Further Down the Rabbit Hole

So, I need to clarify some things.  My wish is that at least it gets indexed by some search engines and people stop accusing me of not knowing what I am talking about.  About a month or so ago, I was interviewed by one of Ohio State’s student newspapers, The Lantern.  The purpose of the interview was to showcase the Open Source Club, which I was completely happy to do because this was an awesome opportunity to get our name out and, being the President, one of my duties is to be the public face of the club.  While most of the interview went over rather well and I was impressed with the reporters knowledge of technology, it did end up with a quote being put into print that was taken out of context and actually completely misquoted altogether. The quote in question made me look like a total idiot when it comes to the open source world.  The quote goes as follows,

“Alek Rollyson, a third-year in information systems and the club’s president, said there is a difference between free software and open source software. Free software is like “free beer, or free as in it doesn’t cost me anything,” he said.”

This is the travesty I am referring to.  While 98% of people reading this article have no idea where the fault lies, that 2% of people are the one’s I am concerned about.  I was bashed by several blogging sites for being a poor open source representative and not knowing a thing when it comes to the open source community. I assure you, this is not the case.  Here’s how the quote should have gone..

“A lot of people see a fundamental difference between free software and open source software.  When you say “free”, most people immediately think of  free in the monetary sense or the famous quote, “free as in beer”.  When I say free software, what I actually mean is free as in liberty.  I am free to share, study and modify the program however I want.  Free software implies that the user is free.”

Since it has been a month or so since this story was printed and the interview took place, I cannot recall the exact words I used. But, I can assure you they were in the same context.  I am not sure whether the reporter just misunderstood what I said, whether I was just unclear in the interview (which I accept is entirely possible), or the reporter just locked down on that “free as in beer” quote in order to draw some more attention.  In any case, I can assure you that is not what I said or what I meant.  The whole purpose of this post was to get it out and indexed by search engines so that hopefully when people come and look me up they can see the correction and know that I am not, in fact, a moron.  I am holding no grudge against the reporter, in fact I think that he did a relatively good job, I just felt it important that I clear my name of what is just a misunderstanding.

It annoyed the piss out of me that irssi doesn’t have a list of nicks in a given irc room.  Granted you can just /who but this just seemed like too much work given that programs such as weechat (which I have since swtiched to) have a nicklist right out of the box.  If, for whatever reason, you decide that weechat just isnt for you and you wish to have a nicklist in your irssi, then follow these simple steps.

grab the nicklist script from irssi.org

then move said script into your irssi scripts folder

then fire up irssi and issue these two commands:

/nicklist screen

Presto!  now you have a nicklist inside of irssi.  Beware of this script however, it does not play well with certain terminal,mrxvt for instance.  There are ways to autoload scripts in irssi but I honestly didn’t use it long enough to be moved to figure it out.  I suggest you check out weechat.

So I was watching Office Space the other day and it occurred to me that movies like this are disillusioning people, mainly us college folk.  Don’ get me wrong, I love this movie and it’s probably in my top ten but I think that the premise behind Peter’s character and his philosophy on life aren’t realistic in today’s world.  We all have a friend or know someone who has the ability to do absolutely nothing, or at least very close to nothing, and still have incredible success.  He may be a math genius, got into med school, aces test, or is a computer genius but seems to put absolutely no effort into this at all, it just seems to come to him naturally.  We all want to be the next Bill Gates and sell something that we actually don’t have to IBM and then go on to make billions of dollars.  We also want to be that guy who basically gets to do whatever the hell he wants but no one questions him because he is the best at what he does.   This guy could come into work late and piss drunk but won’t get fired because he is the only one able to do what he does as well as he does it.  But yet, these people are usually exaggerated and the real ones are as common as winning the lottery.  Like  Matther Broderick in Wargames basically; he may fail classes, but he can change that by hacking into the school’s computer system and changing his grades.  We have all heard that story about how Einstein supposedly failed the third grade, or fourth grade math or something and all of us slacker hopefuls out there use these stories, or similar ones, in order to reassure ourselves that, even though they may be failing now, their slacker lifestyle will payoff handsomely in the future.  Well, unfortunately for us all, this is probably not the case anymore.  You probably won’t rise to be a CEO without your college degree, you probably aren’t going to invent the next google search engine, and you most likely aren’t going to build the next computer empire out of your garage.  The time has passed, mainly just due to the fact that you were born about 25 years too late.  I’m not saying that it won’t happen, I am just trying to say that it is very unlikely in these times.  I really wish it was the case that you could have a section on a resume that said “I succeed while doing absolutely nothing.”  If only that was the world we lived in.  Anymore, employers have this need to see the potential of a savior on paper.  They want your resume to scream, “I will turn your failing company into the next Wal-Mart.”  They essentially want your shit to smell like roses.  You can’t walk into an interview wearing jean shorts and smelling like an ashtray and them hire you based on your reputation as a supposed genius.  I hate to burst your bubble guys, just something that office space brought to my attention.

