My Open Source Mind

#colemak

2009-01-16T12:08:00.000-08:00

More fun than ##politics

This is an irc channel on the freenode network (irc.freenode.net) devoted to the colemak keyboard layout. This layout is the best layout for typing in the english language, though it's also great for spanish and japanse. Yes, it's better than dvorak. If dvorak is the mac of keyboard layouts, colemak is the Ubuntu.

But we're fun loving people here on #colemak, so if you just want to engage in completely random conversation or even operating system flame wars, feel free to drop by.

Proof:

(01:58:16 PM) leo_rockway: that was just reductio ad absurdum
(01:58:33 PM) ethan: watch yourself or I'll get ad hominum up in here
(01:58:38 PM) ethan: with my FIST
(01:58:53 PM) ethan: how's that for absurdum?
(01:59:01 PM) leo_rockway: then I'd call you a nazi and summon Godwin's law
(01:59:16 PM) leo_rockway: I win \o/
(01:59:19 PM) leo_rockway: er... no
(01:59:21 PM) ethan: +1 nazi
(01:59:26 PM) ethan: I summon picachu
(01:59:26 PM) leo_rockway: it's the other way round...
(01:59:34 PM) leo_rockway: I summon squirtle
(01:59:45 PM) ethan: I summon metallic potassium
(01:59:47 PM) leo_rockway: I attack your electric pokemon with my water pokemon water attack
(01:59:53 PM) leo_rockway: it's super effective \o/
(02:00:12 PM) ethan: You have been pwned by a grue
(02:00:18 PM) leo_rockway: grue?
(02:00:22 PM) leo_rockway: !define grue
(02:00:33 PM) ethan: put that in your Awesome Bar
(02:00:43 PM) ethan: http://dictionary.die.net/grue
(02:01:09 PM) leo_rockway: what Awesome Bar?
(02:01:10 PM) Iggy_Koopa: hominem, not hominum
(02:01:16 PM) leo_rockway: I use KDE not awesome
(02:01:19 PM) leo_rockway: yeah, Iggy_Koopa is right
(02:01:27 PM) Iggy_Koopa: Pikachu, not picachu
(02:01:40 PM) ethan: Iggy_Koopa: Thank you, for corrrrrrecting me
(02:02:21 PM) leo_rockway: Iggy_Koopa: you know how to spell pikachu, you nerd! (?)
(02:02:21 PM) ***ethan lets you get eaten by Lacrimose Leeches
(02:02:36 PM) leo_rockway: ethana2: I didn't eat before going into Lacrimose Lake
(02:02:58 PM) Iggy_Koopa: The Series of Unfortunate Events is so old
(02:03:11 PM) Iggy_Koopa: and the ending was so anticlimatic
(02:03:23 PM) leo_rockway: Iggy_Koopa: yeah, and awesome
(02:03:33 PM) ethan: leo_rockway: hahaha
(02:03:37 PM) ethan: leo_rockway: yes, awesome
(02:03:41 PM) ethan: leo_rockway: smart move, not eating

He didn't eat. I didn't see that one coming. Now we'll just have to engage in some arm wrestling or maybe a random klingon duel to the death. See you on #colemak!

When you show up, chances are someone will say 'hi' to you. If not, pick a random person and smack 'em, like so:
/me smacks random_person
They'll either ask you why or smack you back. Just smack 'em again.

#ubuntu

2009-01-04T23:13:00.000-08:00

1224 people in room

Let me ask you, my dear reader, a question. Have you ever been in a room with 1224 people and been able to so much as hear yourself think?

Me neither.

The #ubuntu channel is nearly useless. irc just doesn't work at that scale. The sooner we admit that, the sooner we can generate and implement a solid solution.

Vote this up.

The Command Line

2008-12-30T01:19:00.000-08:00

It's only scary because we make it scary. It's the most powerful interface we currently have with our machines, the predecessor of the phonetic shell, of voice controlled interfaces.

WHY DO UNIX FOLKS MAKE IT SO FRICKING UNWIELDY?!
It doesn't have to be. It shouldn't be.
I love the command line, but frick, do I hate unix.

Don't get me wrong. POSIX is great. It's on my list of requisites for operating system consideration-- but why in hades do END USERS _ever_ get exposed to it?

An online acquaintance of mine from Argentina made a nice little 'urip' utility that turns youtube links into audio files on your desktop. I'm his primary tester, and today we talked a little about command line arguments. An excerpt:

leo_rockway: I could check if the non regex matching "thing" is either -g or --ogg
ethan: what does -g do?
leo_rockway: converts to ogg/vorbis
ethan: ....
leo_rockway: didn't you just read the help?
ethan: but that's what --ogg does
leo_rockway: that's the long argument
ethan: is that how it's done?
leo_rockway: there's always a short and a long argument
leo_rockway: yup
leo_rockway: just man any command and you'll see
leo_rockway: man ls
leo_rockway: -a, --all
leo_rockway: do not ignore entries starting with .
ethan: funny thing there....
ethan: you know what
ethan: if you're going to bother with human readable arguments
ethan: drop the silly --
ethan: -a, all
ethan: list all
ethan: ls -a
leo_rockway: *shrug*
ethan: start a new, more efficient convention, if you can
ethan: urip ogg $URL
ethan: can it be done?
leo_rockway: yes it can
ethan: :)
ethan: think of the usability
ethan: ;)
ethan: when I'm giving my mom instructions over the phone....
ethan: 'install urip'
ethan: 'urip ogg $URL'
ethan: 'sudo apt dash get install urip'
ethan: 'urip dash dash ogg $URL'
leo_rockway: kill dash nine!
ethan: 'murder firefox'

