Larry the Universe

I just got done reading the book "A Man Named Dave", after reading "The Lost Boy", and 6 years ago, "A Child Called It".

Ya know...  To a certain extent, I enjoy doing things from time to time, to keep myself grounded.  To keep myself living in a reality close to what is real for everyone else.  I do this simply to allow me to see what others might be thinking or feeling.

I know my life, comparatively, has been pretty easy.  Not to say that everyone doesn't have their own problems, heaven knows each life can only be compared to itself for a true measure.

Anyway...  These books ...  are amazing.  They're hard to stomach, but then again, so is reality sometimes.  People don't like to talk about child abuse.  People don't like to talk about the problems and undercurrents of society.  But if we don't, then we are kidding ourselves, living in a fantasy, all the while the problem continues to worsen.

I believe taking a bite out of the harshness of life, even if it is the lives of others, can be quite healthy.  For me, I believe it helps me to at least understand a little bit of what abused people go through, allowing the desire in me to do what I can to help, grow.

To Dave Pelzer, I say "Bravo!"  You acheived what you set out to with your books, at least in me.  They were highly educational, and even more inspirational.

They just set my already high beliefs in the unconquerable human spirit, even higher.  Man truly can overcome seemingly unsurmountable obstacles.

Thank you, Mr. Pelzer, for giving of yourself.  You are an amazing man.

Nate Whitehill of Unique Blog Designs fame is running a contest for their one-year anniversary. It's tough to keep an internet business going these days, and it's sufficient to say that Nate and his co-workers put in a ton of hard work to stay on top!

Of course, I can't forget that they make some fantastic blog designs, such as the one Bob Buskirk recently adopted for his blog.

The contest! Entering is simple, just leave a comment on the contest page here. However, leaving a comment only counts as one entry! For an additional five entries, blog about the contest! The winner will be randomly chosen Monday, September 1st, 2008. We will draw the winner via streaming video from the UBD office.

Oh, and there are some sweet prizes! First place gets an iPod Touch as well as their latest Citrus WordPress theme. Three runner-ups will also get a Citrus WordPress theme. Game on!

So Great Britain did really well in the Olympics this year, coming forth in both total number of medals, and in the number of gold, silver and bronze.

Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
Great Britain	19	13	15	47

So well done to all the Olympic Athletes for taking part, from whatever country.

Britain is of course part of the European Union. Alexander Stubb, the Finnish Foreign Minister who is in the news at lot a the moment after taking charge in Georgia, one said that "the EU will always be more than an international organisation, but less than a state." (Source - PDF)

So the people running the young Europeans website, had the fab idea of adding all the EU's medals up.

Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
EU	87	101	92	280
China	51	21	28	100
USA	36	38	36	110
Russia	23	21	28	72

Only a couple of medals away from getting more than the next three regions combined!

Maybe you disagree with Stubb and think the EU is not any different than other international organisations. In that case we would compare the EU to America's and Russia's international organisations.

Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
EU	87	101	92	280
NAFTA	41	47	43	131
CIS	31	35	56	122

Still win!

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

If you haven't noticed I have a fascination with bleeding edge software. One of the pieces of software I have been following since its inception is the GTK port of Webkit. It is an excellent browser engine that is just as capable if not more so than other major competing engines. One of Webkit's strong points is javascript performance. The Squirrelfish javascript engine that was introduced a few months ago offers incredible performance.

To prove my point I tested the latest Webkit from subversion againt Xulrunner-1.9 using two different javascript tests. The first test is I used was Celtic Kane's Javascript speed test. I ran the test a couple dozen times on each browser. The Webkit based Midori browser scored an 89ms (lower is better) for its best case while the best I was able to acheive with Epiphany on Xulrunner was 255ms which makes it over 2.5 times slower. In fact Midori's worst time wasn't even close to Epiphany's best time. I took screenshots of the two best times I achieved. On the left are the results for Webkit/Midori while on the right are results for Gecko/Epiphany.

The second test I ran was Webkit's own Sunspider Javascript test. It is a much more complete javascript test and takes several minutes to complete. Again Webkit outshines Gecko in the Sunspider tests but the results are much closer. Webkit's javascript engine, Squirrelfish averages about 1.5 times faster than Gecko's engine. Webkit results are shown in the FROM column while Gecko results are in the TO column.



It seems this is all about to change. Firefox 3.1 is supposed to include a new and improved javascript engine called Tracemonkey that outshines Squirrelfish. It is not yet complete so it is hard to tell how much better it is actually going to be but preliminary tests show some amazing results. When I get a chance to test it I'll post another comparison.

With all the improvements going into both the Gecko engine and the Webkit engine it should make web browsing on either platfrom a much better experience. I do have to give the Mozilla foundation credit for Gecko. I was starting to prefer a Webkit based GNOME environment over embedded Gecko but Xulrunner-1.9/Firefox-3 was a very good release and the next release is only going to be better. Things are really heating up now in the browser wars again.

Many of the "web tooodotohhh" (Web2.0 in bullshit-speak) services nowadays are completely retarded if not utterly useless but there are some shining stars here and there.

A principle frequently quoted in the context of those services is the "wisdom of crowds" principle:

Instead of relying on one expert you try to have many people add all they know and in addition the result will sometimes be better than whatever some expert could come up with.

