Ross154   The long, uneventful wait for Elite IV

…If it only had 640×480 (or better) instead of QVGA.

…If only it had an accelerometer & magnetometer buried in that thick frame.

…If only it were VGA/DVI, and powered by USB by default.

…If only it had a halfway reasonable DDC reply.

…If only the company that once made this knew it’s true place in the market.

…If only ten other companies made things just like it.

…If only the connection between this class of device and Compiz/X11 (and to some degree KWin) weren’t so obvious..

..If only…

“You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate
energy policy.

You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in  Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn’t get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.

You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.  Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans…oh hell no.”

–rosie o’donnel

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So, another Ant email arrives. One of about 50 each day. And sure enough, it’s never the quantity of email, it’s the quality.

One of the latest little dittys is about Razer mice! I love’s me a good mouse, especially a left-handed one, and it turns out there’s an astroturfing contest!!

Well, let me be the 29,351st person you’ve heard it from.. Another excellent mouse manufacturer has made what looks like the market’s second fabulous left handed mouse. It might actually be better than the Logitech offering (which I won’t link to, because they aren’t the ones with the free mouse contest), since the Razer DeathAdder Left-Handed edition is actually a wired mouse.. The one real shortfall of Logitech’s wireless Left-Handed mouse; wireless = bad for gaming..

Being that I’m left-handed, I often pick up stuff people don’t normally think about. For instance, I’m exclusively a Linux user. I feel Linux is the most ideal platform for gaming and game development on Earth. It’s too bad the gaming development scene has been held hostage by one private company for so long, the stockholm syndrome is almost too painful to watch. If game development shops gave Linux half a chance as their PC platform for gaming, we’d see a lot more, and better results.

So, seeing that I’m a Left-Handed Linux Gamer, who isn’t on Facebook (because free (as in cost) social networks are just another corporate assault on your civil rights)(really, if you don’t understand that, don’t ask for an explanation, you wouldn’t believe it anyway), to find a company breaking the mold of “there are no left handed people”, and offering a high quality gaming peripheral like this one,  you’ll find me and my ilk first in line for the offering. You know, as we discover its availability, through aggressive, customer driven marketing pieces like this.  Now go buy one!

Thanks Razer!

It’s that season again! Being delivered today is my new Sager 9280 notebook! I wonder how it’ll stand being indoctrinated into the Church of Debian Unstable..

Ha, notebook my chocolate starfish… This thing is more of a laptop, in the traditional sense of the word.  This monstrosity makes me think there should be yet another mobile-computing term beyond ninja, monk, and samurai.. I’m considering this one in the Sumo Class.. I’m really quite excited about it. Maybe more later on Sager’s win/lose ratio..

It took forever to find a notebook to match my requirements.. 17″, 1920×1200, no Windows pre-installed.. it was as if I could have the physical size, or the resolution, but not both, and when I did find both, I was forced to accept the Microsoft Tax, or GTFO.. Naturally I chose the latter option.

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(12:45:08 PM) mprov: it still seems like we’ll have to tackle HAL and XInput after we have a driver, but maybe understanding those layers will help us understand what, at the kernel level, we’re trying to achieve
(12:46:58 PM) mprov: HAL depends on (d-bus, and then) udev to provide the manifestation of the /dev entry for the device, when the kernel registers the device, it shows up in /sys, where udev gets the info it needs to generate the /dev entry. Then dbus provides the notification to HAL which provides the permissions and access to the device to XInput
(12:48:01 PM) mprov: that’s the flow of things, once we have a complete handler for the HID layer once we have a recognized device registration
(12:48:58 PM) mprov: what we need in the kernel seems to be just that, a handler for the HID registration, which will provide the /sys entries for /udev to make the device. then we can interface it higher up the stack
(12:49:30 PM) mprov: for udev to make the /dev entry i mean
(12:49:32 PM) mprov: not /udev
(12:50:34 PM) mprov: (i’m repeating myself here, but) once udev generates the device, d-bus will notify HAL to parse the device and register it with XInput, which will make it available to the user

After that.. Wearable computing on every computer, using any HMD, by any manufacturer. Death to monitors!

So, Twitter goes down and Facebook goes down, and suddenly people don’t know what hit them? I’ve never understood how so much of the Internet’s population can mistake a website for a public utility. It’s as if Twitter is supposed to be some deeply embedded component of the internet’s inherent architecture, and when it’s not working; teh OMG, Now what?!

That the majority of twitterers & facebookers don’t realize, much less care, that they’re communicating over a closed, privately owned channel (which may or may not be harvesting their information, relationships, and communications for purposes they never intended) really isn’t my point.

That the attacks were targeting one person, and wound up crippling entire social networking sites (illustrating a lack of integrity in the operating systems involved in the attack,)  isn’t my point either..

I just find it so crazy how surprising and paralyzing it can become to people when one random websites or another goes down. Like a handful of corporations think they can be their own social revolution or something. It’s odd that people have such a hard time seeing past the facade. It seems the strengths of open protocols and federated systems would be far more evident in times like these, but instead, people hardly remember email, or XMPP, or their own blogs.

Whatever. I guess I get it. It’s just so disheartening.

