Every time anyone writes any article about how terrible China is, Slashdot is quick to post it. Woohoo!!! China is evil!!! Everyone look!!!

Now, the Chinese government has drastically cut back on Internet censorship. Wikipedia - a hellhole of free thought - isn't being censored at all. You can read about it on Google News or on Digg. Can you see it here on Slashdot? Of course not. It doesn't make China look evil enough. How pathetic.

Downloaded and installed FC6. I did a clean install. When I tried the yum upgrade from FC1 to FC2, nothing worked. From FC2 to FC3, I ended up with a lot of weird problems. From FC3 to FC4, I spent days removing left-over FC3 packages that caused conflicts. From FC4 to FC5, I couldn't reboot afterward. So, I backup up all my files (including the hidden ones) to USB and did a format/install.

Six disks! Fedora is getting huge. I downloaded all 6 iso files. I don't have a CD burner - that is on my wive's Windows box. But, I found out that Windows XP now has built-in iso burning support from the desktop. Right click on an iso and the option to burn it is right there. So, I burned all 6.

I was good. I checked the media. It all failed. I tried to burn the first iso three times (even using cdrecord on a linux box as work). Finally, I remembered that my CD player does not support DMA. So, I had to install with ide=nodma. Suddenly all the disks tested good.

On to the install. Looks like FC5 - just a slightly different background. Personally, I like the bubbly look of FC5 more than the DNA look of FC6. I do not like the way it tries to force you to use Gnome. I've been using KDE since it was first available for slackware. Why do I have to change now? I had to go into the "customize now" prompt, remove Gnome, add KDE, and then look through all the other bloat FC6 wants to add: Bluetooth? I don't have any bluetooth devices. Power management? This isn't a laptop. HP Printer Drivers? I don't have an HP printer. I used to complain that Windows installs everything including the kitchen sink "just in case", but Linux lets you choose what to install. By making it an awkward option to un-choose the bloat, FC6 is turning into Windows.

Install complete - reboot. No network. What!? I had network access during installation. I check /etc/sysconfig/networking and find that I have eth0 and eth1. So, ifup eth1 and I have networking. What!? I have two network cards!? Yes. All the way through Fedora Core 5, the on-board network wasn't supported. Now, it is. So, I downed eth1 and put my cable in the onboard eth0 port. That's a plus for FC6, but you'd think it would make the active network device eth0, not eth1.

Now, compile my NVidia drivers - no, that fails. Just like when FC5 was released, the drivers won't compile. I did see something strange, installing kernel-devel installed both the i386 and the x86_64 source. I don't have i386. So, yum list | grep installed | grep i386 ... where did all that crap come from? I spend the next three hours removing all the i386 packages. I thought that it is possible that an i386 package would be needed by some x86_64 package, but no. So, I'm left wondering - I installed from x86_64 disks. Where did all those i386 packages come from? I was just lucky that I tend to do a minimal install first to make sure things work. Had I done a complete install, it would have taked a very long time to remove all the i386 junk.

Wow - there i586 and i686 stuff on here too. At least I got quick at removing things with the i386 junk.

Well, I installed the video driver from livna - maybe it won't randomly crash my... OK. If I run glxinfo, it crashes the X server.

Got it all installed. I can boot (and the network works). I can finally add the programs I need and get back to work. I just with that Fedora made it easier to upgrade. At the very least, a fresh install shouldn't require immediate purging of unwanted junk.

What happens when I'm bored at work? I go back to failed projects I've worked on to see if I can get them to work. Just in time for New Years, I got WebPad working. It is not a replacement for wikipedia. It is a one-person online notepad for random notes that you can organize like wikipedia. Need a new page? Just add a link to an existing page and click on it. Now, I need to work on the regular expressions. It will be another couple years before I'm interested in doing that. Perhaps when I'm back in college next year working on my PhD.

I've been playing around with having the content of my webpage delivered in different styles since I first stuck a few lines of HTML together and viewed it with my Mosaic browser on my Amiga. I used server-side includes back then. Now, I use a combination of PHP, JavaScript, and CSS.

A couple weeks ago, I had the idea of creating a webpage that functions like a desktop. I searched the web for a good two days and found nothing. So, I started writing it myself. Now, I have something that is, at the minimum, functional in Firefox. I'll have to borrow my wife's PC to test it on IE. I don't know anyoen with a Mac so I can test it on Safari and IE-Mac. But, I hope it is functional on all browsers.

If you are interested in seeing it, my url is http://shaunwagner.com (you will initially see a page that allows you to choose a theme - choose desktop). If you test it, please let me know about any bugs that you find. I'd like to get this working on all browsers and give everyone the JavaScript for it. I think it makes web browsing much more funcitonal.