We can see that principle at work every day: Wikipedia is a typical wisdom of crowds thing, services like reddit or digg rely on wisdom of crowds, too, to figure out what might interest you. And in many cases it has worked great but sometimes it doesn't (the wikipedia entry lists many of the problems). In the following we'll only focus on the areas where it actually works well.

The services that I consider useful are useful mostly because of recommendations. Last.fm has introduced me to a bunch of artists I had not known before, amongst them a few of the artists I consider to be my "favourites". reddit has pointed me to many interesting articles all over the net and friendfeed has brought a few interesting people and their thoughts and content to my attention. Recommendations rule.

But as always there's the good examples and the bad ones, so what does make a recommendation engine good or bad?

Recommendations have to work, that means that content suggested to me has to be relevant to me or the recommendation engine is pretty much broken. But another aspect that is often forgotten is the issue of trust: I have to trust the recommendation engine and to get that kind of trust I have to be able to somewhat understand it. Let's check out a good example.

Look at the following cutout from my last.fm recommendations:


Why is this a good recommendation? First thing: The music is cool. The recommendation works. The second thing? I see what artists from my library it is being considered to be similar to: I understand why this has been suggested to me which gives the recommendation a whole new level of relevance, since it's not some black magic.

Another example: When you surf Amazon you get all kinds of recommendations, it's a huge part of their business model. When I log into Amazon they suggest stuff I would probably like and they always add the line "this item has been recommended to you because you bought itemX". Perfect recommendation.

Leaving out the information that allows you to understand and trust the recommendation makes your whole recommendation engine pretty much worthless, trust is even more important than the engine working: If you somehow recommend stuff to people that always works but that they just cannot understand you start rumors, rumors about you spying on users in nasty ways, rumors that let you look bad.

Trust is pretty much the most important resource on the net and especially in social thingies on the net it's all we have to determine whether something is worth our time or not.

SCENARIO:

My host machine runs a stable amd64 Gentoo and Virtualbox. My guest operating system is again gentoo (this time a bleeding edge unstable ~x86 with evil overlays), but every X11 capable guest should work.

The guest machine network uses NAT, so there's nothing to configure, just dhcp and internet works.

GOAL:

Have guest apps to look native on my host DE, using systray, being able to copy/paste, while still running on a protected enviroment.

No need to run session managers (xdm) in the guest machine, neither to configure Xorg or to install VirtualBox Guest Additions.

HOWTO:

NAT doesn't allow host to ssh in guest, but there's a workaround:

$ VBoxManage setextradata "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" 2222
$ VBoxManage setextradata "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" 22
$ VBoxManage setextradata "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" TCP

Read here to find how to undo those steps.

The guest now must be shut down (a simple reboot will not work).

Now the host machine can ssh into guest using this command:

$ ssh -p 2222 "user"@localhost

On the host machine we uncomment/edit those lines in /etc/ssh/ssh_config

ForwardAgent yes
ForwardX11 yes

On the guest machine we uncomment/edit this line in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

X11Forwarding yes

Remaining in the guest machine we reload the ssh revice:

# /etc/init.d/sshd reload

Now we run (from the host) a little test to see if everything works fine:

$ ssh -p 2222 "user"@localhost -YC xclock

If it complains about wrong autenthication remove from the guest ~/.Xauthority and try again.

Now we make things nicer:

$ echo "alias runguest='ssh -p 2222 "user"@localhost -YC '" >> .bashrc

Now we can open a terminal and:

$ runguest firefox

Cool, isn't it?

DEAR LAZYWEB:

One of the nicest features of VirtualBox is the ability to "hibernate" the guest "saving the machine state". Can anybody find a way to ctrl-z a forwarded app, suspend the Virtual Machine and then foreground it once resumed the VM?

It seems to me like this chapter has a very deep meaning, but I couldn't quite get it this time.

The whole chapter is about making covenants, and becoming a child of Christ.

It's interesting that after verses 2, 3, and 4, the last word on verse 4 is "joy".  After they had heard the word of God, had their hearts changed through the spirit, and made covenants to keep the commandments of God, they were filled with joy.

I find that quite refreshing.

Another verse which caught my attention greatly, as I have never noticed it before, is verse 14.

I've had people ask me, "Would God really just not let one of his sons or daughters enter into his Kingdom?  He loves us all, and therefore wouldn't be able to let only a certain group of people in."

Well.. Verse 14, in my eyes, answers that quite well.   Yes.  God has commandments, and he requires that we keep them.  If we don't, we won't "know the name whereby we are called", and thus, we won't be allowed to enter.  Harsh, but true.

Good stuff, this chapter is.  I feel there's still a load of doctrine within these verses which I haven't received yet.

Relgious Links:

LDSCompanion.org - A Great site filled with uplifting Quotes, Stories, Poetry, and Music

LDS.org - Official site for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Linux Links:

Gentoo.org - The greatest Linux distro in the universe.

suseblog.com - My friend's blog - we won't hold it against him for not using gentoo.

wonkabar.org - My other friend's blog.  He's a gentoo dev.  He rocks.

