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djotaku's twitter feed
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- just started playing WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- video did NOT kill the radio star. Radio is still around. MTV, on the other hand, no longer plays music videos. RIP TRL.
- Yay MD for the $170 electric bill credit!
- @harajukuroxy that stinks. My mom used to get a lot of migraines.
- My latest computer animation: http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/dtbp/node/48
- My latest computer animation:
- Nearly done with my latest animation
- @minimoniotaku: the old momma joke was hilarious
- Using akmod-nvidia, built the latest drivers for nvidia and 3D works again! w00t w00t! Blender here I come!
- Dagnabbit. Nvidia doesn't support Xorg7.4pre so no Blender for me for a while
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Nov
30
Think you know your keyboard?
Category: Computers | 
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Do you think you know your keyboard? Then read Techn0manc3r’s “Tour of Your Keyboard” post. He covers in depth the meaning behind many keys. Like wtf is Scroll Lock for? Why are there other keys you almost never use like “Pause/Break”? He does an excellent job presenting the keyboard and even veteran computer users will learn a thing or two. Also, it’ll make up for my lack of a good post today.
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Nov
30
Linux News!
Category: Fedora, KDE, Linux, News | Leave a Comment
Some tidbits I’ve gleaned and where to get more in depth info:
KDE3.5 has been released! Hopefully this means that it will make its way into the Fedora Core 5, due out in Feb 2006. Or, if they’ve completely moved KDE to the extras packages, maybe it will be available even earlier! Lots of info here and screenshots here!
Speaking of Fedore Core 5, there is a review of the latest devel freeze to be found at this O’Reilly site.
Exciting!
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Nov
29
New Capitalism
Category: Financial, Globalization, News | Leave a Comment
With all of the job cuts being announced right before the holidays, I was wondering if it might be time for a new capitalism. Here’s a rhetorical question, what if the board lowered their salaries and the CEO’s salary instead of firing people? A typical CEO for these big companies like Delta makes a few million. He or she doesn’t need millions - no one does! Somewhere around $50k can allow someone to survive in the US. $100k is very comfortable depending on the housing market. Certainly, $500k could be enough to live VERY well, even in New York. Let’s say they are firing white collar workers who each make $50k. If the CEO were to lower his salary by just $500k, he could save 100 jobs! If we’re talking about people who make less money, even more jobs could be saved! So why can’t they do this? Well, obviously, no one would ever lower their own salary. But why isn’t there much of a public outcry? People are losing their jobs right before Christmas and these CEOs are flying around in private jets. I know we have even more ridiculous things like basketball players making millions, but I would assume that people would say stuff. For the first time today, I heard them say something on CNN this morning. Of course, it was 6 AM and no one was listening - it wasn’t repeated all day like their typical stories. I know it’s a bunch of BS, but I had to get this off my chest - it’s really been bothering me.
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Nov
28
civ4 patch released!
Category: civ4 | Leave a Comment
I’m a couple of days late, but - the patch is out! Click on advanced -> check for updates.
Civfantics.com has the details of the patch.
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Nov
28
Secret Prisons and other Shady Stuff
Category: News, Politics | Leave a Comment
“Indeed, it has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” - Winston Churchhill
There has been a lot of talk recently concerning the CIA and their interrogation techniques with Terrorism suspects. Specifically, the talk has centered around “secret prisons” in Europe and the fact that the UN can’t go and investigate the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. However, I suggest that the debate is centering around the wrong tennants. Most of the debate has centered around whether we have been torturing prisoners. I don’t want to minimize the evils of torture. We obviously don’t want to use torture because it undermines our message to dictatorships and it increases the chance that Americans will be tortured when they are captured.
However, I think a great deal of the debate has missed a very key issue. Why is the CIA allegedly using prisons in Europe and the Middle East? Why are they keeping prisoners at Guantanamo? Although they are very careful to stress that they do not torture prisoners, they say these prisons are needed for “innovative” interrogation techniques. If these prisoners were kept on US soil we wouldn’t be able to question them this way. (Forget the fact that it would be extremely bad if they were to escape from a US prison) This presents a key flaw in the way the international system of laws works. Why is it ok for us to do something overseas that would be illegal if done on our shores? Either we should do it or we shouldn’t - and sending them overseas to do what we wouldn’t do at home is just a severe case of hypocrisy.
