This is another example of a great project that uses social networking crowd-sourcing. I re-discovered this while looking through my Twitter following list. Check it out:

The project gathers @replies and mentions from Twitter, and displays an animation on a giant screen mounted on a building based on users’tweets. (When it first came out, it was mounted in London, but now, it’s looking for a place to stay.)

How it works

You send an @reply to its Twitter account, @thehellowall, using a combination of the following commands:

• circle
• square
• rectangle
• triangle
• shake
• faster
• slower
• bigger
• smaller
• And HTML colors.

A command could look like this:

@thehellowall White circles bigger

The Wall will interpret your command, and display it instantly. It’s that simple!

Quite simply put, I quite enjoy the tablet. It’s just the right size, and isn’t skimpy on computation power.

I haven’t done a fair comparison of having accelerated browsing on vs off however, but I did notice that it does not like CloudFlare’s IPv6, but then again, most things don’t.

In general, it is a nice tablet with good battery life.

My only complaints are that it doesn’t include all the Google stuff, and there’s no 24-hour clock option.

So while this is just a quick review, feel free to ask questions in the comments, and I will answer.

(This is so short because I did it on my Kindle Fire.)

Thus, we wish you a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Happy Kwanzaa, or whatever it is that you celebrate.

Again, happy holidays everyone!

What prides me about this country is that as a country, we did not strike back with the same violence that struck us. We instead did something good for the countries that were home to the terrorists. We sewed the seeds of democracy, in hopes that their lives would improve. Many people would have simply dropped bombs on the Middle East, but we took this approach of inducing peace.

This year as well, we found and killed Osama bin Landen, founder of the extremist group, Al Qaeda. While many people applauded his death, with many shouting “USA!! USA!!” in D.C. after news arrived of Osama’s death.

I’m glad I live in such a proud country, and I’d like to pay my respects to the soldiers that worked to defend our freedoms, those who just were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and killed by the plane crashes, as well as the families who lost loved ones 10 years ago.

We will never forget.

Animated flag image by 3DFlags.com

Comcast began blocking port 25 TCP, and that was very greedy of them. They want my family to, during this economic downturn, pay more for that, and that just ain’t happening.  However, those nice people at Google gave me a good deal, and now I am using Google Apps for mail at no charge. Aren’t they nice?

On brighter news, the OKS Minecraft server has become a beautiful place. It isn’t exactly stock, but people like it. The latest and coolest addition is the Dynamic Map. The Dynamic Map lets you see what is on the server right now. As the world updates, the Dynamic Map does as well. Hence the name, Dynamic. Right now, an Amazon EC2 instance is hard at work preparing a new static map render, and when it completes, the link will be shown here on this page.

UPDATE: The render that was taking place is long since done, and it is available at http://ec2.theoks.tk/mczoomable_new/.

Thanks, and have fun!

That aside, I have been looking at CloudFlare, and I’ve implemented it in some areas. WordPress is locked to a domain, so this blog isn’t behind CloudFlare. Most sections of theoks.net can be viewed behind CloudFlare by replacing theoks.net with theoks.tk.

What CloudFlare does for you is that it caches static resources like CSS, Javascript, and images, closer to you, resulting in faster load of images and styles. Especially on the image board, and the zoomable Minecraft map render this can be advantageous.

I have also added Google’s +1 button to post pages, as well as the home page, and moved the Tweet button with it to below the post content.

In related news I got into Google+, which is pretty exciting. You may ask me for an invite, but I cannot guarantee that you will be allowed to join.

In case you didn’t know, I went to St. Louis for the FIRST world championships. It was great. Unfortunately I left before everything finished because my flight left before everything ended.

It seems to have sped some loading time up, but I don’t know. If you think it did, by all means, comment.

Thanks to those behind W3 Total Cache, and Cyrus Patten, author of the post on Mashable.

Last night, I upgraded my Debian VM to Squeeze, and set up Google Authenticator on it. The Makefile is kinda terrible, but it works as of now. I just scanned the barcode that loaded the secret key into the authenticator app on my phone, and now I can authenticate with time-based one-time passwords. I got it to compile on Mac OS X (some things are hacked up), but I don’t think it exactly works. I’ll have to dig in further to figure it out though.

Google Authenticator works rather well, although one thing I want is a timeout indicator so I know when my password is going to expire, so I don’t get half-way through typing it and it times out.

That is all.

So, when I turned off my Xbox 360, then turned it back off, it said that I had none of the Orange Box achievements I had collected. Such BS.

However, I had fun playing Half-Life 2 again, as well as Portal. I started Half-Life 2: Episode One, and got out of the Citadel, but stopped to play some Halo: Reach with my friend Brant, and later, Lane joined us, while we were attempting to complete a weekly challenge.

So this weekend was turbo fun, and now people can be less mad about me not writing a blog post. Great job.

So have fun, and stay alive until Mid-Winter Break..

The “Build Season,” when we construct the actual robot, has started. Four teams have been assigned components to complete, with one team integrating the components together, as well as building the basic chassis. Many teams are already jumping onto completing their tasks, and are making good progress to completing our robot.

Something this will accomplish that is very critical is being able to build two robots, and have LOTS of driver practice. Driver practice is critical for success, and the last year, we got next to ZERO driver practice in.

Of course, I can’t reveal details, as it’s top secret, and if other teams were to get in on it, I’d be in real bad trouble, but I can tell you that this reorganization of the club will certainly make our robot a serious contender in the competition.

This isn’t going to be the last time I post about our club, but it’s the first this year.

And here’s what I hope for this blog this new year:

• REAL HTTPS that doesn’t cause the “OH NOEZ YOU’RE ABOUT TO ENTER DANGEROUS TERRITORY” message
• A new layout perhaps?
• More posts this year
• More people on our Minecraft server
• More views on this blog
• Monthly polls

Sound realistic? We’ll see.

This season, has been a great one, and since this is an awesome show, after the finale, the premiere is right there!!

Stay tuned for the final 23 episodes. However there’s not really a way to not be tuned…

Peace be in the galaxy.

My school district has cancelled school for today, and many students believe that we will not have school tomorrow either, as many of the roads are covered in thick ice, and since the temperatures are remaining low, standing water from melted ice is just gonna freeze back up.

On a slightly related note, I have finished watching all of Stargate SG-1. This puts me at having watched over 81% of all Stargate (if movies are counted as two episodes)

I will be completely caught up by the time Stargate Universe Season 2.5 comes around, so then I will just wait like everyone else for new episodes.

ESXi installed quick and set up easily. Set the password and configure the IP and I could let it be, physical access wise.

From there, I simply installed the management software, VMware vSphere Client. Then, I deployed a Virtual Appliance for fun. After downloading, right from the management software, the appliance was ready for me to play with within minutes.

From there, I sent an ISO to the server and installed a Debian 5 virtual machine. I also used the physical server’s DVD drive to install OpenSUSE 11.

You can also take VMware Workstation virtual machines to your server effortlessly.

Right now, I’m setting up the Mobile Access appliance, but the server is on a 10mbit switch and a weak wireless connection, so it takes time to send the disk.

Overall, I give a recommendation for ESXi if you have a brand new server and want to virtualize. It’s free from VMware’s website: vmware.com

Anyways, the iPhone 4 immediately caught my attention. At first glance I did not believe my eyes. It was something! And something quite a world apart from the previous iPhone model. The first things I noticed were-

• its glossy oleophobic screen (which I tested)
• the awesome new rounded rectangular body
• the complementing metal siding and buttons
• the retina display

Just to test Apple’s claims about the magic oleophobic screen, I smudged my fingerprints all over the iPhone (something I would never do on my phone) then I wiped it against my shirt. BAM. Fingerprints gone. No streak marks. That was something.

It felt so nice to hold. Maybe because it wasn’t in such a weird shape like the previous iPhone model.

Then came the controversial retina display. I put my eyes as close to the iPhone as I could without risking them falling into my eye sockets. Sure enough Apple’s claims were right… Again. I could not distinguish the individual pixels. One color merged seamlessly into the other. Lines and text were crisp and sharp. I was blown away again.

it doesn’t stop there though. The touchscreen felt renewed under the glass surface of the iPhone. the iPhone worked seamlessly, no jumps or breaks. The touch functionality was effortless. Its five megapixel camera was stunning, but of course will not replace a regular camera.

Yes, the iPhone 4 is Amazing beyond belief but there are some things I would like to point out. The multitasking involves going from one application through the home screen to get to another app, instead of simply jumping from app to app (maybe its something I missed…) The other funny thing is that you can see the individual pixels quite clearly in apps not built for the retina display. Also, I don’t know if this is just me, but does the iPhone lose its wifi signal when you hold it in a certain fashion?

I didn’t try calling anyone so I can’t day anything about its antenna issues.

On the plus side the iPhone 4 supports tethering (F*CK YEA.) and customizable backgrounds.

would I get it?

if I wasn’t going to call anybody, antenna issues aside… YES! It is absolutely amazing. Great for business. Great for the casual. Great gift. I don’t know about communication via phone, but it seems like even phone calls are getting old fashioned.

