, NeXTstep, OpenStep, etc. crash when you do the exact same thing?

That is my view.

Jory A. Pratt -- Troll, or net.kook? You decide.

2005-11-13T20:11:00.000-08:00

There is a developer for Gentoo Linux whose name is Jory A. Pratt -- you'll see lots of archived email by this guy if you just google his name.

This guy is full of himself. Not joking. He's full of shit up to his eyes, and the rest is toilet paper.

He is a racist, a bigot, and a self-cenered asshole. He takes pride in disgracing the Marine Corps., stealing other peoples' work, and even violating U.S. copyright law. (which is a federal offense). He claims to be a expert at qmail, which he isn't. He also claimed to make the magnesium chat client for Yahoo! (runs on most Unices, including Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and Darwin.), which he didn't. He is at best a maintainer, and a shitty one at that.

This guy is an utter asshole, and a communist dog. He uses the ID 'Anarch_Penguin' on Yahoo!'s "Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris:1" chat room, and 'anarchy' on Freenode IRC. His other Yahoo! ID is jory_is_da_man, (which, by the way Jory, you're not. Get over yourself.)

There are others that have well documented his behaviour. I will not repeat what they have alerady said -- you can just read the facts for yourself. Here be the linky. That will be all, until next time.

Linux or Windows? Screw you, I'll be the judge.

2005-09-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

Microsoft, as we all know, or should know, anyway, is a multibillion dollar (Thousand Million to all those in England) corporation that apparently is dedicated to creating a product that is harmful to any research and user's paychecks. Their Windows operating system, for example, requires more and more disk space/processing power with each new incarnation.

Sure, you can say the same with Linux distro's of now and those of the past, But look at this in a more refined manner.

Lets say you want to use Microsoft's latest products versus the latest Open Source programs for a dedicated router, on as old as possible hardware.

Let's see here... Linux, version 2.6.14.3 as of this writing, can be run on machines as old as 486's without any slowness, lagging, or system failure.

Microsoft Windows 2003 Server requires at least a 750MHz Pentium III.

Linux will run with as little as 2MB of RAM (but not very well, and won't do much. for our application, we will want 16MB of RAM, 8 if we are lucky.)

Microsoft windows 2003 Server? 128MB of RAM. MINIMUM.

Linux, plus the various userland tools (not that many, a lot of routing shit is kernel-side) will run nice and snug on my Compaq Presario CDS 520, which has a 486SX2 @ 66MHz, 52MB of RAM (640Base [doesn't count] + 4MB onboard + 16 on a SIMM that comes with the unit + 32MB from a new SIMM chip).

Good fucking luck trying to get it to even boot Windows Setup, much less Windows 2003 Server.

This is a completely modern, up-to-date Linux install I am talking about.

That just goes to show that Microsoft is squeezing money out of users one way or another. when a user buys a new PC with a Intel CPU, some money goes to Intel, which then is attributed to Microsoft (realize, Microsoft's software depended on a newer system), which gets Microsoft all the latest info on Intel's new chips, like spec sheets and live, working units.

How fucking lame is it to see that Microsoft cannot produce a product TODAY that will run on an old 486, while the Open Sourec movement can cough up at least 100 MAJOR applications (server software ranging from DNS, FTP, proxy, SOCKS4/5, routers, firewalls, and even Web servers), and even 4 operating systems, which will run on these machines WITHOUT ANY PROBLEMS OR PREFORMACE PROBLEMS ON A HOME LAN. (don't know about an office web server, but I am pretty sure a 486 DNS server can handle an entire office of 100 systems.)

Not to mention there are at least 3 thousand minor applications that are Open Sourec and run just fine on a 486 (most of them aren't really useful, like games, and some are, like filesystem checkers, compression agents, archivers, web broswers, etc.)

Even under such conditions, a Linux box will still easily achive an uptime of over a year. Windows 2003 server on the latest hardware has to be rebooted every weekend.

If Linux fails, you can repair it (this is the suggested option) or reinstall it (if need be). With Microsoft, your only option IS to reinstall, and that takes about an hour per machine. No repairs, only reinstall.

If you wonder how this translates to userland preformace, Think about it.
If Linux can run on a 486 in mission-critical applications and NOT FAIL, while Microsoft needs a 750MHz box (and fails left and right), and you STILL are wondering which is better, You need your head examined. Clearly Linux is the winner. And don't give me that "but Linux is for hackers and geeks" bullshit. Even the elderly can easily use Linux, even more so than Windows in some cases.

And Linux doesn't cost anything (Except in a few cases). And before you start asking for voice chat in Linux or webcams, realize no one will help you become a pedophile or some other kind of pervert, as webcams and voice chat are only used by pedophiles and other perverts.

Some piece of hardware not supported in Linux? Just wait. either you will replace the hardware or it will become supported. Good things come to those that wait.

And finally, READ THE FUCKING MANUAL (and no, it's NOT on paper, it's on your hard drive, usually in /usr/share/doc or by calling the 'man (command name of program to get help with)' command. (without the quotes), e.g. to get help with the GNU C Compiler, whose command name is 'gcc', you would then type 'man gcc'.

List of basic commands that you should 'man':
ls
cp
rm
mv
tar
gzip
bzip2

Remember that 'man' is a commandline program. Start a command line from the GUI with the comand 'xterm' (or 'rxvt') [Most GUI's have a 'run' option in their menus.]

Finally, don't forget that you have a program called 'info', which will let you read more interactive manuals. And info pages are usually more detailed than the manpage for a program.

If info can't find a infopage for a program, it'll just show the manpage. (Of course it's better to call a manpage with 'man' so that you see the formatting, which 'info' discards.)

That's my view.