Recent Posts

1976

Living Room / Re: boardgamegeek - all things boardgame site

« Last post by Edvard on January 05, 2009, 05:13 PM »

Excellent site, Mouser. A good place to stop by when considering further board game purchases.

My absolute favorite game has to be Othello (Reversi in some circles...)

I just wish it was easier to buy replacement tokens...

No other game IMHO has been topped it, although I have enjoyed teaching my son the finer points of Risk and Battleship, and we plan to acquire a Stratego set soon.

...And don't forget the ever-overwhelming Game-It-Yourself site, which has BoardGameGeek links for many of their games.

1977

General Review Discussion / Re: Very nice 'first look' review of openSUSE 11.1 (Linux)

« Last post by Edvard on January 02, 2009, 01:57 PM »

Fonts were terrible on my 1900x1200 display, but that was easily corrected

-zridling (December 22, 2008, 06:43 AM)

Were the fonts too small on such resolution or was this the hack-X-to-96-dpi workaround everybody bugged about last year?
I've often figured that if I got tired of Ubuntu I'd move to Suse, but so far I haven't been annoyed that badly. Nice to see a good review of it.

1978

Coding Snacks / Re: REQUEST: Transparent or Frosted or Milk Glass Taskbar Tool ?

« Last post by Edvard on January 02, 2009, 01:45 PM »

Hey, that looks like a really cool idea.
I know there are already existing apps that make windows semi-transparent, maybe adding code to do a Gaussian Blur instead would be just the ticket.
There's a few links at the bottom of that Wikipedia page for C++ and Java implementations, but I'm not half the coder that most folks on this site are.

Any takers?

1979

Living Room / Re: PMOG - Passively Multiplayer Online Game

« Last post by Edvard on January 02, 2009, 01:27 PM »

From the thread title, I thought this would be something like IdleRPG - whereas it actually sounds like this game requires a bit of interaction 

-f0dder (January 02, 2009, 11:06 AM)

Yep, I've found that some players actually don't like to do missions, they just hang out in the chat server, Mine each other in the forums, etc.

I've been thinking about turning one of Ehtyar's newsletters into a Mission and see how it goes.
 

1980

Living Room / Re: PMOG - Passively Multiplayer Online Game

« Last post by Edvard on January 02, 2009, 10:51 AM »

See? It works!
 

1981

Living Room / PMOG - Passively Multiplayer Online Game

« Last post by Edvard on December 31, 2008, 05:34 PM »

At first I didn't what exactly was going on here, but as far as I can figure, the recipe goes something like:

-Somewhat equal parts Digg and StumbleUpon
-Some Facebook/MySpace-style socializing
-Activate with a Firefox plugin
-Season with a little Steampunk mystique...

Voila'!
You got yourself a funky little game that runs on surfing.

PMOG is the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, a free game you play in your web browser.

Install PMOG and surf the sites you normally would. You'll find mines that make your browser shake as well as gifts from other players. You'll take missions around the web, and jaunt from website to website.

With PMOG, the whole web is a game!

http://pmog.com/

Here's a little more about how it works:

First, you sign up and download the Firefox plugin (no IE, sorry).
Then, go to the PMOG home page where you learn about the characters, associations, histories and gameplay.
Now the real fun begins by going on "Missions" which are actually guided tours to members' favorite sites based on particular themes, like say, "Classic Television" or "Funny Animals".
Along the way you earn currency with which you can buy things from the shoppe like Mines, Crates, and Armor.
You also earn experience to level up and your activities determine which "Association" you belong to.
As you surf with the plugin activated, you can lay mines which will explode when another PMOG'er stops by (making the browser window shake if the plugin is running), or leave a crate of goodies on your own site or Mission to reward them for visiting.

There's a ton of other fun stuff you can do and explore, I've barely scratched the surface.
If nothing else, this is a sure-fire way to liven up a late-night session of random surfing while learning about sites you'd never find otherwise.

Have fun!
from ???

1982

Living Room / Re: Ecofont - a free font that saves ink

« Last post by Edvard on December 26, 2008, 11:28 AM »

Hehe
http://www.ecofont.e...hind_ecofont_en.html

(Offset) printers: avoid modern laser techniques that make ink indivisible from the paper. Keep an eye on innovations, such as plant-based ink.

vs.
http://www.ecofont.e...k_at_ecofont_en.html

Printing with a laser printer will give the best printing results.

1983

Living Room / Re: Article: Open source thrives in downturn

« Last post by Edvard on December 26, 2008, 11:23 AM »

I think the original intent of the article has less to do with the statistics of WHO is installing WHAT, but to show how an economic downturn has far less impact on deployment of Open Source technologies and in fact has a sort of 'boosting' effect as more companies are turning to the best solution for the lowest price.

This also means is that 41 of those companies were either NOT investing in new thingummies and sticking with what they already paid for (not spending anything), or upgrading what they already had in place (spending as minimally as possible).

AND we're talking major players here, not mom-and-pop stores. This is a BIG survey of BIG companies. Which is how Gartner gets away with charging BIG money for survey results. And I highly doubt anybody is going to deploy KeePass and then report it in bold type on their bottom line.