For $300, this is major bang for your buck. but make sure you try before you buy.

P.s. I did not try the FaceTime feature and I can’t figure out how to download apps from the app store.

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

I went to the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado today, right after it rained, so the sand wouldn’t be thrown into the air.

I also wrote “theoks.net” in the sand.

A picture is included.

Tonight, I’m staying at the Columbine Inn in my own loft, but it’s hotter than hell, and there’s no AC.

After, we looked at the Ranch on Antelope Island, which was started in the 1800s, and continued to operate until 1981, and is Utah’s longest operating ranch.

Then, we proceeded to visit downtown Salt Lake City, where we visited the Church of Latter Day Saints. Its tallest spire stands 210 ft, with a golden statue of an angel atop it, and walls at the bottom of the church stand 9ft thick.

Tomorrow’s adventure is to go to the Great Sand Dunes.

The PT Cruiser was rather popular at its launch, however has steadily declined. The PT Cruiser is hated for a great many problems, such as its gas mileage.

The PT Loser is classified as a “subcompact” car, however, gets worse gas mileage than a full size car. One of the reasons you would ever buy a subcompact car is to get better gas mileage. Seriously, Chrysler should not have let the PT Loser be so inefficient for its size.

Another important point is that the PT Loser is an unsafe vehicle, especially the convertible. In the convertible, there is a single bar across the vehicle (above the passengers), that if removed, the car would not be able to hold itself together. Talk about poor design.

So let us rejoice that this horrible vehicle is no longer being spewed out to terrorize the world.

Every year our neighbors celebrate with a gigantic party of 50 adults and a swarm of children. They run more than a fireworks party. It’s a huge social hour complete with beer, toy trucks for the kids, and even an outdoor movie screen. After walking around our entire neighborhood this night, I’m pretty sure we have the largest July4 party for miles around.

Good news this year is that there were no spontaneous fires (read last year’s post and my blog post for details.)

Bad news this year is that it’s RAINY which kind of spoils the fun. NOT. The rain ain’t gonna stop our neighborhood from partying till midnight. In fact, I think the crowds are bigger this year.

I always remember the Fourth of July. It’s one of those highlights of the year that you can’t miss.

Our good friend, Matt Ventura, is planning to again set off his questionably legal fireworks, starting at 19:30 PDT. He plans to get some videos, which I’ll gladly repost.

Also, despite Chase killing Seattle’s Family 4th, people have donated enough money to save it. You’ll be able to see it tonight at 22:00 PDT, both live at Lake Union and on KING5.

My plans tonight are questionable. I have no clue what I’m doing, other than watching Matt’s aforementioned videos and likely the Family 4th on TV.

This year, we brought all three of our remaining robots, Catalyst, Bearenstein, and Odyssey.

Unfortunately, during the parade, due to the fact that Odyssey uses four CIMs to drive itself, we did not complete the parade route with a running robot, as we used our two batteries we had along with us.

However, after the parade, we did see many people visit our booth, and we were able to demonstrate the robot there. We allowed anyone who wished to drive Odyssey. They were allowed to drive around our booth, as well as over the “bump” that I’ve described.

Also, this year introduces a new parade meme. During our club’s first year, there was rain at the Maple Valley Days parade, so we were unable to run that year’s robot, Epic. Instead, one member, I believe Andrew Kerr, dressed up in a cardboard robot suit. By the end of the parade, the suit was falling apart and an 8 year old kid shouted “That’s not a robot!” This year, another kid was heard saying “Why are they carrying a triangle?” in reference to the bump, which is definitely NOT a triangle. It is a trapezoidal prism.

Unfortunately, half way through Sunday, our left side bogey wheels were unable to articulate, and they have yet to be repaired.

Thanks to everyone who came out to see our booth, we’ll be back next year!

These images were provided by viewers of KIRO-TV.

This is a complete twist of the weather we had been seeing earlier this year. We’re in for a cold summer.

Software doesn’t have insight like this, and that’s why programmers must remain in the business. To help the software learn.

Look at this beautiful picture:

…and this video feed (refresh the page):

Well there we go. Nothing else to say about the sunny weather other than it’s rarity in Seattle. Have fun!

Chances if you’re reading this, you’ve played with me on the Reach MP beta. As always known, my gamertag is onekopaka, as shown on the Gamer Cards page. If you want to be a friend of me, don’t be annoying.

I’ll see you out in Matchmaking.

Today, at my school, and thousands of other schools around the nation, students participated in a Day of Silence. It is a silent protest to bring to light “anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in their schools.”However, silence is an ineffective tool against discrimination.

If you’re going to speak out about an issue, is being quiet a way of speaking out about it, or is speaking out about it a way of speaking out about it. Sure, the students are staging a protest, and that protest is silent. Why is it silent?

Think about a time when you were super angry at someone or something. Some people will go up in fire about it, while others silently slunk down in the corner avoiding contact with the known world. I find that when you are silent, not many people will support you. Conversely, when you speak out about the issue, you’ll get more supporters. It’s a matter of active versus passive.

Likewise, the Day of Silence protest is silent because people are passively protesting, not a good idea (as we saw in the above analogy) for gathering support for a cause. Silent protests are usually not heard either. Here’s some food for thought: you’re in a grocery store and there’s two vendors who are selling equally delicious appetizers. One vendor doesn’t say anything, and the other says “come try this.” Who are you going to go to? Of course. The point is, in today’s world, if you’re totally silent, no one’s going to hear you, whether or not it’s a protest or your shyness.

Being quiet is not the way to protest. People don’t see you’re protesting. On the other hand, speaking out about the issue helps a lot more. All the protests I’ve heard of are outspoken mass gatherings. I have not heard of one single protest except for this one which was totally silent. These protests do nothing. Sure, being silent may help to show your compassion for a friend who has been discriminated, but speaking out shows your compassion and it helps bring about change.

The Day of Silence needs to not be silent. Everybody knows that silence doesn’t speak louder than words, unless it’s a massive day of silence instead of just two people. People who don’t speak out are viewed as cowardly and weak, and that could cause more people to discriminate others based on race or sexual orientation. The issue of discrimination needs to be spoken about, not diminished by a day of silence.

I saw this and within half an hour dug up the JavaScript that makes it happen.

I’ve posted it on my pastebin here.

So the JavaScript originally had a lot of escaped text, which I unescaped for readability.

The messages in my copy are plaintext now.

Discuss what you think things mean in the comments.

One suggestion I heard is that Tex is saying these things, similar to the I Love Bees viral campaign.

This year, at the Seattle Regional, we were the 2nd seeded team. Yes, 2nd out of 64 teams. We also had the most Coopertition ™ Points, and therefore got the Coopertition ™ Award. We also won the Industrial Design Award, sponsored by General Motors.

Unfortunately, we were knocked out in the semi-finals again by the eventual winners of the event, Team XBOT, Hotwire, and SOTA Bots, so congratulations! We also did not win the Chairman’s Award, however Skunkworks did, so congratulations to them. So we again don’t get to go to “Altana.”

In related news, Kevin Ross and Deb Mumm-Hill announced that the state government DOUBLED the FRC grant money, so that more FRC teams can be started. This lead to the announcement of a possible second regional in the Seattle area, which we hope will be timed so that our team can attend it as well as the current Seattle regional and the Portland regional.

So far, we’ve been running the mill with just spraying with WD-40 as a coolant, but once we get actual coolant running across the tool, we can cut even faster than with just WD-40.

The hard part of making a drain to recycle the coolant is mostly complete, Mr. Prelesnik, a fabrication mentor put in a drain hole, through the shower vinyl that covers the table the mill rests on.

Unfortunately, we cut a lubricating tube because our Z-limit switch didn’t function. Thankfully, that part is easily replaceable.

The mill is actually a manual -> CNC conversion done by IH CNC. Kudos to them as they gave us help over the phone, even at 21:00 their time zone.

I’ll eventually post pictures.

We are working on making improvements to our robot, that hopefully will give us a better performance on the field.

You heard me right. Beginning today at around 11:00am it began snowing. At first it was barely noticeable (except everyone at school went crazy.)

And now, it’s snowing like it’s December. In Washington, we’ve barely had any snow, but now, it’s just coming down hard. Just when you thought the weather couldn’t get any more peculiar, it does.

For me, I’m happy about this. Snow in such unusual times makes me really excited. I don’t know how long this is going to last, but hopefully, I see more days like this. And yes, I will laugh if it snows in June.

Hmmm… I wonder if the guys in Portland are having any of this…

At the beginning of the elimination tournament, our first match we touched the opposing alliance’s tower during the finale, and judges are deciding h0ow to handle that situation during the elimination, they are claiming our entire alliance got disqualified, after they had said our robot just got a red card, which meant only our robot could not complete next match.

I’m slightly confused by the situation, but I am very pleased that we made it into the elimination tournament.

