NASA has outlined plans to return to the Moon. About time. It is 36 years after the first landing on the Moon and I think it would be great to be able to touch down on our planet's closest neighbor. The Moon would be a great staging post for a trip to Mars, but I would not plan a trip to the Red Planet for a long time. The Moon should be our priority right now. Once we establish a base on the Moon, we could use it to launch a spaceship to Mars. Since the Moon has 1/6 the gravity of the Earth it would be more efficient to launch there. The cost of the Moon project is estimated to be US$104 Billion dollars. Which translates into about AU$137 Billion Australian dollars, but I believe it is worth the cost. It would be spread out over 13 years and use tried and proven technology much like the lunar craft used in the original missions. And lunar craters are perfect for building a base inside them.

There has been more talk about the infamous bodies in the barrels case in South Australia. There have been allegations that there was cannibalism of the dead bodies. The flesh was removed from the bodies and eaten by the killers. Totally rank. It reminds me of the Jeffery Dahmer killings in America. The case involved people being murdered and their bodies hidden in barrels in a disused bank vault. So if you are planning a trip to Australia, please avoid south Australia. The new motto is `Experience South Australia. In a Barrel. Cheap Accommodation!'

Train Journeys in Sydney Australia will take longer to complete on modern trains than they took in the 1930's, that is the shocking news in the paper recently. This is with ultramodern Tangara and the Millennium trains. These trains can travel at 115 Kilometers an hour, but they are being restricted in speed in the interests of safety. While countries like Japan, who are far ahead of Australia have fast safe and efficient train services, Australia will be back in the 1930's, We should go back to the old Steam trains and just use them instead. And get rid of cars and have horses and carts and have an Amish styled agrarian society. Who needs fast efficient trains anyway, traveling at maybe 70 Kilometers an hour you will get where you want to go sooner or later. You will just have to get up sooner and then you will be on time. (Maybe.) The `Red Rattlers` were the old trains that moved people around in 1938. But now we have very modern trains that are better than the old trains were, yet they are being restricted to slower speeds to increase safety.

http://www.cityrail.com.au City-Rail Website.

Sydney residents will get used to this soon anyway, They are used to slow running and late trains and poor service overall. You can get used to anything if you put up with it for long enough. The crazy frog thing is actually not so bad once you get used to it. I have seen the music video for the first time and it is very funny indeed. The bounty hunter chases the Freaky Frog all around the city and through the sewers even. There is a $50.000 bounty on his head in the video. Maybe the bounty hunter from Cowboy Bebop should chase him. Then he would be sure to be caught.

Back to the Amish styled agrarian society I was talking about, if we went back to using steam trains and horses and carts, does that mean we would have to get rid of computers and use the Abacus instead.?

I was just trying to fix up a Windows `98 machine, a Pentium III 500MHZ, and it was running Scan disk on Windows load up and it paused because there was a file that was an abnormally long filename and it froze on that. I have never seen that happen before. But I guess anything can happen with Windows. Who the hell would think that Windows is more stable than Linux?

There was a Cyanide scare in a local business recently. Someone had placed a sealed metal container that was said to contain Cyanide. No one knows who put it there or how it came to be in the building. Thank god it was not anything worse. Not that Cyanide is not bad, but there are worse things like Cyanogen. Or Anthrax. But anyone who does this kind of thing is a terrorist on par with Al Queda. No one should have to have something like this happen to them. I am watching the 1953 version of War of the Worlds, and I am really enjoying this movie. It is set in America instead of Great Britain, but it does show the invasion from an American perspective. They are using mortars and Artillery and they are having no effect. Sort of like Independence Day, but better. The Aliens have put up shields around their flying machines and they are impenetrable. High level bombers have attacked them and they had no effect. I have a soft spot for 50's movies, the overly camp atmosphere is very entertaining, and the overdone aliens.

The man threw an Ax at the Martian, and it screamed and ran out. It was very funny. The aliens scream like girls.

The tunnel network in Sydney is being reported as the next most likely target for terrorists. The 80 year old network is said to be inaccessible to emergency services and a death trap in the event of a terrorist attack. There is not so much distance between stations as there was in London, but there still is a danger. The danger of a car or truck bomb in pedestrian tunnels under the city is another danger, but if Ballards and concrete barriers were installed, this would reduce the danger. The only hope is that there are service tunnels or old unused tunnels that could be mapped out and form part of a rescue plan. Bollards have been installed at Wynyard and Town Hall stations and in the Devonshire St tunnel to increase safety. I hope this is enough. I also hope we never have an attack like the attacks seen in London. But we need to be alert but not alarmed as the ads said recently. If we had more security cameras as was the case in London, then we would be able to gather evidence if there was an attack.

