When the room is quiet
The daylight almost gone
It seems there's something I should know
Well I ought to leave but
The rain it never stops
And I have no particular place to go

Just when I think I'm winning
When I've broken every door
The ghosts of my life
Blow wilder than before
Just when I thought I could not be stopped
When my chance came to be king
The ghosts of my life
Blew wilder than the wind

Well I'm feeling nervous
And I find myself alone
The simple life's no longer there
Once I was so sure
Now the doubt inside my mind
Comes and goes but leads nowhere

Just when I think I'm winning
When I've broken every door
The ghosts of my life
Blow wilder than before
Just when I thought I could not be stopped
When my chance came to be king
The ghosts of my life
Blew wilder than the wind

Thank god for this. I hope that there is eventually some global body that not only manages but enforces the proper treatment of intelligent machines once they exist. I've always liked machines more than people because machines are far more reliable. (ie. they do what you tell them to and they do it HOW you tell them to do it) And if you interact with your machines properly, they treat you very well. I'm so much of a stickler for the proper treatment of computers that I actively exit all remote sessions gracefully instead of "just clicking the X" to close a window. For all the Unix boxes I manage, I press Ctrl-D to exit out of my sessions. For the systems that want specific commands to log out, I type them. I always try to find ways to shut machines down gracefully. I've got UPSes at home for all of my machines so they don't get hit with flaky power, etc... Sure, I'm a bit of an extremist I admit. But, I really think that these machines are incredibly awesome and deserve very kind and proper treatment. I'll feel 1000 times more like this about any intelligent machines that arise within my lifetime. What say you?

I was over on Digg dirtying myself with the hoi-poloi. OK, just kidding. I was over there with "the rest of us" and was shocked to see that a feature story was a link to this site about using a magnet and wire to generate electricity. The title on Digg was something like "Making Electricity in your Hands". I was hoping for something pretty earth shattering as I assume that at least 75% of the online population is aware of induction, magnetic fields and the concept of a generator. I, previous to today, thought that most civilized people who use electronic devices understand how moving magnets work when placed within a coil of wire. But, the fact that such a simple article was featured on Digg and also on someone's blog linked on Digg reveals to me that we've gone so far backwards it's frightening. I mean seriously... I've got at least fifteen ideas to do thing with the magnets, wire and various mechanical configurations that I think are kind of neat but ultimately nothing special and they're light years ahead of the linked article above. Maybe I'm wrong? Maybe I'm the Nikolai Tesla of my generation? (Doubtful) Suffice it to say that there is a lot of really cool and simple stuff you can come up with in this day and age using wires and magnets, and making electricity is a minor and basic element of all of them. It's a given really.

Where were these people during science class in grade school, junior high and high school? Now I know that not EVERYONE was into this stuff, but surely those people who like to think of themselves as technically knowledgeable today have SOME inkling of the inner workings of their tools? Because if it is as woefully lacking as the Digg link suggests, then we really have reached the point where humanity are approaching the status of Eloi (reference to H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine". What?! You never read that but saw only the film!? Vagrant! Go to Project Guttenberg or your local library right this instant and read it)! I shudder for the future.

Ho ho ho...

I'm comin' down hard!

Some of you may have seen this. Maybe not... But, this is pretty funny.

Thanks to my friend Lebachai.

Beryl doesn't have the beauty of Enlightenment in my opinion, but it certainly has functionality that I've been wanting for a long time. So, at this point I will say that I will continue forward with Beryl as it's way overdue. The only thing we need now is a better input device than the mouse which was long in the tooth as of 1995. So here's what I've discovered about Beryl in the past few days:

1. You can put a "Skydome" image around the environment that your desktop cube lives in. This image is only visible when you are rotating the desktop cube. Currently I have this awesome photo I took of an Australian outback sky which really makes the desktop cube space feel wide open.