Wasker, I would also be hungry to know exactly WHAT they are deploying and just how mission-critical it is, but rest assured it would be anything trivial.
Sensationalism? What else can you say about something sensational?
 

1984

Living Room / Re: A rant on religiousness about OSes

« Last post by Edvard on December 19, 2008, 07:03 PM »

As always f0dder, I can depend on you to correct technical details I get muddled about.
Yes, if you pulled the plug during a big operation, the file is going to get borked, no matter what you do.

What impressed me was the claim that ZFS is almost immune to it.

...All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS file system, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS detects it and uses another copy to repair it.
...
ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones. A snapshot is a read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem, while a clone is a writable copy of a snapshot. Clones provide an extremely space-efficient way to store many copies of mostly-shared data such as workspaces, software installations, and diskless clients.

ZFS backup and restore are powered by snapshots. Any snapshot can generate a full backup, and any pair of snapshots can generate an incremental backup. Incremental backups are so efficient that they can be used for remote replication — e.g. to transmit an incremental update every 10 seconds.

Also, check out http://opensolaris.o...community/zfs/intro/
And http://uadmin.blogsp...hy-zfs-for-home.html
(a little dated, but it's first-hand experience...)

Looks like a peach to me.

1985

Living Room / Re: New Body Spray For Men

« Last post by Edvard on December 19, 2008, 06:46 PM »

You've got a point there, app.

One day a few years ago, I remember being driven from the breakroom at where I worked by two attractive-but-annoying saleswomen who had just walked in smelling of something flowery yet incredibly strong (think of an invisible Andre the Giant in the form of an orchid bouquet...), so I was forced to vacate the premises.

Now, I understand girls like to smell like flowers. That's fine. Just not so many.

Anyways, after work I was walking down the street to my bus stop when I became vividly aware that the 30-something, not-quite-overweight, knee-length-brown-skirt-and-modest-black-blouse-wearing lady walking in front of me was suddenly the most gorgeous woman on the planet because she smelled like cookies.

I don't know if some genius decided to create vanilla scented perfume or if the lady in question was smarter than the collective IQ of a rocket science convention for putting vanilla extract behind her ears, but the effect was staggering.

Ever since then, I've wondered what other ingredients would be as effective a fragrance? A refreshing breeze of peppermint? Or perhaps the subtle aroma of banana and cream?
Or am I getting creepy?

1986

Living Room / Re: A rant on religiousness about OSes

« Last post by Edvard on December 19, 2008, 10:26 AM »

So far, I've fired up the Live CD and poked around.
Indeed, ZFS is default, and the desktop is Gnome with a veritable handful of default-installed apps.
I accidentally started the package manager that looks suspiciously like Synaptic, and it filled up my memory and crashed. No problem, really, this was a Live CD and I only have 512G in this machine, although I would have liked a "Cancel" button.


I'll dig up an old drive and slap it in for fun and see what the package manager will offer me, although my first impression of it smells like Ubuntu with a Solaris kernel and Sun Java pre-installed

Solid. I have just pulled the plug off the machine while disk activity was happening and no repair or anything needed to be done on reboot. That's the limit of my testing

Nice. Journalling file systems have come a long way in preventing data corruption from power failures/panic resets but it's good to hear first-hand experience on this one.

Ease of use. Create a new "partition" or "virtual machine" in seconds, one command, no waiting. Turn some off, shrink some, grow some. Especially with the virtualization this is cool. I currently have no need for it but next time I have an infrastructure project I would have to consider it seriously.

Seriously cool. Ever since I started seriously poking around computers, this one always hung me.
Why can I not just grow a partition as needed? Shrinking I can understand the difficulty, but at least the other way around should be just as you described. One command, done. Good to hear this one swings both ways.

I'll keep you posted, but I'll do it in another post.

1987

Living Room / Re: New Body Spray For Men

« Last post by Edvard on December 19, 2008, 10:11 AM »

MY EYES! THE GOGGLES, THEY DO NOTHING!!

 

1988

Living Room / Re: A rant on religiousness about OSes

« Last post by Edvard on December 17, 2008, 07:33 PM »

Although Solaris is awfully sexy, I have been playing with it and that file system... that file system...

-iphigenie (December 09, 2008, 07:47 AM)

OK, I'll bite.
At least 3 times in this thread you've fawned over the file system, and that makes me quite curious...

Are you talking about zfs?
Hoo boy, it sure looks promising but from the faq:

It's not bootable? (or has this been fixed?)
Fragmentation still warrants a vague answer?

Looks like the benefits outweigh the detriments, so just out of curiosity I downloaded the OpenSolaris 2008.11 and am going to give it a fly-by and see if it ends up on a spare disk to play with.

1989

Living Room / Sick of cute animal sites? Try this one...

« Last post by Edvard on December 17, 2008, 03:54 PM »

Warning: Contains strong language

A blog where I tell cute animals what's what.

http://fuckyoupenguin.blogspot.com/

The picture that set him off...