Family Links:

Curt and Laura's Blog

Chloe and Brandon's Blog

Craig and Annie's Blog

Friend's Links

Ty and Trista Swartzlander

With the new design of ILMJ, I thought it fitting for people to be able to add their own static links on their blogs...  Doing so is very easy.

A "page" in your blog is simply an entry which stays in the left-hand column on both your main blog site, and each individual entry, as is illustrated below:





So, as you can see, both of those pages have the "About Me" link top-left.  That link will stay on your blog until you remove it.

To create a blog page, you simply check it while you're writing your entry.  Doesn't get easier than that.

Illustrated below:



With the "Main Page" checkbox checked, upon saving the entry, it will be placed both in your blog entry list, and the Pages list.

If you want to remove a page, simply edit it, uncheck the Main Page checkbox, and re-save your entry.  Upon saving, it will be removed.

Happy Blogging!

I'm in a school today setting up a skolelinux environment and the main server (who has 500 GB harddisks) wasn't going to work, the installer froze while "formatting" the hardrive to ext3.

After some fiddling around it turns out that mkfs.ext3 did for some unknown reason completely fill the available ram which made the installer crap out. It was not an installer problem because running mkfs.ext3 would do the same.

I've never seen that kind of behavior but mkfs.jfs came to the rescue, the server is up and running. So if you find that your skolelinux (or other debian-based linux) installation freezes while formatting it might be (for some weird unknown reason) the filesystem type.

Hi there!  I'm PoeticIntensity

I guess this is my journal...  still.

I started journaling when I was 14, in 1990, as a new years resolution.  I had no idea then just how much I would get into journaling.

It took me 12 years, off and on, to transcode all of my 3000+ journal entries, and then put them into a database.  I thought it would be cool to be able to search them, and I was good at web development, so I created a database of my journal entries...

Then, I thought it would be cool to give others the opportunity to do the same - and so ILMJ was born.

My name is Jason.  I'm married with two kids, soon to be three.  I love my wife more every day, as well as my children.

I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and know the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be true.  Living it is the only way we can find personal salvation in the afterlife.

I'm also a Linux geek, and am grateful for the existence of Linux for many reasons.  For one, it pays my bills.  Also, without it, I probably would have given up completely on computers, due to Microsoft's incompetence, and would probably be a lumberjack somewhere in Montana.

With that said, you'll most likely find a mixture of gospel-related entries, geeky entries, and entries about stuff going on in my life.  That's the general gist of it, anyway...

Other than that, I generally enjoy spreading truth, and am as happy as the moment-by-moment choices I make.

Live life.  Love life.  It's your choice.

This article is part of the OQO odyssey series - You can find the previous posts here, here and there.

If you think, the rest of the installation would be a cakewalk, you are under a misapprehension. But let’s talk about it one after the other.

I should start my report at kernel level which was the first big thing as I haven’t seen the WIFI Card or the Ethernet controller on the pci bus. But where is it? The answer is USB:

Bus 003 Device 002: ID 1557:0002 OQO model 01 WiFi interface
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 1557:0003 OQO model 01 Bluetooth interface
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1557:7720 OQO model 01+ Ethernet
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub


Great. The info delivered from the lsusb command is as useful as windows error messages on a Linux environment. So all that helps now is googling for some more hints what they really did. After some hours I was sure: The Ethernet card turned out to be an ASIX AX8817X based thing while the wlan should be something like an Atmel AT76C505A USB WiFi.

Knowing the components it was quite easy building a suitable kernel. But how do we transfer our chroot stuff to the umpc? Our main problem there are our permissions we got to preserve. I have decided to do it the ‘tar’ way, abusing ssh for saving some space while unpacking:

tar cpf - * | ssh oqo “(cd /mnt/gentoo/boot; tar xvpf -)”

But you should take care of the disc first: If you unpack the archives over some existing files, you might run into troubles - at least I did: The device booted, but the next emerge ripped out many essential packages due to some strange things happening with the world file. So my advice would be formating the partition before doing that stunt!

The transfer went fine and just like a miracle the OQO booted. Wow. I could even log into the system for checking if things are ok. As I didn’t like the damn small keys, I just started up an ssh session to the device still being connected to my Ethernet card but sadly ACPI and WIFI refused to work.

Cursing doesn’t help here - so I continued my research which lead me to a package named net-wireless/at76c503a which should take care of my WIFI card. But did you notice the word ’should’?

The next thing I’ll be doing is shooting some messages to some mailing lists for getting some hints. But I’ll keep you updated!

---

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Reading some posts about embedding languages/runtimes in applications on Planet GNOME reminded me I still had to announce some really quick and incomplete code blob I created some days after last GUADEC edition (which was insanely cool, thanks guys).

It takes WebKit’s JavaScriptCore and allows you to embed it in some Python program, so you, as a Python developer, can allow consumers to write plugins using JavaScript. Don’t ask me whether it’s useful, maybe it’s not, but anyway.

There’s one catch: currently there is no support to expose custom Python objects to the JavaScript runtime: you’re able to use JavaScript objects and functions etc. from within Python, but not the other way around. I started working on this, but the JSCore API lacked some stuff to be able to implement this cleanly (or I missed a part of it, that’s possible as well), maybe it has changed by now… There is transparent translation of JavaScript base types: unicode strings, booleans, null (which becomes None in Python), undefined (which becomes jscore.UNDEFINED) and floats.

