Your PC is Doomed

I can't be stuffed posting anything this week, but I remembered this app for Linux that is worth mentioning...

Linux is forever improving computer usage, and this totally awesome application for Linux proves it. Well, besides beryl, but that's a whole new post. This surpasses beryl's eye candy, and takes hold of what every nerd wanted way back in early high school...

I present to you.. psDooM!!!

Ok, so the text based site is a little... well... bland, and not awe inspiring. Until you realise what this does.

This uses the original source code of the game doom and turns it into a process list! That's right, you can run around, and shoot monsters instead of closing down windows. Much more interesting than Crl-Alt-Delete in windows, don't you think? You could easily claim in class that you were trying to kill an unresponsive internet explorer and it just so happened that your process manager looked like a game. Very convenient, if you run Linux/Unix (ports to OSX, a derivative of Unix, have been known to work).

Although, there is a slight issue that would be remiss of me to mention. For those who played the original game, you would recall that the monsters could turn on each other. The issue in psDooM is that those monsters are in facts programs and essential processes, and having your computer literally bloodily hack itself to death probably isn't the greatest thing. The original idea was that in a normal computer, some processes kill others. Problem is, processes aren't usually bloodthirsty monsters killing everything in it's path (unless it's a windows virus). So when your computer crashes and your homework disappears, how do you think the teacher's going to react when you say "but some carnivorous monsters hacked it to death!!! Honest!!!"

Well, now that I've introduced you all to a completely pointless application for an operating system that most people don't use, I'll leave it at that. I'll leave you with a tribute to bill gates...

Change

Now listening to...

Song: You Rescued Me

Artist: Prague Philharmonic Orchestra

Album: A Symphony Of Hope Vol 2

Apparently, this is funny?

Anywho, I've been thinking a lot about change recently for some reason. Maybe it's moving house or something, I don't know, but it's one of those strange topics that pop into your head when normal people are asleep (such as now, for instance).

Unable to sleep for some reason, I got to thinking how much I had changed over the last couple of years. For instance, I am now far more confident in the presence of others. Believe it or not I was shy at a point, and cared greatly about what other's thought of me. I guess working in customer service helps to relieve people of shyness and such, but a few years ago I would never, for instance, yell at a complete stranger to turn off their ringing mobile in the middle of a movie.

Also, a couple of years ago I had come to dislike being a musician. Having played an instrument of sorts since kindergarten, I guess I got a little sick of the whole music scene. People told me "you'll regret giving it up", yet I don't. That break from it has actually created a greater interest to pursue it as a "hobby", of sorts.

To be honest, I don't think it has affected my as much as a lot of the experts would have people believe. I hated high school, and leaving was a relief. Uni life is still hard to get used to, and I'd prefer a propper full time job, but the holidays are good. One of the biggest change would have been moving from my family's church to EBC, but let's face it, I loathed my old one, so that was a big positive.

So, in short, life is good. So all I've got to do now is wait for season 3 of get smart (only ~20h to go according to utorrent) and then I won't have as much of an excuse to be typing blog posts on my laptop at 1am.

OK, I'm out of ideas, and I'm finally tired. I'm off to bed. On the upside, I'd forgotten how good this cd was...

More Weekly Rantings Bought To You By Logan

Ok, you called for it - more logan-style ranting, this week featuring television!

Having just finished watching season one of Jericho, I have come to the belief that viewers are idiots. OK, maybe not everyone, just the <1% of people who actually contribute to the ratings. So CBS cancel Jericho, they get inundated with nuts, and then they turn around with a pretty decent deal to try to get viewers into the show. This leads me to believe that CBS actually like Jericho, and they wanted to give it a chance, but the ratings forced them to try to drop it.

Which brings me to my next point - what's so good about ratings? Statistically and mathematically, nobody likes the show. Yet how is it that all these people protest its cancellation? Websites are formed, action groups are organised, and before you know it, you've got a massive fanbase peeved at loosing their show. I am willing to hazard a guess that next to none of these people have any contribution to the ratings system.

