WillWybrow.com

It’s all very well and good that our favourite social networking site is extremely functional with minimal page reloading (as is the Web 2.0 goal), Some things just aren’t meant to be dynamic. I think that Facebook is trying too hard. I would rather have a faster, old-fashioned system that reloads the page with every click than having to download ten megabytes of Javascript to do what the server could do in milliseconds.

On the other hand, the most ideal solution would be some sort of (customisable) graphical front-end and bypass the browser completely. It should be auto-updating, obviously, but other than that, code would be local for handling visuals, and the only thing that would have to be downloaded is the content (which is what? tiny pictures and blocks of text? almost nothing), taken care of without any web browsing required.

It would make the Facebook Chat attempt at instant-messaging a viable tool (since having the chat window plastered immovably across your browser window is more of a pain than a convenience) and it would help people like me keep their tempers while waiting for Facebook to collapse shitty profile boxes that people keep adding to their profiles.

Might look into it if there’s a nice API.

Well, finally, after an incredible amount of cumulative hours trying, failing and trying again, I have successfully got Yellow Dog Linux installed on a PS3 with fully-functioning wireless networking support.

And I promised myself that my first act with this new tool would be to post on this site about it!

Future developments include sexy streaming videos from anywhere in the world (well, the flat at least)… and from there? There is no limit.

I am not a huge fan of internet video. With my limited internet connection at university and the public location of my computer at home, I don’t get a lot of opportunities to fully explore the wonders that sites like YouTube have to offer. Even internet video serials (inexplicably dubbed ‘podcasts’ by many) are a pain, even though there’s none of the searching you need to employ to find a good YouTube flick.

My reasons for this are pretty much that it feels too casual to devote all my attention to (unlike, say, a DVD movie), but it’s too bandwidth and processor intensive to multitask while doing. The tiny, 320 by 240 pixel video box consumes an entire web browser (since you can’t be on two pages at once*), and that web browser is either on the screen I use for other web browsing or the screen I use for instant messaging. So whatever I do, it’s going to cut into the activities I usually engage in, and it doesn’t seem to fit in with any of them.

Nevertheless, there will be some reason that I have ended up at one of these sites, and for the half hour it takes me to get annoyed at the sluggish buffering rate or the poor quality and content of most of the trash online, I will inevitably find some godless footage to enjoy.

Why do I enjoy it? Surely I already know there’s no god, so having it iterated would only be annoying? No, it’s quite comforting to have my own views asserted back to me, backed up by select clips of the idiocy of theists. Not once would I actually take a YouTube video seriously or use one as a source for an argument; there’s just too much hearsay and opinion packed in around the uncited quotations and dubious facts to qualify for anything that would make me really think. The best ones are the little ongoing question sessions, like the one from Why Won’t God Heal Amputees (.com), that pose (usually ten) questions to watching believers in order to force them to question themselves. Then there are the gems from users like TheAmazingAtheist that are just rants and personal slurs.

It bothers me when YouTubers (um?) try too hard to be scientific. It all sounds wonderful until you realise that it’s in fact a sham and you ought to find a textbook or scientific paper if you want to discuss scientific facts, leaving the casual approach to internet video. So much is just announced without a word of reference.

Anyway, I have said it was a comfort to hear my views asserted back at me. Maybe this is my Sunday service? A pain to get into at first, boring by the end yet strangely confidence-boosting overall? Of course there are key differences (in the procedures of YouTubing and Sunday services, I meant. Obviously there’s the point that we are right and they are wrong, but that’s a given), but I’m still a little worried. While I like Carl Sagan’s quote that atheism is more than not believing, it’s a whole and scientific worldview, I can’t help but notice subtle undertones that speak of atheism in the same way one might refer to a religion. What people are calling “new atheism” keeps coming close to this. We’ve got our patriarchs (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris), we’ve got our books (their works) and we have our preachings. We miss the things that make religion what it is (dogma, doctrine, lies, etc.), but from the outside, what must it look like to others?

Just don’t want to see us classified as a religion instead of no religion.

Now is your chance to reassure me!

*And don’t give me an earful of “but tabbed browsing!!” because you can still only view one page at a time. As monitors get bigger, pages get bigger, so tiling multiple browser windows is futile (as well as being very 1995) and to really browse two pages at once, you need two screens.

