Sorry that I haven’t been writing more often, school has been swamping me. However, I thought it a good idea to lift my nose from the grindstone (hehehe) to say that I have been accepted to the Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs and Policy Management at Carleton University in Ottawa! This was a tied first choice with the University of King’s College in Halifax. Carleton won’t let me defer (I’m considering deferral so I don’t have to work during university) but said that I’d likely be accepted again. UKC will let me defer one year. Now the clock is ticking, Halifax!
So for those of you who don’t know or follow my twitter feed, my aunt is a IT Pro Advisor at Microsoft Canada. You may also know that my opinion of Microsoft hasn’t been the highest (as expressed often in this blog).
The purpose of my visit was to ask successful people how they got to where they are in their field, which holds my interest. The people were incredibly kind and interesting and really let me pick their brains. Continue reading
This evening I was going to sit down and play Age of Empires III with my mom. We have it installed on two computers and just trade discs. Then my little brother said he wanted to play. That’s great, but the problem is that neither his nor my mom’s laptop runs fast enough to play it well and my laptop runs Ubuntu. I checked and it wasn’t supported by Crossover Games, my beloved commercial WINE software, but after googling on a way to play AOE on my Ubuntu laptop, I found Play On Linux.
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
Play On Linux is an application that supplements the WINE translation software that allows some Windows applications to run on Linux. It contains and applies scripts that provide the best configuration for a game.
One of the things that I love about Linux is that there’s always a community, open-source project that makes things work even when an upstream project like WINE doesn’t work by default. It’s by no means perfect – WINE is just a stepping stone to building Linux market share so applications like games would be native – but it’s encouraging when you look at all the junk that’s available for Windows to do a little thing (I looked over programs to encode video to/from OGG in Windows and it was a nightmare of shareware and spyware and uggggg!)
So as I wait for Age of Empires III to install, good luck to the people at PlayOnLinux!
I am an insomniac insomuch as I go to bed, stay awake for 1-2 hours, then go into a fitful sleep and wake up tired.
So when this post came up on Lifehacker I decided I really need to try it. This is all from Dustin Curtis’ website at… well.. www.dustincurtis.com
I’m just going to say this: Doing this only makes sense right now for me: This is my summer break and I have limited time-bound responsibility: only 2 hours 2 days a week do I *need* to do something (work) and I could likely shift my hours to fit the sleep schedule because my bosses are awesome like that (If you need a computer fixed or built or really anything stop by Jankin’s Computers on Gardiners Road </plug> )
What is this? Changing my sleep cycle to be more efficient. Currently I get 6-8 hours of sleep, most of it wasted. I’m fed up with just lying down for hours on end. I read, I count sheep, whatever.
I’ve heard about this before (from CBC’s “Ideas” radio program and – I believe – Wired). It makes you more energetic and gives you more time.
So – starting tommorow – I’m going to start with the “Siesta”. We’ll see how that works and then I’ll explore the possibility of moving on.
Read the article. It says everything perfectly. On a web-design note take a look at how well it’s laid out to look almost like print.
By the way, I’m sorry about not posting yesterday – I was in Toronto the whole day (at Paramount Canada’s Wonderland). Don’t worry, I’ve done pennance in burlap and ashes.
After work yesterday I nipped over to the local library and picked up two books. One was a book on computer security. The other – the one I was actually looking for – was three Renaissance masterpieces: The Prince by Machiavelli (my main read), Utopia by Thomas More (which will be read though I did not seek it out), and The Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (which I have no intention of reading as I have no use for instructions on how exactly to be a courtier, as those training to be courtiers may find themselves short of job prospects). The problem is that the books are in inaccesible languages: The Prince was written in Italian but the version in the book (printed in 1953) contains the original Middle English translation… from 1640. Surely there must be more modern translations of one of the finest works in European political philosophy. Utopia is in its original Middle English – from 1516 – as well. Middle English, as I have started to find, is verily liberal with thine spellings.
Now I’ll be able to be a snob and say that I’ve read both Utopia and The Prince in their original English versions for no reason having to do with academia (in which, of course, the originals are valuable). Goodness knows I’ve been searching for The Prince for quite some time and this one was the first copy I found at the library that wasn’t AWOL.
