Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Resonance
When I was a kid, I used to sit between two mirrors and revel at how I could project my image a few dozen times. Then I wondered... what would happen if I put light between two perfectly parallel mirrors and just have it bounce back and forth. If I removed a mirror, would there still be light inside? It took me like 15 years slap the label resonance on that thought but now I know. And that one time in when we stood on that grate at the park near the samurai school near Ishinomaki and could hear the echoes of our voices. That was awesome... resonance. I don't think it was a coincidence either.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
H1N1
Does anyone else find it a bit ironic that we spent so much time freaking out about bird flu that we as humans get nailed by swine? A bit of trivia... anyone that has watched Moyashimon should know that birds and swine both have diseases that commute with humans. I guess one of those diseases would be the influenza virus. Go figure. I forget what episode it was, but it was pretty amusing since it reminded me of the time taiko kept getting each other sick to breed a supervirus.
As an aftermath to my previous post... I looked up the Win7 exploit. Apparently you have to be at the computer to do it. I'm sure my workplace would freak out about it, but for most people the exploit is pretty minor. Meanwhile I found some fun sites that I can use to increase the security of my home boxes. I think I was born for this job... ha ha.
Japanese:
Pimsleur 33
I really need to get back on the ball for all my little hobbies... =/ Although I was speaking pretty well last weekend; this weekend I really feel like my Japanese is slipping.
As an aftermath to my previous post... I looked up the Win7 exploit. Apparently you have to be at the computer to do it. I'm sure my workplace would freak out about it, but for most people the exploit is pretty minor. Meanwhile I found some fun sites that I can use to increase the security of my home boxes. I think I was born for this job... ha ha.
Japanese:
Pimsleur 33
I really need to get back on the ball for all my little hobbies... =/ Although I was speaking pretty well last weekend; this weekend I really feel like my Japanese is slipping.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Linux FTW
At long last Ubuntu's 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope was released 2 days ago. For those of you that don't know, Ubuntu is just a flavor or distribution of linux... think Windows XP home vs professional except the lines drawn between the different distributions are more complicated than home users and professionals as it touches on your technical expertise with the OS along with the way you prefer to do things. In recent years as Windows has become more and more unfavorable with masses, linux has become more popular with those that feel no need to buy into the OS X (Apple) brand. This trend has been bolstered by Ubuntu who's mantra for user-friendliness has produced a product that leaves me with fewer headaches than windows (finally!), which, to me, puts a rather large nail on the Windows coffin.
I started using Ubuntu as my sole operating system with Intrepid Ibex 8.10. The number at the end corresponds to the year.month of the release so Ibex was released in October of 2008 while Jaunty was released April of this year (2 days ago to be exact). Ubuntu's company, Canonical, releases a new version every 6 months which usually have some marked improvement over its predecessor but has a more stable long term (LTS) release which goes a year or two before getting upgraded.
Ibex was good but there were a few things I had to sacrifice to use it. I have since gotten use to life with a few peripherals I paid for on my laptop, which now factors into my opinion on which OS is best for use. These peripherals include but are not limited to firewire, built-in flash card reader, scanner, webcam, and while bluetooth works I've never synced it up with anything. Where Jaunty surpasses Ibex and how it compares to Windows at this point lies in starting with reinstalling the OS and boot up time. Jaunty now boots up in less than half a minute compared to the 45sec~1min of Ibex and whatever the heck windows might be at the various stages of its life (think corruption and baggage--neither of which give a pretty picture).
As far as installation goes, my partition table was a mess from searching for the proper partition sizes that fit me on top of migrating from 64bit back to 32bit. Flash and Firefox were not happy in 64bit and that was unacceptable for me. In any event, my hard drive was partitioned in a way where I partitions were scattered across the entire drive and to remedy it without just rebuilding the table from scratch would take days. As my windows installation (I dual boot) had become bloated as well, that also needed a format. I spend substantially less time in the windows environment so the lack of upkeep allowed Windows to get fat and slow.
