Recent Posts

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Living Room / Re: Am I the only person that has a real big problem with software like this?

« Last post by Edvard on October 04, 2013, 01:42 AM »

I could (and probably will... later) say quite a lot on this subject, but let me just say this:
When I was working customer service for Sprint, if I had a dime for every time someone called about a tracking app for their child's phone because they were lost/out with less-than-trustworthy friends/run away/suspected of drug dealing/etc, I wouldn't have needed their meager paycheck.  Well, maybe it wasn't that bad, but still...

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Living Room / Re: The Earworms Music Thread!

« Last post by Edvard on October 02, 2013, 07:13 PM »

Oh no, not this one again:     

The jangly guitar riff and the chorus BOTH will stick.. will stick... will stick... will stick... will stick... will stick...

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Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by Edvard on October 02, 2013, 07:10 PM »

I am not sure, but it seems like a parody or satire of modern music. Personally I prefer TommyVFs remix/cover of it (The video is also pretty good)

Long mix

-p3lb0x (September 30, 2013, 02:57 AM)

I saw an interview with Ylvis and yes, they are parodying popular music with all it's accoutrements and smorgasboarding from a handful of other genres.  But then again, when has pop music not borrowed elements from the edges to serve sanitized to the mainstream?  I've always held that pop music was self-parodying most of the time anyway, so when things like this come along, I find there's a particularly gritty irony in that while parodying pop music, they actually came up with a quite listenable... wait for it... pop song. 
"...gaze into the abyss..." 

I mean, if this had been about "boy wants/meets/loses girl" or "we're having a great time at this social gathering" instead of ridiculous animal noises, these guys would be, at this very moment, having the world offered to them on a silver platter (in the form of a tidy record contract, of course).

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Developer's Corner / Article: OAuth 2.0 and the Road to Hell

« Last post by Edvard on October 02, 2013, 12:33 AM »

I was looking up what others had done in the way of making a Box.com client for Linux (there is none, just mount your folder with WebDAV).  Apparently, a client proper accesses your account using the OAuth 2.0 protocol.  I briefly looked at what it might take to whip up something of my own devising, perhaps with a bash script or my budding Pascal skills, when I came across a OAuth library for Delphi/Lazarus (which I can't find now) and decided to look up Oauth and see how difficult it might be to implement.  
I stumbled across this article written by one of the principle authors of OAuth, Eran Hammer, who abruptly quit OAuth last year after 3 years of dealing with the process of working up OAuth 2.0 to a proper IETF standard.  Scary.  I don't think I have enough Jedi skills to get very far with this...

This is a case of death by a thousand cuts, and as the work was winding down, I’ve found myself reflecting more and more on what we actually accomplished. At the end, I reached the conclusion that OAuth 2.0 is a bad protocol. WS-* bad. It is bad enough that I no longer want to be associated with it. It is the biggest professional disappointment of my career.

http://hueniverse.co...nd-the-road-to-hell/

He is actually kinder to the IETF board members in the comments, and clearly he was frustrated with the process as much as the enterprise goons.
Opinions?

780

Living Room / Re: Jazz Recommendation Thread

« Last post by Edvard on October 01, 2013, 08:20 PM »

Bobby Hutcherson on the vibes... bliss.

This whole album is just awesome.

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Living Room / Re: The Earworms Music Thread!

« Last post by Edvard on October 01, 2013, 07:49 PM »

Oh dear... oh dear dear...

I could list a thousand of them, but I'll start with one:

This song

...will now play in your head for the next 3 days.

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Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by Edvard on September 29, 2013, 04:19 PM »

Aaaaand from the "What is this I don't even" department, I bring you:

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Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by Edvard on September 29, 2013, 04:17 PM »

^^ Reminds me of "Brother Metal"  Cesare Bonizzi^w, AKA Fratello Metallo.

 

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Living Room / Re: Vocab tune-up

« Last post by Edvard on September 29, 2013, 04:00 PM »

and here I thought all along that you were this real chilled out kind of guy ;-) :p

   Well, actually, my reaction to most grammar and spelling mistakes:



So... yeah.  

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Living Room / Re: Vocab tune-up

« Last post by Edvard on September 29, 2013, 02:52 AM »

maybe *you* have a fifter I could kiff ?

