The 42nd Penguin

Sign Bruce Perens's petition against Novell

2006-11-28T17:24:00.000-05:00

Novell has betrayed the open-source and free software community by their new alliance with Microsoft. Today, Novell pulled it's full-time developers from working on the Hula Project, which would provide an alternative to Microsoft Exchange. They seem determined to simply become a Microsoft pawn, instead of a serious competitor. I also recommend people to switch to Red Hat's excellent Fedora Core or Enterprise Linux, or to Ubuntu.

http://techp.org/petition/sign/1

Oracle and the Penguin

2006-10-26T09:33:00.000-04:00

Oracle's latest action may very well help destroy Linux. They are trying to set themselves up as a competitor to Red Hat purely for "support and updates", not actually making their own distro. In essence, they're using Red Hat's product against them. Since Red Hat is the number 1 ambassador to corporations (RHEL is #1 Enterprise Linux, if I recall correctly), they are, at the moment, pretty much the only major Linux in the grand scale of the IT industry. If they are killed by Oracle that good enterprise-friendliness goes to waste, as does the excellent Fedora Core 6, which was just released yesterday.

Wonderful. Thanks, Oracle.

Misc Updates

2006-10-25T13:16:00.000-04:00

Stuff I've been doing:

Working on a total conversion mod for Sauerbraten
Playing the Flight Simulator X demo... the graphics don't look nearly as good as the prerelease screenshots. Why can companies not just show real content before release? It only makes the potential customers angry.
Learning Maya for #1 above; I use Maya because it's one of the only 3D modelling tools that doesn't insist on drawing it's own ugly interface instead of using the default
Writing a crypto utility in Java; it's going to be single-key because I don't understand how asymmetric keys work
Debating between a Microsoft Technet account and a Wii over the next few months
Testing Windows Server 2003 Datacenter SP2... MS seems to love the testers enough to trust them with multi-thousand-dollar software, which I appreciate. If only they would give us decent download speeds... even public links are faster!

My Apologies

2006-10-25T11:14:00.000-04:00

It seems indicated that I have not been posting lately. This was mainly to do with forgetting my blogger username, being the idiot I am. With any luck this blog won't stagnate and I'll update more eventually.

Battle for Wesnoth Review

2006-10-01T19:09:00.000-04:00

Battle for Wesnoth is an open-source turn-based strategy game. It has decent 2D graphics, and a very mathematical combat system. Wesnoth takes place in a fantasy world, and has several campaigns taking places at various points in this world's history.

Campaigns

The Rise of Wesnoth covers the arrival of a prince from a western island (reminiscent of Numenor from Middle-Earth) in Wesnoth.

The South Guard is a "beginner" campaign, and is therefore fairly short and easy. You play as an inexperienced commander trying to root out outlaws and undead.

A Tale of Two Brothers is similar to The South Guard in that it's targeted at beginners.

Heir to the Throne is the story of a young man who has grown up in exile with the elves after his father was murdered by his brother and mother. He must retake the throne of Wesnoth.

Under the Burning Suns, my favorite, takes place in the far future of Wesnoth, and contains "desert elves" with unique units and graphics. It's pretty hard.

Factions

Rebels - Elves, merfolk, and "woses," which are inspired by Tolkien's Ents.

Loyalists - Human soldiers, merfolk, and ogres

Undead - Zombies, skeletons, and sorcerors

Knalgan Alliance - Dwarves and outlaws (strange combination, I hate this faction)

Drakes - Dragon-ish beings. I like these.

Gameplay

Most of the gameplay lies in multiplayer, against either humans or bots, since most experienced players will tire of the campaigns eventually. The AI is smart and will often make obvious tactical errors, (which I will usually foolishly laugh at,) like letting one of their best units get killed just before levelling up, and then proceed to wipe out my troops on a much larger scale. The AI battles are not necessarily good training for real MP, because the AI won't respect Fog of War or Shroud, which are commonly used in true MP battles.