If you argue that we need to interrogate them in different ways because they are terrorists, then that is fine. The laws in the US should be ammended so that we can interrogate them in this way no matter where in the world they are being interrogated. To say, we must interrogate them this way and therefore will send them to a place where we can do it, doesn’t look very good for our already shoddy public image. It’s just an exploitation of a technicality.
On a simplified level, I can illustrate it via a story I was recently telling my wife. When I was young - say less than 10 - my parents would sometimes punish me by saying I couldn’t play Nintendo. Then I would proceed to play with my Sega. Afterall, they said I couldn’t play Nintendo, they didn’t forbid me from playing video games. Of course, that excuse only worked the first time. After that, they were sure to say, “no video games” or “no Nintendo, Genesis, Game Boy, or anything else electronic.” So much for feeling so slick. And that’s what the US is doing!
That is the most important part of the debate to me. But, the other part is also very important. We need to decide as an American people what we are going to tolerate. How much of our purity are we willing to give up in the name of our protection? Shall we be obsessed with being blameless and therefore possibly allow more terrorist attacks to take place? Should we be tough on those we catch and, therefore, forfeit some of our ability to call on change from those who torture their prisoners? We can’t have it both ways.
Americans love to complain: if we are too soft and something happens there will be outcries for not having tried hard enough. If we’re hard on them and we lose face, people complain. There will always be complaints because it’s impossible to please everyone. What the lawmakers need to do is ignore the polls and just decide. No backpedaling - no changing your mind when it’s no longer unpopular. We’re talking about really serious stuff here! I mean, schools and taxes are important, but what we do with enemy combatants has very serious reprocussions around the world.
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Nov
27
Waves
Category: Photography, Poetry, civ4 | Leave a Comment
Life seems to be a series of waves that I ride until they crash on shore. Then I wait for the next one and have another go at it. I’m not talking about life fundamentals - those are on a much slower evolution and change much less often, but I’m talking instead about the fun things I do in my life.
Take, for example, my recent fascination with haikus. I don’t even have an event I could pinpoint as the cause. I just saw the snow and remembered how I always loved seeing it fall at night at Cornell. Then, for some reason, I thought the best way to express myself would be a haiku. Now, it seems they are coming to me for all sorts of reasons. And so it will be for a while, until they suddenly stop.
It’s the same with photography. One week I’ll be inundated with ideas for pictures - so much so that I have to write my ideas down if I want any chance of remembering them. And I work on them and post 10 or even 15 pictures to my page on flickr. Then, as quickly as the urges arrived, they are gone and my camera will lie unused for days or even weeks at a time.
Even civ4 or any other video game I have ever played follows the same patterns. I play the game until I can’t take it any more and then don’t play for months at a time. It doesn’t matter if it’s my favorite game (and I don’t have too many of those), I just have no desire to play.
The good thing about the patterns is that I’m never just caught up with one thing. I’m always into another one of my passions and it makes life fresh and new. But sometimes it can be a real pain in the butt. I’ve had some days which were perfect for pursuing my hobbies and I just didn’t feel like doing a darn thing. In fact, it seems that I only ever want to do things when I can’t. During the school year, I couldn’t wait to play Sims 2. I haven’t touched the game since the end of my Senior year at Cornell.
I wonder if other people feel the same way or if this is just a sign that I have found a lot of things that I like to do or even love to do, but have yet to find my passion. Or did even Picasso sometimes feel as though he didn’t want to paint another painting or he would kill someone. Even my blog post format goes in waves. Sometimes I feel like writing posts about my personal life, other times it’s politices, Linux, civ4, or whatever else I want to talk about. Well, at any rate, get ready for the photographic wave coming soon. I play to take some pictures this Thanksgiving holiday - including some I have been planning for a while.
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Nov
26
Xbox 360 in trouble
Category: DRM, M$, Video Games | Leave a Comment
Apparently, MS’s new $400 console is having a lot of problems. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be happy if I plunked down enough money to buy a cheap computer and my video game console didn’t work correctly. However, the real problem for Microsoft is touched upon in this blog.
