My Vietnamese Zodiac program is on the first page of Google when you search for the term! In fact, that about 24 people have come to my site looking for that from a search engine as of 29 February! That’s exciting because I know a lot of people don’t look past the first page of search results in Google.

It’s been a little delayed and it’s long in coming, but FreeBSD 7.0 is out now! They’ve made a LOT of updates over the 6.0 series; most importantly they’ve done a lot of work on the SMP kernel. SMP is what you use if you have more than one processor in your computer or if you have a Dual or Quard Core Processor. So they’ve made a huge step to continue FreeBSD’s place in modern hardware. The release announcement contains a lot of info and the release notes contain even more!

I forgot to post this about 1 or so weeks ago when I finsihed up the script. So here’s how the output looks on my flickr views program:

Now my next step is to put it on the web. However, the Python API I’m using doesn’t do web-based program authentication. It also doesn’t handle multiple user authentication, which I’d eventually like to do. Right now I’m thinking of porting it to Perl or PHP. I’ll keep you posted.

My excitement over Flock has faded a bit. It’s a bit bloated. I understand, because of the software involved in Flock’s features, why Flickr is so slow. However, Flickr is one of the sites I visit more often than any other, so I need it to go fast. Right now I have to load up Firefox whenever I want to do anything in Flickr for more than just a couple of minutes. And watching videos (such as on youtube or vimeo) is next to impossible on Flock. It keeps skipping and stuttering. Also, Facebook’s recent changes to the pokes page make Flock’s Facebook features less attractive to me. 111

At first I used Internet Explorer because we had a free trial of MSN.  Then we switched to MCI, who used Netscape (although you could also use IE) and I mostly used Netscape.  I think this was around Netscape 4 or 5.  I really liked Netscape A LOT and used it almost to the exclusivity of Internet Explorer.  Of course, those were the exciting days when every few months Netscape and Internet Explorer would release a new version.  As I’ve commented in previous posts, whether or not Firefox ever gains a dominant share (and the same with Linux vs Windows), its mere presence will necessitate innovation from Microsoft.  You may have noticed that IE stayed at version 6 for a very long time until Firefox started getting really popular.  But I digress.  Netscape had all the best plugins and I thought it was the ultimate in the Web experiences.  I coded all of my websites with Netscape in mind.

I’ve had this rhetorical question in my mind for quite some time now.  There was a time, not too long ago, when the Iraq War dominated the news.  Not only that, but people were protesting.  Remember Cindy Sheehan who was camped outside Bush’s house in Texas and leading all these anti-war rallies.  About four months ago, it all disappeared.  Coincidentally, this is more or less the same time when Britney Spears had her breakdown and the Presidential Primaries started getting interesting.

I’ve always been a bookworm and so around the age of 11 or 12 I asked all my male and female friends whether they would vote for a black man or a white woman for president.  Everyone, male and female alike would always say black man.  I was surprised that the ladies didn’t stick up for one of their own.  I was so surprised, that I would ask my friends this question every couple of years.  We moved a little and I also changed who I hung out with so I wasn’t always asking the same people.  Yet, even though high school and college a majority would say they would rather go for a black man.

So, thanks to a problem I had with rigging up Nick in " Sugar", I’ve temporarily lost interest in animation.  This happens to me all the time, and I think I’ve mentioned it before in previous blog posts that I’m too lazy to look up before that I tend to gain and lose interest in my hobbies.  For example, I haven’t touched the Wii since I beat Mario Galaxy during Christmas and until this recent problem with “Sugar” happened, I hadn’t done any programming in about a year.  Even my interest in photography has ebbed so much that I let my subscription to Digital Camera Magazine lapse.

After a light window manager roundup in the latest LXF (Issue #103) I decided to give IceWM another shot.  I had looked at it once before and found it to both be bare and lacking any programs in the IceWM->Programs menu.  It loaded up ridiculously fast, which was nice.  Unfortunately, for some strange reason, loading up Rythmbox also loads up the Gnome background.  I understand that the Gnome libraries are loaded for whatever necessary reasons when Rhythmbox loads up, but I think it’s pretty rotten behavior to usurp the desktop background!  I wonder if this is worth filing a bug report about with Gnome developers.

Here’s the computer I built back in January: