ros' rants (mcmonkeys1 rants)

3D Cinema

2012-01-12T10:48:00.004Z

I saw Martin Scorcese's Hugo in 3D in the cinema last night. Everytime I go to the cinema in the last while I'm dissapointed by the small screens, often lack of surround sound, and appalling shutter speeds. The 3D was good, and the movie was not too gimmicky about it, but did use it. BUT! I could not help thinking: yeah that ball looks great coming out of the screen, but why am I seeing eight of them when it moves? It really seems like they're slapping 21st century technology onto 1970s tech, and I guess that's what they are doing, but really they need to update these projectors properly if they want the cinema industry to survive. I think a lot of people have large flat screens and possibly 5.1 surround at home these days. Surely they should increase the framerate and screen size by updating old tech or moving over to digital projectors? And for the love of jaysis turn on the feckin surround sound if you've got the equipment!

Atomic Wiring

2012-01-11T03:54:00.002Z

Researches have just made and tested wires that are 4x1 atoms thick! Small eh? They used it to verify things like Ohm's Law at this scale. Read about it here.

Viewsonic VG2436wm-LED

2011-12-26T09:33:00.004Z

My awesome new Viewsonic VG2436wm-LED monitor (pics pending). Another fantastic gift to myself ;-) Thanks Ros! No problem, anytime Ros.

24" 1080p, colours look vibrant, contrast ratio is high. Viewing angles are no great shakes, but no worse than other monitors. The most stand-out feature is pivot support (rotation) so that monitor can go into portrait mode. This is great for reading long articles, and should be fantastic for writing long functions when I get around to programming again. I have only tested this function on my laptop so far with Intel drivers, works great! Simply put mouse pointer on screen you desire to be rotated and then use the CTRL+ALT+arrow-direction keyboard shortcuts to rotate to desired screen orientation, very quick and easy to apply. The height can be adjusted to quite an exteme to allow for easier rotation, it makes the unit a little prone to shaking about slight vibration though, and may need a sturdy desk/worktop surface.

All in all, a nice little number, and the cheapest 24" monitor with pivot adjustment support built in and decent screen specs.

[UPDATE]
New monitor in action:

OCZ Agility 3 60GB

2011-12-25T22:51:00.005Z

Santa's been! Actually I bought this one myself. I have a Lenovo R400 Thinkpad, it takes about 4/5mins to boot up and hard drive always seems to be thrashing. Seemed to be getting 40-60 MB/sec moving large files off the hard drive which is pretty shit. Bought myself an OCZ Agility 3 60GB and fuck me it's fast! Seem to be getting impossible speeds. It has SATA 150 interface (i.e. 150MB/sec theoretical upper speed limit) but testing with numerous softwares are getting figures of 200MB/sec and over???

It's booting and shutting down breathtakingly fast, i'm actually stunned as to how fast it is, PLUS the drive is designed for SATA 600 interface! I have SATA 300 in my main PC, i will run some tests on that machine at a later date, but stunning results so far! SSDs really do live up to the hype!

[UPDATE]
In retrospect, clearly the Lenovo spec sheet was wrong. Laptop must have SATA300 interface. Getting contiguous large file reads of 250MB/s during testing, but have recorded burst rates of ~298MB/s by monitoring actual system performance using HDTune Pro. Impressive stuff! Alas now, in the inevitable race ever upwards, I am noticing the limiting factor of my laptop's CPU power, and my once proud RAID disk system is beginning to feel a little challenged, regular defragging is now needed and the once seemingly quick boot times seem to take an age as I restart my laptop several times for fun as it does one single boot..

Funny

2011-12-18T00:30:00.000Z

Google this "what defines an english person". First hit, hilarious.

Dennis Ritchie is dead. Long live UNIX and C!

2011-10-27T21:44:00.001+01:00

Sad news and no fanfare for the passing of this s/w giant =(

Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, Passes Away At Age 70

Virgin Media Business study

2011-10-14T19:00:00.001+01:00

A Virgin Media Business study found that 70 percent of smartphone owners would rather give up alcohol than be without their phone.

Are you a smartphone owner and which would you choose?

Ditch Irish for Chinese

2011-10-11T13:13:00.002+01:00

Teaching irish language in irish schools is a quaint idea for keeping the language alive, but lets face it, it's useless. When will u ever use it? Anytime i've spoken irish to an irish person (with my extremely limited vocabularly) ppl just give me that confused vacant stare because they know even less irish than me after 14 years of force fed gaelige. Chinese on the other hand is going to be the lingua franca of international business if current trends continue. Any other nationality already has a head start on us by learning a widely used international second language from the beginning of schooling. The mandatory teaching (notice i didnt say learnning) of irish language is in fact a hindrance to the prosperity of irish ppl. Anyhow, enough raggin on irish everyone knows it already, but what about teaching chinese to toddlers eh?

food crisis update!

2011-09-23T16:45:00.000+01:00

There are now twice as many obese ppl than those dying from starvation according to the red cross. Good news no?

Meteor mobile broadband.

2011-08-26T17:08:00.003+01:00

hooked my laptop up to my phone with a usb cable. so i now have internet at home, wahey!
here are my stats from speedtest.net, bathe in their glory ;-)

Hot shit no? My emails are blazing down in mere minutes!

Actual picture of electron orbitals in a molecule!

2011-08-26T13:09:00.002+01:00

Here is what the molecule looks like in theory:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentacene

Here are the real imaged/measured(!!!) views of the molecules electron orbitals:
news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/molecules-imaged-most-intimately.html

Be amazed! Those weird looking orbital lobey things you may have seen in chemistry class actually exist like that in real life AND we can look at them. We can now look directly at the orbitals that electrons take.

(All the more fantastic for me as i was never really sure that i believed in them.)

Ouroboros in the Flesh!

2011-06-08T01:37:00.006+01:00

"Plato described a self-eating, circular being as the first living thing in the universe—an immortal, mythologically constructed beast.

The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet." - from Plato's Timaeus

If it wasn't for The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy) this would be a little more beautiful to me, personally I don't believe the eventual universe, a static, homogeneous, vast field of radiation really counts as a living thing anymore, more of a remaining smudge of a long deceased corpse.

Makes me think of this scene from Lars Von Trier's Antichrist:

Entropy is sometimes expressed (slightly ambiguously in my opinion) as the amount of chaos (disorder) in a system, meaning the dispersal of energy around the system after spontaneous changes (tending towards equilibrium). Nonetheless the fox rips himself apart as he eats and while there is circular movement the end is inexorable and 'Chaos reigns'. Ya dig?

VIOLENCE STARTS IN BARCELONA

2011-06-01T23:05:00.002+01:00

pretty gay shit going on

"The POLICE (Civil servants) were ordered to ATTACK the Civilians in my city this morning during the completely peaceful and very well organised protest and sit in that has been going on for a week now in the main Squares of every major city in Spain.

We are fine and attending this protest daily, just want to make sure you are all aware whats happening here."

UNPROVOKED POLICE BRUTALITY VIDEO

SIGN THIS PETITION

Live streaming of Plaza Catalunya - Barcelona

Manifesto (Translated)

Firefox v4

2011-05-08T18:27:00.002+01:00

Upgraded to Firefox v4 there last night. Seems to want to crash all over the shop. It's also using
a whopping 400+ MBs of ram. I'd recommend any Firefox users delay their upgrade until next
incremental release, at least (version 4.1?). Other than that, the GUI interface
now resembles Google Chrome. There is also built-in support for roaming browsing, i.e. save
your tabs+history+watever to a server so they open up on whatever machine your using. I also
have a lot of custom settings in "about:config" which have been left unchanged by the
upgrade. That is good =) I haven't snooped around much apart from that.

--

Droplets colliding

2011-05-08T17:39:00.003+01:00

Some cool lookin shit.

700GB of data gone :-(

2011-05-03T02:39:00.004+01:00

The hard drive in my Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive (hmnhd) has died with the loss of 700GB of data. This is extra annoying as i was in the middle of collecting data from all of my machines into the one place (the dead drive) with the idea that i'd then make a backup of that. Suffice is to say i'm gutted. This is the first hard drive that has completely gone on me with catastrophic data loss. FML.

This just keeps making me laugh

2011-04-24T01:52:00.001+01:00

L0UI5 TH3R0UX - \/\/estboro Baptist Church "The mo5t h4ted f4mily in am3rica"

2011-04-05T03:20:00.007+01:00

L0UI5 TH3R0UX's first documentary on the \/\/estboro Baptist Church "The mo5t h4ted f4mily in am3rica". Apologies for the semi-1337 but I'm attempting to hide the link.

Part 2 just aired and is available from the usual sources e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ticxD0GfewA

'Karak' Out Soon!

2011-03-23T18:59:00.002Z

Hairy malaysian ghosts n shit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kGxFgnxIHM

Anarchists for Fianna Fáil

2011-02-18T15:47:00.001Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yieS7jWWdB8

Alternative to "The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie"

2011-02-17T15:41:00.004Z

Found a great book for learning C. Lesson 1 is the usual "hello world", but literally the next example dives into using it as a CGI script. It teaches all the usual C console output stuff, but concentrates on web programming with C and apache web server. This is great, as the terminal is a bit boring looking for the uninitiated, and most ppl are used to booting up and instantly firing up the web browser to click aimlessly on social networking sites.

It includes clean code examples, and moves rapidly on to interacting with mysql and creating images on the fly, while still learning about loop structures etc. At 84 pages of breakneck speed learning, I'd love to hear how a novice gets on with this book. I'm a relatively seasoned C/C++ programmer and I'm still getting mileage out of it.

