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!

Ashley has posted an apology on her blog. I accept that apology on behalf of myself. I don’t know how others who were affected feel. Perhaps next time, do not post hurtful things unless you truly mean it. You really hurt all of us, especially by talking about our mother. (Especially when they are vicious lies)

The inflammatory post which spurned us to write what we did has been removed. For the sake of understanding what got us into such a tizzy, I’ll post a copy of it.

Here it is:

I’m definitely in the anger stage of grief, but bear with me I have always tried to believe that everybody has good in them. I’m not perfect-I react to the things people do that I don’t like, but in the end I usually try to understand that people are the way they are because it’s the best they know how to be. And so when Dan’s family treated me like shit and barely like a person, I tried to understand where they were coming from. I tried to see what I was doing wrong with myself. And yes, they fed me and took me places and paid for me, but they never ever stopped manipulating Dan to turn against me when I wasnt there. And if they were pissed, they didnt mind throwing a tantrum and not looking me or Dan in the eye. And his mom competed with me, and she denies it, but everything he did for me, she wanted him to do for her. And I tried to put up with it. And I hated it, but I pushed him to keep a good relationship with his family no matter how unfair they were acting. But ya know what? I’m stronger now, and I’m pissed at the way I was treated. I’m pissed that they raised Dan to only trust his mom and that being dishonest is no big deal. I’m pissed that Dan’s siblings don’t see that she did the same thing to his brother’s wife before I came around. When dan’s brother got married, all he and his wife worried about was making that awful woman happy, and ya know what happened? She complained the entire time anyway. Yeah, on their wedding day, where they should be worrying about themselves. And I had the stupidity to feel bad for them, and try to understand them. It was stupid because when the criticism turns to me, they buy into it. That’s why Dan’s mom is so good at what she does, because she gets you in her group to complain about other people and tells you how she manipulates them, but no one relaizes she does the same thing to them. Yeah, Eric, your family used to talk lots of crap about Danielle until I came around, and I know they did because I spent time with both Dan and Dave before I was ever in the dating picture, and David has a harder time hiding things, and you all probably know that, but yet I’ve heard her making comments about Dan and I. Maybe people are just glad to have the heat off them, but that’s bullshit, because I tried to not join in on the crap talking about Danielle. And the thing is, I think everything gets denied by everybody because it’s such a habit to judge other people that they’d have to realize a fundamental flaw in their everyday thinking and they just don’t realize it. So deny away, but you’d be seriously insulting my intelligence. And yes Dan’s mom does nice things for people, but you know how you can tell that even that part of her is selfish? Because she doesn’t do nice things without telling everybody and getting mad if she doesn’t get something back. She likes to raise kids because something inside of her needs people to need her to a level that is so absurd that some of her offspring never learned to form healthy relationships with other women. On Christmas Eve, that woman actually turned to me and said “Why do you make my son so miserable?” Who say’s that to people? That is not a nice thing to say, but I just kept my mouth shut-I was dumbstruck. And she would never apologize for anything like that. And that is the kind of person I dealt with for a year and 8 months. I know I make mistakes, I know I couldve been better in some areas, I know I didn’t always do the right thing, but at least I can recognize my own flaws. And I feel regret for the bad things I do.