Statistical moderation works in many areas of society. It helps calculate welfare payments, criminal cases, and the likelihood of network 10 sticking to a show that doesn't have sex in it. But what it cannot calculate is people's personalities. From what I understand, the system is based on age groups, social order, and locations. I have a very different sense of humour to my sister, yet statistically we should watch exactly the same sort of programming. Which is ususally not the case. Come to think of it, last week I did not watch a single show listed in the top 20 shows of the week for melbourne. The only show that I'd watch up there was House, and I didn't bother with it SINCE IT WAS A REPEAT! I'd rather watch the DVD.

DVD sales have soared because viewers are sick of repeats shoved in between new seasons every week (10 are absolute bastards at this), tired of overdone advertising (thanks seven), advertising that gives away the ending (again, 10) and, despite the networks protestations that it doesn't happen, programming going overtime. They can't argue this point with DTV, because their program guides tell me that the next program is on, but I'm still stuck watching Big Brother!

Another prime example is Alias. The final season aired in 2005, yet 7 are only airing it now 1/2 way through 2007 at 10:30 on a sunday night! Yet we can't buy the dvd's in Australia because the tv network hasn't yet aired the show yet. So people download it illegally or buy the dvd from amazon.

Which brings me to another point - if the tv networks think their free to air advertising is so great, why do we have to wait for the dvd to be released after the show's been aired? Surely people would rather see it for free than pay the $50 for the box set. Problem is, we don't see it for free. These days tv is nothing more than a shopping channel - you see a preview of a show you like, then you go download it or buy the dvd. Fewer and fewer people are interested in the crap that you have to endure to watch the show. If I have to listen to that guy/girl adverts about 10's shows one more time...

So, back to the original rant, Jericho is a great show that is not really targeted at the moronic people who watch BB. It is a show that requires thought and intelligence, in a similar vein to prison break and lost. It is (or was) one of the best shows on television, but by the time people realised that it was back on TV, it had been axed. Good job, ten.

Anyway, I'm probably already preaching to the converted, but if nothing else, it will all make us feel partially better ridiculing TV for their crap treatment of Jericho, Stargate SG1, Stargate SG2, Family Guy, American Dad, Scrubs, House, 24, Lost, NCIS, Numb3rs (when it started they kept changing timeslots every week, then cancelled it for a while), and most definitely Whose Line Is It Anyway (a 1/3 of an episode at 3am is not worth showing).

But, on a brighter note, I bought season one of "A Bit Of Fry And Laurie" featuring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. This is a briliant sketch show and well worth watching. BBC comedy at it's best. 221 minutes of sketches for $17. Absolute bargain - unlike the IT Crowd, which JB insist on retailing for $28 for six 1/2 hour episodes. I also got season 1 & 2 of house, and season 1 of lost for $80 (buy 2 get one free).

Oh, and I nearly forgot, the most awesomest ringtone ever. I nearly lost this post adding it, so you'd better be apreciative! (I hit draft instead of publish, then when I went to publish it only 1/2 of it was there... it came back, thankfully).

Awsomely Brief Post

For this week, there will only be the following dot points...

• "The nation" is still absolute crap.
• Movies at northland cannot be arranged at 7:30pm the night of the movie.
• TV networks have no comprehension of viewer's existance.

and last of all...

• I get video mms advertising from three mobile about the show I hate most: big brother. I'm so calling three in my lunch break tomorrow.

To do: see full Paris Hilton post gaol tv interview. Sounds like better comedy than The Nation.

And finaly, the most nerdiest quote I could find from the simpsons:
"The Shaddownight? He once beat me to death with my own lifebar!" (in reference to a MMO)

Discuss.

Another (Late) Weekly Post

Currently Listening To...
Album: Fallen
Artist: Evanescence
Song: Taking Over Me


After watching the link on filmguru's blog, there were links to there videos at the end of it. The one on the left is a fox network panel discussion about religion in politics. It's amazing that it takes until the very end and a college student to say something inteligent.

