Ben’s Blog Blog

Recently, I’ve become much more involved in IRC, which is really nice. This is mainly because MinuteElectron kindly gave me a shell on one of (!) his VPSes, so I now have my Irssi customized to my liking and running in a screen session. Also, I used the nice availability of a shell to get Mutt running with GPG. It is a really nice email client! It’s fast, has more features than I could possibly use and looks cool.

Google Chrome was released recently. It has made me feel like this. Firefox feels more natural, but Chrome is so pretty and feature filled =(. Hopefully, there will be extensions made for Firefox which will give it so many of the nice features that Chrome has.

Recently, I was introduced to a game called Exalted by Kvetch. It is an P&P RPG like DnD, but better in several ways (IMHO). First, stunting. You actually gain mechanical bonuses by describing your actions well, with the highest level of stunt being so cool it actually gets you experience! (We got one of those in our game today, when we flash-banged a building before combat dropping into it in a C&C Generals-esque style). Despite the flash-banging, most weapons are still swords, so it is at about that tech level. Apart from the flame throwers. Also, it has really good social combat rules, well, actually, that’s Fixalted. Exalted rules are awful. However, I also think that the whole setting is more cool (I play a ninja with razor blades concealed in my gloves).

Now that Sean has his new blog running, I am slightly jealous of how nice his website is. So expect many changes to this one.

Sitting inside in Wales, in the rain, I was bored. Luckily however, I had free wifi! Just browsing around, I came accross this thread: http://forum.xcpus.com/mods/9693-project-cm-690-blue-mod.html. I had seen it before, but was more interested this time as I was going to get that case for moose 2. With the idea of doing something similar as a holiday project, I started reading. I decided to do something similar. I decided to do it in red, and without some of the really fancy stuff. I went for a red fan in the front, red paint and red buttons. Pictures follow.

Tools:

Painting the top panel:

Filling the holes on the front panel:

Painting the front panel:

Connecting the switches:

Finished:

It was a lot of work, but I’m pleased with it.

Well, muchly stuff has happened lately. I’ve been learning Cocoa (Fun!) which has been entertaining. I have updated my iPod touch to v2.0, and installed several Apps, including the ridiculously difficult, addictive and fun Super Monkey Ball. Oh, and It’s my birthday.

Cocoa really is a lot of fun. It is so much simpler than writing in .NET or anything like that, and the foundation frameworks are amazing. I have now written a speech synthesizer which gets a list of system voices, displays them in a table, lets you choose one, type in a line to say and then speak it.

iPod touch 2.0 is a MASSIVE improvement over the old 1.1.4. The App Store is great, and so are the new functions, like the scientific calculator and push email. DEFINITELY worth £6 of my money.

It’s my birthday! After much thunking, I have decided to get an Apple Universal Dock to stop my iPod getting scratched and falling off the deck when I sync it - quite a nice bit of kit - the main complaints are with the video out features which I won’t use. I was talking about upgrading my computer with the remaining money, when my father said that if I saved up to buy a completely new PC, then he would contribute money towards it if I replaced the family computer with my current one. This seems sensible, so here is a list of components: (mainly for reference purposes)

Vista Home Premium (unfortunately)
Coolermaster CM690
Corsair HX620
Random SATA DVD drive
500GB WD SATA HDD (Plus current 120GB *nix drive)
2GB of OCZ DDR2 RAM
Zotac 8800GT (Yay!)
Asus P5Q Pro
Intel C2D E8400

Comes to about £600 - probably a bit less. I should be able to get it around Christmas, as I already have monitors, keyboards, speakers etc.

You may have heard, ICANN has approved a proposal to slacken the rules on the internets TLDs. Starting in early 2009, anyone with sufficent hardware, and a buisness plan, will be able to make their own TLD. I don’t like this for two main reasons.

Firstly, the internet is mean to be free. When companies start buying domain names like http://www.coca.cola, it will just have been turned in to one big advert. Which is not what we want. How long until we see things like http://www.mobilephones.buyhere? Or http://www.buycomputers.verycheap. The TLD is not meant to be user customizable. It is meant to give some basic information about the site. For example, .com is a company (although it has now turned more into a generic TLD, as seen in my URL). .net is a personal website. .org is a non profit organization, and then you get country specific TLDs, like .co.uk, .fr and .de. That is it’s main purpose, which brings me onto my second point.

As it is, the internet is structured. You know that when you read .com, you have come to the end of the address. When this proposal is implemented, URLS like http://buy.mobile.phones.here.very.cheap will be a vaild URL. We don’t want this! We want an address like http://subdomain.domain.com. At the moment, if you can’t remember the address of a website, you can safely try .com as the most likely TLD. If that doesn’t work, then .co.uk, .net and .org are safe ones to try. The internet will lose it’s structure. If there are no limits on the TLDs you can use, then it’s like being able to make up your own postcode. The internet will lose all structure.

This is my view, but if you disagree with me, please say so because I would be interested to know why.

I decided recently that I needed to really learn how to code in one operating system. Since Linux is pretty complicated with UIs hard to make, I decided to go for either .NET or Cocoa. Since I hate Mircosoft, I thought I’d go with Apple’s Cocoa, which I have used once before, and was very enjoyable. Also, this will let me write programs for my iphone when I get it *said with crossed fingers*. I’ve ordered a book on Cocoa, and a book on Objective-C. They are Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, by Aaron Hilleglass (A professional cocoa teacher), and  Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan.  They look very good.

Last night, I fixed Ubuntu. Gnome had killed itself the week before, but I really didn’t want to fix it because I  had no idea what the problem was. Turned out, the problem was minimal and a sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop fixed it.

Reading a Lifehacker post on Ubuntu, I read about a program for Linux called Gnome Do. It is a clone of Quicksilver, if anyone knows what that is. Basically, I can now press Super (windows key) and Space, and Gnome Do pops up. I can open firefox by typing fx <enter>. Or any other approximation of the name of the program. I can quickly find files, and even tweet, by typing ‘tweet’ <tab> ‘Tweet here’. It really is good, and should speed up my day to day using a bit. Also, I have found a program called mail-notifier which sends you a pop up when ever you get an email. It even works with Hosted Gmail, which is good.

Sean and I are still dreaming of iPhones, but it is getting closer =). Now I just need to secure a Paper round. Joe let me help on his once, and I am confident that I could do it by myself.