Also to facilitate more ranting, one of the mentors decided he has so much knowledge and that he needs to take over the club’s website. Thing is, he ain’t smart, at all. He doesn’t know about the PulseAudio exploit and went and used Fedora 8, a vulnerable version, in a world facing environment. The opposite of a good idea.

So now I’m debating whether I should just quit the club because I can’t get those two problem people out of my way from participating the way I want to.

We got a loaner trailer for our stuff, while our own trailer is finished being made and decorated. We were packing it last night, and we must finish that today.

I’ll post from Portland.

I just need two more teachers to sign my permission form, then I am leaving on Wednesday, after school.

I’m driving down with other robotics club students, and we’ll make the drive fun.

There will be more when I get down there.

EDIT: All my teachers have signed my permission form, so I’m good to go!

The Build Season started on January 9th, with the season kickoff. On that day, FIRST announces the game robots are to play in competition that season. After the announcement of the game, our club went back to our school to think of strategies to play the game this year. We get 6 weeks to design and build the robot from scratch.

Our team has a fairly long way to go, and only 8 days to get there. I’m feeling that we’re going to finish just barely ahead of time, and we’ll do very well at competitions.

Oh well, I hope this website isn’t phishing for my personal information.

And hopefully this security dilemma is solved before anything bad happens.

Screenshot included:

2010 is hopefully going to be a far better year than 2009.

Again,

Happy New Year!

From everyone at OKS Blog and OKSnet.

At last count, there are 1187 spam comments. I just checked the comments today, and some spammer actually made it to the approved (!!!) list.

But it’s been a good year for this blog. Long live and prosper everyone.

–Deathgleaner

How are you celebrating your Winter break?

So far, we’ve done the first xplugin -> bundled plugin conversion in ScriptBot’s short history, as well as added some little features that make a big impact, such as NickServ identifying, configurable connection port, configuration for whether to join on invite, and more features are of course on the way, in order to make this one of the biggest releases for ScriptBot (aside from 2.0, the massive rewrite).

I hope to also make ScriptBot available in the Fedora repositories, starting with version 2.1, but I’ll need assistance with packaging (see my earlier post on packaging ScriptBot). If anyone is willing to help, that’d be great. Just come on over to #bots on OKSnet. The current roadblock, as mentioned in the post, is packaging a library we use, written in Java, called PircBot.

Just remember that the move is happening. Of course don’t forget to vote.

A couple things:

1. It can’t be run on commodity hardware, it has to be on a Mac.
2. It can’t be virtualized.
3. It doesn’t have server virtualization solutions designed to run on it.

To further that, Apple seems to take NO interest in virtualization. I haven’t seen one peep out of them about it. They simply sell desktop-class virtualization products in their store.

So if Apple wants to MAN UP and write some virtualization stuff, then they can be taken seriously.

I mean really. Virtualization is taking the world by storm, and Apple, the company that is supposed to be all hip and such is not participating. Every single product on the current Macintosh line supports hardware virtualization. Apple does nothing with that fact.

It’s sad. Just sad.

It also messed with all sorts of files. Including the yum configuration file.

Now I’m trying to sort out at least Apache.

In short, don’t EVER try to use cPanel. EVER.

You can read the new features in Fedora 12 on this wiki page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList

Class curves are intended to raise students’ grades above the fail line. Many students see this as a way of slacking off. We’re not talking about just one student slacking off, we’re talking about hundreds of students failing the class and hoping for a bailout from students. Class curves inspire students to slack off, not do better in school. Here’s why:

The moment that students hear that the class has a curve, many of them are inspired to slack off. They know that, even if they do bad, their grades will automatically improve by a few percent and not look as bad. Everyone starts failing, and then the teacher doesn’t want students to fail, so a curve is introduced to bump up everyone’s grades.

I like to compare this with lowering the standard. Allowing students with a D average to pass. Admitting students with a 2.0 GPA to get in college. We’re lowering the standard by arbitrarily raising everyone’s grades. Get rid of this!

It takes less time to load, it looks much cleaner, there’s less CSS, that floating bar is gone, and the look is more coherent.

Trust me, I’m picky with themes, but this one is pretty damn good.

First it was a test, and now our entire class is in the library.

At the beginning I thought this was going to be fun. But no… The only time we stepped out of the library was to get lunch.

Anyways, I’m about to fall asleep and I can’t wait to get out.

Akismet has netted about 150 spam comments. It’s scary that spam comments out-rival normal ones.

Thanks again,
Deathgleaner

Thank you Akismet.

The CDC says that the number of flu cases at this time of year matches the number of flu cases that we usually have near the peak time of year.

Even though people are taking dire precautions such as washing your hands and staying home, the flu continues to spread, probably because one student gets sick while at school, even though they don’t know it. Their latent germs get over the staircase railings, and once these germs become active, anyone who has touched that railing is infected. The spread is exponential, and young people are at more of a risk because they have not been exposed to such strains before.

My advise: wash your hands as frequently as possible. I’m not even joking. And carry around a few plastic bags in case you have to touch anything that’s swine flu infested.

Here’s some very quick wrapping up:

• Icecast streaming is now working pretty decently, however the current test server is in… Germany. (http://publictest16.fedoraproject.org:8000/test.ogg)
• Improvements on documentation, generally on the web site.
• Troubleshooting tests are underway.
• More “ghetto HTML” and such funnies.
• People thinking my bag o’chips is popcorn.

Things will continue tomorrow at I don’t know what time. I didn’t hear that part.

The conference has taken place on talk.fedoraproject.org, extension 2001.

So my first packaging adventure is packaging the IRC bot library that ScriptBot uses.

One word: pain.

There’s a few nuances with PircBot. It comes as a jar with source inside it as well as the compiled classes. I extracted the source, made it usable for RPM to build. I scrapped the binaries, and put it into a traditional tarball. So apparently that doesn’t work.

Next, I found RPM wasn’t making a buildroot correctly. So I had to make a hack around that.

Then, it came to the install path. There’s a page on the Fedora Project Wiki apparently. But I didn’t know that! It’s not linked from the frequently visited Packaging pages.

After getting it to build, it went through a scratch build on Koji, then I filed for review on Bugzilla.

That’s when I found the page for Fedora’s Java packaging guidelines. I apparently did need documentation (although all I can put is a link, the documentation isn’t really pullable from the website). So I ended marking the bug for my request as CLOSED DEFERRED.

Expect a part two post when I actually get Pircbot into the repos.  Also likely is a part three when ScriptBot itself gets in.

See the ScriptBot project page at scriptbot.theoks.net.

Yea, we’ve been lazy these weeks but hope to be back!

I have spam problems too. SpamAssassin is the most well known open source mail-based anti-spam solution. The developers behind SpamAssassin need your help. They need you to submit “ham” and “spam” mail in order to teach SpamAssassin to recognize new spammer techniques.

Check the project out at this wiki page.

Enjoy.

I hate them. You probably do too.

They post random, meaningless crap like “I has ur solutoin to ur prolem. Get Iflackeg today! http://bit.ly/something”

What they want you to get is spyware. Nothing good for you.

I just wanted to rerant about this. I last posted about this here.

The source of the delay in state was a teacher strike, which our own G. Liu discussed in a post right here.

The pure source of the teacher strike, the absolute root of the issues G. Liu stated as the source of the strike is money. The Kent School District’s lack of it. Kent lacks money to pay for building refurbishments that add classrooms, to pay for new teachers, and other issues.

The other problem is that Kent has way too much property covered by them. This specific point means that their schools are packed. There’s also 4 grades packed into the high schools, and 6 packed into elementary schools. Tahoma’s scheme of K-5 in Elementary, 6 and 7 in Middle, 8 and 9 in Junior High, and 10-12 in Senior High works very well. It provides a gradual approach to High School for students and gives a more gentle narrowing of schools. Tahoma has 4 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, one junior high and one senior high (as well as a “High School Alternative”). Kent has 28 elementary schools, 6 middle schools and 5 high schools.

Kent School District is about to be the next GM, going through an awkward “restructuring” to solve their problem. (GM still makes lousy cars though.)

Hopefully though Kent can survive at least until December without further strikes.

The reason the teachers went on strike in the first place was because issues such as classroom head count was unregulated and time spent with students was very small. In terms of these two parameters, Kent School District is not up to par, and the teachers wanted the School District to be. Thus, the teachers were really striking for the benefit of students, since less classmates equals more productivity and more time with the teacher means more learning.

August 31st, the first “day” of school, came around, and still no agreement between the teachers and the District. Finally, our superintendent, Edward Lee Vargas filed a complaint to Judge Andrea Darvas. On Thursday, she ruled that the strike was illegal, ordered the teachers to return to classrooms on Tuesday, and students to go back on Wednesday. But yesterday (Monday), teachers voted 71% to defy the judge’s order. I was absolutely ticked off.