The one on the right is a report/discussion about the war in Iraq and the airing of bombings. Both are worth a watch if you haven't seen them.

So, anyway, it's been a while. I finished uni on 15th June, and don't go back until the 6th August, so I thought I'd have some quality time to finish putting my room together (yes King Kohl, I still have stuff to do too!) to keep in line with the rest of the household who have been complaining about my inablility to match their house moving expertise (It's not good enough! It's been 2 weeks and you've still got that box sitting in the middle of your room!)

Seriously, though, it seems that my uni is one of the few that finish so early, so I'm getting all thesee shifts at work. I'm basically working full time next week, which is good cash, but kind of annoying when I was expecting a break. Can't complain though - it will pay for all the new release games coming out ;).

Now, what to post this week...

You mac weenies probably won't be interested in any of this, but I'll post it for anybody's interest anyway...

I've finally discovered how to theme winxp without 3rd party software!!! I know, not an overly new discovery for most people, but a new one for me none the less. It turns out that if you replace a *.dll file in the windows directory somewhere, you can add your own themes and visual styles! I've tried things like windows blinds in the past, but always found that it slowed down my system too much, and I wasn't interested in paying $30US for the enjoyment. But now I can use the free themes from places such as deviant art to make it look like... well... linux? I've actually got this installed at the moment in the subzero colour. It looks absolutely fantastic on my laptop. I can't be bothered changing my vista desktop as I like aero enough that it doesn't annoy me.

Another great discovery that I've found is foobar2000. It's a freeware, fully customisable media player that has a very low footprint on system resources. Mine currently has this style, until I can work out the complex coding required to properly customise it. I would normally say that nothing beats winamp, but since AOL took it over it's become more bloated than a vista oem laptop.

See, this is what happens when you up your broadband plan to 7gb. You find all this awsome stuff that you never had the bandwidth to search for before. I also found xp login screens and firefox themes.

Ok, and here's one for you mac people (I'm assuming that this will work for pc and mac versions... I didn't check). Itunes themes. Most of them just change colour but worth checking out. It at least proves that itunes is somewhat customisable, despite it being more anoying that wmp (I'm waiting for film guru's indignant "GO STEVE" comment on that one). At least you can actually personalise it. NOTE: I hate wmp, but I still prefer it's media library over itunes. In itunes you actually have to add a file to the library for it to work. It may be good for people with ipods, but I personally have no use for it or the pathetic excuse for a program called quicktime.

And maybe someone can actually explain to me why on earth you'd make programs to look like XP bluesabre? It is the most awful part of xp, what with it's stupid green hill pixelated background. At least MS got it (mostly) right with vista aero. If only it didn't need a graphics card to run it.

See, this is why I like linux. You can actually set it up to do what you want, as oposed to whatever Steve or Bill say you should be doing.

Anyway, now that rant's over, what else is there...

Oh, yeah, I decided to try out opera. It's a lot quicker than firefox at loading, and as such lightyears beyond IE7, but I don't know if I'll keep it. Kind of anoying to use, 'cause I'm used to the "firefox" way of doing things. Once I get used to the shortcuts, I might use it more, but at the moment I'll stick with firefox because I'm lazy and already have it customised to my liking. Opera is a fantastic program though, and well worth checking out.

So, I think that will do for this week. I'll try and get another post in by the end of the weekend, else it won't happen until the end of next week.

Also, for a bit of interactivity, throw in a couple of your favourite apps. Maybe I'll start up a list or something, as I find "I've gotta try that", and then completely forget about it for weeks, then can't find it...

I'll even accept OSX apps - maybe I'll find MS equivalents.

So Many Choices... Linux It Is

Currently Listening To...
Album: Jazz In The Spirit: His Eye In On The Sparrow
Artist: Unlisted
Song: Awsome God

I just had to link this. Rove's been airing clips of it on Rove Live. Absolutely hilarious the things people will do to be a "real live superhero".

Random Pic Of The Week

Sorry if I stole this off someone, but it's pretty funny...