I did not work on the code for quite a long time because of too much real-job-work, maybe it no longer compiles, sorry… Anyway, it’s available in git here, patches welcome etc. I guess this is the best sample code around. It’s using Cython for compilation (never tried with Pyrex, although this might work as well). If anyone can use it, great, if not, too bad, I did learn Cython doing this

It seems that the latest revision of sK1 has a new configurator.py that breaks my old gnome patch. I've updated the patch to work with the latest revision. Hopefully this won't end up being an arms race type of affair where configurator.py is constantly changing. Just rename to gnome-sK1.patch and copy in place of the old patch and remember to edit the fonts and font sizes in the patch if you want to match your gnome theme better.

Midori is now using a new build system so if you attempt to emerge it like before it will not work. There is an updated ebuild available on bugzilla. Unfortunately I have yet to get it to work. It builds fine with the new ebuild but the program will not start. I am using it in conjunction with my webkit-gtk svn ebuild. If I find the solution to the problem I will post an update.

UPDATE: It's working now. I built it with a vanilla compiler instead of my default hardened compiler and it is running now. I test Acid3 on Midori everytime I rebuild it. It gets to 77 before it crashes. This is better than the 69 I was getting before. At one time I was able to acheive 100 percent compliance but that hasn't happened in months. My biggest gripe/bug continues to be the font settings. It seems that Midori will not respect my font settings until I adjust them. I have to change the font size and then change it back again every time I start Midori.

Around this time last year I posted a cheatsheet for writing/packaging/testing scripts in python. Well, I'm speaking this week at the Utah Open Source Conference and will be giving an introductory talk about python. I've also been given my brother'

Read or add comments to this article

There is an incredible series of videos called Dimensions available online that explore the 4th dimension using mathematics. The first half of the series is extremely accessible and allows even a mathematically inept person to understand the shape of 4 dimensional space. The second half of the series delves into complex numbers and spheres where the material is a little more complex but overall the creators of this series have simplified the concepts using excellent visual tools. Personally I think learning complex mathematical concepts has been made infinitely easier by the Dimensions series and I cannot wait for the next series.

Today I needed to sync a file on two servers using ssh, and I needed to do it automatically.  I knew that ssh could use key-pairs to enable a secure authentication system without requiring passwords, but I couldn't remember how to do it.  I googled a bit and found this gem of a tutorial on how to do precisely what I needed:  I'll post both the link and the text, just for easy future reference.

Here's the text:

To {ssh, scp} from HostA to HostB without issuing a password:

On both HostA and HostB,

mkdir ~/.ssh


chmod 0700 ~/.ssh


On HostA,

cd .ssh ssh-keygen -t rsa1 -C "Some comment"


ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "Some comment"


ssh-keygen -t dsa -C "Some comment"

Each of the 'ssh-keygen' commands will prompt you for a passphrase. Choose something easy to remember but difficult to guess. The commands will produce the files


~/.ssh/identity, ~/.ssh/identity.pub


~/.ssh/id_rsa, ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub


~/.ssh/id_dsa, ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub


respectively.


The "*.pub" files are your public keys. The others are your private keys - guard them carefully. If they're stolen, then your account on HostB, or any other machine where you've set up public-key authentication, is wide open to the thief.


On HostA,


scp ~/.ssh/identity.pub HostB:~/.ssh/authorized_keys


cp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub some_temp_file


cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub >> some_temp_file


scp some_temp_file HostB:~/.ssh/authorized_keys2


On HostB,


chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys


chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2


Now you should be able to 'ssh' from HostA to HostB without a password, but 'ssh' will prompt you for a passphrase, because it needs to decrypt your private keys.

and here's the link:

http://osdir.com/ml/netbsd.help/2002-04/msg00162.html

Man, I've got a lot to write.  Quite a bit happened this weekend, and last weekend.  I'll start with this weekend.

We had another LAN party this weekend, and it was up at Shane's house in Perry, UT.  We played the usual, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Unreal Tournament 2004.

Traffic was pretty horrible going up through Davis County, but I left early, so all was well.

This time, there were 8 of us playing, and I must say, we all had a ball.  The usuals, Shaun, Shane, and I were all up there gettin' our groove on, but there were also a few others.  Eric, Blaine, Brady, John, and Shane's son, Darrin were there, too.  Hehe....  Good times.

the most memorable portion of this round would definitely have to be Eric and me taking on everyone else.  Talk about craziness....  I haven't been that intense during a game since I used to play Weapons Factory up at BYU with my roommates.  I remembering actually sweating during those games, it would be so intense.

I guess the intensity comes with really wanting to win.  When the stakes are against me, I tend to up the level a bit.   Heh...  I was shaking after playing 2 on 6 this weekend.  Good times...  I also simply must say, Eric and I won 4 out of 4, and it definitely was NOT easy.

Hmmm....  Other than that, the stuffed burgers were fantastic, comradery was awesome, and the evening was well worth the drive.  I got 3 hours of sleep.

I was feeling kind of nostalgic today, after the house poking around, and I always enjoyed driving Wisconsin Highway 33 (which has terminus points in La Crosse and Port Washington!). In fact, I think taking that 4 – 5 hour drive from one end to the other was my favorite part of living in La Crosse, to the point that I had often gone out of my way to start my drive at one end, so I could say that I drove the entirety of 33.

