http://www.ultimateshowdown.org/

It’s a mix of very funny and a bit juvenile. Enjoy!

The important thing about installing a multi-disc distro with VMware Player is that it will create a lock on the disc so that it will tell you to change discs, yet when you do, it says the same disc is still in there. The way to counter this is to hit the CD-ROM button at the top of the VMware player window. This toggle button controls whether the CD is mounted or not. The first time you will get some warnings, but by clicking cancel you can tell it to ignore the lock the emulator has on the drive. From then on, changing discs during installation is as simple as toggling the button off and on, to let it know a new CD is in.

VMware has relased their VMware Player player for free. This product acts as a virtual machine (as opposed to an emulator) and is, therefore, supposed to give you much faster speeds than a program like QEMU. You could use it to run Windows on Linux or Linux on Windows. I will go over putting Linux on Windows. First go to http://www.vmware.com/products/player and download the player. Then download the Browser-Appliance. Of course, the easiest way is to download a Linux image which has already been created for you. They have Debian, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, and a few others. However, as I already have CDs of Fedora Core 5 test 2 downloaded, I don’t want to waste bandwidth (and time) downloaded the vmx image. Therefore, I will go over a slightly harder way, but, according to the PDF at this site, it doesn’t appear to be that hard.

AOL and Yahoo have announced they will allow companies to pay them money to guarantee their emails will get past the spam filters and appear certified. I don’t like this at all. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it’s all too easy once this kicks in for companies who aren’t paying to get past the spam filters to suddenly find themselves sucked in. Kinda like the Mobster movies where the shop owner who doesn’t buy “protection” gets his store trashed. And what’s to stop them from extending this to us, the normal guys? Email is wonderful and powerful because it’s free! I can shoot off as many emails as I want all over the world without paying $0.39-$2 to get it to the person. Therefore I can send an email just to let someone know I’m thinking of them. I don’t have to come up with a whole letter to justify the cost. I hope I’m wrong. Darn spammers messing up the net for the rest of us!

I have mentioned using GRAMPS for a few posts already. I decided to head on over to their site and see what was on the plate for the next release, version 2.2. I am extremely excited!

The map view, if it’s included looks to be amazing! As you can see if you follow the link, it will show where all the events have taken place.

The pedigree view is much more vibrant now, instead of a dull black and white. It also appears to display more information.

Football just gets in the way of the commercials I want to watch. So what did I do to kill time in between? I hacked Python, of course! I found a bit of humor in this, don’t know if you will if you haven’t taken CS classes.

> li [‘a’, ‘b’, ’new’, ‘mpilgrim’, ‘z’, ’example’, ’new’, ‘False’] > “False” in li True False is True! Kinda like turn left, right? hehe…

Today I started learning Python. I picked it because it’s not only one of the hottest languages right now (outside of C#/Mono), but because GRAMPS is written in Python. I haven’t explored this deeply, but I know for a fact that plugins can be written in Python, if the entire program itself is not Python. (Also, it’s named after one of the funniest comedy troupes the world has ever known!) I have chosen “Dive Into Python” as my tutor in this new language. I found only two things that annoyed me, one was a minor annoyance and one was a tad more annoying. The minor annoyance came from the fact that the author broke nearly 50 years of tradition and didn’t start the book off with a “hello world” tutorial. Yeah, he talks about how he’s not going to bore the reader with all the crap that I always glossed over in the other programming books. I mean, this book truly is what it claims to be - it doesn’t teach you how to program, it teaches you Python. I already know how to program from having taken 2 semesters at Cornell and learned BASIC, Java, C, C++, and a bit of Perl. But to break so many years of tradition! (To be fair to the author, he does type out print ‘hello world’ in the installation chapter, but it’s supposed to be your first program, not the first thing you type into an interactive shell!)

Happy Birthday Dan.

Happy Groundhog’s Day!

I’ll be taking the server down this weekend for some upgrades. See you on the other side.

So you may be wondering what’s up with the lack of posts. It’s not that I don’t have things I want to write about. I actually have a ton to write about, but I’ve been (nearly obsessively) working on my family tree using the FOSS Linux program GRAMPS. There’s a link for the page over on the right panel of my blog. The software is AMAZING! I really think they have done an great job. If you want to keep track of your family memories, this is the program to use! I showed my family members what the output can look like and they are impressed. Not only that, but it has also energized them to help me get more information and media! Go check them out and see how awesome they are!