./index.htm

New Metacity theme. I have just added a new metaci...

2007-07-16T17:55:00.000+10:00

New Metacity theme.

I have just added a new metacity theme at:

http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=62338

This is a good looking SVG theme. Enjoy.

And my new GNU/Linux blog is up at:

http://one.fsphost.com/goten/index.htm.

Windows no Buena Vista that's for sure.

2007-07-14T21:11:00.000+10:00

HREF="http://secunia.com/search/?search=windows+vista">http://secunia.com/search
/?search=windows+vista

Here is a list of Windows vulnerabilities fro Windows Vista the most secure
version of Windows yet.

HREF="http://secunia.com/product/13223/?task=statistics">http://secunia.com/
product/13223/?task=statistics

And here is some information about Windows Vista specifically.

Very frightening stuff , and it is the most secure version of Windows yet.

http://secunia.com/graph/?type=cri&period=all&prod=13223

See the above graph for an indication.

I have updated my dark.wad, get the updated file here.

http://www.geocities.com/hungry_mancubus/darkness.zip

You need http://www.geocities.com/hungry_mancubus/dark.zip

and the scythe2.wad from idgames to run this.

New Website update!

2007-07-13T16:19:00.000+10:00

Very sorry about taking so long to update, I have spent my spare time on a
certain project, outlined below. Hello to all those out there in the wide world
Internet, I have missed you all indeed and bid you hello. I have created a
gaming world in a Doom2 wadfile, a map of superb length and breadth. It is a
counterpart to thespire2.wad and I hope a playable and entertaining/horrible
challenge for the elite Doomer. And I have redesigned my website with a tried
and true tables based design. And a svg titlepic. It will not work in Internet
Explorer, so do not expect to see an image if you are using that heap of poor
code masquerading as a browser. What a joke of a web browser. Firefox and opera
are much better browsers and deserve more of the share of the browser market.
Anyway, look below for information and links about my new project.

I have been working on a new map pack for Doom2 using the scythe2 wad. It is
called `The Darkness` and the MAP28 is the largest map I have ever made. (MAP28)
has about 5696 monsters and will be quite a challenge. It took me a long time
to make this level and I am quite proud of it considering it has taken me over
13 months to create this level and I hope someone plays it and enjoys the
quality gaming experience within. There are always places to hide to get away
from the monsters and fire and duck behind pillars to make the game-play fairer
on the player. I will not really be locking the player in a room and then
spawning in a heap of Revenant or Archviles and expecting you to fight them, I
want wide open spaces and corridor fighting where what you see is what you get.
I am not interested in spawning in monsters from the outside in this map, there
are enough there as it is without any more reinforcements. Unless I make a Doom
map of the battle of the Hornburg. Anyone want to make Lord of the rings Doom?
Feel free to pray in the small chapel, it will not save your soul though. I
wanted to outdo TheSpire2.wad and make a gigantic map that has game-play and
challenge aplenty. I hope I have succeeded to that end.

http://geocities.com/
hungry_mancubus/dark.zip.

This file is about 2.5MB. Scythe2.wad required to play. Works with Zdoom. But
best played with prboom 2.4.1. MAP29 - MAP30 use Zdoom features, but will run
with prboom.

Hello Doomworld.com HREF='http://www.doomworld.com'>http://www.doomworld.com. It has been a
long time since I saw you all, I $(echo "hello") to you all! You are all
legends keeping the Doom game alive for the 21st century. I love how the
freedoom project is coming along. I hope to see it finished soon. It has only
been about 14 months anyway, it is not like I abandoned this site forever. I am
enjoying the series `Heroes` on Channel seven in Australia, it has everything,
with cool powers and great storylines which drops on Alias from a great height.
And Sylar is not dead after being ran through by Hiro. Below is the Japanese
Kanji `godsend` which I dug up in the Japanese Language program `Kiten`. I
believe that Sylar will explode underneath the city and he will destroy the
city and the events of the future will come to pass. Hiro is searching out the
ancient Samurai that maybe can help him save the future. And `Doctor Who` is
back as well as the new series `Torchwood` which references the Canary Wharf
invasion of the Cybermen. Which was a cool episode of `Doctor Who.` by the way,
I really enjoyed how they were eventually defeated. Sucked into an alternative
dimensional existance. And Rose went to another dimension where her parents
still existed.

Godsend.

I have just upgraded to Open SUSE 10.2. Now I am enjoying a desktop
experience rivaling Vista, but without the issues with drivers and
viruses/spyware. GNU/Linux has quite a good desktop experience now and
with the Beagle integration, it has super fast desktop searching and
software that is top quality rivaling and exceeding retail software,
especially the security that is superior to such offerings as Norton
Internet Security and other anti-virus and anti-spyware applications that
consume huge amounts of RAM and slow down your machine with the bloated
shit software that these companies release. Now I would never run this
type of shit and I would recommend that you do not either, it is not
worth it. There are alternatives. Hopefully some of you are using them.
Ubuntuu is a popular choice and has a wide software repository and you
can install any software you require with a simple command.

Makes a difference to Wind-Blows Vista, that is based on a user interface
25 years old. Time for a change. I have had quite bad experiences with
Wind-Blows XP and Wind-Blows 2000 and I cannot believe that people will put up
with this willingly. I cannot believe how bad Wind-Blows is sometimes, I can
use it but not without caution and backing up files regularly. I love OpenSuse
GNU/Linux and the icewm desktop running with nautilus drawing a desktop with
icons and the LunaDotHome theme. It looks just like Wind-Blows XP but without
the ugly icons and desktop wallpaper. GNU/Linux always comes with better
wallpaper. And we all know how important that is. I have been using computers
since the first computers that connected to the TV screen. And then I used a
8086 and a 286 and 386 - 486 then a celeron 600 with SIS 620 MB and 64MB or RAM
later upgraded to 128 MB. And I have watched the Wind-Blows interface grow from
the old Wind-Blows 3.0 then Wind-Blows 3.1 and Wind-Blows for work-groups on to
the Wind-Blows `95 and Wind-Blows `98, and the special edition Wind-Blows 98
SE. And I have to say it has not changed much in all that time. We had the web
integration in the Wind-Blows 98 interface, but who really wants to put a web
page on the desktop anyway?

I think the point is that we still are using the same interface that was
designed all this time ago. To do our word processing and database/Internet
browsing that was designed 26 years ago. But it has evolved for better or worse
since then. Now there are sites such as youtube which are used to post idiotic
videos depicting violence and sexual assault. This is all the brain dead users
can come up with. Totally repulsive. And they think it is entertaining, to film
bullying and assault and put it on the Internet for all to see. This shows the
intelligence level of some of those who post on this site. Not all, but
some. Although the brokeback to the future:HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfODSPIYwpQ">
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfODSPIYwpQ video is pretty funny though and
a good display of editing skill. And head and shoulders above a simple on line
video diary. And this makes it special. Better than myspace that allows pages
about suicide and death. Should be some censorship there.

I have put together a new desktop configuration for Fvwm that emulates the
Windows '95 interface but with some good Fvwm features. Such as the desktop
button bar. And it uses a combination of the Afterstep and Windows '95 window
buttons. Get it here: ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc. Save this
file in your ~/.fvwm directory and restart fvwm. I have created this with fvwm
v2.5.16 so I would recommend getting that version to try out my desktop, make
sure that your version uses the PREFIX of /usr as that is where my version is
installed.

I use OpenSuse 10.2 and I have had no problems with it since I
installed my Xine and Mplayer packages. Now Amarok and kaffeine have MP3 and
DVD support and I have also installed xmms for playing my MP3 collection. And
yes I do own the Cd's that I have copied onto my machine. So do not bother
asking about illegal music downloads. Amarok is a good alternative to xmms
though and can minimize to the system tray in KDE which saves space on the
taskbar. And I enabled MP3 support in this program by installing a new xine-lib
package that has the DVD and MP3 support. And Amarok uses the xine-lib backend
to play music, so there you go. I have the support for DVD and MP3 right there.

Kaffeine is also a good fast DVD player and also uses the xine-lib backend. Now
I have full support for proprietary codecs and movies. And better desktops than
the standard WindBlows desktop that uses a task bar and windows on the desktop
and
a start menu. It has been that way since Wind-Blows `95, I think it is time for
a
change and it cannot come too soon. I know there are desktop shell replacements
like Litestep, but they may not work with Wind-Blows Vista. I once used a 286
machine that had 384KB of memory with a 640KB Everex card installed in June
'92. Only 512KB available. Everex only on loan until we got a Bocaram 2MB
from the U.S.A. Nowadays we can install about 4GB of RAM and people might
whine about that. If they are running Wind-Blows Vista and Half Life 2, then you
need some computing power. But not if you are running Microsoft Office and
using the Internet. Surely not. I have a Pentium 2 machine with 350 MMX
processor and 192MB of RAM and I can run a KDE desktop fine. But more power
does not hurt. Although I am writing this in the Kate editor on my openbox
desktop. I just move the mouse wheel over the desktop to switch desktops
instantly. It is just as fast as using larswm, and more attractive with a nice
bright orange slim-line theme. A Pentium 4 can run KDE just fine and infinitely
faster than Wind-Blows 2000/XP. And that is running off a CD! Wind-Blows Vista
needs
quite more computing resources to be able to run the Aero Glass interface. Try
running any modern Wind-Blows on a 286. Remember 640KB is all you will ever
need.
A very famous saying indeed, like `Trusted Computing.' Although it does not
apply to Wind-Blows XP SP2 or Vista. I have been using GNU/Linux on and off for
a
while and I have been more impressed with it than Wind-Blows or PC Dos or any
other operating system. Although freedos is not bad, I use it to play Quake. I
have also used it to run Boom.exe which can run my massive `Realm of Darkness`
map, a giant massive map for Doom2 that is larger than thespire2.wad. And
contains 5696 monsters and will be a massive challenge indeed for the avid
Doomer. No other map is like mine and runs so well on a relatively slow
machine, well slower than the system requirements of thespire2.wad anyway. When
I type tntem to kill all of the monsters, my map runs better than thespire2.wad
and even though it is quite large it is not an easy map to get lost in. It is
quite linear but with some good secrets in it.