Anyway, nostalgia. I “drove” 33 again today by turning on satellite view on Google Maps, zooming in as close as I could for each location, and scrolling from La Crosse to Port Washington. Fun times.

CSS opacity is a relatively new feature that has become a part of CSS3. Currently Webkit, Gecko, and Opera support standard CSS opacity while IE7 supports opacity with a nonstandard CSS filter. The opacity tag is used like this:


This will give the div with the ID of transblock a transparency of 50%. You can do the same thing in IE7 with a filter. It looks like this:


Ideally you should use both attributes to get the same opacity in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE7. This does not work in old browsers, including IE6. Older versions of Firefox (<0.9)
Obviously you can add any other attributes you wish to the div. This becomes more difficult when you have a div with variable height because you need to repeat the div contents within both the transparent div and the opaque div. I find it is easiest if you limit what attributes you assign to the ID of the div and instead create a class with the shared attributes. So if you want a div with a background of 50% white transparency and a foreground of black bold opaque text it will look like this:


Then when you declare these in XHTML you can use:


and


This way you only have to edit the class to change your layout without having to edit two different IDs. You should notice two things. First that this requires absolute positioning and z-index values to place the opaque text over the tranparent background. Second, I am using the same name for an ID that I use for a class. Normally I would say that this can be confusing but in this situation I think it is actually easier to understand and manipulate the code.

The use of a sperate class is only really needed if you have variable height because otherwise you do not need to repeat the code. The separate class makes sure that the attributes between the transparent div and the opaque div are always the same which ensures the size of the div is maintained whenever attributes or contents are changed within the div. The only time you would actually have to edit the IDs is if you wanted to change the opacity level or the color of the background.

One other thing to note is that IE7's opacity filter only works on elements with a specified height and/or width.

Always a great idea.

Newest addition to my .vimrc:

" map <F3> to html-ify a given document map <silent><F3> :so $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/2html.vim<CR>

Pressing F3 now creates a HTML document that look exactly like my current (g)vim display (including syntax highlighting and whatnot). Useful when you want to have a simple way of formatting sourcecode for the web.

Now that I’m looking for a house, I’m kind of regretting that large payment I made towards my student loan a month ago because “the money was just sitting there.” Doh!

I posted a picture of the Nieuport 24 that crashed at Rhinebeck a few days ago. Today I will post a few others that I took that day. I regret that my picture of the famous Fokker Dr I triplane, known for it's association with the "Red Baron", did not come out so well so I did not post it. To be honest the Nieuport 24 picture came out the best in my opinion. I was in a hurry with my point and shoot so the pictures aren't great but they are the best ones I took that day.

This first bi-plane is known as the Albatros. It was a very successful German fighter eary in the war and was the type flown by the "Red Baron" before he flew the Fokker Dr I.



The "Jenny" as it was known was used to train American pilots during the war and became popular with barnstormers when the war was over and they were sold as surplus.



The Fokker DVII was a superior aircraft at the time and led to the second "Fokker Scourge".



A popular hobbyist bi-plane from the 1930's called the Great Lakes T2-1R. In the distance you can see a New Standard D-25 (left) and a Piper Cub (right).

Linux offers many powersaving features but you have to know where to look to enable these features. There is a wealth of information over at LessWatts.org. I have greatly reduced my power consumption by implementing many of their tips. The first place you should start is by enabling cpufreq. This is probably the number one powersaving feature. I would also enable dynticks in the kernel. To get a better idea of how much power you are using make sure to enable the powertop interface in the kernel. Then there are many tunable powersaving features that you can manipulate from userland. Here are examples that I have used.


Disables polling of your cdrom drive but without it most drives will not automatically recognize when a CD/DVD is inserted.


Turns on powersaving features of the intel 3945 wireless card. Some people have reported that it can cause problems with staying connected to access points. I haven't had much trouble with it.


Enables aggressive powersaving on the hard drive.


Increases CPU idle time which allows you to acheive lower power states.


Enables power managment for SATA.


Increases dirty VM writeback time which allows your HDD to stay spun down for longer periods of time.

In addition to these features the cpufreqd, laptop-mode, and powersave daemons all can help lower your wattage.

Picked up, among others, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. Have only paged through it, but it’s pretty interesting so far. Unapologetically changed the physical landscape, dropped a lot of deities, killed off Mystra, dropped the Weave, so on and so on. Am I going to run it? Dunno. But it’s tempting me, in that “ooh, it’s the Realms” way, changes or not.

