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.
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.
