I think they do.
Well, after spending a week trying to figure out why the permalinks and RSS feed weren’t working (everything returned a 404 error), they finally work. Thanks to STL and his mastery of Apache URL rewriting, everything works perfectly now.
After my last post, I received several e-mails asking about my home theater equipment. I thought I’d answer them here in one shot rather than writing the same e-mail several times. My TV is a Pioneer PRO-1140HD plasma. DVD playback comes in the form of a Marantz DV4001 upconverting DVD player. I also have an XBox 360 Elite and a Sony Playstation2. It’s all hooked up via HDMI (except the PS2, which is connected directly to the TV via component, with a SPDIF audio cable running to the receiver), running through a Harman/Kardon AVR-347 receiver. For speakers, I have Klipsch Quintet III surround sound, with a Klipsch Synergy Sub-10 10″ subwoofer. The entertainment center is cherry wood with a smoked glass (black) top and door windows. The center channel drawer has a black mesh window to let sound through while concealing the speaker.
A lot of people ask me why I went plasma over LCD for my monitor. The answer is, in short, quality. LCDs have come a long way in the last year or so, but they haven’t surpassed plasma technology yet. This is most apparent in black levels, color gamut and motion smear. Motion smear is mostly a fixed issue with the release of 120Hz refresh LCDs (no more 3:2 pulldown!), and LCD color gamut is getting better all the time, but they’re still issues now. Black levels may get better, or they may not, but at current they suck.
This isn’t to say plasma doesn’t have down sides, but I find those down sides to be much easier to deal with, and easily fixed for the most part. Primarily, plasmas aren’t as bright as LCDs (emitting around 300 nits peak output, versus LCDs being in the 400 - 500 nits peak output range now). This means that plasmas, while being awesome at dark colors, don’t have really bright brights. This problem is easily compensated for with the right lighting. The other big down side to plasma is the coarse pixel pitch. Of course, this is only noticeable on smaller screens, and due to the fact that LCDs are cheaper to produce, they’re pretty entrenched in the sub-40″ market. Translation: You really can’t find a plasma TV small enough that the coarse pixel pitch is an issue. The other side of LCDs being cheaper to produce is that they get more sales, and more research, so they evolve faster.
When all is said and done, however, one would be incredibly hard pressed to convince me to buy an LCD over plasma at this point. I’ll definitely be paying attention to upcoming generations of LCD technology, however.
10 points if you can name the game I referenced there.
So I got Halo 3 on release day. Caught some shit from friends for ordering the Legendary Edition, which they have dubbed Sucker Edition. Personally, I’d have to say anyone that got the Collector’s Edition is the sucker, having about an 80% chance of winding up with a scratched disc. Honestly, though, the game is great. It’s a very satisfying ending to a very enjoyable series, and I eagerly anticipate the books to follow. Multiplayer got some much-needed overhauling, too. I’m loving the asymmetrical maps. The extras on the second DVD were fun and interesting, but what’s getting the most attention is the Spartan helmet replica DVD case. I took a few pictures of it for those that haven’t seen it yet (how did you manage an internet connection under that rock, anyway?)
On the entertainment center
Closer view
And a better angle
I was too lazy to retake them after realizing that I forgot to turn the EV level up on the camera, but you get the idea. If anyone feels like getting some multiplayer action in, my gamertag is “Kudakeru”.
Other things are moving kind of slowly. Photopiles development has been slow due to refactoring most of the code. I decided to go ahead and update some things for SQLAlchemy 0.4 and to actually adhere to the PEPs for style and future releases (of Python, not Photopiles). Aside from that, I’m wrapping up getting royally shafted by the dealership where I bought my Passat. It’s had some mechanical problems (read: it’s been in the shop basically since I bought it) and I had been told they would buy it back from me. Turns out that was an elaborate lie. They’re promising to fix it, but they haven’t exactly had much luck in that department so far. Unfortunately Washington’s Lemon Law statutes don’t cover vehicles that are outside of the manufacturer warranty. I think the best part was when they offered to take it back in as a trade towards another vehicle. Translation: We won’t give you your money back, but we’d love to give you a discount on another car, and then sell this piece of shit again and double our money. Yeah, I don’t think so, assholes.
Busy night tonight. STL wanted to go see The Brave One, but we got to the theater too late. So we decided to come back to the apartment here and see if we could talk ithil into going with us. We got him to go, but under the stipulation that we see The Bourne Ultimatum instead. I’ve been trying for a couple of weeks to get people go see this, but it turns out I have a surprising number of friends whom haven’t seen the first two movies. So the three of us headed back to the theater.
I really only have one thing to say about this movie: HE KILLS A DUDE WITH A BATHROOM. No, that’s not a typo, I said bathroom. If you haven’t seen it, do it now, while it’s still in theaters.
And then there was Robot Chicken. Ithil is a bit of a fan, and the season two DVD showed up here at the apartment a few days ago, so we sat down to watch a few episodes after delivering STL to his own apartment. In under an hour, this show managed to defile The Last Starfighter, The Neverending Story, Spyhunter, My Little Pony and Captain Planet in absolutely hilarious and awesome ways. There was also a Zork reference, and they somehow managed to make a funny Chris Benoit joke. Probably because there was no Chris Benoit in it. Plus there’s always the classic Darth Vader phones Palpatine sketch. Robot Chicken is totally aimed at my generation, and I love it. It’s nice to see that Seth Green is still made of win and awesome.