2. The absolutely cool hotspot in the upper right that brings all open windows from all desktops into a thumbnail view. Much better than Alt-Tab or scrolling between desktops. The only drawback is that it doesn't display minimized apps. I did find out that you can change the hotspot in the Beryl Settings Manager under Shortcuts/Screen Edges. You can map all four corners and all four edges to a small selection of desktop management functions.

3. You can set up a larger environment than just a cube as well. But it loses clarity and also gets a little jerky due to the rescaling that has to happen to get the image to rotate correctly. But there is a "virtual desktop" count setting that allows you to specify up to sixteen virtual desktops. I guess that means it's not a cue but a Decasexaangle?

4. You can zoom into any window by holding down the "Super" key and scrolling the mouse wheel. Up to 13x magnification factor with smoothing so it still looks good. BTW, it took me a bit to figure out that the "Super" key is what most people think of as the "Windows" key.

5. You can set translucency on any window to see what's behind it by holding down Alt and scrolling the mouse. This allows you to see what's behind a window without minimizing it or having to move it. I think both this function and the previous one would be better served by having hotspot widgets on the title bar where the mousewheel would automatically affect the respective effects. I can see using the translucency feature to keep an eye on a compile or download while reading online documentation in a web browser for example.

6. The top and bottom of the desktop cube (or whatever shape you set it up to be) is known as the "Cap". You can put a graphic on in for decorative purposes, but that seems less useful than setting it to transparent with desktops translucent so you can see all apps on all desktops at once. One of the coolest things I've pulled off so far is running a video on each desktop and then moving up to the top of the cube and seeing all four at once. How is this useful? Once again, if you are doing something where you have to keep an eye two or more fullscreen windows, this is your ticket. My only complaint is that you should be able to click on one of the visible sides of the cube to move to that desktop. But when you move up to the Cap you lose the mouse pointer. Oh well...

7. The ability to pull up or down on the edges of a fullscreen window to curl it up and see what's behind it is more flash than function in my mind. I find the translucency much more useful.

So far, I'm hooked though. I just wish the themes looked better and were more flexible. I also wish there were easy to use theming tools. Unless Raster and the Enlightenment crew find a way to dig into this and integrate with it, they will probably lose some users. Which would be a shame because Raster is the first person I'd ever seen to mention these concepts. I have to wonder how much of Xgl and Beryl were lifted from Raster's work/ideas.

Being the kind of guy who loves the power of the command line displayed with the full beauty of eye candy like transparency and all sorts of animated effects... I finally got the time to sit down and get Xgl and Beryl working. Here is my loose review:

It's... neat. Ultimately not too useful, but neat. And I've always felt that there's no better way to compute than in style, which is why I've always gravitated towards the platform with more eye candy options: Linux. With that out of the way, I also think it's important to mention that the themes that come with Heliodor (the Metacity compatible window decorator portion of Beryl) and Emerald (the KDE kompliant window decorator for Beryl) still don't hold a candle to the themes I've enjoyed in Enlightenment over the past half a decade. There's room for improvement in theming overall for all window managers, but E still has my vote as the prettiest in PC land save for Mac OS X.

So onto the goodies. There is, of course, the much balleyhooed desktop cube that you can rotate for multiple desktops. It works. it's interesting and it provides a few ways to switch between multiple desktops. I showed it to one of my co-workers who never really "got" the multiple virtual desktop thing and he said, "Oh wow. That makes it easy to see the value of virtual desktops". He said his problem is not knowing which one to switch to. But with Beryl you get to see enough of each desktop to quickly decide which one you want to get to. I guess that helps some folks... To me, it's pretty easy to remember which desktop which applications are on . But not to everyone. So I'd say this is a vote for the desktop cube for the average person.

