[r a n d o m h u m a n]

Life

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 21:46:36 +0000

Probably nobody remembers, but sometime last year I said I was going to write an implementation of Conway’s life algorithm. Well, I got lazy and distracted then, but I finally got around to it a few days ago. It’s fun! But of course, it’s not finished yet, and probably won’t be much to look at when it is (although there are flashy colours…).

Other fun algorithms include the Gravity Algorithm (or something) which I used a few weeks ago to write a simulation of the solar system. It was going well until graphics got involved, then it turned into an unmanagable mess. No matter, it was only an experiment really.

Election update!!

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 00:25:05 +0000

Not really though. I didn’t bother watching the US presidential debates, if they were even aired over here, but I’m sure this sums them up pretty well.

For those of you who don’t want to wait for the above video clip to download, it basically consists of 5 minutes of hums and haws from George Bush. It made me embarrassed for him.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder if he actually made his points more clearly in the debates, but this nicely spliced together clip only shows the stuttering he did before he figured out what he wanted to say. I don’t wonder too hard though, because I think the guy’s an idiot anyway.

What I really want to know is where the hell was Nader? Who organises these things that can get away with completely ignoring one of the candidates? Must be that damn liberal media…

No energy

Wed, 29 Sep 2004 16:12:59 +0000

For the moment, I don’t like wordpress. When I tried to log in from mozilla it crashed my browser. On top of that, I have to redo all the work I did on the look of my blog. Right now, that just seems way to much like effort, seeing as how I lack an internet connection at my new gaf (for the moment).

However, when I do eventually get around to a redesign, and get an internet connection, and can use firefox, I’m sure it’ll be fine. The interface does look pretty good, after all.

Distro woes

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 02:06:42 +0000

5 weeks I waited for these distributions to be delivered, and what do I get? One distro crippled by lack of software, and another crippled by lack of a GUI!

Debian (woody). Crude (but functional) installer, old kernels, but I thought at least I’d have something familiar to work with straight away, even if it was a little outdated. I had all the questions answered, all the software installed, and ready to land with my feet firmly in the K desktop, when I was greeted by the dreaded “3-flickers” (I had the same problem with my laptop until I got Ben Herrenschmidt’s ibook kernel. Ben, you’re a legend). I thought maybe the radeon drivers were too old for my brand-spanking-new (I guess?) radeon 9800SE (agpgart wouldn’t install either…), so I added a testing apt source and got the highest 2.4 kernel available (2.4.27). But I think that made it worse.

SuSE (9.1 personal), on the other hand, has an entirely graphical installer where more or less everything is autodetected. And a 2.6 kernel. I was exploring KDE and YaST in 20 minutes, tops. This is how things should work, I thought, despite all the puke-green splash screens in place of the usual, sleek, scrolling white text on a black background during the boot process. That is, until I decided I’d quite like to use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email-client, and discovered that it wasn’t included, nor was there any way to download a binary package. apt-rpm seemed like a fine solution, but while there was a binary rpm available for that, one of its dependencies needed to be compiled from source. No problem. Except that SuSE9.1 Personal doesn’t include gcc…

Fingers in space!

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 05:46:41 +0000

That Earth, thinks he’s so big… Well I’ll show him!

Dem bones dem bones love: gamma rays

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 02:35:22 +0000

I watched a show on sky one tonight about how to survive if terrorists attack a city near you with nuclear weapons. The guy was piling mattresses and pillows on top of some doors to protect himself from fallout radiation. Now, I’m no expert, but I have a hard time believing that a mattress could stop anything. It’s only some fabric, springs and air.

The guy who planted the bomb was a slightly-brown man in a suit. Message: it could be any of them!

Gimme a break.

Stuff works

Wed, 11 Aug 2004 03:02:09 +0000

Got the pics off my digital camera The quality isn’t great, but I didn’t really expect it to be. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do well in the dark, or in artificial light. Which really sucks, but hey. I guess I’ll just stick to the daytime, outdoor photography.

Ha ha funny

Wed, 11 Aug 2004 02:43:16 +0000

I got myself hooked on webcomics recently. I thought it might be nice to share my addiction, and in honour of my recent changing-of-sides, here’s some OS zealotry based humour:

Ctrl-alt-del on…
Ctrl-alt-del guest-strip on AppleGeeks
XP or 2000?
Windows everywhere

AppleGeeks don’t seem to do the whole OS zealotry thang, but here’s a couple of theirs anyway:

G5, the love of my life
Apple everywhere

Err-or

Sat, 07 Aug 2004 21:00:46 +0000

Microsoft VBScript runtime error ’800a005e’

Invalid use of Null: ‘CCur’

/k/account.asp, line 582

I don’t think Komplett want to take back the ram I bought off them (turns out mac and pc ram is different). If I try filling out the return form a second time, it babbles at me in Norwegian. Or is it Swedish?

Ah well, great website otherwise, and the computer they delivered yesterday seems to be working well, although I have yet to install anything on it. First will be Windows (don’t give me that look!), then Suse (sounds like it’ll be easy to install and use) and finally, Debian (fingers crossed it’s a smoother ride on an x86).

Things I’m looking forward to:

Installing, configuring, blah blah blah. That stuff’s great

Games!! Hopefully wine is as good as it’s been made out to be.

The Gimp, on a big screen. Resolution doesn’t seem great though.

DVD playing, ripping and burning. Downside: Just recently I figured out how to record a DVD to a VHS tape, but now I may never get to try it for real Oh sure, I could do it anyway, but it just wouldn’t be the same.

Getting the damn photos off my damn digital camera. That was a damn stupid purchase on my part. I seem to do that a lot…

Having a computer that I can leave on all the time without the hard drive melting.

Quoting is fun

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 05:13:32 +0000

What’s that from? Simpsons? Family guy? I’m thinking family guy. But it might be from neither. You never know with these things. Or I don’t anyway. Curse my memory! Curse my rambling!

I can’t decide if Bush looks decidedly pasted-in, or if the illusion is convincing. You decide, dammit!