More Odds & Ends

Right. So, I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing something down every day. I’m finding it difficult to think of anything. This is my normal mode of operation.

Maybe I haven’t been reading enough news or something but I find it quite exciting that there’s a woman and an African American (is that still PC today?) as top contenders for president. I don’t see a lot of people making a big deal about it, though. And I’ve yet to hear anyone overtly say that they wouldn’t vote for either of them because she’s a woman and he’s black. Any thing I hear about them that’s negative has to do with their policies, although I do hear a bit about Obama being Muslim. Not a lot, though.

So, overall, I’m quite happy about it and surprised it doesn’t get a lot more attention. Then again, I could just be plain ignorant about everything because I don’t pay a whole lot of attention.

I haven’t gotten very far with learning Common Lisp. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it, so I may not get a working HAL 9000 by the end of the weekend. All this thinking about artificial intelligence has gotten me back to thinking about my original thoughts of AI. A lot of it I’ve already written about, though, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to go over it again.

I’m using Lisp-in-a-Box on Windows. I haven’t booted into Linux so I haven’t gotten a Lisp system working on it yet. I’m wondering if KDevelop supports it. Hopefully I’ll be able to get something going this weekend.

I’ve had way more than six Dr Pepper’s and I haven’t won jack. The bottle says “1 in 6 Wins a Free Dr Pepper.” Lying bastards.

Technorati Tags: dr pepper,obama,clinton,lisp,linux,windows

Bits & Bobs

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything of substance. That’s not a good thing, since the purpose of these blogs is to write down anything regardless of content. At least once a day.

I seem to fall back on things I’ve written about before, and all of that is based on stuff in the past. Hopes, dreams, fears, things I used to enjoy but grew out of. All things that are part of growing up and growing old I suppose.

This is supposed to be a daily thing, though. And I’m not really supposed to care if you’re bored of it or not. Good for me, bad for you.

I haven’t had too much time for writing lately, with the new job and all. So what have I been thinking of lately? The past, mostly. As usual. In truth, a lot of it has been focused on the “Golden Age” of computers and video games. I’ve burnt myself out on that for the time being, though. There are very few people who are even interested, anyway.

My company got me a cell phone. For Valentine’s Day I got one of those Bluetooth ear piece things. As much as I love the old computers and stuff, this is one of the neatest things ever. If, back in 1984, someone had told me that there would be a device that would let someone read a paper, talk to someone a hundred miles away, and take a dump all at the same time — well, I would have laughed. Why anyone would ever want to take a dump while on the phone is completely beyond me, but it is possible. Just having a wireless ear piece is awesome. Being able to voice dial numbers using it is icing on an already sweet cake.

Yes, I know I’m about four years behind everyone else. There’s no need to point that out to me.

I’ve decided to teach myself Common Lisp. I’ve never looked at this language before but seeing as how I’m drifting down memory lane I’ve decided to see what all the fuss is about. Lisp is pretty big in the Artificial Intelligence comm unity. Perhaps I can learn enough over the coming weekend to get my Turin Test Beating AI working.

Technorati Tags: bluletooth,lisp,computer,cell phone

SimCity -> Micropolis

I wasn’t expecting this: SimCity has been open sourced and changed into Micropolis.

Before anyone gets too excited, note that it says SimCity and not SimCity 2000.  This is the original beast.

It’s available here if you want to try it.  I don’t think it’s ready to run for Windows, though.  I’ll wait until it hits the Gentoo Portage.

Now, when will they open source Little Computer People (the original Sims)?

A Welcome Addition

There’s a new computer in the house.  This is happy news because, I hope, it means the stress will be taken off of this one a bit.  This one is my baby, and I’ve had it forever (in one form or another).

It’s been a couple of weeks since I update KDE 4, so I thought I’d give that a shot this morning.  I quite enjoy using it, although the composite effects are not quick when I’m doing other things.  Like updating the system.  Also, I’m getting a bunch of empty “icons” in the middle of the screen since updating to RC2.  Still, no harm no foul.  Just some annoyances, which I’m still expecting at this stage.

We went to see “I am Legend” last night.  I thought it was OK, but some things didn’t make a lot of sense.  I know the general flow of the movie, so I knew what was going on, but it seemed to me that they cut out some important bits.  I won’t spoil it, even though you’ve probably seen it before if you’re familiar with “Omega Man” or “Last Man On Earth.”

One More KDE 4 RC1

Okay, so if you’re not compiling stuff in the background, doing updates, downloading tons of junk, and definitely not compiling updates in the background, then KDE 4 RC1 is pretty swift.

