As much as I love science and the idea of a using science to create a cloud of swarming insects that replaces the sky with eternal darkness, I have to protest. I was browsing through the articles on one of my favorite sites hackaday.com when I happened across a post on controlling beetle flight remotely. Well, that’s cool. Someone built a robot beetle that can fly, like in the movies when you see a spy fly that buzzes deep into enemy territory and sniffs out where the terrorist nukes are.

But no, these ain’t no robots. An group of engineers from UC Berkeley “restrained” a beetle, implanted electrodes into its brain, and used a remote to force the creature into controlled flight. I have to say this is a pretty disgusting act. As humans, we’ve now taken another life form, a being with its own free will and consciousness, and stripped it of just about all that makes it alive, and made it dance a jig for us. It still breathes and exists (for how long I wonder) but its very actions are now controlled by some group of people who did it just to see if they could. Congratulations on making the human race as a whole a just bit more repulsive than it was before.

Also, I don’t buy the “relax, it’s just a beetle” bullshit. Torture is torture, it doesn’t matter who it’s happening to. None of us can imagine what it’s like to have electrodes implanted in our brain administering continuous electrical shocks…and to justify a wrong by saying it happened to something small in size, or happened to something with an exoskeleton is no excuse. What makes it so separate from us? It’s a living, breathing, procreating biological machine that feels and responds to its world…just like us. The only real difference between a beetle and a human is that the human falsely thinks there is a difference between the two.

First article from Feb – insect control
Article on flight control – flight control

It is my firm belief that everyone who participated should be subject to remote control neural implants for a day, with a retarded 6 year old behind the controls.

As all of my hundreds of thousands of readers know, I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my girlfriend’s laptop. Aside from the confusingly random names they give Ubuntu releases, I have to say I’m extremely impressed. The basic idea is that if you want a server linux, go with Debian or Slackware…both are extremely stable, highly configurable, and FAST. Slackware is a bit more for advanced users than Debian (not a big deal if you know how to edit config files) and perhaps a tad faster, but both are well-oiled machines ready to handle anything you can throw at them.

If you want a desktop machine, check out Ubuntu. All the things I try expecting it not to work, it just works. For example, I was testing flash on it and the volume was too loud. Just for shits and giggles, I tried the volume buttons on the laptop. Holy shit, it works. Next, I’m installing printer drivers on the VirtualBox XP instance. Well guess what? I plugged in the printer thinking, well thank god I have windows installed because it will autodetect it. Instantly, I see a window popup in Ubuntu telling me that my printer has been installed and is ready for use. Now that’s service.

Now, all of this plug and chug computing surely comes at some sort of performance hit, but who the hell cares if it makes your life easier and you don’t have a production website running on that box that gets 1000 requests/s.

There is the issue of auto-updates. Sure you need to update buggy or hackable software…but ahem, why is it on there in the first place? The reason distros like slack and deb don’t need constant auto-updating is because they choose packages that have been known for a long time to be rock solid. I can’t say I agree with the “constant contact with the update server” methodology that windows instilled in all of us. That’s something you’d never use on a server. If something sucks or has security problems, you hand-update that package and test it a billion times with your software. Once again though, this is a desktop machine, not a server…and the auto update worked pretty damn well.

So while this review is short and sweet, so has my experience been with Ubuntu. Perhaps someday I’ll install it on one of my own laptops and take it for a whirl.

Ubuntu: two thumbs up for the new or casual desktop linux user. Not for server usage. I’m sure there are some servers that use it successfully, but none of mine ever will =).

So my girlfriend got fed up with Windows. The constant exploits, viruses, slow degeneration of the registry into an slimy ooze of nebulous information. In fact, her windows machine decided to blue screen on every boot, even in safe mode.

I’m not writing to bitch about windows though. I’m writing because she decided to go with Linux, and the first thing that came to mind for a beginner is Ubuntu. Keep in mind, I’m a slackware guy and generally turn my nose up at such things, but this isn’t for me. Plus I wanted to see what Ubuntu is all about. The install was easy, the configuration was easy, I now have good old XP running in a VirtualBox, etc. Things are going great.

Two problems. First, it’s a bit laggy. Some of the screen savers make it seem like the computer was decrypting an NSA information stream…it’s like watching a slideshow. That’s fine, it’s a fucking screen saver. I just went with a simple one.

Second, flash player in Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04 is fucking slow in full-screen. After beating the forums and google to death, I finally found something that works:

sudo mkdir /etc/adobe
sudo echo "OverrideGPUValidation = 1" >> /etc/adobe/mms.cfg

Why does it work? How the f should I know? Ask Adobe. It worked for me and if you’re have problems with flash in fullscreen on Ubuntu, give it a shot. I’ve also noticed that many people suggest disabling hardware acceleration for a performance gain. In order for the above trick to work, you must RE-enable hardware acceleration in flash: right click on any flash video, go to “Settings” and check “Enable Hardware Acceleration.”

Voilà.

PS. Try slackware…never had flash problems =D

Smarty is everyone’s favorite templating language for PHP. It’s great in many ways, one of the main features being that it can display things on a website. It also promotes separation of display code and logic, which many PHP programmers seem to have trouble with: oscommerce, PHPList, etc etc.

So why do I hate it?

<rant>
There’s no fucking point! All bad programmers write bad code. Why create a language within a language just to force bad programmers to do one thing right? I realize that Smarty does enforce separation of logic from display very well. I’ve used it in several projects. But if its capabilities are so strikingly similar to PHP that for most things there is a 1-1 reference, why bother? Why not just use PHP code?

Also, the plugins (and {php} tag) allow you to make logical decisions, run mysql queries, send rockets to the moon…there’s nothing you can do in PHP that you cannot do in Smarty…which makes Smarty completely worthless for what it’s trying to do.

If you want to promote good programming, you don’t need Smarty. You can rewrite Smarty as a PHP object that sets variables and includes a template. I’ve written this a dozen times over…and it does the exact same thing, except templates are in PHP so everyone can understand them, there is no caching trickery going on, and best of all you don’t need to reference some stupid guide on how to display something in a strange language which you already know how to do in PHP.
</rant>

So, in summation, please don’t stop using Smarty. It’s a good piece of code for people who don’t understand the basics of separation of logic from display…but realize that Smarty is a hack, a patch, a band-aid. The REAL problem is bad programming, not something inherently wrong with PHP that needs to be rewritten.

Holaaa. Added a code section on the main page that I plan to more more into. It’s got tag searching (intersection-based) for all two pieces of code posted (in case you can’t find one or the other) but there’s going to be more coming up, hopefully.

So go check it out. All the code on there is free to use, distribute, sell, whatever you want. Just give me credit, or prepare yourself for hand-to-hand combat.

kkthxbai

Here I will outline some wonderful techniques I’ve developed for saving the planet. A lot of these may come off as common sense but, as we all know, most people don’t have it so I’ll go over them anyway.

