return void;

I read this interesting article over on the Washington Post about Microsoft’s dwindling market share. It was one of those articles that was like reading yesterday’s news; everything has been apparent to me since Google went public with their saying “Do No Evil.”

The most interesting part is on the second page. Let me drop a little quote here:

Yet early last month, Microsoft founder, chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates issued one of his periodic calls to arms to his troops, warning them that the industry and their company were at a pivotal, “sea-change” moment:

Microsoft’s software must operate “live” and online, Gates announced, to engage users in today’s always-connected world. Gates and the company’s chief technology officer, Raymond Ozzie, outlined how the coming versions of Windows and its Office suite would incorporate online components such as instant messaging, mobile telephony and search.

Sigh, it’s as if they are incapable of reading the writing on the wall! Here’s a clue Mr-Multimillionaire-CTO-Ozzie: the world doesn’t want your software installed on their computer! It should be clear through Google Maps, Google Gmail, and the many more web services (I hate that term) encompassed in what is known as Web 2.0 (I hate this term even more) that people want your software ONLINE! They don’t want it to incorporate instant messaging, they want a fully qualified instant messager that they do not need to install! They want a word processor that does not install and bloat the crap out of their machine all the while spreading viruses. They want a browser/Ajax based spreadsheet. They’ve clearly wanted an email client, which makes a much better client than Outlook (specifically, its more difficult to spread viruses by just reading an email with webmail).

They missed the boat on the TiVO; they missed the boat on the instant messenger; they missed the boat on the video game market; they missed the boat on the mp3 revolution; they even missed the boat on the mp3 player market even after missing the mp3 revolution. What the hell does their CTO do all day?! Perhaps he should spend less time in meetings and more time watching the market. How the hell can you screw up so many products in so many areas in such a short time span?!

I’ve been on PTO (Paid Time Off) from work since Tuesday this week as part of my 14-day Christmas vacation. I realize I haven’t been posting much lately, I even scrapped several posts I have been working on lately. The reason why is 3-fold:

1. Finishing the Christmas shopping
2. Chores around the apartment
3. Video Games

Sunshine and I exchanged Christmas gifts yesterday because it was our last chance alone before we leave town. We’re heading to Austin Saturday morning to be with both families for the weekend. The living room and kitchen were spotless before last night; I still haven’t cleaned up the wrapping paper and tissue. I also started 2 new games: God Of War and Wipeout Pure. This vacation, I am currently trying to play through the following games:

• God Of War
• We Love Katamari (thanks rainman)
• Wipeout Pure (thanks sunshine)
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
• Gran Turismo 4
• Street Fighter Collection
• Ratchet: Deadlocked
• Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Now that I am about half-way through MGS3:SE and GoW, I will work up their reviews and post them by this weekend. I haven’t played the rest enough to give a solid review; my rule of thumb is half the game must be played to fully understand it.

So the rest of the vacation (if there is any time left) will be spent here and working on the photo album. Since I offered my assistance to the developer, I have found 3 things that must be done to the skin before I can try to integrate it into the look of this blog.

So if I don’t see you beforehand or I don’t know you and will never see you, Merry Christmas! I realize that the term Christmas may offend some of you, but that is not my concern. Technically speaking, He is the reason for the season, so you wouldn’t be spending a fortune every year without His gift to mankind. Go on and celebrate the only birthday that matters.

Today, we received our first comment spam. By that I mean it was the first comment to pass through the moderation filters and actually be posted to the site. It was short and contained a single link to a product that assists in impotence. So, I took action and setup better word filters. You can now see a list of words that are marked as potential spam by reading the codex. If you post a comment that contains any one of those words, fear not that the comment will be obliterated. I did not mark these words as blacklisted (which deletes any comments that contain those words in any form), but rather marked them as spam. This means that your comment will be marked for authorization and therefore a user of level 5 or greater (non-guest) will have to mark it as non-spam.

Spammers dare not tread here.

A while back, I sent a patch in for the skin that I use on my photo album site. Laza went on a trip and would get back to me on it later.

I sent an email to Laza today to find out if they had had a chance to look over my patch. I noticed there was a new release on the JAlbum website for version 6.1. Laza mentioned the problem with the directories would be fixed with this version, so I downloaded it and try it out. I noticed the BeanScript GUI had changed, so I checked the readme. This is what I found:

Chameleon v2.7 for JAlbum 6.1

New features:
- Online print ordering feature thanks to "s1n"

http://voidreturn.com

- Possibility to add uplink from the main page (i.e. you can link
back to your homepage or to your galleries startpage)
- User-defined link at the footer can open in the same window
- Serbian translation by Filip Miletic
- Danish translation by Henrik Andersen
- Polish translation by Artur Starz

Changed:
- No automatic search for folder thumbnail - you can select
through JAlbum user interface
- The tables on the slide pages has the same width as the maximum
width for the images, not the indexpage width as it was before.
- Removed hint for "High quality scaling" and "Quality: 90%".