I have heard that after Wind-Blows Vista was released
a persons computer stopped working very slow and their dual core machine is now
slower than a single core machine. They are now considering moving to
GNU/Linux. If they are reading this, simcity 3000 runs on GNU/Linux as far as I
know and if the version you are talking about is newer then you could try and
run it with wine. I have run Unreal, quake2 and Unreal Tournament with wine and
they ran perfectly. And you will have more security too. Whether with fedora
core 6 or OpenSuse 10.2. And regularly having the machine back up the log
messages with logrotate and having access to the system logfiles through
/var/log/messages. Something you do not have access to in Wind-Blows. And the
mono .NET framework for running such applications as Beagle for instantly
searching for documents via keywords. e.g you have a document that contains
information about locatedb. You just load up the beagle-search program and type
in locate and it will find it. I have about 10G of stuff in my home partition,
/dev/hda2 and it helps to be able to search it so fast. This file I am typing
in is indexed every time I save it, so I can search it as soon as I have
finished typing and it will find it. Try that on Wind-Blows. And the kate editor
in KDE has a auto-completion function like OpenOffice that auto-completes long
words when I type them again. I am a horrible typist, so it really helps. By the
way,I have heard about a machine that was not connected to the Internet when
this happened, so I have no suggestions unless it is the curse of the stale
Wind-Blows installation. Time to reformat and re-install again. Although it
could be good if you have the space to create a ghost image once you have
re-installed and if you need to re-install then you can just roll back to that
ghost image by
running the ghost program once again and restoring the image. make sure you make
an image of the actual partition and not just the contents. And it is a myth
that having a large number of files in one directory will slow down the machine,
that is not true, but having a bloated registry will slow the machine down.

That is why a re-install fixes things for a while. But it slows down over time
as applications are installed and removed. Total shit, who in their right mind
would award a passing score to an OS like this if it was a college assignment.
Not me that is for sure. I would throw in right in the trash can and burn it
with thermite to make sure it was never recovered. And then burn the ash with a
flamethrower. I bet OS2 was a slightly better OS even though it was cursed with
the autoexec.bat and config.sys. Actually Beos would be a good choice, even a
UNIX based OS, like Darwin. Anything is better than using Wind-Blown XP or
Wind-Blown Vista.

I do not need to worry about the installation of
such things as Norton Internet Security or Norton 360. Or even Windows Live
onecare. Norton 360 is AU$129.00 and Windows Live onecare is AU$59.00, which is
a lot of money to spend on something that will take up so much memory. Sometimes
about 30MB. But I do not need to worry about that at all. Only those Windows
people with Vista and XP. Anyway I have been looking at Red Flag Linux and here
is a nice screen shot: maps/redflag.png. This is
it. I cannot get the
installation program to load in qemu. The distribution is based on Red Hat Linux
with kernel 2.6.9 and Gnome 2.10. Quite old packages but I am sure it works just
fine. And it is fitting for a Communist country to embrace an alternative to
Windows. It also comes with KDE 3.2.1 and full MP3 & DVD support. Which is more
than can be said for Suse. And Xorg 6.8.2. Unlike Red Hat to come with support
for non-free codecs but this is about being free from Redmond. Totally better
than a Mac. I will treasure his distro as it is not
available over the Internet. Not yet anyway, but it is nothing you cannot get
for free by installing Fedora Core 6 or Ubuntuu 7.0.4, which is quite a good
fast desktop despite the many problems I had setting it up. I set the GRUB
option in the installation program to install it to hd3 which is /dev/hda4 or
so I thought. I had to install GRUB to the partition manually. I know how to do
this but a new user would not know at all. And I had to setup X manually by
editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file with vi and importing the monitor section
from my xorg.conf from my suse installation manually since the installation
program did not set this up at all. A new user would have no hope at all of
setting this up without searching the web for hours and hours searching web
forums.

But it does work well when the desktop is up. Very fast indeed. But I had the
experience to get it setup. It should be easier. They should squeeze on the sax2
tool from SuSE, available from: ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/sax/sax2.tar.bz2. Once
you have this installed you can just run sudo /usr/sbin/sax2 and it loads up a
graphical tool to setup the video card and monitor, mouse ect. It is a very good
tool and it could be included in the Gnome menus. Then you could exit out to the
GDM login screen and press Ctrl-Alt-F2 and login there and type sudo
/etc/init.d/gdm restart to reload it with the new resolutions. I got Ubuntuu
running @ 1280x800 @ 82HZ. Very comfortable indeed. It comes with Gnome 2.18.1
Gimp 2.2.13 and the usual Totem and Rythmbox packages. I love it indeed, it is
fast and the software works very well.

I have added a new guest book script to my website. I
am getting annoyed with the current scripts, so I coded this script for myself.
It works very well too, very professional looking. I like it because I have
added some tags I can use to print C code just by using <CODE> tags. Just
like BBCODE. I just need to setup archiving and I will be set! It should not be
that hard to set up a archiving system, I just need to look around and I will
find something. Anyway, I have total control over the posting process and that
makes me very happy indeed. See it here:

http://bejiitas_wrath.tripod.com/cgi-bin/mybook.cgi.

I am writing these words on my Gnome 2.18.1
Ubuntuu desktop. It is very fast and responsive on the Pentium 2 machine I
installed it on. And with 2MB of video and 192MB of RAM. Rhythmbox 0.10.0 runs
fine too and plays Audio cd's and ogg files perfectly, a good alternative to
WindBlown Media Player. That program is quite memory hungry. Why when you set
text wrapping in gedit, it still will not wrap like Kate in KDE will? I wanted
to type up my blog posting in gedit but now I am using OpenOffice 2.2. Which
loads quite fast now. Gnome loads so fast on my Pentium 2 that the splash screen
only shows for about 3 seconds. Much of an improvement on Gnome 2.12 in Ubuntu
Breezy. That was cool and I still have the CD on hand. Typing on OpenOffice.org
is so fast, the whole desktop experience with Ubuntu is faster than a Pentium 4
Dell I used once, running WindBlown 2000. That machine was notoriously slow and
lockup prone. Ubuntu came with some sample content and it is quite good too.
Make sure that when you are using OpenOffice, that you go to
Tools->Options->Language Settings->Writing aids and setup the spelling checker
to check spelling as you type as this enables the auto-completion features of
OpenOffice. And the memory settings as well and halve all the settings. As well
as changing the number of undo from 100 to about 20 or so, then you save memory.
Without the virus worries that WindBlown carries with it and the threat of
spy-ware. Although the greatest threat to the bank balance of the person
concerned other than credit card fraud are those Nigerian scams. I have seen
people on 60 minutes here in Australia that have been suckered in by this scam
and were sending money to the person involved. Anyone stupid enough to do that
should go back to where they came from and return their brain for a refund! The
person found out it was a scam and still had tinges of hope that their was a
chance and wanted to send more money!

But enough of that. Ubuntu's Gnome screensaver finally works as expected, there
is a power management option on the screen saver dialog and you just click that
to setup the power management. It is finally a rival to the xscreensaver
program. And did I say that the desktop is faster than Windows XP and 2000?
Better than WindBlown XP, someone I know was using that and it was threatening
to lock up over and over again and running slowly, but that is what you get when
you are running WindBlown rather than GNU/Linux. Microsoft could make WindBlown
better if they put more effort into actually fixing bugs and fixing up the
Internet Explorer browser to support web standards better, but no they just put
together a crap browser and Operating System that does not work properly for
everyone. I have just seen another example of the stupidity of those who post to
youtube. A boy was bashed and it was posted on youtube. It is time that this
site was more closely monitored and censored. The Internet does not need viewing
materials like this clogging up the main pipelines connecting continents. There
are surely some people who do not like watching random violence. I have just got
Xandros 4.0 my first ever GNU/Linux distribution I ever really used. I used it
for working with Word documents and it worked well with my tables based layout.
And it is now a newer version and better than ever. It is better than something
like Windows '98 which I also had at that time. And it was more stable and could
use the Windows fonts for OpenOffice. I would prefer it to Windows Vista.
Although Ubuntu is fast and has a good Gnome 2.18.1 desktop versus the KDE 3.4.2
desktop with Xandros. But it hopefully will not matter if you just want a good
desktop. I prefer to run Gnome as it has just the right feel. Superior to
Windows and the Mac. Windows 7 is being planned for a 2010 release, I wonder if
they will have the support in the OS for the table computer that I have seen on
the news, I mean that is awesome technology and users deserve to have something
that is a total revolution in computing. I assume that you could have a on
screen keyboard and be able to type on the screen in word 2010. Using Gnome
would be cool with the spatial view mode on and people sitting around the
computer and moving and resizing the Windows. Totally awesome technology and it
is moving away from the keyboard and mouse comfortable though they are for short
periods, I do not know how you would play Unreal Tournament on it though :). But
Kudos to Microsoft for inventing something useful for once. Now you can have a
table sized BSOD... I just rented a DVD of 'Nosferatu A symphony of horror'. The
best Vampire movie ever made. Despite the comical death of the Vampire by
walking past a window with the sun shining in and vanishing instantly.

Back to the table computer, it is a shame it is running Windows, I am more at
home with Totem and Helix Banshee rather than Windows XP/Vista and Windows Media
player. I am running OpenSuSE 10.2 and the Gnome applications like Helix Banshee
and Totem have MP3 support, very nice indeed, totem can load xmms play-lists and
give you a nice listing of all your music files. And if I set something up like
DMA on my CDROM/DVD drive, I do not need to re-boot after every simple change
like Windows. And Windows Vista does not have a choice of window managers like
GNU/Linux and FreeBSD or even Open Solaris UNIX. That is better than BSD in my
opinion, easier to setup USB thumb drives and other drivers. Sure, it is fun
trying to find the mount point but you get used to it. Windows XP mounts USB
drives and you have the small icon in the system tray that you click to manage
the drives, versus having a device icon on the desktop like Gnome and KDE. That
makes it much easier to see what devices are installed. And Windows has many
more virus and spy-ware infections as we well know despite the security center
in Service pack 2 and greater security in Windows Vista. And Windows Vista has
high system requirements and some hardware will not work with it at all. I have
heard of 5 people who bought it at a large Australian chain store and the next
day, there were 5 angry customers returning it and demanding help to get it
working. The store-person had to spend 5 hours in the store trying to get it
running on the machines in the shop that have more than enough system
requirements to run Vista and without success, and he has 20 years experience!
What hope does the normal mum and dad user have unless they bought it already
installed on the machines? What a crap release. I have the KDE desktop running
now with the crystal kwin theme that gives me the Aero glass look and a beagle
powered start menu, and it runs on a Pentium 2. If a store-person with 20 years
experience cannot get it running on a fast enough machine in the store with the
official Vista DVD, then it cannot be that good, when Ubuntu would have worked
perfectly. And the feisty fawn release has Gnome 2.18.1 and that is lightning
fast to load. By Gnome 2.20, it will be so fast, that you will not need a splash
screen as it would only be shown for a split second. Then it would be totally
cool. As predicted on the LUGradio podcast when they were discussing hacking on
Gnome to speed up the loading time. Well it has come true and the desktop loads
like lightning and is better for it too. KDE 3.5.5 in OpenSuse 10.2 has a
instant search option in the start menu just like Windows Vista. But the system
requirements are a little lower for this desktop.

I have the Gnome 2.16.1 desktop running now, and I could not be happier with any
desktop, bar KDE. Windows Vista is too new and does not have wide hardware
support just yet. I just upgraded to kernel 2.6.20.7 and that has greater
hardware support. And it will work on any Pentium or Pentium 2 computer or up.
There is support for emulating a second and third mouse button with certain
keys. Useful for running it on a Mac. The Bluecurve theme for GTK2.0 is the best
in conjunction with the newer Bluecurve theme for Metacity. The Clearlooks style
makes the buttons and Gnome menu entries too large, even at 1280x800, I prefer
the small rendering of menu options in Bluecurve. And as I have said it is a
great reminder having the icons for the removable media on the Desktop, instead
of having a small icon in the system tray. I only have the software updates icon
and the uim running in my system tray. And I have quite a lot of memory left.
The price of petrol is going to rise because of the climate change debacle.
Which is a heap of shit. The ice is melting but I doubt that this is going to be
fixed because you install a couple of light bulbs and some solar panels. There
have been ice ages before and then there was a warming into the climate we have
now, and maybe it is just warming naturally, that would make sense to me. 12,000
years ago there was a breaking of the ice age and warming of Europe and the
Americas, this could happen once again, and there is not much that can be done
about this either, the warm ocean currents could slow down & stop without
warning and there would be freezing of Europe. Are we going to try to restart
the gulf stream? Sounds like a good movie to me, we have had restarting the
earth's core and the Sun, now we should have them trying to fix the Gulf Stream.
But what could you call it? Fixing the Gulf Stream I assume. You could have the
cast of The Core in it. Even Rat, the `elite` cracker, and the mad general with
the earthquake gun. A fat lot of good that would do though, but you need a
military angle in the movie. But we have had saving the sun, maybe we need to
make something environmentally minded. Although, that has been done to death. A
good disaster movie would be about the Windows Vista release. Different to the
excellent 10.5 apocalypse and the Krakatoa documentary movie. 10.5 apocalypse
was an awesome movie especially when the American continent split in two. They
were not too worried about the lava river running across the continent, but
they were crying and upset when the ocean ran in the ends and quenched the
lava. For some reason lava is not as bad as water? But it was a good movie.

I had a good day today, I pulled a tree out of the ground with my bare hands,
sure it was rotten underneath and I just rocked it back and forwards and it
broke underneath and then I just moved it over the ground and put it beside the
house out of the way. I just had a large hole to fill in and that was that. I
would like to see the average fat comic book guy Star Trek fan do that! And we
have more firewood. Better for the environment than using Electricity. And it
is good to be able to keep warm when the cold weather descends. Sure climate
change is BS but those people buying expensive solar panels would not know this
at all. And they use Windows Vista and put up with constant patching and
service packs and crashes. Although there are people that send money overseas
to those Nigerian scammers and get grifted good. But they are pretty dumb to
fall for that. I would not be that stupid at all, and I would think that most
intelligent people would not either. I have KDE running now with the Vista
styled start menu and Aero Glass window borders and it runs perfectly with full
support for all of my hardware and software. I do not have to wait for software
vendors to release Vista capable versions of anti-virus and anti-spyware
software do I? Australia is getting a new broadband network that will have a
capacity of 12 MegaBits per second. But someone overseas is wanting to put in a
network with a capacity of one gigabyte. A huge difference there. Some
countries like Japan have rolled out Gigabit Internet connections. Much more
bandwidth and super fast movie downloads, better than a Wimax connection that
the Australian Governnment has promised for country areas. A wireless
connection is inferior to a fibre optic connection that could have huge
bandwidth. I would prefer to have ADSL over a line than a satellite or Wireless
connection which can be hijacked by someone nearby. But this is what we are
getting like it or not. I mean, the standard wireless network that businesses
have can be hijacked by someone outside the building. And there is Internet
Television which requires a fast connection speed of 4 MegaBits per second. But
we can only get something like 512 Kilobits per second. But people think that
is fast broadband, but it is dial up speeds compared to what the other
countries have on offer. I would love to have a 100MBits per second Internet
connection. That would enable very fast movie downloads and watching streamming
television online. Someone has written in to a Computer Magazine about the
Telstra Next G network and he was charged AU$15.00 per megabyte! That means it
would cost about AU$600.00 to download the Linux Kernel! It is the new Mobile
phone network offering super fast downloads, but at AU$0.015c per kilobyte
which is AU$15.00 per megabyte. You would not want to download Windows Vista
service pack 1 by any means. 200 megabytes would cost AU$3000.00! Downloading
Ubuntuu Feisty Fawn would cost AU$10455.00!!!! Totally outrageous. It is
AU$150.00 per 10 megabytes. I am sure that in Europe it would be very cheap to
get a fast broadband plan that offers a generous download allowance and super
fast speeds. 512 Kilobits per second is _not_ super fast broadband. When I was
studying at a college once we had 2 MEG broadband. You could view TV quality
streaming videos. Cool.

I just upgraded to a DVD burner and new soundcard. The DVD drive was no problem
to setup, but the soundcard had to be setup in the Yast control center. But
that only took a minute, I just deleted the old soundcard and setup the new
soundcard as the default. Then I was able to back up my data on a new 4.7GiB
disk. Very nice indeed. I wrote 2.7GiB and it took less time at 8x than my old
CD burner took to write 697MB! But it is a 16x drive.

There has been another terrorist attack in London, involving a car bomb. If I
caught those responsible for these attacks I would hang them on steel hooks
from wires attached to a merry go round and set it spinning and they would spin
around and around hanging from the wires and metal hooks. It would be an
interesting tourist attraction, until they died and the bodies started to rot,
that would not be pleasant with rotten flesh flying off and hitting the crowd.
Or they could be brought into the medical labs of Cabal corp and used for
horrible medical experiments. Like in the start of the movie `House on haunted
hill` with the evil doctor. They could be in my employ and work for my evil
Cabal corp torturing information out of suspects of terrorist acts. Anyone who
commits acts of terror should be hunted down and dealt with very harshly. They
are not helping their cause by doing these things. They willingly incur more
attacks against their countries by attacks like these against London and
America with the World Trade center bombing and the 2001 WTC attacks. Killing
3000 people in one day. They should all be burned alive and subjected to the
worst atrocites imaginable. Nothing should be shied away from to get these
people to reveal their sources and we can finally catch Osama bin laden and
all the other terrorist masterminds and gas them in the gas chambers or grill
them alive on a barbecue. Either is fine by me. I do not believe entirely that
the September 11 terrorists where responsible for the attacks. The Pentagon
attack does not make sense, we should seek out the truth and find those
responsible. They should suffer in Jail for the rest of time and find no peace
even in death. Those in power expect us to believe that there was a plane that
hit the pentagon and then left no wreckage after the impact, considering the
damage usually caused after the crash of a plane on the ground. Totally
bullshite, a crashed plane would have destroyed half the building. There would
be a huge fire and the building would have burned down. And there was a
petroleum station nearby that had a security camera that filmed the incident
and the film was confiscated. That is not a good way to help the cause in my
opinion. If there was something amiss they would not want anyone getting ahold
of it. There is no amity between the government and the people over this
horrible attack on it's own people just to further the war and the Bush
administration. But Osama Bin Laden was releasing those terror tapes praising
terrorist acts, so he is still wanted, but maybe not the instigator of the main
attacks. And building 7 collapsed later in the day for no apparent reason.
Maybe because of the vibrations from the two buildings (WTC) collapsing but
maybe not. Surely the vibrations were not long lived and intense enough to
cause such a weakening of the building structure as strategically placed
demolition charges. But maybe will come out, Surely the blinkered American
public do not believe this! I did at first but now in retrospect I am
questioning all the lies and half-truths in the media. Especially Fox 'news'
and CNN. I would rather watch fiction, at least that is based on truth to some
extent.

