For a while I kept wondering what the heck was going on in Iraq. Why were the Shi’ites and Sunni killing each other? Aren’t they both Muslim? What barbaric behaviour to kill your own compatriots, not because they are a different religion, but just a different sect! But then, one night as I lay awake in bed, I thought of Europe in the 14-1800s. Dozens of wars were fought between different countries in Europe because one side was Protestant and one side was Catholic. Heck, the British suffered through a few civil wars over different sects of Christianity. So, I guess it’s not so strange to see them fighting this way.

My wife asked me a poignant question a couple of weeks ago, “If Linux is SOOO awesome, why don’t you stop using Windows?” I told her that I couldn’t play civ4. “I thought you said it was ready for use and equal to Windows,” she continued. And I realized, there are probably some others who prosthelyze about how awesome Linux is. While I think Linux is amazing, and can do some great things which are hard or impossible to do in Windows, it is not for everyone.

You may wonder what use the command line has? Afterall, why use it when you have a GUI? Well, they are so useful, that Microsoft will be reimplementing it in Windows Vista to allow people to run shell scripts. I’ve blogged about the usefulness of the command line before, but I wanted to demonstrate with some examples.

As I was reading about DSL, I wanted to download the ISO so that I could try it out. But how to do this quickly and without my intervention? Enter the program wget. wget allows you to download from the internet in the commandline. You can download one thing, such as an iso, or you can download an entire website for offline browsing. What makes it better than using your browser to download is that you can set it to retry a number of times so that if the download gets disconnected for some reason, it will continue to try. Also, a good thing to always do when downloading an ISO is to check the md5sum, allowing you to know that your file was not corrupted during a download. No biggie if you are just downloading one thing, but if you are downloading a couple of ISOs, it can get a little tedious. Using the commandline should help you out. So here’s how I started off:

Here are some of the latest screenshots I’ve taken of my main Linux desktop and how to do the same for yourself. Click on the screenshot to be taken to the fullsize picture. I finally listened and provided a low-res picture here instead of resizing the large one, thus a faster download time for those of you on dial-up.

These add-ons on my desktop as known as eye candy. They are on my desktop to look cool and provide some functionality. It’s nothing I can’t already do by going into a web browser, but it looks neater doing it like this - to some anyway. First off, you’ll notice that my menu bar and icons are in Spanish. That isn’t part of the eye candy, but I figured I’d let you in on how to do that in case you also wished to practice your technology vocab. When you are starting up your computer, if you are using Fedora you will have GDM as your greeter - the place where you type in your username and password. Other distros may also use GDM or you may select it on your own. There is a button called “languages” and if you click there, it will set all of the menus to be in Spanish. And when you load Firefox up and go to Google, it will be Google in Spanish! (or whatever language you selected, if it’s supported)

As I was driving home last week, I heard something interesting on NPR. I knew that people had been selling their MMORG characters on Ebay. They would spend a few sleepless nights getting their character up to a really high level and then sell the character on Ebay to the highest bidder. I’ve heard stories of people making thousands of dollars! But this story on NPR took the cake! People were buying in-game money with their own real money. Of course, as the point was made in the story, our money is no more eral than the money in the game, if people have faith in its redemption value. Apparently there are websites which peg the US dollar to the Everquest Gold Piece! But that’s not all!

Started playing Final Fantasy 8 once I finished up 7. I’ve played for about 3 hours and have already found the obligatory Wedge, Biggs, and Cid. In case you’ve never played the Final Fantasy Series, ever since 4 (I think - but definitely 6) there have always been some characters named Biggs, Wedge, and Cid. Cid is usually a mechanic or inventor or something scientific. In 8 he’s the headmaster of a training school for mercenaries. Biggs and Wedge (after who my brother names a lot of his online personas) are like the people who wear the red shirts in Star Trek, they show up for a little while and then are killed. They usually provide some comic relief, although it’s not a requirement.

Work begins later; Thank you white snow for falling. But why the ice too?

I was surprised that, by only raising the level of difficulty by one, the computer opponents in civ4 began to fight each other. In this instance, it was to my advantage because Washington of the Americans attacked Peter of the Russians, who I was planning to attack anyway. I think I will play my fourth game also at this difficulty level or I fear they may annihilate me. I’m not quite ready for that yet.

What does DSL mean to you? If you’re a technological person, it might mean Digital Subscriber Line, a way to access the internet. If you’re not a technological person….well, just ask my sister-in-law what it means to her. But to Linux users, DSL has even a third meaning, Damn Small Linux. What is Damn Small Linux? It is an entire Linux distrobution that fits on a 50 MB “business card” CD-ROM. It’s based on the Live CD technology devised by Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame. He has created a phenomenon by perfecting the idea of having an operating system running entirely in the user’s RAM. This allows you to use Linux wherever you go, no matter what computers are available, and you won’t be touching the underlying system!

I finally beat Final Fantasy 7, it’s what has been occupying all of my time this weekend. I never had a Playstation until College, but I really loved Final Fantasy 6, so as soon as I could, I bought a Playstation. Later my brother-in-law got me a PS2 so that I could play FFX and X-2. I wanted to play the games in order, so I started 7, but then came my wedding, the move, and a bunch of other things. So it dragged out for months. Frankly, I don’t recommend doing that for Final Fantasy or any story-based game. What I usually love about Square RPGs is the bond you feel with the characters. But with so much time between playing, I barely could remember what was going on, much less bond with them. However, as there was still a lot to do in the part I’ve been playing for the past week, I was able to get back into the game.