So, there’s nothing like watching both Microsoft and Apple getting kicked in the balls.. Here ye, here ye, the first Linux platform running Microsoft products.. or wait, EAS? Are you serious? On a Linux based phone??

Ouch..

Oh, but lets not forget everyone’s favorite.. Hi, I’m an iPod.. and I’m a.. uh.. what he said.. iTunes says… ok! ^_^  …Will Apple actually try and stop them? You know that sensation when you see somebody take one in the sack? Damn…

It’s like some perverse capitalistic kung-fu movie with Palm as the down and out hero coming back full force…

All they need now is developer support.. So far, they’re not helping themselves by the SDK being so far off, but you can tell they know, since they’re expanding their early access..

We’ll see.. Its quality is quite an affront to, at least two, industry giants, but in a subtle way. It’ll be interesting to see how the dominoes fall over the next 6 months. Maybe the best of all cases, nothing big will ever come of it, and reason has one more prevailing precedent on its side.

So we came to the conclusion one night; if the true and proper definition of Discordianism is indeed the ability to play the accordion poorly, then the majority of the human population of the planet is indeed Discordian! This is a great moral victory for our species..

Happy Birthday!!

so it appears this link kills spam..

Even if you tell people outright, that wearable computing is real, and literally weeks away, they actively don’t believe it. I guess i don’t blame them. I guess to some folks it seems pretty far fetched.

This post was commissioned by Tom, direct all complaints to him. ^_^

In my recent quest to decide what my next portable computing device would be, it came down to two main contenders, the Asus Eee PC, or the Nokia N810, I realized there’s a good analogy for classifying mobile devices; classes of Asian warriors!

Often in computing circles, parallels are made between the hacking skills of techies, and the fighting skills of martial artists. So it isn’t a big stretch to see why this analogy is apt. I have no illusions it’ll catch on, but dammit it’s a convenient convention..

So in short, my version of the three currently distinct classes of Mobile Computing Devices goes; the Samurai, the Monk, and the Ninja.

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Hi folks,

Hate to jump in again, but Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, and George H.W.
Bush kinda ARE our standards… In the eyes of the rest of the world…

For better or for worse, Jesus ain’t the only game in town down here
on good ol’ Earth. So in our particular stretch of land which we’ve
arbitrarily marked as “America” which we rightly stole from the First
Nations peoples, built on the back of African, Chinese, and Irish
slaves, and have fought and defended bravely for a paltry 200 or so
years since, we are ACTUALLY held to a certain standard by the rest of
Humanity and all their various cultures and beliefs. This standard is
directly set by our leaders and their Foreign Policies..

Christianity might be a fine set of ideals to live by, but it’s not
what the founding fathers based this country on (many of them weren’t
even that religious themselves), and therefore shouldn’t be a big
surprise that our political system has fought tooth and nail to keep
them separate from any one given belief system since its inception.

So in the end, it’s not what you believe that affects how this country
is shaped, but what you do for your country (whether in the name of
those beliefs or not) that matters. Even if you hate the US, if you’re
a citizen of the US, your hatred should be allowed and embraced.
People confuse hatred for the US by its own citizens for
ungratefulness. This is misguided, because if you are trying to make a
difference to this country, whether to your government or your flock,
your hatred can and will have the opportunity to be transformed into
love and respect if you can perceive that your efforts are being rewarded.

I realized recently what the saying “freedom isn’t free” really means
lately, as I fight my own social battles to promote and produce a free
society around me. As society slowly embraces my ideals and those of
my compatriots, my personal disdain for this country slowly recedes.
I’m sure if my (or anyone’s) ideals that they’ve fought for are wrong
or bad for this country, that the other freedom loving citizens of
this country will keep the debates alive and the hardheaded will be
routed or silenced, or best ignored and freedom will still find a way
to prevail.. But I can’t stress enough that even those who are wrong
in their thinking ought to be free to be wrong, and be free to be
proven wrong, and be free to change their minds..

So while I wholeheartedly disagree that Jesus should have anything
directly to do with my country’s politics, and while I respectfully
can’t fault people for disagreeing with me, I am still compelled to
remind people that we are one of very few countries [if any] that HAVE
based our whole political system on the idea that our sovereignty is
not God given. We’ve fought for the freedom of ALL faiths have a
place in our society, and for ALL people to be seen as created equal.

Let’s keep up that good fight an stick to peoples’ actions for this
country, and for their communities, in -whomever’s- name. Nobody’s a
perfect Christian, nobody’s a perfect person, so what if people stay
stupid things, it’s what they do that counts, isn’t it?

All that being said, I should disclaim that i don’t give a damn who
Jeremiah Wright is, or what he’s done or said.. But confusing
political propaganda and religious sentiment is what got us 8 years of
Dubya.. and Democrat, or Republican, (or independent like me), can we
not go thru that again please?

thanks..

love ya,

-m

The orange box runs on Linux. Just like that. I feel kind of dirty playing the games inside, but to feel like part of the gaming mainstream again is sort of worth it.

It is merely my humble opinion, but Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is still more fun than Team Fortress 2. However maybe I’ll change my mind after a few rounds with some people I know, and a memory upgrade.

Thank you WINE developers. Thank you very much.