7/28/2005 #
Vista
After seeing some screenshots and early impressions of Windows Vista, it seems like we’re basically getting XP 2.0. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that the hardware requirements are so high for what you are actually getting.
What about all these 800 MHz computers everyone in the world seems to have laying around in their houses? They’re not that old, certainly not old enough to throw out.
At least in our house, I expect to see these migrated to Linux or given away. We’re using Linux to make what I might call “buffer boxes” to check e-mail on risky accounts and try out websites that may have security exploits. Fedora Core 4 running KDE on one of these machines is perfectly fine for such purposes.
I know my little Shuttle could support Vista, and I’m actually considering grabbing a copy and trying it out. But I’m not planning on wasting money for a license when it finally comes out. This just does not seem like a big enough deal.
7/28/2005 #
Uncanny Valley
I’ve cited this study so many times in conversation without knowing what it was called, so here it is.
7/28/2005 #
Sigma Blues
I’m having some serious misgivings about the current state of the combat structure for the Sigma specification. Note that this is does not affect the already-written vocabulary/architecture section. I’m dealing with procedure now: rolls, conditionals, computations. I feel like the system is not balanced yet, even in my mind.
Compound these feelings of doubt with perpetual sleepiness and some kind of strange health stuff, and you have a 0 words/day progress rate. I know I’m only racing against myself on this, but if I don’t start coding soon I’m afraid I’ll lose interest in the project.
Lots to do tonight. Looks like today will be packing day, which seems early. But I’m actually going to try to bring the bulk of my stuff home over this weekend (kitchen stuff, etc.). If I get the time (and don’t sleep again for two hours like I think I did yesterday evening), I will try to get enough done with inventories to get a revision up on SVN (dang, I’ve been waiting to be able to talk like that for a long time).
I’ve got a little bit of medium-sized stuff in the apartment, but it’s nothing too bad. However, feeling tired at 8:53 AM is not a good sign.
7/27/2005 #
Status Report
I am completely outraged. About everything. Somebody needs to take action. It’s about time we started to take control of these problems. It’s time for accountability.
Too much news watching today. =)
7/27/2005 #
Question
How illegal is it to grab a Windows Vista beta off of BitTorrent?
I would guess it is pretty dang illegal and pretty dang common.
OSNews is reporting (by way of what I would consider the dubiously-credible WinBeta) that the first beta pushes will be occurring tomorrow (well, today now, Wednesday).
The fact that it is now Wednesday means I need to get the heck to bed. 5 hours of sleep if I crash right now. Glad I got that big nap.
Proofreading run comment: “Vista beta” sounds stupid. No, “Vista” sounds stupid.
In other news: Mac mini’s were upgraded today, finally making 512 MB RAM standard issue for $499. HDD’s are still 4800 (I think) RPM, which is a bit embarassing, but hey, the thing is smaller than a telephone. I do not want to buy one now, but they just took care of about 40% of my argument against getting it. 30% is where to put it and what monitor it would use, the other 30% is the up-and-coming switch to Intel (Pentium M? Oh, please yes). I think the switch to Intel will keep me frozen for another year or two.
7/27/2005 #
Hmm
libsigc++
Hmm… This doesn’t look helpful, but it is interesting. Their callback framework resembles that of Qt.
Hotness.
7/26/2005 #
Sigma?
Yeah, so the birdie was wrong last week. For some reason, I felt it necessary to sleep for about three hours this evening, which will prevent the completion of the specification. I’m still working on a very key detail anyway, and I don’t want to rush the process for the sake of completion.
In other Sigma news, inventory is coming along. Not that I’ve been working on it this week, but I feel like I’m fairly close to a rudimentary “get”/”drop” system. Maybe an hour or two of good work, maybe less. The great thing about C++ is that getting the dirty class work done early allows most later stuff to happen quickly and smoothly.
Work moves along. I’m ready to be home for a while.
7/23/2005 #
Quote of the Day
From Slashdot:
“I love Apache, but in the same way I love my wife: with some trepidation. Fast and stable, flexible and reliable, but make one little syntax error and you can lose your ass.”
7/20/2005 #
I Know What an Uninformed Conservative Sounds Like
I didn’t know what a truly, severely uninformed liberal really sounds like, though. Until today.
One thing I can really say about FNC is that the liberals that do make it on (and who don’t get blocked from talking by Gibson) are pretty good. Or at least I think so. I feel like a lot of times the arguments that are presented put the issue in a clear light, letting you choose between two points that only differ at a point where assumptions or arguments begin to diverge. When Sean isn’t going nuts and Alan isn’t being a fruitcake, Hannity and Colmes can have this effect on me. Heck, when O’Reilly tones it down I can get some decent left side input from the likes of Al Sharpton, et al.
Today, I heard a tin-foil hat type argument that was not designed to argue. In fact, the point was to deflect the argument itself into a netherword of political conspiracy and greed. It reached the point where the very existence of the Kyoto Protocol was called into a moral relativist-style question.
The truth is, the arguer doesn’t know what the Kyoto protocol is. That was pretty funny. She didn’t know that the current administration would rather conduct a gay marriage on the White House lawn than secretly sign the Kyoto protocol and hide it from the American public.
Oh, and Bush’s Saudi ties are creating a conspiracy to raise crude oil prices. Of course, once informed of the fact that OPEC sets crude prices and that the Republican majority in Congress rides upon a good economy, which in turn rides (seemingly exclusively) on gas prices, it became the evil other countries in the world who are fixing prices.
I thought Iraq was supposed to be about lowering the price of oil. Why would Bush then conspire to raise prices? I think this sort of contrast happens when you don’t think about what you’re saying.
Oh, and capitalism is great, but we should have a revenue ceiling on our companies to prevent greed.
Luckily, I wasn’t doing the arguing. I let another girl do it, which was outstanding (and humorous). She did a good job. I would have loved to have heard a good, well-formed socialist argument about oil prices, or a look at international relations from an intellectual anti-American. What I got was what I suspected was being circulated amongst the “Viva la Revolucion” style red-shirted college liberals. Which is effectively horse poop relativism crossed with a sense of fairness that is only superceded by one’s own greed and selfish wishes. I’m watching it on MTV right now.
I would like to think I’m fair enough to hate on a conservative that does this same kind of thing, only laced with poor religious arguments or racial hatred. In fact, I feel like I’ve done this very thing before. It really hacks me off when I see someone who sacrifices their own ability to have a thought process for the sake of being angry and one-sided.
Maybe I’m guilty, too. If so, I’m working on it.
7/19/2005 #
True 'Dat
Let’s look at a small example. The Unix programming culture holds in high esteem programs which can be called from the command line, which take arguments that control every aspect of their behavior, and the output of which can be captured as regularly-formatted, machine readable plain text. Such programs are valued because they can easily be incorporated into other programs or larger software systems by programmers. To take one miniscule example, there is a core value in the Unix culture, which Raymond calls “Silence is Golden,” that a program that has done exactly what you told it to do successfully should provide no output whatsoever. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just typed a 300 character command line to create a file system, or built and installed a complicated piece of software, or sent a manned rocket to the moon. If it succeeds, the accepted thing to do is simply output nothing. The user will infer from the next command prompt that everything must be OK.
(From a Slashdot-linked article)