Check this image out! KDE 3.5.5's copy dialog:

KDE Copy dialog.

I wonder if
Vista has something like this? I wanted to copy an image into the folder on my
desktop and there of course was a file already there. But it looks coolness
indeed. Do you like the Aero Glass looking KDE crystal theme? It sure looks
nice and cool when you have a nice background image to show through the window
borders.

Cooler than the London bombing suspects, they should be released into the cold
wastelands out of the movie `frankenstein` and hunted by the monster or torn
apart by werewolves. That would be good justice indeed.

facility.zip updated. And new KDE!

2006-07-03T11:22:00.000+10:00

I have just got more work done on my facility.wad and I have got some 256*256 pixel textures which works very well with prboom 2.4. I tried this with the latest Zdoom and it crashes, so better to use prboom to play this wad. http://www.geocities.com/hungry_mancubus/facility.zip. This map is quite a good looking level and worth a play or two.

I have finished the 256*256 pixel textures and got them to work properly, but they will not work with Zdoom 2.0. There is some problem with that source port as they work perfectly in prboom 2.4.1. But I have put an old map of mine in as MAP08 and it is looking very good with the new sky texture and using my new hi-res textures.

I was looking through my collection of magazine DVD's and I found a collection of KDE 3.4.92 tarballs and I ended up installing over my KDE 3.4 installation. Now after the quite lengthy compilation process of the KDE artwork, libraries and kdebase tarballs I have a much better and faster desktop. So the long process was worth it. And it took less frustration and pain than installing Gnome from source. Although I have installed a Gnome 2.10 desktop from source when I was running Zenwalk Linux. But the KDE 3.4.92 desktop is a lot faster and that is what matters. I could not be happier. Running Kernel 2.6.16.16 I have good hardware support and perfect ALSA sound functioning. I can have a MP3 file playing and at the same time play Doom with prboom and have the PSX Doom mp3s playing while playing doom and have a good soundtrack for my Doom games.

Now I can get back to working on my Doom project.

More Linux News.

2006-06-27T11:24:00.000+10:00

Just upgraded to a new 80 gigabyte hard drive to replace my old and worn
drive which was quite small and not very fast. Here is my partition layout.

2-:$> df -Hla
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 33G 2.4G 30G 8% /
proc 0 0 0 - /proc
sysfs 0 0 0 - /sys
tmpfs 98M 13k 98M 1% /dev/shm
devpts 0 0 0 - /dev/pts
/dev/hda2 33G 166M 33G 1% /home
/dev/hda4 15G 4.0G 11G 27% /usr
usbfs 0 0 0 - /proc/bus/usb
/dev/hdc 0.0k 0.0k 0.0k - /media/cdrecorder
/dev/sda 0.0k 0.0k 0.0k - /media/128M

This is much better, now I have installed SUSE Linux 10.0 and have got Gnome
and Kde and Icewm, Windowmaker, fvwm, mwm and twm installed and just about
everything else you could ever want. Very cool indeed. I installed FreeBSD,
but that is quite frustrating I would rather run Linux. Kde is not so bad
after all, I have 192MB of RAM and 1GB of /swap space, I am not complaining
at all. It runs very smoothly and fast even without recompiling the kernel.
I have the vanilla 2.6.16.16 sources from kernel.org, and I will install
that very soon, I will setup a premptive kernel built for my processor and
enable DMA for faster DVD playback.

You should always replace your hard drive before it crashes of course. I
have helped someone replace their hard drive once, but they were running
Windows `98. (shudder) And he is browsing the web with Internet Explorer
6.0. There is a new thing that the Woolworths supermarkets are doing where
they have AU$20.00 cards you buy and then you go to a website and you can
enter the code from the prepaid card and buy music to download. Problem is
that the website only works with Internet Explorer version 6.0 and you need
to have ActiveX enabled to use it. Totally bogus. Surely you can setup a
webserver that can authenticate the codes entered and then allow the
downloads without needing ActiveX? They do say to use Ietab extension for
FireFox but obviously if you are on BSD or OSX or Linux you cannot use that
as the Ietab extension uses the IE rendering engine through Firefox. And I
actually tried the website with IE6.0 and ActiveX enabled and it still would
not work. And yet the cool features in Hotmail are cool though, like the
calendar and the built in spellchecker. You right click on the word and you
get spellchecker corrections. I tried that in Mozilla 1.6 running on a
Linspire 5.0 live CD and it worked perfectly. The one Microsoft creation I
actually like to use. And it underlines spelling mistakes.

I went on a long walk along the railway line as I like to do frequently and
I was on a high part of the railway track, where a waterway went underneath
and I climbed down to the bottom to have a look through the huge 10ft tall
metal pipe that went under the railway tracks and there was a large
weatherproof microphone dangling down from the top which had a cable going
from it to a solar panel. Which is strange, as I was examining it the owner
of the property came close and yelled at me to leave, whence I then
frantically scrabbled 15ft up the steep slope and down the other side and
scrambled across the rocky slope and made it 15kms back home. It is strange
though, why would a person living on a farm need such security? Very strange
days indeed. Maybe he is growing drugs.

I have just enabled mp3 playback in SUSE Linux 10.0. I copied a fresh
vanilla copy of the xmms library and overwrote the existing file with the
vanilla unmodified copy of the xmms library. So that the directory appears
like so.

[ Jobs 0. PWD: /usr/lib. bash 3.00.16. ]
2-:$> lu | grep xmms
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2006-06-26 19:21 libxmms.so.1 ->
libxmms.so.1.3.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 46K 2006-06-26 19:21 libxmms.so.1.3.1
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 176 2006-06-26 03:32 xmms

The existing file was larger than the one I replaced it with, But now I can
play MP3's and have no more problems with getting that to work, although the
SUSE 10.0 AmaroK program can play MP3's but using that is far from ideal. I
ran /sbin/ldconfig after copying the file and all was well. So that is how
you get MP3 playback working. Just replace the libxmms.so.1.3.1 with a
unmodified version from a Mandrake Linux or other package and then run
/sbin/ldconfig and then you will be able to play MP3's. I had a Gentoo Linux
DVD so I used that to get the files from and patch my system to get it
working. Just make sure you install a file from the same version, e.g
version 1.2.10. But this really does work very well, then just restart XMMS
and you will be set.

[ Jobs 0. PWD: ~/.xmms/Plugins/Input. bash 3.00.16. ]
13-:$> lu
total 160K
drwxr-xr-x 2 gandalf users 112 2006-06-26 21:08 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 gandalf users 72 2006-06-26 21:08 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gandalf users 990 2006-06-25 05:05 libmpg123.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gandalf users 154K 2006-06-26 19:21 libmpg123.so

Here is my xmms plugins folder, I have copied the MP3 plugin to this folder
and it works very well once you have replaced the xmms library in the
/usr/lib/xmms folder. Now I have also deleted the /media folder and I am
using /etc/fstab to control hotplugging of USB devices. Here it is below:

1-:$> cat /etc/fstab

/dev/hda1 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1
1
/dev/hda2 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1
2
/dev/hda4 /usr reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1
2
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0
0
proc /proc proc defaults 0
0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0
0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0
0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0
0
/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd iso9660
noauto,ro,procuid,nosuid,noexec 0 0
none /subdomain subdomainfs noauto 0 0
/dev/sda /mnt/sda auto noauto,user,rw,noexec
0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 auto noauto,user,rw,noexec
0 0
/dev/sdb /mnt/sdb auto noauto,user,rw,noexec
0 0
/dev/sdc /mnt/sdc auto noauto,user,rw,noexec
0 0

</blockquote>

As you can see I have filled out lines to control adding USB thumb drives
and they allow me to mount and unmount them as a normal user and have normal
write access to them. Below is the content of the 90-storage-nosync.fdi file
you are supposed to add to the system to remove the need to mount USB
devices with sync which results in abominably slow access times. But my way
using /etc/fstab is way better. You are supposed to use the following file
by using lshal and using the resulting output to get the uuid of your device
and putting that into the file, but I could not make any sense of that.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>

<match key="block.is_volume" bool="true">
<match key="volume.fsusage" string="filesystem">
<match key="volume.uuid" string="UUID">
<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.sync" type="bool">false</merge>
</match>
</match>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

</blockquote>

I mean really!

