Best Screensaver Ever

I support Spirex as the best screensaver I've ever installed. It's the only screensaver I've found that I prefer to Blank Screen.

Mmmmm, tech support.

Ok, someone sent me this. I was highly amused. It's got subtitles, but you really should watch it. Sometimes this is what the tech support guy actually feels like.

Anybody curious about my bandwidth?

Here's the latest statistics which count almost everything to date but this post here. That day with the gargantuan spike up to nearly 3 gigs? That's right after I told the school to raise my limit to 10 gigs. Bye-bye, $50.

It finally finished

Yay, I finally finished the scan that I've tried and failed to let complete since way back in this post here. That's the good news. The bad news is that the file I wanted it to recover didn't seem to exist. *sigh*

Oh well, I guess it's a good thing that I didn't have anything truly important on my Linux partition. Just a few chat logs, some personal programming projects, and my hard-earned progress in getting Ubuntu Linux to recognize my 2 monitors. I suppose I'll survive.

I think I've changed my mind....

Yeah - I think I'm going to give up again on having a dual-boot system with Linux. I'll just go with the cheap way out and run a Linux VM.

For those of you who use Norton Ghost

I backed up a drive with Ghost 2003. I told it to save the disk to an image. I had it overwrite an image that was already present (I save my disk backups to a removable hard drive). I did this so that I could wipe that partition clean and install Windows Vista to try it out for real instead of using it in this silly little VM. (FYI, Vista in a VM is pretty pathetic. Vista running natively isn't a whole lot better - I'm sticking with XP until at LEAST Service Pack 1.) Anyway, Ghost running in real-mode PC-DOS should have overwritten the ghost file on that drive and I'd have a backup of my Linux drive that I could then wipe to install Vista on.

Well, Ghost likes to break backups into 2 gig chunks when storing on NTFS partitions. It may break them into different-sized chunks on different types of partitions, but on this particular NTFS partition, it uses 2 gig chunks. The first one is "whatever.gho" and then the following files are "whatever001.ghs" "whatever002.ghs" etc. I had a file "40gig.gho" that I wanted it to overwrite. There were no 40gigxxx.ghs files in the directory, just the single .gho file.

Now there is 40gig001.ghs and there is no 40gig.gho. I think that when it overwrites an image file, it doesn't properly register the presence of the new file.

Anyway, I'm now running a low-level cluster-by-cluster scan of a 500 gigabyte hard drive to locate a 2 gigabyte file. This scan started 5 hours ago. It'll probably be finished sometime Tuesday.

Moral of the story: if you're going to have Ghost overwrite an image file, just delete the image file yourself first in Windows and tell Ghost to create a new one.

Notes for Spring Break...

This being my third Spring Break associated with LeTourneau University (though only the second that I'm staying on campus), you'd think that I'd learn a thing or two about the way things happen here. Firstly - the hours for many things (like the library where I can go to get free Microsoft software because I'm in the Computer Science department) are reduced. That's to be expected of course, but I forgot how drastic it is. For instance, the library is closed all weekend. I was expecting to drop in there today to pick up some software (Vista, baby!) and get it up and running over the weekend. Alas, I can't do that until 8am on Monday. It would have been nice to check this YESTERDAY so that I could have checked the software out then. Oh well.

The other thing that you'd think that I'd remember is that....there is nowhere to get food on-campus from today (Saturday) until Sunday or Monday (I forget which). I found this out today as I migrated to the dining hall at 11:45am for lunch and found it shut tight. *sigh*

Thank God for Taco Bell and for nice former roommates who fly home leaving you with their car.

Because I felt the need for a project...

Whenever I find myself wanting to procrastinate, I come up with a project. Something that feels important but really isn't. My current project is taking Warcraft 3, filming a run-through of the entire game (I picked up Fraps the other day), then encoding YouTube-quality videos that show all the important in-game scenes with the unimportant in-game game-stuff being sped through at 5x normal speed (with cheats enabled too, so it goes really fast).

