Project Morningstar

Squirrel on the window!

2006-03-12T17:46:00.000-08:00

Antiwar Protest September

2006-03-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

2005-10-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting one. BBC put out a poll to their readers. "Who do you want to run your world?" Here are the top 11.
1 - Nelson Mandela
2 - Bill Clinton
3 - Dalai Lama
4 - Noam Chomsky
5 - Alan Greenspan
6 - Bill Gates
7 - Steve Jobs
8 - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
9 - Richard Branson
10 - George Soros
11 - Kofi Annan

If you're wondering, I choose Chomsky, although Mandela isn't a bad choice.

2005-09-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

Hi! I'm demonstrating!!!!1!

2005-09-13T21:08:00.000-07:00

Jesus in a box, it's been a long fucking day. OChem lab is going to suck up a lot of time. In lighter news, I did my MatSci homework in 15 minutes, so that's cool. I also went to the Cafe Scientifique in Dinkytown and listened to a physics professor for a while. Physics professors are always fun. I think it's probably because they're crazy.

2005-08-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

So I think Jordan, Peter, and I hit our apex of geekiness last night. Here are the bad signs.

1. We were sitting around and watching the daily show.
2. The LEDs Peter soldered together were glowing in the background.
3. We were all on our laptops.
4. We were ordering flying spagetti monster t-shirts.
5. Jordan was updating his flash plugin.
6. I was SSHing into another computer upstairs.
7. We were holding a seperate IM conversation among ourselves while talking out loud.

Oh well...

2005-08-24T21:43:00.000-07:00

I just made up a new word!

Scientista, n.: An unmarried female scientist.
Hush, and observe the sexy scientista as she goes about her work.

2005-08-23T22:36:00.000-07:00

A series of unfortunate events...

P.S. If you understand this, you know too much about *nix.

2005-08-22T11:12:00.000-07:00

"Torture, treason, and corruption, by our works you shall know us."
--Republican Jesus

Jesus' General

2005-08-20T19:51:00.000-07:00

So, I never realized that James Bond is such a rapist. There's a James Bond marathon on TV right now, and the older 007 films have some pretty clear examples of non-concensual sex. At the very least, they're cases of sexual harrasment that could lead to some pretty severe repurcussions in todays society. At worst, extortion for sex, and possible rape. Oddly, however, the women always seem to begin to enjoy it at the last second. Well, I guess he is Bond.

2005-08-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I just made the most amazing discovery ever. What is it, you ask?

Indie Podcasting.

They are the new media and they rock. The format is actually best listened to on iTunes or Podcatcher. RSS feeds are kind of inconvinient. Do yourself a favor and get some podcasts.

I personally suggest:
The nate and di show
Skepticality

Have a nifty day!

2005-08-15T21:46:00.000-07:00

Ooh! Silly people who think they knew science. Flat earth Society. Take a few minutes and see if you can refute all the arguments. It's like a game!

2005-08-12T12:14:00.000-07:00

Mini-Lan this saturday. Be ready for some wardriving if you want to come.

So here's something good. Skepticality.com. If you're looking for a fun, rational, freethinking time, this is the place. I especially loves Swoopy with Whimsicality. Check it out, you'll see what I mean.

2005-08-11T18:04:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I saw the sweetest car yesterday. Here it is.

2005-08-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

So today is the day. Well, yesterday, actually, but close enough. Someone has figured out how to get OS X to run on non-apple hardware. Nice.

With all the interest, its really too bad that Apple won't open up OS X to run on any hardware. But I have a couple thoughts on the matter.

It's quite possible that they don't want to degrade the OS X experience with all of the issues that can indeed come with random hardware. The truth is, Apple makes pretty awesome hardware, and I don't now how I would feel about running it on a black box. Another possibility, however, is that Apple has decided it's time to go big or go home. On that note, they might have decided to pull what I would like to call the "l33tkr3w gambit."

Apple started a hackathon as soon as they released the x86 version of OS X. They probably knew it would happen, and they probably knew that it would succeed (reletively easily, it seems.) This created exponentially more interested in the technical community than a simple blackbox OS X version would have.

