Wireless Setup in Gentoo Linux Some nice details on getting wireless going painlessly under Gentoo. Deeper magic than others, but still neat info to know.

Part 2 is here.

Six Stages of Debugging Gregg posts The Six Stages Of Debugging..... so, so true, as any developer can attest to :)

E17 Icon Movie Nifty, with E17 kinda available (from cvs), you can check out some of the new stuff as far as icons and dropshadows in this short avi movie. Is Enlightenment still as relevant as it used to be? Back in the day it was a huge kick to see the graphical wondefulness that it was, but with years in between releases, has E lost it's place in the scheme of things as far as being a major player?

Linux Optimization A cool post on system optimization. Gentoo oriented, and some specific stuff, but lots of good stuff there that'll apply to other Linux distros.

Darcs Version Control Intro Of all places, a good comment on /. which has a good intro to Darcs Revision Control. Looks a bit like subversion, with a couple of extras like an offline mode, send changes by email (Linus mode), and easy ability to add your own patches to an OSS project to create your own personal branch. They claim it's not perfect, but it sounds neat.

Half Life 2 Timeline Primotech has a cool timeline of the half life and half life 2 development process.

Oh, and the fix for the stuttering in HL2 has been released on steam. To update, just load up the game (I think).

Closing Comments Automatically in MT 3.x MT Close Comments plugin, for my upcoming move to MT 3.12. Now my question is, can one leave certain particular blog entries open within the closed comment range? I have certain entries which attract very interesting comments which I'd like to leave open to the masses of morons out there. Case in point.

Another Nifty Kung Fu Movie Hmm.... House of Flying Daggers looks much funky. Like Hero and Crouching Tiger, both of which I enjoyed greatly, and starring Ziyi Zhang, who, well, let's face it, she's a hottie and a kung fu master (or at least plays one at the movies)... what more can a geek ask for?

Half Life 2 Stuttering Fix on the W-w-w-way The sound stuttering bug that is in half life 2 is expecting a fix today according to the webpage.

Quake 1 With Proper Lighting Never saw this project before.....

Tenebrae is a modification of the quake source that adds stencil shadows and per pixel lights to quake. Stencil shadows allow for realistic shadow effects on every object in the game world. Per pixel lighting allows you to have fine surface details correctly lit. These are essentially the same algorithms as used by the new Doom [3] game.

Well, it sure looks good! Version 2 is of course, an upgrade of the original.

Rsync Snapshot Backups Jeremy pointed out a way of doing Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Rsync. Nifty.

Half Life 2 Survival Guide For those who have it, you might need the Half-Life 2 Survival Guide from 1UP.COM.

Slashdot Firefox Rendering Fix Cool, someone hacked up an extension called SlashFix, which fixes the odd rendering bugs of slashdot.org under firefox.

New Crossover Office Cool, Crossover Office 4 is hitting the streets. Highlights:

• iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod. It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable.
• FrameMaker and JInitiator seem to work well, but they have not been tested by a wide range of users, so your mileage may vary.
• The CrossOver Office Setup tool continues to improve; it now supports a 'Control Panel' which will let you manage certain facilities for Outlook and specific programs that were difficult to assess before.
• We have made many major improvements to CrossOver for this release. We think you will find that your applications run more quickly and more robustly.

Read the link for more....

(Link now fixed)

Half Life 2: Close Enough to Taste Well, Half Life 2 is going to be available for retail purchase tomorrow, and at midnight tonight they will be unlocking the authentication servers. I'm all for technology and all, but it sucks to have bought a game that you can't play, you know? This is one of the reasons why I haven't bought into steam, which is Valves content delivery system.. though someone on /. called it more of a content restriction system instead. I understand why they need this, but on the other hand, if I own the game why can't I play it, and more pointedly, after I unlock the game to play (assuming that unlocking is needed for the single player retail purchase), do I need the auth servers to be up to play in the future, say in 5 years (Half Life 1 is about that old right?).

Anyway, can't wait for tomorrow!

FoxyTunes - another nifty Firefox Extension While randomly browsing tonight I found FoxyTunes, which basically puts a connection to your music player (looks like pretty much any platform) controls into the firefox window. I'm not sure how useful this is in Real Life yet, but so far it's handy to be able to just mouse down to a play/pause/next/prev button instead of hitting the key on the keyboard, or going to a separate app. Similar to the WMP windows toolbar thingy.

