For what it's worth, I'll be tweeting (fuck, I hate that word) my thoughts during the debate tonight. Head over if you really have nothing better to do.

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I know, I know... I've been an ass and not posted for a while. It's been a crazy summer for me. If you know me personally (or hang out in #fgij on freenode) you probably already know the story, but I'll go into it a bit here. I can't go into much detail, however, as some things are still in-flux and semi-confidential.

• I'm no longer at the Linux Foundation. Left there in April. I also I am not certain I want to re-enter the Linux industry since most companies I've encountered that use Linux in their business expect to be able to bend and mold the Linux community to their will by throwing money at it. Unless you're very lucky to work for a company that understands how the Linux/Open-Source/Free-Software communities work, you're most likely to encounter significant friction caused by the chasm between what managers want the community to do and what the community will actually do. It's a very rare business creature that understands the meritocracy inherent in most Open-Source/Free-Software communities- not just understands it, but realizes that it's the reason why the Open-Source/Free-Software process works so well and if your well-funded suggestion isn't accepted it's probably because it was a bad idea anyway.


• I am working on a top-secret project that I can't go into other than to say 1) I'm not making any money off of it, yet, 2) it has to do with video games (which is something that's been a love of mine since I was young) and 3) it (unfortunately) has nothing to do with Linux . Honestly, if you are one of my friends, you probably already know what this project is. I just don't feel comfortable blabbing it to the world yet.


• ClanAM FFXI End Game is pretty much dead, I just haven't updated the site yet. We still meet on Sundays at the usual time, and if we have enough people who want to do something we do it, but we have no set plans week-by-week and often just do nothing. My FFXI playing has been winding down lately. Honestly, once I finish up BST I'll likely be done with the game (unless some new amazing expansion comes out between now and then that I absolutely must play).


• Been playing a lot of games that I've meant to write about here, but haven't. Hope to make some time to catch up a little bit before the big rush of fall titles starts.


• Had my 4th RRoD this summer. Woot! Didn't write about it like I did the last one, but it happened. Actually happened the day a friend of mine came in from out of town. He and I were planning on getting RSV achievements for completing the terrorist hunts split-screen. Harumph, I say!


• Finally, did I mention how much of a hippie my wife is? Not that it's a bad thing :-) ... My wife has started a compost pile outside the house for our organic refuse, she recycles anything that can be recycled (we usually only take the trash out to the curb once every few weeks as there's so little of it now), she rides her bike to work, and last night she started making her own homebrew eco-friendly laundry detergent. She freaking rocks.

Anyway... there she is. Stay tuned.

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2008 turned out to be a surprising year for games, in my humble opinion. Some games that we were all so sure would be great last year turned out to be duds. Others we hadn't even heard of turned out to be incredible. Then there's the consoles- last year many predicted 2008 to be the year of the PS3, that the Wii's storage capacity would be a huge issue, and that the 360 might start showing its age. Were those predictions right?

Well, let's find out, shall we? Or, at least find out what my opinions are on the matter. After all, what other opinions matter, right?

Without further ado, I give you the 2008 Sam's Video Game Awards.

Read on for it all.

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Okay, so you probably have already heard that Obama won North Carolina heartily and Clinton squeaked out a win in Indiana. The results (with 99% reporting) were [IN] [NC]:

Indiana Clinton 638,274 Obama 615,862 Difference 22,412

North Carolina Obama 890,695 Clinton 657,920 Difference 232,775

If you recall my post from yesterday, I said that Obama had an uphill battle here in Indiana largely due to the population here. I really hadn't expected him to win here, but I had hoped that he would.

Well, looking at the extremely small win here for Clinton (~2%), I am thoroughly pleased. Indiana performed beyond my expectations... color me impressed. In fact, Clinton's win is so small, I think it warrants a special sound:




<br /> <bgsound src="http://files.samhart.net/humor/audio/Price_Is_Right_loser_clip.wav"><br />



Now, there's more detail about her... ahem... "win" than you might first realize. Let me elaborate...

