Category Archives: Geek

All things geek

Entertainment, Geek

Children of the Gods

Leave a comment

Slice of Sci-Fi recently interviewed one of the driving forces behind Children Of The Gods and what I heard got my interest enough to track it down, slap it on my iPod and give it a listen. Its an serious long term audio drama, which is a rare experience for those of us in the US who missed the golden age of radio.

Although, I have to say, ever since I first heard Well’s War of the Worlds audio drama, I’ve been a huge fan.  There’s just no modern content.  Except, maybe the Alien Voices stuff.  I’ve bought a number of their CDs for car trips, and they are a great way to pass the time.  But I digress…

The core concept in Children Of The Gods is that we’re seeing events 500 years or so after the events in Independence Day. Including the much mocked virus Jeff Goldbloom gave the aliens. The first chapter lays out this history of the world between the movie and the now of the story including technology advances, why we fled the earth, and the current system of government.  I’ve in the middle of the third chapter right now, and its pretty good.  I’m going to continue to listen to it.

A cool aspect of COTG, outside of the story, is that its mostly a volunteer effort with people providing voice active from all over the world.  As its not professional voice actors, the quality of performance can be hit and miss, but not so much that its turned me off.  My big fear was the quality of acting would distract from the story.  However, Clerks showed me that in some cases, story and dialog can overcome sub-par acting.  They are also only 3 chapters in, so I figure they are still shaking out putting together the podcast as well as the actors or whatever.  For some tv shows that can sometimes take the whole first season.

Now that its easy to put together high-quality audio and video content on commodity PCs, I think its inevitable that we’re going to get some audience created content that is as high, if not higher, in story content that what the "content producers" are putting out.  I think enough people are getting fed up with the crap coming from hollywood and the record producers that they’ll start rolling their own.  The big question is if they’ll be able to get other people to pay for it, or if it’ll all be for the love of it.

Comics, Geek

WAAAAAAAAAAANDAAAAAAAA

Leave a comment

From the looks of it, this new is about 2 years old, but I just came across it today. Spawn: The Animation is apparently in the works. This is exciting to me for a number of reasons:

  1. The HBO series that ran for three seasons rocked
  2. Keith David is back as the voice of Spawn, which is perfect.
  3. Mark Hamill is playing Twitch.
  4. Phil LaMarr is doing a voice. He’s been great as the Green Lantern Jon Stewart on the Justice League cartoons, and he ruled on Mad TV back in the day.
  5. The show will be “R” rated. WH00h00. Breasts and gratuitous violence for everyone.

I got all the actor info via IMDB. It looks like its going to be a 70-minute direct-to-DVD movie. Now I just need to decide if I should buy it or Netflix it.

Geek, Internet

Firefox and Thunderbird extentions

Leave a comment

I thought I’d document which Firefox and Thunderbird extensions I’m using. This is as much for me to remember should I have some disk failure or something as it is to generate discussion.

Firefox extensions

  • User Agent Switcher – easily change the user agent for sites that work with Firefox but don’t think they do
  • GooglePreview – inserts preview images (thumbnails) of web sites and Amazon products into the Google and Yahoo search results pages. Thumbnails are provided by thumbshots.org and alexa.com.
  • BugMeNot – Integrates BugMeNot right into the browser. Right click on the login area, and boom, you’re in.
  • Live HTTP Headers – Follow the HTTP headers back and forth in real time. Helpful for debugging.
  • ScrapBook – helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections.
  • ForecastFox – brings weather info from AccuWeather.com® to your status bar.
  • WebDeveloper – adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. I haven’t used it a lot lately, but is can be fairly useful.
  • Google Toolbar for Firefox – goes without saying…
  • Tab Mix Plus – Adds a lot of functionality and configuration over tabs. Allows you to change tab size, where the close button is, a session managers, etc. (Now TinyMCE friendly!)
  • del.icio.us – Integrates del.icio.us right into firefox. Has a bit more funtionality than just the drag and drop javascript eextensions
  • Adblock – does what it says, a powerful content filter
  • Fasterfox – allows you to tweak-out firefox’s network and rendering settings.
  • Viamatic foXpose – OS X expose like choosing for open tabs in Firefox

Thunderbird extensions

  • AboutConfig – adds about:config to thunderbird, for behind the scenes tweaking. The most important for me being mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new

  • Attachment Extractor – Can detach multiple attachments from one to many messages in one fell swoop. Rather than visiting each message each attachment.
  • Enigmail – GPG/PGP integration. I mostly use it as a prereq for Display MUA.
  • Display mailing list header – implements RFC 2369 for Thunderbird: Special mailing list header fields in the mail are parsed, and the links are displayed in the extended header view.
  • Display Mail User Agent Extension – This one is more for fun, but sometimes gives insight into who has e-mailed me.
  • Mail Redirect – adds one the features I was missing from mutt. Adds redirection, better known as bounce in elm, mutt, and others.

Now I just need to find a thunderbird extension that does arbitrary headers that are updated on sending. And mutt could be removed from my life. So sad.

Geek, Linux, Unix

Things we have relearned today

Leave a comment

Regular backups are your friend. Also, if you can’t normally back something up (i.e. data in open ldap’s backend) do a regular dump and back that up.

rsync/unison/scp data off your co-loc to a local machine, and back it up again, just for good measure.

The new drive is the drive most likely to die first.

