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Ancient_Myth
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Name: Jon
Country: United States
State: New York
Metro: Buffalo
Gender: Male
Interests: RPGs, fantasy novels, traditional Chinese characters, Jigglypuff, food, sleep, DDR, and writing papers under impending deadlines of doom...wait...
Expertise: Final Fantasy Tactics (inside and out)
Final Fantasy VII (anyone need a Ruby killer?)
Occupation: Student
Industry: Nonprofit
Message: message me
Member Since:
12/8/2003
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| Thought I'd share some interesting links I've come across the past few days.
Google's CEO has some interesting things to say about privacy, but it's unsurprising given Google's business model. However, this makes me even more inclined to use ask.com and its handy AskEraser feature. Who knows if it actually works? Still, there's some peace of mind there.
Next up is an article by arstechnica.com which features a corporation insisting that its First Amendment rights are being breached . Hilarity ensues!
And finally, France's military fights the good fight against M$, as reported by DailyTech.com. It warms my little heart to see open-source software embraced on such a wide scale.
The snow has been troublesome today. It took my father about five hours to get home (traffic and accidents all the way from the south towns).
Finished the Natsuo Kirino book, Grotesque, proving once again that Japan isn't about manga and anime and cuteness personified--not by a long shot.
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| Sometimes, my father is just not dependable.
Spent an amicable Thanksgiving weekend, seeing some of my old friends, talking politics and religion and all the good topics that I haven't had the opportunity to in quite awhile. Evidently, I was pretty bitchy.
Xanga killed my last entry, so I'm going to be more careful this time. Been using Mandriva 2010, which is working okay. USB performance is much better under Mandriva than under Ubuntu/Mint, but foreign language input is broken. SCIM doesn't work and when I use their package management system to try to get ibus, it flips out and installation fails. It's too much for me to diagnose, so unless Mandriva releases some kind of user-friendly fix, I'm probably going to have switch distros. Still have yet to find that one distro that can really replace Windows. So far, I have tried Vector Linux (fast--really fast), but the wireless network manager refuses to connect to a WPA-encrypted network. They also really botched SeaMonkey's interface, as that browser is my preferred one, Vector loses. With Mint 6, I had to configure a text file to get both SCIM and my floppy drive to work, and SCIM itself did not always work properly. I have a low opinion of SCIM, anyway; it is not as intelligent as MS IME, particularly when it comes to suggesting characters, and requires a space rather than enter to select a character, which seems like such a little thing to nitpick but absolutely saps my typing speed. Of course, Mint's USB performance sucked. Mint 7 was just plain buggy. SeaMonkey actually froze the whole system, something that has never happened to me before, and there was no way to restart without hitting the power button on my computer. I have yet to understand how I could have brought about a crash on my computer, but such experiences did sour me on Mint. Fedora's USB performance is also good, but I think it's the kind of OS I'd like a printed manual to read and guide me through. They also did not have SCIM, which means no inputting of Traditional Chinese with Hanyu Pinyin. In this case, MS actually does it better. It also recognized my printer down to its name, but then said that it had no driver for it, which confused me. Finally, Mandriva, at times, likes to churn for a bit, darkening the screen, before resuming activity, which is disturbing. At least they updated to SeaMonkey 1.1.18 in the repository.
We are so late right now.
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C.R.A.Z.Y.
By Jean-Louis Roux, Claude Gagnon, Danielle Proulx, Michel Cote, Michel Laperriere
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EDIT: Tried moving to Linux Mint 7 "Gloria," based on Ubuntu Jaunty. No luck. While I was transferring 2.8GB of files, the rate went way down to ~50 kilobytes per second. I installed about three distributions on Aphrael last night. What impressed me was the fact that the installs were quick--much much quicker than Windows XP, including formatting the partitions. Some of them were more pleasant than others: Vector and Mint were much easier and newbie-friendly than Fedora's. I also tried SimplyMEPIS and Mandriva's livecds, but my inability to connect to my wireless network meant they were immediately discarded. My wireless card was recognized and has an open-source driver, but I just couldn't connect to my network, no matter how many times I retyped the wep key. Linux Mint 7 also seems very buggy. MintInstall has already crashed several times, and finally SeaMonkey gave up the ghost, locked my entire system (including the keyboard, so I couldn't even force quit or kill X). Gloria's going just as soon as I find another usable distro.
