yaleman.org

Starting my day with my normal dose of slash, I found this article calling for the end of the Linux Standard Base. Basically, I’d have to agree with the article it linked to, posted on Ulrich Drepper’s LJ. From what I’ve seen, the LSB is based around stupid standards and testing software that blatantly sucks, and it seems that anyone that passes it is using software that they’ve had to modify to run on a) slower uniprocessor machines b) a distribution that isn’t binary compatible to the shipped verision.

Ok, so I installed Sylpheed, and I played with it. I run my own web/mail server, so I just leave whatever mail I receive on the server so that I can get it whenever I want it by IMAP. My local client already knows what it’s downloaded, so it’s not like I have to download the full 30+ megabytes of email every time. Sylpheed quite quickly downloaded the 4000+ messages that were on the server, and didn’t have a single problem displaying every single header in the inbox when it was done. Filtering messages was processed blisteringly fast and without error - other mail clients sometimes have issues with my filters - and making filters was easy. Navigating between folders was fast, quite frankly I can’t get over how fast this client is, it’s great!

Ok, so I’m a supervisor at work - that means, when I’m doing the supervisor thing, that I have to look out for the people on the floor, take calls that are too long, talk to idiots that think a supervisor’s going to fix their life etc. So I wander over to check on a call that had been going too long, and Lauren’s crying. Ok, so this is different, it takes a fair bit to shake her, so this guy has to be a complete ass. He guy had basically been insulting her, the company, everyone he could think of for ten straight minutes, and being a general pain because he felt like taking his lack of humanity out on someone else.

Ok, so I’ve just finished watching Final Fantasy advent children. First thing - I think it has the thinnest plot in a movie that I’ve seen in a long time. Wow, bad guy gets something he wants, bad stuff happens, then the good guy beats him up and everything goes well! I’m glad this wasn’t actually publicised too much in the media, since it wasn’t much more than a lame fan service. With no development of characters and no explanation of what was going on other than “well, there was this company, and they did some bad stuff, but nature got them back, and screwed over humanity.” After that, if you hadn’t played the game all the way through and knew what had gone on, you were lost. I was, and I had sat through my friends playing it a few times. As far as I can tell, it’s basically an hour and a half of cut scenes taken from what could have been Final Fantasy 7.2, since it was basically x years after FF7, and a bunch of stuff happened! The best part was the fight between Cloud (the good guy) and Sephiroth (guess what, the bad guy!), with the cool-ass 80’s rock backing track, lots of destruction and stuff blowing up. The modelling was great, the voices I couldn’t tell, since they weren’t in English (I’m sure it would have ruined it had they been in english)

This article (news.com.au) is a good example of how not to do NO2 (nos, bulbs, nangs, name it what you will, it’s Nitrous Oxide) Seems the kids had a one meter long bottle of it in the boot of their excel (maybe it’s a good reason why not to drive such a pussbox) and it seems that all but one of the four people in the car died. The police say they don’t know if it leaked or if it was them that opened the valve, but geez - you seriously know about it if you’re affected by the gas - they should have known better and stopped. STUPID PEOPLE DIE!

I setup a Gnome desktop machine based on Gentoo on my dad’s spare laptop a couple of months back, to see if the centrino-based pile o’ junk would work properly, and it did. (for the most part) One of the things that was included in the Gnome install was Vino, a program that helps with setting up remote desktop sharing of the desktop in use. I never knew what the program’s name was, and I couldn’t work out how to get it working on my two-year-old install of Gentoo, and I didn’t want to go to all the effort of reinstalling Gnome just to hope that the program would be installed at the same time. I was cruising newsforge as I do when I’m at work, and I found out what it’s called! Hooray!

I’ve been prodded a few times into looking at Sylpheed - and now this review of the new release on linux.com may have pushed me over to the dark side. It’s a mail client that’s designed using the GTK+ libs, which is good for me - I’m a (nearly) card-carrying Gnome Junkie. I last looked at Sylpheed about 12 months ago, and when I did, it was ugly! I think it was using the original GTK libraries, which makes for some good speed (apparrently, I’ve never seen it) and it was pretty clunky. Looking at the screenshots from the site, and the information in the review, I’ve decided to see how it goes, replacing Evolution as my mail client. I’ve been using Evolution for quite a while now, ever since converting from Windows as my main desktop OS, where I was using Thunderbird (and before that, Outlook 2000) The main reason I’m looking away from Evolution is the fact that it seems to get slower and slower every time I want to use it - and the only explanation I can come to for that is its use of the file-per-folder mbox format for mail storage - and I have folders with thousands of pieces of mail in them at any time. There’s other reasons too - I don’t need a groupware program, just a mail client, and I’m trying to find something that’s a bit lighter on the memory usage as I’ll probably change from an overpowered desktop machine with pretty good specifications to a laptop with more conservative abilities soon.

Here’s a great writeup on multithreaded game scripting using a new version of Python called “Stackless.” Stackless has a slightly different approach to normal when dealing with threads, allowing for micro-threads which have what seems to be a single-byte overhead, tiny startup time and great allocation procedures. I’m going to have to look into it further for playing with some things I want to learn about, so I’m sure I’ll probably wax poetic about it on here in future. Nicely written article that brings out some good points about how game programming works too!

Well, I’m bored at work, trolling the sites on the OSDN and found a well written review of a site called Yet Another Linux Blog. I always like to see people reviewing other sites, because it’s definitely a subjective thing. YALB’s an editorial site with content based around (funnily enough) Linux issues and Open Source software and all the different things that go with it. I couldn’t get to the site from work, and now getting home, it seems that I can’t get to it at all. What a bummer. Sounds like it could have been a really cool site, but I think I’ll have to wait until he stops hosting it from his home connection or whatever he’s doing.

Well, I just finished watching the final episode of the Full Metal Alchemist series. One of the main things I’d like to say is wow. Amazingly well thought out throughout the series, a truly high quality anime. The moral of the story (as all real Japanime’s require) is conveyed throughout the story - told straight out with no explanation to start with - but explained as the series progressed. I’d have to agree with Mitchell’s description of it - it’s like crack… well, more addictive than crack, and more giggling/crying/wow factor. Now all I have to do is find a copy of the movie and watch that 🙂