Another excerpt, this time from my ~/.bashrc:

# system command aliases
alias list='ls'
alias delete='rm'
alias DELETE='sudo rm'
alias frigging='sudo'
alias install='sudo apt-get install'
alias uninstall='sudo apt-get remove'
alias check-update='sudo apt-get update'
alias update='sudo apt-get upgrade'
alias murder='sudo killall'
alias get='wget'
alias GET='sudo wget'
alias enter='cd'
alias up='cd ..'
alias home='cd ~/'
alias unmount='umount'

#functions
function remove () { mv "$@" ~/.local/share/Trash/files; }
function REMOVE () { sudo mv "$@" ~/.local/share/Trash/files; }

Ubuntu may want to be linux for human beings, but I don't know what everybody else is doing. I don't think we can stay on the same path and accomplish what we're setting out to do.
The command line is a cryptic disgrace because we seem content to leave it that way. Fixing this may require patching just about every application in the Ubuntu operating system, but hey, if it can't do that, what is bzr for again?

Corner Case

2008-12-27T04:33:00.000-08:00

Hi, I'm the corner case. I'm the guy you always leave out in the cold, the one you say is crazy. I do things with your software you never thought anyone would attempt. I innovate, I drive progress, and yet you shun me, ignore me, tell me what I'm doing isn't 'supported'.

I'm the one sending SMS, facebookchat messages, and tweets from pidgin. The one claiming that window-picker-appet is the savior of the gnome desktop. The one who made that dual seat rig with userful and pulseaudio. I'm the guy who uses gnome screensavers as my desktop background.

I run into your odd bugs, the ugly ones you hope no one will ever see. I submit the feature requests that put that silly, confused look on your face. I know where your project is going, I know its destiny. Please, listen to me--

I'm the corner case.

Just Works

2008-12-27T04:21:00.001-08:00

Digipro drawing pad users of the world, unite.

http://digitalbluewave.blogspot.com/2008/11/updated-wizardpen-driver-070-alpha1-p.html

Let's make these things Just Work in 9.04.
fabrice_sp is helping me with basically all of my packaging at this stage, we have one we're working on for the wizardpen. The idea for the end result is this:
a .deb file with the drive in it, and a postinstall script that goes as follows:

'please unplug your drawing pad and hit enter.'
grep -i name /proc/bus/input/devices
'pleas plug in your drawing pad and hit enter.'
grep -i name /proc/bus/input/devices
(the second time the command is run, there should be one additional result.)
Take that result and add it to /etc/hal/fdi/policy/99-x11-wizardpen.fdi, which needs to contain some other basically static xml, but I don't know how to post it here..

What would be /really/ nice of course is if the driver was included in main, and could recognize all the different wizardpen drawing pads and make them all Just Work; that is the end goal here, and we need all the help we can get. I hope the wacom folks have it better than this..

And so it begins.

2006-06-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

I think its safe to say that if you walk up to some random pedestrian and say, "Hey, dude. Is the system screwed up?" They might just say, "Yup." without knowing what part and how. The system is messed up. Common knowledge. Let me give you the details. First, lets lay out categories, and then I'll show you a system layout that is NOT messed up, so everyone out there can see what it is.

English- duh.
The government- duh again.
Our system of education- you don't say!
Our system of economy- this is kind of obvious, right?
Our systems of measurement- see that one coming?
Our systems of comunication- 56k, need I say more?
Our basis of belief- Atheism, etc...
Capyrights and Patents- Google "GNU".

I typed one page just now. And intentionally deleted it. Keep it simple. Keep it straight on. So I begin anew. Lets get some important concepts out of the way first.

Free money causes problems. What is given to a person, they value less than if they had earned it themselves, and thus are more inclined to use it unwisely.

Free market/capitalism is the system that human nature implements by default. "You want this? How much are you willing to give me for it?"

Monarchy/oligarchy is the simplest form of actual government to put into practice.

Democracy in its full form can only be put into a place of power by information technology we have not until recently in human history posessed.

A republic is a compromise between a democracy and an oligarchy. It has some of the advantages, and some of the disadvantages of both.

If God is not who you rely on, you are powerless. If God is on your side, though you be more helpless than the weak you are stronger than the mighty.

