Dang’s Weblog

Okay, it’s rant time. I just read Yet Another Linux Sux Rant ®. As with all YALSRs, one of the main rants is that the filesystem layout in Linux (and all Unix varients) it impossible to use for the average user. Their solution is invariably to change the filesystem layout to be something more like Windows. I believe they’re all (yes all) missing the boat here. If a user needs to know where a program is installed, or where a library is located, and they’re incapable of following/picking up the Unix filesystem layout, then something is wrong with the user interface, not with the filesystem. Filesystem layout is completely unimportant to the average user. They should never need to leave their home directory, which can be they happy recipient of the full power of these filesystem layout design wizards. When they want to run a program, they click an icon or type a name. That’s it. All their data files and saved games are in their home directory, network shares are buttons/drop boxes in the file dialog, etc. I would even go one step further, and say that a generic computer user should not be allowed to leave their home directory. If they are a power user, then can have a power user account, with access to more of the system. If they are root, they get full access. But your mother (For some reason, all of the YALSRs use “your mother” as the prototypical knows-nothing-about-computers-but-uses-them-for-email-and-word-and-solitair user. I don’t know whose mother they’re using as this benchmark, but my mother is quite decent at computers. She better be, because my dad uses the most gods-aweful layout for his directories and menus. And they have Windows. At least if they had Linux, he couldn’t screw up the whole system, just his own stuff. Anyway…) doesn’t need access to the root of the filesystem, or the apache logs, or the library heirarchy. Period. She only needs to run programs and access data. This leavs the system designer free to lay out the directory structure however they want, including the full SUS layout, which has enormous flexibility.

Okay, rant over, for now.

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I saw Morgan’s new show today. It’s about video games, and it’s pretty good. I saw the old version of the show (sans Morgan), and I didn’t like it. It seemed a bit too off-the-cuff, and was definitely too long. Now, it shorter, more to the point, and has much better eye candy.

There seems to be a gaming theme here, recently. What with my NWN, and all. I’ve been considering getting WineX, to be able to run more games in Linux, and just today, Janette talked about getting an X-Box. Gaming galore.

I’m not sure how I feel about getting a real console. I’m not really into console games. They have a different feel than PC games. It’s even noticable in console games ported to PC, such as GTA3. The way it scrolls, the way it’s animated, and especially the controls, are very different than PC games. Now, to some extent, the X-Box is more PC like than most other console games, but I’m not sure there are enough X-Box games that I would want to play to justify the expense of the platform. Janette, of course, wants to play the Buffy game. I guess if we decide to seriously consider it, I’ll have to research games.

Maybe I can just Mod it to play oggs…

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So, yesterday, Apple announced their new on-line music service. Basically, for 99¢, you can download a song from their list. You can burn the song as many times as you want, you can put it on as many ipods as you want, you can stream it to other Macs, you can copy it to up to three Macs. And, if you buy a whole album, it’s only $10. Not a bad deal, on the whole. The only problem is the $1500 it would cost us to buy a Mac and two ipods to use the service. Sure, it’s coming for Windows by the end of the year, but probably through some bogus MusicMatch interface. In the mean time, us non-Mac types are left in the cold.

I was discussing this with a friend, who is a “musician” (in that he’s played in some bands, and even had some gigs, but never released any albums), and he dislikes the new Apple service because it’s money to the record companies, rather than to the musicians. So, I asked him, how do I find Indie music that I can listen to and determine if I like it? I’ve looked, and I can’t really find anything. The only place I’ve found is mp3.com, which seems to be mostly about selling you low quality, highly restricted, compter only, non-burnable copies of mainstream music. For years, I’ve heard the promise of the Internet to allow groups to sell their music directly to the masses, cutting out the middle man, and bring in high profits for the artists at low cost to the consumer. Where is it? Where’s all the Indie music?

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Neverwinter works in Linux! This is awesome. I just downloaded the Linux client, copied the data files from my Windows install, and away I went. Saved games, and everything. It seems to work just as good as in Windows, just as fast, same sound and graphics, etc. This is wonderful, because it means I don’t have to reboot into Windows to play NWN anymore.

You see, my computer sits in Linux because it’s useful to have it there. It’s much faster than my laptop, so I use it for any computationally intensive things, such as compiling. I frequently use it remotely, for example from work. This means that, until now, I had to explicitly decide I was going to Game, and reboot into Windows. Then, when I was done, I had to reboot back. Pain in the ass. Now, however, I won’t have to, at least for NWN. I can take odd free moments and Game. Woo hoo!

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Canadian commercials are interesting. For example, they have the Splinter Cell add, which talks explicitly about being a US spook. It’s the only commercial I can remember that doesn’t try expressly to make itself Canadian some how. Then there’s the ones with interesting (and pointless) differences. For example, DiGiorno is renamied Delicio. Why? Otherwise, the comercials are identical. Then, there’s things that don’t get advertised on this side of the river. For example Bombardier ATVs. They advertise Honda, but not Bombardier. Or Canadian Tire, which just doesn’t exist here, but is like Meijer. Then, there’s the Canadian versions of American companies, like Ford. The commercials are very similar, but subtly different.