"C Programming in Linux" by David Haskins.

Download pdf & examples (for free!) here: http://bookboon.com/external/computerweekly/it/c-programming-in-linux
(If your not a UK IT student just put "abroad" and "other" in drop downs).

Dijkstra & Mathematics Inc.

2011-02-09T14:54:00.003Z

Pretty funny, this is swiped from the Wikipedia entry for Dijkstra. He's a pretty important figure in computer science.

"One of Dijkstra's sidelines was serving as Chairman of the Board of the fictional Mathematics Inc., a company that he imagined having commercialized the production of mathematical theorems in the same way that software companies had commercialized the production of computer programs. He invented a number of activities and challenges of Mathematics Inc. and documented them in several papers in the EWD series. The imaginary company had produced a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis but then had great difficulties collecting royalties from mathematicians who had proved results assuming the Riemann Hypothesis. The proof itself was a trade secret (EWD 475). Many of the company's proofs were rushed out the door and then much of the company's effort had to be spent on maintenance (EWD 539). A more successful effort was the Standard Proof for Pythagoras' Theorem, that replaced the more than 100 incompatible existing proofs (EWD427). Dijkstra described Mathematics Inc. as "the most exciting and most miserable business ever conceived" (EWD475). He claimed that by 1974 his fictional company was the world's leading mathematical industry with more than 75 percent of the world market (EWD443).[7]"

SSD Storage Porn

2011-02-07T16:31:00.003Z

A little techno-porn. Industrial raid-array replacing SSD storage drive.

http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodriveoctal/

6.0 GB/s read!
4.4 GB/s write!
5.4 TB data.

Price? 5 figures at least I imagine.

A quick precis of everything

2011-02-01T19:27:00.002Z

Skyline (2010)

2010-12-09T09:24:00.002Z

Great space monster b-movie, with plenty of action and other eyecandy. This is the sort of shit they wish they could've made in the 1950s.

Put Archlinux on my eee pc 901

2010-11-23T03:21:00.009Z

I decided to wipe eeebuntu 8.04 from my eee pc 901. I have put on archlinux which turns out to be great! you have a lot more control of ur installation with archie, and i've gone for a very lightweight approach to suit my netbook. No desktop environment, just using openbox window manager, and carefully chosen each application to get exactly what i want.

A non-exhaustive list-
Programs)
Terminal: roxterm (mainly), xterm
Editor: vim (general), geany (IDE)
Network Manager: wicd (great! ncurses+GUI)
File Manager: pcmanfm ~~(weaning myself off nautilus)~~ nautilus, mc (ncurses)
Video Player: ~~mplayer (no fancy GUI for me, plenty of shortcut keys)~~ smplayer(FTW!)
[Video Editor: avidemux-gtk]
Music Player: audacious ~~(haven't looked into this much seems ok screen space wise)~~(great!)
Office: openoffice, epdfview
Archive: xarchiver
Graphics: gimp, mirage [added eog as mirage a bit slow]
Browser: lynx, firefox (main), ~~chromium~~
System)
Window Manager: openbox
Wallpaper: set with feh (extremely lightweight!)
System info: conky & ~~tint2~~ various tray apps
Tray/Panel/Dock: ~~tint2~~ lxpanel
Compositing Manager (transparency, effects): xcompmgr
Audio: alsa, alsa-utils (alsamixer)
GUI Configurators: obconf, obmenu, ~~tint2conf~~

That's all i can think of right now.

TODO:
Network shares are not mounting automatically for some reason [-requires root?], [or SD card]
haven't thought about bluetooth,
~~must work on speeding up boot process (no autodetecting modules really speeds things up).~~ [never switch off/reboot]
~~Must setup scripts to move ~/.mozilla folder to RAM on system start, and sync to disk on system shutdown.~~ [Done! But for aforementioned reason sync it with cronjob, and logging in or out of bash for good measure. Use rsync as it just updates changes to disk rather than full copy (good for SSD drive)].

Otherwise coming together nicely.
Click for screenshot of 9.1 inch screen:

Have since dicked around with a custom minimal gtk theme, made the windows title bars as small as possible to save screen real estate -may just ditch em all together and use shortcut keys? Every program has been visually miniaturized as much as reason would allow.

Conky now calls a script that reads battery level values from the filesystem and colours the battery display accordingly, e.g. red below 5%.
TODO: add functionality to the script to send notifications and suspend2ram. Need to keep it simple as script is called every ~2 secs.

Predator Ultimate Hunter Edition

2010-11-22T22:44:00.005Z

Nice 2010 50GB blu-ray remaster of the original 1987 arnie classic film. Not to be confused with the 2008 blu-ray version which was the mpeg2s from the DVD upscaled. Available for sale and download now from the usual outlets, e.g.
Soft-copy http://www.katzforums.com/showthread.php?t=2235921

Hard-copy http://www.amazon.co.uk/Predator-Ultimate-Hunter-Edition-Blu-ray/dp/B003JSRSR8/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1290466389&sr=1-1

My new wallpaper:

!blogger.com shrank my hi-res caps!

