Friday, February 25, 2005

Blogging not liked by the Librarian

Slashdot | ALA President Not Fond of Bloggers

Frankly I'm not overly suprised. This is something that I've always expected to hear from the old guard. Sure there are times that blogs are complete crap, but then again when was the last time that something that you read, that was professionally made, was less than what you expected.

Fave quote:
It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

I am a Moron

So I reread the gabeart section. Seems he did mention Yoko Matsugane as a pinup. I, as a skimming moron, did not read that part and just read "name" and went "== illustrator".

Oh well....

The Computer that would just not work

Replaced the motherboard last night. Then spent three hours trying to figure out why it is still resetting. The memtest came back clean, and it's almost [now] all new parts. Hooked it into another computers peripherals and power and it still reboot horribly. It's off to the last desperate measure of installing XP onto another hard drive in the machine, installing WoW and trying to get it to reboot. If it does, then the only thing left that is the same from the old computer is the video card.

And it's not a cheap one. . .

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Shoe Lacing

Where else are you going to find a site on how to lace up your shoes? This site has things like Straight (European) Lacing or Shoe Shop Lacing, which was purported to be used in the early british army for lacing boots. So far the various lacings that I have read about have both talked about easy of removal to get at injured feet. *Not* something I think of when I am lacing my shoes....

Monday, February 14, 2005

*Not* An Illustrator

So I was looking at gabeart_v2.0 and he mentioned Yoko Matsugane. She is *not* an illustrator. She is a model. Remember this, if I teach you anything, be wary of illustrators when they say things like modelling curves. . .

The Tale of The Glitchy Computer

For those of you who want to check to make sure that everything is working fine on your motherboard: Memtest86 - Memory Diagnostic Page is the page for you.

So far this is what has been tried to fix my computer:
New Power Supply
New Mouse
New Keyboard
Old Keyboard reinstated
Defragged the Hard Drive
Moved the most fragemented file from harddrive C to D, defragged C, moved file back to C
Reduced mouse polling speed [slower icky mouse and when it freaked it just hung the box]
New graphics driver [end result the login screen refreshes slower]
Replaced the DirectX9.0c installation with a fresh one
Turned off the sound card [no sound, no stability]
Reduced the Memory speed from 166 to 133 [slow memory still not stable]

One of the coworkers seems to think that it's a ram power module has gone south. Reason being that the memory on the motherboard at home kept posting errors on memtest. I brought it in, and voila, no memory errors whatsoever. How cool is that?

And the reason why I went through the steps of replacing vid/directx? Well the folks at blizzard on the forums suggested those steps. Oh and then other posters would cite that turning off their sound seemed to make it better. What was going on was that my mouse on occasion in game would just start jumping all over the screen like a chinchilla on speed. And it would click along the way. I'd lose icons, target friends, camera would go all over the place. Not fun. New motherboard is at the delivery place and here is to hoping that it is delivered today.

Monday, February 07, 2005

Focus Follows Mouse

Got this from one of the coworker/mac fan/all around good guy:

> Hey,
> I am not sure if you guys have seen this... there is a hidden option to
> enable the "focus follows mouse" feature in Apple's X11:
> Q: Is there an option for no-click-to-focus for X11 applications?
> A: Yes there is a hidden option. From an xterm or terminal execute :
> defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm true
> I got this tip from the following page:
> http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1232.html


Very nice. I can have my ffm back! I've so been missing it.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

Yeah I'm the speshul munkey

I set up an email to send new entries to in blogger. Then I forget it. So I came back today to see what the fark it was. So what do I do. I blog instead. Yeah, the allure of a blog is pretty large.

Ruby ruby ruby

Yeah there are times that I've wondered about my sanity. I really enjoy Ruby. Now some folks would start to talk about how they think there isn't any money to made in it or how they are missing some critical library that makes it an unusable language. To the first group I say "A hacker does for love what others would not do for money" and the other group "If you have a scratch, itch it and then send us the backscratcher". This is a really neat and wacky language. Just look at Redhanded. _why is in a class all by himself, and unlike myself, actually takes time to blog each day. Maybe I should code up some gui widget in Fox which comes standard on windows installs of ruby that takes text and emails it to an address. Then I could have an autoblogger

And the neat thing about ruby is that you can write code like this:

(1..10).each {|item| puts "Ruby is neat"}

Realize though, that my leet coding skills in Ruby are like 1 month old and I'm no David Heinemeier Hansson.

I will say this, Ruby has been for me, a side effecty language. I write some code and in one line I can do three things to the current array and get back the changes I've made at the same time. It's a good thing, but some of my old professors would have a heart attack if they ever saw that code. Oh well, at least I realize this.

/rant