For those of you that don't know, Windows XP doesn't play very nicely with linux, so I had to install it first. Fortunately Linux will cater to XP's whims. I forget how many steps it takes to install XP other than you have to set it up through an ugly blue screen, step away for a half hour or so, come back and run it through more setup, and then step away for like 45 minutes. Ubuntu will not only run off its own CD, it will install after 7 steps that you do at the beginning; the most complicated task being: setting up your partition table. I don't know how long it takes to install after that as I stepped away only to come back to the slick log-in screen for Jaunty. One of the great things about Ubuntu over Windows is right after installing, all the important stuff works out of the box for my laptop. Stuff like internet, video, sound, usb support, and includes an unbloated software suite like firefox, a multimedia player, instant messenger, a disk burning utility, and open office. If most of you are like me, you're not an avid user of windows messenger or Windows Media Player so you have to go hunt for your own installs. Furthermore, some of the more useful things are lacking altogether, like a userfriendly disk burner, dvd playback support, and an office productivity suite. Things may have changed in vista, but for sure that last part has not.
Also, for those of you that have installed windows before, you gotta have those drivers on hand and install them one by one otherwise you're left with a crippled machine where the video won't even look right. Its here that Linux has won a major point against my Lenovo supported machine. Lenovo had something called ThinkVantage Update Server which would automatically install and keep your software/drivers updated. This was useful in that all the update support was centralized and I could update everything at once. So what I usually did after a fresh install was get internet up and running, download the Update program and let that do all the work for me. For some reason Lenovo discontinued this and the thought of having to hunt down the right drivers for my machine along with individually installing each one, run checks with the device manager to make sure things installed and then testing each component to make sure they worked made me leave windows as it was... crippled... and crawled back into my comfy linux installation which more or less works beautifully out of the box. For Lenovo, this procedure might be new as they recently pulled the plug on that service, but for everyone else its pretty standard procedure. I don't miss it. As much as I harp on this working out of the box issue with Ubuntu, there is one caveat. That is: if it doesn't work, don't try to fix it. Usually when something doesn't work straight out of the install, you may luck out by finding a non-free driver or the hardware just isn't supported yet. I've had this in the past with Hardy Heron (I think) and wifi, where my wifi magically worked after having to find the intel driver for it, but another wifi that supported agn networks was still unsupported. I've found that this latter unsupported issue to be the case more often than not.
So after installing an OS, what do you do? Customize! This ranged from customizing your applications suite to the way the OS looks. Unfortunately for windows you can't do much besides play with your widgets (not even so in XP), change your wallpaper, and choose between a few microsoft built themes unless you use 3rd party hacks. As for software, you have to either go and buy it, usually from brick and mortar, or go find it on the interweb. Most of the software on linux can be found in the updater which handles all your OS updates and keeps all your software updated too. Examples of this would be: Deluge for my BT needs (competes with u-torrent); Exaile for music; Xchat for IRC; Pidgin for AIM,MSN,Yahoo,Gchat; gftp; Mplayer and its front end varients: gnome-mplayer and smplayer (replacement for my beloved zoomplayer which replaced windows media player classic); and TeX (a mark-up language for producing the best-looking documents offered to the home-user). I've been able to live pretty comfortably without the rest of the stuff. If I need, I can always emulate a windows environment either under Wine, VirtualBox, or VMWare. Unfortunately windows emulation doesn't work all that well and getting it to talk to Linux for free is a bit of a hassle. Which reminds me... Everything I've talked about so far is free for the most part. Some things like Wine, VirtualBox, and VMWare have paid versions that offer more support for complicated things like transferring files between linux and windows on the fly. I think this should suffice for most users.
There is one type of user that would suffer under this environment: The PC Gamer. You should be able to get some things running under windows emulation but it might not run at peak performance. Linux itself doesn't have any strong games I think but there are plenty of dinky games out there. Some of them are pretty good.
One great more great thing about linux: Its hard to screw up the system by accident. If it crashes, it can usually be solved with a reboot. One bad thing for most people: there are still a fair number of things that require the ability to use the command-line and modify configuration scripts: such as batch unzipping, autoloading an internal hard drive on boot, and a few other things. Fortunately there's plenty of support online so with a little bit of internet 'elbow grease' these software things can be smoothed over.
On a side note: I hear Windows 7 has a serious exploit produced by a design flaw. From the sound of it, Vista is going to be around for a bit longer.
I started using Ubuntu as my sole operating system with Intrepid Ibex 8.10. The number at the end corresponds to the year.month of the release so Ibex was released in October of 2008 while Jaunty was released April of this year (2 days ago to be exact). Ubuntu's company, Canonical, releases a new version every 6 months which usually have some marked improvement over its predecessor but has a more stable long term (LTS) release which goes a year or two before getting upgraded.