1-:$> lshal | grep usb

lshal version 0.5.4
storage.physical_device =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438_if0'
(string)
storage.bus = 'usb' (string)
info.parent =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438_if0_scsi_host_scsi_device_lun0'
(string)
udi =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438_if0_scsi_host_scsi_device_lun0'
info.udi =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438_if0_scsi_host_scsi_device_lun0'
(string)
info.parent =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438_if0_scsi_host'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path_device =
'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0/host2/target2:0:0/2:0:0:0'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path =
'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0/host2/target2:0:0/2:0:0:0'
(string)
udi =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438_if0_scsi_host'
info.udi =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438_if0_scsi_host'
(string)
info.parent =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438_if0'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path_device =
'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0/host2' (string)
udi =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438_if0'
info.udi =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438_if0'
(string)
linux.subsystem = 'usb' (string)
usb.interface.protocol = 80 (0x50) (int)
usb.interface.subclass = 6 (0x6) (int)
usb.interface.class = 8 (0x8) (int)
usb.interface.number = 0 (0x0) (int)
info.linux.driver = 'usb-storage' (string)
usb.linux.sysfs_path =
'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0' (string)
usb.configuration_value = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.num_configurations = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.num_interfaces = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.device_class = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.device_subclass = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.device_protocol = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.vendor_id = 3744 (0xea0) (int)
usb.product_id = 8552 (0x2168) (int)
usb.vendor = 'Ours Technology, Inc.' (string)
usb.product = 'USB Mass Storage Interface' (string)
usb.device_revision_bcd = 512 (0x200) (int)
usb.max_power = 200 (0xc8) (int)
usb.num_ports = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.linux.device_number = 5 (0x5) (int)
usb.serial = '61100740ED069438' (string)
usb.speed_bcd = 4608 (0x1200) (int)
usb.version_bcd = 512 (0x200) (int)
usb.is_self_powered = false (bool)
usb.can_wake_up = false (bool)
usb.bus_number = 1 (0x1) (int)
info.bus = 'usb' (string)
info.parent =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path_device =
'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0' (string)
linux.sysfs_path = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0'
(string)
udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438'
info.udi =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_ea0_2168_61100740ED069438'
(string)
linux.subsystem = 'usb' (string)
usb_device.bus_number = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.can_wake_up = false (bool)
usb_device.is_self_powered = false (bool)
usb_device.version_bcd = 512 (0x200) (int)
usb_device.speed_bcd = 4608 (0x1200) (int)
usb_device.serial = '61100740ED069438' (string)
usb_device.linux.device_number = 5 (0x5) (int)
usb_device.num_ports = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.max_power = 200 (0xc8) (int)
usb_device.device_revision_bcd = 512 (0x200) (int)
usb_device.product = 'Transcend JetFlash 2.0 / Astone USB Drive' (string)
usb_device.vendor = 'Ours Technology, Inc.' (string)
usb_device.product_id = 8552 (0x2168) (int)
usb_device.vendor_id = 3744 (0xea0) (int)
usb_device.device_protocol = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.device_subclass = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.device_class = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.num_interfaces = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.num_configurations = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.configuration_value = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.linux.sysfs_path =
'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-2' (string)
info.linux.driver = 'usb' (string)
info.bus = 'usb_device' (string)
info.parent = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_0_0_0000_00_07_2'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path_device = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-2'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-2'
(string)
udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_0_0_0000_00_07_2_if0'
info.udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_0_0_0000_00_07_2_if0'
(string)
linux.subsystem = 'usb' (string)
usb.interface.protocol = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.interface.subclass = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.interface.class = 9 (0x9) (int)
usb.interface.number = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.linux.sysfs_path = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-0:1.0'
(string)
usb.configuration_value = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.num_configurations = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.num_interfaces = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.device_class = 9 (0x9) (int)
usb.device_subclass = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.device_protocol = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.vendor_id = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.product_id = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.vendor = 'Linux 2.6.13-15-default uhci_hcd' (string)
usb.product = 'USB Hub Interface' (string)
usb.device_revision_bcd = 518 (0x206) (int)
usb.max_power = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.num_ports = 2 (0x2) (int)
usb.linux.device_number = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.serial = '0000:00:07.2' (string)
usb.speed_bcd = 4608 (0x1200) (int)
usb.version_bcd = 272 (0x110) (int)
usb.is_self_powered = true (bool)
usb.can_wake_up = false (bool)
usb.bus_number = 1 (0x1) (int)
info.bus = 'usb' (string)
info.parent = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_0_0_0000_00_07_2'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path_device =
'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-0:1.0' (string)
linux.sysfs_path = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-0:1.0'
(string)
udi =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_4b4_202_noserial_if0_logicaldev_input'
info.udi =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_4b4_202_noserial_if0_logicaldev_input'
(string)
resmgr.hack.add_usb_parent = true (bool)
info.parent =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_4b4_202_noserial_if0' (string)
input.physical_device =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_4b4_202_noserial_if0' (string)
udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_4b4_202_noserial_if0'
info.udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_4b4_202_noserial_if0'
(string)
linux.subsystem = 'usb' (string)
usb.interface.protocol = 2 (0x2) (int)
usb.interface.subclass = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.interface.class = 3 (0x3) (int)
usb.interface.number = 0 (0x0) (int)
info.linux.driver = 'usbhid' (string)
usb.linux.sysfs_path =
'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-1/1-1:1.0' (string)
usb.configuration_value = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.num_configurations = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.num_interfaces = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb.device_class = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.device_subclass = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.device_protocol = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.vendor_id = 1204 (0x4b4) (int)
usb.product_id = 514 (0x202) (int)
usb.vendor = 'Cypress Semiconductor Corp.' (string)
usb.product = 'USB HID Interface' (string)
usb.device_revision_bcd = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.max_power = 100 (0x64) (int)
usb.num_ports = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb.linux.device_number = 2 (0x2) (int)
usb.speed_bcd = 336 (0x150) (int)
usb.version_bcd = 272 (0x110) (int)
usb.is_self_powered = false (bool)
usb.can_wake_up = true (bool)
usb.bus_number = 1 (0x1) (int)
info.bus = 'usb' (string)
info.parent = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_4b4_202_noserial'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path_device =
'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-1/1-1:1.0' (string)
linux.sysfs_path = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-1/1-1:1.0'
(string)
udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_4b4_202_noserial'
info.udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_4b4_202_noserial'
(string)
linux.subsystem = 'usb' (string)
usb_device.bus_number = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.can_wake_up = true (bool)
usb_device.is_self_powered = false (bool)
usb_device.version_bcd = 272 (0x110) (int)
usb_device.speed_bcd = 336 (0x150) (int)
usb_device.linux.device_number = 2 (0x2) (int)
usb_device.num_ports = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.max_power = 100 (0x64) (int)
usb_device.device_revision_bcd = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.product = 'USB/PS2 Scroll Mouse' (string)
usb_device.vendor = 'Cypress Semiconductor Corp.' (string)
usb_device.product_id = 514 (0x202) (int)
usb_device.vendor_id = 1204 (0x4b4) (int)
usb_device.device_protocol = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.device_subclass = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.device_class = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.num_interfaces = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.num_configurations = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.configuration_value = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.linux.sysfs_path =
'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-1' (string)
info.linux.driver = 'usb' (string)
info.bus = 'usb_device' (string)
info.parent = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_0_0_0000_00_07_2'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path_device = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-1'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1/1-1'
(string)
udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_0_0_0000_00_07_2'
info.udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_0_0_0000_00_07_2'
(string)
linux.subsystem = 'usb' (string)
usb_device.bus_number = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.can_wake_up = false (bool)
usb_device.is_self_powered = true (bool)
usb_device.version_bcd = 272 (0x110) (int)
usb_device.speed_bcd = 4608 (0x1200) (int)
usb_device.serial = '0000:00:07.2' (string)
usb_device.linux.device_number = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.num_ports = 2 (0x2) (int)
usb_device.max_power = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.device_revision_bcd = 518 (0x206) (int)
usb_device.product = 'UHCI Host Controller' (string)
usb_device.vendor = 'Linux 2.6.13-15-default uhci_hcd' (string)
usb_device.product_id = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.vendor_id = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.device_protocol = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.device_subclass = 0 (0x0) (int)
usb_device.device_class = 9 (0x9) (int)
usb_device.num_interfaces = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.num_configurations = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.configuration_value = 1 (0x1) (int)
usb_device.linux.sysfs_path = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1'
(string)
info.linux.driver = 'usb' (string)
info.bus = 'usb_device' (string)
linux.sysfs_path_device = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1'
(string)
linux.sysfs_path = '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.2/usb1' (string)

</blockquote>

Can you make any sense out of that? I have just finished reading the three
Lord of the Rings books by J R R Tolkien and I am impressed with the breadth
of this story, greater than any movie could convey. Especially the Two
towers movie which is nothing like the book. But the Return of the King book
contains quite an awesome detail of the destruction of the realm of Sauron
after the ring is destroyed. Everyone should read the books and gain a
better knowledge of the story of the ring. I am typing this blog post with
KWord for KDE and it is much faster than OpenOffice.org. Even version 2.0.1
is slow to start up and needs a speed boost. KWord starts up in a few
seconds, and it does not need a splash screen like OpenOffice has, as you do
not have any time to see it. And the KWord program can use an uncompressed
XML format for saving files. No need for the open-document format. And Kde
is still better than Gnome. I have a Japanese IME installed and it works
properly in Kde appearing in the System Tray, but no such luck with Gnome.
And Kde has the better looking desktop too. Here below is a good blog-site
about one man's experiences with setting up and running Windows Operating
systems.

<A HREF='http://therobincident.com/blog'>http://therobincident.com/blog</A>.
It must be torture akin to the slow torments experienced in the black tower
of cirith ungol to be administering Windows. Slow and painful torture. I
have used Windows XP and Windows 2000, in fact I have used Windows right
back to Windows 3.0, and even before that to MSDOS 3.0! And I have not seen
much of an improvement in Microsoft Related Operating systems in that time.
Not much at all. Windows Vista may even have still a copy of progman.exe in
the directory structure somewhere. But I wonder if the Windows Vista desktop
will be any better than the Kde desktop of 2007? The desktop sidebar and the
MONAD scripting based CLI are gone. I wonder if PC keyboards will get rid of
my pet hate: The CAPS LOCK KEY!!! God I hate it when I sit down to a
computer and start typing and the fucking key is active because the last
person there was using it!!! Fuck Offf!!! Maybe I should just get a butter
knife and rip the fucker out. And then sit down and pull the key out with
the knife. Jesus Christ Holy Fucking Damn able Mother Flipper.

