CodeCall Programming Forum - Blogs - DarkLordoftheMonkeys

I'm retiring this account.

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:14:38 GMT

I now have exactly 255 forum posts. This is a very special number as it's the maximum value of a string of 8 bits, which is very important in computer terms. I'm planning to stop using this account so it stays at that number, and I will be creating a new account soon.

China's search engine, Baidu, doesn't censor porn.

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 03:41:46 GMT

Neither does Chinese Google. Just try searching "hentai" on either baidu.com or google.cn. I found a whole lot of not-legal-in-China material. And they can't do anything to me because I'm in the US. :P

I like Bill Gates.

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:05:08 GMT

I've said a lot of nasty stuff about Micro$oft, mainly because their business practices are immoral, sleazy, and often downright illegal. However, I'm not blinded by hate; I can appreciate some of the people who work for M$, as people, not as employees. My uncle actually works for them, and I respect him.

I actually like Bill Gates, believe it or not. I don't like the company he started, but I like the person who he is. He is generous with his money; a while back he said that if he ever made a fortune he would give it all away, and he has given a lot of it away. He's also a geek. He is the embodiment of what is good about geekdom, and he has shown that geeks and nerds can succeed, that it's not just jocks, actors, and businessmen. He is a symbol of hope for all of us.

Bill Gates has a love for computers, and can appreciate them as more than just a tool for making money. He cares about innovation, and the advancement of technology, and M$ had a lot of potential with him in charge. The problem was that the company followed the same route that most companies follow. It started out as a bunch of computer geeks, people who were genuinely interested in what they were doing, who were doing it for the pleasure of learning and exploring, and out of a desire to contribute to society. Gradually it was overtaken by business majors, people whose only concern is money, and who probably don't even know what a CPU is.

Steve Ballmer is one of these people, and he is the one I hate most. His vows to "fu�king kill" anyone who makes an alternative product, and tries to find ways to make them illegal. On top of Ballmer's hit list are Linux and Google. Micro$oft is now claiming that Linux is a copy of Windows (essentially), even though it uses none of the source code and runs on a completely different platform. So far they haven't succeeded in killing off any major competitors for a while, and though their revenue has grown, most of its products have failed to gain a significant market share over competitors. The X-Box, the iPod Zune, and Bing are examples of this.

If people actually cared about people and not just money, the world would be a better place. Instead we have Wal Mart preventing their employees from forming a union (which is illegal), AOL telling their employees to coerce people into staying with them, then firing one of them for doing exactly what they told him to do and acting like it was his fault and not theirs (not illegal, but deceptive and blatently hypocritical), and a couple years ago we had Wall Street banks investing money that didn't exist, without giving a single thought to how much they were hurting the economy, and the people who live in America. Thankfully, Obama is in charge now, and he is doing things to end the corruption.

In essence, geeks like Bill Gates are good. Big businesses are evil and should be illegal.

Micro$oft's philanthropism

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:57:28 GMT

There is a fund called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that delivers laptops to children in developing countries. OLPC is funded by several technology companies, including Google, AMD, Intel, and Red Hat. Since the start of the project, OLPC computers have shipped with Linux installed.

Now Micro$oft is "teaming up with" OLPC to "provide a Windows platform for the children" (paraphrase). Now, there are two possibilities for Micro$oft's motives for doing this:

1. They have a genuine interest in helping out. This seems unlikely as the kids will get their laptops either way, Windows or not. M$ is not actually supplying the laptops, just changing the OS.

...or...

2. They want to increase Windows's already monopolistic market share by spreading it to another market, over Linux. I wouldn't be surprised by this, seeing as Linux has been #1 on M$'s hit list for almost a decade.

Overall, the kids involved stand very little to gain by having a different OS (with the exception of maybe better Flash compatibility). The only party that really benefits in a substantial way from this move is Micro$oft. Yet everyone is cheering the action and championing Micro$oft's "philanthropism" and acting like it's a selfless act of pure generosity.

This is just another example of M$'s hypocritical use of butter-up tactics to win the hearts and minds of a group of people (in this case, those who care about helping the poor), and then brainwashing them. They're all for giving poor kids access to technology, just as long as it's theirs.