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

Currently I'm using AVISynth to do all of the editing/splicing/whatevering, and I'm using the ever-handy XVid to encode the videos. My final output resolution is currently 512x384, but that may change as I get a better feel for how much video this is actually going to encompass. As of right now, I have the first 4 missions done.

That was Friday and this is Tuesday...

Ok, so this weekend I finally played through the expansion to Warcraft 3. It's only...just under 4 years old. I only pre-ordered the Collectors' Edition of Warcraft 3 and played through it in 3 days (and loved it) and then waited for 3 years after the release of the expansion to buy it and several more months to play it. I don't make cents. I'm not a mint. If I were a mint, I'd make scents. What's that? Suddenly this all stopped making sense? Maybe sleep isn't as overrated as some say it is.

Anyway, I give props to Blizzard for making a most intriguing expansion to an excellent game. Warcraft 3 was a good, solid single-player RTS (though I never really got much into multiplayer), and the expansion added all sorts of interesting twists.

Is it worth it?

The cutting edge. So many computer-savvy people like to stay on the cutting (or bleeding) edge of the technology, and thanks to the worldwide communication infrastructure that is the internet, advancements are made continually. It seems like there's a new Linux kernel released every couple of weeks and I have this pathological need to install it in my system.

You know the old adage - if it ain't broke don't fix it. Well, there's nothing particularly broken about my Linux install. Linux lacks the spitshine polish that Microsoft's OS has (not to mention the commercial software support), but it's really nice for certain things. Like software development. I like to fiddle with an OpenGL 3D engine that I wrote for Linux because it's a lot easier to fiddle with it here than it is to fiddle with it in Windows. But I must question my need to continually download and install the latest "Vanilla" Linux kernel (so-called because it hasn't been modified, patched, hacked, or tweaked for use in any particular "distro").

Now, as my kernel compilation finalizes, I ask myself, "Why do you have to keep installing a new kernel even though you don't really need any of the changes that it implements?"

To that I don't know that I have a good answer. Be right back, it's time to reboot.

Okay, maybe it wasn't actually *that* hard....

I now have a program which algorithmically translates a very basic regular expression into an NFA with ε transitions, then converts that NFA into an equivalent NFA without ε transitions. Our next step will be to convert that NFA into a DFA and then it'll be translated into a minimized DFA. All things considered, this is probably one of the cooler assignments I've ever been given in Computer Science....even if I did procrastinate on it like you wouldn't believe (unless you were my mother in which case you'd have no problem believing how much procrastination I've done).

On the woes of one day's indiscretions...

My school, in an attempt to curb the problems that our network has had in the past (namely, slow access to the internet) has instituted a policy wherein users are allowed 3 gibibytes of transfer (combined up- and down-stream). After you reach your limit, you are placed in what has popularly been referred to as "The Dungeon." In the dungeon, you share a low-speed connection with everybody else in the dungeon, so the more people there are, the slower it goes. I spent the last week of January in the dungeon and was blessed with 0.5 kibibyte/sec transfers when I stayed up until an insane hour when nobody else in their right mind was awake. Most of the time my transfers would time out before completing, causing me to refresh webpages 10 times before they would actually come up. Downloading a page such as this one with Flash and images disabled would probably have taken something on the order of two minutes.

Well, thanks to some decisions I made a few days ago about downloading some software, I may find myself in the dungeon again. If that happens, I'll probably not post more than a single blog entry since it's so bleeding painful to do so. As it stands, I have 4 days in which I must stretch out 100 mebibytes. I think I can do it.

Upgrades!

So someone just offered to mail me his old motherboard, processor, video cards, and RAM. That's like...a massive upgrade. 64bit AMD FX64, dual GeForce 7800s....mmmm, sweet computer. I decided that though I'd love to have the upgrade, it would be better if it were waiting for me at home.

a) I'd spend less time fiddling with trying to get everything working and benchmarked and whatnot while I'm doing school.
b) I don't actually have any real legitimate use for an upgrade at this point in time
c) Having it waiting for me at home would be a huge nice thing so that I can leave most of my computer here at school and just bring home my hard drive. I've been trying to figure out how I was going to deal with the logistics of getting this thing home at the end of the school year since this'll be the first summer that I fly home without anybody driving the route for me to send my computer with.

