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djotaku's twitter feed
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- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
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Sep
30
here’s a link to the video at youube -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpZ4yYrsilc
I think it’s hilarious!
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Sep
30
Wonderful Imperfection
Category: Photography | 
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Sometime the best things are imperfect. For example, there’s something I just love about this photo even though I wasn’t able to capture his whole face since I was zoomed at 200mm and he was moving very fast. Yet I got it in focus and it is such a beautiful black and white picture. Not only that, but his smile and his energy come through so clearly. I just love it, even though it’s far from perfect.
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Sep
30
You can find it here or on the right-hand side under “My pages”. This is a program that’s been in my head for about four days and which I spent most of yesterday working on until I realized I was going down the wrong path. Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This program is my attempt to bridge the borders which artifically divide us in the blog world, while also providing myself with a convinience. The page, if you haven’t visited it yet, displays blogs from my blogroll all on one page. Live Journal, a blogging site, allows you to do this, but only with other LJ users. Similarly, Tripod blogs allow you to do it only with other Tripod users. However, they failed to appreciate the power of hacker bloggers, such as myself.
My first try at this, which I attempted for about 4 hours Thursday night, had to do with what’s known as “screen scraping”. This is where a program downloads the HTML from a site and then processes it. It is horribly unreliable because of the HTML of the site changes, the code becomes hosed. I tried it for a while last night, but the SGML python library just wansn’t meant for that stuff. What I truly needed was the ability to structure the data like XML. Unfortunately, XML readers die on HTML because it’s so badly crufted together. Also, I’d have to design a different parser for each type of blog.
So all I needed was XML! As I was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed (at 0030 AM), I suddenly had an epiphany. Nearly all blogs DO have an XML feed in the form of RSS/Atom!!! Sweet! But I was too tired to try and navigate the XML and I had to work on Friday. So I went to sleep. It’s a good thing I slept instead of working on it, because in the morning I suddenly thought to look for an RSS module for Python as I read about modules in Perl. Surely, someone else had tried to do this! And I was right! Mark Pilgrim, author of the great Apress book “Dive into Python”, had written an RSS parser for python!
After about just 2.5 hours of hacking I finally had the program working correctly! That was yesterday, but I had already made two posts, so I postponed this post until Saturday. Enjoy it! (There will be upgrades in the future!!!)
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Sep
29
I’ll get you someday!
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
This darned pigeon and his brethren in the parking garage at work have put more bird feces on my car in one day than I have had on the car in its entire 11 year lifetime. “Of course you know, this means war!”
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Sep
29
Ulteo - Yet Another Linux Distro?
Category: Linux | Leave a Comment
So why do we need YALD? Well this isn’t just any new Linux distro! This Linux distro is created by Gael Duval, the recently-booted creator of Mandrake Linux. Mandrake Linux was in the position Ubuntu now is - the easy distro to introduce new people to Linux with. It had the easiest installer around and generally worked on the greatest amount of hardware. It was originally based off of Red Hat Linux 5.0. (This is back when they used to sell boxed PC software in the niche that Fedora now occupies)
Mandrakesoft, a company Duval founded to make money from his distribution. They made money by having a Mandrake Club which gave paid users the benefit of being able to download upgrades a few days or weeks ahead (I’m not sure about the timeframe because I joined Linux right before something big happened….as I will soon mention). The French company made some money and lost some money, but within the last year or so finally became profitable. They became so profitable they were able to purchase Connectiva, a Brazilian Linux company! The companies merged as Mandriva Linux and relanched this year with Mandriva Linux 2006. But then Gael Duval got booted from the company he had co-founded!
It’s one of those things that can happen when a company becomes a corporation. It happened to a famous fast-food founder in the US. I can’t remember the chain, but I know it was a burger chain. We always feel for the founder because there’s just something fundamentally wrong about someone getting kicked out of the company THEY founded. However, it happens.
Mr. Duval didn’t take it sitting down, no! He decided to start ANOTHER Linux company. (Take that you idiots who say that Linux it anti-capitalistic!) His new distribution is called Ulteo and there isn’t much information on it yet. In fact, I only found out about it through Linux Format Magazine. They mentioned the cryptic distribution a few months ago and did a feature in their most recent issue.