Merry Xmas!

2010-11-19T13:49:00.001Z

check out this hero:
http://www.nothingtoxic.com/media/1289960370/Drunken_Santa_Runs_Amuck_In_Parking_Garage

--=mcmonkeys1rants.blogspot.com=-

The McGurk Effect

2010-11-03T22:09:00.001Z

All-in-one RAID0 SSD Drive on PCI-Express

2010-10-20T08:57:00.004+01:00

120GB OCZ RevoDrive PCI-Express SSD Solid State Disk (read 540MB/sec - write 480MB/sec) for €327! Almost affordable, and you get 2 quality SSDs with built in hardware RAID0 communicating over 1GB/s PCIe x4 bus.

My current set up feels fast (~150MB/s read/write 2x 7200rpm 64MB cache spinny drives, fake/soft-nvraid) and cost just over half that with 2TB space, but 540MB/sec with enough room to install win7+apps, thats shit's insane!

http://www.memoryc.com/storage/solidstatedisk/120gboczrevodrivepciexpress540mbsec.html

Why Gods Prefer Atheists

2010-10-20T02:17:00.003+01:00

Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive Review

2010-10-12T23:30:00.004+01:00

I've owned a 1TB Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive (hmnhd for short) for about a year now. It's damned handy for sharing media files between my computers (and housemates). In fact, if it was feasible, i would use a network hard drive for all my data across machines and OSes.

There are however drawbacks. The drive (server) is connected only by 1000Mbit gigabit ethernet. That would not be so bad, but my router has only 100Mbit ports and wireless-g @ 54Mbit -obviously my laptops are connected wirelessly. On top of that, all these max throughput figures are not represented in the real world.

Back to the review. I recently updated the firmware from 1.0.29 to 2.0.64. Luckily I backed up everything beforehand, as the update destroyed access to most of my files and folders. Previously, the drive was written to internally by a user with linux uid=254 and gid=254 (some sambauser account perhaps?). That user no longer exists with the update, and so many files/folders have permissions set like

 -rwx------ 254 254 somefile
drwx------ 254 254 somedir

meaning I could no longer access them >:-[
After much messing around, the only thing I could think to do was format the hmnhd.

More Annoyances.
To expedite backing up the hmnhd, I directly connected the drive with a CAT6 (gigabit) cable to the gigabit ethernet port of my big PC. This took over 6 hours to back up ~580GB @ ~27MB/s (probably closer to 7 hours). I'm currently writing the back up *back* to the hmnhd, and am pretty fucking annoyed to notice that the average write speed to the drive after about 30mins is a disgraceful, disgusting, limp-dicked, ravaged-arsed, cock-faced 7.4MB/s. I'm writing back 541GB so this should take me about 21 hours! Lying win2008 server reckons it'll only take 12.5 hours. If your drive is totally full you can probably double these times.
[EDIT: ok it's settled at an average of 11.3MB/s, ~= 13.5 hours]

hmnhd specs: max values
read from 27.0 MB/s
write to 11.3 MB/s --corrected

Buyer beware. I would definitely consider a more expensive unit in the future with removable drives and/or USB 3.0 or other fast interface for large reads/writes.
Did a quick check there, 1TB units available ~€100 with both NAS+DAS interfaces (meaning both network+USB to you). Also no hard drive units with SSH access available -could make your own with a linux-plug or some such device, or forget NAS and get a decent router with a fast USB port and reflash it with DD-WRT or some such arrangement.

Stanton Final Scratch 2

2010-10-04T20:47:00.004+01:00

have had the stanton box, timecode records, and a zillion leads sitting in it's box for nearly 3 years. just got the correct firewire lead for it, *and* ditched trying to get the software that came with it to work. i don't like using illegal software, but in this case it was actually the only way to get it to work, since both stanton and native instruments stopped supporting the hardware in 2005 -the registration software is no longer supported??? and you can only purchase newer versions of the software that don't work with the hardware apparently. so, H2O crew FTW!

Ubuntu 10 (Lucid Lynx) Linux Post-Install Set Up Tips

2010-09-29T11:36:00.010+01:00

1) don't use 64-bit unless you have more than 3.5 GB of RAM installed. more trouble than it's
worth.

2) to change minimize, maximize, close window buttons from left side to right side of top of window:

run gconf-editor and go to /apps/metacity/general/button_layout
change from "close,minimize:" to "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

3) get the win key working:

run gconf-editor and go to /apps/metacity/global_keybindings

change any of these values to "Super_L" to have the win key open that application

e.g. run_command_terminal = Super_L to have the win key open a new terminal window

or panel_main_menu = Super_L to have a similar function to windows by opening the gnome application menu

4) This is general firefox on linux tweak. To set the backspace key to go back a page in history, open a new tab, type "about:config" in the address bar, dismiss the warning and type "backspace" into the filter bar. double click the browser.backspace_action entry and set the value to "0" (zero). As far as I remember "2" is to scroll one screen up in the current page.
This probably makes sense when used in conjunction with the space bar to scroll down one screen in a page.

