saiko cake factory

Programming Fonts

2010-03-28T22:20:00.001-07:00

I've been on the search for a good programming font recently. Can't really find one I like, but I'm picky, so this is to be expected. Along the way I've noticed the ridiculous amount of people who code in... proportional fonts. This kinda blows my mind. I've messed around with this as a joke before in notepad or what have you, but serious coding in a proportional font is so silly. Proportional fonts are terrible at making similar looking characters look different enough. For example, take this piece of C code: b = 42l; It is critical here that lowercase L looks entirely different than the number 1, else the meaning of this line is completely different. I've come to realize I need a sufficiently wide font. Some coding fonts are basically straight up and down. This is really tough on my eyes. I've also noticed that I desire a good distance between lines. Too many fonts don't account for this and thus each line is stacked straight on top of the one below it. This gives me a headache. Sometimes I like anti-aliasing, sometimes I don't. It really just depends on the font. Sometimes it ends up looking way too blurry, which is obnoxious. Then again, sometimes pixel fonts look way too pixely. I really like a lot of pixel fonts, especially profont, but I find myself wanting larger sizes than they offer. Perhaps I'll spend some time making a large-ish sized pixel font that fits my needs. I need a fun way to kill some time because Lost Odyssey is being really boring at the moment.

Haskell: Left to Right, Top to Bottom

2009-12-05T18:13:00.000-08:00

Look at the following Haskell code:


-- Too many parens
a = sum (take 100 (cycle [1 .. 10]))

-- Avarice
b = sum $ take 100 $ cycle [1 .. 10]

-- Points free
c  = (sum . take 100 . cycle) [1 .. 10]
c' = (sum .
      take 100 .
      cycle) [1 .. 10]

They all read right to left, except c' which reads bottom to top. As an English speaker, this is the opposite of what I want in my code. Ruby, for one, fixes this problem. Consider the following snippets:


# The Ruby Way
(1 .. 10).cycle.take(100).inject(&:+)

-- Haskell
foldl1 (+) (take 100 (cycle [1..10]))
-- or
sum (take 100 (cycle [1..10]))

Notice how in Ruby you simply read left to right, whereas in Haskell you find the innermost part of the expression and then read towards the left. Solving this problem in Haskell was actually a lot easier than I expected because of Haskell's freedom to define your own binary operators.

Simply add this code:x ==> f = f xor
(==>) = flip ($)depending on which one floats your boat more.

With this, we can rewrite the nested function calls before in a much more Ruby like manner, with a pipeline:


[1 .. 10] ==> cycle ==> take 100 ==> sum

This generalizes to multi-line expressions nicely too:


sayB = "Brian"
     ==> map (:[])
     ==> reverse
     ==> map (++ "\n")
     ==> tail
     ==> head
     ==> putStr

You read that entire piece of code left to right, top to bottom, as you would expect.

EDIT:

After using this further I realized that you would also want an additional operator: (-->). This operator would compose functions backwards, since (==>) applies functions backwards. This is needed for map simplifications like

[1 .. 10] ==> map (1/) ==> map negate
-- ...becoming...
[1 .. 10] ==> map ((1/) --> negate)

BlazBlue

2009-11-28T21:57:00.001-08:00

I just got back from a good evening of BlazBlueing with my friend. Game is so awesome. I can't wait for BlazBlue: Continuum Shift. Hakumen + Bang for life.

2009-11-22T10:08:00.000-08:00

Ever wanted those toolbox windows in GIMP to skip your taskbar? This is the relevant section in openbox/rc.xml.

    <application name="gimp" class="Gimp" role="gimp-toolbox">
      <skip_taskbar>yes</skip_taskbar>
      <skip_pager>yes</skip_pager>
    </application>
    <application name="gimp" class="Gimp" role="gimp-dock">
      <skip_taskbar>yes</skip_taskbar>
      <skip_pager>yes</skip_pager>
    </application>

Java Bitshifting Wtfery

2009-11-08T16:12:00.000-08:00

In Ruby the following two expressions are equivalent:

1 >> -3
1 <<  3

and evaluate to eight.