There has been a new terrorist tape released that features a person who sounds like an Australian. It is not definite but he sounds very much like a young male of possibly Arabic or other Ethnic descent. He is preaching the usual threats of bombings and killings that most of those aligned with Al Queda usually preach, But he is an Australian, he is obviously a traitor to his country whether is is a citizen or not. He should be arrested and questioned and subjected to the worst indignities our prison system could dish out. Or preferably he could be put in Guantanamo bay prison and left there for the rest of his life.

Once again, FOX news has a segment on the war on Terror. Will it never end? Every time they have news on FOX news it is about the war on terror. Every time! They are saying that there was a suspicious package at the Mayflower hotel. It is suspected to be a bomb, but they are not sure yet. It is not too far from the White House and is being treated as any other bomb but combined with its proximity to the White House, it is even more serious. They are saying now that is was a hoax device, but was not treated lightly as you can imagine. Some people have nothing better to do than plant fake bombs. Anyone who does that is a terrorist. The hoax bomb was destroyed by the bomb squad and has been found to be not a bomb. Just a waste of the Police's time. But you have to respond accordingly, even if it turns out to be a hoax You do not know until you check it out. But putting a fake bomb in a building is a waste of everyones time.

The fans being installed to draw out pollution from the cross city tunnel in Sydney Australia have been removed again to be repaired after they blew up while being tested. And this is in Australia in 2005. What a great country we have. They cannot even build electric motors that can run more than 2 minutes. And this is supposed to be the Clever Country. But it is nothing like other countries who can build tunnels across the English Channel and maybe even across the ocean, and Sydney cannot even build a tunnel across the city. 54 of the motors are being fixed. 54. And this is the clever country. No evidence so far. Apparently the bearings in the fans have failed in two of the units and they decided to replace the bearings in all of them just to be sure. And the cross city tunnel will be the most expensive tunnel in the world for infrequent users.

Sydney Morning Herald.

Go here for any more news on the cross city tunnel. I know about the Big Dig project in America and I am sure that would go more smoothly. The Americans sure know how to take on massive engineering projects and make them work. They are planning the Freedom Tower to replace the World Trade Center which I think is great, but only if they keep a memorial to the victims of that horrific attack. The building will be 541 Meters tall which is taller than the Petronas Towers and Taipei 101. I watched the movie 'The Hamburg Cell' which gave an account of the events leading up the attack and that movie was pretty chilling since it showed the terrorists as they really are. They honestly believe that they will go to paradise after they die. They are more probably suffering in the pit of fire, being burned by the never ending flames of Hell. They will be screaming and blubbering like little girls as the flames burn & scorch their flesh.

They wanted to kill all of the infidels but they do not realize that they are the infidels themselves. They are infidel pig dogs that do not deserve to live. But if they live at all, it should be living out the rest of their lives being experimented on in medical labs, being dissected alive and used to test various medications and surgical procedures. No mercy for the terrorist infidels. The bastard spawn of the Prophet Mohammad deserve to die painfully. For every 10 people that die in Terrorist attacks 'Heaven Forbid', we should kill 1000 of the terrorist infidels. That will teach them.

The new series Rock School is starting on Channel TEN. This series takes off from the movie of the same name. In the series, Gene Simmons from the band KISS is trying to take a bunch of classically trained music students and turn them into a rock band. I am not sure about this series at all, I do not know if it will be any good, I think that I have had enough of reality TV. I know the Americans have Hogan Knows Best, but I am sure that is better than this. I really hate Big Brother and I am very upset that is coming back in 2006. Surely they can come up with a better show than that. It is just as bad as the movie 'The Island'. That is just a re-hash of every single science-fiction movie such as 'Slogans Run' which by the way is a great movie. To just rip off this movie and others to make a new film is atrocious. Make something original next time. Who gives a shit about the non-existent island. I am sick of the movie and that is just from the ads. I cannot imagine how awful it would be to actually pay to watch it. I would rather watch something like American Chopper. Now that is a good show. Or Monster Garage. Jesse James is a legend. There seem to be some plot elements in the island that seem like the classic George Lucas film THX-1138. Which is much like Logan's Run. THX-1138 is a superb film and comes recommended as one film to watch if you watch any science fiction film watch it. And 2001 a Space Odyssey. That too is a classic film. And the foreign movie 'Abre Los Ojos' 'Open your Eyes' a strange film which is somewhat like the 'Matrix' but better.