Part of the appeal of the new company was hinted at in the LXF article; the new OS seemed to be running inside of a web browser. As the website claims that most of the work to make Linux easy to use and install is now available (thanks Ubuntu and others) and Gael wants to start a new revolution in computing! So at least part of the strategy seems to revolve around Gael having your OS reside on his servers and accesible via the web. This would mean that you could access your PC from anywhere in the world that had a broadband connection! This would be quite a revolution in computer and it’s where Microsoft eventually wants to go as well. Personally, I have a problem with keeping my computer and information on someone else’s computer/server. What about when it gets hacked (by Evil Black Hat Hackers - aka Crackers) - I lose my bank info? What about any important documents? Sure, my personal computer can get hacked, but it’s not as nice a target for crackers as a large computer (or computer farm) containing the data from thousands or millions of people. Neither Linux nor Microsoft could convince me otherwise. (At least for now) Also, it’s easier for governments to poke around in there (and less scandalous) than my own PC.
However, Gael recently wrote on his page:
September, 27th 2006 - About the Ulteo Connected Desktop Following the Linux Format coverage, it seems that there is a need to provide a few additional details about the Connected Desktop: the Ulteo Connected Desktop is going to provide a way to use the Ulteo OS within the web-browser, for free. Of course, the Connected Desktop is a part of the Ulteo concept, which also includes an installable and free operating system for PC. The Connected Desktop will be introduced soon.
So it would appear that The Connected desktop will only be one facet of his financial strategy. He’s looking for hackers (in the nice sense of the term) and I think some of the positions are even paid positions! So mosy on over to http://www.ulteo.com and check it out!
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Sep
28
GNaughtyNice is working again
Category: Internet, programming, python | Leave a Comment
After spending the past three days futzing about, I’ve finally configured things on my new server so that GNaughtyNice will once again run. So visit the link on the right-hand side of my blog and see how Naughty or Nice any word is!
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Sep
23
I really respect and admire my parents for what they are doing now. At a time when they should be relaxing after 24 years of parenting, they have taken on 3 foster kids - 2 of them at the last minute last week. It’s not as though my parents are trying to replace the void of their two college and one college graduate children. Originally, they just wanted to help out the world by taking care of children who needed foster parents. The system is so backed up that there are currently about 16 children with no home who spend their days at the office with the social worker. Until these children are placed into a home they cannot have normal lives. They cannot be loved, go to school, and be carefree as children should be. So my mother and father just meant to be a point of normalcy in a life thus far full of chaos. Then the child could be placed into the home of people who were unable to have kids of their own while my parents took on another child.
But now, with my mother taking classes full-time for a degree program she needs for advancement, they have accepted two more children, in order to help out a brother and sister who have been through hell.
“All very nice an well,” you may say, “but what does this have to do with saving the world?” Well, it is a proven fact (or as proven a fact as things can be concerning nature/nuture) that a child who grows up without love or who grows up being shuttled from house to house ends up becoming dislocated from society. After all, families are one of the key elements of socialization. These kids have above average odds of becoming violent criminals. So, my parents are saving the world by giving these kids love so that the rest of the world can be safe when these kids don’t become murderers, rapists, and terrorists.
And I admire then all the more because I know I’d never be able to do something like that.
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Sep
20
Strolling on the beach
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
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Sep
19
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Sep
19
I can just see it in some extremist planning area:
Extremist 1: Hey, the Pope said we were a violent people!
Extremist 2: What a jerk! What should we do in protest?
Extremist 1: Let’s bomb churches and kill a nun!
Extremist 2: Excellent, that will clearly prove him wrong!
See the irony? Why don’t they?
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Sep
19
Thank You God
Category: Photography, Religion, family | Leave a Comment
That my father-in-law was able to get a kidney from his sister and the surgery went well. He is now recovering, but will no longer need dialysis every other day! I kept myself busy/sane in the hospital by reading my Salvador Dali book and taking pictures. Here are some of the pictures from the hospital:
