Others have probably covered it to death. I am just mentioning it because it is that important.

As I was browsing around /usr/share/emacs/21.4/etc/ looking for the emacs manual in order to look for the command to launch the doctor and I found the following. It’ll be funniest if you’re used to Unix man pages. Here it is, the man page for condom.

CONDOM(1) EUNUCH Programmer’s Manual CONDOM(1)

NAME condom - Protection against viruses and prevention of child processes

SYNOPSIS condom [options] [processid]

DESCRIPTION _condom_ provides protection against System Transmitted Viruses (STVs) that may invade your system. Although the spread of such viruses across a network can only be abated by aware and cautious users, _condom_ is the only highly-effective means of preventing viruses from entering your system (see celibacy(1)). Any data passed to _condom_ by the protected process will be blocked, as specified by the value of the -s option (see OPTIONS below). _condom_ is known to defend against the following viruses and other malicious afflictions…

As you doubtless know, the Superman franchise is coming back. After a false start in the 90s where Superman was going to go crazy (inspiring the song Kryptonite by 3 Doors Down), they are actually working on this one. It’s supposed to fit in the timeline after Superman II with Christopher Reeves and is titled Superman Returns. While reading an article about the upcoming movie in the June 2006 issue of Wired Magazine, a side panel titled “The Myth of Superman”, reminded me of one of my favorite monologues in Kill Bill Vol. 2. First what Niel Gaiman and Adam Rogers say in their article:

To All Responsible at nVidia for the production of device drivers,

I want to thank you for producing binary drivers for Linux at a time when most other companies don’t feel that the Linux market penetration is larger enough to develop drivers. So thanks for doing that! In fact, that is why I exclusively buy nVidia for my machines whenever possible. Sure, ATI is sharing NOW, but you were the first to divert some programmers to produce it and your reward is faithful customers like me. Of course, supplying closed-source binary drivers is not the perfect solution, as you have no doubt heard from others. However, I think this is an important first step which allows me to use my computer’s hardware to its maximum and allows Linux programmers to make GUIs capable of eye candy rivaling (and in some cases surpasing) that of Windows and Macintosh.

A little bit of info to impart here with respect to using the proprietary nVidia drivers. So, first I went to livna and downloaded the nVidia kernel modules that match my kernel. Then things were running great - even a little better than before, but something seemed wrong. The people in the irc room were unhelpful when I tried to ask them if nVidia was running. When I tried to run BZFlag, it no longer ran! I kept getting GLX missing errors! Turns out that it wasn’t running! I had to go to system-config-display (in Red Hat Fedora) and tell it to use the nVidia card as my graphics card. Then I opened up a terminal and typed init 3 and went to another VT for init 5 to restart the X server. This time I saw the nVidia logo when I got to the login screen. Success!

I got my graphics card today. Nothing crazy - just a $30 PNY 128 MB nvidia graphics card from newegg. I haven’t installed the nvidia drivers yet, but it has already been amazing in difference. The colors are brighter and more vibrant, the cpu, bereft of its need to draw the graphics runs faster, and windows don’t lag when I drag them around - a problem since Fedora switched to Cairo. There’s also no lag in SuperTux!

After reading about the BSDs in Linux Format Magazine a few months ago, I started to wonder about these Linux cousins. The original Berkely Software Devision port of Unix was developed a long time ago, but the free ones developed almost simultaneously with the Linux kernel had remained hidden from me up til now. Even though I used a BSD machine at Cornell (at least I assume it was since it had a daemon on the login screen), I was just told it was a Unix machine capable of running our software on the Unix cluster.

flickr unleashed a new version of their website today. I am completely lost! Darn these UI upgrades! Why do they do these things? Hopefully things are better now.

Frustrated with the lack of an easy way to create a video DVD on Linux, I decided to write a program to do just that! I wrote a program that will generate the dvdauthor.xml file needed to create the video DVD. Then I realized that if I had been so frustrated, perhaps others were too, so I created a project on Freshmeat.net.

Check out my project! Pydvdauthor

Acme: n. [from Greek akme highest point of perfection or achievement] The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional gadgetry — where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson (two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop. The name has been humorously expanded as A (or American) Company Making Everything. (In fact, Acme was a real brand sold from Sears Roebuck catalogs in the early 1900s.) Describing some X as an “Acme X” either means “This is insanely great”, or, more likely, “This looks insanely great on paper, but in practice it’s really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it.” Compare pistol.