This is great, my first publicly accepted patch! Its a cool feeling to know that you’ve helped make open source software better. I offered my assistance for the future because I use the skin and I want it to work as well as possible.

About 2 weeks ago (possibly longer), I updated my fileserver. With that came an update to GnuMp3d, version 2.9.7-r1. I restarted GnuMp3 and found a bogus function call error:

erebus ~ # gnump3d-index
Undefined subroutine &main::removeLock called at /usr/bin/gnump3d-index line 194.

Investigating, I found that this function did not exist. I left this alone waiting for an update in portage. Alas, there was none. I checked bugzilla and no open bugs were listed. I checked their site, and still nothing. Today, I grew increasingly frustrated and decided to just fix the problem. How anyone could release a program that has problems running under only normal conditions is beyond me.

If you have this version, comment out lines 194 and 535. This function, from what I can tell, has been deprecated. I have not looked into it much, but last week, something was finally posted to the mailing list. It seems that my assumption was correct.

Jive on you crazy cats.

There was a conversation on the vanpool today which started off innocently enough about the purchase, price and quality of HD capable television sets. A couple of the van riders piped up to confess they had in fact taken the plunge into the HD market, but haven’t yet decided to take advantage of HD programming outside of DVDs. This swayed the conversation to what is available through cable and satellite providers in the way of programming, and what each other would watch.

The conversation of Christian television, radio, and religious types of programming came up and the discussion started how it is safe for the family, and not lewd and such. I didn’t feel the need to start an argument over such a thing, because it is their right to believe in such a thing, and I don’t have a problem with that. If their beliefs and viewpoints start to interfere with me directly, attacking me, or persecuting me for who I am then there is a problem and I would have been compelled to defend myself. I always had a problem with the phrase “safe for the family” though when it comes to public programming, but that is another argument.

This particular subject was brought up shortly after I heard a story on NPR’s Fresh Air. It featured Scholar Bart Ehrman’s discussing his new book, and explores how scribes – through both omission and intention – changed the Bible. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

There are specific examples of how scribes intentionally changed the stories of the Bible as it was being transcribed, by hand over the years. Since it was all done by hand there were many opportunities for mistakes and modifications to stories, which in fact happened and has been displayed such an act was committed through the study of transcriptions which were years apart.

An example given early on in the broadcast was the story of a woman who had committed adultery, and the people had set a trap for Jesus, bring her to him. If he was to follow the laws of Moses, she would be stoned to death for her acts, but that would contradict his teaching of love, compassion and forgiveness.

Mr. Ehrman’s studies show that the story had originally been passed down to a scribe who had written the story in the margin of one of the manuscripts. Another scribe who would take that manuscript for reproduction would then move the story from the margin to the actual text, so this is a case where the story would appear in English versions adopted for the King James Bible, which would not appear in the original Greek version. He continues to talk about those who view the Bible as an authoritative guide; they would have to go to the original version, which no longer exists. If the new one is interpreted as authoritative, and theses scribes were able to modify the text as they saw fit, and was then interpreted as scripture then who or what is to say what I speak or write couldn’t also be considered scripture?

Another example is the crucifixion of Jesus which is told in the gospel of Luke and of Matthew.

So I bit my tongue and decided not to bring this up, avoiding such a fight which is based on deeply personal values. Just something to think about I suppose…

Fresh Air Story

Sunshine and I just decided to order a pizza. I went online and updated my Papa John’s profile so I could place an order. Upon checkout, it prompted me for a tip amount; I do not recognize this feature from before.

That got me wondering; what exactly is the customary tip amount for a delivery person. They are paid a regular paycheck unlike waitors and waitresses (usually like $11 an hour or higher). With most large chains, they rarely have to drive far to find your home. What is it worth for the inconvenience of having food delivered to my lazy butt at home?

It’s not like it’s socially acceptable to stiff them; you are supposed to tip them. I found that CNN/Money has a nice little page detailing how much they deem acceptable for most professions.

I tipped the 10% it recommended, but what is everyone else’s policy? Do you tip them like waitors or do you stiff them because you know that they’ve already given you your food at the point of rudeness and you can slam your door on them if you so choose?