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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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Apr
30
Category: Politics, Scott Adams | 
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Scott Adams once again was playing philosopher the other day and tackled a pretty important topic: fairness.
Imagine trying to “fairly” divide ten identical marbles between two kids. You could give five marbles to each kid, wave your arms and declare it fair. The kids would probably agree with this arrangement. The illusion of fairness works.
Is five marbles apiece actually fair?
Don’t you need to know how many marbles each kid already owns? What if one kid has a thousand and the other has none? The marginal utility of an extra marble is much higher for the marble-poor kid.
Why is this so important? Well, look at the Middle East, for example. They are fighting, at least in part, over a fair division of the land previously known as Palestine. And what is a fair partition of Palestine? The Iraelis believe the current partition is more than fair. The Palestinians beg to differ. Many have said it would be fair to have the UN run Jerusalem, but is that really the most fair way to do it?
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Apr
29
Today’s Shot of the Day
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
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Apr
29
Yesterday’s Picture of the Day
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
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Apr
27
Sugar and Windows like Honda and Volvo
Category: M$, OLPC | Leave a Comment
Recently I’ve been a tad annoyed at the criticisms of the Sugar interface to the laptops in the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC). The developers chose to forgo the desktop metaphor as the kids over there in the third world don’t even have desks or files or anything like that. Instead they tried to reengineer things to be as fun and intuitive as possible for the kids that will get the laptops. So many people have complained that the interface is so non-intuitive that there’s no way these kids will get the interface. It should have been made to mimic Windows they claim! I think they just find it unintuitive because we’ve been using the desktop metaphor here since the 80s.
Well, let me tell you a story that proves my point. I’ve been driving for around ten or so years now and I have always driven Hondas. This week I had to drive a Volvo from the 80s because my car was in the shop. I couldn’t figure out how to do something as simple as turning on the air conditioning because the metaphor was different enough that I didn’t quite get which knobs were supposed to be turned which way. I tried twisting this way and that way and only got hot air no matter what.
So it all boils down to what you’re used to.
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Apr
27
An interesting animation
Category: computer animation, videos | Leave a Comment
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the Walmart logo danced to regeton, a mostly crappy mix of reggae and booty music? Me neither! That’s why this video was so surprising. Enjoy!
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Apr
26
Tillman
Category: News, Politics | Leave a Comment
With all the news recently about whether Tillman’s death was just a ploy by the White House to make the war sound great or whatever the heck was going on, I was very surprised to find that I had blogged about it when it happened.
You can read it here.
Here’s part of what I wrote:
It’s not often that one finds acts of selflessness and courage nowadays. Especially here in the States people seem to only be chasing after money, power, and fame. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with those goals - we simply tend to take things too far and puruse those goals at the blatant disregard for others. That’s why Tillman’s story has made such an impression on me. He was a football player who gave up a multi-million dollar a year contract to go fight in Afghanistan. He died last week in post-war combat.
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Apr
26
Where I see the future of computing going…
Category: Computers, Fedora, Geek Love, Linux, M$, Me, ReactOS | 4 Comments
Recently, Penguin Pete, who’s on my blogroll, wrote this piece about his disapproval about where Ubuntu was taking Linux. Some of his key arguments were….doh! He removed the posts. I guess I’ll have to summarize. He said, in a nutshell, that too many Windows users were going to Ubuntu and expecting it to be just like Windows. But Linux is not Windows. This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with people going from Windows to Linux, but their demands to rearrange Linux, which was made in the image of Unix, to be more like Windows, raelly rubs some people the wrong way. He suggested that if users wanted a FOSS version of Windows, they should go to ReactOS, a Windows clone.