However, in Java, the first one evaluates to zero. This was a very odd bug in a particular program I was writing.

It just seems to me that shifting right by a negative value should by equivalent to shifting left by its absolute value, but strangely Java thinks that should not be the case. It may be worth noting that in Python, shifting by a negative amount results in an exception being thrown.

Programming Language Naming Conventions

2009-11-04T12:11:00.000-08:00

Ever wanted a reason not to use C-style identifiers? You know, strlen, strncpy, and the like?
Well consider a predicate function that determines whether something is hit or not.

Here are the identifiers in various naming conventions.

Ruby:
is_hit?

Lower case with underscores:
is_hit

Camel:
isHit

Microsoft style:
IsHit

C style:
ishit

Notice the problem with the last one... such a problem exists for the predicate function asking whether something "is in," though it's much less vulgar (obviously, this is isin in C style).

Partitioning NTFS Made Easy

2009-06-12T17:43:00.000-07:00

Today I was trying to install Linux on my friend's computer. GParted sometimes really sucks at resizing NTFS. It failed three times here. After digging through the internet for a while I came across diskmgmt.msc. All you need to do is press Win+R then type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter, or choose Run from the start menu, type diskmgmt.msc, and press Enter. This program seems to flawlessly resize NTFS (while the OS is booted, amazingly). Now I am about to partition the rest of the drive. Hooray.

MadCatz Street Fighter SE Fight Stick

2009-05-31T21:24:00.000-07:00

I got my fighstick a couple weeks ago and it was my worst purchase in a long while. At $80, you wouldn't expect one button dead on arrival and the joystick to die within a week. Luckily I ordered Sanwa arcade parts to replace the terrible Madcatz ones with. The innards were neatly arranged and fairly easy to work with (a little bit tougher than replacing RAM).

If you're considering getting this, reconsider unless you're willing to mod it.

Compose Key in Linux

2009-05-15T17:43:00.001-07:00

Ages ago I had the compose key working in Linux. I totally forgot how to set it up, and I finally got sick of not having it and did some exploring today.

The short and simple way is to make sure the following command runs every time you log in:

setxkbmap us -variant altgr-intl -option nodeadkeys -option compose:ralt

The relevant xorg.conf section is:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier  "Keyboard0"
Driver      "kbd"
Option      "CoreKeyboard"
Option      "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option      "XkbLayout" "us"
Option      "XkbOptions" "nodeadkeys,compose:ralt"
Option      "XkbVariant" "altgr-intl"
EndSection

And it works now! ©°®ĸə

Making Firefox Text Look Pretty

2009-03-24T23:29:00.000-07:00

I've been rather distressed lately at how terrible fonts look in Firefox as compared to any other program on my computer that uses GTK natively, as opposed to wrapped through XUL. After some searching I finally came across this gem. Just add the following line to your ~/.bashrc file and restart and Firefox should use Pango for text rendering afterwards.

export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=0

This is a major plus for my eyes. Without this, Firefox was rendering absurd ligatures and spacing text completely wrong. Now it is evenly spaced and nicely hinted.

π - 3 = 0: The Mac Calculator App

2009-02-18T21:52:00.000-08:00

My college physics lab room is filled exclusive with Macinstosh computers. While waiting for the professor to show up, I decided to mess around with the Mac calculator app.

I noticed it had many nice features that the Windows calculator lacks. Like the amazing ability to speech synthesize every keypress and result. Oh wait, that's not an amazing ability.

But it does have a π button programmed in there, handy for anyone wanting to do some serious math. But then everything falls apart when I realize I can't trust a damned calculation from this piece of crap. I enter π - 3... and then the equals key... and out comes ZERO! Yes, zero! Zero as in the additive identity. Zero as in the integer preceding one. Did the Mac OS X developers never test this? π displays correctly when you press the button, but subtracting three from it makes all hell break loose.

Does anyone know why this happens? Is this problem still present in Leopard, the school Macs are running Tiger.