Need to read more (also reading GURPS stuff). Maybe I’ll dust off the Undermountain campaign…

Static methods and variables are shared by all instances of the class. Static variables are initialized when a class is loaded whereas instance variables are initialized when an instance of the class is created. Static methods belong to a class, therefore, it can only access static members of the class and it can be called before instantiating the class.

class StaticCase {
	static int staticCounter = 0;
	int nonStaticCounter = 0;
	
	StaticCase() {
		staticCounter++; //class level
		nonStaticCounter++; //instance level
	}
}
	
class StaticCaseImpl {
	
        //static method, entry point
	public static void main(String... args) {
                //StaticCase.nonStaticCounter, error, not a static variable
	
		StaticCase sc1 = new StaticCase();
		StaticCase sc2 = new StaticCase();
	
		System.out.println("staticCounter sc1: " + sc1.staticCounter);
		//output is staticCounter sc1: 2
                //or in static context, StaticCase.staticCounter
		System.out.println("nonStaticCounter sc1: " + sc1.nonStaticCounter);
		//output is nonStaticCounter sc1: 1
	
		System.out.println("staticCounter sc2: " + sc2.staticCounter);
		//output is staticCounter sc2: 2
                //or in static context, StaticCase.staticCounter
		system.out.println("nonStaticCounter sc2: " + sc2.nonStaticCounter);
		//output is nonStaticCounter sc2: 1
	}
}

I got this from Amerei. Here is my color.

Take the Magic: The Gathering ‘What Color Are You?’ Quiz.

This post is a little offtopic but a couple of weeks ago I went to the Rhinebeck Aerodrome to see a bi-plane airshow. Yesterday I learned that there was an accident on sunday that resulted in the death of one of the pilots. When I read the news and saw that it was the Nieuport 24 that crashed I immediately searched for it amongst the photos I took that day. This picture is forever going to remind me just how fragile life is.

I decided to get back into reading the scriptures now that I've finished the last conference talks.

This has nothing to do with Mosiah 3, but one thing I neglected to write about was the last gospel doctrine class I attended.  Our wonderful teacher, Ryan Anderson taught again, and made a wonderful parallel out of Amalickiah and Satan.

We were studying the war chapters of Alma, and while asking questions about Amalickiah, Ryan wrote on the chalkboard, the things that Amalickiah did.  He then asked us if there was anything he wrote which Satan himself did not do.  Some of the things written down were:

• Got cast out of his city


• Took some people out with him


• Became, through deceit, the king of an entire nation


• Persuaded Lehonti to come down, and then killed him.


• Held no value for the lives of the people who followed him

There were many more things, as well, and the things taken to a general level, were all things Satan himself did or does today.

Anyway... I found that interesting...  Now on to Mosiah.

  Verses 1 and 2 are the antithesis of pride, to me.  These people, as far as I know, weren't vile sinners, but quite the contrary.  Yet, they had the "fear of the Lord" come upon them.  Why?  Because they came to a new, deeper realization of their complete reliance on the Lord, Jesus Christ.

Verse 3 reminds me of the stories of Alma the younger, and Enos.  Having received forgiveness of their sins, and indescribably joy.

Verse 9 seems to begin a new train of thought for King Benjamin...  Also, verse 5 seems to confirm what I said about verses 1 and 2.

Verses 4-8 tell us that people who feel what those people felt are ready for salvation.

Verses 9 and 10 could easily be made into a poster, and set for all to see.  Better advice is not given.

For all of the things which King Benjamin could have said, he sure did devote a lot of time and energy toward our understanding the principle of service and selflessness.  He talked about the beggars and serving them for 10+ verses in this chapter alone.  Must be important.

This chapter is always a good one to read.  Good stuff.

You remember that I have tried to crack some random passwords using John The Ripper, don’t you? Well - if you don’t, here’s the according post. Fact is, that I’m as curious as you are about the results - that’s why I didn’t give up yet. So here are the results so far:

guesses: 0 time: 30:22:54:46 c/s: 970 trying: luomme7

We’re cracking since 30 days and no password was cracked so far.

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Four days ago I installed Flash 10 on my laptop. I was hoping it would solve some of the issues I was having with Flash. Unfortunately I haven't seen many differences at all. I'm not sure if my problems are related to Flash itself or nspluginwrapper but Flash still crashes or hangs my browser occasionally and some Flash videos still don't work, they just display a gray box where the video should be. The good news is that Flash hasn't crashed X yet which started happening on my laptop recently with Flash 9. Also I haven't had any regressions yet so that's good news. I would recommend checking it yourself. I would love to know how well it is working on 32-bit machines.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I visited some other flash sites that normally worked with Flash 9 and they were not working correctly. I reverted to Flash 9 for the time being and things are back to "normal".

I haven't been getting much sleep lately...  So I think I'll write about.... something.  I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to write about, but it's been much too long since I've written to continue not writing any longer.

I found this link today, given to me by this dude.  It's a great theme for a blog, and I hope it goes far.

Hmm.... What other ramblings can I submerge my brain in today?  A poem, maybe?

Like rain, fell my body from the grasp of reality as I felt my mind go dark.
No more pain, no more sorrow.
I engulfed myself in the sensation and found myself smiling, finally.  Although the stain of past years may never bleed away, for this moment, I am free.
Unwillingly, I found myself looking down as I felt everything melt away...
...at last... I'm free.

I have no idea where that came from.  Kind of dark for the type of mood I'm in.  Right now, I'm as happy as a hairball.

It might have come from the books I've been reading lately.  Oh... hehe... For those of you who don't know, I believe the last time I read for pleasure was back about a month before I met Sarah, my wife, 5 and a half years ago.  It was a book called "A Child Called It", by Dave Pelzer.

Well...  I recently bought the other two sequels called, "The Lost Boy", and "A Man Named Dave", both by Dave Pelzer, and right now I'm about half-way through the latter.