Of course, as soon as this becomes popular, web browsers will become mini-desktops that you can customize with your own icons (ala Bookmarks) and windows that you can resize and drag around (similar to tabs). Then, my JavaScript will be rather useless.

Usually the mass media is quick to link any two stories together to create the impression that there is a trend going on. In the past couple weeks, I've read stories of the rediscovery of many things once claimed extinct: a special grass in Santa Catalina, a snow leopard on Mt. Everest, a wildflower in Contra Costa County Park, and a woodpecker in Arkansas.
All of these species were listed as extinct years ago by ecologists. Are ecologists jumping the gun on calling species extinct? I remember "extinction" being the hot eco-political word back in the 80's. There were commercials on television claiming that thousands of species of animals and plants were going extinct every week. To take it one step further, there were claims that the cure to cancer "could" be found in some plant or insect, but if it goes extinct, it will never be found (hence, the plot of one of Sean Connery's worse movies).
I wonder how many other species that ecologists were quick to call extinct are still alive and well in some remote area of the world. I wonder why the mass media isn't on a feeding frenzy about this. News or not, there is enough here to create a good story full of half-truths and bad logic. You could spin it to claim that the cure for cancer is closer than ever now that once-thought-extinct species are popping up all over the world. Just think of the commercial revenue an over-hyped story like that would bring in.

I had an idea for a website. Surely, someone else has thought of this and already done it. The idea is to compare the cost of the crimes depicted in Hollywood movies to the amount they intended to make off the crime.

For example, consider the first Die Hard movie. I have a vague memory of it, but I remember that they had tons of guns, enough explosives to cover a whole building, highly advanced drills and computers, and a large, highly skilled, and expensive crew. They were trying to steal some bonds or something. If they had got away with it, would they have made any net profit?

It just seems that the criminals always have millions of dollars worth of equipment - to the point that some even have satellites. They can afford to purchase a satellite and put it in orbit so they can steal [insert something worth far less than a satellite here]. It just makes no sense.

Oh well, I searched the web, but I haven't found such a site yet.

I posted this as a Slashdot Question, but I seriously doubt it will pass through the editors...

In a classic executive knee-jerk reaction to recent news about keystroke recorders being used by spyware, I was asked to research non-typed passwords. Easy: Fingerprint or retina scans. There's also smart card enabled keyboards. I realized two major problems with those ideas: First, they are mostly kludge devices, so they act like keystrokes and get recorded just like any keystroke. Second, they are expensive.

My second idea came in a dream, or maybe a nacho-induced haze: mouse passwords. Have the user wiggle the mouse around and translate that into a password. I know that a mouse-motion recorder could record this too, but it isn't a keystroke. I wrote a javascript to mouse-enable password fields on a website, and... it is a pain to use. It is damn hard to do the exact same mouse motion twice in a row - let alone every time you want to login. But, I thought that all the genius programmers at Slashdot may be able to use this as a starting point. So, I put it on my website with all my other useless code: http://shaunwagner.com/projects/js

If you can make this work, I'd be rather interested in knowing how you did it. As for me, I'm off on the next executive knee-jerk reaction.

I am no longer supporting Opera. I've always been one to fight for cross-browser compatability, but not anymore. I've removed Opera from all of my computers. I've removed Opera from all of the computers that I administer at work. I've removed Opera from the local software repository. I'm also going to redirect Opera.com to a "Don't be so stupid" page on our local DNS.

Why would I do such a thing? I like making decisions. Opera developers want to make decisions for me and then get the Opera zealots to send me hate email (and even a few hate phone calls) for saying that I want to make my own decisions.

What on earth could I want to do that is so terrible that Opera developers have it out for me? I want to give the clerks at work the intraweb functionality that they asked for. They want to be able to hit the backspace key to remove an entry from a select list on a webpage. Easy. Just add a keypress event to the select list. If it is a backspace event, remove the highlighted entry. It works in every browser... except Opera.

Opera developers hard-coded the backspace key to be a back button. It cannot be changed. It cannot be blocked. It will take you to the previous page no matter what kind of event blocking you use. Why are the Opera developers so keen on forcing you to the previous page? As they state, "Why would any honest developer want to modify the default behaviour of the backspace key?"

Why? Why would any honest developer try to give users the functionality they ask for? For that matter, why would the Opera developers write specs that explain how to catch and alter a keypress event, but then program Opera so that the functionality they define does not exist? Which developer is dishonest?

I believe that I have hit a nerve with the Opera zealots. After getting a call from overseas at 2:30am last night and being cussed out in broken English, I realized how fanatical (and stupid) Opera users can be. How dare I want to make my own decision about the backspace key. Opera knows best.

Normally, I'd be pissed right about now, but I'm not.
I booted up my PC this past weekend and I got a system message from SmartD (the hard-drive monitoring daemon). It said that HDD had uncorrectable errors on it. It is a Maxtor, so I went to the Maxtor site and downloaded their harddrive checking utility, PowerMax. It reported an error code and said to email it to Maxtor support. I did and Maxtor support said the drive it about to die completely - so back it up quickly and replace it. The warranty: it ended two months ago.
So, I backed up the drive to my main drive. It was a bit of a pain because I have the drive mounted as /var. I copied it to /newvar. I tried to umount /var, but it said it was busy. So, I removed /var from fstab and rebooted. Big mistake.
All the daemons that use /var crapped out. It took nearly 10 minutes for syslogd to give up and let me continue to a login prompt. The problem is that X wouldn't start and it wouldn't die down to a text prompt. So, I had to reboot without graphical mode and wait again. That time, I started a Knoppix download on my other PC, but it never finished. 700MB over is a long download, even over cable.
Anyway, I got back on eventually and moved /newvar to /var. I rebooted and it still took forever. I searched online and found that I had to run restorecon on the new /var director for it to work properly (why!?). Reboot again and finally I'm back up and running, just one drive short.
Now I have to decide on which harddrive to get. I've had bad luck with both Maxtor and Seagate. I just assume they all die shortly after the warranty is up.

I like rules. I'm not completely OCD. I just like to take everyday situations and create a set of rules to govern what the best working options are.

I sat here staring at a reply to one of my comments on /. and I thought that there should be rules to goven when to reply and when to just let it go. There are some obvious ones. For instance, never reply to an Anonymous Coward. What are some other ones? Sometimes I think that I simply shouldn't ever reply to a reply unless it specifically asks a question. This isn't really a message board for random conversations. Also, I really have nothing highly informative to add until there's a nice story on hedgehogs.

I have an observation which could easily be a complaint if I actually cared about it, but I don't. So, it is just an observation. Every time I make a comment that others find Insightful or Interesting, it quickly shoots up to +5. However, it is normally followed a large number of replies intended to explain what a moron I am. It makes me wonder how many +5 Insightful Morons there are on Slashdot.

All great ideas come in pairs. No, not two ideas. The same idea comes from two people. One person gets the credit and the other gets angry. There have been some exceptions (like crediting both Newton and Leibniz with Calculus). But, why is this important?

I'm working on a couple projects for our local medical university. In the process of development, I was asked if I could figure out how to do what appears to be a simple task, but nobody has been able to do it before. I figured I'd take a look at it in a few days.

The next day, I received a call from a couple people who got my name from someone else. They asked if I could do a nearly identical task. Every great idea comes in pairs.

Now, the dilemma. The people I'm working with now will fund development through government grant and make it non-profit. The new people I got a call from have seed money and want to turn a huge profit. I have to choose between:
  1. Tell everyone I can't do it and stay out of it.
  2. Do it for the people I work with now, making it non-profit.
  3. Do it for the new people and get a cut of the profits.
  4. Do it for both and make everyone happy until they both try to patent it and all hell breaks loose.
  5. Tell everyone it can't be done and do it myself.

Now that the election is over, I hope we can take Slashdot back from the political extremists. I want once again to be able to read comments without having it slip into a Kerry/Bush debate shortly after the idiotic First Posts.

Is it just me, or are the boards becoming more and more politically bipolar? You can't even read comments about a new video card until someone twists the topic into an anti-Bush or anti-Kerry forum. I'm sorry, but technology and politics are not fundamentally connected. They can support one another, but each can survive without the other. As it is, this site is degrading into a black hole of parrot-heads that misquote half-truths and paste undocumented websites to support themselves. I think it is time to take a break from Slashdot. At least football season is starting. I'd rather read anti-Chiefs and anti-Broncos boards than anti-Bush and anti-Kerry boards. On second thought... Maybe I can twist all the topics into reasons why the Chiefs will on Sunday!

I finally broke down and got a copy of Doom3. I knew going into it that it was a bad idea. My PC is only 1.7GHz and my video card only has 32MB RAM. Of course, it didn't run. My wife's computer is a little better at 2.0GHz and a 64MB video card. It runs, but it is so choppy. So, now I'm in the hunt for a new video card and CPU. I'll probably need a new motherboard when all is said and done with. What to do with an old Motherboard/CPU/Video Card?