I also learned that if two platypuses (platypi?) are seen together, space-time will come apart because there is no agreed-upon plural form of platypus

from Admit-One.net

1990

Living Room / Re: Childhood Memory

« Last post by Edvard on December 16, 2008, 10:22 AM »

I remember mine because part of it followed the first three multiples of 5 (5-10-15).

I would be a real geek if I remembered a phone number because it followed a Fibonacci sequence. 

1991

Living Room / Re: Cyan plans to release MystOnline as open source

« Last post by Edvard on December 15, 2008, 10:41 AM »

Guess we'll just have to wait. Hope they don't make you solve a puzzle first.

-40hz (December 14, 2008, 10:49 PM)

The General Puzzle Licence?

 

1992

Living Room / Re: Linux holds kids back - that's what the teacher says! Windows fundamentalism?

« Last post by Edvard on December 12, 2008, 03:17 PM »

I remember the first time I heard that kids were turning in homework by email

Whiskey.

Tango.

Foxtrot.

 

1993

Living Room / Re: Linux holds kids back - that's what the teacher says! Windows fundamentalism?

« Last post by Edvard on December 12, 2008, 10:45 AM »

As they say, truth is stranger than fiction, so I won't rule it out.
 Although I admit it does have a smack of the same kind of troll-licious satire that you'll find at shelleytherepublican.com or jerryleecooper.com (I see Mr. Cooper trolled in on this one as well...)

Either way, I can't help but agree that these attitudes exist and the law of averages says there has to be some representation of reality in the overwhelming response of the commenters.

All in all, it's funny and scary at the same time which of course makes it highly entertaining whatever the case.
 

1994

Living Room / Re: Linux holds kids back - that's what the teacher says! Windows fundamentalism?

« Last post by Edvard on December 11, 2008, 03:01 PM »

 

1995

Living Room / Article: Open source thrives in downturn

« Last post by Edvard on December 10, 2008, 01:56 PM »

I wondered (briefly) how profit-making open-source-based companies would be doing in the recent economic downturn. I just got a little bit of an answer...

Collaboration initiatives are all about streamlining business processes, and the interfaces between legacy closed systems and open source stacks are an increasingly common place to find business collaboration environments.

According to research firm Gartner, open source software is present in 85% of enterprises and the remainder expect to deploy it in the next year.

While the large closed vendors struggle to steer their supertankers through increasingly unsettled waters, open source looks all the more attractive to budget constrained businesses looking to maximize their cost effectiveness.

http://blogs.zdnet.c...collaboration/?p=172

picture from http://www.valeriovalerio.org/?m=200802

1996

Living Room / Re: I can haz LOLMouser plz?

« Last post by Edvard on December 10, 2008, 01:08 PM »

http://www.findsounds.com/

1997

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good sources of astronomy photographs, please?

« Last post by Edvard on December 10, 2008, 01:03 PM »

Damn you beat me to it, but I'll post anyway...
Lots of hi-def photos directly from the site as well.

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

from teh intarwebs

1998

Living Room / Re: How will the Earth end?

« Last post by Edvard on December 09, 2008, 07:55 PM »

Microsoft goes Open Source 

-Carol Haynes (December 09, 2008, 07:54 PM)

Ooohhh... *shivers* yep, that would break the thermostat in hell, wouldn't it?

Also, Spangler candy company ceases production of Dum-Dum suckers.
Extrapolate from there...

1999

General Software Discussion / Re: Lessons from 2 years without Windows

« Last post by Edvard on December 09, 2008, 10:52 AM »

VirtualBox is far superior to VMWare in every way save one: 3D support. The video card it emulates is not compatible with the 3D calls required by OpenGL and Direct3D, which is an issue when running some Windows software. It also locks the program out of use to gamers.

-D--

Looky here --> VMGL brings 3-D effects to VMs

Virtualized computing environments can take advantage of built-in virtualization support in modern dual-core processors, but when it comes to 3-D acceleration in virtual machines, almost all fall flat on their faces. VMGL is a little-known application written as part of Google's Summer of Code 2006 program that lets OpenGL apps running inside a virtual machine take advantage of the graphics hardware acceleration on the host. It has limitations, but if you want 3-D in VMs, VMGL is your best bet.

2000

Living Room / Re: A rant on religiousness about OSes

« Last post by Edvard on December 09, 2008, 10:30 AM »

All OSes are insecure in the hands of an uninformed user. Granted, some are safer because an uninformed user cannot even begin to use them.

Hehe- which is where Linux Elitism begins...

Iphi, this is one hell of a post and one I will be linking to next time I spot a Holy OS War.
At the very least, I will post Iphi's Law in bold and all caps...

As much as I love Linux, I have to admit. 7 years in, I still sometimes tear my hair out and say (softly to myself under my breath...) "If this was Windows, I'd just do this".
But now that I've gotten used to it and have taken advantage of the benefits I have with Linux, I shudder at the thought of having to deal with Windows' shortcomings in the same area.

All in all, kudos for a great post. Now, about this problem I have with 'pon'...