I have recoded all of the Java Script on my site and made it a little more efficient. Some 8 lines where condensed down to just one. This will make it more efficient. I am have also recoded all of the pages in XHML, to replace the conventional HTML I had before. This should work very well even for those people using Internet Explorer. The new colors I am using in my design should be better if like me you like using your machine in the dark and you do not want to look at a bright white page. I have tested this page with Mozilla 1.7, Konqueror 3.3.2 and Mozilla Firefox 1.0 so it should look very good on your machine. Even if you are using Internet Explorer. Of course I would never use that. I would rather use Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox. Anyone who uses Internet Explorer just leaves themselves open to viruses. I have seen the damage that using Internet Explorer can do to a PC and I would not want that to happen to me. The new design looks very good on my machine with Anti Aliased fonts, it should look good on a Windows machine as well. I was getting sick of the white background on my site so I decided it was time for a change.

Like this person I was trying to help with his machine. A Pentium III 500MHZ machine that is running Windows '98. And what a heap of shit that machine is. He had a Directx game that he wanted to run, but it would not run at all, it would just BSOD, which is the standard Windows way of telling you there is a problem. What a heap of shit. At least Linux programs can be debugged with gdb and Electric Fence and by reading the source code. Reading the source code is the way I try to debug applications and it can work wonders. I installed the Linux Doom 1.10 source code and built it and the idclev cheat would not work, so I loaded up st_stuff.c in an editor and fixed the problem. Simple.

I tried everything to get the game on the Windows machine working, I switched to Opengl and that did not help. I installed Directx 9.0 and the latest video drivers and that did not help either. I sent an E-Mail away to the game company but they have not replied yet The configuration options for the game consists of choosing between OpenGL or Directx. The game he wanted to run was Ubisoft Scrabble 2005 and he has a Pentium 500MHZ machine with 128MB of RAM and Windows '98. The computer is just within the minimum requirements for running the game but that does not guarantee a smooth ride. Configuring Quake 2 to run on a machine with a Voodoo 2 with the latest patches was very simple. And Zdoom GL. I was running that once and I was running a level with a brushed metal floor and it was rendered as a mirror. Awesome. And they say that Windows is more stable and secure than GNU/Linux. That is FUD. Microsoft will say anything to sell their software. They are having to drop features from Windows Longhorn to get it out on time in 2006 or whenever. Linux projects such as Mono have features lacking from Windows Longhorn, but they will have those features now. By the time Windows Longhorn is released it will just be another Windows release, not much more exciting than Windows XP. Or Windows ME Moron Edition.

I do not even know if Microsoft will have the 3D features planned in Windows Longhorn. They were planning a full 3D interface with a nice new way of rendering things but now they might be changing things to get it out on time. Actually it is August 2005 already and it will be 2006 very soon. I want to get a glimpse of the new interface and see what they have done just so I can compare it to the latest offerings from Mandrake and Debian GNU/Linux. By mid 2006 we should have some incredible applications available. Although I am running Knoppix 3.6 on my Laptop at the moment. This OS has superb support for various networking devices and worked with my Netgear PCMCIA networking adapter which was not supported at all by Fedora Core 2 at all. It comes on 4 cd's and it supports less hardware than Knoppix does and that comes on one CD. Go figure. I wish I knew why that was. I know the device is very new, but the brand new PCI LAN card I bought works perfectly with Mandrake Linux 10.0. But of course PCI cards are easy to get working. Newer hardware such as wireless cards can be hard. But I am using a crossover cable from the laptop to the server at the moment. But having wireless would be cool once I get the security squared away. I am using SSH to connect to the server so I have a pretty secure connection already, as long as you protect the root account. That is the most important thing. Obviously so. Less cables to trip over just like in the Intel Centrino advertisements. They show why you do not leave your cables trailing over the footpath?

Very funny indeed. Another funny thing that happened today was when I was walking outside at about 1:30AM as you do when you cannot sleep and there was a dog barking in a neighboring street and an irate man was yelling at the dog to shut the fuck up and it would not. It was just like Elaine in Seinfeld when the dog was barking and it would not shut up. The kicker is that his yelling was making more dogs bark, which in turn made all the dogs in the neighborhood bark. I wonder if he got any sleep. If he had to get up at 6 AM it would not be good to be still awake at 1:30. It is very funny when it does not happen to you.

The proposed Desalination plant to be built near Sydney is confirmed to go ahead if the drought does not ease. This plant will provide more drinking water for the people of Sydney, but they really should plan to build another dam to catch more rainwater. That would help more. Maybe even recycling storm-water somehow. They can recycle sewage to be almost drinkable, so why cant' they recycle storm-water runoff? You could get a lot of water back if you could do that. Even if you just used it to water the parks and gardens.