Originally, I was going to post about how I was on the fence about this, but somewhat in favor of Penguin Pete’s point of view. Afterall, I really like Linux a lot for what it is. It served me very well as a web server for a few years and I love the command line. I like the Unix philosophy of small programs that do things well and I like a lot of the software. It’s also easy to learn about your computer and change things in the command line. I don’t want to see all that go away just so we can accomodate lazy users. I’d rather see them stay away from Linux if they are that averse to Linux. So, to me GUIs are OK, but don’t remove the ability to edit the text files! In Fedora, for example, there are some text files that can easily get overridden just because you choose to use the GUI. I think we need to do our best in Linux to cater to both types of users. Keep the command line stuff for those who were attracted to Linux because of the ability to tinker, absent in Windows. Keep GUIs for new users, lazy users, or for those days when even the command line junkies just want to rest their minds and configure some utility without having to read miles and miles of manuals.
However, for those users who want to have Windows, they should go to ReactOS. It’s not ready for primetime yet; in fact, they recommend only running it in VMWare or QEMU for now, but Beta shoudl be coming soon and should be good enough for a good 70-90% of the people. And if people good at programming who love Windows go over to ReactOS, it could probably reach its goals even faster!
Then I read this post on iTWire written in response to Penguin Pete’s article. Key points include:
Trbovich has a great writing style and the logic of his argument does appear consistent. It is also unashamedly elitist. Acording to Penguin Pete, Ubuntu is not really Linux but a cultural cringe to refugees from Windows. Paraphrasing his words, Ubuntu is a Linux distro that is trying to stretch itself like taffy to fit Windows users.
According to Penguin Pete and an apparently not inconsiderable band of Linux stalwarts, Linux is not and never will be an operating system designed to suit disillusioned Windows users. They reckon Linux was designed to be a replacement for Unix not Windows.
….
Some dissatisfied Windows users may argue that they don’t want to replace Windows with another version of Windows - open source or not - anyway.So for Windows users determined to leave the fold, there’s really only two viable choices - Macintosh or a Linux distro. For those not interested in being enclosed in the walled garden of the Mac, Ubuntu has become the Linux distro of choice for a large number of Windows refugees.
I don’t want to put words into Stan Beer’s mouth, but I think he misunderstood Pete. The types of users Stan describes there are not the ones that Pete was angry about. He was angry about the ones that come to Ubuntu and complain about each and every little thing that isn’t exactly like Windows.
Then I read and responded to this blog. And the this post is basically an expansion on what I wrote as a comment there. His key arguments were:
I have been an IT professional for over 25 years. I have been in my time developer, sysadmin (many OS’s), db admin, hardware support, cable puller and all the rest. I have no issues with doing any of that stuff, it’s just that it’s not what I do now. When I’m doing what I do now, I’d like computers to just work. And for that matter, when I’m not working, and I want to play some music, I don’t want to have to google the latest encoding schemes and determine which codec I need to update. I want it to just work. Therein lies a hurdle which Open Source has negotiated poorly to date - one of product management and marketing. And the reason that that hurdle remains is largely in the makeup of the FOSS community.
So, as I propose in the reply to that blog post, I think this is why my (and many others’) fervor for open standards is SO important! When we have free and open standards such as OpenDocument, PNG, OGG, etc we allow people to use any operating system they want. Originally when I created pictures in the the bad old days in MS Paint on Windows 3.11, a Macintosh user could not read it. More recently, when I created MS Word doc files, they could not be read by anyone that did not have MS Word and that means just Windows and Macs as long as MS continues to support office on Mac. Linux users, however, cannot read those files. (Nowadays with OpenOffice.org they are close, but not exact) Imagine the internet if JPEGs or GIFs could only be read by Windows or Macs. It would be horrible!
So my view of the future is one where I see open file formats and FOSS in general alllowing for a fragmentation of the operating system market. And, because of this openness it won’t be like the 80s when Amigas weren’t interoperable with Commodores or DOS. And in this future, the stuff that Penguin Pete, Stan Beer, and Confused will become a relic of the 90s/2000s because people will use whichever operating system meets their needs without having to worry about compatibility between files. People won’t have to use MS Office because they’ll need doc to communicate! We’ll have odt and so they will only use MS Office if MS can provide enough value to convince people to buy their software. When the files produced are just as good in OpenOffice.org as Word, they will need to work extra hard to make their product worth $300. Why do you think they are so opposed to OpenDocument? It’s not for technical reasons, as they claim, but because it threatens their monopoly. After all, if the files were the same, why not use something FREE instead of $300???
