WSJ op-ed.

This bit kinda sums up in a nutshell why I'm bitter: Mr. Obama has not governed as the centrist, deficit-fighting, bipartisan consensus builder he promised to be. And his promise to embody a new kind of politicsâ"free of finger-pointing, pettiness and spinâ"was a mirage. He has cheapened his office with needless attacks on his predecessor.

Another interesting point: For example, he voted for the bank rescue plan in September 2008 and praised it during the campaign. Yet on Dec. 8 at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Obama called it "flawed" and blamed "the last administration" for launching it "hastily."

Oey vey

So Time Warner finally got off their collective lazy asses and increased our upstream here in the STNY market. Must have happened recently but I didn't notice it until today when I took my traffic shaping rules (configured for the old upload speed) offline to do some unrelated testing. Noticed that I had a full megabit of upload and called them to confirm it. Previously they topped out the upstream at 384kbit/s on the standard tier and 512kbit/s on the turbo tier.

The new tiers are 15/1mbits for turbo and 10/1 for standard. A few months ago they bumped up our download speeds to those rates but had left the upstream at the aforementioned slower rates. Previous to that we had 8mbits/512kbits for Turbo and 5/384 for standard. Glad they finally increased the upstream to a more realistic value. The downstream is nice, although I can't really peg it unless I fire up three or four different downloads. If my employer wasn't paying the bill I'd consider dropping it down to standard. Same upstream bandwidth and more downstream than I need.

I wonder if this means Verizon is eying our market for a FiOS roll out? It seems that TW's MO is to lowball their bandwidth tiers in the markets where they don't have any competition, then they bump them up right before someone else moves in. Would be nice to have a second option. I'm too far away from the CO to get DSL with any decent speed. In this neighborhood it tops out at 1.5 and is borderline at that. TW is currently our only realistic choice. Not sure I'd change away from them to go to FiOS (I hate Verizon with a passion) but it would be nice to see someone actually compete with them for a change.

This about sums it up. To bad everybody is so fixated on abortion and the public option to debate the merits of the rest of the bill.

Found this article in the WSJ today. It lists various state attempts to "reform" health care that have had undesirable outcomes and notes how many of these "reform" attempts are included in the Obamacare bills now working their way through Congress.

This is a test

Galactic Federation (Star Trek)
Premise:
Benevolent socialists with insane tech explore space and spend all their time playing interstellar boy scouts.
likely?
Given the current state of human nature? Not really. Plus many laws of physics will have to be revoked.


Sullen Dystopia (Blade Runner)
Premise:
Society continues along the downward spiral, picking up a few new techs along the way.
likely?
Honestly, this one is easier to believe than most. The tech is way less ludicrous, and humanity is just as bad as ever.


Interstellar Frontier (Firefly)
Premise:
Civil War in Space! Trade your kepis for spacesuits. Lovable southerners with amazing tech tangle with despicable yankees who have even more amazing tech.
likely?
Eh. It'd be amusing, but we've already been thru all that nonsense before, and I could do without a repeat.


Technological Utopia (Gattaca)
Premise:
The sinister forces of minimalist art take over the world somehow, and impose their terrifying aesthetic on all. Overtones of fascism make it juicier.
likely?
Very low-tech for the future, most attainable yet. Ridiculous fascist view of genetics gets easier to believe every day.


Charred Wasteland (Terminator 2)
Premise:
Robots done blowed everything up! AI experiment gone wrong decides to put naughty humanity in the corner... permanently.
likely?
LISP is cool but this is just plain silly. Every other aspect of tech (except time travel) somewhat believable.


Crazy Space New York (Fifth Element)
Premise:
NYC's noise, color, citizens and grime survive, modified but generally unmolested, into the 25th century.
likely?
Tech somewhat overdone, but so likeable you want to believe it.

Everyone seems to be interested in server virtualization these days, from small developers to folks interested in starting a hosting operation of their own. Fortunately, there are a ton of options for setting up a virtualized hosting environment. I've written an in-depth, step-by-step VPS tutorial for turning any reasonably modern PC into a virtual private server hosting environment using the following freely available tools:

• Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS (base operating system)
• VMware Server 2.0 (virtualization suite)
• Debian Linux 5 (virtual machine operating system)
• ISPConfig 2.2 (hosting control panel)

Everything is documented with detailed configuration instruction and screen captures of major installation processes. The tutorial is aimed at helping small development shops take advantage of virtualization to create well-structured development, test, and production environments. Information technology professionals working in other fields will no doubt find the information useful as well.

In the near future, I'll be adding chapters and additional resource links that explain how to use additional virtual machines to create scalable database, mail server, and backup server envioronments that can easily be migrated from one physical VPS host to another. For now, I hope you enjoy getting started out with your first VPS setup.

Related to my earlier post on using Debian as the host for a W3C validator, I've written a new tutorial explaining how to use Mandriva Linux One 2009 as a local XHTML validation server. This tutorial uses the latest W3C validator code, and is designed specifically for those implementing the server as a virtual machine in products like VMware Server.

Running a validator server locally allows developers to test internally developed and/or hosted content for standards compliance prior. This can be especially helpful for reducing issues with browser compatibility later on in a project's development cycle.

I've written an in-depth tutorial on setting up a local W3C markup validator using Debian GNU/Linux. This can be of great help to web developers who want to test internal content for standards adherence, such as development versions of websites or intranet content.

I'll be publishing a similar article soon based on Mandriva 2009; this version will include instructions for installing the validator software from the W3C source distribution, which is more current than the version provided in the Debian "stable" repositories.