This is likely to lead to more technical users working with OS X. If the mainstream tech community (the slashbots) move to OS X and away from it's likely to usher in a new age of prosparity for Apple as they drag more and more of the normal community with them.

If that's they're plan, it's a pretty awesome one. If that's not their plan, they may be pleasently surprised.

In any event, I hope that a blackbox version of OS X does come out some day. Until then, um, don't use the cracked version. That would be illegal and stuff.

2005-08-08T21:05:00.000-07:00

Where the Open *Nix Desktop Needs to Go

I was originally going to title this post "Where linux needs to go." But the truth is, that isn't really a meaningful statement. I don't know much about the linux kernel, but as far as I can tell, it's stable, fully featured, and in good hands. It has it's own charismatic leader, Linus Torvalds, a figure to whom thousands of geeks worldwide swear fealty.

Overall, Linus has his thing, and he's doing it well.

What needs to change about linux (and BSD and probably others I'm not as familiar with) is not the inner workings. It's the experience.

I've spoken before about how amazed I am by OS X. It's a beautiful piece of work. Everything works, and works well, and underneath it all, I'm comfortable knowing that there's a stable, standard, well-made FreeBSD base. I can use the bash when I feel like it, but I never have to (unless I want to something esoteric, like install software from the fink project.)

This proves that the tools that the Linux and BSD communities provide can work for the average person. It also shows the things that are wrong with our current approach.

The good news is that now that the way has been shown to us, it's apparent how we can improve our act. The bad news is that copying OS X will lend credence to the accusation that open source never innovates. True, there are many readily apparent ways in which open source has been ahead of the curve, but here, we're playing catch-up. Unfortunately, all we can do is bite the bullet and move on. (I say we loosely. I'm not a very good programmer yet, and I've been using Linux for 8 months. But go with me here.)

The primary issue to the common user is hardware support. A user should not have to try to get hardware support. This is something that needs to just work. No ifs, ands, or buts. I don't know if the bigger linux distros do this, but the smaller ones don't. I can't stress enough that this should be the biggest push. If average joe and jane can't get their sound to work in the first half hour, they aren't going to stay with it. Same for wireless, graphics card (usually not a huge problem) and every other peripheral that they've spent their money on. I know this isn't always our fault, and that few hardware manufacturers are helpful and loving towards the world's linux users. But in some cases, the proper drivers are there, but they don't auto-load and configure themselves correctly. Every time that happens, we lose a potential users. That needs to change.

The next major barrier is software installation. This is getting better, but it still needs improvement. Tools like synaptic are acceptable ways for users to install software, but they have two weaknesses. The first is the lack of integration with websites and the rest of the outside world. When a user goes to a website and looks at the download section, and all they see is deb packages, rpms, and source packages, chances are that they'll use them. There are two ways in which this situation could be improved. One would be to integrate some sort of protocol handler (like those produced for AIM links) with both a synaptic-like client and an OS version sensor. Having the client request the right package type automatically and install it (with proper user confirmation and security measures, of course.)

A better solution would be similar to the one that was instituted in OS X. Standardized package formats. The best thing for the Linux community would be to remove the current 4 (more?) options for package type and go with one. Most obvious among these is auto-package. In my opinion, the linux community should be hog-piling on the possibility of cross-compatible packages, but that hasn't really happened.

If autopackages did become the accepted standard, then the next logical step would be to allow click-to-install with them. This is close to done already. Currently there are four steps to install, which isn't horrible. But that includes changing the execute permissions, which isn't good enough for the average user. The path should be obvious. Double-click should at least yield a pop-up dialog asking if the permissions should be changed. The current dialog also asks if the user would like to view or run. Also not good enough. Close, but a real end-user friendly system shouldn't have these unnecessary steps.

Lastly, the file system needs to be cleaned up. Even windows is ahead of us here with the program files directory. Here, again, we could take a lesson from OS X with it's /Applications directory and it's *.app packages, which, for those of you who arn't familiar, are folders that contain all the information for an application and act like executable files when clicked. It's a very clever system, and while the symbolism isn't accurate, the ease of application installation, use, and removal is unbeaten.

