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.
Another Fun Night In the Sonic Community
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
Here I am, late Sunday night, up to tell you about the excitement that transpired today in the Sonic Community. Ofcourse by mentioning Sonic Community I assume that you’ll immedately imagine a bunch of nerds obsessing over a blue hedgehog thats just a video game character, and for the most part you’d be right. However, the Sonic Community is full of way more than that, oh no no no, the Sonic Community is made up of primarily drama. So why do I tell you this? Well today happened to be the most drama filled day that I have ever seen to date in the Sonic Community, and it happens to revolve around a site that prides itself on being one of the biggest sites in the community, Sonic Retro.
Sonic Retro is not new to any of this drama, having faced it’s fair share since its inception in 2004. Of course there was the big fireworks show over the site ’s message board name being changed from Sonic 2 Beta Message Board, to commemorate the merger of the Sonic 2 Beta Message Board and the Sonic Classic Message Board. And then there was the Glowing Bridge incident, when a few dissatisfied members of the Sonic Retro community decided to fork off and form their own message board. The end result was the shutting down of Glowing Bridge after months of trolling and drama-whoring, as it became to be known as, by Sonic Retro members who felt that Glowing Bridge was not to be taken seriously and that any split off should not happen.
The latest round of mjaor drama happens to revolve around a statement made by the most active member in the Sonic Retro staff, Tweaker. Now, Tweaker is quite an interesting character; first off, hes highly tempormental and will not hesitate to banish anyone who he sees as a potential threat to Sonic Retro. He prides himself on his work on the Sonic Megamix hack series, one of the most popular in the Sonic Community. Hes pretty good with words, so he is quite easily able to talk his way into things or twist events to better his own purposes. His temper on IRC is legendary, enough so that a new Meme was coined to reflect this temper and is known as a Tweaker Tantrum, his tantrums reached a peak when he did a /akill on an entire IRC channel because he didn’t want to deal with the topic at hand. Tweaker pretty much is the head administrator at Sonic Retro. The other playing members as Administrators are Hivebrain and ScarredSun, who was the former administrator of Sonic classic. Both are pretty much only active if something serious enough arises. There was another, LocalH, who was given the Sonic 2 Beta page by Simon Wai, google his name, but LocalH was let go by the other staff due to his inactiveness.
So, now that you’ve been introduced to the head staff at Retro, let us begin. Back when the Glowing Bridge fiasco occured Sonic Retro was hosted on a server run by another major player in the Sonic Community, who would also go on to lead the forming of the Glowing Bridge, Qjimbo. Before Qjimbo had split off with Glowing Bridge, in what is known as the March 25th coupe, he had apparently snagged a SVN snapshot of the source code to the Megamix project, as Megamix does their hacking by manipulating the actual M68K ASM. For the longest time Qjimbo had kept this code to himself, but he eventually ended up sharing the code with another community member named MadEchidna and MadEchidna then had proceeded to give the source code to other people in the community, essentially leaking the code. Things continue downhill from here when MadEchidna eventually shares this bit of information to a known internet troll named Alexis, who then pasted the logs in her IRC chatroom. For one reason or another MadEchidna got extremely angry with this move by Alexis, telling Tweaker about the leaked Megamix beta and letting it be known that it was infact Qjimbo who had initially snagged the code.
Tweaker, obviously angry at this, was quick in banning Qjimbo from Sonic Retro and all was calm until another incident in the day occured. See, Alexis has a goal for her channel, she wants to obtain a user count of 200 users and in an attempt to do so had created video advertisements to be placed on Youtube. Another set of community members are brought into the mix here, a server/hosting administrator named Sonic Kid, and a website operator using his services named SeanieB. Earlier the two had a little spat, mostly because the nature of SeanieB’s site requires the streaming of massive amounts of data, he runs a Sonic music archive site, a lot similar to the RSN Radio site I run. SeanieB was complaining to Sonic Kid because for one reason or another the streaming was happening at a very slow rate. SeanieB claimed it was a problem with Sonic Kid’s server, and Sonic Kid claimed it was a problem with SeanieB’s internet connection, it turned out to be the latter. During this time Sonic Kid had threatened to kick SeanieB off of his services, and who could blame him? For someone to do very minimalistic troubleshooting and in the end come up to say its a problem on your end when it clearly isn’t? I wasn’t there for this but I’m told SeanieB had a very asshole-ish attitude about the ordeal.