Truth is not meant to be witheld. Truth is meant to be given to all for free. All truth. You don't say to a person, "Hey, you want the good news? Give me your wallet and I'll tell you." Sure, it would be worth it. But doing things that way is wrong. God gave you that truth. God gave you all the abilities you have. Let's apply the concept, shall we, to patents. "Hey, I came up with that design! You can't use that! I'll sue!" So, the other dude goes and does something else instead, and progress, once again, has been impeded for persuit of personal gain.

Now lets go back and look at a popular mantra of the U.S.

Life, liberty, and the persuit of happyness. Hmm... Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.

Because the direct persuit of happiness doesn't lead to happiness! It leads to destruction, inneficiency, disorder, competition.... all that. The form of government that I propose works like this. You have God's people. They unite. You have a state that in practice is a pure sovreign democracy, and in effect is a theocracy. It's citizens, being the members of the body of Christ, work as a body, as opposed to a bunch of random rivaling entities like corporations and political parties and activist groups and secret societies and cartels. Simplicity. You have a central IT backbone through which all data travels. All data is free to all citizens, all citizens do their best to contribute. Because the state IS the kingdom of God on earth until he comes again, and everytime a part of the body does its part, the entire people benefits. Currency is redefined. No one is obligated to honor it but the state. People's obligations are to the kingdom, and currency is but a quantization of what they have worked for and are worthy to receive. I-owe-you's from the governmental structure, if you will. The state has departments of different things, which keep track of what the people need to have done, and coordinate the people's efforts in the most productive way possible. People lay out plans for a processor and operating system, people work through plans, plans get done in such a manner. New technology is discovered, everyone learns about it within a day or two, technology is implemented immediately. A sweet application is developed for a particular purpose, everyone gets to use it right away. Someone sees a way to improve it, collaborates with department, application improved, everyone can update... Some one sees a possiblity for a new program, brings it to the public's attention, public sees it too, project begins, project ends, everyone benefits.

And so it would go... but back to the communication system. Everyone needs the equivalent of:
--a cell phone. A person should always be able to be directly contacted.
--a PC.
--an online profile and address through which to send an receive communication, vote, discuss, blog, and all that. Every time a new service is thought of, account functionality simply expands to include it. Like.... Google! You know, email, IM, search, blogging, online file storage...

The results of this system would be very similar to Firefox, Linux, Open Office, and all that. GNU General Public Liscence. All the way. (At this point, I'd like to urge you to boycott all software that costs money... like Windows Vista and Microsoft Office...) Stuff gets better, its free, modify it as needed, no problems. Good system. Wikipedia, MySpace, all that, too. Everyone has a net-passport-profile kind of thing, everyone works together regardless of physical location..

I'll begin a new post now...

System of Measurement

2006-06-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

I mentioned English and our system of measurement. Here's what I've been working on for some time...

Measurement'll go first, why not. Um... So we have American Standard and Metric, right? American Standard isn't base ten and is useless for any kind of calculation. So then its metric we're left with. But it can be improved. We can do this by assimilating constants. We must first establish some kind of unit of time. The second? Did God ever divide time into hours, minutes, and seconds? I don't think he did... pretty sure not. So let's take it base ten. Ten units in a day, ten units in each of those and so on... down to about the same range as the second we know today. I calculated 1 day *10^-5 to be like .86s or something like that... just a sec...
.864s... wow, I remembered pretty well.. ok. Then you set c to be an even power of ten. as opposed to 2.98*10^...6 I think it is, just say c = 10^x d/t. That sets your units of distance. That turned out to be... Man, I've typed this all up already... shame I didn't bring my PC up here... 299,792,458 m/s to 10^8 d/t... meaning that its...
346982011.57407 m/ so 346982011.57407 m = 10^8
3.46982 revised meters in a meter, placing us at 28.82 cm/ revised meter. Or... yeah, I probably screwed it up. The right calculations are at home in Omaha. If you care, just email me. Moving on.

English. Oh.. man. Starting new post.. I'm sorry this rather sloppy, people. My other documents are awesome, and stuff never seems to go into type twice at the same quality. First time is always better...

Language.

2006-06-22T18:13:00.000-07:00

Here goes. A good language for everyday interhuman communication. You start off with an alphabetical sytem, kind of. You know, as opposed to the entire chinese character thing... Every character makes one sound, and only one sound. Always the same sound, regardless of circumstances. I spent years intermittently analyzing the vocal abilities of the human mouth. I developed a chart. Not a random string of sounds to be recited with a song by first graders, or backwards by drunk people at policemans request, a chart. Ok. It's an 8*8 chart, with 4 notation possibities. One byte/ character total. Consonants. Not just English ones, either. All the possible ones. Or most anyway... I'm never really done.
<>,K,,T, ,,, P.
<>,G,,D, ,,,B.
<>,ng,,N,,,,M.
<>,gh,,Z, dh, <>, V, <... grr... getting tedious... but you get the picture...
Then you have the "vowels". I've classified them into two groups by behavior. One group contains vowels which cannot easily be switched between without changing syllables. The other is the opposite. We'll call them "long" and "short" as I do, simply because.... the short mostly coincide with themselves in english.
a,e,i,o,u,oo...
and the long? brace thyself.
y,w,l,r. That's right. R is a vowel as far as I'm concerned (said that earlier, people found it funny)...
Then you have the glottal close and mixed aspirates and such. Anyway...
I don't feel like typing all this up right now... my end result yileds cahracters that in primary script appear similar to this:
LEFTI... yeah... I'm just gonna post now.