Ironically, none of these things would be nearly as hard to program as the things I've already seen the linux community to do. I've seen reverse-engineering. I've seen linux go to the ipod. I've seen GUI tricks that are months or years ahead of their windows counterparts and on par with their OS X. I've seen applications that are window manager agnostic. I've seen actual security measures put in place, and updates provided. And I've seen all of that cared for and updated and improved in just the nine months since I started caring about linux. But no one has done the things we really need. And that's a problem.

In the future I'll talk about some of the ways in which we might improve the development process for the linux desktop, and some other features we might include.

2005-08-07T13:29:00.000-07:00

Lots of interesting things today. For one, Carnival of the Godless is up again. Very nice this week.

For another, a birdwatcher posted some pictures of a praying mantis killling a hummingbird. I was impressed.

That was via phyrangula.org. I really can't say enough good things about that blog, people. It's written by PZ Mayers, a biology prof at Morris. He's an excellent writer, knows his biology (of course), and even knows his way around a computer quite well from what I can tell (he's an Apple man, which currently gets him some more points from me.)

On that note, I'd like to talk about OS X a little bit. I 'm a Linux user, as most of you know, and I have been for the last few months. I'm comfortably running Gentoo on my desktop right now, which is a mid-range computer that I recently built.

I've bearly touched it since I got the ibook I'm using right now.

It's a 500 MHz machine from a couple of years ago that I got on ebay. It actually takes time for text to come up on the screen after I type it. The screen is only 12". But given the choice between this, my desktop, and my old laptop (which hasn't gone to it's buyer quite yet) I've chosen this every time.

Part of it is size (I'm comfortably sitting on my bed right now, looking out the window) and part of it is certainly the joy of having a new OS to play with. And a good part of it is the beauty with which an ibook is made (more on that later.) But mostly, it's OS X. It's almost definately the best OS I've ever used. This is a particularly odd feeling because it's really FreeBSD, with the Apple window manager (Aqua) running on top of it.

When it comes to the distinction between capitolism and community driven projects (projects largly labled as communism) I usually come out more left of the line than most people. But I've had a revelation. The best projects are done by people who care and have some organization. One or the other doesn't cut it. The linux community is fragmented, their projects are freqently redundant, and they've never really sat down and fixed all of the usability issues systematically. I have yet to find a distro that does everything I want it to out of the box. Ubuntu comes close, but the wireless support isn't even close to working form me. (I know other people have had different experiences.) Furthermore, sound is imperfect, samba is fairly difficult to configure.... the list of petty annoyances goes on for a while.

On the other side of the coin is Windows. Everything works, but the lack of quality is readily apparent. Standards support is horrific, and the entire UI experience is shoddy. Further, seemingly common features are fairly well hidden. Everything is overly bloated, especially SP2 for windows XP (which takes as much space as the OS itself.) If you're going to increase the size of my OS, you'd better increase the functionality too. Security updates don't take that much space.

Add to that the list of dropped features in Longhorn (a much better name than Vista any day) and I really have no idea what the developers of Redmond do with their time. My bet is drink on the job. I know I would if I ended up working for M$.

Apple hits it right. The care that went into everything is apparent. Everything works properly, and well. Everything works the first time. I have yet to experience any frustration, except when trying to get it to interface with a different computer, which also went surprisingly well.

Thus Apple has joined the ranks of Google and The Daily Show in my books. They're groups that are in bussiness, it's true. But it's fairly easy to see that they actually care what kind of product they produce. It's a small group, but a good one.

On that note, I'd like to salute Google, the Daily Show, Apple, and any bussiness out there that actually takes pride in the products it produces, or the services it offers. You make the world better. Not many groups can honestly say that.

I think helios said it best. Brave soldiers all.

I'd like to talk about the ways in which linux could improve it's quality, ease of use, and hopefully market share as well. But for all of you out there who arn't geeks, I highly suggest that you consider Apple next time you purchase a computer. You deserve a change.

2005-08-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

So one of the minor disadvantages of an new OS is that I have to find applications that do the things that I need. On that note, once again, I have another Blog editing tool, Chronicle Lite. It seems to be working out pretty well so far.

