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.
Windows 7
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
Lately I came across a copy of a beta build of Windows 7, and seeing as I’ve missed out in the past I decided to give this beta a try. I have to say I am quite surprised that Microsoft seems to have actually realized the issues with Vista and made a actual effort to fix them. First off network performance has definantly improved, to give you an idea, viewing a video over WLAN resulted in a constantly buffering video on Vista, about 10 mins of playing actually got you 8 mins of video, this of course being done in VLC while leaving buffering at its default 300ms. Compare this to Windows 7 where the same setup I was able to get about 10 mins of video before buffering problems occured, kudos to Microsoft for fixing their network stack.
Overall system performance was also faster than Vista, quickly noting that my desktops specs are a Core 2 Duo cpu overclocked from 2.66Ghz to 2.81Ghz, 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, and a nVidia GeForce 8500GT 512MB video card. Programs opened faster on 7 than they did with my previous encounters with Vista. The only problems I really have with Windows 7 so far is the default taskbar is way too big for my tastes, however you can set it back to the original size; the ISO I got was 2.4GB which, considering how much there is in terms of graphics and programs, still is too bloated for me considering Ubuntu packs more visual gimicks and apps yet fits onto a 700MB CD-R. By the way, resource usage was down in 7 compared to Vista.
Now, this next one I’m not so angry I about, I just found amusing, for those who haven’t used Vista, Microsoft included a new feature for gamers called Game Explorer which is just a place that shows you installed games and some info about them like game ratings. Now, I decided to test Unreal Tournament 3 on Windows 7 and while the game performed well Game Explorer decided to pass off UT3 as a Early Childhood game. It may or may not be a problem in Windows, but when it gives you a list of content including “Blood and Gore” and “Partial Nudity”, early childhood? Screenshot included.
An Update
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
Been a while since my last post so I figured I’d post a little update. First off happy new years to all, hopefully 2009 won’t be as bad as 2008. Secondly, RSN2.0 was moved out of dev status and over into production status. I made a few changes to the overall RSN site, moving domained sites into just subdir’ed sites. I’ve restarted the RSN Forums as well, hopefully everything will be better this time as well, but I won’t hold my breath on that one. Finally, I’ve finally turned 21, ho-boy this is going to be interesting indeed. I’ll hopefully try to be more frequent in future postings but as with the message board, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.
Networking At DeVry
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
For those who don’t know I am currently going to DeVry University for a Bachelors in Network and Communications Management, known within the college as the netcomm program. So recently me and friend decided to go into the college’s network lab, again shorthanded to netlab, to mess around with their switches and routers for a bit. Here are the results, click on images for bigger pics:
When we started…
What we ended with…
Essentially we configured a network that would give certian computers certian IP addresses via DHCP and then map them into the college’s network using NAT while using ACLs and VLANs.
Below are the configurations:
ROUTER
! version 12.2 service timestamps debug uptime service timestamps log uptime no service password-encryption ! hostname bloom ! ! ip subnet-zero ! ! ip dhcp excluded-address 192.168.5.1 192.168.5.10 ip dhcp excluded-address 192.168.10.1 192.168.10.10 ! ip dhcp pool FIVEDOTS network 192.168.5.0 255.255.255.0 dns-server 10.8.239.21 default-router 192.168.5.1 ! ip dhcp pool TENDOTS network 192.168.10.0 255.255.255.0 dns-server 10.8.239.21 default-router 192.168.10.1 ! call rsvp-sync ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! interface Ethernet0/0 ip address dhcp ip nat outside ip dhcp relay information trusted half-duplex ! interface Serial0/0 no ip address shutdown ! interface Serial0/1 no ip address shutdown ! interface FastEthernet1/0 ip address 192.168.5.1 255.255.255.0 ip nat inside duplex auto speed auto ! interface FastEthernet1/1 ip address 192.168.10.1 255.255.255.0 ip nat inside duplex auto speed auto ! ip nat inside source list 1 interface Ethernet0/0 overload ip classless no ip http server ! access-list 1 permit 192.168.10.0 0.0.0.255 access-list 1 permit 192.168.5.0 0.0.0.255 access-list 101 deny icmp any any ! ! dial-peer cor custom ! ! ! ! line con 0 line aux 0 line vty 0 4 ! end
SWITCH
! version 12.1 no service pad service timestamps debug uptime service timestamps log uptime no service password-encryption ! hostname Switch ! ! ip subnet-zero ! ip ssh time-out 120 ip ssh authentication-retries 3 ! spanning-tree mode pvst no spanning-tree optimize bpdu transmission spanning-tree extend system-id ! ! ! ! interface FastEthernet0/1 switchport access vlan 10 switchport mode access ! interface FastEthernet0/2 switchport access vlan 10 switchport mode access ! interface FastEthernet0/3 switchport access vlan 20 switchport mode access ! interface FastEthernet0/4 switchport access vlan 20 switchport mode access ! interface FastEthernet0/5 ! interface FastEthernet0/6 ! interface FastEthernet0/7 ! interface FastEthernet0/8 ! interface FastEthernet0/9 ! interface FastEthernet0/10 ! interface FastEthernet0/11 ! interface FastEthernet0/12 ! interface Vlan1 no ip address no ip route-cache shutdown ! interface Vlan20 ip address 192.168.10.20 255.255.255.0 no ip route-cache ! ip http server ! line con 0 line vty 5 15 ! ! end
Christmas Advertising Already?!
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
What the hell man, its not even Thanksgiving yet and I find the local mall is set for Christmas, as are the TV stations pumping out store commericals advertising Christmas sales. For crying out loud I like the holiday as much as everyone else, but do we really need to start this stuff so early? I swear its going to get to a point where Christmas advertising is going to begin after the 4th of July.
Pastebin On RSN
Posted by voice | Filed under Site, Techie
Thats right, I have setup a pastebin on this server. For those who do not know, Pastebin is a PHP webapp created by Paul Dixon that allows you to post your code on the website and the website will display the code in a highlighted format depending on which language you select. The pastebin is available here. Here is the list of currently supported languages:
- Bash Script
- C
- C++
- C#
- ASM(NASM)
- M68K ASM
- Z80 ASM
- HTML
- PHP
- Perl
- Python
- CSS
- TCL
- SQL
- MySQL
- Java
- Javascript
- Objective C
- XML
So, if you wish to use the pastebin then by all means go ahead, however if it is abused I will have to restrict access to it.
Obama Won
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
Just felt like saying it. What a wonderful start to the month! By the way, if you didn’t see last night’s Comedy Central’s Indecision ’08: America’s Choice coverage of the election, try to find a video of it online, it was epic!
A Slow October
Posted by voice | Filed under RSN2.O
Yeah, its been a rather slow month but I do have some news. I am still actively working on RSN2.0 as well as some other PHP related projects. Eventually I’m going to need some people to help test RSN2.0 so keep checking here as I’ll first ask on the blog before going to message boards.
It’s Log!
Posted by voice | Filed under Humor
This’ll take some of you back down memory lane:
