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.

Just tested and, yes, for the small, uncomplicated Hello World program it works just fine on Windows XP. I just had to install .NET. (It took about 10 minutes….I don’t know why)

FiveFour years ago I was on Spring Break and watching CNN at 0000 (midnight) or later. I was talking to my wife (then my girlfriend), although I don’t remember if it was over the phone or on AIM via my dad’s laptop. There was a breaking news bulletin and then I saw a night vission goggles image of Iraq being blown to bits. Shock and awe they called it. I was certainly shocked - although I had been vaguely following Colin Powell and the others making the case for WMD. I didn’t have cable Tv in my dorm, so I wasn’t really following the news at all that year. I was pretty impressed when, about a month later, the fighting portion of the war was over. Actually, as far as I was concerned, the war WAS over. Recently, we have learned, Rumsfeld had hoped the same thing. It was his idea to get rid of Saddam and then let the Iraqis do their own thing. However, some other demons - perhaps Cheney or Wolfowitz - whispered into Bush’s ears about making it into a wonderful Democracy and all kinds of BS that had nothing to do with the WMD/Al Qaeda lies they told us to get into the war.

After reading Linux Format Magazine (LXF) Issue #91, in which they used Mono to code a GTK gui, I decided to take up C# programming. I will follow along with the tutorials and gain another programming language under my belt. Today I started with LXF #87 and completed my C# “hello world” program. The syntax is interesting - it’s a cross between C and Java. Of course, that makes sense as it lists those as its predecessors. Python (and Perl) is still much quicker for short programs, but for complex ones C# seems to be the way to go. At least, a lot of neat Gnome projects have been created with C# such as Banshee, Tomboy, and f-spot.