Some parents and students actually supported the striking teachers. I stand fast in opposing this strike though. First of all, school has been delayed because of this stalemate between the two sides. Secondly, the School District has already offered the teachers a multitude of proposals that the teachers might as well accept, but no. The teachers are so stubborn, even in this recession, that they will by no means compromise. Horrible attitude, teachers. Such proposals they got were assistance for large class sizes and more pay. An alternative is better than nothing, so why not just accept and end this stagnant strike? Lastly, Judge Darvas already ordered the teachers back to class, and defying a judge’s order can result in jail time or fines. I would not risk this to continue on strike, and I don’t get why the hell the teachers are.

I’m absolutely pissed. This strike has made life boring, and there’s no end in sight. Some of my classmates say school will likely start in October, and Darren asked me what I would say if this case was taken to the Supreme Court? First of all, I’d laugh, and secondly, I’d already be attending a different school.

But there’s still one type of “matter” that perplexes me, and I’m not even sure if it can be classified as “matter.” This blog is made out of data. Before we go on though, let’s make sure we have this concept clear. It’s the data we’re talking about; not the data storage device, be it a flash drive or a hard drive; nor the type of machine you’re using to view the data, be it a mobile phone or a monitor.

1s and 0s are all that make up this blog. Matter takes space, but data doesn’t. Matter has mass, but data does not. A hard drive with 1 terabyte of free space will not weigh less (or more) than the exact same hard drive with no free space remaining. Yet, the hard drive that is completely occupied with data weighs no more than an empty hard drive, and still can store thousands of photos, videos, and applications. A photo album with no photos in it will weigh less than a photo album with a thousand photos in it. Yet with a hard drive, more photos does not equal more weight.

So here’s the question- is data matter? Are we violating Newton’s first law of thermodynamics, saying that you can’t get something out of nothing? Are we getting something out of nothing? Is this a paradox? Does this spell doom for physics? science? the world? the universe??? existence as we know it?????!!!!!!

Wikipedia administrators have turned Wikipedia into an online totalitarian regime, and no one is doing a darn thing about it.

(Note: This does not apply to all administrators on Wikipedia.)

On a Wiki such as Wikipedia, there are 3 tiers of users: Regular users, Bureaucrats, and Administrators. Out of those 3 tiers, it’s the administrators that are the worst. If you are a regular user on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons or any Wikimedia Project (Wikinews, Wikisoure, Wikibooks, etc), you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Administrators are supposed to be “helpers” and people who “clean up and perform maintenance” on the wiki. Apparently, the administrators who are on the Wikimedia Project’s wikis have abused this power so much that they can’t even be classified by the two phrases above. Instead, their function now is to bash users for making accidental edits and to find excuses to block users. On Wikipedia, I got blocked for “spamming” the Wikipedia Sandbox with a survey. Well, the sandbox is an area where people test wikicode and no one really cares what goes on it. Now, apparently, administrators spare no pages in their around-the-clock hunt for “vandalizers“. Some administrators have been so sucked in and addicted to this task that they literally stalk the people that make even the slightest trouble. One example of such a user is Either Way. I made an edit on the Simple English Wikipedia and he said something about that on my user talk page. Then, I uploaded an image on Wikimedia Commons, which the user followed up with a comment. I make another edit on the English Wikipedia and still, Either Way is following me. I swear that these admins have developed secret admin-only tools to stalk and hunt down users.

Because of administrators, Wikipedia has turned into an online totalitarian regime, with administrators at the throne. Whether you know it or not, every time you log on to a wiki, there’s always one administrator who has his or her eye on you. It takes just one mistake, one wrong edit, and that administrator will be on your case before you even press the “save changes” button. How do they do this? Administrators use heinous “automatic users” called bots to accomplish the task of stalking down users (although the admins are barely human, they can’t possibly watch over millions of Wikipedia users). These bots are the administrators’assistants, and thousands of them are crawling all over Wikipedia, and at the slightest bit of a mishap, they’ll leave a horrific message on your talk page and notify all the admins. Then all hell breaks loose.

Another notable conflict I’ve had with administrators was on Wikimedia Commons. I nominated one of my pictures, a panorama of Mount Rainier, for Featured Picture. I believed that it was such a good image that I used a few other user accounts under the same name to vote for it. Unfortunately, this kind of activity sticks out like a sour apple to Commons administrators, and I was promptly blocked. I would have been fine if the block was less than 3 days, but of course, those administrators have mental problems. They blocked all of my other accounts, blocked my main account (Deathgleaner), blocked indefinitely, and without any prior warning. Usually, users are given at least one warning if the offense hasn’t been committed before, and I have never committed any offense like this and I get blocked indefinitely by one administrator. Then, another administrator follows me just to rub it in my face, followed by another, then another, like an online pileup of football players. The administrators also put a notice on the voting page of my panorama saying what happened. This screwed people’s perception while voting and caused them to focus on the incident rather than the image. Yes, some of the comments did regard the image itself but I still believe there would be less opposing votes if the administrators hadn’t screwed up the voting page with numerous comments.

After my primary account, Deathgleaner, got blocked, I created another account so I could keep contributing, in a good manner, to the wiki. Yet, the administrators are so one-sided that they only see the bad stuff, and that was that the user account I was using to keep contributing was connected to my main account. The administrator wasted no time in blocking that account. It took me another three months to finally convince those biased admins to unblock my main account.

One of the most recent and ongoing conflicts happened on Wikisource. I was looking at the text for a book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. When I found out the first chapter was formatted as prose, I promptly disagreed and changed it so that it was not formatted as prose. Of course, a nosy admin walks by my user talk page and leaves a note that basically said “prove it”. I gave him three very trusty sources and he still didn’t believe it, which got another administrator on the case. The debate escalated from there and resulted in me being blocked, for the millionth time. One of the admins said that I needed “special guidance” on editing and that my changes are “erratic”. The only person who needs special guidance and is erratic is that doofus who wrote the comment on my talk page! Now there’s a huge pileup of administrators’dumb comments on my talk page, including one comment that said “I am going to block you for 14 hours so you don’t prevent us from carrying on with our lives”. Well, I doubt these admins have any “life” other than gluing their eyes to a computer monitor and trying to hold records for the most number of users blocked.

All this administrator activity on Wikipedia and other sites has pissed me off. I have almost stopped editing on Wikipedia because I can’t do so peacefully. The administrators only exist for the purpose of framing users and causing more trouble rather than settling it. They have framed so many users that their reputation has changed from people who help other users to people who block users. In fact, these administrators have turned Wikipedia into a Neo-Nazi regime, and they treat the rest of the Wikipedians like Jews in World War II. The only way to stop such horrendous injustice towards non-admins is to dethrone the administrator position. Talking to admins is useless, they’ll only call in other administrators to help take down the talk. Sure, Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but it’s only free if we don’t have any nagging administrators patrolling Wikipedia every second of every day.

Perhaps you’re a user on Wikipedia who’s had a similar story. Please share it with me so I can back up my claim (or maybe it’s just me). If you hate Wikipedia’s administrators, feel free to leave a comment saying “I HATE WIKIPEDIA ADMINISTRATORS”. Feel even more free to list off the usernames of such admins and I will happily post them on my blog.

UPDATE: Great news. I have found out that Wikipedia and other similar wikis don’t allow freedom of speech, even for people in the United States. First of all, that’s an infringement on the Constitution, and second of all, I guess that’s the reason why I get block threats from Either way and other such dirtbags. I swear that it was administrators who took away this right in order to promote a more uptight community. And now I’m blocked on Wikisource for saying that I hate administrators. Those administrators have no sense.

A (Mostly) Complete OpenWRT Tutorial

Go ahead and check it out.

This is the 100th post, and if none of the previous posts before this get deleted, it will stay that way.

I can’t check the full statistics, but right now, we have 100 posts , 5 pages, 13 categories, 423 tags, 113 comments and no pending or spam comments.

SO HAPPY 100TH POST OKSBLOG!!!

Click on a few ads (seen near the top of the page) to support my crazy venture of a separate memcached machine, and we’ll see how speed improves when we get a memcached machine up.

The memcached machine will be running a stripped Fedora 11 install (as in no GUI), with a 64-bit kernel (because it’s a whole new machine I’m gonna put together). I know that memcached is used in the Fedora Infrastructure with MediaWiki. Possibly, I might have the wordpress-mu install use memcached as well.

For those of you who don’t know what memcached is, memcached is “a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.” (from the memcached home page) memcached came from LiveJournal, a project of Danga Interactive. We’ll see if when we get a memcached instance (if we get a memcached instance) things speed up.

I had to hard reset my mac unfortunately.

The IP responsible for this crap is 117.21.241.10 most likely.

Thanks,

Darren VanBuren

(Admin)

So I wish people would realize this and switch. Cause 20 years from now, no one’s gonna be talking about this (thank god). At least OKS blog still remotely works, but not as good. Images don’t show up, the font and style are all wonky, and other crap. But OKS blog is telling users in BIG LETTERS AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE to switch. Thank you OKS.