-tomos (August 29, 2013, 06:20 PM)

fo forry, fad to fay no fifter. 

-cranioscopical (August 29, 2013, 08:39 PM)

Actually, that would be 'kiſs your ſiſter', consistent with the post-medieval/pre-modern usage of the archaic 'long s'^w. 
Glad to see it go, really.  I've a spelling-nazi streak in me that would have been driven to fits...

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Living Room / Re: Jazz Recommendation Thread

« Last post by Edvard on September 27, 2013, 01:02 AM »

My taste in jazz has two feet: One foot in the canonical (Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Dave Brubeck, Wes Montgomery, Vince Guaraldi), the other in the "suspected to be clinically insane" avant-garde (Sun Ra, John Zorn, Peter Brotzmann, Skerik, Bill Laswell).
The listed musicians are by no means a complete list, just what I could throw off the top of my head that haven't been mentioned before.

787

General Software Discussion / Re: Why 24-bit/192kHz music files make no sense - and may be bad for you!

« Last post by Edvard on September 24, 2013, 08:00 PM »

Rumor had it that was a trick used extensively by Motown Records and picked up on by others.  Part of the rumor is they had their own low-power radio station that would broadcast to the cars in the parking lot where musicians and producers could listen to the final mix over the car radio.

788

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Be Tiny, World! release for Android, PC, Mac, and Linux.

« Last post by Edvard on September 20, 2013, 02:47 AM »

OS: Debian "Testing" (Jessie) 64-bit.
BTW Version 1.130917.12

I added a "Kid Mode" to the game, which gives you a little drone that shoots at planets in the latest version that might help make things easier for you.

Actually, I liked the challenge of having to avoid a world you already made tiny provides.  It's like a 'bonus' difficulty.  Don't know if you had that in mind when you coded it, but it works. 

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Living Room / Do you like short films? Of course you do! Shortoftheweek.com

« Last post by Edvard on September 20, 2013, 02:13 AM »

Short of the Week has been serving up epic bite-sized films to millions of filmmakers and fans since 2007. We seek to discover and promote the greatest and most innovative storytellers from around the world.

-http://www.shortoftheweek.com/about/

http://www.shortoftheweek.com

I only just discovered this website about a month ago, but it is now my second favorite website (after DonationCoder ).  Films are all of good to great quality, sortable by Genre , Topic, Style, Country, Year, Collection or Playlist.  Also, subscribe to their RSS or Twitter feed to get notifications of new shorts as they get posted, even submit your own creations.  Enjoy  

from: the awesome part of the internets

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Be Tiny, World! release for Android, PC, Mac, and Linux.

« Last post by Edvard on September 20, 2013, 01:30 AM »

Linux version runs great, Deo.  Too bad I keep crashing into the tiny worlds because I have to start shooting at a big world coming my way... 

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Developer's Corner / Re: Odd/Fun Ways You've Learned Programming

« Last post by Edvard on September 20, 2013, 01:01 AM »

Another interesting way that I learned was via the Beagle Bros contests (in old fashioned BASIC with Assembler calls).

Dude!!  I LOVED Beagle Bros back in the day, hammering away at their advertisement's 'one-liners' on the school's Apple ][+ and ][e's.  I learned SO much from those.  Our family was too poor to afford computers back then, but I had read through so much BASIC code that I knew it by heart by the time we finally got a Timex-Sinclair 1000.  
I made two programs on that; a 'catch the falling object' game that got faster and objects falling farther away from you as you progressed, and a 'steer a vehicle (actually a letter "A") between the ever-closing walls' game.  Both of them I saved the source, hand-written on school note paper, for years so I could show off to my friends whenever I had the chance (they all had Commodore VIC-20s and TI 99/4As, the lucky bums).  That's all lost to the sands of time now...
Funny thing, that's also how I learned how RAM could affect a computer's speed.  Because the Timex-Sinclair 1000 had only 1K of built-in memory, I always had to code in larger slow-down loops when programming other computers, and when my uncle bought a 16K RAM pack for his TS-1000, I thought it was the fastest computer I had ever seen.  

Now, I'm learning Pascal (seems to be the only language I have the bean for anymore) and as a learning exercise, I'm turning all the text-mode tutorial programs into full GUI apps in Lazarus, with sometimes unexpected results.  

