Obsolete_Your_Idols

Sat, 31 Jan 2004

Here's a project inspired by rubberhose, but aiming at a simpler install of greater usability, named phonebook.

posted at 18:03 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

By way of johannes grenzfurthner and thus here, I read about one of those bootable live filesystem CD Linux instances, akin to Knoppix named Dyne:bolic from the folks atDyne who sound quite cool but their homepage is presently unreachable. At least there's a Google cache of dyne.org to look at.

posted at 13:25 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

That's a Spicy Filesystem!

An email on a list I sometimes skim pointed me at this project, which has some interesting stuff tucked away in it.

posted at 13:25 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

My Name is a Killing Word

I had a chance to finally see Evita recently.

I found it confusing [even with helpful explanations provided] and flashy without a lot of substance seemingly to it. The songs are almost catchy, but can't seem to compete with ones from Jesus Christ: Superstar for memespace.

It did inspire me to go dig up some books on Argentina and read them.

posted at 09:05 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

Blackobite Rebellion

Now I've seen the third season of Blackadder. Quite fun. Blackadder as butler to a fool, with some fodder for the lighter side of a 7th Sea campaign.

Episodes:

Dish & Dishonesty - Parliamentary politics, Blackadder style. Good payoff at the end for the setup.
Ink & Incapability - This one's got Robbie Coltrane as Dr. Samuel Johnson and also a Shelley and Byron character and is decently funny.
Nob & Nobility - Totally righteous skewering of several social phenomena: fads, poseurs, gourmet foods, obsession with other cultures. Good 7th Sea fodder, too.
Sense & Senility - Er, anarchists and actors. This should be more interesting than it was. Maybe I expected too much from it. The ending seemed a bit weak to me.
Amy & Amiability - Oh boy, Miranda Richardson! Very good 7th Sea fodder. A dashing highwayman or two or one. Some cute sallies at Cyrano de Bergerac. Probably my favorite of this season.
Duel & Duality - Season ender. No Flasheart. No all fall down. A cute Prince & Pauper reversal. A cute Atkinson - Atkinson dialogue.

All in all, I think I liked season two more but season four less. But that's entirely subjective. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd seen the seasons in a different sequence.

Oh, and it's got the Blackadder Christmas Special on the DVD. That was delightful fun.

posted at 09:02 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

The Secret Names of Streets

Finished reading the second edition of Unknown Armies.

I'm not prepared to do a point-by-point comparison to first edition but it is, in fact, an improvement on every aspect. So if you've held off buying it, stop waiting. Well worth the money to someone running or playing Unknown Armies. From structure to simplification of mechanics to inclusion of first edition supplement material, this is a winner.

posted at 09:02 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

Transmetropolitan: The Cure

Let's see. Social commentary, madcap violence, drugs, prostitution, secrets, schemes, dark shadowy authority and monstering. Yup, it's a Spider Jerusalem collection.

If you like this sort of thing, you'll like it. If you've never read Transmetropolitan, this is not where you want to start. It's a climax of the arc and without context, you'll wonder what is actually going on here to a level which will distract from the story. However, if you've started reading Transmetropolitan and begun to wonder if it's all obtainable to trade paper bound collections, very nearly. There are only six issues not in tpb at this point. So you might as well pick this up when you get the rest of the tpbs.

It's got a number of cackle-worthy gems in it and it's, at worst, fun.

posted at 09:02 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

StormWatch: Final Orbit

Collecting the StormWatch/WildC.A.T.S. crossover and the end of the second StormWatch series.

Let's see. How to summarize.

Warren Ellis kills a whole bunch of characters. Everybody left goes on to be in The Authority.

There. That's all there is to it. I wasn't interested the first time I read the crossover, never having read WildC.A.T.S. nor particularly getting wood over Aliens, and it wasn't any better in this form, though it was more cost effective, I suppose.

Recommended only for the absolute compleatist or the Alien fetishist. Really not that interesting taken as a work on its own.

posted at 09:02 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

StormWatch: Lightning Strikes

Character focused stories for Jack Hawksmoor, Jenny Sparks, Jackson King. That's worth the price of admission. The rest of the book is some more scary background stuff with Rose Tattoo and then a sort of Lovecraft Light bughunt.

Probably worth it for the compleatist but there's nothing here you'll need to read. The Jackson King story is an interesting look at militias from someone who doesn't rub elbows with them.