Thank you Mr. Person-who-gives-me-free-stuff!

Microsoft Propaganda Convention 2007

So today I went to the Microsoft "Ready for a New Day" launch convention. It was interesting, I got to see some cool features of Vista & Office 2007. From a development standpoint, I think the new Windows Presentation Foundation stuff is pretty interesting and will turn out to be more than hype. From a user's perspective, I think Office 2007 will make it a lot easier to make nice-looking documents/presentations/what-have-yous, and the side-effects of that will be the extra effort that professional "make-it-pretty" types will have to show the "it's-3d-so-it's-pretty" types why they spent all that time in school learning how to make it pretty.

All in all, it's a good thing. But that's Office.

Windows....ah, Windows. I was amused to no end when I saw that the most hyped thing about Windows in the keynote address was the highly improved search functionality of Windows. Don't get me wrong, I think it'll be fantastic. But I was amused that the keynote speaker was talking about the newfound ability to click the Start button, then type "calc" and as you type it narrows down the search results until it shows you the application you want.

So...yeah. Launching applications in Windows just went back to a command-line paradigm. I found that absolutely hilarious. (Of course, I've had my Start Menu optimized since the early days of Windows 95. Here, let me give you a breakdown of my Start menu's contents.)

• Start
• Programs
• Applications
• ASUS Probe
• C++ Builder
• Dia
  
• Eclipse
• E-Sword
  
• Force 2.0
  
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
  
• Scientific Notebook
• TI Connect
• TweakUI
  
• Virtual TI
• VMWare Player
  
• Entertainment
• American McGee's Alice
• Descent II
• Diablo II
• DOSBox
• Emperor - Battle for Dune
• Freespace 2
• Half-Life
• Half-Life 2
• Homeworld
• KotOR 2
• Outlaws
• ScummVM
• Steam
• UnrealTournament
• Warcraft III
  
• Internet Stuff
• Filezilla
• Net Transport
• PuTTY
• Serv-U Administrator
• Skype
• Trillian
• Ventrilo
• Windows Live Messenger
• Zone Alarm
  
• Multimedia
• VidEditing
• {various ripping/encoding tools}
  
• Audiograbber
• CloneCD
• Cool Edit Pro 2
• ID3-TagIT
• IrfanView
  
• Media Player Classic
• Picassa
• PowerDVD
  
• Startup
• {This space intentionally left almost blank}
  

The point of all this is to show an example of an efficiently laid-out Start menu. How many folders are in the Programs section of your Start menu and contain only one item that you ever use. If you only use the one item, then why have it in a folder? Wouldn't you be better off just moving that one item up a level? That's basically what I did - I organized all of the items that I used into categories. Now if I want to launch (for example) Media Player Classic, I use the following keystrokes (in sequence, not all at once). [Winlogo] [P] [M] [M]

The first pulls up the start menu. The second selects "Programs" and opens the next level of menu. The third opens Multimeda, and the fourth launches Media Player Classic (since it's the only thing in Multimedia that begins with "M").

Personally I still like my system better than Vista's way of doing it, but I've always been one who likes to do march to the beat of a different piccolo.

Anyway, as I write all of this, I've got a virtual machine busy installing Vista. My poor computer's freaking at me because it doesn't have enough RAM to support the VM and do this massive file copy operation I told it to do AND let me post on my blog and work with IM and browse the web in tabs.....

At least I'm nice enough not to be making it play MP3s for me....though I was watching random video clips I found earlier. But I stopped doing that a long time ago.

Anyway, I'll take a few weeks and fiddle with Vista. If I get it working the way I like it, I might just Ghost the VM and install it natively.