Apparently yesterday was Jordan's birthday. So there are some festivities.

Also, I figured out how to get my wifi card working properly in Linux. Just in time for my laptop to be sold. Fortunately, Jordan is getting the same model, meaning it is not a waste. Now we'll be able to do some serious wardriving.... Or warbiking. Or whatever.

Anyway, if you have a prism 2 pcmcia card for linux, and you're deperate, try modprobing for orinoco_cs. It just might make your day a little better.

2005-08-04T19:33:00.000-07:00

So I had my first full day with OS X today. I'm very pleased. Apparently there's an X11 subsystem that allows the running of X applications alongside aqua applications. Meaning, of course, that I can still have Linuxy goodness. Hell, i can even run fluxbox or kde if I'm really that desperate. I have all my needs covered, (browser, IM, fun applications of goodness). Also, people go all gaga over ibooks, even if they're Windows users. I'm not really sure why. I guess even a 2 year old ibook does look pretty damn good.

Anyway, basically, I'm happy with my new laptop.
Peace out.

Worship me...

2005-08-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

...for I am your king.

Sigh

2005-08-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

This is getting annoying.

Everyday, I see realism become a smaller and smaller minority in America. So let's go over the basics agian...

1. Intelligent design is creationism. As long as you put the creation of life in a box and label it "God did it," you are preaching creationism. That case was decided at the Scopes Monkey trial in 1925. Guess what happened.

2. Every intelligent design argument has been refuted, but no one pays any attention. No, seriously. All of them. If you have something new, email me. I promise I'll be interested.

3. Naturalism (the premise of science that everything can be explained by a natural, as opposed to supernatural cause) has held up for hundreds of years. If you want to challenge it, you should have actual evidence, laid out systematically.

4. Be very careful when insulting the work of thousands of scientists. Hundreds of grad students spend 60 hours a week studying evolutionary biology. People have done their thesis work on it. Academics spend their lives on science, with minimal reward. We do it out of love, and because we want to make the world better. If we had an alterior agenda, we would have gone into buisiness. We're serious about our work.

5. If you want to keep your toys, your computer, your car, your house, you should not drive scientists out of your society.

Anti-Intellectualism is a dangerous thing. Ever wonder why America is behind the rest of the world? It's partially because of our school systems, no doubt, but mostly, I think it's because of the attitude that our society holds toward academics. State-sanctioned dismissal of the opinions of the educated on a matter of education is another step down a path we don't want to be on.

2005-07-29T12:54:00.000-07:00

I gave my boss a Knoppix 4.0 DVD and a Knoppix 3.7 CD today. He was a little *nix-curious. I also read a lovely article on crunchable.net. Honestly, I'm not sure how much I like the writing style overall, but that having been said, it certainly has it's good sections...

"Unix, in short, is the wheel. As in “don’t reinvent the wheel.” Its design is rich and primal. It comes from a time before mice you could plug into a computer, before computers could make sounds greater than a single tone of beep. Before icons, before graphics entirely.

Only words.

When I finish the first draft of this essay, instead of dragging a sheet of dog-eared paper from a floppy disk to a hard drive, I’ll type:

cp /mnt/floppy/geek.txt ~/words/crunchable/

And the end of the world is only one sentence away:

rm -rf /

The commands are obscure and sleek, the way poetry is. If you want pictures of pieces of paper and hard drives, there is software that will give them to you. But the words at the core of Unix will never be erased. Because of that, the pictures eventually feel like vanity. "

"But I also like it because its spartan nature is a boon, in a strange way. I can’t really browse the Web very well with it, and shooting people on the Internet would be more slide show than massacre.

In other words, I can only do things with it that matter.

I can write.

Geeks ask a lot of their computers. We learn about new uses for computers and immediately want to try them out ?�� we want to make our machines do things they never even thought of wanting to do before. We want more than the reasonable. We want five kinds of fantastic all happening at once.

Typing these letters on this computer in the dark is different. There are no distractions. Nothing teasing me away from my thoughts.