There I feel better now. I hope <A HREF='http://www.google.com'>google</A>
does not crawl this...

Here is a nice random link function I wrote for my system information
program. <A
HREF='http://geocities.com/hungry_mancubus/sysinfo.tar.gz'>http://geocities.com/hungry_mancubus/sysinfo.tar.gz</A>.
A small program written in C++ and very fast too.

int RandLink() {
int Num;
srand((unsigned)time(NULL));
Num = rand() % 31;
if (Num != 0) {
goto out;
}
else {
Num = 1;
}
out:
return Num;
}

</blockquote>

And some more:

void Kernel()
{
/*
Reading in /proc/version to display kernel
information.
It has to fit in an Xterm without unecessary
line wrapping.
*/
FILE *f;
char Kyo[40];
f = fopen(log, "r");
if(!f) {
printf ("Sorry, I cannot open: %s.\n", log);
exit(1);
}
else {
// Based on sample code from:
//
http://www.koders.com/c/fid84CFEFBF311605F963CB04E0F84A2F52A8120F33.aspx
// Specifically the section on parsing the /proc/version.
if ((strcasestr (Kyo, " 2.4.") == 0) || (strcasestr (Kyo, " 2.5.") ==
0)) {
printf ("--Kernel 2.6+\n");
} else {
if ((strcasestr (Kyo, " 2.4.") != NULL)) {
printf ("--Kernel 2.4+\n");
}
}
while (feof(f) != 1) {
fgets(Kyo, 2, f);
if (strncmp(Kyo, "((", 1) == 0) {
printf ("\n--");
}
if (strncmp(Kyo, "#", 1) == 0) {
printf ("\n--#");
} else {
printf ( Kyo );
}
fflush(stdout);
}
}
fclose(f);
}

</blockquote>

Nice is it not? I sure can write nice code, but if only C++ had some better
regex functions like in <A HREF='http://www.perl.org'>perl</A>... But I have
managed so far...

Do you not know death when you see it old man?

--Witch King of Minas Morgul. Lord Of The Rings.

Gnome ALSA woes

2006-06-19T12:34:00.000+10:00

Just tried to use the Gnome rhythmbox program to play some mp3’s and it will not work properly as it needs to use OSS and I am using kernel 2.6.16.2 and I have an ALSA based system now. And I need to configure it for ALSA but I do not have gnome installed so I cannot change the settings with the multimedia systems selector. The simplicity of gnome applications is very annoying when you have Windowmaker as your desktop and only install the base gnome libraries and not the whole thing. There should be a more verbose setup dialog to make life easier for people like me who do not like running bloated desktops like Gnome or KDE anymore.

The Facility

2006-06-19T11:38:00.000+10:00

I have started a new map, here: The Facility.. This is a map for Doom2 MAP07 that uses the Mancubus and Arachnotron specials to make a cool map. I am having a good time making this map, I hope you like it too. This map is styled very much like a Master levels map but with new textures and good details. This level will start out easy and get very hard very quickly. I want to make something like a classic HR map with good details and game-play.

Go get it. prboom required to run, should work with Zdoom as well.

I have typed up a quick guide to compiling a new kernel for Mandriva Linux 2006, check it out on my Linux tips page: Linux Tips. This guide uses the latest 2.6.16.2 kernel and should help anyone who wants to upgrade their kernel and enjoy the latest features. I am using LILO as an example but if you are using GRUB it should be relatively simple to adapt the examples to suit.

Linspire Desktop.

2006-06-06T11:39:00.000+10:00

Here is a screen shot of my aforementioned Linspire desktop.

http://www.geocities.com/hungry_mancubus/1.jpeg

1280x1024 Jpeg. This desktop uses quite a good theme and well worth the 5 minutes or so it takes to load it up and get it running.

Linspire 5.0

2006-06-06T11:00:00.000+10:00

I have just started using a Linspire 5.0 live CD when I am browsing the web
and it seems to be the best way to browse the web safely. It has Mozilla 1.6
and OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 as well as an outstanding Kde desktop. And it
auto-detects the network settings and mounts my USB thumb drives as well.
And programs loading from the CD do not take long to load at all. Much
better than using Windows. And my website viewed in the browser still works
just fine. Even the Java Script and DIV layout.

And it is based on Debian as well. Which makes it even better. Not bad at
all. I am typing this in the OpenOffice suite on Linspire right now and I
would not be without it. I am quite happy with it.

The base.wad I was working on has been finished, get it here:
UAC Base. This also includes E1M2 an experimental map using SP_HOT_1 textures. I hope you like this map and record some cool demos using it. I had a good time making this map and I am
working on a good map now that is a mixture of Master Levels styled
architecture and texturing and Doom2 MAP01 styled texturing. That map will
be quite cool and I am using Booms pass-through flags for having switches
that can do more than one thing simultaneously.

With Fedora Core 5 I have installed Mplayer from source and got DVD playback
working just fine. Now I have cause to be happy.

And I have just noticed Hotmail's Spell checker function. I am using Mozilla
1.6 and I am just checking over this message before posting it and there is
a spell checker function built in just like the one in Firefox 2.0. Very
nice indeed.

Windows Media Player 11

2006-05-16T10:46:00.000+10:00

From Slashdot.

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 15, @07:04PM
from the early-is-just-more-fun dept.
Windows Media
TacoLL writes "A new version of Windows Media Player, Windows Media Player 11, is set to be made public on Wednesday, however, it has found its way into the hands of internet users before its public release. Flexbeta has some early screenshots of the next Media Player for Windows users."

The site seems to be down however.

HTML.

2006-05-15T11:03:00.000+10:00

Browsers really annoy me, I try something and it does not work. But I tried a quick css hack and the blog page is now working. I love the <SPAN> tag.

fvwm

2006-05-15T10:38:00.000+10:00

I have upgraded to Linux Kernel 2.6.16.2 and I could not be happier. Sound apps still work perfectly using alsa, even Zdoom 2.0.98 which has had problems with that in the past. I have abandoned the Gnome and Kde desktops and now I have a customised fvwm desktop. Which switches desktops instantly and uses a great deal less memory than Gnome and Kde. I was going to try to update to Gnome 2.14, but it is not worth it when they use so much goddamn memory to load up. Windows XP can load it's desktop many many times faster than Kde and Gnome. And that is the whole boot process, not just loading the graphical part. If Gnome could be faster than that then it might be worth using. It would be worth using if it was as fast as fvwm. Or the Damn Small Linux Fluxbox desktop.

That desktop is quite fast and works very well. But fluxbox is the best of them all. And a good advancement of Blackbox.

Here is a pic that is worth showing twice. Spybot search and destroy running on Winshit XP. WTF is going on with the interface? All I did was try to change the IE page back to the defualt and this is what I get? There is something wrong with a program that tries to hide the button labels and you have to click on the very edge of that grey stuff as you cannot click through it. A heap of shit. Why would you want to use such an OS?

Spybot crapness

2006-05-08T12:52:00.000+10:00

WTF is this?

I had this happen when I was using this Windows XP machine and it spat out an error when I reverted the settings of IE back to normal. But it would not allow it and it showed this error. The buttons are not visible and you have to click on the edge of the button to activate it. Another reason to not use MS software.

Windows

2006-05-08T11:31:00.000+10:00

I have just got a copy of the Doom2.exe file and I can use it to run Dehacked to make some useful dehacked patches for my Doom projects. If only someone could make a *.bex editor... I went to the supermarket to get some cereal tonight and there was a box of cereal for $3.99 and one for $6.99 that were exactly the same weight and size, yet one had different ingredients. But not by much. Yet it was $3.00 more expensive. Not much I know but why is this? Just because the box that was cheaper had the bag inside 70% full and the slightly more expensive one has it 80% full? It is a huge conspiracy I think. Just like the shows on Discovery Science Channel where they were taking about the Aliens that are ruling the planet, and they are lizard people just like the ones in the movie V. George Bush is one, and PM Tony Blair and the Queen. Very funny indeed, and they think that the Pyramids in Egypt are portals to other dimensions.

I went for a walk before to while away the afternoon and I ended up walking about 40 KM. And it was freezing cold and threatening rain too. But it was fun... Although now I am quite worn out and now I just want to type this and have a nice cup of tea. But it was very good because I walked up a high mountain where it snows in Winter and it was freezing cold. But it was also perfectly still and totally silent. No bird noises or anything. But it would not be as nice to be walking around if there was snow falling, since I was only wearing runners. Some people go for walks in the evening, but not to the extent I did. But I was pretty tired after that walk though, my legs were so sore, but it was the weekend, so I had plenty of time to rest and recover. But it was fun and only took me 4.25 hours to walk about 40KM. Not bad huh?

There has been talk in the news about a hacker who got into the American Department of Defense computers and the computers at the Aeronautics Administration I think and they had blank Administrator passwords. Now this is a total joke. Who is in charge of these machines? Someone who does not care about security for sure. I hope someone had the sense to fire them. But it is annoying when there are people going on about hackers when there is a different definition of the word in the FOSS community. Just a thought. But most of those people in the press who write about IT have a quite limited view of the big wide world. But they need to be more educated on the differences between hackers and crackers or malicious computer users and software writers. Like those people behind the www.findthewebsiteyouneed.com fiasco. And the melissa virus, although well written according the the source code I have seen, is still a malicious virus. And Windows XP, which can bring your whole machine to a crashing halt. Although I have seen one person who installed Windows XP `Service pack 2' and it fucked their whole machine up. The sound stopped working along with the network service for the LAN connection.