All the stuff that wouldn't fit in the 1200 character limit of "About Me"...

2006-09-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

First, I'll describe what one would note about my personality. I'm rather quiet most of the time, but I speak when spoken to. I try to use my brain as much as possible, but I get nervous around girls, inhibiting its proper functioning. I don't like having attention drawn to me amongst large numbers of people, especially when that group includes females. I'm strange, but I don't want it to scare people away. I'm not after girlfriend-boyfriend relationships really, because I've always liked someone, and it never ends well in my experience..., but I want to keep all my friendly and distant relationships positive and healthy. For better or worse, I care very much what people think of me. I value respect, but I have rather weak power of will. As I go through my day, I try to obey as many rules as possible, hold doors for people, and acknowledge people's presences by nodding my head. If you don't know me, that's a general overview of what you'd see. If you do, I hope this makes things clearer regarding my tendency to avoid people in general. If you are a female I know and wish to talk to me, modesty, sincerity, and frequency of communication are excellent alleviators of my nervousness. Let's see here, to summarize the rest, I'm a geek, and when nervous I can be a klutz as well. I enjoy intelligent discussion, and from the odd perspective of inside my brain, I'd describe it as a rather noisy environment, always thinking about something. Sometimes it annoys me, but I have a relatively well defined interface with the world, and thus don't generally come off as a complete ADD. Like many others, I've never been officially diagnosed, but I have my suspicions. I just kind of keep most of it inside. Except, well, at home. In that case, I'm quite random... sometimes witty, etc. My mom thinks I'm funny, at least.

Here's some other random background.

I used to do basically all of my homework and ace everything. Then, third semester freshman year, I was sick for a week and my propensity for late assignments caught up to me. I never wanted to be the guy who never did his homework, but over the following years, it is essentially what I became. (Pray for me.)

On a random note, I value my hair. Longer hair is freedom for me, but none of my older family members, (grandma, mom, dad...) like it because every once in a while it hides my eyes. When it is as long as I like it, I usually sport the "beach boy" look.

I'm weird. I like to think- I analyze everything. I believe all information should be free. I'm not a commie, and I'm not a capitalist. I like to exchange knowledge with persons near and far. IT is an extension of my mind. I like Google, and I like Firefox, Linux, and Open Office. Current projects:
Language.
OS.
Government and Educational system.
PC architecture.
I was going to do a programming language too, but Twilight is looking good... Python if that doesn't turn out...
And for old friends who may come across this, I'd love to talk to you too. Social networking is one of those things I always looked forward to. (If only I could....) Now I can. (Exactly like Google Earth) Please allow me to recreate old connections. All you people who went to school with me, or Boy Scouts, or church... or various combinations of the aforementioned... If I happen to forget your name, which is likely, show me your face.

Email: ethana2@gmail.com (checked daily)
Verizon: 402-740-8740
Home (I may be online)402-498-4423
MSN messenger, Skype.