And now, for your viewing pleasure…..a scene from office space, so you can enjoy it as much as I did

So I read an article on slashdot about how two hackers at the Hack in the Box convention in Dubai demonstrated how it is possible to compromise the OS due to a security flaw in the design….the flaw is that the OS trust that the boot process is safe. Now this may sound potentially groundbreaking, but I assure you it is not. The catch is that you have to have physical access to the machine. What the hell is the point in that?! If you had physical access to the machine, then the machine is compromised already anyways. Also, if you had access to the machine, no matter the OS, you could install whatever code you wanted on it…why the need for the boot code? What a waste of freakin’ time.

So I read an article this morning on Slashdot about a new technology that would allow you to insert small flexible nanotubes underneath your skin, which would essentially create a display screen…..right on your body.  How awesome is that?!  You could text people right from the palm of your hand, literally.  Apprently Phillips has taken this idea to an artistic level and applied the technology into the realm of tattos, so you would be able to change a tattoo whenever you wanted or have the tattoo change based on your mood, or just have an animated tattoo.  If this stuff isn’t the coolest thing ever I don’t know what is.  It was also discussed in a similar article about how tiny wireless receivers could be implanted as well, essentially making you wireless.  Now I am fairly certain that this technology isn’t anywhere near the commercial level yet but nonetheless, I am so getting a digital tattoo whenever it does.  A display screen on my hand would be my dream come true.  I’ll post the video below so you can see just how awesome this is.  I realize the video is a year old but the article made it seem as if research companies were actually making some real headway on this, so apparently this could be reality in the next couple years.  I apologize however for Phillips need to use naked people in their ad, was that really necessary?  Its still pretty damn cool tho…enjoy.

While it is just as easy to go to twitter.com and update your status, it is just way freakin’ cooler to do it from the command line.  Now I will have to disappoint you Microsoft loyalists and say that this only works in Linux.  My bad.  Anyways, I take no credit for this script at all, I am just informing you of it because it doesn’t show up many places and I thought it was a pretty useful script.  The downside to this little piece of code is that you have to imbed your username and password inside the script itself, which most of the time is a bad idea, but if you’re willing to take the risk, it’s pretty damn sweet.  To do this, just paste this code into /usr/bin/twitter (which you will need to create):

Obviously, you will need to replace the capitalized letters with the info required. Then you will need to make this script executable via chmod +x /usr/bin/twitter.  Now to reap the rewards.  Bust out a terminal and type in the work twitter, then write anything you want, that happens to be less that 160 characters long, and it will update your twitter account with whatever you typed after the word twitter.  You are now so much cooler than you were before that it is actually making my brain hurt but, unfortunately, as cool as this may be, it will not get you any chicks.  Enjoy!

So one thing I miss about windows is the Active Desktop, or at least some features from active desktop.  You can just drop cool animated HTML files into the active desk and it just plain works.  Unfortunately, this is not as easy in linux.  Enter a small program called xwinwrap.  This nifty little bugger lets you run pretty much anything you can think of as a desktop background.  You can even run things like the Quake 3 demo as your background, how freakin’ awesome is that.  The instructions that follow I know for a fact works in Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid.