Losing /var really fucking sucks.

Recreating most of the information in ldap out of mail logs is cool, though.

Drinking doesn’t solve sysadmin nightmares, but it makes you feel good while you’re having the nightmare.

Entertainment, Geek, Linux

Really Slick Screensavers for FC4

1 Comment

For those who haven’t seen them, the Really Slick Screensavers they really are some nice eye candy. A number of years ago, Tugrul Galatali ported them to Linux, primarily for use with XScreenSaver.

I’ve been pretty busy the past few months, so I was living without the RSS on my desktop since my move to FC4. I finally had some time to kill today, so I went about to get them up and running, and in RPM form. Since last time I installed them (version 0.7.4) Tugrul updated them to version 0.8.0. The spec file I used needed to be updated to match 0.8.0, to fix a small bug in the 0.8.0 build system, and account for differences in FC4. After a few moments of screwing around, I’ve got a spec file that works, a patch that works, and a built rpm.

This spec file is by no means perfect, as I’ve been learning how to build spec files on the fly, but it’ll work in most cases. I haven’t loaded it up with BuildRequires, but if you’ve got a modern desktop like GNOME or KDE installed and their devel packages, you should be in good shape.

I have to give credit to who originally put the spec file together, but I forget who that was. I’m fairly certain I got it from Tugrul’s page, but I can’t seem to find it again.

Geek

RAISH

1 Comment

A few weeks ago I attended the RETS committee meeting in Las Vegas. The meetings were in the Westin Casuarina hotel. While staying there, I discovered that Las Vegas is truly on the cutting edge of technology. Since I found no other way to describe it, I called it RAISH.

blog/RAISH_by_David_Riggs

Yes, RAISH. Similar to the RAID systems we all know from our machine rooms, RAISH stands for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Shower Heads. Both shower heads worked and there was a good pressure on both.

Since its only two shower heads, its either RAISH 0 or RAISH 1, I just can’t deceide which.

(Thanks to David Riggs for the photo. He snagged it with his digital camera. My cell phone camera was/is on the fritz.)

Coding, Geek

XEmacs tricks

Leave a comment

Sean and Joe were talking on IRC about Steve Yegge’s post on Steve Yegge’s 10 Specific Ways to Improve Your Productivity With Emacs. He had me at #1. Seriously, the most important thing to me on his post was how to swap caps and control on XP.

Even though I currently prefer Xemacs, most of the items still apply. Actually, many of the suggestions I was already doing. (I have to thank Dave Dribin, my xemacs mentor, for that.) The few I wasn’t that I thought were sane I added, like removing the menubar I never use and the scrollbar I so rarely use as to be never.

Here’s a few of my Xemacs suggestions:

;;; Remove "XEmacs:" from the modeline as it annoys me
(setq-default modeline-buffer-identification
	      (list (cons modeline-buffer-id-left-extent "")
		    (cons modeline-buffer-id-right-extent "%17b")))

I got this one from an emacs HOWTO somewhere. I find it very useful, especially in e-mail.

;;; Make highlighted regions act like a word processor.
;;; i.e. select a region, the region is then overwritten
(cond
 ((fboundp 'turn-on-pending-delete)
  (turn-on-pending-delete))
 ((fboundp 'pending-delete-on)
  (pending-delete-on t)))

Here’s a quick translation of Steve’s Item #7 to xemacs:

(set-specifier menubar-visible-p nil)
(custom-set-variables
 '(toolbar-visible-p nil)
 '(scrollbars-visible-p nil))

A question I have to ask myself, is now that I’ve removed all that, why am I still using xemacs over regular emacs. I need to think about this. Something in the back of my brain is saying that mouse wheel support and a few other things were better when I started out. Fedora Core 4 doesn’t ship with xemacs anymore (but its in extras) so I might have to give emacs a try again.

Geek, Linux

self-made HAL and iPod problem on FC4

1 Comment

This was originally going to be a post bitching about how much of a pain in the ass FC4 had been for me when compared to its older brother, FC3. However, it turns out the problem I was having that almost sent me back to FC3 was of my own doing.

When FC3 first came out, it didn’t have support for Firewire built into its kernel, so I’ve been hand compiling a kernel since then so I could use my iPod. When I installed FC4, I just used my .config and built a kernel for FC4. This was the source of my undoing and of losing a few hours debugging.

The show stopper that almost sent me back to FC3 was that I couldn’t get my Firewire based iPod working with FC4. I couldn’t find any reports of this problem, so I figured it had to be something unique to me. I finally found this series of posts from the HAL mailing list. This pointed out that it was a kernel problem.

I rebooted and dropped back to the latest Fedora-supplied kernel and lo-and-behold, it worked. So, it turns out that the way Firewire reports that device type in the kernel changed for the iPod. Its become more specific, which is not a problem, but it introduced a new type that the current version of HAL that comes with FC4 was unaware of.

The kernel used to report the iPod as (emphasis mine):

Vendor: Apple     Model: iPod              Rev: 1.53
Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02

It now reports it as:

Vendor: Apple     Model: iPod              Rev: 1.53
Type:   Direct-Access-RBC                  ANSI SCSI revision: 02

To fix this, I took the patch from that first post I linked to above and the hal src rpm from FC4, and merged them together and rebuilt. Boom, it works as it should. I’ve put a diff of my changes to hal.spec up, in case anyone else wants to redo this.