But shouldn’t undisputed classics of European literature be available to the public in the vernacular? Shouldn’t the man on the street be able to read these books without having to trawl through an archaic language? Shouldn’t we encourage people to read these great works, and if so shouldn’t they be applicable? I saw a copy in the library that was a transcription of the principles of The Prince to business (business is now the new principality, as politicians could hardly get away with what Machiavelli suggests).
We should have copies that are relevant to the modern world. At the outset, Machiavelli asserts that there are only two basic types of government: “Republique” and the Monarchy (which contains, of course, Oligarchy, Aristocracy, and the type of federal monarchy observed in the Holy Roman Empire). We exist today in a world that is much more sophisticated: Communists fall in to neither of these catagories. Neither do Constitutional Monarchies – which are governed by the people AND the monarch with various mixes of power (for example, Canada leans more towards the Republic despite the rather powerful monarchy because the monarch in question is in England but nations such as Thailand have a much more assertive monarch). Each of these have their own sophistication.
Would we see a personalized version of Machiavelli’s philosophy – a philosophy that prides shrewdness, manipulation, and deciet as a means to an end – as immoral? Certainly I think we need to compromize (which Machiavelli asserts must not be done in order to assert strength and independence). Moreover, who do we see today that uses a Machiavellian philosophy in their own lives or in the running of their countries? You probably know someone who is pushy, someone who knows *exactly* what they want and how to get it. Would we see it as an affront to an open society or a way to cut the fat from a civilization obsessed with political correctness and unoffendedness (yes. I made that up. So sue me)?
At any rate, I look forward to reading these two books over the summer and perhaps adopting some of the ideologies within… MUHAHAHAHA
Let’s take a detour from my rants and look at an application I just can’t get enough of: Miro
Miro, formerly Democracy TV, is an extremely rich Open Source application that manages media feeds on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Take a look at www.getmiro.com and download it for yourself.
Miro is, as far as I know, unique among applications. It deals with a pressing issue surrounding internet television. It used to be that if you wanted to watch internet TV you’d have to visit the website for every show every week to make sure you were on top of the game. If you were techhnically gifted you could set up the RSS feeds to tell you when a video was available. Not practical. At all.
Miro takes standard RSS feeds and downloads the videos – or podcasts – associated with them. You simply click the RSS icon and tell Miro (with CTRL-N or Sidebar->Add Feed) to subscribe to it. All future updates are delivered to your desktop. Lickety split.
Well what’s a problem with this? Well lets start off with another application I was using before Miro: Rhythmbox, Ubuntu’s default media player. It has podcast functionality built in to it. I listened to a bunch of stuff on the This Week in Tech network as well as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s podcasted shows like Rewind, The Vinyl Cafe, and SearchEngine (now run by TVOntario). Rhythmbox would download it and I would listen to it and it would sit on my hard drive forever until I had several GB of podcasts I would never listen to again.
Miro keeps any new podcast or video for 6 days after you listen to/watch it before deleting it. If something really floats your boat you can take the option to keep it. You get to define how much maximum space Miro uses, anything. It keeps all your unplayed videos in one place so instead of checking each video stream for a new video you can just press play. And if you stop while you’re watching a video and you want to watch it, Miro starts where you left off.
Miro also includes an internet TV directory. Say I want to look at the stuff offered by Internet TV studio Revision3, which makes such awesome picks as Tekzilla, The Totally Rad Show, Film Riot, and Diggnation. I just search for Revision3 and press a button to add it to my feed. It doesn’t do this for podcasts but it’s just as easy to use as any other podcast client.
Only feature I’d add is the ability to do text RSS (blog posts, etc) and present them in a visually attractive manner.
If you want something to manage your internet television, Miro is a great, crossplatform solution. Windows, Mac, and Linux.
The reason I haven’t posted in forever is that I’ve been planning to bring you a huge review of different Linux distros and specifically how they implement KDE.
