Archive for the ‘Just for Fun’ Category

Online Pets?

Okay, I guess I’m going to show my ignorance on the toy industry here, but I couldn’t believe this when I saw it in the store. I was walking through Target last night going after some last minute Christmas gifts and saw this sign. Apparently the whole aisle was designated for “Internet Pets”. They’ve had virtual pets for a long time, but do we really have to have online pets? Perhaps thanks to a little shell scripting and cron we can have fully automated pets that are fed, walked, and loved on automatically. Now I just need to find a way to get my virtual dog to pee outside instead of on the carpet all the time..

Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Dec 24th, 2008

Return to Windows?

Since last Tuesday when CrossOver offered their products for free, I’ve been installing all my old Windows games to see if they’d run on my Mac. I plan on reporting my results, but I ran into an interesting situation in one of my tests. It was a battle of wits greater than The Princess Bride.

The game I was experimenting with was one that I’d played thousands of times in my former Windows life. Dirt Track Racing 2 from Infogrames ran beautifully under CrossOver with one small exception. When you hit escape while racing, the menu didn’t display. If I hit the up arrow which would “move” the “cursor” which did not exist to the “quit” button that didn’t exist and hit enter I could still exit the race. Only a minor workaround was required. However, when using the menus to exit the game itself was where it got interesting. I was prompted by this intriguing question:

I came to an impasse. Clearly I can’t choose “Yes”. I can’t in my right mind go back to Windows after seeing the light with Mac and Linux. Of course, even if I wanted, I don’t have Windows installed on this machine. This answer truly went against my deepest convictions and desires of my heart. Yet, if I answer “No” it takes me back to the game menu. So, logically, I can’t answer “No” or I’ll get nowhere. However, if I answer “Yes” then I am admitting that my *NIX diversion was just that: a diversion. It was like I was somehow admitting that I needed to come back to Windows. But still, I can’t answer “No” because then I’m back to where I started and can’t get out of the game. While trying to escape Windows, it had backed me in to a corner. Obviously, Windows wanted me to say yes but I couldn’t in good conscience answer “Yes” to the question “Return to Windows?”!

In the end, I ended up just shutting down the machine to avoid answering the question. I’d rather lose data then go back to the list of troubles I had with Windows. :)

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Nov 5th, 2008

The Best Linux Distro

In many a forum and blog entry, hundreds of Linux n00bs have asked what the best distribution of Linux is. The answer is, of course, that it depends upon what they want to do. Really, a lot of them do a lot of things well, but there are specific quirks about each one that cause us to be willing to start holy wars over our preferences in forums and other places. I finally decided to do something about it and solve the question once and for all. I used the greatest tool ever for decision making, sucks-rocks.com. Unfortunately, it was a three-way tie..

If you have any distros you want to add to compare, you can get to my list here.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Oct 7th, 2008

7 Software Utilities I Need for Real Life

We as humans have designed software to make our lives easier. My life is so ingrained in software that sometimes I find myself wanting to just type a simple command to make things easier myself. In fact, some days I even know what utilities to use and exactly how I would script common tasks in my life. Here are a few of the utilities I’ve wanted to use for the physical world:

grep - I’d be a rich man if I had a quarter for every time I wished I could do something like this in the physical world: ‘grep -R car_keys /home’. Unfortunately, this would probably allow me to be even more unorganized since I could just search for what I need rather than actually organize things so they are easy to find.

rsync - I’ve always wanted to be able to take a set of knowledge that someone has and just copy it over to me. Using rsync, I could easily transfer all data or a set of data from someone else’s brain to mine. But, alas we couldn’t be that lucky.

Xgrid - Whenever a task is too large for me to comprehend or accomplish in a given amount of time I really wish I could just hand it off automagically like Apple’s Xgrid. Delegating tasks tends to be a pain. You have to transfer the information (which we just discussed) and then give an explanation on how to accomplish the task. Using Xgrid, I could just hand off tasks (this would’ve been useful in college) and get the results back.

snapshots - We’ve all been there. We think “wow, that wasn’t my brightest moment”. It’s times like this where I wish I could just fall back to a point in time. We can make volume snapshots or virtual machine snapshots, mess up a machine beyond repair, and fall back to a previous running state. This would have been especially helpful that time that I tried closing that garage door by putting my fingers between the panels and pulling down. Doh!

rm - The human brain remembers a lot of things (though it seems not the things we want it to). Some days I’d like to be able to just wipe bad memories from my mind using rm.

kill - Don’t worry, I’m not looking to kill anyone. What I really need is a way to kill off processes. You know, when you’re lying in bed at night and you just can’t stop thinking about that latest article on whatan00b.com? Wouldn’t it be nice to just to just kill off the process? I know I need that some days.

SSH - Some days I know exactly what I forgot to do or want to preheat the oven on my way home or just change my laundry while I’m at work. SSH would be perfect for that, but sadly enough, no such luck. (note: The oven thing would actually be possible, though a little bit ridiculous at this point.)

Software running in the human world would definitely be helpful and help me accomplish a lot more in a day. What’s really sad is when I know exactly what command to use.. Now, I need to get back to grepping searching for my keys.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Sep 22nd, 2008

Blue Shell vs. Blue Screen

Anyone who has both used Windows and played Mario Kart, can relate to the horrors that are blue screens and blue shells. Video games have been used as tools to teach real-life lessons and skills and blue shells in Mario Kart seem to be teaching us how to deal with blue screens. In some circles, Mario Kart is taken more seriously than real life and I’ve found a number of similarities between blue shells and blue screens of death in Windows. Below are some of my findings:

1) They are both blue in color. This is an obvious observation, but an indication of things to come…

2) Both have the initials “B.S.”. The letters “B.S.” also stand for something else, but to keep this G rated, we won’t go there. One of my good friends in college always said, “It’s no coincidence that the acronym for blue shells is ‘B.S.’.”

3) They both cause users to start over. In Mario Kart, the leader is completely stopped, stripped of all his/her weapons and forced to sit and wait until the kart is ready to go again. In Windows, the user is completely stopped, stripped of all the programs in memory and forced to wait until the system reboots.

4) They can happen at any time. In Mario Kart, the blue shell can appear at any time fired by any other driver (below third place) on the track. In Windows, any exception or hardware failure can cause a blue screen at any time.

5) Both are the cause of bad language. It’s a proven fact that Mario Kart causes bad language (see diagram below, gotta love xkcd!). We’ve all been there at midnight while working on an important project and suddenly, blue screen! Sometimes it can be enough to make a preacher cuss.

6) They are both scary looking. Let’s face it, the blue shell has large spikes and flies through the air, and you can observe the blue screen below:


Blue Screen Of Death by *IMustBeDead on deviantART

7) Both strike fear into the hearts of those who have experienced them. Whenever the words “blue shell” are heard by a Mario Kart addict, terror usually ensues. The same can be said for Windows users.

As you can tell, Mario Kart blue shells way too close to the Windows experience for my comfort. Okay, so maybe it’s a little exaggerated, but clearly there’s a resemblance, especially for those of us who take Mario Kart way too seriously.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (2) : Sep 2nd, 2008

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