Bars, Entertainment

Crystal’s Party Bar

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In the Tempo section of the Chicago Tribune was an article on Crystal’s Party Bar in Crystal Lake. This sounds like a place that 1) needs to be closer to me and 2) is close to the vision I had if I were to open a bar.

But the multi-player games are a little addictive at Crystal’s Party Bar in Crystal Lake. Like many suburban bars, Crystal’s has that all-in-one motif: A dance floor for clubbers. A bar menu and playoff games for the sports bar set. Fireplaces and couches for the lounge lizards…

But it’s the video gaming that sets Crystal’s apart. More Dave & Buster’s than Crobar, Crystal’s is adorned with flat-screen televisions at each of its first-floor booths, allowing interactive game play from just about anywhere in the bar…

And with Xbox and PlayStation2 consoles securely attached to the first-floor ceiling, patrons can play their favorite video games at any of the individual booths.

Just sign up, turn in your driver’s license at the DJ booth and you’ll receive a game and two wireless controllers, manager Brian White says. The bar staff will handle food and drink orders while you play (appetizers and sandwiches are available until 10 p.m.).

I think this is a great idea for a bar, its just too bad its too far out. I’ll have to drag Sarah out to check it out sometime. If only because their video Texas Hold’Em is a big draw.

I’ve always wanted to open a geek friendly bar, and I’m not sure this is it. Although, it has all the items I’d want in my place, except maybe wireless networking of some sort.

The party music, though, in my bar would be relegated to Friday and Saturday night. The rest of the week I’d like to keep it somewhat sane so someone could bring thier laptop and do some coding and drink a beer. Or maybe play Quake or something. Of course, I’d have a large beer selection.

However, running an bar would take a set of skills and a bunch of capital I don’t have. I’ll have to keep the dream alive. A place like Crystal’s Party Bar makes me think I’m not totally crazy.

Another feature I’ve been considering more recently is how to make it somewhat kid-friendly, or at least have a kid-friendly night. The video games certainly help there, but I’d also like people to feel free to bring their toddlers. If only for my own selfish purposes.

Entertainment, Geek, Linux

Really Slick Screensavers for FC4

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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

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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.)

Beer, Entertainment

Don’t ruin my beer!

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From this mornings Chicago Tribune: Goose Island may partner with maker of Budweiser

The beer industry has been buzzing for weeks about talks between Chicago’s largest microbrewery and Anheuser-Busch Cos., fostering speculation the St. Louis beer giant may be interested in buying an ownership stake in Goose Island.

Goose Island president and founder John Hall confirmed that the maker of Honker’s Ale and other brands is in talks with Anheuser-Busch, but those discussions have been limited to “distribution issues,” he said. He declined to comment further on the nature of the talks.

The brewery that made Celis White was aquired by one of the macrobrews and it was never the same again. I’d hate to see the Goose ruined that way too.

Coding, Geek

XEmacs tricks

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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

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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.

____ of the day/week

Metasyntactic variable

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My phrase of the day is metasyntactic variable

A metasyntactic variable is either a placeholder name (a kind of alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion), or a random member of a class of things under discussion. The term originates from computer programming and other technical contexts, and is commonly used in examples by hackers and programmers. The use of a metasyntactic variable is helpful in freeing a programmer from creating a logically named variable, although the invented term may also become sufficiently popular and enter the language as a neologism. The word foo is the canonical example.

My coworker was asking me what this foo I keep using in discussion is. So I turned to Wikipedia to give me a clear definition and background. It was listed in the Examples section of the metasyntactic variable entry under Nonesense Words.

Foo is the first metasyntactic variable, commonly used to represent an as-yet-unspecified term, value, process, function, destination or event but seldom a person.
Bar, the canonical second metasyntactic variable, typically follows foo.
Baz, the canonical third metasyntactic variable, is commonly used after foo and bar.

The article also has examples via english words, people, and places. Its an entertaining read.

Keith's attempts to fix the cable of life