Yet Another ATCS Monitor Experiment
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff, Techie
Interested by a website left in a comment in a previous posting about ATCS Monitor I decided to see if I could get sort of the same thing going myself. While the site in the comment apparently used VBScript, and no longer works, I decided to go the ghetto way of doing things, running the program on a server and having Irfanview take a screenshot of it every 45 seconds. The end result is this, naturally it looks pretty rough due to my method of acquiring the screenshot but I myself am not a VB programmer, nor a .NET programmer.
Oh, in case you’re wondering, the UP Geneva Subdivision stretches from Clinton, IA to Chicago and is the UP mainline that runs through Rochelle, IL.
Currently down, check back later.
Ubuntu 9.10
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
Is almost here…
ATCS Monitor on the iPhone
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
Recently I became the owner of a iPhone, I know, right now AT&T and Apple are the devil, I’ll see how things pan out in a year or two. However I have to say I have been enjoying the fact that I actually use the phone more often then I thought I would, especially for organizing and whatnot, the POS freebie phone I had before had problems doing this. Anyways, I happen to like trains and watching trains, the term for this being “Railfan”, and as such knowing where the trains are is usually a plus.
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Cheesy Ad for RSN Forums
Posted by voice | Filed under RSN2.O
Yup, we infact do have a message board and as per usual it needs moar activity. Feel free to join in on the conversations taking place there. So of course the first question I’m sure is on your minds is “why the fuck should I join your forums?” I got no answer to that other than its not strictly a sonic message board, theres already enough of them, albeit sonic’s face is attached to it. I’m working on expanding the forum’s coverage and of course more activity on the forums would help me to achieve that goal. It also helps in that I’m one of the few administrators in the Sonic Community that isn’t a complete egotistical prick, just saying.
Seeqpod Is Gone, Now What?
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
So if you’re like me you were pretty pissed off when Seeqpod shutdown back in April. If you don’t know what happened long story short is that the RIAA went ahead and sued the little man into oblivion because they couldn’t play ball with the big boys like Google or Yahoo, seems to be a reoccuring theme with the RIAA.
That doesn’t mean we’re out of luck just yet though, you see, because all browsers download static content to your computer in the form of a Cache File. While this wont work for streaming solutions that use the Flash Streaming system, like LaunchCAST (if thats still up), it does work for a majority of other sites. How do you retrieve this treasure-trove of goodness? Well at least on Linux its very very easy…almost too easy. Assuming you use Gnome and Firefox…
- First off, you’re going to want to open up your home directory, on Gnome this is under Places.
- Once you open that you’re going to need to find Mozilla’s hidden directory where they store all of their stuff, hit Ctrl+H to expose the hidden directories and go on ahead from there.
- Go into the ‘firefox’ directory, this will be different almost every time you clear out your Cache, but you’re looking for a folder that looks like ‘32rnp081.default’ and clicking on it.
- One more folder to go, click on ‘Cache’ by now your pwd should be /home/youraccount/.mozilla/firefox/.default/Cache.
Once there you’ll find a bunch of crap but at least on my system music is identified with a musical note icon, making identification a lot easier for me. Drag the file to the desktop, append .mp3, and there you go, you’ve just obtained a song for free from the internet. A word of caution however, since I used the google method to find mp3s, you’ll be hit up with a lot of false results and pornographic ads but thats all part of the game, you’ll also find that the quality of the mp3s is rather varied.
All of this being said, I cannot stress this enough, you need to support the bands you love, find some way to give your money to the band (I try to avoid giving to the record companies because they tend to take 90% of the profits anyways, whos the thief now RIAA?) be it either going to live shows our purchasing gear from the band’s website. Support the artists, not the companies that do absolutely nothing other than record songs, which can be done on a standard computer by the way.