As many of the folks on my friends list know, I'm an active duty member of the United States Navy. Prior to enlistment, I spent a few years as a general I.T. nerd, doing software development (desktop and web applications, mostly on Linux) and network security work. At age 25, I made the decision to enlist in the Navy, and have been extremely happy with my decision ever since.

In my somewhat limited spare time, I maintain an educational resources web site. I take a great deal of pride in my job in the Navy, and have written an article for people thinking about enlisting after high school. I enlisted a bit later in life, but I hope I'll still be able to relate to folks in the 18-20 year old range.

Please feel free to give me feedback on the article, and I'll do my best to answer any questions my fellow geeks may have regarding military service.

Since I do most of my web development in Perl under Debian Linux, I decided to write a beginner's guide to Perl development. It's a work in progress, but already has eleven chapters as of this posting. Source code examples are provided for each concept. Here are the current chapters:

1. Introduction and Motivation
2. System Requirements and Getting Perl
3. Variables and Data Types
4. Program Flow Control
5. File Input/Output
6. Subroutines and Code Reuse
7. Your First Web Application
8. Getting User Input with HTML Forms
9. Coding Style and Maintenance
10. Security Considerations
11. Additional Programming Resources

Please feel free to give me some feedback on the tutorial; I'm looking for ways to improve it. Thanks!

The Slashdot relationship system is a useful way of keeping track of people I personally find interesting. If you're reading this, you've probably come here because you're curious about why you've been placed on my friends list. Simply put: I happened to have found a post of your interesting or insightful. Perhaps you offered unique insight into something that I had not previously considered. Perhaps your posting history is funny enough to warrant making you stand out from the thousands of other posters. Nevertheless, if you're on my friends list, it doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with your statements--it just means that I found your contribution to the fray worthwhile enough to include you on a list that makes your posts easier for me to find. If you're on my friends list, you're also much more likely to receive moderation points (I almost always moderate up--I hate modding down simply because moderation points are so valuable). Is this fair? Well, maybe not, but I am a fairly lazy reader. If you stand out from the crowd, I'm going to reward you for it.

I do cull my friends list on a very infrequent basis. There isn't much order to it with the exception that this usually occurs when: a) your last comment was made over two years ago and b) you haven't already friended me in return. People who have me on their friends list as well are immune to the periodic culling. (Of course, if your posts suddenly become entirely inflammatory and your history takes a gross turn for the worst, you're likely to be removed!)

So, don't be alarmed! My intentions are mostly neutral, with the exception that you're a little more likely to receive a slight karma boost the next time you post, and I have mod points. It isn't a guarantee, of course, but it does make it much more likely.

Additionally, following in the footsteps of a friends journal some time back, I will friend you if you friend me. If you put me on the enemy list, I'll friend you. In fact, I might even change the relationship at random just to generate "relationship changed" notices--for fun.

EDIT: Aug. 2008 culling completed. Anyone whose last post was prior to Aug. 2006 and does not have me friended has been removed.

I doubt many people here are NBA fans, but those that are: VOTE FOR STEVE NASH for the all-star game!! He's behind Tracy McGrady, what's up with that? McGrady is barely playing, he's always injured and he's rubbish compared to Nash as a player altogether.

While you're at it, vote for some forwards in the West better than Battier.

Rockets players (and Yi Jianlian of the Bucks, who is a write-in) are getting overly large numbers of votes because... of China! See, Chinese people only care about teams with Chinese players -- the Rockets because of my man Yao and the Bucks because of Yi. Yes those guys are good and Yao is rightfully an all-star (and Yi has the potential to be one for sure) but their supporting cast is just not up to snuff and is getting far more votes than they deserve because they happen to be the only players people in China know (presumably because every Rockets and Bucks game is televised in China and the others... not so much)!

So, until the NBA realizes that if there are 10 Chinese players in the NBA the all-star game will look like the Chinese National team scrimmaging and does something about how the voting goes (I'm not sure what), we need to vote for the players that *we* want in the All-Star game.

I don't mean to sound like some anti-foreigner guy since I'm an immigrant myself, but really if it's the NBA, which is very much an American sports organization, then the all-star game should really not be so influenced by another country.

I've created a web-based embedded version of the open source crossword generator application on ClassHelper.org's Crossword Generator page. This version allows visitors to your web site to create custom crossword puzzles using their own words and clues, and we support customization of the template it uses to match your site (we perform this service for free).

The free version is ad-supported; you can subscribe to the paid version for $3/month. Happy puzzling!

In writing a series of Open Source Gaming articles, it's easy to leave out a lot of peoples favorites. In order to combat this, I am taking all suggestions for the Next four installments. I play each game and give a short overview.

Upcoming articles up are:
Part 5. FPS (Preferably not already covered in Part 1)
Part 6. Turn Based Strategy, I especially need help here, as it is my least favorite genre.
Part 7. RPG including MMO types

The rules are simple all games must:
1. Must be open source.
2. Must be available for Linux & Windows at the very least.
3. Must have a website for readers to visit, Some great games didn't make the platformers article due to there being no active website, but were available in all major repositories.
4. They must offer Binary/Installer Downloads.

The intended audience for all my articles are primarily Windows users. I'd like to expose them to the best that open source has to offer, while trying to shield them from the hassles inherent in compiling the source.

Feel free to leave comments/suggestions here or at the blog.

The first three articles have been completed and can be found here.
(4 are currently published and part 5 is upcoming.)

Part 1 The Quakers, covers Open Source games written on the 3 idtech GPL releases.
Part 2 Real Time Strategy, covered Spring, Dark Oberon and others.
Part 3 The Platformers. Mario Clones and others.
Part 4 Racing

http://mrcopilot.com/search/label/OSGGFG