Updated Ubuntu on my laptop.

* ditched ubuntu (gnome) and kubuntu in favour of xubuntu - smaller, simpler, faster, less disk space
* file manager - dolphin (the KDE one)
* photo manager - f-spot (the gnome one)
* wireless - working again (apt-get install b43-fwcutter)
* suspend/resume - working and seems faster!
* graphics accel - working (apt-get install nvidia-glx-180)
* web browser - firefox 3
* IRC client - xchat
* bittorrent client - ktorrent (KDE)
* CD burning - k3b (KDE)
* skype
* music player - I am trialling songbird since amarok 2 sucks
* ditched OSS4 on laptop because it doesn't function after a suspend/resume cycle - now using plain ALSA

I stuck with ext3.

I started a packages.list file in my linux config that lists all of the Ubuntu packages I like and use.

Fairly painless, all things considered.

I decided I needed to "come out of my shell" a bit more, so I'm founding a new society for people like me.

Lucy and I dropped by the Petersham Bowls Club on Friday afternoon. It is only used recreationally now and so they let any riff raff run on the green. One of the consequences of this is that on Friday afternoon they have a family night where a great many kids get balls and run amok while their parents sit around drinking beer and eating dinner from the bistro. It was a laid back experience.

I had a dream tonight that involved twenty shining little faces looking up in silent awe at a night time spectacle on the bowling green. Something really special.

I woke up at 4am (slapped sleepily in the face and doona stolen), with this vivid imagery and soundtrack going through my head. I thought... I could find a video of that and I'm sure I could get the soundtrack... and I could demonstrate what my dream was like.

( Step into my dream! )

Gareth: Regain Short Nob
Zlatko: Pork As All Jatz
Paul: A Tall Maid? Nup!
Carys: Alas! Dry Corn

By sad_frog, haju and me.

I am a father and a web developer so I feel that I'm highly affected by this issue. Taking China as a case study, I can happily say that this plan is technically flawed. China is getting ready to abandon it. [1]

I'll reflect on this with my own personal experience.

The only time I've ever encountered child pornography on the Internet is on Usenet, where you can see newsgroup categories helpfully laid out for you, like child.pornography.binaries (I made that one up but it's an example) which you can subscribe to with a news client. Now... correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect illicit Usenet content is incredibly difficult to filter. This system is distributed, decentralised, syndicated, and goes largely un-talked about.

This scheme is especially flawed, I feel, because it's aimed at stopping paedophiles and terrorists. (At least, that's what it says on the box. It could easily be used to censor more subtle things like political dissent.) To me, "paedophile" is one of those IT bingo words that we'd hear around the office sometimes. It falls into the same category as "DRM, "web 2.0" and "agile development". These words are bandied about in a culture and context of fear. Fear of being left behind, fear of being inefficient, fear of being sued. Managers, and I imagine politicians, who resemble chickens running around with their heads cut off, don't make sensible decisions. In fact they can make decisions which are disastrous.

In other words, this scheme is balls. It's a knee jerk, poorly considered, incredibly expensive, technical minefield that is very ineffective.



[1] http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2138157.htm

I updated my programming blog, bluepuyo. I'll put the particularly nerdy computer programming related posts there, in future, so you don't have to suffer reading about awesome scripts that make your computing life uber convenient. :P

We should play the poetry game again. I could use a laugh. Who's up for it?

Bad dreams so I got up and turned on all the lights.

Last night I dreamt that a strange intruder was in my house at night and I needed to wake up to talk to him, or fight him, or otherwise deal with him. He was doing something quietly working away, moving around a bit. I was too asleep to figure out what he was doing. I'm not sure I wanted to know. He was a 6" man with dark hair and a tendency to look at you with his head at three quarters like a portrait, so he'd look at you out of the corner of his eyes. I couldn't wake up despite my best efforts. I pulled my eyelids back and stared at him with exposed eyeballs and all I could see was a sleepy blur moving casually around, periodically inspecting me with side-turned eyes.

Tonight I had a few different ones.

I dreamt that hairy caterpillars were breeding in my sinuses. If I blew my nose very hard, a couple would plop onto the floor, wriggle onto their feet and start to make a break for it. As they moved over different surfaces, their spiky tufts of hair changed colour to match what they walked on. I couldn't bring myself to kill them because I didn't want to be stung. I was also in no state to deal with them because I was in a panic at the sensation and knowledge of them living and moving around in my sinuses, yelling for help and blowing my nose repeatedly.

