Linux Tutorials Available Soon!
If you take a look up at the header on my blog you should see a shiny new link named SuSE Linux. In order to supplement my turn or burn philosophy towards Linux I feel I should offer my readers some insights into how specific Linux distributions work. One of the hardest things to manage in any distro is keeping it up to date. Therefore, my first task will be to write up how to keep a fresh and clean SuSE install updated with the latest cool stuff.
From now until I get tired of it, and in between projects, studying, and general moving towards graduation from my wonderful Alma Mater, I will post one brand new Linux oriented tutorial per month on this new site. I will eventually branch out to problems that tend to occur with other distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora. Can you simply google and find this information elsewhere? Sure. But one thing that most LOS distributions lack is good documentation. The tips and tricks to keeping your distro clean and up to date remain buried among forum posts or on wiki's out in the middle of nowhere. I hope to consolidate all these sources and bring it to you, the anxaw reader, in one giant space.
Cheers!
Windows Vista: The Best Case for Windows XP
Windows Vista continues to piss off even the hardcore XP users. This article is a great case study of an old school XP user upgrading to Vista and breaking all the problems down for us.
The thing that irks me is that everyone that I have tried to turn away from Windows Vista always responds with something along the lines of "but it's what I'm used to." Sad to say, but with Vista's new features you will do much better to either learn a Linux distribution (XGL looks way cooler than Aero anyway) or switch to Mac. As a matter of fact, as the above linked article points out, Vista has a learning curve. Windows XP users, open up Windows Media Player 11 and tell me where your context menus are. They aren't there. Vista designers have decided to kill a 20 year old desktop paradigm. Hmmm.
Something else that I found disturbing is the incorporation of a small chip called a Trusted Platform Module (wikipedia) into some hardware. Apparently this little gem has been shipping quietly on motherboards for a while now. This isn't related to Vista, but as you'll find out later it enables some very bad things. It does the following:
1. Uniquely identifies your hardware (usually the motherboard).
2. Remote attestation - Creates an unforgeable summary of the software on a computer, allowing a third party (such as a digital music store) to verify that the software has not been changed.
3. Sealing - Encrypts data in such a way that it may be decrypted only in the exact same state (that is, it may be decrypted only on the computer it was encrypted running the same software).
4. Binding - encrypts data using the TPM Endorsement Key (a unique RSA key put in the chip during its production) or another 'trusted' key.
The first and second features are arguable threats to privacy, and the third and fourth are poster children for DRM. To make this concrete, imagine that I have a song that I download in iTunes. If sealing and binding were in place then it would be impossible (without cracking the keys on the chip) to transfer that song to any other electronic media that didn't have an identical TPM chip. Since number one states that no two chips are the same, then you are hosed. Vista uses this piece of hardware in it's hell-spawned incarnation of WGA.
Vista is not only the best case to stick with XP. It's also a great reason to switch to Mac or Linux. Below are some links to some really good and usable Linux distributions. I challenge you to go to one of these sites, download a Live CD, and run it. All you have to do is stick it into your computer and boot to the CD drive and you can play around with a fully functional Linux OS. Try that with Windows. My personal favorite distribution is OpenSuSE, but it really doesn't matter to me what distro you go with. Ubuntu is notoriously easy to use, Fedora is the open source spinoff of the hugely successful Redhat 9, and SuSE is the most versatile without losing its usability. Pick one, try it, and install it on your computer after you convince yourself that it really is better. A word of caution to notebook users: wireless cards are amazingly annoying to get working in Linux. Check to see if yours is compatible (Anything centrino, or non-broadcom core will work without hacks).
 OpenSuSE |
 Fedora |
 Ubuntu |
Interesting changes
Sometimes I go to a local house church here in Atlanta. And by sometimes, I really mean not often enough. Recently we came to a unanimous decision to have a regular discipleship meeting on a particular day at a restaraunt, and our first task as a group would be to read Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster. Honestly, this book has made some revolutionary progress in my walk with the Lord.
The book is segregated into chapters dedicated to the different facets of spiritual discipline. So far I have read chapters one, two, and three, which cover an introduction, and the topics of meditation and prayer respectively. I'm slightly behind my house church bretheren--who just finished chapter four: fasting--but I am experiencing such a revolutionary side of Christ through Foster's writing that I really want to take it slow. I want to marinate in the concepts he describes so I can discover new insights in to God's Word. By no means am I replacing God's perfect Word with an imprefect man made manuscript, but I am instead using it as a supplimental guide as one would use a thesaurus or dictionary when writing poetry. It is quite sad however, that I am not to the level yet that I can experience such "Ah ha!" moments when directly reading the Word of God. I hope that through Foster's writings I will learn how to experience such intimacy with God that I can strike out on my own with nothing but the Word and a conviction to be richly and genuinely changed.
DragonForce: Inhuman Rampage
Warning: Extremely cheesy 80's hair metal ahead. Anyone who describes themselves as extreme power metal automatically gets points in my book. Most of them look like something straight out of the 80's with big hair, tight black leather pants, Ibanez guitars, and solid state Marshall growl. If you can get past all that, this band is alot of fun to listen to. If that's not enough to convince you to at least give them a test listen, they have a keytar player. Limozeen baby!!
Musically, this band is the home of speed guitarist duo Herman Li and Sam Totman, who are masters of phrasing to the extreme of Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai. Both of them like octave wah, long harmonizing tap solos, and dueling sessions to the tune of 3 minutes or sometimes longer. For someone who appreciates things like that, these guys will blow you away.
Lyrically, DragonForce is total cheese. When you have a lead singer with a name like ZP Theart, how could you not expect amazing lyrics like:
On a cold dark winter night hidden by the stormy light
A battle rages for the right for what will become
In the valley of the damned a warrior with sword in hand
Travels fast across the land for freedom he rides
Honestly, I'm speechless. Hands down, these guys are masters. Amazingly all of their lyrics are clean and often epic in nature. That's not something you get out of todays emo slanted pop music culture. It's a breath of fresh air from typical death/nu metal. ZP's voice tone is no different than any other 80's band you have ever heard, so there isn't much to expect in terms of talent. It's clean, high pitched and always right on target; analagous to Stryper or Poison. No screaming here.
If you are too cool for cheesy lyrics, or you think 80's style shredding guitar solos are lame, then you need to take a dive off the popular culture bandwagon and demount your musical high horse. No matter how cheese their lyrics are, or how extravagant their harmonizing guitar solos are, I simply cannot say no to DragonForce. These guys are definately "F-ing metal."
If you need some excellent late night coding music, you like 80's music or malmsteen style playing, or you simply marvel at tap solos played at ridiculous speeds then DragonForce is for you.
Sleep is for the weak
I spent my first night at the TSRB. When I said earlier that this semester was busier than last, I wasn't kidding. I'm taking a couple of hours off just so I can get my head back and do some pleasure reading, but after that it's back to the mines. I came up with a pretty cool idea for a research project a while back, and I'm pretty excited that I was able to expand up on it and present it to the folks in my research group. It's a relatively hard problem so I am probably going to outsource some stuff for my sanity's sake. I don't need to be trying to implement 4 projects and write papers on them. Two is certainly enough.
Pics are still broken mainly because I'm too burned out to write anything that resembles code right now. Most of the past night and the day before was spent hacking C++ so that it works on my target platform. Unfortunately, I broke said platform right before my demo--the odds of which are not stunningly low when you take my luck into account--so I was forced to improvise. I came up with a pretty cool and hopefully informative demo about some Machine Learning concepts that I want to integrate into my projects.
I'm slightly satisfied in my work for a change.