ACEN 2009
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
Been a while since I did a update so I guess its time for another. I just recently arrived home from a weekend at a Anime convention held annually in the area named Anime Central, ACEN for short. Not much really to say other than I had a fun time and actually managed to escape with more than a dollar in cash. Heres some picture highlights from the weekend:
There are plenty more available here
Open Sourcing the Sonic Community
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
Recently an interesting topic of discussion popped up on Sonic Stuff Research Group (SSRG)’s message board over the sharing of information in the form of displaying the M68K ASM source code for Jumpdash in Sonic 1. Somehow doing so ruffled some feathers amongst some veteran Sonic hackers who began to say doing so is ruining creativity and innovation, apparently the idea of making available M68K ASM for learning purposes frightens them to no end, and in the topic they showed their belief in controlled learning, note that once again Tweaker seems to be the hot-headed one in this topic.
I’m not exactly sure how sharing code ruins gaming in general, I mean how many retail games license and re-use the same game engines over and over again; Bioshock and Sonic 06, both use the Havok Physics engine, but I guess if you’re paying money to use someone else’s code then its ok. id Software, the makers behind Doom and Quake, has released the source code for Quake and Quake II but I haven’t really seen any flat out attempts to copy Quake pixel for pixel.
You have absolutely no idea what it’s like, clearly, to create something of your own skill, ability, and creative mind just to see cheap imitations prevalent about and accepted as “good enough” by the general populous, leaving the true creative works overshadowed and left in the dust. – Tweaker
That was directed at Qjimbo, but for a moment lets just pretend Tweaker was saying that to all of us. I personally do a lot of PHP developing, my site, outside of this blog, the radio center, and the forums, were either completely coded by me or heavily modified by me because of the open source nature of the software. I have released my code to people in the past and I dont see any cheap RSN knock-offs, and even if people did use my code I really wouldn’t care because I’m proud of the code I’ve been able to write. However…
Something interesting I’ve noticed is that the only people–or at least an overwhelming majority of them–who are trying to make the argument for the copy/paste bullshit are the people who have never made a Sonic ROM hack. You may say this doesn’t matter, but I disagree–there seems to be a drastic difference in perspective from people who actually understand what it’s like to be in the active, creationist side of the hacking scene in comparison to the one that just plays and observes the works people come out with. It’s as if people don’t comprehend the effort, ability, and skill involved in the practice, and blindly preach that everyone should have everything as if it doesn’t matter. Would you really like it if every professional video game that came out these days all had the same exact features built from the same exact code snippets? I hardly think that would be fun or appealing. – Tweaker
First off, as I said before, Sonic 06 and Bioshock are using the same Physics engine, both games make use of the engines in their game play, IE: Bioshock’s Telekinesis Plasmid and Sonic 06’s use of Silver’s Telekinesis abilities to solve puzzles, create/clear paths, or fight enemies. While the code may have been modified just a smidge its the same damn set of features Tweaker is complaining about, but somehow 2K Games and Sonic Team are allowed to get away with it. Secondly, while I don’t endorse copy and pasting code Tweaker’s argument is in no way a vaild excuse to say that code should not be shared publicly with others. I understand that theres a lot of time and effort put into some of these hacks as well as a lot of creative talent, but again how is this a valid reason to keep others from sharing? “I think because I make music no one else should be allowed to discuss or share their musical pieces or techniques because of the time and energy I put into creating my musical piece.” thats exactly what Tweaker’s argument is sounding like.
I don’t think every project done with a Sonic game needs to be open source, what I disagree with is this idiotic notion that just sharing a bit of code ruins hacking for everyone else in general. I see this as an attempt to keep the playing field uneven and to keep certain projects higher above others. It’s no secrete the project Tweaker is involved in, Megamix, is a highly popular hack both inside and outside of the Sonic Community, and I sort of begin to see why Tweaker is so up in arms over people learning ASM or hacking in general, what if someone makes a hack that is better than Megamix? And as forum member Emily Sapphire put it…
Another thing, isn’t it basically copy/paste bullshit to be using Sonic source code at all? Seeing as Sonic Team made it, I guess no one cares about Sonic Team though. The way I see it, the whole “community” is based around copy/paste bullshit since it’s all about using someone else’s code for your ROM hack. – Emily Sapphire
Sharing is helping spread knowledge, don’t try to stop it just so you can keep it all to yourself.