Yesterday, I was driving home when I saw a few menacing clouds that looked like thunder clouds. They were towards the east, so I reasoned there might be some kind of thunderstorms there. Today, I haven’t seen a cloud in the sky. It’s 85 degrees in my house, 95 outside, and not many people here have air conditioning. At least I have a fan.

So for all of you feeling this heat, drink plenty of water and don’t move around too much unless you have to (writing at OKS blog is a great way to cool off!)

OKSWbot has some problems, like it has a non-functioning Infobot Module (defective AnyDBM_File Perl module?).

Mozbot is not even used in #bmo on irc.mozilla.org, the bot “bugbot” is a supybot.

I have added a new bot, OKSbot, which is based on supybot. I chose supybot because both fedbot and zodbot (both bots for Fedora IRC channels) are based on supybot.

I just set him up today, and I haven’t even gotten used to supybot.

If you might have any supybot knowledge, feel free to share it through the comments.

• G. Liu: As I write this, he just investigated a fire at Ridgewood Elementary School. See http://twitpic.com/9cdbv and http://twitpic.com/9cdgz.
• Matt Ventura: Firing questionably legal fireworks. See these posts on his blog: A Big Boom, A Quick Home-made Firecracker.
• Darren VanBuren: Launching fireworks. Nothing really special.

So have a safe & fun holiday, from all of us here at OKS Blog!

Done with teachers.
Done with homework.
Done with math, english, social studies, and all those subjects.
Done.

No more stress.
No more lack of sleep.
No more cramming.
No more nonsense.

No more angering the librarians by playing games on the computer that you’re not supposed to.

No more.
Done.

Here’s how to get YOUR rpm package into MY yum repo:

1. If your package is compiled, compile it for as many architectures and distributions as possible.
2. Send a link to all your compiled RPMs, and source code to spamtrap AT oks DOT verymad DOT net
3. I’ll email you back if your package was accepted.

Here’s a link to the .repo file you will need to use the repository:

http://fpaste.org/paste/15984/plain

simply put that file in /etc/yum.repos.d/ as oks-yum.repo and you’re good to go!

                  “Oh look, it’s the pointy-eared bastard.”

This film was awesome, even Star Trek fans would like it. It made over 350 million world gross. Terminator Salvation has failed with no reputation to speak of. I wonder what Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will turn up. Anywho Star Trek is AWSOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The link is: http://bit.ly/LH5GC

The website wasn’t unveiled just today, but in New York, everyone gathered around a billboard that will update itself.

There’s a lot of video formats out there. Most of them are proprietary, which really sucks.

The Free Software Foundation decided to start their campaign to promote Ogg, a free, rights-free media container format.
Audio in Ogg files is usually encoded with Vorbis, but others are out there. Video is done in Theora.

That’s all for now, I guess. Then again, it’s 0:42. So I’m tired. I will now wander off to bed.

PS: This blog post was written in TextMate.

I’m very fortunate to have the number of visitors I have, and I’m fortunate to have the enthusiastic authors here as my friends.

It’s been a long time coming, and one more comment will be the 100th comment.

I am happy to continue administering OKS Blog, and we will continue to flourish for years to come!

Thanks,

Darren VanBuren

Administrator of Onekopakaspace

ScribeFire allows you to post to blogs such as WordPress and Blagger. This blog, in fact, is supported by WordPress. What I would like to know is if it is possible to post to this blog. The site editor can reply to this post by including a list of steps to set up ScribeFire to post to here.

UPDATE (6/15/2009 @ 7:20): The site editor has replied

OKS Blog is powered by WordPress 2.9-rare (as I write this comment).

Setting up ScribeFire to post to OKS Blog is easy.

Just use http://oks.verymad.net/~onekopaka/blog/ as the URL and your username and password to login to the Admin interface here.

-Darren VanBuren

UPDATE (6/15/2009 @ 15:46) by Darren VanBuren:

My last name doesn’t have a space…

UPDATE (6/15/2009 @ 16:25)

Hmmm… I’m trying it out and it doesn’t seem to be working. When I try to load a post, it refuses to load. I just have to try publishing a new post.

16:30 – ScribeFire can now post (I sent a test post), but can’t edit. Looks like Mr. VanBuren will have to work this out.

Rattlesnake Ledge

Here are some pretty tall trees:

Download Fedora 11 when it releases at fedoraproject.org

My school year sucked. This year, was my first year being homeschooled. Apart from being homeschooled, I realized how much I hate my mother. So, I go to my grandparents house everyday, and do schoolwork.

So, I’m looking forward to summer. Looking at how the weather is now, I’m not too certain I’ll end up enjoying it though.

It was a year full of memories for me. When I started school back in September, I had to switch classes because “they” screwed up my schedule. After I switched classes, I discovered that I had a test on a book. While everyone got two weeks to read the book, I got three days, and yet, my teacher expected me to pass the test like everyone else. I didn’t pass the test and that ruined my grade for the rest of the year.

The first semester of school went on without much more happening. Tests, projects, quizzes, waking up too early, sleeping too late every single day. This was the case until December, when school was happily interrupted by storm after storm of snow, much more than we’ve gotten for the past twelve years. Some days we had late starts, and some days, school was canceled. Kids enjoyed the days they had off from school, but snow plow drivers and those who still had to go to work did not.

The second semester came quickly, and I tried some new things. I played a piano accompaniment for the orchestra and for several people at their recital. I went to our school’s restaurant and tried some great food there. I conducted the orchestra and went to a college to perform there. It seemed like I had finally found the zest of high school, even though I wasn’t in athletics or too many school activities.

And finally, after a few more concerts, contests, and competitions, it is almost time to say goodbye. Today, our principal recognized our seniors for their excellent work and their legacy at our school in a special assembly. They will graduate next Saturday and move on. For me, that’s still a while away, but a time will come, and when it does, I will look back at my twelve wonderful years and wonder: “What will be in store for me for the next twelve years?”

During the time that this blog was down, I actually created a new blog on WordPress, which this blog is based off of. It’s at deathgleaner.wordpress.com

But now that this blog is back, I don’t know what to do. Should I keep my blog on WordPress? Or should I post here? My previous preference before this blog went down was to post on this blog, but for now, you can find me active (more or less) on both my WordPress and this blog.

Update (3/6/09 17:15PST): I have made up my mind. School-related stuff will go here and everything else on my other blog at WordPress. Of course, I’m flexible, so keep updated!

Update (9/6/09 20:15PST): Maybe not just school stuff will go on this blog. I will decide at my own will which blog I’ll post to.

Make sure you have root access. This cannot be performed without root access. This is for firmware version 4 and higher, my Acer Aspire 3690 used that firmware, so this is what I’m giving instructions for.
yum install b43-fwcutter

cd /tmp

wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

bunzip2 broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

tar xvf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar

b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/wl_apsta_mimo.o

echo “alias wlan0 b43″ >> /etc/modprobe.conf

system-network-config

I should have an external hard drive tomorrow so that I can install Fedora 10 then I’ll correct these instructions. For some reason my internal card doesn’t like these drivers (last I checked) but it likes the Windows drivers, so I may use ndiswrapper. Who knows?

A large majority of the post was forked from http://fedoramobile.org/fc-wireless/bcm43xx-yum-extras.

On Saturday, I had a piano competition. To be specific, it was the Green River Piano Competition. It was held at Kentlake High School.

When I got to the campus, it seemed so new compared to my high school, which is about the second-oldest in the district. I’ve seen some of the Bellevue schools which look just amazing, and this is right next to them in quality. Apparently, there was a judo competition going on there, which really doesn’t go well with classical music.

I heard a mixture of composers, including Liszt, Beethoven, and Bach. I played a Bartok sonatina and a Bach prelude, and got a score of “1″. Four other people were able to get that score.

Sunday, we had a Christmas musical. I was to play Pachelbel’s Canon with two others as a prelude to the Christmas service. So, why have the service in January? Well, what stops us from having Christmas in January, or for some, June? Besides, there was so much snow in December that the service was canceled.

The play was about a young boy named Foster who forgot the meaning of Christmas and all  he wanted was presents. One of the cool parts in the story was when they turned off all the lights and the actors were wearing white gloves. They turned on ultraviolet lights, making everything that was white, including the gloves, glow. Quite a show.

After the service I headed down to Snoqualmie Falls. One of my mom’s friends told her that the falls were absolutely enormous. I had been their once, but when I got there, I was blown away, quite literally.

The falls, raging with all that floodwater, sprayed fine sea mist into everything it could reach. The sea mist created a thick fog, making photography there notoriously difficult. I did manage to get a few pictures where there was mist and where I didn’t get sprayed by it.

Now, I’m in a library, writing, or rather, typing this post. I wonder how this chaotic weekend will end…

Since it’s just a CSS property, we can apply it to any HTML element

Check out this image:

It is rotated 25 degrees counter clockwise.

In other news, there are now categories on OKS Blog and this is the first post to use them.

That’s my iPod showing the page, with WP touch, a plugin to make an iPod friendly blog, enabled.