ignore this

2008-06-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

1bf532acf07835edf2f37780b68757dd

md5 for a text file for the verification of its creation date

My Alaskan Journey

2006-06-21T16:28:00.000-07:00

Well... I'll start off with the reason. My dad's a dental hygenist, and Alaska pays them more than the other states, on average. He flew up, he flew back to Omaha.... Now, I'm here for the summer. The interesting part? We drove. that's right. Three thousand four hundred miles of American and Canadian highway. Let the tale begin: We started off trying to fix a miss in the engine of my dad's 1980-something Honda Accord... it kinda worked. We do a lot of that. Last summer, no kidding, my dad and I rebuilt the engine on that thing. On a hot summer day, it's not...... fun- to rebuild twenty-year-old engines outside.... but as you may later see, "fun" is not really what my dad is about. If you know him well, you may agree. Andrew Hammond has helped us with that project, and he can tell you how it feels...
So. We couldn't completely fix the engine miss, but we had to head off anyway. All morning on 6/7/06, we packed that car so efficiently it's hard to imagine. I got some of my music to listen to on the drive, four Enya CDs and the AOE soundrack (the only music I have performed be Microsoft employees)... I asked what kind of music we'd listen to before I did, see, and the response I got was that we had plenty of sermons to listen to.... We drive up through the dakotas and we hear a radio station for which our good friend Paul Rehm was the manager. We tried to call his cell. No luck. Anyway, we continued past Sioux City, switching drivers every few hundred miles or so.... it was insanely flat and boring land, but the clouds were pretty. So we reach the Canadian border the following morning... pretty early, too... you know, when its all cold and everything... We had a lot of ID and stuff, but we lacked the following :passport, visa, dad's birth certificate (which my mom tells me wasn't given to him because his mom didn't want him to marry his wife/my mom) So we received an interesting line from the Canadian customs agent: "You do realize you're entering a foreign country, right?" No really! I thought Saskatchewan was a state! 'Course, you don't SAY that, but.....
We drive across Canada... and then past Edmonton things got interesting. My mom called us on my dad's cell. I talked a little while. "Do you have anything important to tell us? Anything interesting going on down there in Omaha?" So she wanted to talk to my dad. With his being so impaired we see our first deer in Canada, I do believe. Up close. *beware- TMI risk* It was pregnant, we had deer fur all over the side of our car, and some deer blood and stuff... our hood was jammed down, as were our headlights, we temporarily lost a blinker... let's see... ah yes. *end TMI* So here's the deal with cars and our family. We have one rather new car. We go through old cars every other year it seems... we had that van (I think Andrew helped with that one) we still have my olds.... Kevin Grey gave us this Honda... there's a story there. Here it is.
Kevin's outside of the system (good for him) but that means he can't get loans. He needed one, and my dad has been purposely building his credit rating for many years. My dad let him borrow some money, and as a token of good will, he gives us this car. See, he had two of them, and he took one and did its body up good as new (that's what he does)..... he did the wrong one. We essentially spent our summer transplanting the internal "organs" of one Honda into the other. Here, a while later, we put it in for more bodywork... drgang land vehicles.
Well, anyway, as we drove through the mountains, which was quite fun at high speeds, but don't remind my mom of that, there were signs for many different types of animals to watch out for. I'm completely serious here. There were signs for: caribou, deer(a few km too late, I fear), moose, mountain goats/sheep, wild horses, bison/buffalo... I think that was it. It made me feel like it would have been a great joke to make a sign for some random other lifeform and put it at the end of the mountain pass both ways. Here are some of the ideas we came up with:
Borg next 15 km: prepare to be assimilated. (Andrew Hammond and myself on one of our random long phonecalls where he's otherwise bored out of his scull...)
Rhinos next 3 km or some other African animal, you know.. (the first idea)
I don't know what else you could do.... if it's not a real animal, I guess it doesn't fit in with the same scenario, but such signs could be great jokes... I liked the borg one because you can imagine what a simplified black drawing of a borg would look like on a road sign ;)
Ah yes. There were these people with "Alaska bound" scrawled on their rear windshield with window paint... Through the mountains, I was officially dissalowed from attempting to keep up with them... They hit a deer too, and it took out their AC... Speaking of which, even way up there, it was insanely hot the entire trip! Evidently, the lakes just thawed days before we were up there... man! (We never even bother trying to keep up with our auto AC systems- just roll down them windows.) Ah, the mosquitos. (random note: probably from spanish "mosca"= fly)
They are man eaters. I mean, you get up where we were and the nights are about the same length, except the mosquitos determine when they start instead of the sun :) Really though, up near Tok, where we camped (for free of course) I woke up like at 4 Am and it wasn't really that dark. Insane. From then on... oh yes! Our annual Criminal encounter! Ok.
My dad was looking for free lodging the entire trip, mainly campgrounds, right? We pull off the highway late at night on a random Canadian road and find a field with an abandoned truck. We've had a truck stolen ourselves (much more on that later, I lead an interesting life) with similar results. They steal the truck, they pull a bunch of random parts, then they dump it somewhere. So my dad looks at this probably stolen truck and says something to the effect of "How nice! Let's set up camp right next to it- it should be able to protect us from charging moose!" To which I replied something to the effect of, "I don't feel comfortable maintaining such close proximity to a vehicle which we can suspect to have been stolen from a random person at some recent pont in time and abandoned here be nefarious criminals who may soon revisit the site" Of course, we then set up camp. and wouldn't you know it... A bunch of young adults pull into the field in a truck towing a small car with brocken windows, and proceed to unload its contents before our eyes. I'm dead serious. And glad to not be dead, period. See, guns are illegal in Canada, but so is the thievery of small cars, I'm pretty sure, so you never know what to expect. We pretended not to care while frantically attempring to call the police on our cell phones. Annnndd..... you guessed it! No coverage. So these dudes pretend not to notice us, get done, drive a ways away behind the trees, and shut off their engine. We waited for a few hours, and decided to just go to sleep. We slept in the car, despite that we had the tent all set up between it and the stolen truck. In the morning, we drove to a power plant or something and told the police what we knew over the phone. We had captured a few liscence plate numbers and such, vehicle descriptions, of course... I think that's it for the journey, basically...

