Brandon's Blog

12/25/2005

Christmas, Vista, etc.

Doing a little after-midnight tech reading following a quite good candlelight service.  It was nice to see the folks again, especially those back from college.  We’re at the point now to where there are high school seniors I saw in the hospital as babies.  Some of the people I knew around the halls growing up have certainly become outstanding individuals.

Changing the subject from more solemn, brooding topics…  Vista just seems like vapor to me, devoid of any personal meaning to my life.  My digital camcorder, on the other hand, has been subliminally snarky with me because I didn’t catch onto the appeal of the devices earlier.  I honestly didn’t know they were as good as they are.  Excellent devices, especially those just above the quality you tend to see sold prevalently at Best Buy (of course, everything is far cheaper online).

I think I now have just about all of the Barenaked Ladies studio albums.  I plan to listen to them all very soon.

It was a great Christmas.  I am very displeased to see my dad’s WPC54GS Linksys network card be such a piece of junk.  A little-known fact is that the return route of Santa’s sleigh involves passing out RMA numbers.  Wish me luck.

Actually, the card’s not a piece of junk; it’s the drivers.  However, any good Linux dork knows a wireless card is all drivers when the drivers aren’t working.

Stupid Broadcom.  Bring back the PRISM chipset, Linksys!  Nothing screwed up back in the glory days.  Well, except that everything but the drivers screwed up in the glory days.  I remember sitting on the couch glaring across the room at an unblinking (that’s actually a funny pun now that I type it) WAP11, screaming at Windows to explain if it wanted a hex or ascii key, then entering the WEP passphrase instead of the key.  What a mess!  The only thing that’s improved is my knowledge of the mess.

Well, WPA-PSK is better, but we can’t use it here at home.

I think I’m going to go back to the dorms next year, much to my eagerly-anticipated embarassment.  I might just do it because it would be funny, but not messing with furniture and meals sounds good, too.  We’ll see what happens.

I guess I should get to bed, meaning I should read a few more pages of prewar German and then get to bed.  If I even type the word Postfix (oh, darn) I’ll be up all night reading.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or whatever makes you happy.  I’m not going to boycot!

12/24/2005

Dropped the Grinch

Well, whatever dross was left over in my mind from this weirdo semester seems to have cleared out as of today, so that’s a great Christmas present for me.  It lifted right off.  Great feeling.  It’s really good to have all that put away.  I made the grades I was expecting, which was probably the best thing.  A little strange part of me was wanting to do not quite that well.

It’s fun just tooling around with a new camcorder and looking for something to solder with a Cold Heat tool.

I’m adding another programming project on top of an existing project and a some-other-time project.  I really want to write a PHP application to manage a server.  Kind of webmin with a lobotomy.  The some-other-time project is a Quicken-esque application for Qt 4.0.  Unfortunately, that means I’m either installing “experimental” packages on a base Slack install, or that I’m waiting until KDE 4.0.

Back to the server thing: the way webmin is, you need a brain transplant to understand all the options.  Well, actually, you need to be able to do everything from the CLI to understand the GUI.  Paradox alert.  This would simply stuff and still allow for a sweet virtual hosting rig.  Probably a Python + PHP thing (Python script installed in /usr/local/sbin run by PHP with sudo’ed root privileges).  Sounds insecure, but I don’t mind a hacker adding and removing users.  As long as they can’t get a shell.

Anyway, back to TV, German history, and rest.

12/23/2005

So Strange

I’m afraid to post what I’ve been ruminating mentally over the last day or so, because it sounds so bloody despicable.  Not in a depraved way, but more in a “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch” way.  And I don’t really think this stuff is valid; it’s more just an interesting proposition followed through a little too far.  I’m all for Christmas and presents and all that good stuff.  So, now that I’ve managed expectations drastically enough, allow me to unimpress:

Is Christmas Economically Efficient?

The thought hit me today.  Do we come out ahead?  We all know the retailers depend upon Christmas to put them into the black for the year, and fiscal years are typically arranged so that these earnings make it into the statements at the last moment.  But the evidence seems to lead to a negative.

Revenue is one thing; efficiency is another.  So, let’s break down the “Christmas transaction,” which is effectively an indirect form of barter.  Social culture dictates that for every present there is another present.  It may or may not be ‘equal and opposite.”  Luckily, we eliminate the need for a double coincidence of wants, as money moderates this exchange.

Let’s assume that the ideal Christmas involves an exchange of gift(s) totaling an equal value.  We can say that “gift expectations” are in equilibrium when this event occurs, as sufficient time has elapsed for the gift exchangers to settle upon a mutually-acceptable dollar value for presents.

