I should be asleep, but I realized something I need to remember.

Right now my parents opinion means a lot. I trust them. I always have, but there was a significant period of time where I thought I knew better about many things. But I found out I was wrong.

Now if I need advice, I turn to them. If I need support (which I have needed a lot of lately…) I turn to them. If I need to talk, I turn to them. And you know what? They advise. They support. They listen and gab it up. 2000 minutes a month I chew up talking to my Mom. Just about things. Life. What happened at work. Problems, solutions. She puts her life on hold to talk to me.

And that is truly amazing. She never has to go because she is busy, or is watching a movie. She has a patience which I cannot even fathom – I don’t know how she does it.

Truth is, my parents are the best people I know. They are the most important people to me. I owe everything I am to their guidance and, well, genes :-).

When it comes to matters of import I know my Mother’s advice will not let me down. We may dissagree on the cause / effect / existance of global warming, but if she approves of something, I feel comfortable approving of it. If she does not approve, it’s probably a bad idea.

I guess the real point is that you should trust your parents, and step back to appreciate how wonderful all those little things they didn’t let you do have helped make you a better person today ;-).
I suppose it is just a part of growing up that we rebel. I regret it.

If you must know, I have decided that this time around, if / when I find somebody new, I will make sure I get MY parents explicit approval (or persuade it out of them :D) first. They know so much more about life than I. I wish I could have realized that sooner.

Goodnight world.

Look what they figured out.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5120662.stm

Summary: putting up pictures of eyes makes people more honest.

The world in 1984 was not a good thing. Big Brother was once a symbol of oppression. Then they made a TV show. Now it’s lost its stigma, so you put it in a headline, and people think of reality TV, not a poorly written book with terrifyingly familiar themes.

Just wait. The freedoms that have been destroyed in the name of “fighting terror” are a terror in and of themselves.
You see, the goal of terrorist activity is to cause fear, and to get a fearful reaction. The Muslim terrorists cannot be appeased – our very way of life offends them. We are infidels. Our country is morally diseased.

So they attack – try to destroy our freedoms. Our president believes that fighting back is the answer – a holy war. And what happens in time of war?

An unregulated, secret branch of the federal government is permitted to search without a warrant, arrest without charges or probable cause, try and convict without a jury (much less due process), eavesdrop on all DOMESTIC communication, And now, track all your bank transactions.

And Bush has the audacity to become upset when the news leaked out. He claims the newspapers are undermining the war on terror.
No, they are helping. He is playing right into their hand…

Fred Upton is a bad man. He is a very bad man.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5063072.stm

“Representative Fred Upton, head of the House telecommunications subcommittee, said competition could mean people save $30 to $40 each month on their net access fees.”

Representative Fred Upton has TWICE pushed through a policy that will have a negative impact on all but the weathly.

Network performance Tiering is not competition. Competition is when CONSUMERS have the ability to chose between a number of distinct organizations providing similar services. That sort of competition is a good thing – people will not pay more when they can pay less for the same thing.

Internet service tiering ONLY BENEFITS THE TELECOMUNICATIONS COMPANIES. Nobody else. They will be given the ability to arbitrarily decide that one server does not deserve the same bandwidth as another. Who do you think will get highest priority? Why the telecomunications companies themselves, and their business partners of course.

This is a slippery slope. There is a slight – VERY SLIGHT possibility that consumer internet bills might go down a little. But the bills for service providers will go up.

Already companies have to pay exorbitant amounts for an OC3 connection. It really is obscene. But once they had that connection to a backbone they were set.
Well not anymore. Now you also have to bribe the owners of the backbones to let you use enough bandwidth. Sure, the internet ACCESS cost may go down, but the SERVICE costs are going to go up. Free services could disappear. Hosting costs, colocating costs are going to shoot through the roof once you start seeing any quantity of traffic.

THIS IS VERY BAD FOR THE FREEDOM AND OPPORTUNITY ON THE INTERNET.
THIS COULD STRIP THE INTERNET OF EVERYTHING FREE.

The argument being made is that phone companies cannot offer video services because the internet is too congested. This is bogus. Video streaming is not possible because residential internet bandwidth is not high enough yet. The infrastructure is capable. The congestion is not the backbone, it is the endpoints.

But lies from wealthy people have a way of becoming truth.

And the words of slimy politicians like Fred Upton have a way of ruining things for everybody.

Please people, tell your republican congressmen that they represent you, not big businesses. Tell them to support internet neutrality, and set the dollar signs in their eyes aside.

Save the internet.

Recently I purchased a new 120 gig drive, and I was inspired: Hey I should try installing linux again.

For those who know me, and have a memory for such things, I have linux moments. I would really like to be using linux. I would prefer it. As yet I have never paid for windows, and I do not look forward to having to. (Yes, I’m legal…)

So I decided to give SuSE a try. I have used in as a 64-bit server OS, and it was much easier for a gibbon like me to install and configure that any other *nix I had tried.
After reading the reviews going around the internet, it looked like SuSE was the closest to being a desktop OS. Better installer, easier to configure, more features etc…

My last affair with linux lasted a week. I had completely switched, and used it exculsively. For the regular day to day tasks, it worked acceptibly. I could chat, check my email, surf the web, listen to music and watch most videos.
Everything was working ok (aside from my hatred of open office – word processors should not be written in java…). I believe I was using Mandrake, and that particlar version did not come with firefox. Ok, so after MUCH ado, I did get it installed. And it worked acceptibly.

There was one thing that was driving me nuts, however. The fonts looked… yucky. They were muddy, fuzzy around the edges and blocky. After much research and even more ado, I recompiled X.Org to support font hinting and installed the MS fonts.
After switching to these better fonts, I still had fuzzy text in some programs. I found out there are multiple places you have to turn off antialiasing. So I edited config files, I edited xml files, and as far as I could tell, there should have been NO antialiasing.