The Dahlman Episode

2006-06-21T17:39:00.000-07:00

The summer my dad and I were working on the Plymouth voyager in his parents' die cutting shop bay; I don't remember the year... We had an old black Chevy truck that had been owned by my other grandparents, namely my Grandpa Jerry. He sold it to my mom for a dollar, and we had it sitting by the aforementioned die cutting shop. One day, it disappeared. My dad didn't like that very much. So we decided to hunt them down, and that we did (hang on here, there's a car chase near the end) We found out that this criminal was kind of an idiot. For other thieves out there, there are four things you do not want to do when stealing things.
1: revisit the site on a nearly daily basis looking for other stuff to take,
2:(in the case of a vehicle) drive them around town casually after stealing them,
3: steal them from my dad or those close to him,
4: offer to buy them beforehand, giving out personal information in the process.
My dad actually chased them in my sister's car when he realised that the truck that had just passed him in the other direction had all of grandpa's union bumper stickers, right where they'd been for who knows how many years...
So my dad rapidly and energetically turned around, and the other guy, guilty as he was, immediately sped up. Chase #1. Eventually, the guy took the truck through a bunch of parking lots and then over a curb or something, which ended the chase, as my dad was using my sister's low-profile Le Sabre, I think it was...
So let's see what my dad and I did... ah yes: it is important to note that my dad and I would work well into the night on that van of ours. They drove by once, late at night, while we were still there. We failed to get a license plate number, unfortunately... We used the personal info given to my grandma by the suspected crook to track down a few things. Like the dudes house, for example. Call the number. "Hi, you've reached so-and-so, please leave your message.."
Look up the dude, and I have forgotten his name as of writing this, in the phonebook. Borrow Grandpa Jerry's other vehicle, which he still has, and use it to conceal our identity with my sister's car from the earlier chase... Go to the dude's house late at night. Attempt to slip a camera under his garage door. Return multiple times to stake out the neighborhood. And here's what you will likely remember most: steal his trash at 3 AM and dig through it and make observations at a nearby bag and save (or some store like it)
Uhh... I'll try to remember what we found out from his trash, and you may find this impressive. There were two households in that house. One of the guys recycled, one didn't, and the guy who didn't, I believe was abruptly quitting many pharmaceuticals and returning to habitual smoking and consumption of beer. Soon after that, we found we weren't getting anywhere. Dead lead. So we were driving around SE Omaha looking for leads. We found one. The dude who offered to buy the thing before it disappeared said that he worked for Dahlman Auto Body. We drove down some major street and sighted a Dahlman Avenue. Here began the real fun. We located this "Dahlman Auto Body". Now, a regular auto body shop is usually open from like 8 AM to 11 PM or something like that, right. 2 AM was a little unusual. And regular auto body shops, well, don't have bald lanky white guys dressed in black clothes patrolling nearby intersections... I smile as I now type this... we drove up to the guy, he walked up to us, and we drove away quickly. We came back again. With a disposable camera. We pulled up to him and leaned over as if to ask for information of some sort. The information? A picture of his surprised face. A real shame it didn't turn out :) Don't feel bummed- WE DO HAVE A PICTURE OF THESE GUYS. And it's great. When we locate it, I'll be sure to put it up here. "Whatcha doin', dudes?" He asked in shock and suppressed surprise as we sped off. Then we made our mistake. We kept driving around the area. Chase #2: We happened to notice we were being followed by a black truck. Not our black truck, though: much newer and generally spiffy-looking. My dad is generally a very legal driver. This chase then, went the speed limit for probably all of its duration... Whenever we put on our turning sniggles (family tradition, Caroline started it), the dudes in the truck would immediately pull into the corresponding lane. This was all fun for my dad, who played with them like that for a while. They were getting pissed. We proceeded into Council Bluffs, Iowa. When the highway was like four lanes, we pulled into the far right one. We passed up an exit. Then my dad says "Hold on!" and I'm thinking "Great." We take the exit, at like an 80 degree angle off of our course. They followed us. We then... pulled into a McDonald's drive through. They soon pulled up beside us. Before they did, however, my dad once again said four little words, which I think offer an interesting insight into my dad's way of dealing with life... "Get the camera ready..." They pull up, I raise the camera, the dude raises his finger....

*click* Oh, man, that was terrifying.... The entire time this is happening, of course, I'm thinking, "What if these guys have a gun?!?!?"
Beautiful picture, by the way; that's the one I need to find for you people- the other dude we snapped earlier was in the passenger seat, and conveniently leaned over to see us.

The driver, a bid bald white guy dressed in I think a black T-shirt and jeans, promptly cut us off in the drive through and began to jiggle the door handle with fury trying to get out of the truck ASAP and scare us as much as he could in the process.... My dad shifted our vehicle into reverse and we backed up with a terrified me in the passenger seat, and a severely angered criminal sprinting after us to be seen right through our windshield and headlight beams. We escaped into Council Bluffs... but we had to get back home sometime, right? There are only two or three highways that go between the two cities. They camped out in a gas station parking lot monitoring one of them, which we were going to take. Then, my dad realises that we need gas. So we turn left twice into the gas station. I look out my window, and Oh, Joy! They are right friggin there, intently monitoring the patch of road we would have been on just seconds ago had we not turned off to get gas. We got gas, hoping they wouldn't notice us. They didn't. We then crossed the street and tried to see them with binoculars, but couldn't. We then went down the minor neighborhood street we were on, on got back on the highway via the last possible chance we had, thereby evading their detection.