Only words. "

Operating systems are just like anything else in this world. They come in different materials, and different qualities. In windows, everything may be shiny and it may even work sometimes, but it's all made out of plastic, the same as everything else served to consumers in this country. There's always the threat that if you push it or pull it or bend it or press it, it will break, and there's nothing that you can do about it.

OS X feels like aluminum to me. It has a light feeling, not the heavy steel that made up OS 9. It's strong. There's always the assurance that if you want to break something, you're going to have to work damn hard. OS X is sturdy.

Linux is, and will always be my favorite, though. Linux is like deep, rich wood. It's something that you can work with. Don't like a section? Shave it off, round the corners. Make a completely new replacement section. It doesn't always come out right, and it's a lot of work sometimes. You can get a version that's already nicely polished and varnished and ready to be used. But nothing compares to the joy of doing it yourself.

2005-07-24T21:05:00.000-07:00

So today. Carnival of the Godless is up. That's always fun. Built a computer with Alex. That was fun. Oh, yeah, lan party last night. Fun. Fourteen people I think. We blew a couple of fuses, and my room was sweltering, but other than that, it went off without a hitch. We should be having a couple more in the next month. They will be bring your own fan events.

2005-07-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

Waiting for the LAN party tonight. If you're not coming, you should be.

In other news, more bombings in London. I talked to a kid at work about them. Apparently, his opinion was that they were particularly horrid because they were out of sheer hatred, as opposed to political reasons. I just want to be clear on two things. One, when you blow the crap out of someone, chances are you hate them. State-sanctioned hatred is actually worse in most cases, it's just something we've gotten used to. Two, Islamic fundamentalists may be assholes, but they have their own political reasons as well. They don't hate our freedom, they hate our decadence, ignorance, and corruption. Oh, and they think we worship Satan. I guess the point is, religious extremists are assholes, but we should try to understand why we piss them off so much, too.

Or something.

Microsoft coders to "get started on" Longhorn.

2005-07-21T22:12:00.000-07:00

"Longhorn looks like a really neat project." Samuel Tartle continued, "I mean, there's nothing really that 'new' about it. But it does pull together some of the most recognizable parts of todays greatest operating systems in one package. A lot of times people like to claim that Microsoft doesn't really innovate, they just copy the successes of others. But let's face it. There are features that people want. What's Bill supposed to say, "Looks cool, but we're not going to do it unless we did it first."

Samule Tartle is the project leader for Microsoft's new OS, currently named Longhorn.

"Last month, Bill [Gates] sat all the developers down and told us about his ideas for Longhorn. New API, new security features, and some additional "corporate strategy" features that we expect to keep people locked into Windows with. Hell, he even said that we'd finally be updating our terminal. God that old one is sad. I tried to do some system repairs with it the other day, nearly had a stroke.

"Personally, I'm really pretty confident that we can get it all ready by the beginning of 2006. I mean really, what's there to do? Getting the new terminal is going to be a breeze, we're just taking the bash and changing the names of some commands. God I love that thing." Tartle turned back to his workstation. "I do most of my coding in Ubuntu lately. I used to use Red Hat, but it just felt too corperate. Anyways, we're adding journaling to the filesystem. That should take a couple days I guess. Then some more eye-candy. That's gonna be the big one. OS X is kicking our ass. But we can just take some of those free downloads for skins and use them. I think someone did a Windows to Mac gui conversion over at Engadget that we can copy.

When asked about the recent Longhorn beta, Tartle replied, "Phfff... 'beta'. Hey, Alice, come over here for a second, would you?"

"Alice did the construction for the beta last week as I remember."

"Yup. It was fun, actually. I started by reskining XP to look a little more modern. Did that over lunch Wednesday, I think. I changed the BSOD to RSOD too. I always hated that old thing. Then I hacked together a little port of Nvidia's transparency package, changed the icons, and Poof! New OS. Kind of. Took three days in all."

"The highups thought it would give us some more time to relax before people really expected a new release. They don't like to work us too hard."

Padme said it all...

2005-07-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

"So this is how liberty dies. To thunderous applause."

So the house just voted to renew the Patriot Act. Apparently for the next ten years. Sucks. Ass.