Linux is not hard to use.

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 04:24:42 GMT

I don't know why people say Linux is unfriendly and hard to use. I have been using Debian for nine days now and I haven't had any difficulties with it. Want to install software? Just download an RPM file, click on it, and let the package management program do all the work. Want to hook up to a network? Just click on the icon in the top right corner and select the network to connect to (in the GNOME desktop). Everything is intuitive, point-and-drool.

The only time I ever had to use the command line for anything that a non-geek would want to do was when I wanted to unmount a flash drive so I could eject it. I didn't know the commands I had to use (fdisk and umount), but I was able to get them by just looking at a post on a Linux forum that I found by googling the problem. I just followed the directions.

Linux has come a long way in the last decade. It is no longer a user-unfriendly OS that requires excessive technical skills and command line work. It has all the graphical frontends that Mac and Windows have, and it comes with a whole lot of alternative software that works just as well as the proprietary equivalents. Heck, I just found that OpenOffice.org can open Powerpoint files; it's completely compatible with Micro$oft Office.

I've found Epyphany (the default browser for GNOME) to be pretty good. I use Firefox in Mac or Windows, but in Linux, Epyphany is my browser of choice. It already has all the necessary Flash plugins (so I can play internet games, watch cartoons, etc.), and there is no screen flickering. It's not arcane in the least. Neither is anything else, aside from the command line.

Sexy OS's

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:55:04 GMT

I've noticed that whenever I search Ubuntu on Google Images I get pictures of boobies, and whenever I search FreeBSD I get pictures of hot girls in red underwear. :confused: I can't help but think these OS's must not have much to show in terms of quality so they feel a need to compensate by making them sexy. Perhaps that's just my Debianist elitism starting to develop.

GNOME

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:57:23 GMT

I just found that I could boot into different desktop environments on Knoppix. All I have to do is hit F2 when Knoppix is loading, which brings up a screen full of options, or "cheat codes", that control how the OS is loaded. One of the options is for the desktop environment. The default desktop for Knoppix is KDE, which is very similar to the Windows interface and pretty crappy. I told it to load GNOME, and now I can change my desktop wallpaper and my screensaver. The interface is more like Mac's with the menus at the top. Best of all, the systems settings actually work, like when I make a change to the settings, the change actually occurs, whereas in KDE it would usually do nothing.

Here's the wallpaper I'm using for my desktop right now:
debian1wu8.jpg

There's also an option in the setup to boot into Knoppix 2, which is text-only, so it more closely resembles one of the old CLI-based *nix systems. Very retro. There are a few problems with it, though, namely that it can't access the files in /media/sda2 (the volume for the hard drive), it's restricted to the Bourne shell, and there appears to be no way to connect to a network. So basically, it's useless for just about everything except playing Nethack.

Knoppix

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:12:25 GMT

I just booted Knoppix, the Linux Live CD. It's the first time I've ever touched Linux; before my only experience has been with Windows and Mac OSs. Now I'm exploring what it has to offer.

I've located the files on my hard drive. This is important if I want to modify anything there, since the root directory in Knoppix is on the CD, not on the hard drive. With all the stuff I do with computers, I'll need more disk space than can be provided by a 16-GB DVD R+W.

Knoppix seems to come with a lot of software already installed. I'm not sure if this is true for every Linux distro, but I have all the standard Unix programs plus Konqueror, Lynx, GIMP, Bluefish Editor, GVim, OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, and a lot of other stuff I haven't heard of.

Knoppix is somewhat slower in some cases than my Mac or my PC when running Windows, probably because I'm running everything from the CD drive, which is very slow as far as storage devices go. Whenever I open a new application I have to wait for the CPU to access everything from the drive. Another annoyance is this weird screen flickering I am experiencing. I can't explain it.