The truck got left somewhere in Omaha. The police picked it up. It had a ton of parts pulled out of it. We went to the impound lot. And don't you just love our system of law and justice? If we were to get our vehicle back, we had to pay an impound lot and vehicle desertion fine! Because of course, it's obviously the victim's fault the vehicle got stolen, right? Of course. So we said goodbye to the old truck. *sniff* So endeth the Dahlman Episode.

If you would like some excitement yourself, or want to learn more about fine criminal establishments like Dahlman Auto Body, feel free to visit Dahlman Avenue late at night with a camera. The criminals there are in full operation to this day, I do believe. Oh, yeah... wear body armor :)

I'm an Ubuntero!

2008-11-14T16:57:00.000-08:00

First order of business: I've upgraded the Ubuntu Stellarium package to 0.10.0
Here's how to get it.

I have installed stellarium on my machine with these same steps to ensure that nothing is broken. It's not as scary as it looks.

Note that this guide will not work if you're using a PowerPC machine such as a PowerBook or PlayStation3. Ubuntu doesn't have OpenGL acceleration on the PS3 anyways, and if you want to build a .deb for yourself on a PowerBook or other PPC based machine, let me know; I can walk you through it. Unfortunately, canonical only builds PPA packages for i386 (x86), amd64 (x86_64), and lpia (low power intel architecture)-- which is just another way of saying ...more x86. Also note that this guide will not work on Ubuntu Hardy; only Intrepid and newer. If you're still waiting for a bug or two to get worked out of Intrepid, just hang onto this for later.

Firstly, add the apt-line to your software sources.
System > Administration > Software Sources
Go to the 'Third-Party Software' tab, click the 'add' button near the bottom left corner of the window.
"Enter the complete APT line of the repository that you want to add as source"

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ethana2/ubuntu intrepid main

When you close the window, it'll tell you it needs to reload the index of stuff you can install, go ahead and do it.
== at this point, you have added my Personal Package Archive to your Ubuntu installation ==

[If you already had stellarium installed, just run updates and you're done. --I'll assume you don't.]

Next, go to Applications > Add/Remove, and search for stellarium. It should return one result, and that one result is of course the one you want.
Check the box next to it and hit 'Apply Changes'. Enter your password, and it will probably complain about how I haven't been knighted by King Shuttleworth. Ignore this and install anyway. I am responsible to Canonical for my behavior in regards to this PPA, having signed their code of conduct with gpg, and I'm not going to mess with anyone.

After installing this application, you will be provided with the opportunity to run it immediately. Do what you want.
Stellarium will show up under Applications > Education, but you can move it wherever you will with the Main Menu Editor found in System > Prefs.

Enjoy*

*Enjoying is not required by the GPL; if you choose not to enjoy it, no one can stop you.

Gaming on Linux: The Time has Come.

2007-08-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

If you're from Ubuntu feature requests, skip to paragraph 4.

One of the reasons for not moving to Linux that you hear a lot from windows users is that their games don't work on Linux. For the most part, this is true. Of course, there are always compatibility layers like wine or, ahem, cedega... But let us think for a moment: this is just another proprietary app dependency. Sure, it'd be nice if they made games for us, but we have the best kernel on earth, the best window compositing system, the best 3 browsers ... Heck, we even had better hardware support than vista for a while. What got us there? For the most part, not proprietary software dependency.

A short time ago, I surveyed the Linux gaming situation and was pleasantly surprised. We have unified. We have advanced. Through great projects like ioq3, crystal space, SDL, and opengl, we have, in my opinion, nearly caught up. You can play sauerbraten, tremulous, nexuiz, openarena, urban terror, and many others. What is lacking? Out of the box support for controllers. Let's face it: who has an open source gaming console? Yeah. Good job. So let us examine what a pc needs to catch up in full.

Out of the box controller/gamepad support. Do we have it? Kinda. But what if you want to use it? Tough. You have to go out and find the source for joy2key and joy2mouse, run a ./configure make sudo make install on it. Now, console users don't like terminals. I don't mind them, but before I knew what I was doing, I tried that and it didn't work. I probably didn't do it right... Anyway...

What we need is a way to simply plug in your gamepad, and be able to just use it. This involves binding keys and mouse movements in its simplest form. Heck, I like having a backup for my keyboard and mouse anyway. That binding needs to be integrated into the gamepad manager, and all of that needs to be included(optionally) with Ubuntu. If not the default Ubuntu, perhaps a new variant, like Ubuntu Full Circle? (I think that would be appropriate, next to the xbox 360 and nintendo revo--- wii. Best of all, you could install it on the ps3 --also, as an indicator that one of the last weaknesses of Linux... has caught up. The circle is complete. Once we were but the learners. Now we... are the masters. *I plead fair use*)

ethana2@gmail.com -- help me refine my ideas.