Ibex was good but there were a few things I had to sacrifice to use it. I have since gotten use to life with a few peripherals I paid for on my laptop, which now factors into my opinion on which OS is best for use. These peripherals include but are not limited to firewire, built-in flash card reader, scanner, webcam, and while bluetooth works I've never synced it up with anything. Where Jaunty surpasses Ibex and how it compares to Windows at this point lies in starting with reinstalling the OS and boot up time. Jaunty now boots up in less than half a minute compared to the 45sec~1min of Ibex and whatever the heck windows might be at the various stages of its life (think corruption and baggage--neither of which give a pretty picture).
As far as installation goes, my partition table was a mess from searching for the proper partition sizes that fit me on top of migrating from 64bit back to 32bit. Flash and Firefox were not happy in 64bit and that was unacceptable for me. In any event, my hard drive was partitioned in a way where I partitions were scattered across the entire drive and to remedy it without just rebuilding the table from scratch would take days. As my windows installation (I dual boot) had become bloated as well, that also needed a format. I spend substantially less time in the windows environment so the lack of upkeep allowed Windows to get fat and slow.
For those of you that don't know, Windows XP doesn't play very nicely with linux, so I had to install it first. Fortunately Linux will cater to XP's whims. I forget how many steps it takes to install XP other than you have to set it up through an ugly blue screen, step away for a half hour or so, come back and run it through more setup, and then step away for like 45 minutes. Ubuntu will not only run off its own CD, it will install after 7 steps that you do at the beginning; the most complicated task being: setting up your partition table. I don't know how long it takes to install after that as I stepped away only to come back to the slick log-in screen for Jaunty. One of the great things about Ubuntu over Windows is right after installing, all the important stuff works out of the box for my laptop. Stuff like internet, video, sound, usb support, and includes an unbloated software suite like firefox, a multimedia player, instant messenger, a disk burning utility, and open office. If most of you are like me, you're not an avid user of windows messenger or Windows Media Player so you have to go hunt for your own installs. Furthermore, some of the more useful things are lacking altogether, like a userfriendly disk burner, dvd playback support, and an office productivity suite. Things may have changed in vista, but for sure that last part has not.
Also, for those of you that have installed windows before, you gotta have those drivers on hand and install them one by one otherwise you're left with a crippled machine where the video won't even look right. Its here that Linux has won a major point against my Lenovo supported machine. Lenovo had something called ThinkVantage Update Server which would automatically install and keep your software/drivers updated. This was useful in that all the update support was centralized and I could update everything at once. So what I usually did after a fresh install was get internet up and running, download the Update program and let that do all the work for me. For some reason Lenovo discontinued this and the thought of having to hunt down the right drivers for my machine along with individually installing each one, run checks with the device manager to make sure things installed and then testing each component to make sure they worked made me leave windows as it was... crippled... and crawled back into my comfy linux installation which more or less works beautifully out of the box. For Lenovo, this procedure might be new as they recently pulled the plug on that service, but for everyone else its pretty standard procedure. I don't miss it. As much as I harp on this working out of the box issue with Ubuntu, there is one caveat. That is: if it doesn't work, don't try to fix it. Usually when something doesn't work straight out of the install, you may luck out by finding a non-free driver or the hardware just isn't supported yet. I've had this in the past with Hardy Heron (I think) and wifi, where my wifi magically worked after having to find the intel driver for it, but another wifi that supported agn networks was still unsupported. I've found that this latter unsupported issue to be the case more often than not.
So after installing an OS, what do you do? Customize! This ranged from customizing your applications suite to the way the OS looks. Unfortunately for windows you can't do much besides play with your widgets (not even so in XP), change your wallpaper, and choose between a few microsoft built themes unless you use 3rd party hacks. As for software, you have to either go and buy it, usually from brick and mortar, or go find it on the interweb. Most of the software on linux can be found in the updater which handles all your OS updates and keeps all your software updated too. Examples of this would be: Deluge for my BT needs (competes with u-torrent); Exaile for music; Xchat for IRC; Pidgin for AIM,MSN,Yahoo,Gchat; gftp; Mplayer and its front end varients: gnome-mplayer and smplayer (replacement for my beloved zoomplayer which replaced windows media player classic); and TeX (a mark-up language for producing the best-looking documents offered to the home-user). I've been able to live pretty comfortably without the rest of the stuff. If I need, I can always emulate a windows environment either under Wine, VirtualBox, or VMWare. Unfortunately windows emulation doesn't work all that well and getting it to talk to Linux for free is a bit of a hassle. Which reminds me... Everything I've talked about so far is free for the most part. Some things like Wine, VirtualBox, and VMWare have paid versions that offer more support for complicated things like transferring files between linux and windows on the fly. I think this should suffice for most users.
