Those of us who read the newspapers, which tend to be focused on more details than Tv news, have read the stories that neither the administration nor Tv news have focused too much on: Iran was cooperating with the USA after 11 Sept 2001. They were helping us go after the Taliban and catching terrorists. Of course, I’ve learned recently they also had a self-interested motive in doing so as the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was [along with Iraq] one of their long-time rivals. However, they were helping us. Then Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in the Axis of Evil in the 2002 State of the Union. Besides providing a lot of fodder for SNL and other Late Night Shows, this had the effect of Iran ceasing to help us. They were thinking, “Axis of Evil? You SoB, we were just helping you in Afghanistan!”

It was another toy program, although a bit more useful than last time. It reads through a directory and recurses through subdirectories to fine all txt files and builds up a cache. Then it searches those for any text you want to search for.

Perhaps I missed a subtlety, but it appears to only search on one character searches as opposed to a whole word.

Next issue begins a real program - an RSS reader. Since I have that issue, I think I’ll do it tonight and then turn in for the night.

This news is a few weeks old, but I’m behind on my “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” podcasts. However, a congressman said that we have to be really careful with dealing with Iraq and Iran (meaning bomb the stuffing out of them) or else our money may one day read, “In Mohammad We Trust.”

Hey you moronic, racist/religioust, jerk - does our money say, “In Jesus We Trust?” If your improbable scenario were to play out, our money would read “In Allah We Trust” and everyone knows that Allah == God. Therefore it would say the same thing it says now.

I booted into this disc to see what games it had. It is a decent disc and I discovered that there’s a Penguin-based Mario Kart Clone. It mostly has FPS shooters.

Anyway, when I booted back into Windows my network card was no longer working. After fretting for about an hour and rebooting and shutting down, I went on IRC and found the answer. Sometimes (although it’s never happened to me before with a livecd) the drivers get into a weird state. To fix it, just completely cut the power. That means shut down your computer and then pull the power cord and wait for about 1 minute. After that it will work again.

Despite the fact that the ReactOS test specifically said that 0.3.1 was not ready for installation on computers, I tried anyway. Looks like they decided to keep that horrible installer from Redmond. Quite a shame when most Linux distros are using graphical installs. You don’t need to copy the bad stuff too, ReactOS team!

However, that computer already had Linux on it and, for some reason, ReactOS did not know how to use the partitions correctly. So instead of getting to test how ReactOS was going on real hardware (vs the VMWare images I’ve tried so far), all I got was a GRUB error. When I get more time I’ll have to fsck it to wipe the whole drive and then try again. Hopefully by then they’ll be into the 0.4 series. (I don’t see myself having much free time anytime soon)

I started working on a new animation project a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty excited about this because it’s going to be my first animated short with a plot. Sure, the Penguin Flight animation technically had a plot. But it didn’t have a valid story-telling plot. There was no conflict - it was boring. (Not to make, but to watch) For this new animation I’m going through all the steps - starting with writing a story and storyboarding. Then creating a 2D animatic. This is not, by the way, the budgie video I was previously planning. That one has been shelved for now because it didn’t really have a plot and I am really into this new story. I’ll go back to it later, I think. Also, you may see the bird make cameos in other shorts. At the very least, it was a great exercise for me to learn more about modeling.

Some guys over at Novell decided to update the Mac v PC ads to become Mac v PC v Linux. I think they’re pretty creative and he gives a great reason behind the choices he made for the video.

I’ve got the videos here, below, but be sure to follow the link above and see how they came up with it.

Whenever one political party expresses wishes to give a fixed percentage tax cut to all Americans, the other party portrays it as tax cuts for the rich. (I’ve complained on this blog about this before) Their proof: the rich get back a few thousand bucks while the poor only get back a few hundred. The stupidity: if it’s a tax cut where everyone gets 1% off, and the rich people put more in, 1% of their money is more than 1% of the poor person’s money. Of course, they never dig deeply into it in the news and perhaps it’s a tax cut on Porches or something else that only rich people have. Somehow I doubt that or the other party would bring it up.

Next time you find yourself wondering why people like me (or rms) make such a big deal about having the source code to software (especially when it comes to voting machines), ask yourself why we make scientists show us all of their research instead of taking their word for it. Think about why it’s important that other scientists can recreate the experiment and how that analogy applies to software stability, security, and overall quality.