SJ, Internet

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Arthur

I think we just survived the worst two weeks of May, ever: it had been raining for so long, that everybody and their cats were either longing for sun or snow. It’s bad when you get hit with a lot of snow, but rain? Come… on. It may then also not surprise you that the NOAA is suggesting that this year is going to be a busy hurricane season:

It said that three to six of the forecast hurricanes are expected to be major, meaning a minimum Category 3 hurricane with wind speeds of at least 178 kilometres an hour.

The actual link to NOAA is right here. Thanks to the CBC for providing actual external links in a side column.

This Saturday (the 21st), it’s going to be Judgement Day. According to Family Radio, the Rapture will start at 6PM ET (NYT link). I don’t know what to think of that. Actually, I know what to think of this: It’s amazing that it takes a lot more scientists to formulate a Theory (peer-reviewed at that) and it only takes one guy, Harold Camping, to accurately pinpoint the day and time of the apocalypse. Since nothing will happen, Saturday, I’m curious what the excuse will be. Tip: blame 64-bit computing.

Last but not least, I found this on Metafilter (link): “Arc of Life and Love”, about love, life and cancer. The video is, well, heart-rendering. Keep your Kleenex handy.

The Rapture, the best on Reddit:

Update: The Day after at Metafilter

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Not. Again.

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Arthur

Via the Null Device (link), the timely announcement that it’s time for the yearly Eurovision Songcontest (link) and all the hoopla and camp that comes with it. Actually, the very first link goes to Der Spiegel, which is an article that discusses the deeper meaning of the much, uh, lamented, contest in the universe and its, uh, how can I say this properly, appeal:

Many of these acts are like swans emerging from the shadows — they are underdog stories that gays can identify with. This idea of triumphing against the odds and coming out and being the most glamorous and popular person is a narrative that seems very attractive.

I’m not sure if this was always true, I mean the part where the contest became associated and popularized with and within the gay movement. To me it always seemed to have been a gradual process where every year more outrageous, silly and extravagant songs and acts were submitted to the contest’s finals. Nowadays, I have to laugh the moment the Eurovision subject comes up: Besides the extravaganza, I fondly remember the ‘bloc voting’ and ‘sore loser voting’ and of course, the sour remarks of the commentators.

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Crysis

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Arthur

I‘ve always been hesitant of trying Crysis (2007) mainly because of the fear my current hardware wouldn’t support the notorious system requirements and other related video graphic cards tweaks that are needed to get this to run nice and smooth. Worse yet, Crysis is currently (still) the litmus test how good your high-end PC can run this game. All the hoopla out of the way: I, however, had no problems getting Crysis to run on my laptop. I had to tone it down to a 1280 x 800 resolution and all settings set to medium. The result is actually not too bad and at least it seems very playable (without any lag, that is). The proof is in the screenshots.

Now, I haven’t really played FPS games recently and upon starting up a new game in ‘normal’ mode, during the initial runs, my skills were obviously lacking to say the least and the game does not forgive you for that. Like any other FPS, it’s very fast paced and running into hectic situations has two outcomes: you get either killed or get your butt kicked by the AI. This is also when you learn to rely on the specific nano-suit skills the game provides to you: using a short cut you can adjust to focus on Shield (max. protection), Speed, Strength and Stealth. If you prefer to lay down and scout the environment before attacking a heavy-guarded base, you can do so. However, nothing stops you from ramming a vehicle in a guard post, jump out of it and “run and gun” your opponents. The game flow is so fluid and so dynamic, that it doesn’t matter what route you choose or which approach you use (by vehicle, food or water) as long as you make it to your checkpoints, from where the cut-scenes and main story line will continue. In that sense, Crysis is indeed a typical linear FPS game, make no mistake about that. However, the open-world and the excellent AI, will most likely make every new game a different challenge.

So without a doubt, I highly recommend this game. It’s a game that doesn’t punish you when you take the wrong short-cut. It is demanding though, skills and computer wise, but the freedom of movement in this game and for an FPS, it is magnificent. Truly, magnificent.

Continue reading →

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Contrast

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Arthur

By now you’ve probably already heard that the US has managed to find and kill Osama Bin Laden (Google News: this was last Sunday (late) night and it marked one of the weirdest rash for news by, well, any news organization in the world. There’s an excellent write-up what happened at the NYT when the news broke that something special was going to be announced (link). The last couple of days, as details emerged about the raid, it appears as everybody and their dog was involved in the killing of America’s most wanted terrorist. As of today the score is: UK SBS officers were involved, a Belgian trained dog was part of the raid, the intelligence services in Maryland US were involved, Cheney and Bush were indirectly involved because of their terrorist interrogation plans, Pakistani security officials… and what else? I can assure you that I had no finger in this momentous task and I’m sure more news will come out of this to prove that very fact. Or something like that.

That being said, the reason for that nice Pershing rocket in this posting is that, somehow I ended up looking up Werner von Braun, who was that famous Nazi rocket scientist who helped develop America’s very successful Space and Weapons programs. When he surrendered to the Americans in 1945, he said:

We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.

Fifty-plus years later, one can only think what would have happened if Braun had not surrendered and was killed by the SS.

Update 1: Twitter and the Bin Laden raid.

Update 2:Bin Laden’s death in inforgraphics.

Update 3:Bin Laden hideout had ‘substantial’ porn stash

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You asked: Kubuntu or Ubuntu

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Arthur

Just yesterday, Canonical released one of the most important Ubuntu versions of its history: “Natty Narwhal”. The most famous Linux based desktop officially did away with the Gnome shell and replaced it with the Gnome based Unity shell (wikipedia to the rescue).

There was a time (see here) that I really wanted to like KDE 4 as opposed to Gnome. I only reverted back to Gnome, because KDE was slower than a pair of mocassins in a pot of molasses. So, yesterday, I started the regular upgrade process: The upgrade to Unity/Narwhal went fairly smooth and when the much touted shell finally showed up properly, I was fairly impressed. While toy-ish, the window handling appears fairly intuitive (“Mac-like”) and the general layout looks, well, clean. However, it’s buggy and it’s slow, with disk-activity and processor activity spiking out of control without any particular reason.

Returning back to Kubuntu, (you know, all things KDE), I was pleasantly surprised to find out it that is a lot more stable than I’ve seen almost 1 year ago. Heck, it’s even usable. Kubuntu or Ubuntu? Kubuntu, for now. Maybe in another year, I’ll be looking at Unity as my default desktop environment, but as far as it looks like right now, I won’t be looking at Unity for a while.

05/05/2011: It looks like my laptop (equiped with an Intel 9xx GPU) wasn’t the only one with sudden freezes: it seems to have been fixed, right a couple of days ago.

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Seventy Five

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Arthur

I finally managed to add some notes to the 75 or so personally selected songs of SXSW 2011 (out of 1200 or so: earlier). I’ve not ranked anything in this list as ranking is so subjective: I think together all the songs form a solid and enjoyable list of songs. The songs that sprung out I marked as ‘recommended’: ‘recommended’ as in ‘this band has a future’ or ‘the song is just plain simple subjectively good’. Personal side-notes were written up to be as brief as possible, more or less to provide a mental anchor to distinguish the artists and/or songs

I’m fairly happy with the fact that even some dance/hiphop songs made it to this list: artists like K.Flay and Ancient Astronauts obviously surprised me because of either a smart delivery of lyrics or a highly inventive use of samples.

What else? Most of the bands listed below are independent: to support them, please find their websites or buy their songs from their preferred digital music distribution system.

Over time I hope to be able to add proper linkage to the artist’s websites. In the mean time, enjoy:

Continue reading →

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DD-WRT

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Arthur

I had a WRT54G (version 8) left over and thought of using it as either a repeater or a client: however, I believe that since V7, Cisco has stopped supporting client/bridge modes in their (consumer routers). I’ve been wanting to convert this router over into DD-WRT, but never really had time. Today, was the day and out of memory to get this going:

  1. Download the two files, the vxworks app and micro DD-WRT.
  2. Hard reset your WRT54G (keep the ‘reset’ button pressed for 20+ seconds).
  3. Set your computer to get the IP automatically and connect it to the router.
  4. Load up the admin page of the Linksys router and go to the Upgrade page and select the ‘vworkskiller’ file. After upgrading, the router will reboot. Note: at this stage, there’s no Linksys admin pages anymore.
  5. use tftp to upload the last file to the router
    1. Windows/DOS: tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put dd-wrt.v24_micro_generic.bin
    2. Linux: atftp –option “mode octet” –verbose -l dd-wrt.v24_micro_generic.bin -p 192.168.1.1
  6. After upgrading, it will take a minute or so for the router to reboot. Browse to 192.168.1.1 (using root/admin credentials) and you should be good to go and see the pretty DD-WRT admin pages.

Note: no guarantees here. I’m not responsible for any ‘bricking’ of your router.

Update: I did the tftp part on my linuxen b0xen: surprisingly, tftp isn’t installed by default on Windows Vista and higher.