In normal, everyday life, the Patriot Act doesn't represent a very grave evil. But it still represents a removal of liberties for the American people, and we should not be so quick to let it stay, especially not for such a long period.

2005-07-21T19:49:00.000-07:00

Huh. So I made $4000 today. I got a scholarship for doing research. It was kind of random, but I'm not complaining.

2005-07-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

LAN UPDATE!
Directions and Obligations
Also note that we would appriciate anyone who could bring folding chairs or the like. And everyone should bring a couple of bucks for food.
See you soon!

2005-07-19T18:34:00.000-07:00

Ooops. Still haven't gotten the hang of this new client. Anyway, now that the cat's out of the bag, LAN party at our house on Saturday night! ~20 people! We're really excited. We might even have a girl or two!

2005-07-18T21:17:00.000-07:00

Ooh, i think I like this concept. Now I can post blog updates through gaim. So awesome. It's a plugin called gaim-blogger that essentially adds my blog as a Buddy on my buddy list. Check it out, and make yourself a blog or something. :)

So in other news, I have a new computer! Neato. Lan party happening at the pad soonish. Life is going well.

2005-07-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

Whoot! New computer coming tomorrow. Mildly excited. I plan to compile gentoo on it. My first gentoo box....what a moment. So ya, I'll try to keep the list of issues and features updated here. I'm actually really excited to be able to use updated/bleeding edge packages. I love ubuntu, but I tried installing a hex editor the other day, and it said that I didn't have the newest version of mono. I don't really want to uninstall mono, and eveything that depends on it, and then reinstall from source, so I didn't do it. And that's not cool.

Gentoo does it right from what I hear. Packages are source code, meaning they take very minimal time to update. So awesome.

Other news, the Micro$oft Longhorn beta was released just a few minutes ago. Slashdot storm going up. Catch you on the flipside.

2005-06-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

I've been cranky lately, and I don't know why. Things I would normally ignore now bug the hell out of me. Alas. I hope it goes away, or at least I figure out why, soon.

Thoughts from Amundson Hall.

2005-06-14T19:18:00.000-07:00

Today was a rough day.

Two and a half hour safety seminar, broke my wireless software (fixed it) and staying late to finish drying and cleaning some DNA. Fortunately, this particular part of my job has a lot of sections for free time. So, I will write.

So I'm heavily considering building a computer. It's based on a heavily-overclockable AMD chip called the Sempron 3100+. Reports are that it's overclockable to something like 40%. With an initial clock speed of 1.8 GHz, this ends up being near 2.5 GHz. Very respectable, especially given the current performance ratio between Intel and AMD chips. Fully overclocked, this CPU is supposed to get performance 5% better than a 3.4 GHz P4. Very impressive, and a nice step up from my laptop, for only about $400 total. It would probably serve as the server for our house for the rest of the summer, and as my personal computer for the rest of it's lifetime. Here's a better formatted list, for those of you who care.

Current Laptop:
Inspiron 5150, Loki

New Desktop:
Custom, Codename Morningstar

CPU
Laptop: 2.8 GHz P4
Desktop: Sempron 3100

Hard Drive
Laptop:4200 rpm 30 Gig
Desktop: 7200 rpm 80 Gig

Memory
Laptop: 786 Megabytes
Desktop: 1024 Meg Dual Channel

Graphics
Laptop: GF 5200 Go
Desktop: ?

Here's a link to some of the overclocking info.

So, about my job. I work at Amundson Hall, ChemE department at the U of M. My personal task currently is to do PCR and cleanup of DNA templates from 8000 genes of Stremtomices cilicoler. Interesting, I'm sure... This week, my lab is having an event called "short course", which means that we are running seminars for important people in the field of biochemical engineering.

Speaking of cleanup of DNA, back to work...
--Lewis

There is no spoon.

2005-06-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

Interesting...

So I went camping last night with Peter, Jordan, Gloria, Jill, Beth, and Will. It all went well. Especially sleeping conditions. Jordan, Gloria, Beth, and I ended up spooning in a 1-2 person tent. Exciting time.