So, with a new work-in-progress template design for this week, I found myself in the rather unusal dilema of having a few options to choose from. Some topics include...
- Torchwood
- Forza 2 Motorsport
- Linux
- TV Advertisement Rants
- TV Network Rants

I figure since tv has been way overdone by everyone else already, and the people who I know read this blog don't own an xbox 360, it would be pointless covering TV and Forza (at this stage). And since I've only watched the first 4 eps of Torchwood, I might as well cover the lot when I've seen them all.

Since this blog is, after all, called "Confessions Of A Computer Nerd", I might as well cover the most nerdiest topic of all - Linux.

Lots of people seem to ask me questions about what linux actually is, I guess I should start there. Trouble is, explaining it is difficult. So here's the wiki. In short, it's an operating system based of an old operating system called unix (see wiki link). OSX, incidently, is also based on unix.

The key behind linux is that is is open source. This means that it is fully customisable down to the last detail. To make things a little more confusing though, Linux (or any operating system) isn't actually what you see on screen. It is the code behind it.

A poor analogy is a photo shop. You take in your oldskool film to be printed and hand it to the customer service person. They then hand it to the guy who actually prints it. Once printed, the photos are given to the customer service person, who gives the photos to you.

Ok, stay with me. Linux is the printer guy, the one who does all the work on the photos. The customer service person is just there to make things easier. In an operating system's case, this is the fancy graphics. You see it? Huh? Bad I know, but you (hopefully) get the picture (get it? Picture?).

So now I've clarified what linux is, I'll explain the GUI or Graphical User Interface. This is the stuff you point and click at with the mouse. The two main types for this are Gnome and KDE (pics in wiki link). Gnome is comparable to OSX, while KDE is comparable to the windows interface. These too are open source, meaning that you can make them look exactly how you want them to look without having an extra application change it for you (in window's case).

When you combine these two things together you have a distribution, a whole free operating system that I find easier to use than windows and OSX (which I admit, I haven't used much of).
You can still access windows files and folders, osx files and folders, and most hardware works straight after installation without drivers and such. It even has windows emulation, which while not perfect, is acceptible for small tasks, and even apparently runs microsoft office adequately. Not that you need it, with perfectly reliable free legal software that doesn't cost you a cent to use.

So, how's this compare to OSX and Windows? Well, linux is finally at the stage where it can probably be installed by someone whose computer literate, and without a degree in software engineering. With the one that I use, all you need to do is put in the disk, and there's a simple step by step program that does eveything for you. You can even try it out from the cd without breaking everything. The user interface is a decent quality, and you can change it as you see fit. It's prime advantage is application managers that can automatically download free software from the net. Just click it and it downloads, installs and is ready for use without EULA's, and usually without reboots (for most apps).

So, what's left to mention? Windows 90 odd % market share. It can't be that bad with that kind of record, can it? WRONG!!! again, wiki link.

As you can read in the link, it really all began gaining momentum at widnows version 3. It was the first pc operating system that could run on more than one type of hardware (3 at the time). At the time it was revolutionary, and there was finally someone to rival apple. Problem was, they got too successful. Jobs had been kicked from apple, and linux was concentrating on server orientation. This left a gaping big hole for windows '95. After this, we start to see windows downfall. Windows '98 was thought to be a minor upgrade to '95. This is when MS started getting nasty in the web browser wars. When they bundled IE into windows, no one had any reason (at the time) to use nutscrape - sorry, netscape navigator. So instead, netscape decided to add more uneeded features, resulting in it's downfall.

Now MS are far too comfortable in their success and have dropped the ball, and people are filling in the gaps. According the apple's (laughable) release of safari to windows, IE marketshare is down to 75%, because they haven't released a decent update to it in years. Hence firefox. Safari is bug filled crappy software by apple's standards, but is still better than IE. Oh, and while I'm thinking of it, there are no real security/virus threats to linux machines. Virus protection is completely unneccesary, although freely available if wanted.