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A little word from the late Hunter S. Thompson on the "End of America", which is very timely on this day of the Indiana Democratic Primary. Hunter S. was talking about the news media immediately after 9/11, but his words ring very true today.

I sincerely hope that everyone here in the state that I live (Indiana) goes out today and makes the right vote for our country. Personally, I think the right vote is Obama. He is one of only two very intelligent and thoughtful presidential candidates we've had in my life (the other was Carter), and I, for one, think we are in dire need of intelligence in the White House.

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I've been an xkbset user for a long while now (I'd estimate at least since 2001). I'm someone who can't stand two things when working with laptops:

• 1) I hate it when they don't have a 3rd mouse button (for all my handy-dandy copy/paste goodness under X)


• 2) I hate it when they have all these damned unused keys all over the keyboard (Windows key, Internet Explorer key, email key, "arrow clicky on an abstract pull-down menu key")

Well, the wunnerful thing about Linux and X is that I could remap those useless keys to more useful functions. Couple this fact with the powerful fbkeys in Fluxbox, and I can set up some pretty useful combinations.

For example, in every laptop I've had thus far there's been a useless Windows key down on the left of the keyboard between the CTRL and the ALT. This is as good a place as any for a middle mouse button, so I've always remapped it with some variation of the following:

xkbset m
xkbset exp =m
xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = Pointer_Button2 Pointer_Drag2"

(Obviously, keycode 115 has to be changed when that number isn't valid)

Anyway, everything's been hunky-dory for a while now and I've been a content and happy beaver... At least, until sometime this last week....

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For those who don't know, I've been growing my hair out since sometime in the fall of 2006. It started originally as an experiment (I hadn't had long hair since my teenage years, and I was curious if I'd like it as an adult), but I continued to do it because I found out about a great program called Locks of Love.

Locks of Love is a non-profit group that provides hairpieces to children who are suffering from long-term medical hair loss. From their website, their mission is to:

...return a sense of self, confidence and normalcy to children suffering from hair loss by utilizing donated ponytails to provide the highest quality hair prosthetics to financially disadvantaged children.

So, since the fall of 2006, I've been growing my hair out long enough to donate it to this wonderful program. I've been using fancy conditioners to keep my hair in good shape, and have generally been taking better care of my hair than I ever had previously.

Partly because it's funny and partly because it helps get the word out about Locks of Love, I'm going to share with you my trip to the Salon where I donated my hair.

Read on for all the gory details and to find out why I looked (at least momentarily) like Pippi Longstocking:

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I vow today that I will never allow some blinkard, narrow-visioned, elitist Test-Driven-Development (TDD), Agile or XP (EXTREEEM PROGRAMMING!!!11one1eleventeen) cock-sucker push me around again. I also vow that I will fight these religious zealots with their pigheaded belief that TDD is the end-all, be-all solution to everything, until my last dying breath.

Seriously, not since... well... never.. have I felt so strongly about a particular technical methodology. I may rant about the cults of elitism surrounding git or vi, but they can't even remotely approach the level of elitism and self-assuredness of correctness in spite of ample contradictory evidence as the TDD crowd. For those practitioners and proselytizers of TDD, you're either with them or you're some sort of mentally retarded misanthrope who writes shitty code and probably eats babies.

What is TDD, and why do I hate it so? Well, let's explore the subject a bit deeper, shall we?

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• Just because you fantasize about being raped doesn't mean everyone does...


• Would the LHC destroy Earth once activated? Hmmmm, the people behind the lawsuit may have a point, after all, look at this:
  


• For probably the first time, Yahtzee actually nails a review:
  

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Link to the release notes. Reprinted here...

Go get it!

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Very sad news of Arthur C. Clarke's death from Sri Lanka today.

What follows is the last message he left the world shortly before his 90th birthday a few months back.

