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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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Dec
31
The Kodak is Gone
Category: Me, Photography | 
2 Comments
My Kodak 3600 DX served me well. That 2.2 Megapixel camera was my first digital camera and I took many great shots with it. Some of my favorites are:
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Dec
31
Wordpress is 2.0!
Category: wordpress | Leave a Comment
Well, about 14 hours ago WordPress went 2.0!! It is amazing! They have REALLY revamped things. I’ll have to relearn how to do some tasks, but it is genrally very amazing. For example, now I can create new categories from within the post instead of saving, going to the categories page, creating it, and then coming back. (using AJAX - like flickr.com) It allows me to be a LOT more flexible in my tagging and I love that. Also, the preview is not just the text and images anymore, they make it look EXACTLY like your page! It’s really awesome and I’m glad I upgraded. They have continued to create great blogging software that puts all other blogging software to shame!
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Dec
29
KDE 3.5 is the last KDE release before KDE 4. As you will know if you are into the Linux world, most projects reserve a major number change for possible imcompabilities. It’s part of the reason why Gnome is no longer following math and is at release 2.13, which is larger than 2.9. When Gnome finally switches to 3, it’s open season for breaking compatibility with all the GTK+ apps that work with the past few years of Gnome. It’s a chance for programmers to say, “Hey, when I made function foo, I had to use a hack to make it work with the Gnome 2.0 series. Now, I can rewrite the Gnome libraries to make it work with proper programming techniques so it works right.” The same will happen with KDE 4, which is having a rewrite of many of the core libraries.
Of course, as Techn0manc3r says, KDE is the 800 pound gorilla of Window Managers/Desktop environments. It’s a huge bugger - with three programs open, 192 MB of RAM is used up. Thankfully, this computer has 512 MB and that’s why I NEVER run KDE on my laptop. (It has 128 MB RAM) Even on this computer I usually run fluxbox for the beauty and simplicity. Also, flux tends to load faster and loads GTK apps pretty quickly too. But with KDE 3.5 out, I couldn’t resist seeing what they had changed.
In a word: sleek. KDE 3.5 is much sleeker! It’s always had the best eye candy in my opinion, and this release really cleans things up. For example, the KDE systray now blends seemlessly with the rest of the KDE taskbar. The programs on the taskbar also no longer have a border between them. I never thought it would make a difference, but it looks a LOT cleaner! Superkaramba is now officially part of KDE! I had to uninstall the previous version (easy to do with yum) for KDE to upgrade. It is no longer represent by a bomb icon, but a cool blue button. The tooltips look a lot nicer now as well. They are especially informative when highlighting over the pager as you can see below. The rest of KDE pretty much seems the same.
Above are pictures of my current desktop without too many enhancements. I haven’t spent the time necessary on KDE since I don’t use it often. Perhaps that will change as I tend to keep my desktops up for a while. Also, I’m trying out aKgregator as it got better reviews for RSS than Thunderbird, which I currently use.
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Dec
27
The Jargon File
Category: Computers, Geek Love, Internet, M$, Technology | Leave a Comment
Think flickr is addictive? Spend hours perusing Wikipedia? Then you better stay away from The Jargon File, a reference to geek terms maintained by hacking demigod Eric Raymond. You can easily spend HOURS learning the meaning behind words in geekspeek or (even more fun) reading about the background BEHIND these terms. Eric Raymond, the major co-author of the introduction, is a great author and the intro is as much fun as the rest of The Jargon File. Especially awesome is the part about the geek psyche. It explains why we find funny:
while(microsoft == evil)
{
world = messed_up;
}
because it’s implicitly an infinite loop. Read The Jargon File only at the peril of your life going down the drain….
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Dec
26
Yumex, the graphical frontend for yum has been upgraded to version 0.44. This version fixes all that was annoying about the previous version. It now automatically takes the user to the output page during updates to see what is going on. The interface is also a lot cleaner and there are a lot less popup windows which had a tendency to get “lost” if heavily using multiple desktops.
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Dec
26
today’s short posts
Category: Computers, Internet, News | Leave a Comment
there will be a series of short posts today to make up for a long and substantial one.
SETI at Home is now over! I never thought this phenom would end, but, sadly, it has.
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Dec
26
Linux distros for all!
Category: Linux | Leave a Comment
I believe that the more choice in Linux distros, the better! It’s good to have one for each purpose and the following website shows why:
the best linux distro
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Dec
25
Merry Christmas!
Category: Holidays, Me, family | Leave a Comment
This was one of the best Christmas celebrations either in spite of or because it was so simple. I got some really great gifts including:
- Final Fantasy 6: Grand Finale - this CD has some AWESOME symphonic recordings of the best songs of FF6
- Fantastic Plastic Machine: Les Plus - a great remix CD of that funky Japanese DJ, FPM. I’m sure you’ve heard him in commercials and movies and didn’t even know it. For example, one of his songs from this CD was in the second Austin Powers movie.