I was using a Windows XP machine recently and I was copying a couple of files from the hard drive to my USB drive and the fucking god-damned shit eating OS locked up. I pressed the power switch and it would not respond to that at all and I had to pull out the power cord and wait a minute and push it back in to reset the machine. What a heap of utter shit. Linux is definitely my preferred OS. Why the hell fucking crap does a machine using the ATX power supply not respond to the reset button when you are pressing it when it is locked up? I hope Windows Vista will be more secure than Windows XP, but will it be more stable than Windows XP? I think not. BSD and Mac OS and Linux are more secure and stable than Windows XP and come with heaps of software. FreeBSD has heaps of software available in /usr/ports and this is more than enough reason to switch. And FreeBSD comes with Koffice which has the same features as OpenOffice.org but loads much faster. Much faster indeed. So it should not be that difficult to speed up OpenOffice. Not having sections written in Python should help. Not that I have anything against Python, but C++ is still faster.

And Linux is quite unlike Winblows, where any file is writable and if you are running as an unprivileged user programs will not function properly. Now that is a joke. Windows Vista may have the same problems as Windows XP & 2000, we will see.

But of course, the Windows people are not going to have restricted user accounts on their machines, it would be too much hassle. I.e more hassle than just running as Administrator or using runas. Which sounds like sudo but I bet it does not work as well. Linux works well running a restricted user account, within reason. You do need to add yourself to the audio and cdrom groups to access those devices, especially me, I am running the 2.6.15 kernel with selinux so I have greater security. My whole system loads up very fast indeed, I compiled the kernel with the essential modules compiled in so I do not need a initrd to load the drivers from /lib. The kernel loads instantly and goes straightaway into the init process. Then I just need to setup the sound with alsaconf as root and I am done. But since I do not need to re-boot unless it is necessary, I have no need to go through this process over and over. And my machine uses the text based login instead of the graphical bootsplash favoured by many linux distros. And I use the vga setting set to 0x307 to get a 256 color 1280x1024 resolution text console. Very nice when using GNU Midnight Commander. And I am using the KDE desktop. Way better looking than Gnome. Gnome is a mess of dependencies when installing the desktop from source. But for KDE, you have the kdebase and kdeartwork packages which include heaps of software.

Nigerians.

2006-05-03T12:15:00.000+10:00

Here is a funny SPAM message I got. It is actually quite well done. He wants to give me the money and then give me 5%. When if I got that much money I could just take it all and then he could be put in jail owing to a tip-off from an anomymous tipster and then I would have all the money and he would be rotting in a African Jail. So funny. He is actually trusting me with 10.5 million dollars and trusting me to actually give it back afterwards?

FROM: MR.RAYNOLD BENJAMIN OLDS',
36b Attha Benious Aures,
Cotonu-Republic Of
Benin.

Dear Sir/Madam,
Thank you for giving me your time; please be patient
and read my email,I sincerely hope that after you
read this mail you will act fast and respond to my
call. May I first introduce my self:I am Mr.Reynolds
Olds',the eldest son of Late ENG. MARTIN OLDS',a
farmer from Zimbabwe.

I know this email will reach you as a surprise, or
probably you may even think it is a joke, because of
lots of funny mails circulating over the internet.
Well if you do, I really understand, but honestly,
I need your assistance to help me receive the sum of
$10.5m(Ten Million Five Hundred Thousand United States
Dollars) kept in a Security Company in Amsterdam
Holland by my late father. My father was one of the
biggest farmers in our country and because he strongly
opposed Mugabe's ideas, he has to be killed.

During the current war against the farmers in Zimbabwe
from the supporters of our President Robert Mugabe to
claim all the white-owned farms for his party members
and his followers, he ordered all white farmers to
surrender their farms to his party members and his
followers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2678557.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2414713.stm

Mugabe's supporters invaded my father's farm and
burnt everything in the farm, killing my father and
made away with a lot of items in my father's farm.
Before his death,my father had deposited with one
Security Company in Holand, the sum of $10.5m
(Ten Million Five Hundred Thousand United States
Dollars). This was money he planned to use in buying
new machinery and to set up a new farm in Swaziland.
After the death of my father,l decided to escape on
asylum to BENIN Republic because of continued
harassment from Mugabe and his supporters.

I got your reference from the Benin Exports Promotion
Council (BEPC)Having noted the confidence reposed on
your person I became convinced of your capability and
goodwill to asist in securing this money for an
investment in your country and to help my entire
family. The money has been in the security company in
holand just for safe keeping although the courier
company were not aware of the content in the case
because it was convey as personal valuable goods, I
have all documents with me as of when it was deposited
in a Security Vault for safe keeping.Our country has
been frustrating us since the death of my father, hence
i have lost confidence with anybody within the country.

And if you agree to help, we will compensate you
sincerely for your candid effort in this regard with
10% of the total amount of $10.5 Million US Dollars.

Also, when the money ($10.5 Million) is moved into
your discrete account, you will be allowed to withdraw
35% in your favour while 5% would be for expenses, tax
as your government may require. The remaining 60%
will be invested meaningfully for us(me and my family)
in your country. I have perfected arrangements with
the Trust Company concerned and has been assured 100%
risk free and safe operation.

What I demand from you now is to arrange to visit the
Finance Company where this money is being deposited
and claim it as the bona-fide owner. And in due
course,all contacts must be made through my private
E-mail:mrrayben@walla.com,Tel:+229 95713752

You will be Godly rewarded for your candid effort.
Please do call me immediately you get this message
and send forth your private Phone/Fax number(s)
and E-mail address(s)for easier communication.
Awaiting your response. Thanks and God bless.

"With Regards, From"
The Entire Family,
Best Wishes.
Reynold Olds'

Close but no cigar, MR Olds.

Date & Time.

2006-05-02T12:25:00.000+10:00

Here is a snippet from the Aaron Margosis weblog. Concerning the date and time applet in Windows XP. Only the Administrators can change the settings. Which of course is correct, on Linux you need to be the 'root' user to change the date & time. You can switch to the root account in an xterm and type date -s "" and type the new date value in between commas. Then just hit ENTER and the new date will be updated instantly.

Aaron Margosis' WebLog : Changing the system date, time and/or time zone:
By default, only Administrators and Power Users can use the “Date and Time” applet to change the computer’s date, time, or time zone. A regular User double-clicking on the clock in the notification area of the taskbar gets only an error message that says, “You do not have the proper privilege level to change the System Time.” This is probably the #1 annoyance for people who have tried running as non-admin.

KB article 300022 describes how to allow non-admins to change the date, time or time zone. The KB’s first suggestion is that you ask to be made an admin or Power User. Please don’t do that. That’s kind of like saying, “I occasionally need change for a dollar, so please grant me unfettered access to the US Mint.” Fortunately, the KB also describes more granular modifications.

First, you need to have the “Change the system time” privilege. Run “Local Security Settings” (as admin), navigate in the left pane to Security Settings \ Local Policies \ User Rights Assignment. Double-click on “Change the system time” and add users or groups. You can also specify “INTERACTIVE”, which will allow whoever is logged on to the computer to change the date and time. You need to log off and back on for the change to take effect.

That gets you past the error message, and lets you change the date and the time. However, attempts to change the time zone will fail silently, with no error message. To change the time zone, you need to change the permissions on this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation

According to my testing, here are the permissions you need: Query Value, Set Value, Create Subkey, Enumerate Subkeys, Notify, Read Control. KB 300022 says to grant “Delete” also, but as far as I can tell, that does not appear to be necessary. This change doesn’t require logoff/logon to take effect.

[Update March 1 2005: KB 300022 has now been updated. It no longer recommends that the user be added to Administrators or Power Users, and it removed its requirement for "Delete" permission on the TimeZoneInformation

Of course if you set open the date time properties and use the Internet time server to update the time this is the best way to do this. And it can be scheduled regularly. But Window's permissions handling still sucks, for example there are many programs that will not work properly if you install them as Administrator and try to run them as a restricted account. Which sucks, Linux and FreeBSD do not have this problem. On BSD I installed a program as root and I could still easily run it as a normal user. Windows has many problems with this type of thing and it would only be solved with a new filesystem and removing the registry based OS components and having a C:\System directory that contains all configuration options for the OS, and is only accessible by the Adminstrator.

This would result in greater security as shown by Linux and BSD variants, which of course are super secure and way above any Microsoft software.

Bug Fixes.

2006-05-01T12:05:00.000+10:00

Just fixed a bug with the blog page layout.

Should be fine now

Gnome 2.14

2006-04-24T11:43:00.000+10:00

The Gnome desktop I have installed is quite fast now since I have tweaked the settings of the desktop to use less memory and now it is a lot faster than the previous desktop I had. I might put up a page about tweaking Gnome since it is my favorite desktop and I do not care what people say about it, it is still well worth using. I just downloaded the embedded IE extension for Mozilla Firefox and now I can view pages within FireFox with the IE engine. But with a more modern and secure browser. And this way you can test your website with Firefox and see how it will look in IE. But if you have disabled ActiveX scripting, which is recommended, then the websites such as http://www.windowsupdate.com/ will not work in the Embedded IE feature. But this is cool though, ActiveX is pretty insecure and there are better ways of deploying web scripting that do not rely on such insecure scripting code. But that means you could not visit this website on Linux, unless you had crossover office installed and Internet Explorer. That works apparently. But it is better to use FireFox since that works with the large majority of websites. And IE 7 is not in wide circulation yet. But it will be interesting to see how it renders websites compared to Firefox when it is released. And the extension shows the IE icon in the address bar and this is how you know is active.

