November 2006 Archives

I always feel that hope when I see the day the earth stood still. How I would like our options to be that black and white.

Apparently there is a Notepad conspiracy where it hides certain text from the user. The problem is that it isn't hiding it, it's just guessing the character set incorrectly. Raymond explains things a lot more eloquently than I. It seems to be a similar problem in the gnome notepad (gedit) utility - when it can't guess the character set it puts up a D'oh, I can't interpret this file message.

The msnbc website's entertainment drop down is utterly insane... It can be disabled but on my screen those little teeny tiny targets are difficult. Fitts' law anyone?

Finally deactivated that fracking red mercury bomb. For the last mission I decided that all bets were off for all the other characters in the game - really should not have done that as it sent my stats into the floor. Prior to this mission it was practically 100% intact bad guys, for some places. Well, leaving the boat blow up doesn't count, does it?

Splinter cell Double Agent's auto updater seems to have a little bit of confusion as to what it's updating. The dialog says that it's the updater for the previous game. I do realize that it's mostly recycled code, but this should be a configurable. Thank crap they dropped the starf**ce protection system. It was really annoying, with subversive device drivers on the machine.

It turns out that I'm registered to vote. Apparently the road I live on is split in two. Just a little on the scary side.

Another stupid email. Just some text and a 'click here' link that simply directs you through doubleclick/edgesuite. Put some effing useful information in the email instead of trying to data mine at every possible occasion. And no, the message says you have received an html email, but the content... it's all plain text.
Bleugh, for a message that claimed to be a piece of customer service information, the fact that it directs to a data mining site angries up the blood.

Well Solaris express doesn't panic my laptop any more. I had one of those wierd variants of a bge card. Now all I need is wireless.
and sound...

It's the world's most advanced operating system? I mean really, that's an overstatement. Hello! that's nothing more than a brag as there's nothing to back up the statement. Advanced for what? File systems? zfs! observability? dtrace! pretties on the screen? XGL! The ability to perform more than one name service lookup at a time? [ok, that's a cheap shot, I'm sure they fixed this]
Pants, complete pants I tell you!

It reeks of some form of elitism, and lets be honest using X for so long made a three button mouse mandatory, what with the middle button paste thing, which I love and try to recreate on the PC when using cygwin/X applications. Every time I look at a mac, I get this chill just thinking about the higher price tag along with the crippled bar of a mouse button. It's effing stupid. We still have double click for the primary select, and if you want a context menu you need to use one of the extended keys (honestly, I can't remember which) to get it to pop up. It's a really fricking broken model when you have only one button.
Send in the pie menus, my friends, send in the pie menus.

Last week's South Park episode with Richard Dawkins was funny. No sacred cows left untipped with these guys.

I've been reading 'The God Delusion', by Signor Dawkins. Prior to reading this book, I've only read articles and summaries of his work. This is much more of a full digestion of his work.
To be honest, and this is based on some terrible reading in my youth, I'm a monist, with slightly dualistic tendencies based on being able to use some mechanical system to replace/reproduce someone's mind. Let's be honest about this; I think it's only a matter of time before we create a mechanical system that can replicate actual people. The why question is, of course, is this the same person?
If you recreate the exact mind of another person how can anyone determine after the fact that one is different from the other; in fact as a recreated being how do you know that one is more than the other. Consider if you replaced someone's brain one neuron after another is there any difference?
Honestly, this isn't a god question, it's not about god, it's more of the nature of existence. Whee, I can back myself up, what does this mean for my mind in the future?
Pants, I've just put into words something that has been sitting on my mind for a long time.
Sorry kids, I don't believe in a god.