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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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Mar
30
First GUI Program! (I think)
Category: Mono | 
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I’m pretty sure this is the first GUI program I’ve ever gotten to a useful state. No source code yet, as a lot of the buttons don’t work, but the basic functionality does. It’s a GTK-based RSS reader. I did it based off of code in LXF# 91. They called their Chomp. Since Mono is spanish for monkey, I called mine Monkey Bites. Enjoy some screenshots.
Click here to see my development environment as well as the running program.
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Mar
29
A few changes
Category: Site | Leave a Comment
If you click on any of the blog posts you will see two new things - related posts and links to tag my blog in digg, redit, etc.
I will be working on getting it showing on the main page too, but it’s not a big priority for me right now.
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Mar
29
I’m reading through Leviticus right now and boy is it tough going. The entire Biblical narrative has come to a complete halt as rule after seemingly arbitrary rule is spelled out. And the killer is the repitition. Instead of lumping twenty offenses together and saying, for all of these the punishment is X, it lists the punishment each time for each specific offense!
I used to think that these rules were pretty arbitrary and marveled at just how detailed the regulations concerning their lives was. One thing I’ve always wondered about is what the point of it all was. Why did God have to have all these rituals - did He really need the Isrealites to kills goats, pigeons, and sheep? Couldn’t he just have told them to pray and He would answer their prayers?
I came up with the following hypothesis as to the reasoning behind all the rules. They mostly revolve more around God looking out for His people because I really don’t see why He would NEED these things. One theory is that these regulation allowed the Iraelites to have a healthier life without requiring them to learn all the things we know about modern medicine. For example, there were forbidden to touch carcassas. We know now that this can cause diseases, but they didn’t know that back then! Some have also pointed out that, overall, the diet prescribed to the Israelites by God is one of the healthiest diets a person can have. I’m not a nutrition expert, so I can’t comment on that too much.
Another reason I think the rituals were asked for is that God wanted the Isrealites to prove their devotion to Him as well as prove it to themselves. Thus, nearly everything requires a sacrafice of a sheep or goat. For the Isrealites, especially at this point in their history, these animals represented wealth. Not only that, but sheep could provide wool and goats could provide milk. So the animals could be retained while their products continued to enrich the owners. They couldn’t get rid of their sheep with bad wool when sacrificing to God because He demanded perfectly white sheep. So, to partake in the sacrifices was to give God your wealth and means of making wealth. I think this is definitely a sign of devotion.
Those are some of the ways in which the regulations helped the Israelites in their daily lives as well as showing their devotion to God. However, there is also the possiblity, which I have explored before in other blog posts here or in my first blog, whereby sin is something tangible. Rather than just being a word for disobediance to God or a metaphor for our spiritual distance from him, perhaps it is a thing which exists, but cannot be measured in our world. But maybe in the spiritual world, when sin occurs something binds to your soul which prevents it from proper communion with God. So it’s not just that God wants us to obey him as a sign of love and respect but because, we are accumulating “sin” which makes it impossible for our souls to rejoin with God.
Just some ideas on the reasons for the insane number of rituals governing Old Testament Israeli life.
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Mar
25
Who says NYers don’t know God?
Category: Photography, Religion | Leave a Comment
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Mar
24
Andrew
Category: Others' Blogs, Politics | 1 Comment
I replied to your Iran comment with something nearly long enough to be a blog post. Looking forward to any future debate on that thread.
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Mar
24
Blender Nation has been one of the really great rigged up characters available for use in Blender, mancandy. It’s very useful for people who want to focus on backgrounds or learn how to create a semi-realistic humanoid and rig. After seeing this story about different pictures people created with mancandy, I decided to give it a shot. It’s a very well rigged character and I think I will use it to practice facial expressions and body language. I only played for about 5 minutes, so I know there’s lots I’m not taking advantage of, but here’s my best shot. It’s now my Windows background image. Link is to a background-sized image.
