Serious Sam 2 Update From what I read from Croteam, Serious Sam 2 is coming along nicely and should be visually on par with the likes of Doom 3, Half Life 2, and Halo 2. Guess we'll see when they get a bit closer though. I'm glad that they are still up and at it though, I was a bit worried they'd disappear as a one hit wonder :)

SCO and Darl - What Drugs are They On? In an open letter, Darl McBride determines that the GPL and open source software is, among other things, a threat to US security. Evil doubleplus bad people in other countries can obtain "their" intellectual property for free over the internet (even from countries they as good wholesome apple pie eating Americans would never sell to) and use the technology to build a virtual supercomputer in short order. This supercomputer would no doubt be used to create more weapons of mass destruction, without giving SCO their just desserts, and kill puppies.

I'm convinced that you have to be on some really good drugs to reach these conclusions.

New Productivity Virus on the Net Damn you SilverStr!

Remember the Warthog vid called "Warthog Jump: A Halo Physics Experiment" where they were showing a bug in the physics in the game Halo? Throw some nades under the vehicle and watch it launch. Was a well done video at the time (in case you haven't seen it)

Well, now there is a flash version you can play yourself. It just sucked me in for a good 30 minutes. Unfortunately... I can't get past level 30.

30 levels in 30 minutes. How about you?

About the same here, can't get past level 30...

CodeProject The Code Project - Free Source Code and Tutorials. Mostly aimed at windows, but if you're looking for .net, c++, snippets, etc, this looks like a good place to do it. Don't tell Mike's boss though :)

Convet Atom to RSS The Atom 0.3 to RSS 1.0 converter will provide an RSS feed from an atom feed. This is useful only if you read atom only sites (such as Mike's) in a news aggregator that doesn't support atom (such as (AFAICT) NetNewsWire.

Windows XP License Calculator Want to know how much licensing really costs? Check out the Windows XP ROI Calculator, which will tell you that upgrading 1000 PCs to windows xp will cost you $473,000 (with labor). At least using the default values for most everything. Interesting stuff.

Pingu Part 2 I got the link to Pinguin-Weitschlagen ;-) from the gentoo-user list, and damn it's fun. It's the original bat the penguin for distance with a twist. The sort of twist that helps sysadmins relax :)

Page two is interesting as well, a music video (of sorts) in a foreign language (spanish perhaps?), but it's catchy.

Mozilla 1.7 Alpha What's New What's New in Mozilla 1.7a? Well, better pop-up blocking, multiple identities in mail, UI for smooth scrolling, 2% decrease in binary size, 4% improved pageload times, better dynamic style changes, and new SVG backend for a start.

Log Watching In the "to do later on when I have time" category comes the Central Loghost Mini-HOWTO with some good info for syslog-ng, swatch, and the like. Also here is the Gentoo security guide which is another good resource.

Microsoft on Linux Interesting interview with Martin Taylor, the MS platform manager (as seen on slashdot). My favorite part of the interview was this:

Security is one of those workloads where Linux is getting traction, partly because we don't have a firewall appliance offering today. We have technologies, but we don't have a lockdown, hardened firewall that we can put in.

I think I speak for myself when I say that the reason Linux is getting traction in security technologies is that it's proven itself to be stable and secure, whereas Microsoft's track record for security and stability are horrible. That is why I think that Linux is making tracks in the security space.

Henry Earl Fan Site Henry Earl , a man who has a fan site, a song, and his realtime arrest stats indicate that he's already been in jail for 47 days this year already. Thanks again $othercoder for the link.

Web Designers Rant Craiglist has a great post on web designers and their customers, which is well worth the read (by adults anyway). Via my favorite spamassassin author at taint.

MySQL and PostgreSQL Benchmarking Wish I'd heard about MySQL Super Smack earlier, it looks nifty. A benchmarking tool for MySQL and PostgreSQL similar to apache benchmark (ab) created by MySQL guru Jeremy Zawodny. Wonder how the MySQL tweaking on UFies holds up? :)

PostgreSQL Annotated Configuration Guide Annotated postgresql.conf looks like a good guide for performance tuning for postgresql.

Panoramas with the Gimp Well, I posted tonight about panoramas, about gimp digital photo techniques, may as well end off with a LJ artical on Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP :)

The plugin, Pandora, seems to work well and not well. On one hand it dealt with a large 7 image panorama better than Canon's or Adobes software could. On the other hand however, it didn't allow me to tweak nearly as easily as I could with other software (I clicked one part of the image and it disappeared!).

Bed now.

Panorama Tips Some Panoramic Photography Technique.

Gimp Digital Photography Resources GIMPguru.org has some tutorials and such for using the Gimp for dealing with digital camera images. Sadly I think it's still lagging beghind photoshop elements and it's brethren, but it costs a heck of a lot less!