Everyone needs a holiday. Everyone. Sometimes there’s such a thing as a partial holiday. It can look like he’s there, but he’ll be out of the office, leaving someone else in charge. A caretaker of sorts, but a caretaker of personal life.

Upon returning, if he’d left someone reliable in charge, everything would be running smoothly and there would be very little damage to repair. But TC didn’t have anyone reliable to leave in charge. He just had his wayward and unpredictable counterpart who went by the name of Ace.

“Who are you?” asked TC. “I haven’t seen you before.”

“I’m your assistant,” replied the new employee. “You can call me Ace.”

“Really? Why do people call you that?” asked TC, sceptical that anyone would have such a handle.

“It’s my name. Why do people call you ‘TC’?” asked Ace, becoming defensive at TC’s attitude.

Instead of replying, TC simply turned and left the company of his would-be ‘assistant.’ Aside from having a stupid name, the man had a stupid purpose. Since when did he need someone to assist him? Was his work not good enough? He went to see the Boss.

The Boss didn’t often respond to queries. It was his way to issue his reply through others, or if he did it in person, it was wrapped up in a cryptic hint. TC hoped he’d get a straight answer this time. He’d been confused by the Boss’s answers in the past, but after working the situation out himself, he could see how the clue should have helped.

The Boss lived at the Top. TC worked at the Bottom. It was never the case that the Boss came down from the Top, but he would send messages and messengers down to do his bidding. He never invited those from the Bottom to the Top, but still they came, unbidden. TC mounted the stairs and began the long ascent. He climbed the stairs with measured pace.

The staircase was a spiral, but it wasn’t a typically spiral staircase. The central axis was a hollow tube, and the staircase itself was very wide. It was in a flute of glass, the outer wall of the stairwell being made entirely of connected windows. As TC climbed higher and higher, his view of the world became wider and wider. His shoes made a pleasing echo as they came down on the white marble steps. There was an indistinguishable strip on each stair where the marble was unpolished, to give the steps additional grip on the shoes of those who climbed.

TC reached the top of the staircase, and set into the side of the flute was a doorway into the Top. There was no lock on this door, those from the Bottom were free to surface at any time. It used to be locked, many years before TC even awoke. But he did not think about such times, for the Boss during that period was still in training, developing to be all he was.

“I am here to see the Boss,” announced TC as he pushed the unlocked door open. He entered into a green and blue hall that was completely round. The ceiling was painted in a monochrome blue, but the lighting of the room (one central, yellow sphere) caused it to appear to have a gradient. The walls of the room were painted in the same blue, down to about halfway, and from there started the unusual green and sand pattern. The floor was a huge mosaic of tiny tiles in a range of greens and browns, with streaks and patches of blue throughout. If TC had known a little more about life outside, he would realise that this was, in fact, a map of part of the world.

At the point of the room opposite from the doorway to the stairwell was a desk that was curved to fit the wall. Behind the desk was another door, this one had a tiny glass pane set into it. It was circular, about the size of a large coin, and it allowed the attendant who was sat behind the desk to see the Boss. The attendant was lifeless at the moment. It had no mind, the Boss just gave it directions to follow. As TC approached, however, its preprogrammed response began, and it raised its artificial face to TC, speaking in a slow, synthetic voice.

“Wait here.” The drone stood and put its eye to the tiny window set into the door that would be indistinguishable from the rest of the wall, save for the silver doorknob attached to it. Turning back to face TC, the drone spoke in a more natural tone, adding a little humanity to the situation. “What is your query?”

“I demand to know the meaning of assigning me an ‘assistant,’” fumed TC. “Is my work not satisfactory?”

“Necessity facilitates it,” replied the drone, back to its monotone.

“Damn it, don’t give me any of that cryptic bullshit,” warned TC, his temper rising. “Give me a straight answer, or, so help me, I will go in there and get a straight answer.”

“Necessity facilitates it,” repeated the attendant. Furious, TC ran to the desk and jumped across it, slamming the attendant out of his way. He grabbed the doorknob and wrenched it as hard as he could. The door gave way, but slowly. TC set one of his feet against the wall and used it to gain leverage as he pulled the heavy door open. Unnatural white light flooded the room, and TC forced the door wide enough to walk through.

“I am coming in,” he said, feeling some inexplicable need to announce himself, to warn whatever was on the other side and give it a chance to stop him progressing further. He was afraid. Blinded by the bright light, TC put his hand up to his face as he inched over the threshold.