This collection reads like a bridging sequence, fleshing out characters, winding up to something interesting, which turned out to be the second StormWatch series.

posted at 09:01 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

We Few, We Happy Few

Henry V is pretty darned good.

There's a lot to like here. Branagh really carries off the role, the story is structured [obviously] well, the dialogue is [of course] tight and moving. For people who like Shakespeare, there's nothing here to dislike.

Yes, I do realize everyone has already seen this movie. But I liked it. Shut up.

posted at 09:01 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

Clothes Make the Men

Courtney pointed me at The Yes Men and they immediately became one of my new favorite reading sites.

posted at 09:01 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

Throw the Bums Out

Impeach the miserable failure.

Gratuitous google bomb courtesy of my noticing some nitwits trying to bomb Michael Moore with that tag. Tit for tat in this dilemmatic prison.

posted at 09:01 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

Mon, 19 Jan 2004

Freebooters

Here's a set of links as memo to self, pointers to free/open/secure operating system loaders to come back to later when I have time to think about this. The idea being that if you can escape proprietary BIOS in a fashion which allows you to verify security, update when needed, and share with your friends, you'll have a happier, healthier gaggle of systems. This came up recently on the Beowulf list recently tangential to something else and got me started looking for similar/related projects.

Aegis, secure boot system
freebios, firmware collection for a BIOS replacement
linuxbios, replace BIOS with a compressed Linux kernel
openbios, IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) compliant firmware project
TIARA (utcboot), Openbios/GRUB/PFORTH composite

posted at 13:01 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

Stow Light

I wanted something a little lighter than stow for managing a group of symbolic links. I quite often find myself building an intricate tree of files somewhere on a filesystem and then wanting to be able to combine them in a single directory for some purpose without name collision. This isn't the smartest way to do it, but it saves me from recreating the pipeline one-liner I've been using each time I needed to do this up until now.

#!/bin/bash

# mklinks by Shannon Prickett <binder@manjusri.org>
# Makes unique symbolic links from files under source directory in target directory.
# $Id: mklinks,v 1.1.1.1 2004/01/19 19:30:51 binder Exp $

SRCDIR=$1
DESTDIR=$2

FIND=/usr/bin/find
LN=/bin/ln
READLINK=/bin/readlink

if [ -z "${DESTDIR}" ];
then
    echo "   Usage: $0 <source directory> <target directory>"
    echo "   Create unique symbolic link for each file under <source directory> tree in the [flat] <target directory>."
    exit 1;
else
    IFS=$'\t\n'
    echo "Searching ${SRCDIR} for files."
    for targetfile in `${FIND} ${SRCDIR} -type f` ; do
        targetpath=`dirname ${targetfile}`
        targetprefix=`basename ${targetpath}`
        targetname=`basename ${targetfile}`
        if [ -L ${DESTDIR}/${targetprefix}+${targetname} ];
        then
            linkend=`${READLINK} ${DESTDIR}/${targetprefix}+${targetname}`
            echo "Found link to ${linkend}"
        else
            echo "Linking $targetfile to ${DESTDIR}/${targetprefix}+${targetname}"
            ${LN} -s ${targetfile} ${DESTDIR}/${targetprefix}+${targetname}
        fi
    done
    echo "Complete."
fi

posted at 11:42 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

Sat, 17 Jan 2004

I'm Getting Better!

Memo to self: Check this source-to-source translator for C out. I'm cCured!

posted at 19:41 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

Fri, 09 Jan 2004

Well, it's Buzzword Compliant

Here's another one of those notes I leave to myself.

This game engine sounds interesting. Too bad it's a 0.03 release.

posted at 07:30 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

Go Go Mozilla!

So if you love Mozilla like I love Mozilla, you'll have tripped over all sorts of plugin foofarahs as things which should Just Work in fact Don't Work. So Devil pointed me at a page of plugin help for Mozilla on x86 Linux.

If you do something like update your system with reckless abandon often, you may find those tips helpful.

posted at 05:59 PST (-0800) (comments disabled) permanent link

Wed, 07 Jan 2004

FAQ: Respond to an RIAA Lawsuit

Here's a webpage with some answers to FAQs about being sued by the RIAA.

It's the kind of thing you want to have read before you need it, much like the ACLU reference card about how to handle being arrested by police.