Speaking again of the City-Rail service I spoke about at the top of this post. I have read in the paper, that the trains are skipping stations without warning in the interests of safety. First it was the trains traveling too slowly because of the poor condition of the tracks, and now it is trains skipping stations. The train driver is given the order to skip stations mid-journey which is strange considering that the passengers waiting at the platform just watch in disbelief as the train sails by. This is totally unbelievable, I cannot believe that this is happening in Australia in 2005. But the way this country is going, it will be all this way soon. They are saying that the system is getting worse and worse, so I do not know where it will end. Cities like Japan and New York have better public transport systems than Sydney does. I do no know why we cannot have a good public transport system like other cities do. But that is what you get for living in Australia I guess. We have to suffer the consequences of having a union led group such as City-Rail that employ hopeless workers that bully the public and do not care about the reason you might have for not having a ticket on the day, they just want to behave like the Waffen SS and treat the commuters like criminals,

We need an inquiry into the running of the state transit system and try to fix all of the problems that have been caused by the former transport minister. Bob Carr has done nothing for this country, But neither has anyone else for that matter. The new transport minister is delusional if he thinks he can fix the problems with the current service. What is needed is better leadership, which is a rarity in Australia at the moment. But we will keep hoping and praying that someone will come and fix the problems. If we got the Olympic games in Australia again, then they would have to fix the problems with the trains to accommodate the needs of the many visitors to our fine city. But nowadays that would be a security nightmare, and would take quite a large amount of efficient policing to make sure the city was secure. Especially searching bags of train passengers to ensure they are not carrying a bomb. The security of the stadium would also be a nightmare. But we do not want something like that right now, we have plenty of other things that need fixing first. Like the aforementioned trains and the whole public transit system. It is a total shambles right now and needs to be fixed desperately.

We are also unsure about the future of Telstra after privatization. I am sure they will not care about the telecommunications company after it is sold off to god knows who. Service quality will undoubtedly decline, we will probably have to ring someone in India to get technical support and wouldn't that be just great. It is already like that with some areas such as Information Technology. So why would it not be like that with the telephone service? The people in the rural areas will suffer the most. While users in the cities are enjoying broadband connectivity, the bush areas are still stuck with unreliable narrow-band services using a 56K modem, which may only connect at about 40K. At the most. That is not much fun to use, but better than nothing I guess. And the quality of the copper line you are connected through determines how fast you can access information on-line. And some in this country are better than others.

Helen Coonan has stated that services are improving and the roll-out of broadband services to the bush is continuing, but I hope that she does more to fix the problems with the services. In the cities some areas have no mobile coverage and that is in the city! Why can't they fix it. Why cannot they find a way to give the existing mobile towers greater coverage. Instead of building more of them. FM radio has good coverage, why can't you design a mobile phone that has equivalent coverage of the city. I know that a mobile phone has only a small antenna, but you only need a relatively small antenna for FM radio reception as well. Although the mobile phones probably use a much higher frequency for their transmissions and reception, but surely it is possible? I do not know that much about the mobile phone transmissions, but I know that there must be room for improvement. In Star Trek they only had small transceivers and they could communicate with the ship orbiting above at about 20.000 Miles an hour at about 300 KM altitude. And yes I know that Star Trek is fantasy, but I am sure the technology could exist and be scaled down so that everyone's phone could work via satellites instead of using mobile phone towers. Then you could use the phone just about anywhere. Satellite phones are about AU$3000 now but I hope that in the future the technology could become cheaper. I finally have a page design, that I am happy with. I have tested it with Mozilla 1.7, Mozilla Firefox-1.0.4 and Konqueror browsers and it works a treat. Setting up the positioning of DIV layers can be frustrating, but the end result is worth all the effort. I have changed the layout of the page and recoded every single page to optimize them and now it looks a little more professional. The pages use XHTML formatting and this keeps the HTML tighter, and will help with debugging using this formatting, I can have better pages for my visitors, and of course a page that looks good is more fun to visit. I have not tested this page with Internet Explorer, but it should work just as well. I know that Internet Explorer has issues, but I know that many people still use it, So I have to test my site with every possible browser. But it is usually Internet Explorer 5.5 that causes problems with my site. But the Microsoft Browser has many problems. According to http://www.secunia.com. Microsoft Internet Explorer has about 20 serious problems with the browser that could allow a malicious person to access data on a users computer. Mozilla Firefox has three and the Opera browser has none. For such a secure browser, it is a shame that it has such a small user base.