OSH Laptop Design

2007-05-01T20:28:00.000-07:00

Here follows my idea for an open source laptop. Naturally, its components should be open source too.
First, all components need to use USB 3.0. This idea is detailed in a previous post here.
Secondly, it needs to be liquid cooled. This may sound ridiculous, but when you see my idea for the implementation, you may change your mind- more on this later.
Third, while the CPU instruction set's being open may sound stupid, keep in mind that the gcc can add it as a target platform as easily as it could be designed int eh first place. I believe it already exists anyway.
Fourth, it has a co processor. This would require the Linux, Open Solaris, FreeBSD, Haiku, whatever- kernels to be altered, but it would be worth it. Threads would issue a kernel call for mass math batching to the co processor, which would be used for all math intensive operations.
Fifth, it would take advantage of every power saving method under the sun. Parts of the processor would power off via clock gating when unused. Both clock frequencies and voltages to all components would be scaled dynamically.

Here follows some more specific design ideas: The liquid cooling system would be quieter and work better than current laptop air cooling. Thanks to all the power saving measures in place, it wouldn't ave that much stress put on it usually. It would have a small pump in the main body, and would cool all components that generate heat. One tube goes up behind the screen, and one comes down. There, a heat sink that covers the entire back side of it dissipates the heat with vertical fins while the laptop is open. Aluminum would likely work fine. This also opens of some neat aesthetic possibilities. Due to the flexibility of USB 3.0, the keyboard is not mandatory. One could easily replace it with, say, a touchscreen. Or a solar panel, with the top screen being a touchscreen. Possibilities are endless.

We touch first on the hard drive. First notable difference: simplified electronics. The system could use one GB of GDDR3 for L3, graphical cache for the co processor, and perhaps hard drive cache as well. The hard drive itself would lack a cache. Using Gb USB 3, it would negotiate one 60 and one 1 volt power input. The 60 bolt drives the motor, and the one volt drives circuitry. It would have instant spin down in a similar manner to hybrid vehicles. Shock mounted.

Next, the optical drive. Power negotiation would be identical to the other, with the exception of an extra voltage for the laser. The laser would be an independent unit of the drive, capable of bring upgraded to higher frequencies as needed without replacing the entire drive. The tray and reading/writing mechanisms would also be independent, allowing for design variations like drives that grab the disk and pull it in, without major redesign.

The power supply would put out a few 60 and 1 volt lines, with several variable voltage outputs. While these may not be particularly efficient, they centralize power conversion in the PSU. Centralization of operations is crucial. As all other components, it would be liquid cooled. Thus, it would be much denser than many other PSU's. This may sound like a bad idea, but as long as the liquid system is well designed and no one is emptying rounds into the machine, it should be fine.

Another component that one might find interesting is the modulator. This would be a digital-to-analog wave generator, and could be used as a modem, or to provide traditional audio output to old headphones and speakers. Or, hey, tuning radio and TV- even broadcasting at moderate power. This would be placed above the screen, along with a digital microphone and perhaps a webcam.

The usual or recommended setup would be one colemak thin keyboard, a thumb pad for security, and a touch mouse. Perhaps a small scanning pad would be handy too. These would be isolated in the keyboard layer, separate from other internal components, and a breeze to replace. As much as possible, the machine should be EM shielded and waterproof. With the right sealing methods, and design, it may be a good idea to actually make it capable of underwater use, conditionally. That is, it needs to be designed with that in mind, but most people wouldn't need it actually built in when they get one.

I want to set up some kind of group to make such designs a reality, but I need all the help I can get. ethana2@gmail.com- for those willing to contribute or comment.

USB 3.0

2007-05-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

The point of USB is to standardize communication systems. It cannot do this, however, unless it is flexible enough to operate in the manner required by a vast variety of applications. Here, the creators of the USB protocol made a few fatal mistakes:

The limited it. They limited the connection pin number, and they limited the connection frequencies. And as for going wireless, they limited it, I believe, to single connections.

Here, I will detail my idea for USB 3.0. If anyone wants to use this idea, they may, and in fact, I encourage them to. But the second they try to rip it out of its proper place in the public domain with patents or similar intellectually fascist methods, I intend to attack. Because just about any idea is obvious to those with the right background. But I won't rail on IP laws here. Back to USB 3.0. You get the point.

One of the ideas central to the USB standard is backwards compatibility. This means that to form a USB connection, you have to start at the lowest common denominator and scale up. USB 3 needs to be a simple addition to that. Here's how a connection should be made:

Host to device: Hello?
Device: I'm here on USB 1.1.
Host: Can you do USB 2.0?
Device: Yes.
Host: Can you do USB 3.0?
Yes. 1 connection, 2 bits, 500 MHz
Host: Scaling to 1 Gbps connection.

or, 5 years down the road-

Host: Can you do USB 3.0?
Device: wireless USB 3.0, 5 connections. One bit/connection, frequencies 4.00, 4.01, 4.02, 4.03, 4.04 GHz.
Host: scaling pseudo parallel connection. Enabling soft encryption.

Why do we need this? Simplicity. Today we have USB ports, DV I/O, PCIe, PCI, SATA, etc.
I want one type of connection and one only: USB 3.0. Monitor, Stereo vision headset, controllers, hubs, cards, drives, eeg's, wireless scanners, co processors, PSU's. Everything. And without royalties.