Fast forward to today, SeanieB and Sonic Kid happen to be in Alexis’s channel as these videos are revealed. SeanieB procided to relay the link for the video in Sonic Retro’s channel, where Sonic Kid also happened to be, saying that all the users of Alexis’s channel should drink some bleach, this obviously pissed Sonic Kid off for some reason, probably taking it as an attack against him as well. When confronted with this Seanie had denied he ever said such a thing, to which Sonic Kid posted logs of it, Seanie remained quiet, I’m guessing not wanting to comment anymore on the matter. Sonic Kid decided he had had enough of SeanieB’s anticts and decided to delete Seanie’s account without prior notification, in the process deleteing the core of SeanieB’s website. Words were said, mainly by Sonic Kid, announcing the deletion of Seanie’s account and site after the fact, leaving SeanieB shocked, apparently.
SeanieB continued to pour his heart and soul in Sonic Retro’s IRC channel about how he cannot believe that Sonic Kid just completely wiped out all of his work in a few minutes. I’m not sure if this is really what tipped Tweaker over into doing what he did, or if he was still fuming over what Qjimbo had done, but a snipplet of a log was released:
<Tweaker> I GIVE UP
<Tweaker> FUCKING DONE
<Tweaker> I’m sending all of you this database full of passwords
<Tweaker> we’re going to tear through accounts and fuck shit up
It’s known now that this was said in a private staff-only channel for Sonic Retro, but as the snipplet shows, Tweaker had apparently had enough and was going to send someone a list of passwords for malicious purposes. A flury of “Oh shits” was made and numerous people throughout the evening had tried to warn Retro’s members of this threat made by the head Admin. All attempts to were met with topic deletion and banning from both the IRC and the message boards. These actions helped to fuel the fears that this threat was legit, that Tweaker really was going to release all the passwords for all of the members on Sonic Retro.
Damage control kicked in pretty much when the other administrators where notified of Tweaker’s statement, however it wasn’t the kind of response you’d really expect. Those who mentioned it were told that the log came from a private chat, and that Tweaker was venting, and that they were sure Tweaker would not go through with it. Hivebrain responded saying those banned deserved to be banned for leaking private channel logs as well as Qjimbo’s leakage of the Megamix source, ScarredSun responded pretty much the same. Much bickering ensued and eventually the Retro staff started to say that Tweaker was only joking, and that he rants like this all of the time when he is pissed off. Now, I don’t know about you but I don’t like it when an admin makes a statement to the effect of his going to release my password so that others may screw around with my account, and I’m sure you all don’t either, even if it was a joke, however given the context of the log snipplet, its really quite hard to see the joking nature of his statement.
Many others have tried to find excuses for Tweaker’s behavior, and most of them stem around the excuse that Tweaker, as an admin of one of the largest sonic communites out there, is constantly under a lot of stress, and that from time to time he snaps. However, how many of you have snapped due to high stress and weren’t given a free pass because of what you do? I mean, when I get so pissed off I’m about to do something insanely stupid like what Tweaker did I step away from the computer and listen to my MP3 player for a bit, very calming. Now, why am I telling all of this, because I am one of those that tried to warn members and was immediately banned from Sonic Retro. I had made a topic in their Site Affairs forum, simply posted the log snipplets, theres another which I will tag at the end, and asking a simple question: what the fuck is going on? Tweaker could have answered the question to reassure everyone that he was not going to release anyones information, but he opted to delete the topic outright, going past the normal proceedure of trashing the topic, however trashing a topic still leaves it visible.
The last I check, about an hour ago, I am still banned from Sonic Retro, and I can safely assume that Tweaker is still the administrator of the boards. I think the fact that the rest of the staff worked so dilligently to protect Tweaker, and his actions, is worrying to say the least. Most admins at a multi-admined site who did what Tweaker has done would have had their admin powers revoked, or in some cases even banned from the site itself, but Tweaker remains where he was at the beginning of the day. Do you think this is fair? I don’t, and I’m not alone in this, but everyone else seems too complacent to really say anything else about it. So thats what a typical fun night in the Sonic Community looks like. If you didn’t like what you read, I suggest you follow the wise advice from the Sonic Retro staff and not join to begin with, and quite honestly I think you’d be better off avoiding the Sonic Community as a whole. We tend to be quite a bitter lot who have nothing else to do but piss and moan about anything and everybody, this blog post for example. I’m trying to run my site without the politics and drama that 99% of the rest of the Sonic Communities have, but lets face it, in the Sonic Community drama comes knocking at your door weither you want it to or not.