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Living Room / Re: Hardware Question: Baseboard Management Controller communication failure

« Last post by Edvard on September 15, 2013, 04:21 PM »

Yes to the BIOS.  I checked the BIOS version and it is the same as the latest one on Dell's website.  The ESM I'm not so sure about. 
The thing is, the machine worked perfectly when we got it, approximately 3-4 months ago.  Then my son went to a local youth camp for their leadership training program for 3 months, during which time the machine sat idle, unplugged.  Some posts I saw suggested a faulty battery, so I checked the BIOS battery, but it was a full 3 volts. 
My wife is not too happy about yet another broken piece of junk possibly recoverable hardware hanging around the basement.  I'll check into the ESM.

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Living Room / Re: Hardware Question: Baseboard Management Controller communication failure

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2013, 08:10 PM »

Power down.
Set NVRAM jumper.
Boot up.  Get NVRAM jumper warning.  Grub can't find disk (my bad, fixed on next reboot).
Power down.
Un-set NVRAM jumper.
Boot up.  Fans do not spin down like normal, same error, but I fixed the disk problem.  Runs, but noisy as hell.

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Living Room / Re: Hardware Question: Baseboard Management Controller communication failure

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2013, 06:50 PM »

Aha, I missed booting with the NVRAM jumper set. I assumed it was like a BIOS clear jumper, in which case, setting the jumper for a few seconds is all that's needed.  I'll have to wait until Debian is done installing (we were going to fancontrol a go) and I'll give that a shot.
 
Thanks, I'll report back with results

795

Living Room / Re: Did Microsoft put a mole in Nokia?

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2013, 06:38 PM »

^Fortunately Qt is available under both GPL and LGPL (plus a commercial license) depending upon how nicely you want to play with others and how much you want to keep for yourself.

Since the FOSS world operates under open licenses it wouldn't have much mattered since you can't rescind a GPL or LGPL after the fact no matter who currently 'owns' Qt.

-40hz (September 14, 2013, 05:36 PM)

Yes, you are correct, the open source stuff would remain untouched, but managing the project and the commercial side of Qt would have changed management hands, and THAT would have been disastrous, I predict.  Thank God for forks...

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Living Room / Re: Hardware Question: Baseboard Management Controller communication failure

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2013, 03:36 PM »

Thanks for that, but I did see that posting and many others like it but the method described did not clear the problem.  I read somewhere there was a software solution to turn the fans down after booting to a Linux operating system, but I've lost it and it may have needed the BMC to be functional (which it is not at this point).

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Living Room / Hardware Question: Baseboard Management Controller communication failure

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2013, 03:19 PM »

I picked up a couple of Dell PowerEdge SC1425 server racks from Craigslist for FREE.  One for me to play with self-hosted cloud services and shared storage, the other for my son to build a Blender offline renderer.  Now his machine is giving the afore-mentioned error, and the fans keep going on full.  I realize the server isn't "broken" per se, just the thing that controls the fans, but I'm wondering if there's any way to fix this?  I've done the power down-unplug-push power button-repower cycle, but the same error came up.  There are a few posts marked Solved on Experts-Exchange, but the answers are held ransom (no more simply scrolling down).  Anybody have experience with this, and is there a way to fix it, or is the hardware simply toast?

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Living Room / Re: A School System goes NSA-Lite

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2013, 02:59 PM »

...
Positing a completely abusive and unworkable "solution" to a "problem" that is doomed to be overruled is the perfect excuse. Because now, should anything happen, the school administration can whine "See? We soooo tried to do something to protect the children!!! But we were overruled by those nasty judges who just don't understand the challenges facing parents who want their children educated - but can't be bothered to do anything themselves to help raise them. IT'S NOT OUR FAULT!"

-40hz (September 11, 2013, 05:32 AM)

This.  

Every.
Damn.
Time.  

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Living Room / Re: Did Microsoft put a mole in Nokia?

« Last post by Edvard on September 14, 2013, 02:45 PM »

Ah, so that's why Nokia sold all of it's Trolltech assets (Qt).  At least it was passed on before it ended up in Microsoft's clutches, planned or not. 

800

Living Room / Re: printer to repair or not repair

« Last post by Edvard on September 09, 2013, 10:01 PM »

^^ +1