In the same way as a camera balances out light levels, suddenly the bright light seemed no brighter than was usual, and the glare receded as TC walked into the room. Where was he? He looked around to see a huge, circular room, painted in the same colours and decorated in the same manner as the attendant’s room, with one or two distinctions.

All the colours were much darker. The ceiling and upper walls were very dark, almost purple in colour. The ground ranged from dark greens to black, and the blue streaks and patches in the floor were also very dark, now almost looking like land themselves. The single, yellow orb in the ceiling was now a much dimmer, white orb, and glittery sparks glowed on the ceiling.

There was a desk at the far end of this room too, but where the other desk was made of a deep, dark brown mahogany, this one was a bright beech wood. Behind the desk sat another dull-faced attendant sat in front of door with a gold doorknob. As TC approached, the second drone came to life.

“You will receive your answer here,” it began, and TC stopped at the front of the desk, eying the gold doorknob. Inside, he wished that the answers he got here would be unsatisfactory, just to excuse him going through that next door. The drone spoke again. “You have received appointed help. You are to share assignments with him, but each do individual reports. They will be submitted together. Sometimes we will choose one, other times we will choose both. If needs be, we may combine the two into a single report under one name.”

“Why? What’s the purpose of all this?”

“Twofold. Firstly, there are some assignments where your work is not applicable. That is not to say that what you produce is not outstanding, but it occasionally is not fit for purpose. That is fine, such purposes were not in your role description, therefore it is not expected of you. But we have attempted to use your work in other fields by disguising assignments, to no avail. So, we will simply write them exactly as we have need, and though your work will not fit the requirements, the work of your assistant will. The other purpose is for security and reliability. If there are two of you, and one fails, it is less devastating to the Boss’s work than it would be were there just one of you who failed. And you have scheduled leave impending,” concluded the drone dramatically.

“Scheduled leave?!” asked TC, horrified, who had never taken a day off in his life. “What for?”

“There are some things the Boss needs to take care of, maintenance and corrections to the system, which has developed problems we are unable to solve with you here. Therefore your will be sent on fully paid, unconditional and indefinite leave, until such time as you are required again. Your noble principles and logical mindset are worthwhile assets, and will be missed for the time you are away, but in order to complete this maintenance we will need someone who is a little less honourable.”

“Why?” asked TC once more, desperate for some closure on his dismissal.

“I am sorry. You have been informed of all that is necessary for you to continue. You are excused from the Top now.”

As much as he would have liked to have argued the point, there really was nothing that could be done when asked to leave the Top. TC suddenly found himself in the glass-walled flute again, looking out over the land. What had been a bright, sunny day before had now clouded over, and the overcast weather looked like it would only get worse…

AtheistPorn.com Update

A while ago, I wrote about our discovery of AtheistPorn.com during a meeting when things got a little off track.

I wrote to the owner of the site as soon as I could. Here is a transcript of my message:

Furry Girl,
Some friends and I happened across the website, AtheistPorn.com. After posting about it on my site, word got around and someone finally referred me to your websites, informing me that you were the owner of AtheistPorn.com as well.
I’d like to start by telling you how great the idea is. Do you have any plans to add to the site’s content in the future?
Just wondering!
Regards,
TC

After a considerable wait (the owner is subject to masses of e-mail, so it takes a while to reply to it all), here is my long-sought response from Furry Girl:

Hi TC
I’m not sure when I’m going to do more with AtheistPorn.com, but it is on my list. Mainly, I’d like to showcase my fellow pornographers and models who are atheists, just as a sort of pervy element of the overall “outing of atheists” that folks like Dawkins have really been trying to popularize.
Stay tuned!
Furry Girl

So, that’s our message; it’s not a dead site and it will someday be a fully-fledged godless playground. Until then, I guess we wait…

Having failed to boot the promised wonder of the custom PS3 2.6.24 kernel, I decided to give the whole thing another try by downloading the source for the latest, 2.6.25, and compiling that on the PS3. What could go wrong?

Well, I didn’t fine-tune the modules and drivers that I needed, so it took for fucking ever. Then, of course, when it was done, the PS3 wouldn’t boot into it. Pushing my browser to its limit, I opened up a quick page to search for possible causes of the problems. There are two tentative answers to the problem; one that I need the latest kboot version, and to install that (but I think I already have it… I can, however, check). The other “solution” is that the PS3 doesn’t like booting into kernels above 2.6.22… I can’t see this being a likely answer, however.