[EDIT] On that note i thought it might be good if the space bar did go forward in history one page. There are no settings in firefox/mozilla for this, so i delved into the world of greasemonkey to make this possible.

Here's my first greasemonkey script!

It adds an event listener for keydown (key events are not available by default in greasemonkey),
checks for space bar press (it assumes the code for space bar is 32),
goes forward 1 page in history,
& suppresses the default behaviour for space bar (i copied that bit, don't really know what it does)

here's de code:



// ==UserScript==
// @name           Space Forward
// @namespace      http://mcmonkeys1rants.blogspot.com
// @description    Makes space bar go forward in history and not scroll down
// @include        *
// ==/UserScript==

function KeyCheck(e)
{
 if(e.keyCode==32){
  history.go(1);
 if(!document.commandDispatcher.focusedElement)
  e.preventDefault();
 }
}

window.addEventListener('keydown', KeyCheck, false);

pretty basic, but it works!

5) Get rid of F10 menu accelerator, ("ALT+F" works fine, and "F10" interferes with midnight commander quit key):
run gconf-editor and remove "F10" from /desktop/gnome/interface/menu_accel (i.e. set="")

6) Set up SMB N/W share mounts:
make sure smbfs & smbclient are installed.
add this horrible line to /etc/fstab (all in one single line)

//192.168.1.13/public    /media/public    cifs    user=netusername%netpassword,directio,soft,noexec,nosuid,nodev,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000,file_mode=0664,dir_mode=0755    0    0

-subbing in your network login for "netusername" & "netuserpassword", and your own network locations and local mount points.
i wrote that some time ago, most of the option are not required, i was trying to stop the local PC from hanging when my NAS went down.
don't for get to "sudo mkdir /media/public" or whatever you'll name them.

[EDIT/EDIT]
OK I'LL PROBLY TURN THIS INTO A WHOLE NEW PAGE SOMEWHERE FOR MY OWN REFERENCE MORE THAN ANYTHING. I've gone thru this process so many times when installing new OSes that i should probly keep a record rather that rediscovering de same ould carp (esp. linux).

right, i've been busy, must say i'm lovin de look n feel of ubuntu 10, and so many previously annoying linux things are seemless now (e.g. wireless networking, and ACPI -yes! that used to be a problem! anyone remember havin t write/download specifics for their broken BIOSes?? twas hell i tell thee, but auto shutting down before ur laptop's battery emptied was a must! i digress, n fuck all ppl would get this. i.e. praise be linux kernel 2.6 and the copping on of Dell and the like).

all what follows is pretty personal to my own system.

gonna need an autostart file -right it appears that system/preferences/sessions no longer exists, now it's the more intuitive system/preferences/Start Up Programs, duh! i had to google that, stuck in me ould ways. tsk.

have a few config files i reuse: .conkyrc, .fehrc, .fehbg, .bashrc, .vimrc
install the relevant apps: vim, conky, feh.
will post config files when i set up a new space for this, good to have somewhere, maybe someone else can benefit as i've carried these for years n spent a lot of time on them.
java is an annoyance on ubuntu, they insist on openjdk/icetea/gcj and there all still shit slow and have incompatibilities with java proper. PAIN! as i do program in java, and java apps? well, they are slow enough as it is -raw C/ASM baybee!! fuck de rest. n fk u java queers, real men use C/C++/
have a new step by step for keeping java up to date manually -post that also on new "space".
that's all i'll post now. DEFO GET BACK THIS!

Who are these ppl?

2010-09-28T19:32:00.003+01:00

A list of the visitors to this site by country for the last few months. Some weird ass locations.

Lithuania? Philippines? I can barely spell those countries.

New World Order -OK Maybe?

2010-09-28T18:18:00.005+01:00

i'm beginning to think the unthinkable. that maybe we need a single world government to regain control of the world economy. individual state governments have lost/are losing control like they used to have before the globalisation of businesses. raising and lowering interest rates at a national level have a much subtler affect than they used to. multinationals (stockholders) are basically unanswerable forces that cannot be controlled by single nations alone (lets disregard BPs seeming demise due to the US), which makes it near impossible to implement measures to inhibit the boom and bust cycles. this is clearly just applying an old solution to a new problem, but what else is happening? at least there are nasty groups out there that are considering this option as opposed to??? mind you i have absolutely no idea what i'm talking about.

tl;dr i have no idea what i'm talking about ;-)

*(tl;dr == too long, didn't read)

Programming humour

2010-09-28T16:42:00.003+01:00

Pretty funny tutorial on C language pointers.
DISCLAIMER: Strictly for nerds only!
http://pastebin.com/vQbu9Lek

How many nukes are within striking range?