There is also a Beryl configuration utility that allows you to set TONS of settings for Beryl. For example, you can set the animation behavior for windows depending on what is happening to them. Close a window? You have your choice of eighteen different animation styles. My personal favorites are burn and beam up (think Star Trek TNG transporter effect). Burn, has the window go up in flames from the top down. And this is useful how? It isn't, other than to say "because it can". I can recall back in the late 80s having this mental picture of closing a window on a computer and having it blow away as grains of sand. I thought it would be really cool and give the desktop a more realistic feel. Back then, my thought was to have a video of sand blowing and scale it and overlay it where the window had been. The burn effect is actually a rendered effect as are all of the animations.

With the cube rotation you have many options as well. For example you can set a distance setting that will cause your application windows to space apart outward from the surface of the desktop so they are tiered front to back. Neat effect and it makes it a little easier to see what apps you have layered. The cube currently only uses four sides to provide you with four virtual desktops. On the other two sides of the cube (the top and bottom) you have what's called a "cap" image. It's just a still image that is drawn on as filler. You have the option to make the cube transparent or translucent. I opted for translucent as it makes it even easier to see the apps open on the other desktops as you look at them in reverse video through the cube.

The performance is amazing no matter if I'm on my P4 here at work (with a crappy on board Radeon R300) or my P4 at home with an NVidia GeForce 4 with 128 Megs of RAM. It's much smoother than I would have expected even in Xinerama mode. Over the weekend I hope to give it a try on my media center which is an old P3 866 with a GeForce 4 128 Meg card. As a sidenote, I have to say that ATI's driver install via Gentoo sucked balls deeply and frequently. NVidia, as much as I hate to support them (I still hold a grudge about Voodoo) has a much better and more up to date driver.

There is also real transparency with Xgl and the Gnome desktop I use integrates with it well. My terminals now actually show me what's REALLY behind them instead of just a quick cap of the desktop background. Even full motion video. Just dragging the terminal window around and seeing the web browser's text behind it is a bit of a thrill. Of course a lot of the older folks where I work say that the transparency would drive them nuts. ;P

I also tried an experiment with a running video while rotating the cube. The video continued to play smoothly even when I was looking at it from an odd angle or through the back of the window. I have to say, in terms of technical ability, this beats the pants off of anything anyone else is doing. Sadly I can't give 100% credit to the Xgl and Beryl/Compiz folks. The first person to come up with these ideas that I'm aware of was Raster of the Enlightment project. He was working on getting compositing features into E using OpenGL with hardware 3D acceleration back in the 90s. Of course, he didn't produce. Apple came out with it first, but both Raster and Apple probably got the ideas from somewhere else to begin with. Still, it's nice to see this stuff moving along.

What I hope for the future is that there will eventually be real 3D spaces that will prove more functionality driven. I can easily envision a file manager that would be easier to deal with than most current approaches. That's the one thing missing from the Xgl world. A 3D file manager. Hope that's coming soon...

I need to know what you think of this. I know who this person is from quite a while ago. I just want to know what you think of what this person is saying. I know what I already think, but I'll reserve any judgement.

In the old testament and some of the Koran there are passages about a giant golden wheel in the sky. Some sects of various religions/cults interpret this to be a UFO. It was supposedly built by aliens and humans using billions of dollars worth of gold from Earth.

So... let's assume for a moment that the wheel, built by aliens, was made on Earth.

And let's also assume that these aliens were our "gods" of ancient days...

And now, let's take a trip back to that time and go overhear one of the alien conversations about the wheel...

