year++;

No new posts until the new year gets out of the way. So enjoy the brand new year, and may it be a lot better than 2006 was.

Truths about atheism

Edit – This post really doesn’t belong on this blog. Removed.

xmas hatred.

Why do I dislike xmas? Here’s why:

* Forced consumerism: Companies push “holiday sales” for their businesses to artificially inflate their projected goals for year’s end, thus making the upper management, owners, and stockholders rich, while not caring about the actual consumer and the products they buy, and stepping on the backs of the underpaid, overworked employees who did the real work while you sat in your cozy chair in an office, smoking a big fat cigar, reading profit reports. These people are simply despicable.

* Consumer insanity: People go nuts over sales and “must-have” products (in other words, products that sleazy marketing people pushed on people, especially impressionable children, to get), and the amount of stress, traffic, crowded stores, accidents, and general mood of our society goes into a place that just is not good for us.

* Lying to children: Christmas begins the lifetime of lies that is told to our children. Santa Claus should be celebrated as a symbol of the holidays, and an embodiment of the giving spirit. Instead, children are told that an actual, real, magical fat man comes to everyone’s house that he judges “nice” and brings them toys. It’s one thing to enjoy a fantasy for what it is — fantasy sparks imagination, and imagination brings creativity and progress to our society. However, it is dangerous to actually lose ones self in said fantasy and make it real. Children being lied to about Santa Claus (and that’s what it is — don’t think that it’s harmless, you are deceiving your children and nothing good comes of that) and you are not only teaching them to lose themselves in a fantasy, but also setting them up to eventually learn that you were lying to them. The people that you trust the most in your life at that age telling you lies? How do you think that feels? Not good, I’d say.

* The celebration of a fairy tale: Of course, the whole “virgin birth of Our Saviour Jesus Christ” is just a folk tale anyway. Even if there were someone named “Jesus” born to a supposed virgin (“Honey, I swear, I’ve never had sex with anyone! It was a miracle birth, it had to be!”), don’t you think that those around him could have embellished things a bit to further their religious beliefs and make themselves look more important? Do you really, truly believe in something that has absolutely ZERO evidence of being true, especially in the face of science, fact, and reason which has MOUNTAINS of evidence that directly contradict the garbage you’re spewing?

There, I feel better. Merry xmas, everyone.

Hmm.

What does one write about when there’s nothing to write about?

If I were running Windows, I’m sure I’d have some problem to talk about. A friend of my brother has been struggling with his Windows system lately because of performance issues. Games just aren’t as snappy as they used to be, from what he said. Windows just has some sort of creeping decay quality about it, I believe, that makes one’s system go from a snappy system that works as well as it can to a bloated mess that runs everything as if it was stuck in thick molasses.

And, of course, I don’t get that problem with Linux.

Therefore the problem. How can I talk about Linux when there’s nothing notable to report? Should I replace some critical package with a bleeding-edge release just to see how it affects my system? Completely change to ~x86 (Gentoo Unstable), for that matter? Write a program that randomly changes one byte in random executables every so often (which I honestly think happens in Windows)?

Stability is so boring sometimes.

Eh, anyway, I got my site up and running with the e107 CMS, a content manager that I’ve used and liked in the past. Sure, I would have liked to do something myself, but I’m a bit too distracted by other things going on these days so I went for the easy solution. I do plan to do a bit of customization and hacking to it to get it exactly how I want it.

Now that I think about it, maybe I should boot into FreeBSD for a while. I never did get Doomsday working…

日本語

The title of this post reads “nihongo” (roughly “knee-hon-go”) which means “Japanese” as in the Japanese language. I’ve had some trouble getting proper Japanese support working as it should be, but I think I’ve finally got it sorted out.

Japanese input support requires two installations (and the associated font set): an input program called scim (Smart Common Input Method), and a parser called anthy, which converts the input into proper kana and kanji. Problem was that apparently scim was using another parser that wasn’t so good, and somehow anthy got lost in the mix. So I did a re-emerge of anthy, went into scim’s preferences and enabled only anthy as input, and restarted it.

勝利！ It works. Best thing is that it would not work in Firefox at all before, and I would have to paste Japanese in from another application. Seems to work just fine in Firefox now.

So, yeah, I’m happy.

ZSNES issues

Well, I have been having issues with one of the emulators I use for many entertaining games: zsnes, an emulator for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). For a long while, it was working just fine, thank you very much, but recently I have been having some major problems.