Star Trek Ship Quiz Think you know your Star Trek ships and ship design? Take this Quiz quiz and see how you do. I got 7 out of 10.

Aircraft / Tower Conversations Very funny Airplane / Tower Conversations. For example:

There's a story about the military pilot calling for a priority landing because his single-engine jet fighter was running "a bit peaked." Air Traffic Control told the fighter jock that he was number two, behind a B-52 that had one engine shut down."Ah," the fighter pilot remarked, "The dreaded seven-engine approach."

Thanks Dave for the list!

SCO Image Thanks to Oneiros for passing this page from groklaw off to me. A sign? (in more ways than one :)

Tinkering with MT Templates mediatinker.com has a great writeup (with graphics and screenshots) on how to go about tinkering with Movabletype templates. Very newbie oriented, it's still a good resource for those who want to go a bit beyond the default.

Viagra Prank The Viagra Prank: Ordering Viagra Online, Then Taking It In Church. I think that says about all. Very funny write up on uhmm... ordering viagra online, and taking it in church :)

UT 3.3 Is Out Hey you UT freaks, Urban Terror 3.3 has been released! Get it while it's hot.

Cat Training How to Toilet-Train Your Cat, a link for my friend DJ, who was wondering (but most likely will never see this page :)

Mix Debian Stable, Testing and Unstable Wim just threw me a link to Apt-Pinning for Beginners. Pinning allows you to run a mix of debian stable, unstable, and testing by setting a weighting for packages from each category. Check it out.

iPhoto Export to Gallery Very cool, iPhotoToGallery lets you export photos to gallery directly via the Edit->export option. Very neat find via Eclecticism. Now if only iPhoto could do uploading of images to web albums like it does for .mac accounts but for your own server. Anyone know how to do that?

W2K Source Code Review K5 has an article with a quick look at the Win2k source. The author notes on the quality, style, comments, undocumented messages and features used by various MS applications, and potential risks of the code being out in the wild (already released exploits aside :)

Urban Terror 3.3 Today? According to the UT website, Urban Terror 3.3 is aimed to be released today sometime. Fingers crossed.

Starship Troopers 2 Trailer

I found a trailer for this and thought it might be a joke or fake, but a bit of searching found a website with a trailer and everything. Of course, having http://starshiptroopers2.net forward to http://energo-system.cyberdusk.pl/ne/bindex1.html seems a bit odd, but it sounds like it's a direct to video production, so that can be expected. Anticipated release is sometime in the summer of '04.

Deep Thoughts on Gay Marriage Probably a bit too political, but why not. Some thoughts on gay marriage, which seems to be getting a lot of debate lately for whatever reason. I think gay marriage is legal here in Canada now, or soon will be, though I'm not sure. I do remember some folks from south of here complaining that Canada was a haven for evil, with legalized pot and gay marriage and all that.

Anyway, for the above link I have to say that #8 is my favorite:

8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

Spyware Oh My If you ever needed more of a reason not to run IE and Outlook, this is it.

The Core Inspired by watching a bit of this tonight, I present to you, Bad Movie Physics' review of the physics in The Core. Hint: Not even close :)

Improvements Needed in Panther MacZealots has Panther: Room for Improvement. Sounds good.

Daily Show on The Prez Lisa Rein points to quicktime captures of the Daily Shows take on Mr. Bush and his nationwide TV interview. Most amusing.

Thank you Tide Just a flood of funny stuff out there this morning. Please read more for a letter passed on from my buddy Jason. It's from a middle-aged housewife to the Tide detergant company.

Dear Tide:
I'm writing to say what an excellent product you have! I've used it since the beginning of my married life, when my Mom told me it was the best. Now that I am older and going through menopause, I find it even better!

In fact, about a month ago, I spilled some red wine on my new white blouse. My unfeeling and uncaring husband started to berate me about how clumsy I was and generally started becoming a pain in the neck. One thing led to another and I ended up with a lot of his blood on my white blouse. I tried to get the stains out using a bargain detergent, but they just wouldn't come out. After a quick trip to the supermarket, I got a bottle of liquid Tide with bleach alternative, and to my surprise and satisfaction, all of the stains came out!

In fact, the stains came out so well, that some detectives who came by yesterday told me that the DNA tests were negative and my attorney said that I would no longer be considered a suspect!

I thank you, once again, for having such a great product. Well, gotta go. I have to write a letter to the Hefty bag people...

Signed,
A relieved menopausal wife

MS Source Code Leak and LOTR Someone on /. has found a great connection to LOTR and the source code leak through this post. Great stuff!

Mishaps on the Shopping Channel ContractPeon posted a link to a great video of a shopping channel pitch for a katana (mpeg). It has to been seen to be believed :)

(link via J-walk) [Hi. Im Black!]