2010-09-26T12:24:00.002+01:00

http://nukeometer.com/ will give ya an idea. I reckon having all the world's submarine missiles within striking range for any global target is a little off though.

US Drones "Hacked" By Iraqi Insuregents

2010-09-26T08:56:00.003+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-american-drones-hacked

Pretty amazing what the US military counts as "hacking". OK I think a lot of people know that what the media calls hacking is actually "cracking" -circumventing security systems. The US military it would seem have another view entirely. A method one could use to "hack" the military drones is to tune in a digital set top box to the unencrypted omni-directional signal that the drones blast out when in use. It's as much hacking as watching ITV Digital on Freeview. Anyone else a little shocked? The mind boggles! This reminds me of the case against that autistic guy who "hacked" into the pentagon looking for evidence of UFO cover ups. He was able to browse around their open, unsecured network shares (filled with sensitive documents) with zero technical knowledge. They've been trying to have him imprisoned for "breaking into the system", obviously the lawyers are having a field day.

Community

2010-09-24T23:41:00.003+01:00

This just cracks me up every time. It's from Community S02E01. Great show including an ageing Chevy Chase.

Asian Poses

2010-09-16T02:43:00.002+01:00

heh, a complete website devoted to this shit. i'm amazed.
http://asianposes.com

Throat Singing

2010-09-10T03:54:00.003+01:00

Must take my didgeridoo somewhere echoey, or fuck the didge n learn how to throat sing, this guys pretty awesome at it:

Alexander Glenfield: Seven styles of Tuvan throat singing.

extra links:
http://www.myspace.com/alexanderglenfield

Engrish T-Shirts

2010-07-26T15:21:00.003+01:00

these are more good t-shirt ideas than funny tbf

<- somebody make this one for me!

thomann.de delivery!!!

2010-07-13T11:49:00.010+01:00

excitement overload as this box appears

GOODS!

YAY!

playtime!
gotta fix up my big PC box first tho..

update: installed new system fan and disabled on-board graphics. still givin me jip.

unpacked my new AKG 601s. incredibly comfortable so far, nice big cushions, circumaural design covers the ears well. con: lead is well embedded in there, no replacing it without major surgery if / when anything goes wrong.

finally get to properly test out my new ASUS XONAR Essence STX soundcard's headphone amp, the cans are 120ohm so had to adjust the card's setting accordingly. tested it on some youtube videos i know, can hear all sorts of new glitches and artifacts in the audio. tested on a flac version of Animosity & Drumcorps - Altered Beast EP, -FUCKING AWESOME!!! unbelievably crisp and clear, all kinds of new sub-bass going on, incredible sound separation AWESOME AWESOME FUCKING AWESOME ARGH MY BRAIN IS EXPLODING SO MUCH CLARITY! -eh, yea, i think i like these cans.

can't help but wonder what the AKG 701s i was originally planning on buying would be like. probly wasted on me tho, as i'm too used to shit audio systems and these are already blowing my fucking mind. may have to start getting/making more flacs instead of mp3s tho. a whole world has opened up in terms of audio quality -thought it would.

[update] i've been busy`. oxygen 61 gen3 is savage. nocturn is a little disappointing -shoddy physical build quality, knobs look like they're about to break, and software is not seamless either. the novation launchpad is still in it's box.

Novation ~~Launchpad~~ Lunchpad -haha getit? .. uh ..ha..anyone?

Remember The Lisbon Treaty?

2010-07-08T20:26:00.007+01:00

I'd almost forgotten the Lisbon Referendum of 2009 until this article in the Irish Times today
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0708/1224274266971.html

An interesting read in it's own right, but the particularly resonating paragraph follows this one. Keep in mind that this is an unelected EU commission/comittee that have legislative power over the entire EU. One of my major complaints about voting in the undemoctratic treaty -at the time people told me I was being anti-EU, which never was. Now we are stuck with this shit most likely forever now that it it's been put in place.

"The commission sought to push ahead with the declaration by way of a written procedure after a meeting of the committee where there was no quorum. Under the "silence" procedure in question, the decision to make the declaration would have taken effect automatically if no member state had raised an objection by Tuesday's deadline. "There will now have to be a full hearing of the proposal at the . . . committee where Ireland will be able to voice our profound concerns at such a proposal," Mr Ahern's spokesman said."

Perhaps if Ahern's lackeys had not been on the top of their game (e.g. there was any real political news this week in Ireland apart from the beginning of our great leaders' 12 week summer holiday, or indeed that it had occurred within this schoolboy-style summer holiday) it would have gone unnoticed -as I'm sure many declarations already have [ please feel free to check this, I might sometime but feel lazy right now ].

