Missing Gear
By the way, I handled one of the Zune HD's while I was at Best Buy a couple days ago. They are thought defyingly thin.
I've been in kind of a rut lately. I'm nearing completion of entering the main script events into Spiral Island, but some of them have left me kind of scratching my head as to how I want them to play out. I haven't been able to write for any of my active stories, either, because I sit down, write something, and then end up not happy with it and delete it again.
I dunno. I think maybe my mind needs to come to a singularity again and then disperse before I'll be able to really start flowing again. Until then I just have to trudge through as best as I can.
Date posted: 06 November, 2009Tags: personal writing
Compacted
So I did decide to go ahead and upgrade my XPS to Windows 7 after all. I made this decision mainly because I had switched to 64-bit Vista not that long ago, and the UPEK fingerprint reader software for 64-bit has a major memory leak. I had caught it multiple times taking up more than 2 Gigabytes of RAM, slowing my system down majorly. Windows 7 added a uniform API for Biometrics, integrating fingerprint readers into the main login system and eliminating the need for having third party software installed to manage it. I use my fingerprint reader for logging in all the time, so it was a necessity to have a properly working software controlling it.
I also own an ASUS Eee PC 900A, which I currently have running Xubuntu 9.10. It has a small 4GB drive, and every time I install a new OS on there I find myself having to uninstall a lot of unneeded packages to free up space. I have it currently at 1.08 GB free, but that can swing wildly down to less than 400 MB free depending on what I'm working with on there at the time. To try and make space easier, I got to thinking about using a compressing filesystem on there, only to find out the only Linux filesystems that really support integrated compression are Reisen4, which isn't integrated into the main kernel and is currently stalled, and Btrfs, which is expected to eventually replace the extX file systems currently in use, but is well behind development schedule. I'll probably switch to Btrfs in the future, but it doesn't warrant another reinstall right now when Ubuntu 9.10 release was just a week or so ago.
While I was doing the research, I remembered about the NTFS built-in compression as well, which had been out of mind since I hadn't ever seen it used since the private NT Server my high school's Multimedia lab was run on. I have only a 160 GB drive on my XPS, which I keep in two separate main partitions (in addition to the MediaDirect and Dell Tools partitions) of 100GB for the main OS, and 47 for various experimental OS's from time to time, with my music collection stored there when I'm not experimenting with anything else. When I reinstalled with Vista x64, 30 of that original 100 was taken up by the OS alone, and after installing all my tools I had less than 50 GB left. If I try and install any games I lose a lot more space, having less than 30 GB free when I decided to install 7 and getting down as far as less than 10 GB free at times in the past.
So I decided to turn on compression when I installed 7, to see how much it changed things. The actual 7 install itself took up only 15 GB instead of 30, which was nice. I compressed my Users folder, and the 32-bit Program Files folder (the 64-bit one doesn't get a lot installed in it, so I haven't bothered). After installing most all of my tools (I still need to install Photoshop and VirtualBox), and downloading STALKER in Steam, I currently have 67 GB still free! My Program Files folder is compressed down to 79% the size of normal. All in all, very nice results, and will make things much better to work with in the long run under this setup.
Date posted: 05 November, 2009Tags: computer software
Frozen History
Now, I could have sworn that I wrote an entry about the closing of GeoCities, because I distinctly remember doing it....
Oh nevermind, that was done a lot further back than I thought it was, no wonder I couldn't find it. Since I Do It Live, I will leave my mistake there.
Anyway, as of Monday, GeoCities is now completely closed. Although it's a far shot from the internet being relieved by horrible website designs, the historical significance of one of the oldest internet hosts being taken offline is pretty immense, and a lot of the internet has been now removed from circulation, removing it from sight, removing it from mind, and removing it from existence.
That is, if not for efforts to preserve it, of course. I've talked of the Internet Archive before, which has set up a special section dedicated to the GeoCities archive specifically. However, they weren't the only people this time to hold up the idea of a New Alexandria. A small group threw together a project called Reocities, to download as much of the GeoCities servers as possible, and rehost them. They have a nice detailed account of how they did it, too, which is a pretty cool read for the technological aspect of the feat.
"Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make," so said Douglas Adams. And because of that, the importance of preserving as much as we can about the reality of things is paramount, so that we can prove things as they really were, instead of just rumor and hearsay. Thanks to the Archive, as always, and thanks to Reocities, for seeing the need to preserve a major part of the Internet's history.
Date posted: 29 October, 2009Tags: internet new_alexandria website_design
Persona
Well, Windows 7 is officially released now. Unlike when Vista was released, I won't be switching to 7 immediately. My desktop is slowly spiraling to it's death, so I'm going to wait until i get a chance to build a new machine for that, and my XPS I don't want to change until I'm done with the work on Spiral Island. So I have a copy of 7 just sitting here waiting to be installed.
I'm finding the advertising scheme Microsoft came up with for Japan rather surreal, though. In an odd way to try and appeal to the geeks there, they decided to play off the internet's OS-tan phenomenon and sanctioned an artist to make an "official" OS-tan for the system: Nanami Madobe (which is a play on words derived from Windows 7). There's even a Windows 7 theme Microsoft released for 7 with a collection of wallpapers of the character and a sound scheme made up of various voiced recordings for the character.
I just find this turn of events incredibly strange.
Date posted: 23 October, 2009Tags: advertisement computer internet software
Power Ballad
So this week Brütal Legend came out. It's a combination of Adventure and RTS elements in a sandbox environment, gameplay wise, starring actor and comedian Jack Black. But, perhaps best of all, the game's story is High Fantasy set in the world of Rock.
In Brutal Legend Jack's character, Eddie Riggs, is transported from a rock concert into a parallel world, which was once ruled by a god-beast made of fire and molten steel, and it left influences of heavy metal around the world. There are stone monuments of guitars, old car parts, and walls and roads made of large speakers. But best of all is the soundtrack, with over 100 Heavy Metal songs sitting as setting for the game's main sequences, and a musical score written by LucasArts composer Peter McConnell based on those tracks to fill it in, make it an absolutely enjoyable game, soundtrack wise. If you're into metal, anyway. It's a fun game, full of witty humor and random comedy of errors, so I would recommend anyone who likes that type of music to play it.
I would have liked to have heard some Blind Guardian in the soundtrack as well, though.
Date posted: 16 October, 2009Tags: music video_games