Canadian commercials are, in a way, wierder than Italian commercials, the only other country’s commercials I’ve seen a lot. Italian commercials are completely different than American commercials. The style is different, the cinimatography is different, and the products are different. Even the products that are the same, such as cell phones, have quite different commercials. German commercials, at least the ones they show in German classes, are more similar to American commercials than Italian commercials are. But Canadian commercials are almost identical to American ones, except for the slight emphesis on being Canadian, and the different products/companies. It’s obvious that 99.9% of Canadian commercials are made by the same ad agencies as American commercials.

So, I leave you with this thought:
“It appears that we are a country that understands the value of a loony”
– A commercial for a men’s suit company, ala Mens Warehouse.

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So, I finally tried UT2003. I downloaded the demo for Linux, and ran it on my workstation. First, it was the easiest game install I’ve ever done. Download the file, run it, and boom, I’m playing UT2003. That easy. No configuration, no annoying wizards that are 50 steps long, no reboots, no updates, nothing. It was great. And, it ran well. I’ve never tried it on Windows, so I don’t know if it’s better, but it was certainly good on Linux.

Now on to the game. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Unreal universe. I don’t know why, but I’ve always prefered the Doom/Quake universe. It somehow seems like it’s more real and less cartoonish. That said, the graphics are great. The gameplay is very much like UT was. There’s some weird guns, but ultimately you run around shooting at anything that moves. I won, against the stupidest bots, so I don’t imagine I would last long in a real, online deathmatch. But then, deathmatches were never my thing. I’m more of a goal-oriented, story-driven, make-it-to-the-end kind of first person shooter lover. My all time favorite is still System Shock 2.

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William Gibson has stopped blogging. He says that blogging ruins his writing for is books. This is too bad, because I read his blog. It was a bit weird, and made lots of references to things that I didn’t know about, because I’m not a rabid Gibson fan. However, it’s a bit sad, because my blogs go down by one. I guess I’ll just have to find a new blog.

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So, the hockey today is not up to the hockey day before yesterday. We’re mostly watching the Dallas-Anaheim game, and it just doesn’t have the speed, the intensity, the moves, or the hits of either of the game sevens on tuesday. It a way, it’s almost lethargic. We watched about half a period of the Jersey-Tampa game, and it was similar. Maybe it’s just the difference between a game 1 and a game 7, maybe it’s just different teams, but it’s nowhere near as fun hockey.

Of course, I’m horribly dissappointed that Detroit lost already. But, now that they’re gone, I’m quite impartial with respect to the teams left. I tend to root for whichever team has more Michigan players. That’s about as good a system as any.

It never ceases to amaze me that an arena can have basketball one night, and hockey the next. That’s an amazing amount of ice being frozen in a remarkably small amount of time. It must be quite expensive in terms of refrigeration energy.

The scores on the bottom of the screen on ESPN are sponsored by Sun. I wonder what Sun has to do with hockey? Are geeks known for their love of sports?

Dallas is looking pretty bad tonight. They’re pretty much getting creamed, and unless they turn it on soon, they’re going to lose bad. Detroit didn’t look this bad once. No wonder they’re getting boo’d.

I wonder if Zederberg can win the Rookie of the Year award with Detroit going out in the first round? I think he deserves it, but I’m sure that fans of other teams feel the same way about their rookies.

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Well, I’ve been finally forced to layer my spam filters. Blah. The problem with a baysian spam filter (ala bogofilter, which I use) is that it can be fooled by this:

her<!5916>e to remo<!20491>ve

The number inside the angle-brackets with the bang on the front is an html comment. Since bogofilter doesn’t remove html comments, the “Click here to remove your email address” line doesn’t get parsed that way. Fortunately, this same mail was classified as spam with a quite high number (7.7) by spamassassin. So, now I’m running through bogofilter and spamassassin (with threashold of 7.5), and if either of them says it’s spam, it’s spam. Hopefully, this will cut down on the spam leaking through, without causing more non-spam to be caught. I also added a custom rule to spamassassin to give Linux Kernel Mailing List mail a -5. I had the problem before that spamassassin was classifying LKML mail as spam when it wasn’t. This should solve that problem. So, I guess, after some tuning of my threashold, I should be mostly spam free. Yay!

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Well, the Opteron is out, and early indications are that it screams. The SPEC numbers are great, with the 244 (at 1.8 GHz) beating the 2.8 GHz Xeon in every benchmark, and with integer performance beating the Itanium. The FP numbers lose to the Itanium at less than 4 processors, where the Opteron catches up. The SpecWeb number beat everyone at all levels. On the whole, it looks promising. Other benchmarks are not out yet (or at least the one I’ve been able to find is slashdotted), so it’s a bit hard to tell, but I’m optimistic.

Update:
Well, I’ve managed to read the benchmarks, and I’m quite happy with the Opteron performance. Dispite being 1.2 GHz slower, it consistantly beats the top-of-the-line Xeon in server based tests, especially in 64-bit mode. On Workstation tests (running 32-bit Windows XP), it’s not stellar. Some of them are quite poor, which is odd. It should be on par with the lower end Athlons in the test at least, and it’s not. This makes me think it might be a pre-release hardware issue. Still, 64-bit mode, with it’s higher register count, is quite fast. I’m highly optimistic that the Athlon64 (which should have higher clock speed) will be a great workstation processor.

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