But as for the Firefox security holes, they will be patched well before the Microsoft browser is ever fixed. We all know that. Now for some Firefox lovin!

http://www.mozilla.org The home of the excellent Firefox browser.

The Firefox browser for Linux is only a 8 Megabyte download, the Opera browser is only a 5-6 Megabyte download. Very tightly programmed and very secure. The alternatives to MSIE are making the case for running that bloated heap of shit very un-watertight indeed. I would never use that unless their was no choice, but you really should install Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla-1.7 suite. That provides an email client and a web editor. Opera is also of course a very good choice. I would run a few browsers on my machine, then I could test my site in more than one browser, as sometimes your CSS layout will look different in some browsers. My site looks slightly different in Mozilla Firefox than it does in Mozilla 1.7 and Konqueror, but it still looks good. The top navigation bar is shifted up slightly in Firefox by 2 pixels, but I am not going to get all hissy over that. Only two pixels for god`s sake. Nothing to worry about. Anyway I bet my site design is broken in IE just because I did not use any Internet Explorer extensions or something. I know my last site design looked pretty fucked in IE5.5 bu then again, that browser itself is pretty fucked. Not my fault. My current code for my site is valid XHTML so it should fucking well work. I am editing this post now with Open Office 1.1.3. I have installed Mepis Debian Linux on my main machine with KDE 3.3.2 and Kernel 2.6.10. This system is better than Mandrake Linux and I can install my collection of Debian Linux packages to get a good smooth system up and running. I have installed Midnight Commander and rxvt and now I am very happy with the system I have. The Mepis installation includes Apache 2.0 so you can setup a web server very quickly. As well as a good Firewall package and Mozilla Firefox.

Now that I have installed my Windows XP fonts pack I have access to even more fonts than those supplied with the default Mepis installation. Although, the Mepis system does include Anti-Aliased fonts, so you do not have to stuff around with font settings to get a good looking system. And I put prboom-2.2.6 binaries into my home directory to test SDL, and it worked first time. Very good indeed. I have booted with Kernel 2.6.10 and I prefer to keep it that way. No way I would install fucking Windows XP. Debian GNU/Linux is a millennium better. KDE 3.3.2 is awesome and millions of parsecs ahead of the Windows 2000 and XP Explorer shells. I installed lxdoom and all related packages, so I can enjoy a game of Doom, and I will install Yadex-1.7.0 when I get the chance. If this is how KDE looks now, how well will it be looking when Windows Longhorn is released? KDE will be way ahead of Microsoft Windows. And Ubuntu is also good, but I do not like having to use sudo for everything, that cannot be as secure as using su to change to the root user to perform a task and then switching back. I just prefer that method. You can setup sudo to just run one task, such as nmap. But you do not need for everything surely, unless you are lazy and do not want to type 'su'. I prefer more security. But each to their own. If you wanted to run a certain command, you could use su -c ''updatedb'' to run the command. It will ask you for your password and then return you to your normal shell while the command executes. This is useful when you are in a hurry. But I am very happy with this system, it includes everything you need. Including Wireless LAN support. Very useful for roaming networking with encrypted SSH connections. It is better than Windows XP which can be compromised just by plugging in a specially programmed USB Drive. prboom 2.2.6 works extremely well on this OS, I installed the binaries into $HOME/bin and the prboom.wad into /usr/share/games/doom and it will run very well indeed. Speaking of running very well indeed, I just installed Quake2 and it works extremely well on Mepis. The CD music and all. Been so long since I played it but I still remembered how to get to the Lost Station and get the Super Shotgun. Very good game too. I wish there was a Quake2 styled engine that could run Doom maps. That would be perfect.

Maybe Zdoom will evolve to be able to render dynamic lighting and 3d models for objects. A lot better than sprites. And any system now can run something like that. And you could have high resolution sky textures, like Quake2 has, they could be 256*256, and they would look stunning. As the Quake2 sky textures do. Having dynamic lighting rendered from rockets and fireballs as they travel down a hallway, should not be too hard to do now. Actually, I mentioned earlier about a GL Zdoom port, it had 3d objects, but they were not very good. Surely someone could make models that are of Quake2 quality. But a Quake2 styled 3d engine for Doom I think would be a good idea. Any coders reading this? The Quake2 engine plays so smoothly I think it would be a perfect style of engine to run Doom maps. And with CD music as well, you could chuck in the Quake2 CD and listen to the music while you play. But the coolest thing you could have in the engine would be dynamic lighting cast from textures and flats, that would radiate out irrespective of sectors and light the map realistically. That would be awesome. I am sure that is possible, I have played a lot of Quake2 and I love the ambiance created by the quality of the lighting. That atmosphere is hard to reproduce in Doom. But some come close. But I would love to see Quake2 quality dynamic lighting in a engine for Doom. That would be the ultimate.