1. Driving. This is the obvious and hard one. Although I realize you can’t stop driving altogether, there are ways to drive the same distance without using as much gas.
   • Accellerate slowly. You are driving a 2 ton object. Although it feels slow, generating the amount of power to get that object from 0 to 30 is enormous, and a lot of fuel is used to get started. I can’t stress how important this is going uphill…take it slow.
   • Don’t stop for anything. Once you stop, you have to accelerate again. If you are coming up on a red light, decrease your speed a few hundred feet before you reach it. Then, you’ll be traveling a constant slow(er) speed and by the time you get there, the light will be green. If you get good at timing, you’ll be able to keep up a good speed and never have to stop for a red. Don’t mind the asshole tailgating you, they’d have to wait at the light anyway. With stop signs, obey the “no cop, no stop” philosophy.
   • Keep your tires filled and your car in tune.
   • Get a better car. If you actually go offroad a lot, you constantly haul stuff around, or have to deal with 3 feet of snow, you can skip this step. If you live in California like me, you can ditch your stupid SUV and get a real car. Remember, the size of your dick is inversely proportional to the size of your car. The bigger your car, the tinier your penis.
   • Get off your fat McDonalds ass and walk or ride your bike once in a while.
2. Lights. Get compact fluorescents. The initial cost is worth the eventual energy savings. They last forever and are much brighter than incandescents. Also, with any type of light, it’s better to leave it on for a few minutes than to incessantly turn it on and off. Note – with compact fluorescents, they are not disposable…they need to be properly recycled!
3. Heating/cooling. Heating a house or apartment is a big deal, so do it only when you need to. Wear a coat or put on some shorts and open the windows. Yes, you may be uncomfortable, but don’t be such a fuckin’ wuss. Some people are cold all the time and have no food. Bein uncomfortable builds character. Get over yourself, asswipe.
4. Food. I’m not going to shove the organic thing down your throat. It is better, however, to buy foods from your area. If you live in Siberia, skip this step. If not, supporting foods that haven’t been trucked across the globe saves energy because they haven’t been trucked across the globe.
5. If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brow… You get it. Flushing doesn’t waste water. Water just goes back into the water cycle. Flashing wastes electricity. Huh? Toilets don’t use electricity, stupid! Oh yes they do. In order for the water to come out your sink or toilet, it has to be pressurized. This takes a lot of energy. Imagine, if you will, trying to pressurize an entire city with a hand pump. A lot of work, right? Right. Well, pumps use electricity, and a lot of it. The less water you use, the less electricity used to pressurize the water system.
6. Don’t die. As your body decomposes, it releases harmful carbon into the atmosphere.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my energy-saving tips. Be sure to stay tuned for more in the future.

We’ve all heard of proposition 8 in California…the ban on gay marriage. It was a dark, bloody political battle that ended in tears, anger, but also joy and a feeling of sanctity for those that won. Let me say that I do not support prop 8. Not because of the rule itself so much as it being a constitutional amendment, not a law. The very document that lists the rights of the residents of the state of California was amended to tell a specific subset of people that they cannot partake in a religious ceremony that binds them for life.

I don’t support state-sanctioned gay marriage. Not in any way shape or form. I don’t think the state (political state, not geographic state) has the right to marry two men or two women. Neither does it have the right to marry a straight couple though. Marriage, although deeply ingrained in our society, is a religious ceremony. It’s a dance two people do to signify their unending commitment.

The state has absolutely no business supporting this ritual. I believe separation of church and state has been defiled by the state taking it upon itself to say who can marry and who cannot. Is that not up to the specific religion the couple in question are marrying under? What moral right does the state have to support a religious ritual and then only for a specific set of people?

I believe the state has overstepped its bounds. I believe the state, as it already does, should allow civil unions between partners, giving them the applicable tax breaks they would receive as a married couple, but not marry people. Marriage is a religious institution and as such should be completely unrecognized by the state.

Note that this would solve all conflicts surrounding marriage. Two gay men can get married at the devil-worshiping, blood-drinking, child-molesting church down the street, and Mr. Conservative who goes to the bread-eating, jesus-praising, child-molesting church up the street doesn’t have to recognize the two gay men’s marriage. It didn’t happen at his church or under his rules, so in his mind, the marriage can be null and void… but the state gives the two gay men their civil union, and then politely bows out of the conflict, letting the upstanding Christian and the society-destroying gays fight it out between themselves.

Everyone wins, and the state can wash its hands clean of all moral conflict surrounding a religous institution.

So you may have noticed some changes going on with the site. Don’t worry, these changes will continue. In fact, you cannot stop them, even if you pay me $1 million. You’re welcome to send me a check anyway though.

I’m adding a homepage (powered by aframe, site coming soon!) that shows links to sites, movies, etc…anything I think is worth checking out. I’ll be adding a code section soon to showcase how fucking good I am at programming.

Stay tuned for more updates.