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SXSW 2011

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Arthur

This year I decided to listen to all the SXSW 2011 showcase tracks: all 1154 of them. The torrents are available from the Unofficial SXSW torrents website, a whopping total of 6.5 Gb. The point of this exercise? I consider myself someone who knows music, who is fairly objective and will mark anything as likable, as long it has a combination of good unpredictable music. Good intelligent lyrics is a plus. The end result of this two week endeavor (picking out songs I liked vs. songs I didn’t like) is fairly bad: only 6% or so actually made it to my iPod. There were days that the state of popular music (listen, indie music doesn’t really exist) made me depressing as every song turned to be about the typical themes of love, hate and desperation. There are bands (and artists) who seem to get it, go against the mainstream and produce truly unique songs: the list of 75 songs I marked as good, I will discuss some other day. Without hesitation, 5 songs that surprised me:

  1. ‘Once and for all’ – Clock Opera (youtube): The lead singer is not afraid to use his falsetto voice which is something I so much appreciate, as I’ve been in a similar situation (More about this later). From all the depressing love-hate-kill songs in the SXSW11 set, the lyrics are refreshing and allegedly, based on a popular US play.
  2. ‘Losing sleep’ – Edwyn Collins (Youtube): Sometimes simple is better. Sometimes it’s a cliche. Excellent simple and catchy song.
  3. ‘Lemonade’ – Braids (Youtube live). Montreal-based electro-guitar-pop band with a song that features a surprising outtro.
  4. ‘Havana’ – Lex Land a singer songwriter from LA. I don’t know what to say here but I like the voice and where she’s going, lyrics-wise.
  5. ‘Guttersnipe’ – Bhi Bhiman (mp3) Singer-songwriter, obviously soul, folk with a touch of Sri Lanka and that walking bass.

There are so many more songs, but the one that should have gotten the prize for ‘weirdest’ sound is ‘The Green word’ from The Lava Children. It’s so off-tune or wait, no, it’s modulation or something. I can’t explain what it is but I’m sure it would look interesting on sheet music (for the daring. I’ve warned ya).

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The Media

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Arthur

The drama in Japan, after the earthquake and tsunami, seems to have been kicked off the prime news slots on CNN. Two days ago, Japan’s struggle with the aftermath of the tsunami and the possible meltdown at a nuclear facility was literally part of the 24 hour cycle: yesterday and today Japan was ‘handsomely’ replaced with ‘Target Libya’. How, absurd: so after pumping the worst-case scenario (“impending nuclear disaster RIGHT NOW”) for over 7 days, one would say that the people working 24 hours a day in that nuclear reactor are doing a better job than CNN had been suggesting. CNN? That’s like watching a drama queen facing a meltdown.

Anyhow: that tsunami disaster, eh? By now you’ve seen the live video feeds, the photos and the relief response (even you, Google), before and after photos, scientific analysis of the event, conspiracy theories, online community response (Reddit) and what not. Here’s my major gripe: in one year, which of the links above will still be ‘alive’ or functional? What about two years? Three? Does anyone still remember the Indian Ocean tsunami?

While there’s obviously nothing we can do for people in disaster zones (except for giving monetary donations), it always appears that disasters are over after a week. This is not true of course: they just drift off the daily news cycle on the major US networks because they have better things to report about, like a “tomahawk cruise missile in a camel’s ass”.

04/08/2011: Massive Japanese tsunami debris field to reach North American westcoast by 2014 (CBC link).

03/11/2012: First anniversary of tsunami in Japan, prayers and protests against nuclear energy.

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March. Break.

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Arthur

Today, we finally hit +7 degrees Celsius temperatures and, with that, obviously, rain. I happened to look outside a couple of times and I noticed that the ground is finally getting bare, that is at spots were we shoveled. This was a pretty bad Winter, actually one of the worst I’ve seen in my Canadian life: 2 storms in December (total of 54 cms), 3 in January (total of 64 cms), 4 in February (total of 97cms) (the stats, starting with January, are here).

Four or five weeks, I bet with someone that Winter was over: I lost of course and I got beaten up because of that. Today, I believe that this is the end of this dreaded Winter. I guess, the only part to be done is break up the snow and restore the damage that was done to our pretty gravel driveway.

On the other hand, someone said that the Almanac claimed that Winter was going to keep going on until April: if that’s the case, I plan to dig out my weather altering machine. Really. I got one in my shed.