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Mar
24
Collections on Flickr
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
We’ve been asking for it forever and finally flickr has delivered! We wanted sets that contain sets - it makes for better organization - and now they’ve delivered in the form of collections.
Visit my collections page on flickr
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Mar
23
[LXF 89] RSS Reader complete
Category: Mono | Leave a Comment
I’m including the file here. It’s just a command line RSS reader. The included readme file will tell you which parameters to pass it. It doesn’t really do a lot of checking or than for the words “sub” and “unsub”. It’s a pretty neat proof of concept. I’m not going to improve on it much at this stage because it’s going to be used in issue 91, I believe, to create a GTK application. It would be my first ever useful GTK application, so I’m pretty excited about it.RSS Reader
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Mar
23
Please pray for
Category: News, Politics, Religion | Leave a Comment
John Edwards wife and Press Secretary Tony Snow. Cancer doesn’t care what side of the political spectrum you’re on, it still attacks.
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Mar
23
The X and Y Axis of Evil
Category: News, Politics, War in Iraq | 2 Comments
Those of us who read the newspapers, which tend to be focused on more details than Tv news, have read the stories that neither the administration nor Tv news have focused too much on: Iran was cooperating with the USA after 11 Sept 2001. They were helping us go after the Taliban and catching terrorists. Of course, I’ve learned recently they also had a self-interested motive in doing so as the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was [along with Iraq] one of their long-time rivals. However, they were helping us. Then Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in the Axis of Evil in the 2002 State of the Union. Besides providing a lot of fodder for SNL and other Late Night Shows, this had the effect of Iran ceasing to help us. They were thinking, “Axis of Evil? You SoB, we were just helping you in Afghanistan!”
Yesterday I learned on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, an NPR news quiz show, that the only reason the Axis of Evil was created is that the Administration didn’t want it to seem that they were focusing too much on just Iraq. So Condeleeza Rice told them to add Iran and North Korea. So these countries were arbitrarily added just to pad their justification for the Iraq war and have led to all kinds of unforeseen consequences. I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but perhaps if Iran had not been named we wouldn’t be in as much of a situation right now over their nuclear program. I know they were doing it covertly anyway, but perhaps we would have been able to negotiate a little better and there wouldn’t be so much rhetoric back and forth.
I hope the next President is surrounded by less ineptitude.
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Mar
22
Second Mono Project in the bag
Category: Mono | Leave a Comment
It was another toy program, although a bit more useful than last time. It reads through a directory and recurses through subdirectories to fine all txt files and builds up a cache. Then it searches those for any text you want to search for.
Perhaps I missed a subtlety, but it appears to only search on one character searches as opposed to a whole word.
Next issue begins a real program - an RSS reader. Since I have that issue, I think I’ll do it tonight and then turn in for the night.
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Mar
22
In Mohammad We Trust?
Category: News, Politics, Religion | Leave a Comment
This news is a few weeks old, but I’m behind on my “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” podcasts. However, a congressman said that we have to be really careful with dealing with Iraq and Iran (meaning bomb the stuffing out of them) or else our money may one day read, “In Mohammad We Trust.”
Hey you moronic, racist/religioust, jerk - does our money say, “In Jesus We Trust?” If your improbable scenario were to play out, our money would read “In Allah We Trust” and everyone knows that Allah == God. Therefore it would say the same thing it says now.
In fact, I will repeat again for the sake of my readers - most people in the middle east get mad when we are translating their words from Arabic to English and then don’t translate the word Allah. It makes it look, they say, as though they worship some other god named Allah. In fact, they believe in the same god as the Jews and Christians. The Jews call him Yhwh/Jehovah/Emmanuel, we call him God, and the Muslims call him Allah. You may even notice that both Jehovah and Allah end in “ah”. That’s because “ah” means god. Allah means, as far as I can tell The God. (From the fact that alchemy, another arabic word, means the chemistry)
I’m sick and tired of these congressmen and women playing to xenophobic fears people have about Muslims. For like the sixth time, we may view the current Shia on Sunni action as barbaric, but we did it all throughout semi-modern history in Europe with the