I dreamt that I witnessed two cars smash into each other at high speed. The first car crumpled and drove home into the front of the other car. A small woman in the front seat flew forward through the windscreen and met a large bearded man in the front seat of the other car, her head pushing deep into his chest in the force of the impact, past rib cage. She pulled her head out, uninjured, and looked at him, tears rolling down her eyes. "I'm so sorry," she choked out. He looked down sadly at the gorey hole in his chest. Rib bones and yellow grisle protruded from either side of the hole in which bloody mushed up organs flailed weakly in their last moments. He didn't say anything. He just looked at her with this sad disappointed look that tore her apart. The look kind of said, "I loved my life and there were so many things I was looking forward to." She begged him to be alright. She offered to compress the wound. She cried hysterically as he leaned forward and died. I could see a shadowy figure in the passenger seat of his car.

The intruder dream is still fresh in my mind and I'm quite on edge. The house is dark and quiet. I'm acutely aware of every doorway, every unseen nook. Every shadow I turn my back on makes my neck tingle and my heart pound. The front door was the worst though. Shadowy entryway to my house with a small glass panel in it where tall people's faces sometimes peer in. I'm staying upstairs tonight.

Lame lame lame.

Link: The Heroes Personality Test written by freedomdegrees on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test View My Profile(freedomdegrees)

A very smart guy named Simon Howe at work developed this little script for running fdb in a loop so that you can forget about it.


$ cat runclient
handle all print nostop
run
c
c
c
source runclient
$ fdb
...
> source runclient


If you've used fdb before, this should all make sense and if not, you don't wanna know. :)

Lucy: "Drinking your own blood supply is never a good meal option."

Tonight we went to see Juno at the Moonlight cinema. 4 stars. I'm tired. Goodnight.

ERRATA: Okay it's the next morning. It was more like a 3 star movie but it somehow slipped an extra star because even though the quality of the movie was 3 stars, I enjoyed it like a 4 star movie. I had a 4 star experience, because of the fine company I was in and the comfy bean bags I was nestled into and the cool bats and stars overhead.

How can I explain why it's 3 stars? There are two things that irked me about it. 1) Jennifer Garner was the most convincing actress in the film. Ouch. 2) It's a movie about incredibly rich white Americans.

No particular order.

Went with Lucy and bought a few dozen large plastic boxes from Kmart in Ashfield to facilitate the storage of valuable junk in our new built in wardrobes.

Cleaning up house after the furniture moving. Being done piecemeal. But it's kinda fun. I like what Lucy's done with game consoles and I like my new drawer/shelf combination for my clothing because shelves are much better than drawers for keeping reusable clothes like jeans for the week. I look forward to having a clean and organised house that's slightly more robust against wandering little fingers.

Took my prot warrior Annagold to a Karazhan last night and had a ball. Friendly people, jokes on voice chat and good start/end times. Started 7pm, first pull 8pm, got to bed a little after 11pm, 5 bosses and 2 gear upgrades later.

Rode to work this morning. Sweat got in my eye and made it sting but it was awesome. I enjoyed it.

Did some homebrew game programming on the Nintendo DS yesterday. Had to hit the OpenGL books to remember all that stuff about projection matrices, model-view transformations, etc. Good fun. Very mathsy. Got a cube spinning with some coloured lights. Looks a semi-okay on Desmume. I don't actually own an NDS so I can't tell if it looks good on a real one. :P

Went to Brazilian BBQ to celebrate a work colleague getting his Australian work visa. The type of BBQ we went to was invented in his home state in Brazil. It's like some old dudes in a town walked around with big skewers and kept testing the hypothesis "will it BBQ?" (cf. Will it Blend?. Things that BBQ: cows of varying ages, sheep, chickens, pigs, pineapple, cheese. I also tried a couple of real caipirinhas. Very limey. Pretty nice and I'm even a tee totaller... well I guess not total. I couldn't sleep all night because I had a stomach full of cholesterol soaked salty meat and my body wanted to punish me or something. Felt pretty sub-par since but the ride to work this morning helped.

Played DotA with work colleagues. 2v2 all mid games. -apemomdu. I get paired with the weakest player and the two middle-skill people get paired up. We smashed them. The Chaos Knight is ridiculous, especially late game. Items: Diffusal Blade, Power Treads, Perseverance, Manta Style. Stun, blink, split, smash, chase, stun, kill. Awesome.

Slow progress on the Facebook word game apps. Lucy is overbooked with work and study and sleeping already. We've nailed the design and got our application key and development key. We have a domain name, hosting and Subversion repository set up. I need to sort out how RFacebook works (was giving us some error about a session id) and then just sit down and program it. It won't be hard but it will be awesome.