1. Copy and paste this into your terminal to satisfy the needs of xwinwrap

2.  Now copy and paste this in order to get the xwinwrap source code

cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/xapps co xwinwrap

3.  Now here’s how to compile, type these both into the terminal

cd xwinwrap

and then….

make

4.  This is optional but if you do this it makes the xwinwrap command easier to get to

sudo cp xwinwrap /usr/bin

Now you can do some really cool stuff with this program like play movies, games, programs, screensavers all as the desktop background

Run this junk in the terminal and witness its coolness. Check out the xwinwrap man page for all the command

This will run the matrix screensaver as your background.  Just fool around with the commands and you can run pretty much anything with this sucker.

I waited until the end to include this for you lazy bums who don’t want to compile yourself.  Here is a link to a deb package that will just install it for you.  I did this for your own good b/c compiling your own software is good practice.

Here’s a video to show you what the final product looks like

Amarok is an awesome music program that any tunes junkie should get there hands on.  While I realize that there are a ton of awesome Open Source music players, I just really think that Amarok rocks so I am going to show you a way to make it work even better.  Amarok supports SQLite out of the box, which does its job, but it is not nearly as fast as MySQL in handling large music collections.  I myself have a giant collection, so I need a database engine that can handle the load.  Amarok 2.0 has since been released and it has built-in MySQL support, so no extra setup is necessary.  While this is convenient, the standard repository version of Amarok for most distributions is still, and probably will always be, 1.4 ish.  With that in mind, I am going to give some instructions on how to utilize MySQL for this version.  First off, this guide is for linux users only. Again, my bad.  Secondly, you will need the MySQL server and client packages, which can be obtained with the simple line “apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client” without the quotes of course.  Now that you have the packages you will need to create an Amarok database within MySQL and create a user “amarok” that the program will use to access and maintain the database.  This can be done with the following lines:

$ mysql -p -u root   <<this will get you into the MySQL prompt (you will need to enter the root password that you set up during the isntall process)

now use these lines to set up the database:

That should get you all ready with a shiny new database and database user that amarok will be able to exploit.  Note: obviously you will need to change the password abaove. I used the obnoxious capital message to catch you attention on purpose.

Now that you have a database, you will need to configure amarok so it can utilize it.  Open up amarok and go to Settings > Configure Amarok > Collection.  You should now see a dropdown box that says “SQLite”.  Change that to MySQL and then the hostname should be localhost, the username should and database should be amarok and the password should be whatever you decided to replace the password with in the code above.  Now hit apply and ta-da!, amarok will be using MySQL as its database engine.  Enjoy!

Step 1: Backup all your shit

Step 2: Download this.

Step 3: Burn that to a CD or DVD, whichever you prefer

Step4: Change the boot order in your BIOS so you can boot from that new awesome CD you have

Step 5: Insert your CD/DVD and reboot your computer

Step 6: Click “Install Ubuntu”

Step 7: Follow very obvious instructions that my 12 year old sister could even understand

Step 8: Witness the awesomeness that will soon be your brand spankin new computer that will be way better than it was before

Step 9: Thank Alek

Step 10: Party (this step is not optional)

This was all a joke by the way, treat it as my way of lightening the mood for more advanced things to come.  Disclaimer:  this WILL erase everything you have on your computer so don’t do this unless you already know what you are doing or have consulted me prior to performing step 6

-al3k-

Let me begin first by describing what “screen tearing” is.  Screen tearing happens when you scroll, refresh a page, move to a new page, or something of the like and the screen sort of “tears” and doesn’t refresh all the way, or it artifacts and doesn’t move in some spots.  The screen will update as soon as you click in another spot but it is just extremely annoying when you are reading an article and part of the screen doesn’t scroll.  You will end up clicking several hundred times to get the screen to refresh and I can say that it is just really, really annoying. I am not sure if this is specific to a certain card, I have a GeForce 8400M by the way, or what but my Google searching seems to allude to the fact that it affects several different lines. The only way I have found to fix this problem is to downgrade to the 173.xx driver series, and then the problem will go away (at least it did for me).  I am one who loves having the cutting edge software and all the new bells an whistle, but the screen tearing is just too much to handle.  The direct link to the latest release of the 173 series is below, I hope this solves everyone else’s problem as well.

Nvidia Linux Latest 173 Series Driver (this is the x86 architecture version, so if you have a 64 bit chip you will have to navigate to that version)