Sega Genesis Tribute Album
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
Not really sure how long this has been out, and since I dont keep in the loop with the sonic community anymore I only just found out about this. Its a interesting compliation of music by fans of Genesis video games and worth a listen if you feel like you need to waste some time. Heres a short description from the website
This is a tribute to the runner up of the 16-Bit console war, the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive). This is a collection of 39 tracks, new and old, for a console constantly considered full of suck. Does this album prove otherwise!? I like to think so.
They have the album available for download on their site but I have also opted to mirror the zip file on my server, you can download it by clicking the cover art below.
LOSER: A Sega Genesis Tribute
A Big FU to Windows Advocates
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant, Techie
So yeah, I love how I constantly hear how Windows is superior to Linux because “it just works”. Well you know what, the past 5 hours or so I’ve found that to be a complete bold-faced lie. My sister got a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7422 laptop from BestBuy a while back and has spent that time dealing with Windows Vista Home Premium edition. First off, let me state how horrible the cooling is on this laptop, I installed speedfan because it felt like the laptop could cook an egg and I was proven right, Windows Vista just idling was making the laptop a toasty 81C, holy crap. My sister had asked repeatedly in the past if I could just remove Vista and install XP on it, and until recently I had refused because Windows as it is is a pain in the ass to install.
Eventually I cave in and tell her I’ll remove Vista from it, however she had also asked about installing Ubuntu, out of curiosity. I decided I’d go ahead and install Ubuntu because she doesn’t do PC gaming anyways and I figure if she doesn’t like it I can just install XP. Her laptop is running a AMD Turion64 X2 processor so my natural move is to grab the amd64 copy of Ubuntu 8.10. I had had problems in the past with the 64bit version of Ubuntu, mainly getting certian programs to run, but I was very surprised when I installed it, unlike the previous attempt on my Dell laptop this installed fairly quickly and with no problems. The next step most Linux users are familiar with is determining what works and what doesn’t and then finding the appropriate drivers for those devices; however, everything worked out of the box, including the ATI graphics, the only issue was finding the 64bit version of applications I use and know she’d be using. All in all I had her laptop setup and ready to go in about 1 1/2 hours, not too shabby considering installing the standard 32bit version of Windows XP usually takes about 3 hours if you dont have the drivers or SP3 already downloaded.
Initially my sister tells me, when I give her the laptop back, that she was joking about installing Ubuntu, however I told her twice that I was going to install Ubuntu and heard no objections, but she decided to give Ubuntu a try, then she asks me if I can dual-boot her laptop like I have done with my desktop and laptop many many times before, its very simple for me to do now. However, again since its a 64bit cpu I figure I’ll install Windows XP 64bit Edition. Things begin to degrade quickly when I start up the installer, the old dos-looking installer bit, not the graphical setup part. About 70% into installing the laptop suddenly shuts off, I figure its a battery or loose conection, so I fix them and try it again, 21% this time before the laptop shuts off. Its about then I notice that the cooling-fan part of the laptop is barely touchable its so hot, the laptop had been shutting off due to overheating. This is the first time I’ve ever had to deal with a piece of hardware that overheats from just installing a OS, and this didn’t happen to me when I was installing Ubuntu.
The problem was eventually solved when I took the laptop out into the garage, a cool 23F, and let it to install in there which surprisingly worked. Next step, install drivers, easier said then done and this is the point where I gave up. Google searching for 64bit drivers over a span of 3 hours turned up only one driver that actually worked, the ATI video driver, everything else hasn’t worked or for some reason is hosted on a shitty filehosting site called rapidshare, aka rapidshit. At this point I’ve decided I’m going to try Windows XP 32bit but not until tomorrow, I don’t wish to spend my whole evening working with the black hole that is Windows.
The Drama Continues…
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
This is rather dickish and pathetic, but for some reason I was skype chatting with other people who invited SeanieB into the chat. Seanie’s sole line of text in the entire chat was the following:
Sean Brackeen fuck you, voice
SeanieB, if you have a problem with what I’ve posted and what I’ve done then come out with it. Don’t pussyfoot around taking cheap shots at me like that just because I won’t side with you over what happened to your Sonic music archive site.