Where I live, Renton, we do not get so much so; not the most snow, nor the least. But this year seemed different.

We have had storm system after storm system move in on us. Wednesday experienced two inches of snow, nothing compared to what would happen next. On Friday, after the Wednesday snows had melted, we got a four-inch covering of snow, along with three millimeters of ice on top (yes, I measured that). This added ice made the snow exceptionally crunchy, like walking on potato chips.

Come Saturday, we had blizzard-like conditions. Around 7pm, strong winds started to blow all the snow off the rooftops. This snow accumulated wherever it could, including on our front porch. In fact, the snow drift was about two inches. This blizzard continued for a while.

In the end, Renton saw about twelve inches of snow. The ice left over from the previous storm was still there and as crunchy as could be. I built this huge bowl of snow, but I didn’t know what to do with it. Our neighbor built an igloo that was quite nice. That bowl of snow in my backyard was intended to be an igloo, but I didn’t know how to build one.

UPDATES

(Dec. 26, 2008 @ 3:08p): Meteorolgists were right in their predictions of another storm around Wednesday. The storm was not as severe as before, but we got quite some snow that I did not measure. This snow dragged on until Christmas Day Thursday, when it snowed all day and night. And, for the first time, our car got stuck in the snow. Luckily, we were able to get out.

No one plowed our neighborhood that day, so when we got back, it was all h*** broke loose. It got worse, though. Around 9pm, there was a sudden power outage. I don’t know what caused it, but I took some pictures of our neighborhood, which I will upload later. Lucky for us that the power came back around 10pm.

As I write this from a library in Bellevue, it is snowing, but not for much longer. This snow will turn into rain, and melt away what it brought. You’ll either be happy to be out of the deep freeze, or sad as the snowmen in your neighbor’s front yard melts away.

(December 29, 2008 @ 7:51p): More snow for this region is predicted any where from Monday to Wednesday*. It’s Monday, and for the past three days, all I’ve seen is rain, rain, and more rain. This rain has melted away 80-90% of our snow. It has also been very windy today.

Just a few days ago, something unfortunate happened in our neighborhood. Supposedly, two people were walking on one of the storm drainage lakes in our community. One of them fell through the ice. I’d infer that the other called 911. My dad witnessed some of the event, saying that there were four ambulances and several police cars. No one was aloud to watch, but my dad did see a gaping hole in the ice where the person fell through. The rescuers through a life ring into the frigid water in hopes of saving the victim, but that didn’t work. Police eventually had to don special wet suits to dive in the water as a last ditch effort for rescue. This story hasn’t appeared on the news yet, though.

(Jan 10, 2009 @ 8:0_p): We got an unexpected two inches of snow the day before school, so it was two hours late. Other than that, the snow has disappeared, but much of the sand on the streets remains. In fact, I was riding my bicycle and fell due to the sand.

The snowfall has been replaced by rainfall here, and hasn’t caused any problems for Renton. Elsewhere, it’s a different story. Floods closed all of the mountain passes and some major highways, which made Western Washington an island.

*Correction: The predicted storms are supposed to bring with them high winds and rain.

A view from my house in Renton, WA

Peace out,

Deathgleaner

Seattle doesn’t get snow very often. So I’m excited that we got some. More is predicted to come on Wednesday. So enjoy the snow on my blog. If you’re on an iPhone or iPod touch, the snow is disabled due to performance issues. I will enable it on a dedicated snow page.

Anyways, after that bump, everything was quite easy. I also made MXR work after a bit of cgi.assign magic.

To view pages as served by lighttpd (Blog or Wiki or subdomains aren’t supported) just change the port to 81 by adding :81 after the domain.

My sister goes to Evergreen City Ballet. They put on a presentation of the Nutcracker at  Auburn High School Performing Arts Center and Renton IKEA Performing Arts center.

Last year, I played the role of the bed. I was underneath the bed, which moved around the stage. So how exactly does the bed work?

The Bed is nothing fancy, just some padding on top of a wooden frame they custom built, and on casters. There is a harness and buckles to buckle the harness to. Then, the person under the bed pulls the bed.

I hopefully will find some pictures of the bed so I can show you inside the bed.

That’s it for now.

Everyone loves to freeze SpringBoard between two screens.

More details here.

After hearing that statement, I decided to Google search this. The only result I found was that “polar graphs…show patters of racism”. That was the only explanation I got, so I decided to go to the Wikipedia Reference Desk for Mathematics.

I posted my question there, and waited. After a day, here’s some comments I got:

There is nothing inherently race oriented in the definition of polar graphs. Specific instances of polar graphs might be considered racist.

Presumably because they are based on Poles – that’s as worthy of the word “joke” as the likelihood that Fermat had a solution to the Riemann hypothesis.

Did a manic-depressive invent those ?

I would have said that Cartesian graphs are more racists than polar ones.

Clearly a revolutionary approach is needed.

If you want to read all the activity that question has generated, go here.

Peace out and ha-ha!

–DEATHGLEANER

Upon arriving at Wal-Mart, there was a line stretching for about 500 feet. We waited for thirty minutes just to get in the door.

When we got inside, the store was less crowded than I expected. We went to the Electronics section to look for a Toshiba laptop. Unfortunately, both the Toshiba and the HP laptops were completely out. Considering that the store opened at 5A.M. and everybody was buying TVs, it was reasonable that they sold out. We did however buy a GPS and a HP printer.

Along with the two electronics, we bought a few kitchen supplies. My mom didn’t like them, so the next day, we returned the items.

The return line that day was practically as long as the waiting line the previous day. It seemed that everyone was so dissatisfied by the products there. Some people were even returning TVs!

That’s all I have to say.

Peace out.

–DEATHGLEANER

* Listening to Alice’s Restaraunt on KZOK

I didn’t watch the Macy’s parade, as I didn’t want to watch Rick Astley sing his crazy song.

Also, the I’m at my grandma’s house with the family. My cousin’s grandpa says hi.

I’ve had no problems so far. Installing wireless was one click. Same for flash.

So I’m going to continue setting that machine up.

This is the 60th post on OKS Blog

Apparently, in World History class, we were doing a crossword that had to do with European Exploration and Colonization of the World. One of the questions on the cross word was:

11 (Across): Hernando Cortez conquered which Mexican tribe in 1521?

We already knew that the second letter was a “Z”, but didn’t know the answer. In fact, I didn’t even read the question. This one guy, by the name of Reggie, asked me what the answer to 11 Across was. I looked at the row and made up the word “Ezbco”. It doesn’t make sense that Hernando Cortez conquered the Ezbco tribe, but Reggie actually believed it. He even asked the teacher if the answer was “Ezbco”. At that point I broke into an uncontrollable laughter that lasted ten minutes.

Hernando Cortez conquered the Aztecs.

I made up other words for some of the crossword answers like “Macon” (Question was “Which port did Columbus sail from?”). They actually believed me a few times even though they knew they fell for the first one.

Peace out,

Ha ha!!!

–Jeff

UPDATE:

I did a Google search on “Ezbco” and guess what? It searched, and our blog was the FIRST ONE on its list of results. :-O !!!

We first peeled off the shell by immersing the eggs in 90mL of vinegar for three days. When we got back, all of the shell of my egg was removed. We decided to test how hypertonic laundry detergent and VitaminWater were to the egg. We immersed four de-shelled eggs, two into each solution.

After the first day, the results were quite obvious. The eggs immersed in VitaminWater were beginning to expand because water had been moving into the cell; apparently, the concentration of water in VitaminWater was greater than it was in the egg cell. The opposite happened to the eggs immersed in laundry detergent.

When we first saw our eggs, there was a one-inch thick membrane of semi-solid laundry detergent surrounding the eggs. It made the egg take on the appearance of an embryo. Upon taking the eggs out, we realized that almost all of the laundry detergent had taken on this solid form.

We proceeded to wash our eggs and our hands, but had no idea that the laundry detergent was notoriously difficult to wash off our hands.

When we examined the eggs, the surface was wrinkly and calluses were starting to form. But this would compare to nothing as we observed the next day. It was the first day’s results, ten times worse. The egg’s membrane had become so loose that we could lift the egg by the membrane and shake its contents around. The calluses were so abundant that the membrane had become a thick wall of bumps. On the other hand, the eggs immersed in VitaminWater were filled with the orange liquid and looked like they were ready to burst.

Eventually, we popped our eggs. Unlike some, where the contents exploded out of the hole, ours leaked out slowly. We had to squeeze our eggs to get the contents out. What was left was a membrane that I swore could have been converted into a small sack for storing things.

Never repeat this experiment, unless you want your hands to have a gooey feel and if you want to see what I mean by a one-inch thick membrane of semi-solid laundry detergent. I don’t think you would want to try this, considering that all my classmates cringed at the sight of my egg.

Peace out,
Deathgleaner

On Tuesday, I won a pie eating contest supported by the ASB. The pie was lemon (bleh!), but I still won! Hopefully I can get a video up (if people who videoed me in the contest cooperate) so until then, just believe me. Oh and I was still hungry.