Therefore, we must arrive at the conclusion that a long-run Christmas transaction is merely an inefficient means of reducing liquidity; people are converting money into an equal-value good, then exchanging that good for a good of equal value.  Obviously economically inefficient, especially considering the amount of rent-seeking that must occur in order to accumulate, package, transport, and exchange presents.  The picture becomes more interesting in the short-run, as presents of unequal value are exchanged.  Clearly, the person who has less expenditure gains more in the transaction, thus actually appearing to penalize generosity.

Black clouds aside, we might actually gain from the coincidence of discounts present around Christmastime, thus making it more efficient to “trade” during this time period.  In this way, Christmas serves as a sort of external market in which discounted goods are traded.  However, it is difficult to avoid consideration of the short-run losses of disequilibria in gift value.

In the long run, it’s probably a wash.

Merry Christmas.

12/22/2005

Whew

Well, that took a buttload of work, but it’s done now.

I like it.  I might tweak it a bit, but it’s pretty much there.  Colors were a pain (note: never design a website on a laptop).

12/22/2005

Revision 12 and Documentation

Revised Doxygen output is now available from the right bar, and Revision 12 is up with nothing much interesting.  I’m poised though, as a cobra preparing for attack.

12/22/2005

Priceless

You have to love Chuck Norris.

I certainly love the facts.

12/22/2005

Lotsa News Today

Well, it’s the day of X11R7, trumpeted as a means of bringing new developers into the xorg fold.  I think the transition to modular X will be recognized in a year or two as a major stepping stone toward a much stronger *nix graphics system.  Or, it’ll just get crushed underfoot.  Who knows.

The first update to OpenOffice 2 is out, and the first service release to Debian Sarge hit the torrents.  Ubuntu has filled its true hidden function, embarassing Debian and pushing them out of release-paranoia a la BSD.

I was actually a hype factory for Kubuntu, but after seeing how it choked my PII 400, I am squarely on the MEPIS boat.  MEPIS is now my preferred newb distro, and I’ve looked at Mandriva (installer only – it errors out on my 400), too.  No contest, actually.  Installing from a LiveCD is brilliant.

Apt is not as good of a package manager as I had dreamed.  I have experienced numerous bad downloads, which really busts my chops.  MD5 checksums, anyone?  Portage is my favorite, which is disappointing.  My ambivalence about this stuff reveals my deep-seated Slackware loyalties.  FreeBSD’s system balances security and Slackware-esque DIY mentality.

Slack is no desktop, even with KDE.  It just doesn’t feel right; it’s too stock.  The UI tweaks in MEPIS just blow it all out of the water.

I’m actually looking at some CGI server management scripts.  I really have more stuff going on recreationally right now than I can handle.  Learning Perl ain’t exactly what you want to occupy the clean-up position on a to-do list.

I have some good ideas for the Sigma combat system, that (at least in my mind) are successfully integrating the idea of “balance” (footing, etc.) to the mix.  Time will tell on that…

12/22/2005

Don't Blame TxD

Save the whipping boy’s butt for when it really counts.  I’m tearing this site to pieces right now.  Permalinks already work.

Yes, they deserved to die!  And I hope they burn in Hell!

12/21/2005

The New Hitlist

With the STL revelations of yore, it’s time to refocus, regroup, and start kicking some butt.  I have a beautiful Slack 10.0 minimalistic (yeah, even on Slack standards) install with X, flux, and gvim.  It’s like I step into a two-year timewarp and start coding.

I had to build SVN from scratch because I didn’t feel like downloading and burning Slack 10.2.  Welcome back to Slack, young dork.

I’m actually sticking the nuts out and learning the intricacies of vi.  I know I would hate emacs without even using it for more than five seconds.  My main weakness with vi is entering Insert mode in the various clever ways that actually enhance productivity.  I was universally issuing “i” commands, which insert before the cursor.  I just learned about “a” for append and “c” for change, which really help.  “o” automatically drops you a line and enters insert mode, which is often very nice.  I was basically crawling before, and now I’m limping.  I did get a regexp find and replace going yesterday while modding an apt sources.list file in Kubuntu before chucking the thing out the window.

SimplyMEPIS is a great newb distro.  I’m very pleased, and I think it will serve my family well as a “don’t want to risk a real computer on that website” browser/mail platform.  Especially since the Firefox transition here has been of the “wait n’ see” ilk.

The hitlist is as follows:

12/21/2005

SVN Update

Revision 10 is now on my subversion repository.

It features the new-and-improved Makefile that downloads and compiles static libraries for Lua.

It’s a start!

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