By the time IE 7 is in wide circulation, Firefox would be past version 2.0 surely and then it would have the finalised SVG support. I have already seen the cool sunbird program where they have built a calendar application using Firefox technology. I cannot wait to see what the future holds. China are harvesting the organs of executed prisoners in China. They do not need the organs after death, but it is without consent. Iran is threatening to attack it's enemies with the might of it's military. They still deny having nuclear programs intended to develop nuclear weapons. But they are threatening to cut off the hand of any aggressor which sounds like they may attack with all force if they are attacked. Which could mean it would be a bad idea for America to attack their nuclear facilities. But those Camel fucking, Prophet Mohammad worshiping terrorists are said to be planning a new attack(s) on Indonesia. They are absolute dog blowing scum and should be captured and used for horrific medical experiments. They should be pushed into ovens and burned alive, or impaled on red hot stakes and left to twitch in horrific agony. They deserve no mercy, only horrific agony and suffering. They should be tied down to an operating table and dissected alive, there should be no end to their suffering.

I am building the components of Gnome 2.14 and I am already seeing an improvement over the Gnome 2.12 desktop. I have built Gtk 2.8.9, gnome-session-2.14 and gnome-themes-2.14 from source and the metacity desktop. It is about time that Gnome had a speed boost. I just want to build the version 2.14 release of Nautilus and maybe Gedit and then I will have a good desktop. The nautilus Filemanager and the metacity desktop are the main sections of this desktop to target for improvement. Once I have a faster version of Nautilus, the desktop would speed up. Although, if you turn off icons on the desktop, that gives a huge speed boost. But I really want to test this out, The version 2.0.1 release of OpenOffice.org is a little faster than previous versions and integrates well into the Gnome desktop.

I also have a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald target puzzle solver for you. This program was up and running on the web some time ago and was taken down. I cannot find it anymore. Anyway, here it is: http://www.geocities.com/hungry_mancubus/target.gz. This program is written in standard C and compiles with no problems with gcc 4.0.2. It was originally written by Rod Johnson and is well worth having. For usage on Linux you will need the /usr/share/dict/words file, but you can edit the source file to point to the location of your words file. I have hacked on the program to use strncpy() instead of the dangerous strcpy(). It works perfectly well on Linux, I just type export QUERY_STRING='a=words' to give it a random word to work on and it will output the answer.

Suse Linux is better than Mandriva

2006-04-18T10:46:00.000+10:00

Just installed OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 and I am using it to type up this post. It is a little faster to load, but still will not work properly with Microsoft Office documents. Even simple ones. But it works very well now and can easily work with documents created with earlier versions. The TV show Alias has an an absurd plot-line where a 500 year old manuscript contains the DNA sequence of a man living today who is a person of interest to the organization. Total crap. I mean how is this even possible? And there was a prophecy of the end of the world in the manuscript as well, but that was forgotten about by the end of the episode. Oh well I guess it was not that important. And one of them is in Tibet meeting with David Carradine and receiving a manuscript from him that has something to do with what is going on, whatever that is. I have no idea.

It is just totally unbelievable programming, they once had a giant rotating red ball of energy and they had to deal with that. What the fuck is that? Even worse than Spiderman 2 where they created a sun in a laboratory experiment. Which would not happen unless you have a nice polished chamber to create the fusion reactions and you have a massively powerful magnetic field to contain it. Which he did not have. And it was only the size of a basketball and had massive gravity. Which is insane even if it was composed of the same matter as a neutron star. But it would be cool if he made it dense enough and it collapsed into a black hole. Now that would be cool. Then the Earth would be sucked into it and everything in the solar system!

15 User: $@witchking.sauron.net:\> ./sysinfo --uname1
System Information Program.

--System name - Linux
--Nodename - witchking.sauron.net
--Release - 2.6.15-Bejiitas_Wrath
--Version - #1 PREEMPT Sat Apr 8 21:38:35 EST 2006
--Machine - i686

This program is distributed with NO warranty
Express or implied. It is free software and
you can do what ever you want with
this program and it's source code.
Thanks saruman.
You are using the /bin/bash shell.
Linux version 2.6.15-Bejiitas_Wrath (saruman@WitchKing) (gcc version 4.0.2 20050901 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)) #1 PREEMPT Sat Apr 8 21:38:35 EST 2006

************************** *_* * *_* ************************

Above is the output from my system information program. I have just finished debugging a section of code that prints out the contents of /proc/version. Now it is ready to use. And very functional. Get it here: http://www.geocities.com/hungry_mancubus/sysinfo.tar.gz.

Here is the section of code I was talking about. Works very well indeed.

/*
Reading in /proc/version to display kernel
information.
*/
FILE *f;
char Kyo[40];
f = fopen(log, "r");
if(!f) {
printf("Sorry, I cannot open: %s.\n", log);
exit(1);
}
else {
while (feof(f) != 1) {
fgets(Kyo, 2, f);
printf("%s", Kyo);
}
}
fclose(f);
Goku(0x32, "\x2a");
return 0;

This program will build very quickly and is a good way to get information about your linux system. E.g by putting it in your .bash_profile or .bashrc. I am now using mandriva Linux 2006, but I have re-installed the 2.6.15 kernel I built on that system since I had packaged it up in a tarball on my USB drive and so I copied the files onto the Mandriva system and it worked first time. And the tarball package of my kernel with all of the modules is only 7MB. And it loads very quickly. And I used a initrd to do the bootstrap process and load the reiserfs module and other initial modules to get the kernel going.

It even has the kernel driver for mounting mac formatted hard drives, but I only included it because I might want to read MAC formatted CDROM's.

Actually I just re-installed SUSE Linux as I tried very hard to get midi playback on Mandriva 2006 and I installed the timidity patches and the main program. I then loaded up prboom 2.4.0 which uses Timidity and there was no output even after checking and rechecking the configuration. It would run from the console, but not when called by the game. There were no errors but there just was also no music. Now this is not the only problem I had. There is also a problem with the alsamixer setup where you can only set the basic mixer volume up or down and the settings for the line in and cd etc do not seem to work whereas on SUSE they do. Very strange, I am sure that rebuilding ALSA might help, but it is better if it works from the start. Very helpful indeed. Actually, installing SUSE Linux 10.0 did not take too long at all. I did the installing and then it went through adding user accounts and setting the root password and then it finished by writing the configuration and then it loaded up a Graphical GDM login screen and I logged straight into a Gnome 2.12 desktop. Windows Vista requires a re-boot! But everything nowadays will be Windows XP and Windows Media Center and Windows Vista everything will be Windows and they can keep their sometimes sluggish and virus and spyware and trojan prone PC's. And I know about the fedora-redhat thing a while back but hardly anyone would fall for that. You would have to download the packages and then navigate to the directory containing them and run rpm -ivh *.rpm as root to install the packages. Then you would be screwed. But if it was a program you were unsure of you could install it to your home directory, or the home directory of an unprivileged user and test it there. Or just to unpack the RPM files and examine their contents. A little bit of caution goes a long way. But I really do not like Windows XP and Windows 2000, but sometimes I have to use it. But it is quite underwhelming and especially when it keeps running out of virtual memory. But this is a Windows XP machine running with 128MB of RAM. Total crap.

1 User: $@linux:\> top

top - 11:22:52 up 2:29, 2 users, load average: 0.88, 0.65, 0.56
Tasks: 81 total, 1 running, 80 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 44.7% us, 3.5% sy, 0.0% ni, 50.8% id, 1.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 190280k total, 186528k used, 3752k free, 4528k buffers
Swap: 377488k total, 7384k used, 370104k free, 82432k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
20464 saruman 15 0 36232 12m 8904 S 36.7 7.0 0:09.58 gnome-terminal
19704 root 15 0 20828 12m 4856 S 7.1 6.6 0:57.66 X
20515 saruman 16 0 2112 992 764 R 1.3 0.5 0:00.20 top
19836 saruman 15 0 46696 8588 6688 S 0.6 4.5 0:02.41 netapplet
19848 saruman 16 0 34872 15m 11m S 0.3 8.3 0:16.38 gnome-panel
19945 saruman 15 0 13152 4392 3656 S 0.3 2.3 0:01.33 gnome-screensav
20085 saruman 15 0 131m 65m 43m S 0.3 35.1 0:39.34 soffice.bin
20223 saruman 15 0 43372 13m 9140 S 0.3 7.0 0:14.49 xmms
1 root 16 0 692 132 88 S 0.0 0.1 0:02.92 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.16 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.43 events/0
4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 khelper
5 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
9 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
251 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.06 kblockd/0
289 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
288 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.87 kswapd0
885 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
1060 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.28 reiserfs/0
1973 root 12 -4 1780 564 492 S 0.0 0.3 0:03.84 udevd
2381 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd
4364 messageb 17 0 3520 1248 1124 S 0.0 0.7 0:01.50 dbus-daemon
4412 root 16 0 1492 432 404 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 acpid
4421 root 16 0 4900 3476 1468 S 0.0 1.8 0:07.73 hald
4426 root 18 0 1792 556 484 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 hald-addon-acpi
4597 root 17 0 1796 712 624 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.32 hald-addon-stor
9428 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kgameportd
9895 root 16 0 2204 664 560 S 0.0 0.3 0:02.60 resmgrd
9932 root 15 0 1884 660 520 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.08 syslog-ng
9938 root 16 0 1628 604 408 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.02 klogd
10258 root 16 0 1384 336 284 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 dhcpcd

The above is the output of top running in Suse linux after a fresh installation, with OpenOffice.org 20.1 and Xmms 1.2.10 running. OpenOffice.org is quite fast now, and worth using even though it needs more MS Word support. But there probably is no help from Microsoft on that front. They have the upcoming Vista release to concentrate on. That should keep them busy, I wonder if they will have some Enigma styled music for it like with XP. That could be cool.