There are three "ages," Default, Great War, and Age of Heroes. The default age simply allows each faction to recruit all level 1 and level 0 units. Age of Heroes throws level 2 units in, and is my favorite, even though it's scoffed in MP. Great War, the least popular, has two factions, Alliance of Light (the "good units") and Alliance of Darkness ("the bad units.") This is like the default age in that it only allows level 0/1 recruitment. Of course, in any age, low-level units can upgrade to higher level units with battle experience.

Conclusion

Battle for Wesnoth is an incredibly addictive game, despite it's graphics, which are 2D and not particularly wonderful.

Graphics : 6
Gameplay : 10
Fun Factor: 10
Creativity: 8

Overall: 9

wesnoth.org

PanQuake

2006-10-01T13:38:00.000-04:00

I played a very strange Quake source port, called PanQuake, today. It renders in a "panorama" mode, allowing you to see 360 degrees around you. It was fun until motion sickness caught up with me, at which point I stopped, which was probably a good idea.

http://wouter.fov120.com/gfxengine/panquake/

Shooting War

2006-09-30T19:31:00.000-04:00

Today I read Act I of the (non-humorous) webcomic Shooting War . Wow. It was good... and disturbingly plausible. It covers the experiences of blogger-turned-journalist Jimmy Burns in 2011 Iraq. John McCain is President, Bangalore is blown up by a suitcase nuke, and government after government in Iraq falls.

Good stuff.

The Corruption of the 'Net: Part II

2006-09-30T18:43:00.000-04:00

Since the last post was hastily written and somewhat incoherent, I'll elaborate here. Computing has become a commodity. Innovation is dead. When was the last time you saw a truly innovative piece of hardware? How about industry-changing software? It's all been evolutionary. The last innovation that I remember was the X Window System, and even that was merely an evolution of earlier GUI systems; supporting client/server networking as an integral part of the software was important enough to qualify as innovative. Windows and UNIX and Mac have merely been evolving; is the latest build of Vista really that different from Windows 95? Linux has improved more, but almost all of that is user-friendliness and hardware support; nothing revolutionary. Mac OS has mated their nifty user experience with FreeBSD. Cool, certainly; but in the grand scale of things not that great.

People tell me the Internet is revolutionary, and I tell them they are idiots. The Internet is just an improvement on networking technologies that have existed since the '60s. The fact that the incompetent can access them is no real improvement.

The Corruption of the 'Net

2006-09-30T18:02:00.000-04:00

The Internet has become a Bad Thing. Why? Because the incompetent, in having access to it, have destroyed it. Since these are the vast majority of Internet users, the corporations pander to them by creating such inane sites as MySpace and Digg. And I can't even visit my favorite technical forums anymore without 12-year-old warez monkeys demanding cracks and serials. I look forward to the day when someone creates an "other internet," that actually requires technical knowledge and genuine interest to be able to use. But that won't happen, at least not commercially, because it doesn't sell. The only hope comes from open source developers... I suppose if I want something like that I should create it myself. Anyone interested?

Welcome to the Machine

2006-09-30T16:42:00.000-04:00

This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

With any luck, this blog will survive long enough to cover various politics, science, and tech issues. Sound familiar? Good.

Today's first post is about Microsoft. I do not particularly care for Microsoft. The reason I am frustrated with them this time is because of their obsessive propaganda efforts for Windows Vista, which is turning out to be a mediocre (at best) operating system. Originally, Windows Codename Longhorn, as it was once called was supposed to have WinFS (a revolutionary new data storage system,) Avalon (a new library for displaying program content in a non-ugly manner) and Indigo, a new solution for internal program communication. The first kicked the bucket completely after Vista went beta; the latter two have been merged into the .NET framework 3.0, which will be available on XP and Server 2003. So basically, Vista is now XP + a new shell with a new theme. Yuck. Not to mention that it's going to be done in three weeks, and is still unusable on 64-bit platforms.