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Roll up the Rim 2011

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Arthur

This years “Roll Up The Rim” contest seems to have started early and it seems like Tim Horton’s (or its parent company) has decided to have the contest run slightly longer because, it’s the contest’s 25th anniversary. If it runs longer, there should be more prizes? What say you?

Actually, while the regular prizes are back in action (Toyota, TV, Grill) it looks like 2011 indeed brings extra prices: instead of the 4 main prizes, we actually have 5 of them: if we look at the past years, either the grill (“Napoleon”) or the bike (“Raleigh”) acts as the extra one. The cash prizes are totally gone though: The last time (and only time) the cash prizes weren’t there was in the year of 2008. However, there were 100 cash prizes worth 10,000 each last year: the total of that surely passes the amount of this year’s number 2, 3 and 4 (100 Panasonic TVs, 1000 Gourmet grills and 5000 Raleigh bikes have). According my best estimation the dollar number is around the 500,000 (TV ~ 3000, Grill ~ 1000, Bike ~ 500).

Region-wise, all regions except for the Atlantic provinces have gotten more cups than last year, with the absolute winner Ontario, followed by Alberta and BC. The total of cups for all regions are about the same: it hasn’t really changed in large numbers from the year before it appears.

So, yes, there are more prizes around (thanks to the extra bike / gourmet prizes). I’d be really surprised if the “longest ever prize run” actually will make it to the end of April. Good luck and stop drinking coffee by the end of March.

Previous entries: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 2002. Or click this tag for all posts tagged with ‘Roll Up The Rim’.

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400 to volunteer?

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Arthur

National Geographic has an article about how readily people are to volunteer for ‘single fare’ missions. According to the National, when Fox News (yeah, we know) reported about future Mars missions, 400 readers signed up for a possible trip. Apparently, everybody qualifies for such a dangerous mission, that is, in their own mind:

“I do VERY well with solitude, I am handy with tools, very good at making things work, have generated my own solar energy, built three houses (with my own hands) and am quite sane and stable”

I wash my hands a couple of times in a day, which would make me a qualified “marsonaut”.

It looks like Fox’s inspiration for their article comes from The Journal of Cosmology, which recently featured a long editorial about a possible mission to Mars (full editorial): the editorial contains a dozen of chapters, discussing the reasons why we should go and, my favourite, how to reproduce on Mars:

Moreover, the human female has evolved the cognitive and intellectual capacity to employ cosmetics, perfumes, colorful clothing, push up bras, high heels, and so on, which draw attention to her breasts and derriere, and which emphasize and exaggerate her sexual availability by mimicking the signs of estrus common in other social primates

No wonder people romanticize a mission to Mars.

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Uprock

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Arthur

I have been thinking about my ‘breakdance’ period a lot recently for no apparent reason, except for that it was triggered by the song ‘Uprock’ from the Rock Steady Crew (DailyMotion video and my own sample on this server in the traditional 30+ seconds). This song actually was the staple song for our (me and my twin) breakdance affairs: it was the song we practiced on and the song we performed on. This was actually the only break dance record we owned: that is besides the many mix-tapes we had (recordings from the radio mostly). Mix-tapes, of course, were frowned upon. A lot, I remember.

Anyway, “Uprock” was released in 1984, a year after the Crew’s breaking hit ‘Hey You’ and (despite the fancy clip that came with it) it hardly made it to the hit charts, much to our displeasure. The song has a more distinct hardcore sample feel to it and obviously, it’s the better song to dance on (compared to ‘Hey You’). The 12-inch record itself came with the ‘extended version’ (7 minutes long?) and the ‘single version. Most likely, there was an instrumental version on the B-side (Just checked “discogs”: looks like I was fairly close).

Good old times right? I’ve mentioned my breakdancing on this blog before (notably here and slightly less here). We used “Uprock” at one time to disrupt a (history) project week where we danced on the ‘extended’ version of that song, much to the pleasure of the classes and teachers (surprisingly). This event led to the invitation for that infamous school night for students 1 or 2 grades below us (mentioned in that first link) where we basically outdanced and shocked the audience with headspins (shocked I tell you), turtles (sideways), handspins and backspins. We were proud breakdancing nerds and fearless dancers with the right ‘I don’t care what you think of us’-attitude.

This school night was also our very last public breakdance performance, which made the event all the better and bittersweet at the same time. Homework was obviously getting more important: when I look back to the days after that night, it’s almost like we shrugged it off. I don’t recall we made a decsion or something and our parents didn’t really care if we were breakdancing or not. However, I guess, we just knew that it was time to grow up and go on with studying. At the age of 14 or 15: that was probably the best assessment teenagers can make.

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