Wrong. Firefox was still muddying up the fonts. So, I had to go though the advanced configuration page and look through hundreds of poorly documented settings turning off anything that resembled “blur, fuzz, smooth, alias”. No good. Nothing worked. I managed to make them look worse, but it refused to use my truetype fonts, and it refused to stop makeing the fonts look ugly.

To top it off, gaim’s window flasher was buggy. I need that feature.

The stray the broke the camel’s back, alas was lack of support for Windows Mobile devices.

Fastforward about a year. I don’t really use my pocketPC much, so it is not nearly so much of a priority.

Well SuSE got one thing right – font hinting is compiled in by default now. ClearType is also an easily selectable option, as well as cleartype configuration.

But…

It doesn’t appear to work.

When I switched between them I saw no difference. Even using the truetype fonts, linux was mucking them up.
The killer in this case came from Firefox once again. The fonts just look bad. They look terrible, and they still have not made it easy (or perhaps even possible) to correct.

I was not going to waste my time on it again. I have found that the linux community does not think clear fonts are important, and that I am whining without cause. So I will just not use linux. Perhaps in another year they will get it together.

They need to stop this multiple font rendering engines. They need unity.

One thing I use a lot in windows is my second monitor. I have a dual head graphics card, and I like to have the extra space. To get this in linux, I have to install ATI’s proprietary drivers.
When it first started up, it looked like they had it right. They had created two desktops, and you could move your mouse between them. Then I noticed something. An annoying series of little windows containing the icon for all running programs showed up on the left desktop. Before I installed the drivers, this had been like the system tray in windows – a part of the upper taskbar. Now each program took up a full section on the lower taskbar and cound not be minimized to the tasktray.

Ok, I can live with this I guess…

Next, you cannot drag windows to the second screen. If you right click, you have the option of seding the program the the right desktop. So I chose that, and it places it on desktop # 2 on the left screen. Nothing shows up in the right screen. Apparently the right screen was supposed to correspond to desktop two. That is a great idea, but it didn’t work. Aside from being able to move the mouse between them, the two screens were completely independent.
No thanks. I need to be able to move things to my second display when the primary gets too cluttered.

The other issue is that the photo sharing feature in Yahoo Messenger (by far one of the nicest features I’ve seen in such a product) is not supported in linux. And I can’t use my napster subscription.

So there you have it. Two years in a row, and the fonts are still muddy. The cleartype does not appear to do anything, and programs do not play well together.

I guess I’ll try again next year.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4635233826986620052

NEVER USE A MESSY RECIPE!!!!

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

Congress is working on a bill that would allow telecommunications companies to charge rates for better bandwidth. That is, they are trying to abolish Internet Neutrality.

What this would mean, is they could determine that a particular service is using too much bandwidth, and limit them to a total of 50k/sec. That site would, if it received too much traffic, appear to be non-responsive. What happens when a site is non-responsive?

People go elsewhere.

Go to the site and sign the petition. Here is the letter I included for my congresman.

The internet was founded on the proliferation of freedom. It has been instrumental in bringing nations together and accelerating equality.

Information, and the passage thereof needs to remain free of class and privilege. All nations, all classes, all races deserve the same level of service from the backbone of the internet.

What these companies are suggesting as beneficial is a lie. Imposing artificial limits based on how much a person is willing to pay will alienate those small businesses incapable of fronting the bill.

This does not encourage competition: it is a cleverly disguised assault against it.

The telecommunication companies are all in the business of providing “bulk” services. Since they own the backbone, they don’t have to pay the excess fees. Smaller companies – and even larger ones – Like Google or AOL will suffer – and have to raise rates for their consumers.

The result of this would be a slow – even bottlenecked internet for those who could not afford to pay for more.

I believe you will agree with me that this is wrong, and must not happen.

Please act immediately to save the Internet.

Warner Brothers Inks deal with BitTorrent

LOL

ROFL

Wow. Just wow.

In case you don’t understand, there is no company BitTorrent. BitTorrent is an open source, duty free protocol.

That is like saying Warner brothers signed a deal with Ethernet.

Oh man.

EDIT:

OK, so the arrogant self worshipper Bram Cohen went and took his open source technology and “trademarked” the name and started a “company.” A company which nobody uses. A company he should not have named after a technology that the community has done more for than he ever will.

His clients are clunky, featureless, and oh yeah, written in python. Pretty much the most worthless programming language on the planet (tabs for heaven’s sake. What the heck!)

Yeah, so this ticks me off. If he wanted to start a site, fine. But don’t be a jerk and name it after a TECHNOLOGY. Much less an OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGY. Much less an OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGY FOR WHICH THE ORIGINATOR’S UTILITIES ARE GENERALLY CONSIDERED CRAP.

Ok, now I’m really done.

I had to reinstall nucleus, and repair a database table. I’ve never had to do that before!!

I hope nothing important went missing. Guess I’ll find out when the two people who visit my site check in. That should be in about…. oh 2 weeks 😛

So about 3 hours ago I popped up my site fully intent on posting about something, and was totally distracted by the fact that the thing was broken. And now I cannot recall what I was going to say.

Darn.

Do you like my new layout? I found it on the nucleus site and thought it was pretty cool. It took a bit of work to get it to behave, but I think it’s pretty nice now.
I enabled member signups, so if you want to track comments, go ahead and signup 😀

Comments are working now. Don’t know how that happened, but the code for the blacklist got all fubared.

There once was a monkey named Moses,
who a bad case of halitosis.
No one was in a rush,
to give him a toothbrush.
So they went around pinching their noses.