Well, that’s the “reason”…
I was planning to do that, but got sidetracked. However, there is news on that front:
I am now a Konvert (this, to the uninitiated, is a reference to the sometimes annoying habit of KDE developers naming their apps with K, like KMail, amaroK, AKregator, etc). When I decided to update Ubuntu from 32 bit to 64 bit I decided to try installing Fedora while I had a clean computer. Fedora and I, well we just didn’t get along. Package management was confusing. So I went to more familiar territory: Kubuntu. And fell in love. Now, it should be said that package management is the same as in Fedora, but as soon as you start installing GNOME packages (like Cheese) you get Ubuntu’s Add/Remove and Synaptic Package Manager. It’s cheating, yet, but nice cheating.
Anyways, I’m here to show off my nice shiny KDE 4.2 desktop.
This is my KDE4 desktop with Qwit running my Twitter stream
Just a short overview of the desktop:
I’m running Kubuntu 9.04 64 bit. I added a few Folder Views to contain the icons. My twitter application is a gem called Qwit. I have a few Photo plasmoids as well to personalize my desktop. I’m using a plasmoid called STask to make all my open apps only use an icon instead of a windows-like bar.
I love it. Kubuntu’s installation is easy, and though I had to wrestle with Jockey (Ubuntu’s Restricted Driver Manager) for a while, it’s great. The plasmoids really sell it for me. They can do just about everything.
I’m using a theme called Bespin that you have to compile from source but doesn’t like 64 bits. I happened to find, however, a DEB of the respository while absolved me of having to compile the code. Much much much nicer than the default Oxygen.
I grew up on GNOME so this is new to me. But I love it. There are a few problems, mostly to do with artefacting on some windows, but I’m looking into fixing it.
btw, new blog policy: I know I haven’t posted in *forever* but the new rules are a Post A Day. Yep. Let’s see how far this goes.
Hey. I told Jay I’d post this earlier but I got caught up in a mutli-show marathon of Battlestar Galactica. Seriously addictive.
Anyway, Jay and his dad took his friend Pat and I geocaching in Amherstview this afternoon, something I had never done. Now, I have some footage on my camera but because I’m a lazy bum I’ll just point you to Jay’s vlog. [via www.jaydaily.com]
Anyways, Amherstview isn’t far from where we live. It’s pretty residential and alot of woodland. Really, really scrubby woodland. We found four caches in total. Some were easier, some were… harder. One (which we failed to solve in the end) involved empty medicine bottles hung from a tree, perhaps 3 dozen of them. Two of them (supposedly) had co-ordinates – North and West – to the actual cache. Some others had Please Try Again. We only found the West co-ordinates. Otherwise, we found some cleverly hidden in trees and two in ammo boxes, which are apparently ideal because they’re weather resistant and large enough to hold things to trade in. Jay brought a wooden snake that we traded at one cache for a water pistol which we traded at another for hockey tape.
All in all, fun times. One thing I’d really like to do is try it in a huge old city like London or Prague where you could see the city that way. Apparently Kingston is great for geocaching, and I’d like to try in the city some time.
Gladys Tallbright was a very peculiar person. She was not glad, nor was she tall, nor was she particularly bright. Gladys, you see, was what children would call the “crazy cat lady”; except she was not crazy and only kept one cat, Andromache – who very much resembled Gladys with her narrow eyes, regal demeanor, and black coat. Gladys, you see, had come as a refugee to Canada after one of the wars in Africa. I don’t know any more than that. Whenever she was not at Mrs. Tallbright’s side she was roaming the neighbourhood, watching everything everyone did. She was Gladys’ eyes and ears in the outside world.
I lived on the same street as Gladys for the entirety of my childhood – until I moved to University. Gladys, however, was not the sociable type. When the whole neighbourhood got together to throw a block party Gladys would observe from her throne at 394 Massey Crescent, rocking on her deck while petting Andromache. While all the parents on the street were sipping lemonade made by (the unfortunately named) Shirley Temple and the children were weaving among them playing tag, Gladys would be regarding the whole affair through her inch-thick glasses which were eternally perched on her nose ready to make a break for it and skip town. It was an unfortunate place to live for an elderly widow who did not particularly like children, as we were particularly rambunctious. Continue reading
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