So, as predicted, we now have;
-meetings of the unelected committee behind closed doors
-written, legally binding proposals stacked in volumes
-direct translation into EU law if noone bothers to read / object to them in time
-no recourse if anything slips through

On a more general note, the original Irish Times article also implies to me that Israeli interests have there own lobbyists in Brussels and that money talks. Is it in EU interests that we export work outside of the EU during recession times?

Blah, blah, blah, I told ye so, etc.

Sponsored by the Lisbon. Best Out Of Three? Campaign ;-)

-=mcmonkeys1rants.blogspot.com=-

My Big PC Box

2010-07-02T12:58:00.011+01:00

problems problems, have had my new box a couple o months now, but ain't had chance t fix it. prob is: hangs after logging into windows (server 2008rc2 & win7, both 64-bit). used to hang with definite graphics card probs -screen set to a random primary colour but could remote login to reboot, solved by taking the side off the case for extra ventilation -so that was a heat problem. now it will lock up (-system freeze but screen locked to last position and error for remote login) on every first boot up, but usually ok on second -like it has to "warm up" or something.

system is:
amd phenom II X4 965 Black Edition -great!
nvidia gtx260 graphics -good, but not as impressive as i'd hoped 1920x1080
4 gig ddr3 ram matched to cpu
2X 1 TB 7200rpm HDs with 128MB cache (raid 0)
kind of a shit mb i've decided, but nvidia chipset based. it has damn on-board graphics which i did not want, i disabled that wank in the bios, but temp still comes up when using temp monitors, and is always running at critical for some reason??????? -BULLSHIT! anyhow, i digress...

ok so, i've bought a new 12cm system fan, that makes 2 plus a small side panel one, installing that and closing side panel oughtta create some good airflow -fingers crossed.

next prob is that i'm using nvraid (raid 0, my first raid! fucking awesome performance already with windows server -100MB/s++ file copy). problem is installing linux dual boot on this fucker, tried hyper-v but it fucks up performance to a noticeable degree -shit stalling when i adjust audio volume -even when not running another OS! -bullshit). so a massive task is going to ensue tryin t get grub to boot all these OSes off a wanky soft raid. adding to this problem is that i've seen some excellent benchmarks for using jfs filesystem with nvraid (-almost as good as hardware raid -1% off!!), it's not a standard supported fs like ext2/3/4/reiserfs/etc so of course i've gotta have that too. ext vs jfs 200% faster! holy fuck! and yes i am aware of the slowness of jfs in deleting files, but everything else is pretty top notch -go ibm!

this shit takes up way too much of my time, i spend most of my life installing OSes and worrying about storage performance. it took me a full week to install eeebuntu on my asus eee 901, just coz i was so paranoid about wearing out the shit SSDs that come with it and messing with a calculator tring to work out optimal positioning of partitions to align with write sectors and honing performance of linux to flush in optimal write block amounts. JEESUS! who gives a fuck ros! clearly i do.

so where do i fit in time to do the actual real work of writing software? i've got 3 laptops, the netbook, and now a full pc also, *all* with constant problems. would be easy if i wasn't such a complicating bastard insisting on such weird shit customized to each individual pc. -was thinkin of getting a macbook for ease of use so i could forget about these things, but i'd probly piss on that dream too considering:

--i refused to use itunes with my ipod -resulted in a long search a brief interlude fucking with linux on the ipod before settling on floola -excellent cross-platform program!

--every mobile phone i buy i must fuck with to death, even write javaME progs to get the shit i want outta it. [edit: current project is bluetooth PC remote control using Nokia E63 and Symbian S60 programming, see new blog=http://bluetooth-hid.blogspot.com/ ]

--generally too curious for my own good. would end up getting rid of the mac GUI or something retarded just coz i wanted "more control", -whatever that means, probly means the usual: more scope to fuck up the OS beyond repair ;-P

ok this post has gone on long enough, think i should probly be done here.

Jason Stackhouse (true blood)

2010-07-02T12:03:00.002+01:00

"policemanship ain't just about tackling people, there's ...marksmanship, ...paramilitary training. I got all that now."

just watchin s03e03 now, this show goes from strength to strength, awesome.

-=mcmonkeys1=-

Software Patents

2010-07-01T13:23:00.004+01:00

Great video against software patentability funded by the fsf
It gives a nice bit of history and background.

Link is here: http://patentabsurdity.com/watch.html

UPC password cracking

2010-06-29T04:01:00.003+01:00

just did a litttle research there. UPC WPA keys consist of 8 random capital letters.
even with this restriction, that leaves 208,827,064,576 possible combinations (26^8),
that's a wordlist of 208GB using ASCII encoding.

using aircrack-ng it would take my new system, which is checking roughly 3,000
keys a second, 2.2 years to go thru every possible combination. i think i might take
a tea break while my PC is busy.

now if someone could port aircrack to use my GT200 GPU... ;-)

-=mcmonkeys1rants.blogspot.com=-

Israel's Neo Nazis- Israel

2010-06-28T00:23:00.001+01:00

yup, israel's one fucked up place

more blockAID news

2010-06-26T08:01:00.002+01:00

blockade? what blockade?

will this "democratic" nation ever let up?

