Patented Farts
Those guys over at United Aircraft really take their flatulence seriously.
Stupid Words
I'm very curious as to where the words "orientate" and its opposite, "disorientate," came from. They sound incredibly stupid. What was wrong with "orient" and "disorient?" Fewer letters, and you don't sound like a retard when you say them. Dictionary.com even says that the longer versions just mean "to orient" and "to disorient." Everybody wins when you use the shorter form. Using the longer form means you like to kill puppies.
Rejection
From The Examiner:
Lots of schools are vying for the “most emphatic rejection” prize. Cornell is leading the race, informing students in consecutive sentences that the electronic rejection they are reading will be confirmed in a follow-up letter that will make the rejection official. We don’t want you. Get it? We really don’t want you. The “snuff out all hopes” double rejection strategy appears to be colleges’ latest attempt to improve their U.S. News & World Report selectivity rating. Two rejections for the price of one. What tipped the scale in Cornell’s favor is that they even include an invitation for you to visit their Web site to get information about applying to transfer to Cornell after your freshman year, so they can reject you again.
Awesome. Absolutely awesome. My alma mater never stops entertaining me.
Open Phones
Screw you, iPhone. I want one of these.
I stumbled across a blog post about the OpenMoko platform today. I'd heard of it before, but never really looked into what it was.
I'm not sure I'm quite ready to give up my insistence on a small flip-phone in favor of a more multi-function device, but if I did, this would be what I'd want. Sadly, I'm afraid it won't gain much traction in the US without some kind of deal with a major wireless carrier. US cellular customers aren't used to buying a phone, and then later finding service for it. Hell, most US cellular customers aren't used to buying a phone, period: the phone comes free (or at a very low cost) with a service contract.
And the carriers won't like this phone. The end-user can modify any aspect of the software that runs on it? That's a big no-no. The carriers love their closed systems, and love controlling what you can and can't run on the phone.
But still, I remain optimistic. It might start out as a geek toy, but that's how most popular tech advancements begin to enter the mainstream.
I'll definitely be keeping tabs on OpenMoko to see where it goes.
Back from CeBIT marathon
I just came back from my CeBIT marathon (i mean my one day trip to CeBIT). The first word that comes into my mind after visiting CeBIT is “_HUGE_”. This event takes place into around 23 showrooms, each of them big enough to host an entire commercial aircraft. I have been walking all day long (including a 6km long walk just for the trip to the nearest Burger King) and i’m exhausted now.
I dropped by the GNOME and KDE booth and was a bit deceived. In comparison with the other booths, these ones were pretty small and without any attractive posters, sport car :p or whatever. But I took some pictures of the suggestion board that had some interesting notes :D.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t meet with Jens because he was working today. May be next time.
Airconfig Screenshots
By popular demand, here are a few Airconfig screenshots. Note how the signal strengths are all 100% in my menu; part of the blame lies with the bcm43xx driver's inability to report proper quality values. (But hey, I'm just thrilled I can use wireless on my PowerBook under Linux with a nice set of free [as in speech] drivers. Yes, consider that a middle finger tossed in the direction of Broadcom.)
Airconfig
Sometime last November or December I posted about GUI wireless networking config options for Linux, and I mentioned I was planning on writing one if I couldn't find one that met my needs (and actually worked).
Well, I went ahead and did it. It's not finished. There are things that don't work yet, buttons in the settings window that aren't connected to anything, and probably a bunch of error conditions I haven't handled yet. But it's starting to actually work for me, and I'm going to start actually using it for day-to-day stuff.
I haven't made any releases yet, but you can grab it from my Subversion repository (warning: sometimes the server decides to go off into the weeds and becomes unreachable). See the website here for download/install information, and do pay careful attention to the requirements list: older versions of the stuff in that list will almost certainly not work. I'm sorry about the high required versions of glib/gtk+, but I'm not going to try to reduce those until the app actually is "finished" and I have some spare time.
Please look at the README as well. There are a few dependencies that are required that probably aren't already set up properly on your system. (For example, there are only two distros I know of offhand that package wpa_supplicant with the D-Bus control interface compiled in.)
Note that Airconfig is more or less cross-desktop. It doesn't require any Xfce or GNOME libraries to function. It might not be particularly friendly (in the blending-in sense) for KDE users, as it does use gtk+. (A small exception: xfce4-dev-tools is required, but only for building from SVN. When I make release tarballs, you won't even need xfce4-dev-tools.) However, currently the GUI stuff is confined to two files, so it wouldn't be too difficult to write a Qt/KDE frontend (or even a wildly different gtk+ frontend) for it if you don't mind that it depends on gobject. That's probably a project for somewhat far in the future, though (I might do it myself; I haven't touched Qt since 2.x, and it would be fun to re-learn it).
Anyway, give it a look if you're interested. I've added Airconfig to Xfce Bugzilla, so feel free to report problems there (I greatly prefer that instead of email). I may not get to your bug for a while since there's still a lot to do.
Xfce and Choice
Since my last entry, a several important things happened. A number of users and developers chose to engage in a flamewar on the mailing lists. A few developers chose to leave. Many chose to just ignore the problems and focus on their work. Meanwhile, the council has chosen to start doing something about it. Since that last entry ("It's not about choice"), many things have happened. Well, we're Gentoo. We're flexible. We choose when to do things and when to do nothing. We'll adapt, and hopefully we'll weather the storm.
This weekend I chose (there's that word again) to update my Xfce Guide for 4.4, which is now being stabilized. Kudos to the arch teams and the xfce team; you guys rock!
You'll find new package suggestions, new descriptions, tips, links, and even a chapter on migrating from 4.2 to 4.4.
Now, you can choose (that was the last one, I promise) to do many things, but I hope you'll choose (okay, maybe not; I'm such a tease) to read the updated guide and try out Xfce 4.4 yourself.
And now, I choose to go to bed, since the PST to PDT change means the clock just struck 3AM.
Edit: Who's this joker over here? Who chose to write up that kind of wackiness?!?
Xfce and Choice
Since my last entry, a several important things happened. A number of users and developers chose to engage in a flamewar on the mailing lists. A few developers chose to leave. Many chose to just ignore the problems and focus on their work. Meanwhile, the council has chosen to start doing something about it. Since that last entry ("It's not about choice"), many things have happened. Well, we're Gentoo. We're flexible. We choose when to do things and when to do nothing. We'll adapt, and hopefully we'll weather the storm.
This weekend I chose (there's that word again) to update my Xfce Guide for 4.4, which is now being stabilized. Kudos to the arch teams and the xfce team; you guys rock!
You'll find new package suggestions, new descriptions, tips, links, and even a chapter on migrating from 4.2 to 4.4.
Now, you can choose (that was the last one, I promise) to do many things, but I hope you'll choose (okay, maybe not; I'm such a tease) to read the updated guide and try out Xfce 4.4 yourself.
And now, I choose to go to bed, since the PST to PDT change means the clock just struck 3AM.
Edit: Who's this joker over here? Who chose to write up that kind of wackiness?!?
Hell
From Penny Arcade:
Tycho: We're gonna die, right? You're here to take us to heaven? Jesus: I'm just here for him. You're gonna burn in hell forever. Tycho: God dammit. Jesus: See? It's shit like that.