Anyway, I still have windows on my desktop because I like to game. But my laptop boots just as quick and WITHOUT CRASHING AND DRIVER UPDATES with ubuntu linux installed. It's easier to use and took me 1/2 the time to install.

What's more is that when I bought the laptop, I had no choice but to have windows installed. This is how microsoft makes their money - from manufacturer support. Manufacturers are always going to prefer a nice long legal agreement with lock in contracts than a free, flexible operating environment. This is the reason why windows succeeds, and no other. But with Vista, things may change, but I doubt it. While large businesses won't spend the millions needed to change to linux, and home users don't know the difference, thing won't change.

So, I hope that clears up peoples knowledge of linux a little bit. In reality, I've probably confused you more than anything else, but what the hell.

Also, feel free to comment/critique/suggest improvements for the template colours and such. It ain't no where near finished yet, so I might need some creative input.

In news this week...

Now Listening To:
Song: Molossus
Artist: Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard
Album: Batman Begins OST
IT'S ON NOW, MATT!!!

Random Pic Of The Week

I figure since the quality and quantity of my posts are... dubious, I might try out a regular once per week summary of thoughts/events, etc. After all, I can't get much worse from here, can I?

I found an app that gives a detailed report on hdd performance, temperatures and run time. At this stage, my computer has been running for a total of 9 months, 24 days, 13 hours. This works out at roughly being 12hrs per day. At around 400w on average power, and 550w at full load, that's a lot of juice, that I don't pay for. I'm begining to think that maybe I should use my laptop more...

In other news, Torchwood is about to hit screens in oz on Network Ten. I just found out it's actually a spin off from Dr Who, so God knows how far it's going to get before it gets axed. Anyone taking bets for 2 eps? The link's to the official ten website with an extended preview for those who want to check it out.

Anyway, it seems like a slight improvement on the latest bbc series, as you might tell from the video link. It has promise, although if they have the same script writers, than it's screwed. I'm downloading the first ep now, so we'll see how it goes. Who can't help but watch it with the whole "flash random scenes out of context from the first ep with dramatic male/female voiceover" adverts that ten are now famous for. "Captian Jack is comminnngggg....". And that's why people bit torrent.

UPDATE: Torchwood ain't half bad. It's aimed at an adult audience, so it's a lot darker than Dr Who, but I think it might actually work. I think the script writers might like the cybermen technology a bit too much though. And the overly obvious references to Dr Who are sometimes overdone. But it's pretty good for a modern BBC production.

Speaking of Ten, Jericho gets booted from screens after only 1 return ep. Seriously. I recorded the last two because of the crap timeslot, and for the second recording I get "Mean Girls". What's the deal with that? Why on earth would you air a show like Jericho, which has a more mature audience, after a bogan farm fight night? It did alright last year on Thursday nights, and is there any surprise no one tunes in when the show starts late, wedged in between what equates to school kid backyard playdates and a bogan porn fest?

The only people with less braincells than the Big Brother housemates are those people that watch it. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that drama without nudity is not going to rate well folling Big Brother.

Yet another show to add to the torrent list (Jericho, not big brother, that is...).

So, how many Indians does it take to up an internet plan and move house?
No, it's not a racist joke, despite how that sounds, but in answer it's 3 - 1 to change address, 1 to up the plan, and 1 to explain what the first 2 did.

It turns out instead of transferring our account, they simply created a new one and negleted to tell us. Which meant that account details couldn't be accessed from the net, and that our optusnet emails will be changed, confusing everyone in the process. And this is the industry I'm going to enter. *shudder*

I could comment on Paris Hilton and Tony Mockbell, but I think we're all decided on that one (and yes, I ripped the idea from Rove)...

Paris in black wig

Damn, I've got my last exam Friday this week. Stupid holiday mode zapping all my study motivation!

Well, this seems to be more substantial than most of the previous posts. This may work after all.

NEXT WEEK:
Review of Forza Motorsport 2, provided EB Games haven't screwed up or delayed the backorder. Can't wait!