On Thursday at dinner, I shoveled ~ 3 plates of pasta into my stomach. After that, I was still hungry. Take that! I did feel my stomach stretch out to make room for the food.

So anywho, it has been an exciting eating week.

Not intended to be mean or condescending.

Biased, you could say that.

At the time of posting this blog, I discovered that the site admin changed the theme. Now the CSS or whatever runs really slowly, even when I’m using Firefox 3.0.4 on a Mac PPC. JavaScript would be a better alternative for adding effects to this webpage, including that pop up navbar you will see if you scroll down the page.

One of my friends by the name Dylan has a blog at www.conduitzone.com. He uses Joomla (whatever that may be) and enhances his page with JavaScript and Google Ads just for the purpose of earning money. His site runs just fine and smooth, except for the fact that it is quite slow to load.

Overall, the theme and asthetics of this blog are great, but needs some improvement on the code and technical part. Also, the “Log In” link could be a little more conspicous, I had to use the word find to find the link, which was hiding in the “Meta” section.

Since this topic is highly controversial for some people, everyone is welcome to post their comments about this and the Onekopakaspace Blog.

I hope to see many improvements being made in the near future.

Peace out,

Deathgleaner (aka mbg.gold)

OPINION ADDENDUM:

November 22, 2008 @ 3:14:15pm

The column on the right is sometimes very lengthy. At the end of some posts, it extends about a mile down the page, leaving a football field of blank space. The site admin needs to trim off some of that fat (no offense).

November 25, 2008 @ 12:40:09pm

I see that the theme has changed. now, the background is static. Good Idea. it just makes your blog run even slower.

UPDATE: The Belkin router is gone!

But now Opera 9.6 has made it better. Opera 9.6 is clearly faster. I will post more about Opera 9.6 later.

I’m new to this blogging thing but Darren says it’s fun. And I’m not really a Colonel, I just like the Air Force. Another thing: Vote for Obama!

• A kid held up a sign saying “OBAMA BIDEN 2008″
• Another kid held up a sign saying “MCCAIN PALIN 2008″. Gross.
• My friend by the name of Tyrone said that McCain would die in office and Palin would take over
• There has been much discussion about the election. All of my friends are voting for Obama

Please remember that Election Day is November 4th this year. If you are registered, don’t forget to vote!

And vote for Obama if you don’t want a president to get Alzheimer’s in office.

Change for the better.

Peace out,

Geoffrey Liu

ELECTION DAY UPDATE:

People are beginning to wear their campaign shirts and signs, I’ve seen equal numbers of both. After school, there was this huge crowd with Obama and McCain supporters all arguing about how good each of their candidates are. I have never seen anything like that.

According to CNN, Obama has won the presidential election. Good thing otherwise our country would get a lower average IQ (John McCain does not promote science) and McCain would have a heart attack if he jumped up and down because he won.

Notebook Software is software that enables you to use a board, called a Smart Board, to click on objects on your screen. The Smart Board also allows you to use digital pens to draw in programs like Smart Notebook and right on the screen. It’s sort of like a touch pad.

I was trying Notebook Software 10 out today. Here is a short summary of how much it sucks:

• In 1st period French class, I saw the transparency layer of the new Notebook Software. It was frickin crap bloated like hell. The frame looks heavy, and it’s VERY hard to use
• At lunch in the library, I was testing out Smart Notebook. I drew a freeform shape and tried to fill it with color. But guess what? The damn software wouldn’t let me fill it in.
• The splash screen for Notebook Software reflects on how bloated the software is. Sure, looks modern but is nothing but a load of bull.

After that experience, I wish that my school hadn’t updated to the new and crappier software. It’s so freaking bad, it makes MS Office seem good.

Like heavenly good.

Peace out,

Deathgleaner

PS: All school related posts will be filed under the tag “Kentridge” from now on as well as any other applicable tags.

Apparently, this one kid by the name of Eric put about twenty hot tamales into a full can of soda. Then, another guy, Ethan, took a sip of it and he could barely stand the spiciness. Then, another kid by the name of Tyrone took the can of soda and chugged it down like he hadn’t drunk in four days. His reaction wasn’t that bad, considering that Ethan had a flush-red face after just sipping a little bit.

I am Deathgleaner, and will report any future things that happen at my school.

Peace out,

Deathgleaner

Game show host: “What is the capital of France?”

Contestant: “F”

After all, F is the only capital letter in France.

I will try to keep updated on anything that happens around my high school.

Apparently, a few Winblows lovers are arguing that WinBLOWS is better than the Mac OS. I strongly disagree with them however. But, this one kid who’s my friend has a bunch of reasons why a Windows is better. All these reasons seem very controversial to what I’ve heard:

• “Windows Vista has better security…I once hacked my parents’Mac. It was so easy to hack their Mac.”
• There are no admin privileges on Macs
• There’s better software for Windows

Only my other friend, who has a MacBook, and I know the REAL truth: Macs are better than winblows.

11-13-08 UPDATE: From my user talk page on Wikipedia-

At a recent forum, Ubuntu, Mac, and Vista were all put to the test of some of the worlds more skilled hackers to find a way into a up-to-date system. The mac box lasted a little over 10 minutes. The windows box hadn’t been cracked by the time the exercise was over.

Macs are pretty, like flowers. Windows is functional, like a set of cutters. Treat the cutters poorly, and they’ll rust and go blunt. Treat them well, and they’ll cut the head off your flowers any day. Doesn’t matter how you treat the flowers though, they’re gonna die eventually

That was quite surprising. Please see my user talk…

In other news, OKSW is now closed up so you don’t see the horrendous PHP error that was there. So, read my page explaining the problem.

This about wraps up this post.

Now, on to the Chrome part.

Google Chrome, Google’s new open source browser, only for Windows (as of this writing) looks cool.

I’m just writing about Chrome right now because I’m now actually on a Windows machine. You most likely know that I stick with OS X Leopard or Linux. But, Google hasn’t gotten those done yet. So I have to deal with *shudder* Windows to use Chrome.

Chrome is fairly fast, and has a fair amount of animation (like closing, opening and switching tabs). Also, it was fast to setup.

I plan to use Chrome on Mac anad Linux as soon as they come out.

One annoying thing is that there’s no adblocking. Google, I know you make money off those ads, but please incorporate adblocking into  Chrome for the next release.

So, that’s it for this post. You have fun browsing the Internet (or crawling for those bots) but stay safe. (Use a REAL browser to look at that pr0n)

So what do you think? Is Quartz Renderman’s lost cousin? Seeing as that Pixar has always used Steve’s platform, it very well may be.

Photosynth, Microsoft’s new project which allows you to map out 3D space simply by putting together pictures.

When I went to the website (www.photosynth.net), I clicked one of the “synths”. I got this message:

Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.

I was running Firefox 3.1a2pre (i built it from hg!) on Mac OS X Leopard.

I also spoofed as Firefox 3.0 on Linux and it says the exact same thing.

Freddie is an expert bike rider, and can do all sorts of tricks and stunts, like ride his bicycle with no hands. But the one thing he can’t do is comb his hair while riding his bicycle, as he tried to do one day. Why can’t Freddie do this?

I have discovered two possible answers. You can try this brain teaser yourself!

Proof: I searched for ‘site:oks.verymad.net onekopakaspace’on Live Search and Google. Here are the results pages:

Live Search

Google

UPDATE: The reason Google doesn’t crawl my site is because they don’t have FreeDNS DNS entries. Unfortunately, I only have FreeDNS subdomains.

So, add a comment if you want Google to retrieve FreeDNS DNS entries! (If you don’t, explain in a lengthy 2 paragraph comment that has no grammar or spelling errors)

You acknowledge that the Covered Code is not intended for use in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation, communication systems, or air traffic control machines in which case the failure of the Covered Code could lead to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.

Kind of strange.

Any litigation or other dispute resolution between You and Apple relating to this License shall take place in the Northern District of California.

Home field advantage!

UPDATE: Web Pages DO work. Here is a sample I just published.

UPDATE 2: You can access the webapps but right now they fail.

UPDATE 3: The webapps are a bit better now, but still have issues.

it’s filed as rdar://problem/5923005 for the special Apple crowd with access to Radar reports.

The technical description of this bug is here.

There is also a 33 year old UNIX bug. It’s a buffer overflow bug. It’s technical description is here. As far as I know, there is no Radar report. But I wouldn’t know.

Anyways, let me know if you guys like this theme (add a comment) and we’ll decide if we should keep it.

UPDATE: We switched back to K2. Scrolling takes forever.

UPDATE: We switched to WicketPixie again. The scrolling problem is being fixed.

Any who: I just wanted to start a post that is to be a primer on open source.

Here’s a bug I fixed.

Happy 4th of July! This year makes the US 232 years old.

I am working on this bug and hope to have it fixed by the end of the day.

UPDATE: I had to go to 2.6-beta1 from my Time Machine Backup. Now we can use those kinds of URLs again.