I'm amazed that someone could treat someone that badly.  Basically, the books are about Dave's journey through living as his mom's prisoner, her beating him within an inch of his life on a daily basis from the age of 4 until age 12, and him overcoming it and becoming an adult...  It's quite a dramatic book, but I love it.  Keeps life real...

Because heaven knows, I've had, compared to others, a life blessed way beyond what I deserve.

I've often pondered why I think that is.  Why I seem to always get the upper-crust in life....    I think it's two things (from the top of my head, with absolutely no forethought on the subject):  Attitude and Gratitude.

Yup...  I'm fairly certain that a person in my exact location in life could be hating his or her life right now, whereas I love it.  It's all about attitude (or perception, as my good friend Scott and I talk about regularly)...

The gratitude portion simply comes from a scripture I know to be true:  D&C 78:19, which says:

And he who receiveth all things with athankfulness shall be made glorious; and the things of this earth shall be added unto him, even an bhundred fold, yea, more.

Yup... If the scriptures really are true, and I believe them wholeheartedly to be such, then that right there is one of the main reasons, along with attitude, that I enjoy my life so much.

Hmm.... what else can I blabber on about?

I've got another LAN party coming up this weekend (tomorrow), and I'm so freakin' stoked about it...  It should be an absolute riot.  We're going up to Shane's house in Perry, UT to get the action on, and man, am I ready for some ACTION!  Awww yeah, brother...  Some serious Enemy Territory: Quake Wars action.  Action that means I'm up all night long honing my skills as a homicidal maniac bringing death and destruction with every turn.

hehe...  I love that game.

That's about it for now.

The word tuple is used quite a lot in computing. That’s what database people call a row in a table. It’s also what several programming languages call a structure where the fields are ordered but not named.

It seems to be one of those words that is hard to translate, so other languages often use the English word. And yet there is some confusion about pronunciation. Some say tahple, some say twople. As far as I know there is no dispute about the spelling, it’s tuple. So where do you get twople from that?

I think having a lot of exceptions on pronunciation from what is the obvious pronunciation is bad for language. There are words that are fancy or interesting enough to perhaps deserve it, but tuple isn’t one of them. So I’m going to keep saying tahple.

As promised in the first part, we want to do the stunt ourselves - but as I do not own a copy of Flash nor someone was willing to donate a license, I have to do it in PHP using the MING Library. But let’s stop ranting and get down to a text editor:

ming_useswfversion(7);
$movie=new SWFMovie(7);
$movie->setDimension(480, 360);
$movie->Background(0,0,0);

What we did here is the start of a small php script that generates an empty flash object we’ll be using as our workspace. Its size is 480 by 360 pixel. As I’m damn creative, I just call it ‘video’ and start adding some more code for embedding the video ’screen’ into it:

$stream = new SWFVideoStream();
$stream->setDimension(480, 350);
$item = $movie->add($stream);
$item->moveTo(5, 5);
$item->setname("video");

Now our scene is set and ready for the flv file we know from the first post. In Flash we’d be using ActionScript. I guess it would look that way:


connection = new NetConnection();
connection.connect(null);
stream = new NetStream(connection);
video.attachVideo(stream);
stream.setBufferTime(10);
stream.play('http://ourhost/mystream.flv');


For using that code in PHP, I just smack it into a variable and add it as SWFAction to our project. Regarding the location of our flv file: Feel free to be creative - I’m just using a static location here as it’s just a demo.

$action = new SWFAction($action_string);
$movie->add($action);

Ok people - Now the important part: as I am a man, I need something to play with while watching the video. How do buttons sound? Controls?

Let’s fire up gimp and paint them. If you’re nice, save them as DBL graphics or just use the png2dbl tool that came shipped with ming. As I’m done with the paint job now, let’s hack it into our player:

$button = new SWFButton();
$flags = (SWFBUTTON_UP | SWFBUTTON_HIT | SWFBUTTON_OVER | SWFBUTTON_DOWN);
$button->addShape(ImageShape("images/pause.dbl"), $flags);
$action = new SWFAction("stream.pause();");
$button->addAction($action, SWFBUTTON_MOUSEDOWN);
$button_ref = $movie->add($button);
$button_ref->moveTo($x, $y);

And that was the easy part because I want a progress bar. As we have already quit our paint program, we’ll be doing it using PHP:

$mc = new SWFSprite();
$shape = new SWFShape();
$shape->setLine(4,25,0,0,128);
$shape->movePenTo(0, 5);
$shape->drawLineTo(0, 10);
$mc->add($shape);
$mc->nextFrame();
$slider = $movie->add($mc);
$slider->moveTo($xMin, $y);


And now let’s move it:

$a = new SWFAction("startDrag(this, $xMin, $y, $xMax, $y, 1); drag = true;");
$slider->addAction($a, SWFACTION_MOUSEDOWN);
$a = new SWFAction("stopDrag(); drag=flase;");
$slider->addAction($a, SWFACTION_MOUSEUP);

The progress bar is now drag able, but it still doesn’t work until we add some more code:

// width in px
width = xMax - xMin;

paused = false;
if(drag) {
// pause stream while seeking
_global.stream.pause(true);
paused = true;
x = _root._xmouse - xMin;
seekTo = (_global.streamLen / width) * x;
_global.stream.seek(seekTo);
} else {
pos = (_global.stream.time * (width / _global.streamLen)) + xMin;
this._x = pos;
this._y = y;
}

// restart paused stream
if(paused) {
_global.stream.pause(false);
}

And that’s it. Let’s finish the movie by skipping to the next frame. Regarding my demo script here, I’ll just write a swf file as I have hardcoded the FLV file location. Alternatively you might want to make php send the swf file to your clients.

