Ghost Riding 101

If you don't know what ghost riding is, watch this video, listen to the song, and understand the lyrics:

Now that you know what ghost riding is, this next clip shows one common use of the ghost ride:

Finally, ghost riding can go wrong. These clips depict the darker side:

The Robot

Here's my friend Kevin busting a move, and a pretty awesome song:

Rat Maze Game

Try this awesome game. Turn the sound way up, the music is off the hook!

Tsumptin and Tunisia Open Source CD

I was looking for a way to burn ISO images onto CD (funny how Windows XP doesn't include such a feature... bastards) and I stumbled upon an open source cd with all kinds of windows open source software. Free!
When I have the choice between open source, and commercial software, I almost always choose open source. It's much less likely to be bloated and sketchy because you can look through the code yourself and make sure it's safe, and there's nobody sitting behind it trying to make money, which means the incentive to stick ads or other software into it is much less.
Anyway, I'm seeding the torrent for version 1.75 of this disc now, as there are lots of cool little tidbits on it. Check it out! You might find something useful!

Safari Update - Eve Online

An update to my preliminary review of the Safari browser for Windows...

I play Eve-Online, and I just found that after installing Safari, Eve Online would not start. This makes me uneasy, to say the least. I have no clue why Safari and Eve should see or have any interaction with each other. I can't, at this point, blame either product, but for now, I have uninstalled Safari.

Safari for Windows

I have IE7, FireFox, Opera, and Safari installed on my windows box now. Since I do a lot of web development, the more browsers I can look at something in, the better. Here's my preliminary review:

Pros:
It's fast - Apple claims it's up to 2x as fast, which wouldn't surprise me, but it's certainly quicker than IE.
It's clean - The interface is nice, although appleish and apparently not skinnable, and the default font is excellent.
It seems to display most pages right. At least better than IE6 or IE7. I initially had issues with Safari because it had poorer support for CSS2 than IE, but it looks like it's come a long way.

Cons:
Nice firefox features are missing. Where's my spellchecking for text boxes?
Plugins aren't as well established, universally compatible as Firefox. Where's my del.icio.us plugin?

Summary:
If you're a Firefox or Opera user, don't bother. It's not as good. If you're an IE user, please for the love of god, try something else. If something has kept you from Firefox and Opera, give Safari a try. And if you're a web developer, well, we now have another check to run! Safari on Windows!

More Airline Security Bullshit

Another story about the security people at the airlines harassing people and violating their rights.

I guess my real problem with all of this is that like, with the music industry, you have a group of companies that do things unscrupulously, and you don't want to give them your business, so you steal their music. Everybody's happy! But with airline security, you either put up with their crap, or don't fly. Because the government stepped in and screwed everything up, your best alternative is what, drive? Take a train?

Anyway. Just more crap. Soon I'll have to wear a star on my arm so people know I'm not a Catholic Republican.

Flippin Awesome Modems

Whatever company actually stuck this ad together has serious stones.

Great Idea

I was going through my notes from... a while ago, and I found a note to myself. I have no idea how old it is. 1-3 years?

Get people from jail to teach kids to brush their teeth

I'm not sure exactly what I had in mind, but I think it's along the lines of the Scared Strait! program, where we'd have inmates with bad teeth come in and talk to kids in grade school about how they better brush their teeth, or they're gonna pay.

Moped Fire-Cycle

I just got a notice from someone in our residence life department, referring to issues about our building:

As for the individual with the moped, we do not typically allow vehicles with gasoline in the building areas, as it is flammable and a fire hazard. If you have anywhere else to put it, that would be great. Otherwise, bring it into the lobby for now

Yeah. We don't like gasoline near the buildings. Bring it inside.

Kubuntu Feisty Installation Part 2

Ok, so I have Feisty installed, and nVidia drivers up and running. Next issue, I realized that my resolution was slightly off. 1184x1024 instead of 1280x1024, I believe. A quick fix:

System Settings > Monitor and Display > Hardware

My monitor was set to "generic". Entering Administrator Mode... and going into the hardware list, I found my monitor, selected it, selected the proper resolution, and everything was crystal clear.

Finally, I wanted to install Beryl. If you don't know what Beryl is, look it up. Makes OS X look like Apple has been sleeping for a year, and it makes Vista look just pitiful, which...it is. Beryl has a lot of fancy eye-candy, but it also has a lot of neat features to improve productivity once you know how to use them. Also, eye-candy isn't a bad thing. I can do what I do with or without Beryl, but with Beryl, I look good doing it.

So anyway, installing Beryl for Kubuntu was anything but painless. There exists a script on the Beryl Wiki which installs it, and places an icon on the desktop to start Beryl, but it does not auto start, and for the life of me, I can't get it to autostart, even with the directions on Beryl Wiki. So each time I boot into Kubuntu again, I have to manually start Beryl, which is worth it. But still.

Kubuntu Feisty Installation Part 1

If you're a geek and you haven't tried Kubuntu Feisty yet, you're really missing out. I've been using it on my main computer for about 3 weeks, and so far I'm impressed as hell. This is the saga of my install of Kubuntu Feisty 7.04 from the 650MB live/install CD.

Now, I did run into some issues. I wanted to dual boot between Kubuntu and Windows XP (I gotta have my games), and I knew I needed to really reinstall XP since I've been riding it pretty hard this last year, but I wanted to see how Kubuntu dealt with it. I tossed the disk in the drive, restarted, and the computer booted into Kubuntu. I told it I wanted to install, and everything was strait forward.

Kubuntu recognized the existing Windows partition, and asked me what to do. I could resize the Windows partition and install Kubuntu in the new space I made, install and use everything, or install in the largest existing free space (none?). Like I said, I wanted to reinstall Windows, so I selected this option knowing full well that things might get ruined, but I told it to resize Windows and use 30GB. The installer made a bit of noise...and froze. For a long time. I guess it's possible it could take hours upon hours to resize my drive, but I don't have time for silly things like that. So I restarted, and checked Windows. It was fine.

Ok, so time to hose everything. I deleted all partitions, installed XP on 30Gb, and it was happy. Next, I threw in the Kubuntu CD again, and told it to install on the remaining free space. It worked its magic, restarted me, and boom. I have a boot loader asking me if I want to run Windows XP or Kubuntu. So I picked Kubuntu.

First issue I ran into was that Kubuntu doesn't come with drivers for nVidia cards, and I definitely wanted support for all my fancy graphics. I've had really rough times with Fedora and SuSE trying to get nVidia to play friendly. Here's what I had to do:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Once you're in there, change the line that references "nv" as the driver to "nvidia"

Restart X11, and you're in business! To check and make sure everything is happy, run this command:

glxinfo | grep direct

It should have a "Yes" by direct rendering.

Io's Volcano

Just in case you're not glued to /., here are 5 frames of Io's biggest volcano shooting crazyness 200 miles into the atmosphere:

Volcano-Go-Crazy

The Art of War

If you've read Sun Tzu's The Art of War, read this. It is a rough draft.