Anyway, getting back to Mepis, I have found out that the 'lame' mp3 encoding program is included. This is a bit different from the usual step of bundling oggenc. But it works very well with the KaudioCreator program to rip CD's and collate your music. I ripped a track and encoded it and it was saved in the ~/mp3 directory. From there you can add them to your playlist and play them with xmms-1.2.10. Or xine. whichever you prefer to use. Realplayer 10 is also included and has a wide range of codecs supplied as well which also work with xine for playing many different formats of videos and audio streams. Xine also comes with some nice skins. The inclusion of the SDL libraries is a good move by the developers of this excellent distribution. It means I can get games running without having to install the SDL packages. lxdoom and prboom both run very well and Quake2 runs perfectly. The speed of the game is as fast as I used to play it on Winshit. But now I am using a more modern Operating System. Better than Windows 2000 which I have used on a Dell machine with 512MB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor and it would still slow down. But when I tried Linspire Live CD on it it was lightning fast. Oh well, we all know that Windows is totally shite and the people that use it are suffering in slavery to Microsoft. But some people do not have a choice do they? But really everyone should try Linux, it will work better than Windows, and modern distros like Knoppix and Mepis have outstanding hardware support. So why not give them a try.

I love running Debian with Kernel 2.6.10 because it seems to make programs load more smoothly. Not necessarily faster, but much more smoothly. And Mepis includes gcc & g++ so you can write programs on it and build them without any problems. Very good if you want to install something, but there is only a source tarball. Although installation from source is mostly the best way to get the cutting edge Linux software. Such as Xscreensaver. Mepis includes v4.16, but you can easily install the source tarball v4.18 if you wish. This would give you all of the GL screen savers if you wanted them. But unlike with Mandrake Linux, the Matrix screen saver is included. Redhat would include that but they would leave out mp3 playback. Which is pretty much vital if you are like me and like your music. But being able to play Quake2 on my machine while running Debian is quite cool. I have not played the game for so long, it is hard to remember all of the secrets. But the game is still very good to play after all of these years have gone by. Quake2 has been available for GNU/Linux for a while, But the Debian binaries are the easiest to get running.

Anyway, I am having a good time using Mepis Debian GNU/Linux, it works very well and has the best hardware support. My 100Mps LAN card I had plugged into a laptop running Mepis was auto detected and setup without a hitch. I wish I could say the same for Fedora Core 2. It would not work with it at all. It is a Netgear FA4111 PCMCIA networking adapter. Only about a few months old too. It is good to be able to install GNU/Linux without worrying about hardware compatibility. Service pack 2 for Windows XP has caused a few problems, but I would never run that unless I won a machine with it on or something, I would never actually install it myself. who would?

It is strange though, the libraries in /usr/lib for the Xmms modplug player were installed, but the actual files that enabled it were not available in the /usr/lib/xmms/Input/ directory. I put them in ~/.xmms/Plugins/Input/ directory and the problem was fixed. I have installed the SDL-1.2.8 libraries and now I have the include files for compiling SDL applications. I am working on SDL Doom and have made some headway with this excellent application. I have made headway with the new cheats I am including in this game. I have idcd for extra ammo and idkill to make yourself a zombie. I have fixed the problems with the mouse support when it was running with SDL-1.2.8. It now works very well, and i have made the Spectre demons a little more transparent. Read the README and the Changelog for more information.

Using -grabmouse is stupid, when you could have the mouse support loaded automatically by the game. Everyone uses a mouse to play games these days. Anyway, it works now, all it needs is a simpler .doomrc that allows you to remap keys. Or a linux version of DOS Doom's setup.exe. That would be sweet. Anyway, this is greatly improved on the default linuxdoom-1.10 source and well worth a look. If anyone can get rid of the low detail mode and make a better configuration file format then feel free to pitch in.

Full credit for the SDL port goes to Sam Lantinga who ported this excellent game to an excellent game library. Now it works better than ever. Thanks heaps!

http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/ Check out his site!