Gibson Road, Glasgow

2010-06-21T09:32:00.003+01:00

Street festival, great ska band, sun shining the fuck outtovit, lashing cans into plastic cups, good times...

Gibson road street festival, part of the fortnight long West End Festival in Glasgow.

Glasgow in general? Great city, great vibe, beautiful buildings, a shite load of art n culture, and cheap as chips. Expect to pay £1.69 - £3.70 for a pint -it pays t shop around, but ya can still enjoy a swanky, snooty pint for only €4.60! Glaswegians can be fat bastards, enjoy shit like battered, deep=fried pizza. Haggis? You probly call it black pudding, but wouldn't eat it whole or battered and deep-fried, not too bad tho, had t try it.

superman sex

2010-06-15T11:11:00.000+01:00

have u ever wondered how superman could fuck a real women without ripping her apart?
the writers of smallville obviously have. view clip for the saucy secrets of superman's sex life.

The seven deadly sins

2010-06-14T19:46:00.000+01:00

Greed:	Medium
Gluttony:	High
Wrath:	Medium
Sloth:	High
Envy:	Medium
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	High

How do you fare?
The Seven Deadly Sins Quiz on 4degreez.com

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world

2010-06-14T19:11:00.000+01:00

music: Barcelona - Please Don't Go

Googling "bacon"

2010-06-05T03:31:00.007+01:00

try googling "bacon". surprisingly here are some of the first hits:

How to download TV and movies without torrents

2010-06-05T01:57:00.002+01:00

For downloading from sites like rapidshare, youtube, megashare, megaupload, hotfile, etc. etc. all those sites which are great but a pain to download from because of reminders about pay version, timers until your link is ready, and catcha images. jdownloader takes care of all of these annoyances, and has a whole host of other features that make it my weapon of choice for direct downloading.

Applies to both windows, linux, etc.

Install the following for full integration:

1) firefox
2) the cavern links checker (requires greasemonkey addon) <-checks for dead links!!!
3) jdownloader itself
4) flashgot (firefox extension) <-jdownloader can install this for you

Some wonderful settings on these programs, in jdownloader i recommend setting it to unrar downloads including deep unrar (i.e. rars that contain other rars) and delete the archives after successful extraction.

Pay for a premium account (or earn one by uploading!)

I can't recommend jdownloader more, it's an absolute must in your downloading arsenal, and contains many many features that are constantly being updated and improved e.g. youtube downloader, remembers passwords for rar archives, etc. Absolute winner program, and written in java so will run on any computer with the java runtime installed.

After that i highly recommend katzforums divxturka etc. always find what i'm looking for on these sites, but they're 2 a penny out there just avoid the ones that are just searches of forums or you'll end up with rar files without passwords, fakes etc.

Fitness Motivation

2010-06-05T01:43:00.003+01:00

don't really like six-packs on women, but if she was my fitness intructor i would never miss a session. her routine is pretty hardcore! the muscles on her and even she is totally fucked.

i started my get fitter routine today by switching to rollies =)

Israeli Products

2010-06-04T17:37:00.002+01:00

barcodes beginning with 729 are issued in israel.

tesco, M&S, dunnes stores all sell israeli fruit, veg, and herbs. produce marked WEST BANK come from israeli factories built on bulldozed homes, but are usually just marked produce of israel also.

a british link http://www.bigcampaign.org/index.php?page=who_sells_israeli_goods, there are probably better sources out there for israeli goods sold in ireland.
--
-=mcmonkeys1=-

Cool lookin

2010-06-02T08:07:00.001+01:00

--
-=mcmonk=-

Giant styrofoam robot

2010-05-26T05:09:00.003+01:00

test content sent via email

-=mcmonk=-

i need to blog :-(

2010-05-25T09:14:00.001+01:00

right, it appears i'm one of these saddos that just can't keep their yappin fingers shut. random blurts on facebook don't seem t do it for me. i need t read over de faggotry i've been spurting, and shit seems t disappear into de murk on facebook without a proper history. why? i dunno why, maybe coz noone else will read over it, but either way i need the catharsis.

so, ros enters de world of actual, real-life blogging, something i've been enthusiastically condemning for years, -maybe i was over-compensating, who was to know i was just sitting in the closet. truth be told i've been moonlighting for years in one guise or another. bebo - b.log e.arly b.log o.ften, random forums all over de gaf, an inexorable torrent of mass emails, 4chan -where i've actually started using a moniker on possibily the most popular ANONYMOUS posting site, in fact i've a string of websites strewn about the internet trying t make some random point that occurred t me for a few instants, and was as quickly forgotten as the urls.

my arm hurts, will i ever be back here?