Tango Inkscape Icons

2008-11-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

Blasphemers! Inkscape ships with a Tango icon set and doesn't use it! I found someone else's blog who posted the command to enable it.

EDIT: Inkscape changed this directory.

# mkdir -p ~/.config/inkscape/icons
# ln -s /usr/share/inkscape/icons/tango_icons.svg ~/.config/inkscape/icons/icons.svg

Fable II Review: Teaching Kids How Badass Heroes Are and How Easy It Is To Make Money

2008-11-16T13:30:00.000-08:00

Seeing as I'm halfway through my second character in Fable II, I figure it's about time I wrote a review for the game (My first review ever! You can check it out on GameFAQs). Also, keep in mind that 5/10 means average, not bad.

Graphics (9/10):
Glad to see the bloom has toned down since Fable I, though it's still around. Now, instead of your hulking, brutish, octogenarian Fable I character glowing like a Christmas tree at midday, your slightly muscular, young and hip Fable II character stands around in the town square being blinded by the morning sunrise's bloom. But that time frame of bloom is small, and not a problem, seeing as it really only happens whilst staring the sun down, and that's not something you'd exactly like to do in real life. I never looked at one thing in this game and said "Oh... that looks bad," because everything looks great. Maybe even too great, as the game tends to have slowdown issues in towns, but that's for another section. The character models all look really good. The towns each have a very different style, but all feel like they could be actual towns, as opposed to the two-house ordeals in Fable I. All in all, the graphics never knocked my socks off, but were very solid.

Controls (10/10):
The idea of mapping a type of combat to each button is executed perfectly. I was initially frustrated by the way magic is cast though. The idea is that you have five levels of spells, and you hold B to charge them. You could have Slow Time on level one, Force Push on level two, and Fireball on level three, so that a quick tap of B would slow time, a small hold would push, and a longer press would unleash fiery doom. This is a somewhat frustrating change over Fable I seeing as you could flip between spells at will in that game, but this method does have its advantages. First off, before it was not possible to cast many lower level techniques, you would merely resort to the highest level you had achieved, despite how much overkill it may be. Secondly, it makes spell organization far easier than the last game. The main problem is that at the beginning of the game you only have level one spells and it's quite hard to switch them mid-battle (you can either choose to cycle and get hit by baddies, or go through the games annoyingly slow menus...). After you earn a bit of experience, though, and get a wider array of spells, you realize you only need a few spells to do all the work you want, and can organize them in the magic totem pole effectively. That is when the simplicity of this system shines. Melee combat is quite natural, especially the new flourishes. Tapping X to attack, and holding X to unleash an unblockable attack is very fluid. Quite possibly the only flaw to melee combat controls is the fact that the rhythm-based attacks are hard to execute during hectic battles, and not worth the effort. Finally, the gun controls are the best. Tap Y and a direction to shoot at a specific enemy, or just tap Y to hit who you are locked on to. Speaking of locking on, this is a mostly automatic ordeal in Fable II, making combat even more natural, and running away less so. If you hold Y, you'll go into aiming mode. In this aiming mode, you are completely immobile, but shots stun enemies more, and if you've upgraded your skill in marksmanship, you can use this mode in conjuction with the Left Trigger in order to sub-target enemies. This means that once you get the combination ingrained into your muscle memory, unholstering your, pulling a 180, and shooting someone's head off will become a quick flick of the thumbs, and prove to be highly satisfying.