So ya, back now, stuff wet, need to go to work tomorrow. That's pretty much all.

--Lewis

Technology and you. And you. Simultaneously.

2005-06-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

So, I suppose today is a good day to start talking about technology. There's been some pretty big news lately, and even more importantly, I have an hour long break at work ahead of me! :)

So, there have been a couple of big things happening lately. First, a new release of Gaim is out today. Lovely news, as always, with a few new security fixes and whatnot. For those of you who haven't tried it, Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging client. In other words, it can handle all of your screennames, buddies, and messages from AIM, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, and others, for those of you who are just too indy to go with the crowd. I highly recommend it. Yahoo's official IM client is also pretty respectable, as are Trillian and Miranda. I highly suggest you try one of them out, and IM me, if you don't on a frequent basis already. "Lucky and Pozzo" on AIM, and "blackrose572" on Yahoo.

Next on the list of important tech is the PS3. The official announcement just came in that the PS3 w/hard drive will be shipping with Linux PRE-INSTALLED. That's right, not just compatible, not just hackable, completely pre-ready for your amusement and computing needs. For those of you who don't know, I'm kind of into Linux, especially lately, so this is definitely good news in my book. Also exciting, because that means that the Cell processor, the next-gen processor shipping with the PS3, will be very Linux-friendly. I'm hoping to see one available from IBM for a reasonable price within the next couple of years. For those of you who are tech oriented, there's a great article about the Cell here.

That, I suppose, brings me nicely up to the OS wars. Most people are most familiar with the various Windows operating systems, made by Microsoft. The most current is XP, with Longhorn coming out...eventually. The "runner up" in most people's minds, is Mac OSX. Macs are more expensive, and also a little bit easier to use. Until recently, I would say that the average geek looked down upon anyone who used a Mac, because they're just so damnably user-friendly.
Fewer people are familiar with the various open-source operating systems, with Linux being arguably the most popular. I'm sure that I'll post more about Linux stuff later, but trust me, for those of you who like a little playtime with your computers Linux is your best bet.

I guess that's a good start for now. Seeya.

--Lewis

Obligatory explanation post I.

2005-06-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

So, about me, for those who are starting off. I will be a sophomore at the U of M next year. IT Honors, Chemical Engineering. Currently, I live with Jordan and Peter near Hamline, and bike daily to my job at the chemical engineering department at the U of M.

Well, that was fun. Now on to some other things.

For those of you who haven't switched to Mozilla Firefox, or another browser yet, I highly suggest you do. Also good are Safari (OSX) or Opera (All). Or so I hear. I've mostly used Firefox and Konqueror. Anyway, if you're using Internet Explorer (or the AIM browser) to read this right now, please seriously consider making the switch. Trust me, you'll be happier if you do.

On that note, next subject. If anyone is looking to make the switch, or needs other tech support help, post a comment. I am now open for business. That's what I'm here for. I have not yet been bogged down by requests. Someday, I may reverse this policy, so take advantage while you can.

--Lewis

P.S. First person to correctly guess the reason I chose the title "Project Morningstar" gets a prize. There is more than one correct answer. Also, some of you may get prizes regardless. :)

Main screen turn on...again!

2005-06-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

Yipee! Ok, so some of you are probably getting bored by now, and some of you may have never read my writing before. Some of you probably don't care. But hopefully, this time my writing will stick. New format. My writing will be done on Drivel, and hosted on Blogspot. Periodically it will contain links to my former website, www.tc.umn.edu/~mars0334, (Omnigeek Productions) where I will store other media.

This blog will cover several issues.

1. I think that it's important that we realize the crucial state of politics in the US right now, and respond accordingly as citizens. As such, I will cover as much important political information as possible.

2. Understanding religion and philosophy are integral to understanding how politics does and should work, respectively. Therefore, religion and philosophy will be covered to the extent of my knowledge as a philosopher and theologian. In addition, I encourage comments on these posts (and others), in the interest of academic freedom and open discussion.

3. Technology. Over and above all, I am a tech. I will be covering open source software, my work, and the most relevant of the daily tech news.

Peace out.

--Lewis