I did discover an undercurrent of Microsoft-style totalitarianism after I executed make install. The kernel installer takes it upon itself to change my boot configuration and update the vmlinux symlink in /boot to whatever new fucking thing it was, and rename whatever it pointed to before to vmlinux.old.

This is all well and good, apart from the fact that my stable kernel was already called vmlinux.old, and this got overwritten. That meant it was a frantic dash for the kboot prompt before it timed out and booted an unbootable kernel to firstly search the hard drive for a usable kernel (oh, I’d forgotten which ones worked and which ones didn’t) and get the command line options right. I eventually was given a half-way there shell prompt which (unlike the kboot shell) mounted the hard drive as writable. So, I was able to scribe myself a new kboot.conf using echo that gave me options for a number of the older kernels. Next reboot, we were back rolling.

Anyway, to summarise the problems: the system freezes about 5 lines after the kboot prompt.

I have this weird situation happening with some people I know.

It’s so, so weird…

I’m telling you, there’s something unsettling about how blind the two of them are to what they obviously have in common. They are alike in key ways but not so much that they’d be bored with each other’s company. They have the same half-attempt at grammar and spelling when they write; there are mistakes, but not too many, and the prose doesn’t necessarily always flow right. Their personal message fields in Windows Messenger are written in exactly the same tone… as in, show me one and I’d be hard pressed to choose which one of the two the message came from… seriously. They’ve got the same kind of humour (and I think this is important for people to get along). Fuck me, they even smell the same (and you’re going to think that one is weird of me to say, but it’s actually true, they’ve got some common components in their “personal smell” (not that they smell particularly strongly or badly, but everyone has a personal smell, you know?)).

What I want to know, is: is there any way I can force them to get together? It’s for the greater good, but I don’t think that’s what two people consider when thinking about dating.

Remember, the greater good…

The fun never ends with everyone’s favourite open source operating system…

As stated in the previous post, I tried installing a custom 2.6.24 PPC kernel this morning. To my complete irritation, the thing installed after a great deal of hassle on my part, but still failed to boot when I needed it to.

On the plus side, I now know that the best working kernel I’m playing with at the moment supports the PS3’s wired connection completely. Before, this was just an assumption, and knowing my luck, it could easily have not worked at all, or only worked on the kernel that omits the SD card slot driver… But it works fine, and I gave ToolChronicles a customary browse with good old Firefox… It wasn’t satisfying enough to wash out the ashen taste of failure in my mouth from not getting 2.6.24 to boot, however.

Not to worry, I shall be going over the instructions (if I can find the page again throughout my many tabs) and checking I did everything right. And I’ll probably have another shot at it either tomorrow, Wednesday or Thursday at the very latest. I will keep you all posted (if you care…).

…is triple your usual web browsing

Loading the PocketPC build of Fedora 5 Core onto Roku’s 60GB PS3 was much easier than I’d expected. Making it run perfectly was not.

Aside from there being no wireless network support (which is really more of an inconvenience than a real issue anyway), there was some stupid problem with Fedora that kicked off all users (bar root) after ten seconds of being logged in to KDE or Gnome. Scouring the internet (and tripling my browsing) came up with no solutions. So, abandoning that, I tried to download Yellow Dog Linux, which allegedly included wireless support anyway, further helping the situation. But, when the time came to click on the link to the FTP site, I had no room on my hard drive to fit the image file (yeah, but what can you do?). So I started ferreting around for ISOs I no longer needed (as in, I’ve burned them to CD or DVD… you never delete stuff because it will eventually come back to bite you when you least expect it). Instead of finding them, I uncovered my “ps3ux” directory with Ubuntu PPC 7.10 in it. So, I decided to give it a try. Never mind that it favours Gnome (inherent homosexuality, see below), it probably wouldn’t log out all other users after ten seconds, and there are some kernel patches that boast wireless support.

A few hours later, we were up and running. So far, it’s beaten Fedora in terms of reliability, but wireless networking is still an issue. I’ve got a new kernel that I’m going to RPM and boot later (when people have stopped selfishly using the TV for “entertainment”…), so I’ll bring you an update on that when we’re there. As it stands, by the way, the wireless indicator LED on the PS3 lights up, but iwconfig is being a fussy bitch and the network manager says “no connection.”

This is the future of Java. One day…

N.B.; this is not the same Michael from Michael’s Revenge (below), in case you were wondering.