Terminally Incoherent

Steven Johnson needs to get a medal for his open letter to Hilary Clinton. All I can say is: “Fucking brilliant”!

Sigh… I think more gamers should start voting. If we would get that critical mass of voting power to register on political radar we wouldn’t have this problem… Oh wait… What am I saying… I forgot that politicians do not care about voters when big money is involved. Let me rephrase it - video game companies should start lobbying American government more vigorously.

Btw - why is Hilary going ballistic over this? Is this prude and popper act an attempt to distance herself from Bill’s indiscretions? Does anyone (excluding backwards bible beaters) still cares about that anyway?

I have a fever, and the only cure is more Cowbell!

The other day I was fighting with a really shitty desktop at work. All I had was an oldish HP monitor which for some reason did not want to work with WinXP. The frequency was wrong or something like that. Sad part is that I needed to log into windows to fix it - but I could not do that without a monitor (and the desktop was set up not to allow remote connection).

Fortunately, all I needed to do is to get in there and copy some files to the server. So after looking for a working monitor for half an hour, I pulled out my CD case… And realized that I gave away all my Knoppix CD’s! (Note to self: burn more Knoppix!)

So I ended up using Slax which I had in my case for a while now. It was a godsend - the version I had was booting into text mode and I could simply access the public shares via smb from bash. But just for the kicks I tried KDE. Again - monitor could not handle it. I killed X and tried again - this time using slax script called guisafe. I’m not sure what it involved (I guess starting up X with the lowest specs possible) but it worked like magic! I had KDE running within seconds, and I was happily browsing network shares, and copying files where needed.

Today I had to do a total wipe & reinstall on that machine. WinXP installation held up nice on the shitty monitor all the way through install, configuration and until the first real boot into windows. And then it crapped out again. I actually had to drag the box to the next cube to get a working monitor and finish up.

Conclusion - my I would be dead without my live linux cd’s. And my monitor is a piece of shit Oh, and slax is actually extremely useful. If you don’t have Knoppix handy, Slax can be a lifesaver. And it is one of those minimalistic suites that will fit on the 8cm cd - that makes it more portable than a full sized knoppix cd.

Of course there’s always DSL Linux which weighs in at 50 meg, and fits on a credit card sized cd Or course it is a little on the light side, application wise. Still, it is a fully functional, multi purpose distro.

If you don’t care for flexibility, and need your h4xing tools you can always go with the infamous Knoppix STD which is a really bare bones system with some useful tools for cracking passwords and doing security audits. I actually used it at one point to reset passwords in a winxp box that got locked out.

Mark Frauenfelder from boingboing just posted an interesting note about the Gorkster ruling. This was originally posted on Daily Kos by RadicalRuss. If you haven’t noticed it yet - the Gorkster ruling is grossly contradictory to the new legislation shielding gun companies from liabilities! The Daily Kloss post has a side by side comparison of both statements.

And here is the gist of it all:

If a company makes a product that is inappropriately used to illegally copy a movie, that company is liable. If a company makes a product that is inappropriately used to illegally kill a human, that company is not liable. What’s the common logic holding these disparate concepts together? Massive corporate special interest money. Welcome to your government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations

This is incredibly sad but true. If you ever needed a proof that our government and judicial system is corrupt, look no further. This really makes me sick…

Now the big question is - if this bill passes, can someone use this in a p2p defense case? Or is it gun only?

VGCats strip created and maintained by Scott Ramsoomair always makes me giggle. This time he takes on the recent GTA Hot Coffee Debacle in his unique, quirky, dirty minded way. You got to love it!

I wish he would publish a RSS feed so that I could subscribe to the strip. Actually, I just realized that a precious few webcommics actually uses RSS to syndicate their work. It’s a pity, because I would love to have live bookmarks to my favorite strips on my toolbar.

So, if you are a comic strip creator, and you happen to be reading this: get with the program and start syndicating via RSS!

Update:

I emailed Scott about the same time I posted this. He just got back to me with a link to his new RSS feed. Awesome! Maybe I should start emailing some of the other commic strips that I like?