I think it's about time to switch distributions. I got Fedora 12 "Constantine" through the torrents, and will probably install it as soon as I've backed up all of Aphrael's data. That is, IF the backup ever finishes... Under Mint 6, a typical file begins the transfer at 3MB/s, which doesn't seem too bad for a 700MB file. However, the performance never stays at that high of a speed, slowing down when it has finished about the first tenth of the file. By the half way mark, we're down to 200KB/s, which is a g o n i z i n g l y slow, particularly when you want to move files in the gigabytes. Consulting the forums, both Ubuntu's and Mint's, just made me more confused and unsure of what the problem actually is. Some of the solutions were to muck about with kernel options, which, quite frankly, scare me. Others say that upgrading the kernel is the best way to go, which has been known to break systems. Others say that it is strictly a hardware issue, with possible conflicts with VIA chipsets (not uncommon). Still more say that the USB drive is hungry for power, which is causing the slow speeds. They insist the problems are the same under any M$ OS. Unfortunately, I beg to differ. Althalus and Beldaran, both running Windows XP, both transfer files MUCH faster. I haven't done any formal testing, but it's certainly moving faster than 30-45 minutes per 700MB file. Why does transferring that same file to Althalus's hard drive take less than 2 minutes? Finally, a helpful forum member mentioned that Ubuntu/Mint are notorious for slow USB/SATA performance, and that Fedora is much faster, leading me to hope that Fedora will wipe out this miserable problem for good.
Of course, every review I've ever read of Fedora mentions numerous bugs, a consequence of being on the "bleeding-edge," but seeing as how the only way to get anything off of Aphrael is either through burning a CD or USB, the USB troubles need to be addressed. Luckily, the Fedora livecd worked fine with my wireless card, so I'm a bit more optimistic about the outcome.
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| Had a rash of strange dreams lately, but few which I remember in entirety. Some glimpses from the past few nights:
Flying, hampered by the weight of a large male companion, thus unable to fully take wing. We resort to jumping from building to building, trying to dodge the evil bad guy's power rays (or equivalent).
MY EVIL PROFESSOR, a bunch of undergrads, and me nervous as hell at the oral defense for my thesis. Makes me even less inclined to actually write one... I remember he asked a bitingly difficult question that made me feel stupid (but this was par for the course in reality).
Multi-part dream, which was the height of weirdness. First off, my sister and I were in a strange house getting ready for some kind of special outing, which entailed bathroom time. I remember ruining my clothes and needing another outfit.
Then, cruising with Jennifer in her old Camry. We ventured into the great unknown (aka an Asian mall/market/shopping bonanza), where we promptly got separated. I then met up with Lydia, and we passed by the smelly fish stands, along with the sticky black floor mats that accompany them. The two of us were on the run from some evil organization out to Get Us. Then, in a weird twist of the fabric of the universe, Lydia transformed into Sergiy, only this was the real Sergiy, as opposed to the evil dark-side Sergiy, who had joined said evil organization in its attempt to crush us, freedom, democracy, and true love. This evil Sergiy had engineered a horde of storm-trooperish type robots, who rose as one and began to surround us, but of course he'd also made an evil feminazi version, which was the one that actually attacked us. The two of us were seconds from being executed when we realized she was dependent on a good wireless connection. Salvation was at hand in the form of our cell phones, which we whipped out to mess up feminazi's signal. She imploded. Sergiy hightailed it out of there, turning back into Lydia, but I saw that the evil organization had imprisoned a Korean guy that I remember vaguely from campus. We'd never spoken before but I offered to wheel him out of there (he was bound to his chair). We left as quickly as possible (luckily he got out of the wheelchair and started running). Cue explosions and massive damage. Korean guy and I ended up back in the mall proper, where we met up with Lydia and Jennifer and tried to remember where we were parked and what exit to take. I voted for the exit via the fish stands, but Lydia kept saying that her Geo was elsewhere. Korean guy wasn't saying much, but I did remember that the bad guys were hot on our heels and unlikely to give us a break if they caught us. Then, we were outside, scaling down a mountainside. My cousin's cousin appeared then, frantically waving at us to enter the rock face through a large gaping crack. We passed through the portal, Korean guy bid us farewell, absconding with Lydia, and I returned with Jennifer to her Camry, where we burned rubber as best as her 2.2 liter engine could run.
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Boystown
By Carlos Fuentes, Pepón Nieto, Pablo Puyol, Concha Velasco, Rosa Maria Sarda
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Aren't we all a little too old to be playing this same game over and over again? I'm so sick of it--I hate being the war zone correspondent for both sides.
Right now, she's getting her anger and frustration out through the use of the meat tenderizer. He's lying in bed as usual, drooling.
She told me today that no love, except maybe God's, lasts forever. Poor woman. I think she was really cheated out of life.
Thanks to the lovely mood, I broke the kitchen light's shade and spent an hour trying to put the pieces back together. Damn plastic. I thought it wasn't supposed to shatter. There are still pieces that are missing, over which I'm kicking myself. I hate when something is complete and then gets broken and the fragments are now lost forever. I used alot of tape.
I wish...
So I'm sensitive and cold, is that what he's saying? I just don't understand anymore.
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