$movie->nextFrame();
$movie->save("FLVPlayer.swf");

The moral of the story: There’s no magic behind those video portals. It’s just some lines of code, darn simple and stupid.

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Seriously. Is there so little to write about that everybody writes about some theme prototypes for the new Ubuntu release? If you consider that (and posting screenshots that have been flowing around for months) news you better start doing something else.

Yeah there's gonna be a new Ubuntu release soon, here's the short summary:

The GNOME variant will somewhat work and have some UI patches that might be neat but that never reach upstream. But in general it will try to follow fedora and opensuse by trying to incorporate all the technology those two distros work on while doing a half-assed job implementing them (remember the pulseaudio fiasco that gave an awesome product a bad name just cause someone decided it would have to be in since all the other kids have it).

The KDE variant will throw the KDE 4 version that they manage to compile out in spite of it being months away from being feature-complete enough to get work done. Most of the things that make the GNOME version usable will not be available but hell, something needs to be done cause the KDE4 live CDs that everybody used to play around with KDE4 for the 5 minutes they could stomach it were based on OpenSuse.

Apart from that the release will feature nothing. Version bumps for all the programs in the repository. Some new artwork here or there. But as we have come to know Ubuntu, it will be mostly an aggregation of the work the other distros like fedora and Opensuse did. After upstart I have not seen any real innovation by Ubuntu, except for their "bulletproofX" idea which only makes sense cause they tend to break things with updates so users will end up without X or means to fix that issue.

Really, I don't have anything against people running Ubuntu, but why does some work on themes get that amount of coverage? Is it just cause the whole thing is too unexciting to write anything real about but the buzz needs to be kept up to stay "the lead"?

When I was younger, men with long hair were considered to be open-minded, often somewhat politically left, progressive and all that Jazz. I just realized that nowadays many men with long hair are very conservative. I really think I need to shave my head.

The pop singer Lily Allen wrote a piece on her blog saying that she had finished her anticipated second album called Stuck On The Naughty Step but her record company had not yet released it, perhaps because the people supposed to be doing that had been laid off.

For this post, it does not matter if you like Lily Allen or not, but in the last paragraph, I linked to the Lily Allen's blogpost, look did it again! Not hard was it?

Well three of four of Britain's major national broadsheet papers quoted from the above blog post, the Times, Guardian and Telegraph, All three of them failed to link to their source. The Metro, the paper they put on buses and trains, did not do any better.

Only the tax funded BBC managed to link to Allen's site. However, the link is across in the right column, and does not link directly to the blog post.

I know by the standards of newspapers that the hyperlink is cutting edge technology, being invented only in 1965 by Project Xandu and first used on the World Wide Web in 1991 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee

The journalists presumably had the blog they were cutting and pasting from in front of them while writing, would it have been that much more effort to cut and paste the URL into the post?

On most browsers, you can copy the URL with these three shortcuts: Ctrl+L, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C

Unless you are on the Mac, then you want: Cmd+L, Cmd+A, Cmd+C

Hyperlinks are what turns text into hypertext, there is a clue in every link: http://, the HTTP stands for Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol. It is not PTDP the "Plain Text Deadend Protocol", it is not NWHTHTCNLP, the "Now We Have Them Here They Can Never Leave Protocol".

Linking to what are you talking about is how the Web works, like taking your trolley back to the trolley rack is how supermarkets work. Throwing your trolley into a ditch or leaving it in the middle of the road ruins the ecosystem. It is also rather inconvenient for the other shoppers who find there are no trolleys anymore.

Likewise, withholding the sources to keep your readers in the dark is disrespecting the ecology of the Web. Again the key is in the name "Web", interconnected sites, it is the World Wide Web, not 'My Little Cul-de-sac'.

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Have you ever asked yourself how sites like YouTube are working? Why it is possible grabbing videos from there that simple? How it’s built? I guess that’s some questions now. But if you don’t mind, I’ll answer some…

Let’s start with our web browser and hit a video portal. As an example I’m using the following video clip found on YouTube:

Let’s assume that everything web based has to be downloaded to your computer to be displayed in your browser. In our case it’s a website and the embedded flash video object which should even be cached on disc. The clue here is the fact that if you hit the reload button, the video is already ready to be played instantly.

As a proof you can empty your browser cache and reload the site again - et voilà, we’re downloading it again. Having an empty browser cache is a nice thing, especially if you are looking for objects inside. Regarding our experiment here, we should have the swf flash movie in there, the website itself and some images.

But if you watch your cache carefully, there’s more in it - a strange file named .flv which leads back to Macromedia if you google for it. Let’s watch another video without clearing the cache and see what happens: The swf file stays pretty much the same - just the flv file count increases.

Now let’s add 1 and 1 and hope its result is 2: If I am right, the flv file i