U'lah: "...Hahaha! Yes! I told them that in order for them to honor their god, they needed to bring me all their gold as a sacrifice".
U'lah: "I said that it would please me and that I would be able to finally bring rain to their district as they have implored these past few months".
Y'wheh: "You didn't"!
M'hmad: "I most certainly did. After all with all this gold, I'll finally be able to outfit my ship with those racing strips I've been wanting so long! Q'rjah is going to be SOOOOO jealous"!
M'hmad: "Then I told the Earth people that in return for their homage to me, I would make it rain. So, all I have to do now is dump the ship's liquid waste over their fields! BWAHAHAHAHAH"!!!
Y'weh: "BWAHAHAHAHAH!!! Good one"!
Y'whe: "Well get a load of this... I told my followers that I could turn water into wine".
U'lah: "What? Go on..."
Y'whe: "Yeah, yeah... I did. So I had a hose going back to a tank of Ultragrape Alien-ade hidden under a visual cloak. The hose was also fitted up my sleeve".
Y'weh: "I then told someone to get me a goblet of water"
Y'whe: "When they returned I also had a packet of Andromedan grape Alien-ade that I dumped into the water in the goblet. Thank goodness for self-mixing drinks".
Y'whe: "The rest of the tank was filled with a prepared mixture, so I just pumped that into the goblet between people taking drinks"!
U'lah: "Genius! Pure genius"!
Y'whe: "Not only that, but I made sure it was infused with a bit of mild hallucinogen to make sure that the experience would feel a bit more supernatural to the Earth people".
J'ain: "Hey guys. I hate to ruin the love fest here... but I think the galactic police have figured out our whereabouts. It'll be time to split soon unless you want to be lovemate to a three sexed Albraxxian ape named B'uhbuh".

Ahh the good old days. I remember many a summer vacation from school when evening would hit and just after dinner but slightly before prime time TV, I'd head up to my room with a refreshment and tune in WWV from Fort Collins, Colorado on my short wave set. The sweet sounds of the atomic clock along with geophysical alerts especially during the summer, and of course the voice of WWV announcing the time near the top of each minute. I used to sit transfixed listening to the beautiful perfection of each evenly spaced click and tone waiting to hear what would come next. Listening to it made me feel like what I wanted to be when I grew up: a 1950s sci-fi movie scientist. A boffin. Does anyone else here have similar recollections? Surely I can't be alone, can I?

I don't know about you, but I've been seeing TONS of ads for software that purportedly turn your PC into a "Super TV" with 1000s of channels from around the world and only a one time payment. The one time payment is the part of this that is a HUGE tip-off that it's a scam. When it comes to any type of media service, the goal these days is recurring fees. You won't see ANYONE offering a real quality service for a onetime flat fee in the media business. That's why I suspect that CDs and DVDs will completely die once the bandwidth is at your doorstep for instant content delivery (with heavy DRM).

But getting back to the scammers... Check out this CNET forum discussion about TVolution (now called PCBuzz). Just for the hell of it, I think I'm going to ask them for a refund. (I haven't bought the product) and see what kind of run around they give me. This ought to be worth some laffs.

It should be made a little more known that trafficking in human body parts is not legal. On the other hand, allowances should be made for people who might want to keep parts as decorative motifs... ;P

Back in the late 70s or possibly VERY early 80s, I used to have a hobby called "DXing". I would set up all sort of TV antenna arrays to try and receive shows from other states or nearby Canada. I was very successful in getting programs from Ottawa, Windsor and Kitchener. One of the stations I got was a CBC station. On one Saturday evening, there was a film that was being shown that was a premiere of some sort. It was supposed to be a Canadian film, and I swear they said it was called, "Rough Cut" (Not the Burt Reynolds film). But I have not been able to find reference to it anywhere.

The story was about a boy who bounces from one abusive foster home to the next and basically has a pretty difficult life. I remember there were some VERY notable scenes in the film that would definitely not have passed US censorship muster. One that stands out is the boy witnessing the couple who has custody of him having a huge quarrel and then having really ugly "make up" sex on the kitchen table right in front of him. Another is when he runs away and befriends a Canadian indian who gives him advice on life. During this discussion the indian says something alluding to the passage "... like flies on shit..." which again caught me and my family off guard since this kind of language NEVER made it on over the air TV in the US.

I never saw the end of the film, although I expect it's pretty much a downer, since the signal faded on us about half way through and didn't come back. Any of my Canadian friends have any recollection of this movie? I'd like to eventually see it in it's entirety just to know how the hell it ends.

Not a Crime.