Combat (8/10):
Keep in mind everything I said about controls above, as they also factor into the score for combat. Combat shines in Fable II, far surpassing any fun I had in the original Fable. Combat feels great, but there are a few problems with the types of encounters you run into in this game. First off, as battles get harder in this game, the developers handle this by merely throwing more enemies at you. There's only a very small handful of enemy types in the game, and you'll kill a million of each of them by the time you're through. I thought there was some promise when I was fighting these commander-type enemies who could shoot spikes at me and push me, but they are the hardest baddies in the whole game, which makes for a disappointing zenith of difficulty. This game was obviously made with the casual (read: unskilled) player in mind, just listen to any of the recording of Peter Molyneux before the game came out, but leaving hardcore players in the dust isn't fun. This game needs a hard mode for players like me, because purposely gimping your character into being less powerful to make the game harder is less satisfying than earning a beefed up character and fighting ridiculously tough enemies. The last thing missing about encounters in this game is bosses. Any good RPG has memorable bosses. This one does not. In fact, there isn't even a final boss. That was terribly disappointing. The coolest boss in this game was in the second quest or so, all the rest were either trolls (boring, slow, shoot them in the glowing weak-spot combat) or just regular baddies with flags on their backs. Combat was mostly great in this game, thanks to the controls, but the game could use some scaling down of encounter sizes (along with an increased frequency of encounters to counterbalance this) along with harder enemies and better bosses (plus a final boss!).

Sound (6/10):
The sound in this game is easily its most disappointing aspect. I have not had one sound clip or song from this game ever get stuck in my head, or even play once. Everything here is utterly forgettable. Music merely accompanies the action, rather than driving it. Though, this is somewhat fitting for such an open-ended game. More powerful music might be better suited for a more story-driven, typical JRPG. On the bright side, the music was never annoying in this game, which is most certainly worse than forgettable.

Other Gameplay (7/10):
Having a husband or wife is far more entertaining and demanding in this game. They need money to live, complain if your house isn't nice, want sex (but not too often), and you can even raise a family with them (watch for the hilarious quote when your husband realizes you are pregnant...). While the game has a small wardrobe, anyone with enough imagination can make it feel large due to the huge selection of dyes in this game, so you can make your clothes all sorts of different colors. The only thing missing is a special dye that allows you to enter custom colors, but most people should be satisfied once they find enough dyes. Purchasing this property is far more interesting now, as rent collects more frequently and is transported straight into your wallet. Sadly, rent values are ridiculously high, and becoming a millionaire is rather easy in this game. As I mentioned somewhere above, the menus in this game suck. They are very, very slow, and whenever you consume an item, you are returned to the game. Feel like eating a few pies and downing some experience potions? There goes two minutes of real time. I really wish there was a consume all button, that would've remedied the problem of the menus, except for their slowness (but made that less of an issue). There are also a decent amount of sidequests in this game, many of which have interesting storylines (favorite: helping a farmer's son come out of the closet). Overall, these other aspects of gameplay are pretty nice, even if menus are tedious and money is so devalued that I gave 100,000 gold to my wife as a gift because I was bored, and I always buy every item when I go into a shop.

Story (4/10):
I wasn't expecting much here, given how awful the original Fable was in this category. And then the game surprised me. You start out the game as an orphaned child with your sister, homeless and living between two houses. After doing some quests to earn five gold pieces (they didn't need to bring that element back...), a dog you saved in an earlier quest follows you home. It was very touching, as the dog really looks happy to be with you, and feels natural. Then due to a magical happening, you go talk to a powerful man in a castle. It is here that he you and your sister, which I found quite interesting. Somehow, the ensuing revenge plot isn't very interesting though. The game then becomes a disjointed series of fetch quests, gathering three heroes to help you defeat your adversary. While the story started out interesting, it falls flat on its face once you reach adulthood.

In Summary:
Fable II is very solid visually, has great combat, and lasts long enough if you like sidequests and feel like replaying the game as a different type of character. The negative aspects of the game really aren't a big deal if you know what to expect and place your focus on how ridiculously fun the combat is, and dress up your character just the way you want.

Buy or Rent: If you like sidequests and multiple playthroughs, buy it. Else rent it.
Score Modification: Add a point to this review score if you really like character customization or you never pay attention to the story in games.
Score (7/10) actual average is 7.34

The Future of Microsoft

2008-11-08T23:02:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking for a long time now about how much market share Microsoft has. Specifically with Windows, it just flat out dominates the market in a completely disgusting way. If the United States is anti-trust, you'd think something would've happened by now.