ZSNES would freeze whenever I switched focus away from it or just use it for a while. It would appear to freeze, then display maybe one frame every few seconds. It also lost my gamepad mapping once for some odd reason.

I tried deleting the configuration files in ~/.zsnes to no avail, so I did a re-emerge, this time with no CFLAGS (optimizations). End result so far is pretty good, as it hasn’t frozen yet. I also tried doing a non-stretched screen resolution to see if this might be part of the cause.

So far I’ve gone through several SNES games after the re-emerge and it hasn’t given me any more problems Hopefully this issue is solved. I just wonder what in the world changed to cause it in the first place…

Now, if I can just figure out what happened to SCIM and my Japanese input mode (it’s pretty much completely broken — I can force it to input Japanese kana, but it won’t convert to kanji), I’ll be happy.

I hate sleep

One night of messed-up sleep and you pay for it for a week by having odd sleep patterns. Damn sleep.

Actual Linux postings to return tonight, I hope. If I can stay awake long enough.

Can’t sleep, clown will eat me

I’ll just skip the blog post tonight. It’s late, I haven’t done anything significant with Linux today except listen to some music and play games (I am so close to beating Zelda: LttP again). It’s really fun just to play in Linux, too. Windows was always such a chore to wade through; its interface and methods seem so bland and close to actual work.

Linux is my playground. Windows is a prison.

Firefox 3

Code-named “Gran Paradiso”, Mozilla’s first alpha release of Firefox 3 was released recently. Development builds of 3.0 have been available for a while, but this is the first true milestone release for the next major version of the Firefox browser. So I decided to download and compile it to take a look. The compile took a few hours, predictably, but was painless (except that at some point, Firefox lost the ability to automatically make a tarred archive of a dynamically linked build, forcing me to manually copy over the release to a new directory while dereferencing the many symlinks in the build directory; the packager informed me that I would have to build static binaries to do an automatic tar package, something that hasn’t always been the case).

I’m using it now, and so far, there hasn’t been any issues with stability. There was a warning on the release page that web pages containing Eastern language characters (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc) could freeze the browser, but I haven’t seen that happen yet. I’m not going to replace Firefox2 at this time, but just keep it installed separately for testing purposes. Page rendering speed seems to yet again be improved (I’m not sure how the FF developers do it, but with every major release, page rendering gets faster; kudos to them), but it still hasn’t passed ACID2. It all seems very similar to Firefox 2 at this point, although the changes listed on the release page seem to support the major version number bump.

So for an alpha, it seems pretty stable thus far, and has convinced me that Firefox is still the best browser out there. I look forward to a final Firefox 3 release, and will continue testing out the milestone releases along the way.

Old Games

Rant mode today. Posted this as part of a rant on this Slashdot article about the option to go back to older games if they feel that next-gen systems and games are too pricey.

[...]
It’s basically everyone being told that these expensive, shiny new systems are superior in every way, and people see the shiny graphics, drool, and believe every word of it. People want to believe what they are told, and especially those who buy these systems defend the price they paid for it in their minds by fooling themselves into believing it will do everything including curing cancer, and do it better. Sure, the PS3 and the XBox 360 are a bit more powerful than their predecessors. The issue is whether they are significantly more powerful so that games for them are truly next-gen. And in general, except for the graphics, they’re really not. And graphics, sorry to say, are not the most important part of a game. If you like pretty graphics and stuff exploding, go watch a movie, go outside, or whatever.

…[I]t amazes me how we march forward into the next generation of gaming and are so willing to pay so much money to be entertained in the same way that we have been entertained by consoles in the past. Given that there are so many good games available for past consoles that you haven’t played (unless you are just a hardcore, no-life-outside-of-games gamer that has literally played it all), it’s hard to imagine the need for a new console generation. The same, unfortunately, can be said about other entertainment media, especially film which is suffering from the same style-over-substance problem that gaming has, so it is not just gaming that is at issue here. Just like many modern film fans who love the latest SFX-filled action yawner and turn their noses up at old black-and-white cinema classics, new gamers that drool over graphics and won’t give old games a second look are shallow people who do not care about the substance of the medium.

It’s sad, really.

Right now, I’m replaying (actually re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-replaying) The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past for SNES and loving it. Old Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 (granted, only a few 2600 games are compelling enough to get regular play, but there are a few of them) games get regular play. I even played through Zork 1 recently. All of these are gaming experiences lost on the latest generation of gamers whose gaming snobbery prevent them from even looking twice at a game without shiny new 3d graphics.

Their loss.