Dragon Illusion The Dragon Illusion is neat, and has a video showing exactly what they are talking about.

Half Life 2 Kinda News This image is not only cute, but it, along with others, shows that Half Life 2 might be sooner than expected. Of course, right now my expectations for it coming by sometime soon are next to nothing....

A $200 (CND) iPod? Accordion Guy notes that iPods Got Even Cheaper. $199 (after $40 rebate) CND. Wow. They are refurbs, but with a 90 day warranty.

I have my finger on the "order" button. Why not right, it's only money :)

*psst*... can anyone spare $199 CND for me?

Other Gentoo Utils A list of some useful portage utilities for Gentoo Linux that currently aren't in portage can be found here.

Last Day to order Ubuntu Just a note, free shipping for Ubuntu Linux if you want pressed CDs (bottom of the page). They are closing the shipping on November 12^th

The Final Spam Solution You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If... is a great list of things regarding people who think that they have found the One Ultimate Final Spam Solution (well, actually the "Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem" if you want to get technical. Quite amusing :)

OpenOffice PDFs with Bookmarks and Hyperlinks Just a quick plug for extendedPDF, which lets you use openoffice's export to PDF functionality with the additon of hyperlinks, bookmarks, and all that good stuff.

Networking for Your UML Wim pointed out the VNUML Project home page which:

...is an open-source general purpose virtualization tool designed to quickly define and test complex network simulation scenarios based on the great User Mode Linux (UML) virtualization software.

Which basically means that you can use it to get your networking up and going with User Mode Linux. Going to have to check it out.

Firefox 1.0 Tomorrow! Whohooo! Firefox 1.0 is still on track for tomorrow! Can't wait (not that the pr2 release that I'm running is going to be much different) for it, and great job to the mozilla folks!

For all Your Slave Girl Costume Needs So your SO asks you what you'd like to see her in and you think, "I could tell her what I think of that gold bikini that Carrie Fisher was wearing in Jedi.... but you can't actually get those anywhere, so why bother...". Well young horndog, fear not, there are Princess Leia Slave Girl costumes available!

High Bandwidth and Call for Donations In a fit of madness yesterday I posted a local mirrored copy of the new Episode 3 trailer, and somehow it got around the net as a mirror in the feeding frenzy. You can see the results from the BigBrother image. So sometime this morning Fred noticed that the bandwidth was up at something like 20mb/s when he moved the file away. Of course, we did basically the same amount of bandwidth we do in a month in one day, and while the way the hosting works we're not on a bandwidth-based pay system (ie: NN Gig per month) I'm not sure how the hosting company will react.

So now is as good a time as ever to once again bring out the tin cup and point to the "Help UFies via paypal link to the right. If you've got a bit of extra to spare it would certainly make my life easier and the keeping of this server up and going a bit less of a stress point in my life. Please and thankyou and I really appreciate it.

Next time I'll just keep it to myself!

*makes note to set up bandwidth limiting in apache*

Flatout Game Demo is Nifty Anyone else played the FlatOut demo? It's a racing game done to todays standards of game technology... great graphics, ragdoll physics, completely deformable cars and track environments (no more staying on the track muahahah) and "games" like the third gametype in the demo where you try to launch your driver really high up from a jump. Long story, check it out and see if you like it. This is something I'll be keeping my eyes on!

Video *ist-DS Review Someone over at the DPreview forums posted a link to this video review of the *ist-DS DSLR from Pentax. Not hugely deep or anything, but interesting to watch anyway :)

Episode 3 Trailer Well, it's out and I've got a local copy (grab it from usenet at alt.binaries.starwars and save my bandwidth). I won't spoil anything, but will say that it looks pretty funky. I just hope I won't be disappointed again :)

ArcterMoved Just in case anyone was wondering where my personal website disappeared to (all three of you) the ip changed (long story) and you can find me at http://70.69.65.225/blog. Or, set your primary DNS server to 65.110.12.162 (ns1.ufies.org).

You may now go back to watching up to the second voting coverage of the elections.

GIMP 2.2 Preview Available An announcement about a GIMP 2.2-pre1 (the Halloween Release) is out.... looks like some neat features are going into this one, changes to tools, HIG work, etc.

Scratching an Itch Now here's some useful software.... Teatime is a gnome panel applet that tells you when your tea is ready. Whohooo!

D-BUS Tutorial Ross Burton has a nice tutorial on how to Connect desktop apps using D-BUS.