New Firefox Features Tain.org has some notes on new features in Mozilla Firefox. This link for Silverstr.

An Ode to Internet Users I found this beauty in the midst of a FARK.com comment thingy regarding the "released 6 months after it was discovered" microsoft IE patch. Read on for a great post by pomposity...

Somebody just might listen to this:

I hate you.

I hate you because you use Outlook Express.

I hate you because you open "those virus attachments" and make the internet suck just a little bit more for the rest of us.

I hate you because you think you're protected because of that "Norton thingie" in the system tray, even though it cannot catch new viruses.

I hate you for not using a firewall.

I hate you for using Internet Explorer and getting infected with spyware.

I hate you because right now your computer is being used to flood the internet with spam, because that virus gave control of your computer to a spammer.

I hate you because you don't care.

I hate you because you pirated that software that secretly contained a trojan.

I hate you because you don't password your computer. (NEWS FLASH: if you don't use a password, half of the hacker's work is already done.)

I hate you because you don't realize that as soon as somebody breaks in to your computer, you no longer own it.

I hate you because you farking purchased a Windows computer and didn't farking bother to secure it.

I hate you because anybody with sufficient time, money, and workers could take over your computers and cripple networks with flooding.

I hate you.

This has been brought to you by the "If you're not going to play any games buy an Apple because it's actually secure by default; and if you already own Windows turn your effing firewall on and get a Mozilla or Opera product instead of using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express (although you can use IE occaisionally if the site doesn't work) and then you should get Spybot Search & Destroy, install it, update it, and remove the spyware on your computer" coalition.

Cross The Border, Pay $10,000 This one really goes under the "Stupid" tag (via farkcost a Maine resident $10,000 because he drove around the gate at the border, as he's done for the last 8 months. I'm so very happy that the government is protecting us from the flow of uhm.... Americans into Canada... to go to church..... uh huh.

Sorry for the political post, but this was pretty stupid. Uhmm.... very stupid. Yet another case of "shut off brain and follow rules to the letter."

2004 is 20 Years Too Late SOS: Students for an Orwellian Society is hilarious (it's funny cause it's true). A look at the current state of affairs in the world through the slightly tinted mirror of George Orwell's 1984.

War Is Peace

Oceania (commonly called the US and Britain) is at war with Afghanistan Iraq. Oceania has always been at war with Afghanistan Iraq.
[...]
Freedom Is Slavery

The Anti-Terrorism Act ensures US citizens' freedom by ensuring the FBI's ability to examine their activities.

There are also some great posters and other tidbits. Take it as a parody or a political view, or an unpatriotic view that should be reported to the ministry of justice immediately, whatever turns your crank.

Mutt and Vim Working and Loving Together In trying to find a way to set mutt to have vim use 72 character line widths I found this page of MUTT and VIM - Tips and Tricks. Shows how to set up your .muttrc to execute vim with the right command line args for this, or set up an autocommand to match on /tmp/mutt* files, which is what mutt will use.

There are some other good ones in there. Pardon the page link, the original is this page but for some reason no browsers want to display it. Thanks for "view as html" google!

Here is another, page with some more mutt configuration hints. Heck, just head over to this page of configuration files for everything from vim to X. Probably out of date a bit, but hey, it's got pretty colors!

An Introduction to Firebird (the database) The Linux Journal has anice Introduction to the Firebird Database. Sounds like it's pretty good, and on par with Oracle for some features. It'd be nice to see some benchmarks or feature to feature comparisions with PostgreSQL and MySQL though.

CSS Debugging Cool, codepoetry has a CSS Debugging Stylesheet that looks like it'll be handy when I finally redesign things. Any day now. Honest.

Postfix MyDoom Fixes There is someone's body_checks file available for postfix users to help squash the MyDoom virus (thanks again microsoft!). You can put this into your postfix setup by adding the following line to main.cf:

body_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/body_checks

with the body_checks file being something like what is posted in the link. In theory it should work :)

Anyone know of a good integrated virus checker for postfix like qmail has?

I've added some body_checks onto the ufies.org mail mail system and it's catching stuff already, which is good. If you're losing mail let me know though :)

Some good procmail magic is also available here.

Up and Running So things seem to be partially back up and going. Head over here to see a tally of what's up and not. Many huge thanks again to Fred and Neil for helping to get things back up and going today. Again, comment here or on the link above for anything that's not working for you.

UFies Scheduled Downtime Friday Feb 6 (today) Yes, the box crashed last night. Yes, currently SMTP is down and I'm not sure why (smtpd is crashing with a signal 11 all of a sudden). Yes, this will all be fixed (in theory) tonight between 3:30 and 6pm PST.