I hope that this brings attention to WordPress developers, so they can fix this problem.

After much research, this bug also would affect us if we used /year/month/day/post-name.

The POS failed!

Upon scanning a DVD, the POS and Windows FAILS!

When I got there, which was after the fail, it was on the screen without the window that is shown when you’re logging on with Windows XP Pro

Then, my dad attempts to blame my mom for ‘scanning her card too early’.

But everyone knows that it’s Microsuck’s fault.

Liquidation World doesn’t though, their POS systems run a Red Hat derivative. See how smart some people are finally becoming.

Since then, I have only added music and copied some videos to it.

On to the actual review.

It’s somewhat less locked down then the RAZR in a couple ways:

• No requirement of Windows Media Player to add songs.
• Ability to add videos.
• Ability to send pictures over Bluetooth

But it’s also a bit more locked down in one way:

To change the proxy you MUST edit a hex file.

I think that is REALLY REALLY annoying.

Also, we switched to WordPress’s widget system, instead of K2′s because K2′s was all f’d up.

UPDATE: We also have scriptbot.asmcbain.net and asmcbain.net indexed.

On a lower note, our WordPress has a problem. Look at the bottom of this page. There’s a nasty PHP warning. I am upset with it too. I’ll just keep on doing svn up until it fixes itself.

On a higher note, our Trac is fixed. It also moved to /trac instead of /cgi-bin/trac. It also is running 0.12dev. 

UPDATE: WordPress was fixed. Wasn’t that fast?

mp3blaster works great. My build only does mp3 / wav, but when compiled on a different machine it can also play ogg and sid.

I am satisfied with mp3blaster’s performance. It runs nicely and can also use SDL for audio (a very good thing in my case).

I have a project that was just kickstarted into actual development.

ScriptBot was originally by AMcBain, and was pushed into our subversion repository, and development started.

If you feel that you could help this project, catch me in #bots.

This thing is about 20 times as powerful as the cheap $1 laser you would buy in a store, and it is 532nm ( green) so it is much more visible than a red pointer.
Here’s the features: (* means it is advertised to do this, but I haven’t gotten around to trying this, and in some cases, don’t have something to try it on.)

• Beam is visible in a medium-light room.
• Stings bare skin. *
• Makes rubber smoke and leaves the rubber scorched.
• Lights matches. *
• Goes for miles. *
• Pops balloons. *
• Etches plastic. (with lenses)
• Looks damn cool!

More to come later

And i’ll do it later.

Note: The champions’names will remain undisclosed until further notice. We will refer to the winner of the winner’s bracket as Player 1 and the winner of the loser’s bracket as Player 2.

In the first game, Player 2 beat Player 1, and because this was Player 1′s first loss, the two had to battle each other again. This, as Player 2 would say, would be “a battle to the death”. After the game, we weren’t so sure if that final game really was.

In the opening of the second game, Player 1 was white and Player 2 was black. Player 1 opened by moving a pawn two spaces forward. Player 2 mirrored the move, so to speak. This continued with a few other moves. The knights were out, taking pawns and anything in their zigzag path. Then, Player 1 mobilizes his queen, and brings it out. Player 2 starts moving his pawns out, forming a discontinuous line of pawns. This lead to Player 2 being put in check by the opponent’s queen. By this time, both players have most of their pawns out. Player 2 sets up a queen-for-queen trade, quite a risky move. All of a sudden out of nowhere, Player 1 realizes he has a pawn at the other end of the board and promotes that pawn to a second queen. Despite the unexpected pawn promotion, Player 1 keeps walking his pawns. By this time, all of Player 2′s pieces are huddled in a corner (except for an out lier pawn), while Player 1′s pieces cover the whole board. The game suddenly ends when Player 1 puts Player 2 in checkmate with two queens and a bishop. There wasn’t even much of an endgame.

I will ponder over this while I sleep..

UPDATE: NAH!!!

“Internet Explorer is a piece of crap, and has decided to close on you.”

“00x000x00 – Unreferenced decision to close.”

“Kernel Panic – Woah! You ugly freak!”

Here is an example:

That has been cached so it doesn’t have to everytime that is loaded, call for latex, then dvipng.

I will be adding a math tag to the forums, which are here.

Update: The forums now are SMF which doesn’t allow custom BBCode.

<meta name=”generator” content=”Adobe GoLive” />
<title>Your Website</title>

At Cedar River Montessori School, there where some Macs from the Classic era. They had SimCity, and that was what they were used for. That was a very long time ago, about early 2000s. They ended being stored in a barn, where I would never see them again….

Fast-forward to December 25, 2007. That was the day I got my Mac Mini. I love it. It runs programs waaaaay faster than my Crapsta laptop.

It has died once and recently came back to life. Now you’ve been SERV’D! by it. (or him. Yes, it is a him, technically speaking. see here. It’s related because the mac is on irc.mozilla.org in #oksw, #mac, #bots, #classicrock, #shoutcast, and #astronomy as okswbot.)

But now this mac is your master.

svn co svn://theoks.net/tichat2/trunk tichat2trunk

Please note that TICHAT2 REQUIRES Omnicalc.

Seriously, who ever heard of a category cloud?

Tags are shorter, and you can apply more than one to a post.

A snapshot of what the Firefox Tinderbox looked like.

Look how long it takes Windows to build!

Linux could probably build 5 times in the time Windows takes to build once.

OS X could do at least 3 builds.

Update: Comments are closed on this fucking microtards.

Yes, it’s Classic Rock.

It may have been forgotten but now it’s making a come back!

The station ’round here (Seattle, WA) is KZOK. 102.5 MHz FM.

They also have an HD Radio channel.

1. It’s not open source.
2. It’s by Microsoft.
3. It’s not simple.

So that’s why I made the campaign against it.

(Silverlight: Ruin the Web button will go here.)

I only have it so I can use sites that require it.

Here’s to an open-source clone!

“We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” said Ballmer.

“We have a talented team in place and a compelling plan to grow our business through innovative new services and strategic transactions with other business partners. While Yahoo! would have accelerated our strategy, I am confident that we can continue to move forward toward our goals,” Ballmer said.

“We are investing heavily in new tools and Web experiences, we have dramatically improved our search performance and advertiser satisfaction, and we will continue to build our scale through organic growth and partnerships,” said Kevin Johnson, Microsoft president for platforms and services.

See here for more detail.

Mind you yesterday was the release day for the game.

There was at least 25 copies of the game still available!!!

Well, haven’t put the disk our Wii yet. We’ve looked at the manual and played around with the Wii wheel.

One funny part is:

Peter: I too will be abstinient. I’ll be as untouched as the turn signal in an Asian woman’s car.

Asian Woman: How much turn signal I need to cut across eight lane? None? I turn now! Good luck everyone!

[Asian Woman's car hits several cars and an oil tanker which explodes.]

Then there’s the angry German kid.

(Translated) Angry German Kid – Correct Translation

bugs.webkit.org:

BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
“XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problem, you aren’t using enough of it.” – Chris Maden
UNIX is user friendly, it just picks its friends carefully.
Programming is like sex: One mistake and you have to support it for life. — Michael Sinz
Get me a 16-inch rotary debugger (extra cheese)
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity. – Dennis Ritchie
khtml/html/htmlparser.cpp:998: // support for really broken html. Can’t believe I’m supporting such crap (lars)

the above quip is true. at line 998, it really says that. See here for proof.

bugzilla.mozilla.org:

“…One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them…” JRR Tolkien
“640K ought to be enough for anyone.” – Bill Gates, 1981
“Black holes are where God divided by zero.”
“Is an IDONTCARE resolution in Bugzilla too much to ask?” — pavlov@pavlov.net
“Houston, we have a problem…” — James Lovell, Apollo 13
“Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free” — Linus Torvalds
+++OUT OF CHEESE ERROR: REDO FROM START+++
303 Keyboard error, press F1 to continue.
404. File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)
How could I break the Mac? I don’t even BUILD on the Mac!
A Communicator access a day helps keep micro$oft’s fury at bay…
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of
vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall
be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of
days.- Mozilla, 12:10
Area = Pi*r^2 — No no!! Pie are round, cornbread are square!
Do I have to pay the RIAA licensing fees for music I have stuck in my head?
Don’t make me bust a CAPS LOCK on your ASCII!!!
ERROR IN BRAIN.VXD: Thought Halted
Hey, can I use “background-colour:” in my stylesheets?
How to make COBOL a great language? Remove “OBOL”.
How to make COBOL a great language? Select “COBO” then Type “Per”.
Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No-one hears your screams.

Well, I’m done.

If you need more funny quips:
bugzilla.mozilla.org quips
bugs.webkit.org quips

Now, I unlocked Sonic, and Green Hills Zone.

After I finished SSE, there was like 12 things that popped up!

Anyways, it was very fun to play SSE. I’m not very good. I’m gonna start doing online play.

My Friend Code is: 1590-4739-1831

Please post your friend code in a comment.

Yes, it hurts.