Cityrail in Sydney have brought out a 'new and improved' timetable for the train commuters, that means they have to get to the station earlier to catch their trains. The trains run slower so they made everyone arrive at the station earlier to catch their trains because they can pretend that the service is efficient. What a load of bullshit. The trains are running at the same speed in mid-2005 as they were in the 1930's! Now why do we not get rid of the modern trains and get the old romantic steam trains back. They were efficient. And probably faster too. If Cityrail could actually hire staff that actually did some work for a change instead of spending most of the day standing around smoking, then they might get some work done. If they are running the trains so slowly in the interests of safety, what state are the tracks in then? Our Amish styled agrarian society is coming, soon we will be going around in horses and carts and riding horses. who needs trains anyway? And they are thinking of selling Telecommunications off to the highest bidder, what is our country coming to? We will have nothing left for ourselves if this happens. Our country is lagging behind just about every other country in the world, such as Korea and Japan and America and Britain and Thailand. Need I go on? Getting back to the SDL Doom port I am working at improving, I have made significant headway with improved game mechanics. I have pulled in some code from dosdoom v0.61 and now the cheats are laid out in actual letters instead of hexadecimal upper case ascii. Now it is much easier to add new cheats. I think this game is quite good right now, I just wish I could get rid of the randomly pitched sounds. But something I would like to add are obituary messages that are shown after you are eaten by a Demon or something. I could just add char deathMSG[40]; in the code and then

sprintf(deathMSG 'Player was murdered by a %s', killer);

plyr-message = deathMSG;


something like the above would do. should not be too hard to do either. it would be quite cool.

unsigned char cheat_noclip_seq[] =

{

/*

0xb2, 0x26, 0xea, 0x2a, 0xb2, // idspispopd

0xea, 0x2a, 0xf6, 0x2a, 0x26, 0xff

*/

'i','d','s','p','i','s','p','o','p','d',0xff

};


or like the above code. which line is better and easier to edit?

I think I know the answer to that. whose idea was it anyway to have the code like this?

0xb2, 0x26, 0xea, 0x2a, 0xb2, // idspispopd

0xea, 0x2a, 0xf6, 0x2a, 0x26, 0xff


when this is better?

'i','d','s','p','i','s','p','o','p','d',0xff


much much better. Anyway, I have put in a message that appears when you die and it works, but I need to work out how to get the name of the monster that killed the player. I tried plyr->attacker, but that did not work. There must be a simpler way to do it even if I have to write my own functions to do it. Once I get that working I will be happy. I know all of what I am doing has already been done, but I like the challenge of doing it all again myself. Building on the work of Chi Hoang that coded dosdoom of course. I have played dosdoom and I liked it but I want to create my own personal Doom source port. One that is still relatively close to the original DOS source. Although I have never seen that. (The source code that is,) I wish the source for the DOS version was released but you cannot have everything. I am happy with what I have accomplished and I am sure I can make something good out of this excellent source port. Another source port for Linux that deserves a plug is Doom Legacy which has many good features and has the death messages feature. Maybe I should ask them how they got it to work. There must be some identifier for the players killer that I could use to write a function to associate it with the corresponding monster. can you do an associative array in C++?

Surely it could work.

I have read an article in the paper's technology section about spyware and other dangers, and I think that the threat is not so bad if you exercised caution and used programs such as Mozilla 1.6 and/or Mozilla Firefox. I use mozilla firefox for Linux and the Windows version running off a USB drive and I have not had any problems with it at all. You can get a flash plugin for running Macromedia Flash applications on the web. This works very well and you can take your bookmarks with you where ever you go. The full Mozilla suite of applications is a good choice to install on your machine if you are running Windows and you want more security. But there are other threats to on line security such as trojans hidden in downloaded software from less reputable sites. But Red Hat Linux users have experienced this as well with the site fedora-redhat offering packages for download that contained a trojan. but if you are careful with your choice of software and do not install any software from disreputable sources, then you should be safe. Much of it comes down to common sense. But many people forget this and just download any cool software from the Internet without checking the source of the software package. Some disreputable MP3 download sites offer some software you must download before you can get the files from their site. But if you install it, you will get a trojan horse installed onto your machine, which can be very hard to remove afterwards.

But as I said, you just need some common sense when using the web. Install Mozilla Firefox or Opera and you will be much safer. 90% of web users still use Internet explorer, but I think it is time for a change. If only someone could do something about SPAM. But at least we can do something about trojans and phishing by using more secure browsers. Internet Explorer 7 is due for release very soon, but I am not holding my breath that it will be more secure, just more bloated. You can run Internet Explorer on Linux with Crossover Office, But I would rather not. Konqueror and Firefox are very stable and good browsers for Linux and have many more useful features. Konqueror has a feature, where you can change the settings and pretend you are using Internet Explorer or Opera. This could be useful if a site will not let you in unless you are using IE. And it is useful if you are developing a Javascript application that tests for various browsers. Just like the one on my site. It reads the value for the browser and operating system you are using and uses that to print a specific message applicable to whichever browser and operating system you are running.