In the past, such a faux pas would have taken weeks to get attention. One person would have a broken box and think maybe it was just them. After a few weeks of reports, someone at a store like EB would leak the problem to the press and THEN it would be a big deal. That’s how things used to work. Unfortunately for MS, that’s not how they work anymore.
Take, for example, the Sony malware debacle I was following on my blog. Just a little over a week after a hacker figured out the problem and reported it on his blog, Sony was recalling the discs and making all sorts of apologies. This sort of speed is unprecedented! Usually companies spend weeks denying and then playing down the risks. However, when people can be vocal on their blogs, things begin to add up. Especially when sites like Technorati provide a gauge to how much a particular topic is being discussed.
I hope that MS realizes that, while they may be kings in the OS department, they are relative tyros to the console market and didn’t even do that well with the first xbox. They would do well to take a lesson from the Sony incident and just apologize. They are also extremely lucky that we live in such a connected age. If the problem happens to be software related, they can simply release a patch via Xbox Live and fix their user’s systems. In the past they would have had to have boxes shipped to them to be fixed.
I can’t say that I’m suprised at the reports of the boxes. In addition to the fact that it’s very hard for any manufacturer to keep their products from having defects, MS has two things working against them. First of all, the Xbox 360 was rush-delivered to stores to get in this Christmas season and get a leg up on Sony and Nintendo. This type of situation almost always leads to a shoddy product. Second, look at the crap job they do on Windows. They release a product that’s halfway done and reason that they’ll fix it via patches later. That’s not the way to do things! Oh well, I’m just glad I’m not one of those who has to have the latest thing right when it comes out. (I didn’t get a PS2 until they were $150 last summer) If I ever get an Xbox 360 or PS3, it’ll be a few generations down the line - after they have fixed all (or most) of the bugs.
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Nov
25
Viruses and Virus Software
Category: Computers, Linux, M$ | Leave a Comment
As I spoke with my in-laws last weekend about viruses and anti-virus software makers, they voiced a thought everyone has had at one time or another- perhaps the viruses from Norton and McAfee. After all, why would you spend $40 a year to keep your computer safe if there weren’t any viruses? As I explained to them that, actually, most viruses nowadays come from Organized Crime in an attempt to steal identities, I thought about the fiasco it would be for such a thing to occur. It would be like Microsoft purposely creating a virus for Linux.
But then I read this story and began to wonder if Norton and the others really had my best interest in mind. If they really ARE looking to protect me from spyware and all that crap they use to scare us into buying the products, why didn’t it catch the Sony malware? In the end it all comes down to money. Sony can afford to pay them to keep quiet about things and let the malware be installed. It certainly ISN’T about user convenience as Norton bothers me enough, asking about each and every program who wants to use an inbound or outbound port on my computer.
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Nov
24
Photographic You;
Previously avoided;
Now in so many!
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Nov
24
A Haiku
Category: Haiku | Leave a Comment
First winter’s snowfall;
Flakes falling from a dark sky;
Morning: All is white.
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Nov
24
Thanksgiving
Category: Me, family | Leave a Comment
The timing of this holiday is perfect. Coming near the end of the year, there are basically 11 months upon which to look back on. As my wife reminded me last weekend, a lot have happened this year. As a matter of fact, I think this has been the most eventful year of my life. Here are the things I have to be thankful for this year:
May: We both graduated from Cornell with excellent grades; I had two job offers and selected one in the last week of school.
June: I found a good temp job while I waited for the hiring process to fnish up at my permanent job
July: I married my girlfriend of almost 4 years. We had a beautiful wedding where next to nothing went wrong. Our honeymoon was safe and fun.
Aug: I was able to get my wife temp job where I worked, boosting our salary to help save up for our impending move.
Sept: I was called in to start work ahead of schedule, meaning I’d get to have benefits (health insurance!) sooner!
Oct: My wife found a great job she loves
Nov: My parents became relicensed to act as foster parents. Now they will get to provide care for a young child who might otherwise be neglected or abused.
Even though we received the sad news last week that my father-in-law’s kidneys have stopped working and that he will have to be on dialysis, we can be thankful that I was hired to work near her parents. When she found out he was in the hospital, it was only a 3.5 hour drive for father and daughter to be reunited. We can visit them and they can visit us every weekend, if they wished.
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