I also got my copy of BT’s This Binary Universe today. It’s been out for a while, but I never got around to ordering it. Very solid album, and a new sound for BT that strays entirely from the (imho) overly pop-laden direction he was heading prior to this. Plus, it comes with a DVD that has videos for all the songs…and 5.1 DTS mixes. All music should be in 5.1 DTS. Damn.
After dealing with trying to get OpenGPG and my e-mail to cooperate off and on for a couple of days, I got this crazy idea: All of the code I’m writing these days is in Python, and it’d be handy to have Apache running for testing stuff right there, without having it fluffing up my task tray and what not; I’ll just dual-boot Linux!
The rationale here was that I’d spend most of my time in a Linux desktop environment, and boot into Vista when I wanted to play a game with my friends or something. I have no idea why I thought this would be cool and fun. It was anything but.
First I installed Kubuntu. I have to say, installing from a LiveCD is a far superior setup process. My computer being usable during the operating system installation is a really nice feature*. At least, it would be a really nice feature if the operating system wasn’t so broken. The install finished, and I was informed that I should remove the CD and reboot my computer. Easy enough. Except it hangs in the shutdown process trying to kill the X server session. So I hard reboot, POST goes by, then all the fun device detection, and hey, GRUB even works properly. We’re on our way to a fresh Kubuntu experience. Only KDE hangs at startup, too. Wow, way to go guys. Turns out there’s an issue between my video card and the included NVidia drivers. Once I installed updated drivers, it booted just fine…sort of. Every time I rebooted, I had to re-edit the xorg.conf file and change all of my resolution and desktop settings. So Kubuntu went out the window.
Next I tried Ubuntu, thinking that maybe the GNOME setup would be put together a little bit better. Nope, same problems. Even the same xorg reconfiguring issues. So Ubuntu went out the window.
Then I tried Slackware. Now this is a distribution I’ve stood by for years. It’s what my local server box is running on, and it’s an awesome distribution for this job. The only hitch I had during the installation process was discovering that my Slackware12 install CDs got hosed somewhere between the last time I used them and this occasion, but that’s an easy fix. Got everything set up, played around with Fluxbox for a while before deciding that KDE was the window manager for me. Started setting up my ideal desktop environment. This required a lot of extra applications, which I had to download and compile from source because Slackware doesn’t have a package manager like apt. This is where it all started to fall apart. I really can’t see the draw to a system where I have to spend hours tracking dependencies and building them just to get a couple of programs to operate properly. This is ridiculous. So Slackware went out the window.
My entire weekend just served to reinforce the things I’ve been saying about Linux for the last couple of years. It’s not a competitor for the desktop market, and unless a whole lot of things change, it never will be. If it’s your thing, great. It’s good for a lot of things. However, for the basement-dwelling assholes that continue to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign: get over yourselves. Your choice of operating system is not enlightened. It’s masochistic. People don’t have time to chase dependencies or recompile a package from source, and implying that this just makes them lazy is ludicrous. A good operating system doesn’t require these things.
I’m back to my every day Vista setup after this bout of temporary insanity. Still no encrypted e-mail, but it’s one of those things I’ll just have to live without until the GPG4Win team gets a new version put together.
I run Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit on my desktop. I code on it, I game on it, I even watch the occasional DVD on it when I don’t want to relocate to the living room. I find that most of the nay sayers don’t really know much, if anything, about what they’re so fervently attacking. As I like to say: fuck the nay sayers. I like Vista.
That being said, there are certainly some disadvantages to using a brand new OS. I spent most of tonight (read: early Friday morning) installing GPG4Win and getting keys and whatnot set up. Keys were generated and exchanged, data was encrypted, there was joy. Until I tried to encrypt some e-mail. GPG4Win includes the GPGol plug-in for Outlook. This would be great if any attempt to use it didn’t crash Outlook. Granted, the plug-in was developed for Outlook 2003 and I’m using 2007, according to the bug tracker it’s been an issue ever since 2003 SP2 was released.
That’s a Long Damn Time for a bug to sit on your tracker without being addressed. The general response seems to be “Don’t use Outlook”. No, no, emphatically no. Fix your product. This bullshit with discriminating against your users because of their choice of client needs to stop. It’s one of the things that make me hate the open source world so much. Other fun, long-standing bugs include not being able to import keys across different versions. I’m a big advocate of keeping your software up to date, especially when it’s security related software, but that doesn’t mean everyone I correspond with does it. I can’t even begin to express how aggravating this issue is for me right now.
If anyone has some information on fixing these problems that I’ve managed to miss, or at least a functional workaround, please, oh god, please let me know.
I can definitely remember when it wasn’t, though. I couldn’t tell you for sure when the transition happened, but it definitely happened.
I felt the need to start blogging again. This is partially because I miss having a writing outlet (and because people are harassing me to write more), partially because I feel the need to share some of my rants and partially because I want to explore the evolution of a blog and a blogger from the inside perspective. For now, I’ll be writing about whatever comes to mind, but a theme may develop as things progress. Or it may not. This is really going to be more of a general discourse.
Standard New Blog Intro out of the way. I should have some new stuff for an article on the Photopiles development blog soon. With any luck that will be ready to start bringing in a bunch of testers within the next couple of weeks. This is really just going to be an exercise in keeping myself away from playing any games as much as possible.