int main() {



if(browser == “Internet Explorer”)

{

    kill->IE(NukeExplorer());

    printf("IE Nuked. Have a nice day.");

}

else

{

    welcome();

}

sprintf(BUF, 'Thank you for killing IE. You are the best %s.\n', IEKiller.);

return 0;

}


Speaking of dosdoom, I have re-written the v0.61 source code to run on Linux and it works! It runs very well at 640x480 at 65000 colors. The monsters look glorious especially the Baron of hell and the Demons. It uses translucency for some items and support for CD music and MP3 and MOD playback. I only had to remove stupid asm code from the source to get it to work.

asm("

    movl _SCREENWIDTH, %%eax

    movl $rdc8width1+2, %%ebx

    movl %%eax, (%%ebx)

    movl $rdc8width2+2, %%ebx

    movl %%eax, (%%ebx)

    ":::"%eax","%ebx");

} // Wtf?


If anyone can tell me what the above code sample does, I will be very happy indeed. Why not use a freaking block of C code instead? asm sucks arse. I know it has something to do with the high resolution screenwidth settings, but they work perfectly well on my system without that code.

Linux Battlestar 2.6.10 #1 Sun Jan 23 20:56:15 EST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

The above line is the specification of my current system. I am running Debian GNU/Linux with Kernel 2.6.10 and current versions of ALSA and OSS. I should be able to get the sound support working on Linux and be able to move my changes to the sdl_doom code over to the dosdoom engine. Which I think will be a preferred base for my project. I only really need to get the sound working and I will be happy.

Anyway, I have installed gvim and blackbox onto my Mepis Linux system and it works very well with the utra minimalist desktop provided by the Debian package. Mepis only came with VI, so I had to install vim to get an editor that was more fun to use than zile. Although zile _is_ a good editor. But I like vim. And mcedit. But I really do like this Debian OS. Much better than Windows, and you cannot repeat that often enough. I have installed the zsh shell in place of bash and I have to say it is much better with regards to automatically displaying completions for various commands. When you are using a command such as ./configure it will display the available commands that you can use with it such as --with-x and --without-x ect when you are using the tab key for the auto completion features. This is an excellent feature and something that bash seems to lack, BASH can display auto completions for various things, but not the same as zsh. And I can use my bash functions in zsh just as well as in bash. And I am preferring the Gnome desktop environment over the KDE environment, as it seems to be much more smooth in operation and just feels much cooler. I installed a new GTK theme engine and setup a very minimalist theme for Gnome that is as fast as possible. My system is far faster than the Redhat Fedora Core 2 and Redhat 9.0 desktops but using the same environment... Very nice indeed. I installed the gnome-themes Debian package and I have a nice selection of themes to choose from. Gnome really does look better than the Crap kiddie look of Windows XP. Really nice. I think that the way that folders are implemented in Gnome is actually very cool and much better than the Windows explorer model. Once you get used to it it is faster to use and I love the nice icons that preview their contents. A feature that has been implemented in Windows Longhorn, but a feature that has been around on Linux for years. And you do not need a 3D card to run Gnome. And I have the Japanese fonts installed so I can display icon names in multibyte text if I desire. In Windows, it is hard to get the Window titles and the interface to display with multibyte text. You can get fonts to display Japanese text in the web browser, but not the interface. You must need to buy a special version of Windows for that locale. Which is silly, Linux comes with support for many locales, and can display the Xfree86 interface in many different languages.

Back to dosdoom, I am having a good success rate with modifying the code, I am going to convert the sound code over to use SDL instead of allegro. Although, Allegro should work, since I have installed version 4.20. maybe, I should just update the Allegro code in the dosdoom game and fix it that way. The last time version 0.61 was worked on was 1997, and it is showing it's age. But I am making inroads. I have added support for the freedoom wadfile with the -freedoom command line option, so this is something, as well I have added all of the cheats from the v0.64 release of dosdoom and updated the killall monsters cheat to kill all of the lost souls that are thrown out when the Pain Elementals die. You can download a latest build of this source port here.
Dosdoom Source.. I have re-done the sound code, and removed all of the sound server code. Now the game runs very fast without -nosound. But there is no sound yet, I need someone to fix the sound using Allegro and get it working.

I have re-coded my viewblog CGI script using code from my guestbook CGI script. This script now works even better and has more features. It badly needed an overhaul and now it is done.

I have added a new page about the zsh shell with a copy of my .zshrc. check it out.