- Linux Shell Scripting with Bash - to help me continue honing my programming skills
- A great book on creating surreal artwork with Photoshop
- Hollywood Shuffle - a great movie about Blaxsploitation films
- 1776 - a book about the American Revolution
- some other stuff that was ordered, but didn’t arrive on time
But my favorite part was giving my presents to my family members. I made a calendar for my mom and her brothers with old pictures from their childhood since their mother died this year. I don’t know how my uncle in Miami reacted, but my uncle who was with us in Tampa was near tears. I’m glad I was able to make them emotional in a good way as they remembered simpler times. I think that’s one of the reasons God gave me the talent of photography and photo editing. Oh, and I gave my cousin a blog for Christmas as one of her presents. She loves to write and now she can write for the world. She has some great poetry up. You can check out her site here.
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Dec
23
Big Brother wears Mickey Mouse Ears?
Category: Disney, Me | Leave a Comment
Went to Disney a few days ago with my family and found out that Disney is not quite the innocent little park it once was. I never quite felt the same about the park after 11 Sept 2001 when they began checking bags, but this time it was even more invasive. In order to enter the park I had to insert my ticket and then be digitally fingerprinted. Why did I have to be fingerprinted? To tie the ticket to me. In addition to the fact that it had my name printed on it, it now had my fingerprints attached to it. Now, I can’t really think of too many nefarious things Disney can do with my prints, but it was just really weird. Are that many people having their tickets stolen?
Perhaps what was going on was that people were buying the Park Hopper passes and then a whole family would visit Disney two people at a time. It’s the only real reason I can see for the moves. That or perhaps the cost of the blacklight ink for getting back into the park was sky-rocketing. Either way I didn’t like it and it tainted my experience.
Although my younger self would never had believed me, Disney is boring as an adult and the fingerprinting just added to the gloom. It’s not so much that Disney is boring as the fact that it’s not entertaining enough for the $60 price tag. It was a little too much money to see some animatronic pirates. The best ride for me continued to be the Haunted House.
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Dec
20
In all the magazines and web articles I’ve been reading, there has been a call to arms in the Linux camp. Microsoft is going to be innovative, for once, and we’re going to take advantage of it. There will be significant interface changes for Vista and MS Office 12. According to Linux Format Magazine issue 73, there will be major changes to the way Office looks. Why does all of this matter? Well, one of the complaints leveled against Linux time and again is, “it may be simple, but I already know how everything works in Windows. Why switch and waste time relearning it?” It’s the whole gist of Microsoft’s campaign that it costs more to switch to Linux than remain with MS. It’s not cost as Linux is free as in beer and freedom, but because we have to retrain the workforce, they claim. So, the logic amongst Linux enthusiasts goes, if MS is going to overhaul things, why not give us a shot? I must say this viewpoint appears to have some merit.
The second reason people are claiming that the Vista upgrade time is an important one for Linux is that MS is going to once again raise the bar on the minimum system requirements. Although Windows XP says the minimum requirements are 256 MB RAM, it’s daft to try and run it on less than 512. And if you intend to do serious gaming, video editing, or image editing, you will need at LEAST 1 GB. Obviously no figures have been released, but the rumour mill abounds with people saying that most of the current PCs that people have will be rendered ineffective when Vista comes out.
Now, with some modern Linux distros like Fedora, it can be important to have at least 256 MB (although my Linux laptop has 128) and really 512 is essential to enjoy Gnome and KDE. That is to say, you can use them with less RAM, but you won’t be able to have all the glitter like transparent menus and the like. However, there are many distros like Damn Small Linux, Feather Linux, and others who intend to make sure that Linux will continue to run with as much of the newest software as possible while running on the oldest of software out there. The minimum requirements for the Fluxbox-sportin’ DSL include 64 MB of RAM.
So, while some distros continue to trudge onwards, we can be sure that users will be able to continue to get new software and run it on their aging PCs. So someone like my uncle who doesn’t have the resources to always be purchasing new hardware, doesn’t have to be stuck with Windows 98. He can switch to Linux and continue to benefit from upgrades to his system and always use the latest software his hardware will support.
There are, of course, other issues such as MS Vista requiring a new monitor which supports some sort of DRM and new graphics cards. Linux, on the other hand, will work with nearly any monitor.
So maybe this is a time to tell your friends who wish to upgrade, but can’t afford the new hardware and will have to learn a new interface anyway that there is a great FREE alternative called Linux. Only time will tell if the Vista release truly is the time Linux takes off or if it is just another false alarm. I hope that Linux would reach the prominence necessary to get hardware driver writers and game designers to take note. We don’t have to kill Microsoft and we certainly don’t want to be a new monopoly as that would be like the rebels becoming the new Emperors - replacing one dictatorship for another.
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Dec
15
Quickies
Category: Books, Internet, Linux | Leave a Comment
1) In this post, wget had created a directory structure, foiling my plans to do the md5sum check automatically. The correct way to do what I wanted to do was use the option -nd for no directories. If I had typed
wget -nd address
it would have just saved to my current directory and the code would have worked perfectly. It would have also worked the roundabout way that I showed.
2) If you like Neal Stephenson’s style of writing then you MUST read Catch-22! Catch-22 is the literary father of his style of writing so be sure to check it out! I just finished the book a couple of days ago and I loved it! It was a little confusing at first, but then I couldn’t put it down.
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