I don't know why this rash of hardware problems has cropped up, but I'm going to guess it's that the box is overheating a bit, or the RAM isn't that good, or the poor little thing is just taking an enormous beating. At this point I don't care because between 3:30 and 6:00 tonight the box will go down, have it's innards put in the new (actually old) system and have that fresh, new and lovely clean box come up.

I'll put a page on my home website of http://arcterex.net/blog with a list of what is working and what isn't, and encourage all to post there (or here if apache is up) to let me know what is working and what isn't. Please expect a couple of days of confusion before things are worked out, but by tonight mail and web at minimum should be up and going for the most part.

So backup, cross your fingers and send good vibes!

Update - I managed to get mail going again by removing the postfix-tls package so if you can't do secure SMTP that's why. Sorry, but it'll be fixed tonight.

Mind Hack Whoah. This not only works but works disturbingly well. It's pretty freaky actually.

Building a G5 Cube Very cool, someone built a Power Mac G4 Cube. It's not english, but the pictures say it all. Wonder if he'll get sued for putting an apple logo on it? Via random($foo).

RSS Specs and Incompatibilities Mark has a good post on The myth of RSS compatibility. Does anyone really care that much about this stuff? Seriously, it's xml, most aggregatores can read most of the major versions and most of the blogging tools have at least three different feeds created automagically for you by default. Can't people just pick a format and call it a standard? I mean pick one format, not pick more than one and call it a standard [insert old joke about lots of standards here]. Oh yea, egos, I forgot. *sigh* Still an interesting read to see the history behind the insanity :)

MSN Toolbar Apparently there is a MSN Toolbar Beta out. Looks pretty familiar to me. Uhm.... with the exception of the MSN specific links (messanger, hotmail, etc which are dups of the google news, etc) it looks almost exactly the same as the google toolbar. Except it's a version behind. And about a year behind. And uhmm.... why would I want it again? Oh right, because it'll probably be shipped with IE, or installed via an IE security update.

Once again, thanks for nothing microsoft.

On Boobage Jake over at Lying Media Bastards has some good thoughts on the great Boobery incident that happened during the superbowl. My favorite quote (which I have to agree with) is:

Sometimes I think about living in a cave, far far away from other people. But then I'd only have two nipples to look at, and that's just not enough.

There was another great quote on Eclecticism on the "incident" which goes as such:

In the middle of a heavily-publicized violent sports event (maybe not as overtly violent as boxing, but when many players are injured and hospitalized each year, sometimes gravely so, we're not talking tiddlywinks), in the midst of a halftime show known for excess and pushing the boundaries, the world got a momentary one-or-two second (accidental?) glimpse of a single breast.

One breast. A couple seconds. And it's instant controversy.

Roughly half the world's post-pubescent population already has two breasts of their very own, and I'm assuming that unless they ensure that all lights are off every time they get dressed or take a shower, they've probably already seen those; and the other half of the population generally spends a fair amount of their waking hours trying to find ways to see those breasts that they don't have! This isn't exactly a new thing, folks.

Sorry for quoting the whole thing, but it's all pretty relevant :)

Why Your Blog Must Die Somewhat serious, somewhat tongue in cheek, Why your Movable Type blog must die is a good article on kuro5hin.org about how the blog-plosion is another sad and stupid fad in the sad continuing tale of the Internet.

I have to agree a bit. I had my own 'blog' 8 years ago when it was just something for me to write my stuff in and my only readers were my parents and the only reason they read was to see if I was going to be around on the weekend to come by for dinner. Nowadays it's the latest fad, everyone has one, people are pushing them as some sort of innovative way to do office communications, social networking blah blah blah blah.

I have no doubt that blogs will continue on in some form or another just as diarys and ships logs have for years and years now, but I do think that the current trackback, moblog, blogroll craziness will die out in a while when people realize that (as the article says) "All your blogs talk about the same crap".

Mozilla Firebird Optimizing Cool, Geek Style has some tips for Optimizing Mozilla Firebird.

FreeBSD LiveCD Cool, FreeSBIE has a FreeBSD livecd. I've been hearing for ages how stable and wonderful *BSD is (and I did consider it for the the new UFies.org server, but in the end decided that putting a system on the net that I didn't know about would be a Bad Thing :) but have never really tried it outside of VMWare a couple of times.

Anyway, if you're interested in trying out FreeBSD without worrying about all that scary installing stuff, check out FreeSBIE.

Suexec and VHosts Damn, spent the last day and a half trying to figure why none of the user blogs on the newly built and currently building UFies.org box weren't working (figured I'd majorly screwed something up) and I finally find that 1 - movable type likes to be able to write to the db directory (updating indexes or something I assume) and also that suexec won't work with vhosts if they are in user ~/public_html directories. That sucks, but at least now I know!