There is one type of user that would suffer under this environment: The PC Gamer. You should be able to get some things running under windows emulation but it might not run at peak performance. Linux itself doesn't have any strong games I think but there are plenty of dinky games out there. Some of them are pretty good.
One great more great thing about linux: Its hard to screw up the system by accident. If it crashes, it can usually be solved with a reboot. One bad thing for most people: there are still a fair number of things that require the ability to use the command-line and modify configuration scripts: such as batch unzipping, autoloading an internal hard drive on boot, and a few other things. Fortunately there's plenty of support online so with a little bit of internet 'elbow grease' these software things can be smoothed over.
On a side note: I hear Windows 7 has a serious exploit produced by a design flaw. From the sound of it, Vista is going to be around for a bit longer.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Catching up on the cards.
Sorry its been awhile since my last post. I had a large stack of flashcards to work through on top of a bunch of taiko related things on top of acclimating to the work life.
I don't have much to say because I have a few more things I need to get through before turning in tonight and that doesn't really include spilling my thoughts online. Not like I really want to post up stuff about work anyways... and other than that there's not much else to put up atm... except maybe thoughts about facebooking a certain someone. But I'll see how much longer I can resist that temptation. I've got bigger fish to fry... like calling up insurance companies and a courthouse to settle things related to working adult life.
As you can see group 4 was the biggie. I did about 120 a week ago... the other 150 cards or so I did this evening. The two Pimsleur may have been recorded already. That was from when I moved down here.
Japanese:
Pimsleur 32
Group 3: 35/44
Group 4: 244/277
I don't have much to say because I have a few more things I need to get through before turning in tonight and that doesn't really include spilling my thoughts online. Not like I really want to post up stuff about work anyways... and other than that there's not much else to put up atm... except maybe thoughts about facebooking a certain someone. But I'll see how much longer I can resist that temptation. I've got bigger fish to fry... like calling up insurance companies and a courthouse to settle things related to working adult life.
As you can see group 4 was the biggie. I did about 120 a week ago... the other 150 cards or so I did this evening. The two Pimsleur may have been recorded already. That was from when I moved down here.
Japanese:
Pimsleur 32
Group 3: 35/44
Group 4: 244/277
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
First Night
Somehow managed to have a taiko nightmare within 10 minutes. It was like... wake up... oh 5:20... I'll get 20 more minutes of sleep... Have a nightmare (taiko bootcamp...) wake up... wtf? 5:30?
I woke up somewhere around the part where i was in the shower and the camp instructor started yelling at us for something. The bathtubs were all at different heights. mine was easily 6ft off the ground...
guess it was only half a nightmare. i forget what the scary part was.
Japanese
Pimsleur 32
I'm currently crunching through a big batch of fours then I need to clear out the fails. It's starting to grow. I'm in the middle of working on 650~675 though.
I woke up somewhere around the part where i was in the shower and the camp instructor started yelling at us for something. The bathtubs were all at different heights. mine was easily 6ft off the ground...
guess it was only half a nightmare. i forget what the scary part was.
Japanese
Pimsleur 32
I'm currently crunching through a big batch of fours then I need to clear out the fails. It's starting to grow. I'm in the middle of working on 650~675 though.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
Self
It seems like with each passing day I lose more and more of myself and the only thing that remains is the cold machinery of an engineer.
Stepped my involvement with facebook one more time. Doing anymore would be a pain. Last step will be when my ucsd email expires and i stop getting notifications.
It'll be interesting when I meet people for the first time and be like... so... when's your birthday? Where do you live? What's your mother's maiden name? ... and put it all in my blackbook... i mean blackberry. c_c oh, i'm serious about the birthday part. I suck at remembering those kinds of details so i gotta rely on something to remind me otherwise i'll never remember it.
Group 4: 51/62
Stepped my involvement with facebook one more time. Doing anymore would be a pain. Last step will be when my ucsd email expires and i stop getting notifications.
It'll be interesting when I meet people for the first time and be like... so... when's your birthday? Where do you live? What's your mother's maiden name? ... and put it all in my blackbook... i mean blackberry. c_c oh, i'm serious about the birthday part. I suck at remembering those kinds of details so i gotta rely on something to remind me otherwise i'll never remember it.
Group 4: 51/62
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)