OpenOffice.org

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 02:26:20 GMT

I went on the internets, looking for stuff,
To replace M$ Office, 'cause I'd had enough.
I wanted to find something new, something free,
Seemed like Open-Source was the way there for me.
So I found OpenOffice, and thought it would do,
I thought I could write and do DBM to.
Downloaded it, thinking, this beats M$ Word,
Which makes me do $hit both insane and absurd,
Like capitalizing every first word.
Download is complete, install OOo,
Then open it up and see how it goes.
I looked and said �Wow!� it looks just like Word!
It makes me do $hit both insane and absurd.
I didn't know anyone copied M$,
But Oracle did, the shear crazyness!
But hey, at least now I do not have to pay,
For an office app that I won't use every day.
Well, I've still got Vim, and iWork on my Mac.
But wish I could have my 100 megs back.
I went on the internets, looking for stuff,
To replace OpenOffice, 'cause I'd had enough...

I think I like Windows after all.

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:41:30 GMT

It has no gcc or make. On the one hand that means I can't compile C code (which I can always do on my Mac, so that's not a problem). But on the other hand, when people write open source software for Winblows, they don't assume you can compile it from source. Which means, I get the fu�kin' binary! :D:D:D I get the final, compiled product for a change, not a bunch of source files that I have to run a makefile for, which invariably results in a compiler error. I get the actual software. I kinda wish the developers would do that for Macs, too, but I guess my Mac will just have to do with not having all the software I want. Still, I like having access to multiple platforms.

Winblows 7 sucks!

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:33:21 GMT

I heard good things about Winblows 7 from some people who used it - it's faster, more secure, etc. I just bought an HP laptop with Winblows 7 installed, and it is the worst OS I have ever used. Half of the time I click on something, nothing happens; it just won't open; and it has this annoying tendency to open something or invisiclick an icon without my consent if I have the cursor hovering over it for more than two seconds. It is slow and unreliable, and when I open an application it takes forever to load.

Currently I'm trying to get the computer to boot from the CD drive so I can run Knoppix. Apparently I have to reconfigure the BIOS settings to place drive F: (the CD drive) first in the boot order. The only problem is that the way to access the BIOS settings for a PC is to press Del, F2 or whatever when it's loading, like when it's running the BIOS startup program, and it displays all those command prompt messages that tell you the status of each device, along with the key combination you have to type to get to the settings.

Winblows 7 doesn't do that. Or the new HP laptops don't; depends whether it's dependent on the hardware or the software. Instead, when I boot up the computer, it goes straight to the GUI. So now I have to find another way to access the BIOS or the boot options. I've searched the control panel and the settings but haven't found anything. I even went to the device manager and looked for the BIOS so I could see what kind it was. All I could find was the driver for the BIOS, which had none of the information I needed.

So I've had that computer for probably about two hours and I've already encountered a slew of problems with Winblows 7. I would even go as far as to say it's worse than Winblows XP (which I've used a lot before and am quite comfortable with), though the XP systems I've used had the professional addition, whereas this is the home edition of Winblows 7. I'd try some clever trick, like editing the boot.ini file, to get it to work the way I want, but that would almost certainly void the warranty.

I'm now back on my Mac, where I have nine applications open and about 30 windows open in Firefox as well as an @$$load of programs running in the terminal and none of it has caused me any issues. I wonder what I should do with my PC, now that I'm certain it won't let me dual boot Linux without getting permanently fu�ked up. I hate Winblows.

Something strange

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:04:58 GMT

I know this probably isn't what I think it is, but I appear to have been able to log into a Google server without a password, through Telnet. I was trying to see if I could use Telnet to test a certain port on a remote host (since you can't do it with ping) and the following happened:

I typed:
Code:
telnet 66.249.81.104 80
My terminal told me:
Code:
Trying 66.249.81.104...
Connected to lga15s01-in-f104.1e100.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
A few minutes later I got:
Code:
Connection closed by foreign host.
Since I know nothing about Telnet or SSH except for what they are, I can't really tell what is going on here. Can anyone who knows how remote logins work give me an idea of what just happened?

I just hope I didn't do anything illegal.