Listening to albums: Statues by Moloko (fav tracks = Familiar Feelings, Come On, The Only Ones, I Want You, Over and Over) and Sam's Town by The Killers (favs = the popular ones :P When You Were Young, Read My Mind, Bones).

Wrote Ruby script to organise karoke collection into huge directory of zips where each zip contains the .mp3 and .cdg files, with reasonably standard naming. Somehow managed to de-sync the zip filesystem FAT and the actual filenames, such that unzipping the files results in an error claiming that they're corrupt. Like hell! Lucky I worked on copies. ;) Just have to massage Rubyzip the right way and get some microphones and we'll have Karaoke parties with laptop instead of dodgy Karaoke machine. Awesome.

So I lay on the kitchen floor at 4am (can't sleep anyway) and I think I might know where the slugs are coming from. I put a few grains of salt on one of the slugs and watched as it fled in terror to its hidey hole. A process that took half an hour. There's a little hole under the cupboards just above the skirting board, in the corner.

The other slug that was inside the cupboard, well, that cupboard has holes at the back cut in it for pipes so I suspect he came in through those, since the front of cupboard forms a reasonably tight seal and I can't imagine a slug squeezing through it.

So they basically are coming from the wall/outside/below ground, they come in through any hole available in the cupboards and we just haven't systematically filled them all yet.

... NOT, as I had previously theorised, beaming in from the Slug Ship Enterprise.

Okay, so I've been playing Psychonauts for about 2 hours now and I'm happy to give it 5 stars and recommend it to anybody.

Psychonauts is a 3D platform game chock full of witty jokes, wry situational humour, satire, dream therapy and psychotherapy references, slapstick and trippy nonsense. The attention to detail is overflowing and you can tell the developers put so much love into this title it oozes out of all its orifaces.

Zero Punctuation was right. I think I agree with everything he says in his review, now that I've played the game. It's a great game and went totally under the radar (well my radar at least) while other hyped titles turned out to be disappointing (read: Bioshock). I've had more fun playing Psychonauts so far than all of Bioshock and I feel like I'm barely into it.

Some of the mechanisms they use are cliched. Collect N things and buy new psycho powers. But honestly, I miss the age of the platformer and I'm happy to indulge it a bit nowadays. And when the theme is so whacky and amusing and well executed and the things you're collecting are mental baggage (picture luggage and handbags with googly eyes and stupid grins) and mental cobwebs, it's amusing enough to get away with it, the rapscallion of a game. *shakes fist* And they do vary the formula frequently so I haven't gotten bored yet. There's a lot of jumping around, climbing, swinging, balancing, all Prince of Persia style. That forms the basis of what you do. But they've put in a lot of mini games and they vary the platform formula quite a lot. You run from room to room and gravity changes direction in confusing ways. It's like playing Portals only more structured and fun. At one stage I was running around the surface of a cube, being chased by a huge fat shambling hulk of a mental censor (a man with a red rubber stamp who runs around in your brain censoring things). So far the psycho abilities I've unlocked are fun to use and vary the game play (setting fire to things and shooting things). It's mildly amusing to me that these are reminiscent of the abilities in Bioshock, and yet they're done so much better. What can you do in Bioshock? Kill everything that moves. Loot. Yawn. Or use your fire skill on the big oil slicky thing that you're so obviously meant to use it on, it might as well be a neon green button that says "Press to use fire and win". Yawn. In Psychnauts I set fire to a squirrel. Hilarious. And I set fire to a bear and it ran around with its bottom on fire. Hilarious. I'm not entirely sure what you can set fire to that's actually useful but I'm not sure I care at this stage, I was having too much fun. Like when you're doing jumps through billboards and headshotting grannies in GTA3 and you neglect to progress the main quest line.

Oh and the characters are great. They're like something out of Earthbound... or The Mighty Boosh. They're kids in a summer camp for psychic ability training and they're all mad in one way or another. Bizarre little plots develop between them and you can eavesdrop, talk to them, and taunt them with items from your inventory. Like waving a button in front of a girl who likes Neil and saying "This button looks like it's from a girl's dress... I found it in Neil's locker." Schoolyard pranks and bullying ahoy. The Monkey Island adventure game credentials shine through here. The characters are as well developed as any I could name from a Bioware game post 90's and Bioware is a company that toots its own character-development horn (but have disappointed me for years now).

So yes, Bioshock is lame, Bioware is dead to me, things that start with Bio in the games industry should all be looked at with slit eyes and rotten tomatos at the ready. Psychonauts is fun. Here, take my money Double Fine Productions, you've earned it. I want more games like this, please. :)

Mario Paint rocks. I loved it when I was younger. I wasn't this good though.