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80s dating videos edited together into a montage of suck:

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In my general browsing today I encountered the following very useful post from Carlo Wood concerning recovering deleted files from an EXT3 filesystem. I've never done an "rm -fr ~" on any of my machines, but I've certainly had enough filesystems die on me, and done enough stupid things to appreciate and fear the ramifications of lost data. Hell, not two weeks ago I had my desktop die on me in a spectacular way.

Anyway, I began to wonder what I'd do if I encountered a similar problem as I use XFS instead of EXT3. (Several years ago, I used Reiserfs, but after a catastrophic Reiserfs-related meltdown I switched.)

Then I realized I use rdiff-backup and have incremental backups of all of my data since Summer 2007 (when I started using rdiff-backup :-) So I probably wouldn't need to go through the pain of having to restore low-level XFS transactions.

I am very enamored with rdiff-backup. In fact, if rdiff-backup were a woman, it would be a no brainer to cheat on my wife with her (unless she already was my wife, of course). I also think I have a pretty clever system set up for my backups, so I'm going to share it with you all...

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Okay, so I'm somewhat spoiled by all my years working with Debian based distributions. You know, the ones that just work....

Anyway, I've been having to deal with a SUSE system lately (don't ask, work related, not my choice), and I've been insanely irritated at how inferior this hunk of shit is.

One of my biggest gripes has been the general system administration, or how YaST worms its tendrils into every aspect of system configuration making it impossible to do normal Linux things and generally makes it much less pleasant to work with. One such instance is the package management system which, as near as I can tell, is the digital equivalent of having Tim Conway's "The Old Man" character manage a library.

Anyway, today during a particularly long wait for an added upstream package source to process by YaST, I drew the following "Dramatic Interpretation of a SUSE Experience". Enjoy!

It should be noted that I was actually able to finish the above comic before the process finished.

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Wow, what a shitty day I had on Friday. In addition to some major issues with a project I'm working on at work, I had my desktop die on me in what was the most spectacular way possible.

I was sitting there, listening to music by Akira Yamaoka being played by Amarok on my desktop. I was actually working on my laptop and my desktop was only playing music at the time (my laptop has tiny horrible speakers, but it was where all my work was).

Suddenly, in the middle of Flower Crown of Poppy, an insanely loud "FZZZZZZZZZAAAAAAAAAT!" erupted from my speakers, my monitor flashed bright white, and then my desktop died amid the wafting scent of ozone and toasted electronics.

Opening the desktop up, I found two popped capacitors on the mother board, and visible smoke from the power supply.

Now, this couldn't have been a power surge; Nothing else in the house or even connected to the same outlet experienced any problems. The problem was 100% isolated to my desktop.

I've not pulled the HDD yet to see if it's okay, I haven't tested the monitor or speakers to see if they fried as well, nor have I tested any other component (graphics card, sound card) from the desktop to see if they are all right. All I really know right now is the motherboard and power supply seem to be toast.

I didn't have any warranty on this box, in fact, it was actually a system I took in lieu of half a paycheck from my previous job. I managed to get around 9 months worth of use out of it before this happened.

At any rate, this has to be the most spectacular system death I've ever encountered. I almost wish I would have been filming it :-)

Oh, and because this happened, allow me to say, "thank goodness for rdiff-backup!"

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Just a smattering of stuff, no real set topic.

• My.Debian. is a neat little site I recently discovered and intend to put the RSS feed on my site. Honestly, the content is all over the board, with some basic stuff most Linux users should already know mixed with some really neat obscure stuff that is useful to know (like this post on VirtualBox and vboxmanager.) Any Debian, Ubuntu, or Debian-based distro user should check it out.


• Game graphics during the 8-bit era. Stumbled on this yesterday, posted it to FGIJ with general applause. Definitely a nice trip down memory lane, I cut my graphical teeth on the old 8-bit Atari computers. Interesting stuff for anyone who was a part of that scene.


• I purchased Endless Ocean for the Wii a while back. I've really been impressed by this non-game, it's a unique and enjoyable experience, even if a lot of the general game reviewer community is panning it. It's so unique, in fact, that I will be very tempted to include it in this year's Sam's Video Game Awards.

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