I found how to enable the compositing effects, so I got that going and it’s pretty sweet.  It works as well as Beryl did for me, when I was using it.  Overall I’m pretty happy with it.  Would I use it as my main DE right now?  No…  not quite yet.  For one thing, I can’t get user switching to work and I do use that sometimes.

On the plus side,  I haven’t had anything crash yet.  My sound does work (as long as people don’t unplug my speakers, ahem) so that’s not an issue.  But there’s still some little things that should be polished before I’d jump all in.

Oh, I need to fix the menus so I can use them to launch certain programs, like Firefox (which has gone missing from the menu altogether) and Open Office.  I don’t know how to do that manually, yet.

More KDE 4

I started updating the KDE 4 stuff this morning. It’s working much better for me. I now get icons down in the… kicker? Task bar? Whatever it’s called these days. Anyway, I’m glad they’re there now. It makes stuff a bit easier to get to. I can even log off now without getting an error. And the workspace switcher doesn’t crash on me anymore.

I’m still missing stuff from my menu, though. Firefox being the most important one. I have no idea on how to add stuff to the menu. Also, I can’t start OpenOffice. The icons appear, but it just starts KEdit with the .desktop information. That’s kind of a bummer.

The whole thing is kind of slow. I’m not sure if that’s the way it’s supposed to be (at the moment) or if the hardware accelerated compositing isn’t working. I have the KDE 4 Live CD, but it’s at work so I can’t test it out. One thing the live CD does that mine doesn’t is having to click the different categories on the menu (Favorites, applications, etc.). With mine I just mouse over and it switches and that gets really annoying when I’m trying to scroll to a program to launch. I have no idea how to change that, if it’s changeable right now.

These are relatively minor quibbles, though, considering the release state of the software. It seems basically usable, though. If I were to have to re-do my computer I’d probably forgo putting 3.5.7 (or . on and just stick with 4.

The installation using Gentoo and Layman is pretty easy, once you get past the initial steps. That’s always a plus.

Just for kicks I should try out the multimedia features. I’m not even sure, yet, if I get sound. The device notifier thing works, though. Well, that’s a big ‘No’ for the audio… I wonder how I fix that?

Doing The Linux Thing

Great.  Yesterday I managed to get KDE 4 running properly.  Or as properly as an incomplete RC1 will be.  Which isn’t too bad.  I experienced quite a few crashes and I can’t end the session without crashing it.  But it’s still mostly usable. And it looks interesting.

I also got Apache installed and running.  And PHP, with a bit of mental wrestling with my USE flags.  Sheesh.  But it’s all there.  Oh, and I fixed my spell checking problem with OpenOffice.  It was a day of triumphs!

Now I’m going to teach myself PHP.  I reckon I’ll be using Quanta because it’s easier that way.

KDE 4 RC1

I took the plunge and installed KDE 4 RC1 on my Gentoo installation.  It went quite smoothly with the only thing not working being the networking stuff.  Once again, Kopete caused problems so I skipped the whole thing.  Maybe I’ll see if I can get that fixed this morning.

So far I think it’s looking pretty good.  I’m not sure if this is supposed to happen or not, but it looks like the KDE 3.5 and Kicker are being loaded just before the KDE4 stuff.  That makes me confused.

Liveified

Okay, I went nuts this morning and installed all of the recently non-beta-ized Live programs.  These include:

• Live Writer — Allows you to write blog entries with a real editor and send it to different blogs.  This isn’t limited to Microsoft’s Live Spaces, either.  You can send it to WordPress, Live Journal, and others.
• Live Mail — Let’s you get your mail from your Hotmail account and, presumably, Yahoo! if you have a premium email account.
• Live Messenger — The newest version of Microsoft Messenger.
• Live Photo Gallery — Shows you pictures and allows you to add tags and upload them to Live Spaces and Flickr.

They’re kind of neat, although everything is running a bit slow with Live Mail going.  And I’ve already gotten errors about not being able to get my mail from it.  And I have a problem selecting an email and dragging it to a folder.  I have to take two tries to get that done.  Otherwise it looks okay.  Not really a step up from using Live Hotmail in a browser.  Or whatever they’re calling it.  Oh, you can also post your email directly to your blog with it.  I don’t know why you would want to do this, but you can.

I’m just not overwhelmed with any of it.  Give me a while and maybe I’ll feel like I can’t live without it.  Although…  It is really nice to be able to send my blogs to three or four different sites without having to log into all of them.  I noticed that MySpace is not supported, which is a shame since it’s one of the biggest ones out there.

 

Technorati Tags: microsoft, live writer, live, blog