So in my future people use whichever operating system meets their needs best. If they are running a server they will choose Linux or BSD. If they want a desktop where they can tinker with every little setting they will choose Linux or BSD. If they want a desktop that will make all the decisions for them and leave them with an elegant and easy to use computer they will choose Windows, ReactOS, or Syllable. If they want a computer which perfect for video editing and so efficiently written that one user claimed he used to play Quake and watch tv on the computer at the same time, they will choose Haiku-OS.
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Apr
25
Awesome webcomic
Category: xkcd | Leave a Comment
I found this great web comic, xkcd, courtesy of my brother Dan. I don’t know how the site is overall and they do have a warning that some strips could be bad, but I found this one hilarious.
I love this particular strip because of the crazy circular logic involved to keep yourself sane if you start to succomb to urban legends and conspiracy theories. Here’s a mind trip for you - if The Matrix was real as told in the movie The Matrix, then the machines should make the movie The Matrix so that we would think it was just Hollywood machinations. If anyone came to us saying that The Matrix was real, we’d just dismiss them as a looney fanboy. Before we might think they were crazy, but maybe not. But after the movie came out, if they suggested such a thing, they got it from watching the movie. I know…don’t think about it too hard…..
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Apr
24
Tai Shan
Category: Photography | Leave a Comment
Tai Shan gets to stay until 2009! The Chinese Government decided to let us keep him for two more years!
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Apr
24
So he *does* admit it!
Category: Religion | 2 Comments
(I’m writing this on the 21 around midnight, but I have a lot of posts coming up so I time-shifted this to the 24th)
If you’ve read my blog long enough, you know that I believe in events transpiring when they should. In other words, God places things in our lives at the right time. If you call it luck, what is luck, but another name for God? You’re still ascribing it to an unexplainable force.
About 5 months ago I was reading an internet FAQ on Islam. Within the FAQ they stated that Jesus never claims to be the son of God in the Bible. Thus it’s ok for them to merely call him a prophet. Christians just assumed he was. I thought it over and since then I couldn’t think of one time that Jesus admitted he was God’s son. He speaks of the Son of Man in the third person throughout nearly the entire New Testament. A while back I remembered that at his trial he does not deny it when the Pharisees accuse him of claiming to be the Son of God and that this really gets their blood boiling. But I knew there had to be other times, didn’t there?
Today I decide to read Scripture. (And here’s where things tie into the top paragraph) My Bible is put away and I’m in the computer room so I decide to try the Linux program GnomeSword. A couple of Bible downloads later, I’m in the program. I don’t remember where I was in the physical Bible so I choose at random. I choose the International Standard Version and it appears they only have the New Testament. I pick Matthew and randomly pick chapter 16. The number’s been in my head a lot recently. And then I come upon this…..
Matthew 16:13-20:
13 When Jesus had come to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”14 They said, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.
15 He said to them, “But who do you say I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!”
17 Then Jesus said to him, “How blessed are you, Simon, son of John! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven has.
18 I tell you that you are Peter, and it is on this rock that I will build my church, and the forces of hell will not overpower it.
19 I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you prohibit on earth will have been prohibited in heaven, and whatever you permit on earth will have been permitted in heaven.”20 Then he strictly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ.
There’s just one part I have never understood, what is the meaning behind verse 20? There are other times such as when he exorcises demons that he tells people to keep their mouths shut. What gives? Has anyone out there ever asked their preacher/priest/sunday school teacher? Why all the hush-hush?
Anyway, I’m glad I at least found another example where he does indeed claim to be the Son of Man.
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