SNIPPLETS:
<Tweaker> I GIVE UP
<Tweaker> FUCKING DONE
<Tweaker> I’m sending all of you this database full of passwords
<Tweaker> we’re going to tear through accounts and fuck shit up
<Tweaker> by the way Upth
<Tweaker> tell MK he’s a backstabbing piece of shit
<Upth> relayed
<Upth> though to be fair
<Upth> I really don’t condone the giving out of passwords… with the sole exception of fucking qjimbo because goddamn he’d do it to you
<jman2050> I haven’t seen Tweaker like this in a while
<jman2050> And I couldn’t fathom a guess as to how Stealth would respond even if I tired
<Tweaker> You know what, I don’t even give a fuck
<Tweaker> he SHOULD NOT BE GIVING OUT STAFF LOGS
<Tweaker> I’m SICK OF THIS
<Tweaker> I’m abotu to shut down Retro
<Tweaker> and replace it with a pager full of everyone’s personal info
<Tweaker> let them fuck each othert up
Sonic Retro - Keeping it classy since 2004!
EDIT: I felt this picture appropriately sums up everything that happened lastnight.
WKOW/College Girl vs. Internet
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
Many of you have probably read on digg, reedit, slashdot, ect. of the girl in Wisconsin who dropped her online classes because she ordered a Laptop with Ubuntu installed on it. What followed is probably a big wall of bashing from the Internet that rivaled the ignorance of Mac users on the Internet. However having read the article, and the subsequent update to the original article I believe the reporter who wrote the story is incompetent at best. First off, just the way the story was written was horrible and I cringed with every word I read. It made it out that because the girl in question was unwilling to try to solve the problem practically it was obviously Dell and Ubuntu’s fault for her failures in higher learning. As other people online have noted, Dell has made it very difficult to mess up ordering this badly, you honestly have to google on how to order a Dell laptop with Ubuntu. I honestly believe the girl deserves what she gets for failing to visually verify her order before submitting it, and given that she was in a Technical College, that implies she has some knowledge in computers.
Then we’ve got this blog entry by Ron Giordan of WKOW-TV (Madison, Wisconsin) that just further derails the station’s integrity. Let me start off by saying that Ron claims to have been in the journalism business for more than two decades, but by reading his blog entry I cannot in good conscious believe this person is more than 25 years old. It was a flaming post on the same level as the people he claimed to be sending him hate mail. No professional would ever post this kind of mediocre crap on their blog:
I want each of you to remember why you got picked on in grade school and high school and feel the need to act this way as adults…if you even are adults. PS: let the flame war on me begin…frankly, the more traffic I get to my blog, the cooler I am!
Even if you’re trying to be hip or keeping up with our current generation’s forming of sentences you don’t put that out there. Remember now, I’m a 21 year old college student and my blog post alone is proving to be more mature than lines of words put out on the blog post in question. Heres another lovely quote from Ron’s mind, rembmer people, he claims to be a professional:
But…I have to tell you, this last e-mail, by far, is the best angry viewer e-mail I have ever read in my nearly 2 decades working in a newsroom. This person was so upset by this story he spent a lot of time looking up words in his thesaurus and, in the end, his letter touched on nothing substantive. I am letting you read the entire letter because I have laughed at it so much; I want all of you to laugh as well!
This is how he describes how a person he only names as Jeremy wrote his letter to Ron, which is surprisingly well written for hate mail. I’m honestly shocked and surprised news organizations allow people like Ron to work and speak for them, and its setting a bad precident. You would expect this kind of posting on a Internet message board. A journalist who cannot accept criticisim and in reponse fires back in a troll-ish way is not a good journalist, and should not be allowed to work in the industry. I agree that some of the comments may go too far, and harassing people on their facebook pages, albeit facebook is horrible to begin with, is not the way to about doing things, but that does not justify this kind of rambling from Ron Giordan, or any other journalist for that matter.
I end my rant now with a screenshot of my Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop, running Ubuntu, with Microsoft Word ‘07 and the Internet working.
Microsoft Word and the Internet working in Ubuntu
Interesting Linux Tool For Compiz Users
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
It’s no secret that some apps and Compiz just can’t play nicely together, on my laptop the results of running Google Earth with Compiz running at the same time results in a earth that flickers every other second, making the program unusable. When running games its advised you shut off Compiz until you are done gaming, probably for the same reason. In short, Compiz + 3D App = Hell. Ubuntu gives its users a somewhat simple way of disabling the composite desktop manager by means of a tab in the Appearance window, but for me that seemed to be one two clicks too many so I sought out an alternative.
What I ended up stumbling upon in Google was a small application created by a person by the name of Forlong on his blog, the application itself is called Compiz-Switch which is a simple little program that switches out Compiz for your desktop environment’s default desktop manager, for example on GNOME it switches between Compiz and Metacity, and vice versa. After the first install it can be run from the Applications menu, but when you add it to your top panel it becomes a quick way to switch between the two, allowing you to get those 3D apps working properly more quickly. As I said, its an interesting tool worth looking into.