Why computer generated art is not taken seriously

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:12:17 GMT

When have you ever gone to an art museum and seen a Photoshop image, a 3D animation, or ASCII art? I certainly haven't. I see paintings and sculptures, I see black-and-white photographs, and I see abstract "masterpieces" that people built from the contents of the neighborhood dumpster, but no CGI art.

I think the problem is that CGI simply isn't taken seriously enough to be considered "art" in the same sense that an amorphous pile of assorted scrap metal with blue paint spattered all over it is considered "art". This may be partly due to the so-called high art community's selective liberalism/conservatism (notice, for instance, how a lot of photos are still taken in black-and-white, because it's somehow "prettier" without color - WTF?). I think it's also partly due to their general snobbery and condescending attitude towards that which they deem unworthy. How can a picture made with ASCII characters be considered art? It isn't a Moving Revelation of the Artist's Passionate Soul � like a pile of fu�king garbage is.

I would like to ask why computer generated art is not considered "high" art. Is it because you're using tools to make it instead of your own hands? Isn't it that way with photography too? Or maybe conservative (read "all") art-scholars just think it's a flash-in-the-pan thing, sort of like rap vs. classical music (rap has been in existence for about 25 years, actually, despite everyone's claims that it will be dead by next summer), or Harry Potter and Stephen King vs. Shakespeare (I'd like you to check out the literary criticism of Harold Bloom, a proponent of "high" literature. It's worth a few laughs.). Whatever the reason, I don't see why art made with ASCII, Photoshop, or Maya is any less "art" than anything made with more traditional media.

How to pass arguments to a sed script

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Sat, 01 May 2010 16:03:22 GMT

sed, unlike other languages used for command line programming such as C and bash, has no built-in way of getting parameters from standard input for use in the script. This is a major drawback when you want to, say, search for an arbitrary word in a text file. That was the case with this script that I just wrote, a script that is supposed to get a definition from a small text-based encyclopedia (a single file by the name of Digipedia.txt) and print it to standard output:
Code:
#!/usr/bin/sed

/^\\e.*mword:\\e.*m$/{
    :cont
    /^#$/b end
    p
    n
    b cont
    :end
}
Here, word is the variable I want to be input by the user. But there's no way to tell sed to do that. Fortunately, I have found a way of working around this, which is to have a shell script use sed to edit the sed script and change the value of word to another string, thus sending a virtual parameter to the sed script. Here's what my shell script looks like:
Code:
#!/bin/bash

cd ~/Desktop/Computer_Stuff/Shell_scripts;
sed "3s/word/${1:-help}/" select_definition.sed > tempfile42.sed;

declare -i count=$(grep -c "31m$1:" ~/Digipedia.txt);
if [ $count -eq 0 ]
then
    echo "No article for $1";
else
    defn=$(sed -n -f tempfile42.sed ~/Digipedia.txt);
    printf "$defn\n";
fi

rm tempfile42.sed;
unset count defn;
As you can see, the script changes select_definition, the template script, for the temporary script tempfile42.sed, which is the one that is actually run. So far, this has worked perfectly, and I have been working on compiling my encyclopedia.

This was actually inspired by an idea I had last night, in which I implemented fortune, a Unix command that retrieves a random quote from a fortune cookie file and prints it to the terminal, sort of like a fortune cookie. If you are unfamiliar with fortune or fortune cookie files, you can read about them here.

Here's the script that I wrote to implement the fortune command:
Code:
#!/bin/bash

declare -i fortunelength=$(grep -c ".*" ~/Fortune-Cookie-File.txt);
declare -i randline=$RANDOM%$fortunelength+1;
fortune=$(sed -n "${randline}p" ~/Fortune-Cookie-File.txt);
printf "$fortune\n";
unset fortune fortunelength randline;
A random selection from my fortune cookie file:

Positive, adj.:
Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of one's own.

If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.
-- John Galsworthy

Pick another fortune cookie.

I am not human. I am something else.
What am I? I may never know.
Am I less, or am I more?
Either way, I will walk a different path...
Wherever it may lead...

How to mess up your terminal and make it crash

DarkLordoftheMonkeys — Sat, 01 May 2010 01:48:00 GMT

I am never doing this again:
Code:
cat /dev/random