I imagine a future for Microsoft in the likeness of Apple and the transition to OSX. Since Leopard, OSX is considered an official version of UNIX, and OSX is built on the open-source XNU kernel. Say Microsoft was split into two distinct entities in order to satisfy anti-trust laws, the new split-off could then start fresh, with a whole new platform. It could be built on a UNIX-style kernel so as to facilitate security, and involve a completely new user experience. The new UI could be something similar to the Xbox 360 Dashboard UI, separate "workspaces" for different tasks, screen-oriented applications, and useful notification popups. Perhaps it could have a hierarchical tab structure. Say the main tab group contained "Internet | Media | Office | System", and say that the sub-group of Internet contained "Browse | Search | Instant Message | Email". Maybe these things could even be color coded. Say for example you were in the Office section, writing a document, and a friend emails you. A notification would pop up, and just by pressing a key on the keyboard (maybe the Windows key, it deserves to be used more), the OS would flip tabs over to Internet::Email. Say you're in Media, watching a new movie you got, and someone comes online and IMs you, you'd press the Windows key again, your movie would pause, and you'd zip over to the Internet::IM section of the OS.

I'd go on, but I'm a bit tired, and if I wrote anything more in-depth, maybe some software company would steal my idea :P I would just love to see Microsoft broken into pieces, and love to see a totally new idea for a more user friendly OS, because, lets be honest, mom and pop generally aren't too keen on how everything works, so the simpler it is, the better for them.

Rhythmbox Malloc Segfault

2008-10-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

Rhythmbox on Arch Linux crashed when I would seek in songs. I used yaourt (add the repo to pacman.conf; then pacman -S yaourt; then yaourt -S rhythmbox-svn) to install rhythmbox-svn and now things are working great. I hope if you're Google searching that my blog comes up and helps you fix your problem if this afflicts you.

Ubuntu Not-o-magic

2008-10-24T13:44:00.001-07:00

Turns out my Back and Forward buttons work fine in Firefox 3 with no setup in Arch Linux too. Hah.

Ruby and UTF-8

2008-10-23T22:56:00.000-07:00

Ever wanted to use a real λ in your code instead of lambda? You can with Ruby! Ruby has support for UTF-8 encoded scripts and identifiers. I wrote most of a script in Japanese the other day, it was really funny. If you want to add summation and lambda to Ruby, you could do code like:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -Ku
# Note the hashbang is different^

module Kernel
alias λ lambda

def Σ(*args)
  args.inject(&:+)
end
end

sum = Σ 1, 2, 3
puts sum

That simple code right there is about 10 different reasons I love Ruby. Also, if you know any other languages that support Unicode identifiers, please comment.

Fable II

2008-10-23T22:51:00.000-07:00

Fable II is out, I got it release day. I expected Peter Molyneux to be full of crap about this game, but it's actually quite good. I was skeptical of the "colonial era" theme, but it's rather cool. I had a threesome and got an achievement. I can earn gold off of my real estate empire while at school. The only problem is I'm suddenly no longer allowed to use beds, and my wife is terribly horny... It's shaping up to be good so far, and I'm mostly loving everything about the new combat system. I'll write again after I beat it.

Back To Arch

2008-10-23T22:50:00.000-07:00

I've switched back to Arch Linux. It's nice having up to date packages.

Cons of Ubuntu

2008-10-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu has been irking me lately. Specifically, packages are outdated. GNOME Do was at 0.4 in the repos, and 0.6.1 is out. Ubuntu expects me to wait until Intrepid Ibex to update. That's just stupid. Sure it's not long until then, but we shouldn't have to wait six months to get new packages. Open Office 3 has been out for ten days, and won't be coming to Ubuntu until Intrepid. This is just pure stupidity. Open Office 3 has new features that greatly assist me as I am reading my college essays returned from my professors. All this outdatedness makes me want to switch back to Arch, but at the same time, if I did that, I'd miss out on the automagic of Ubuntu. Then again, I had everything I wanted set up before in Arch. I saved my entire /etc directory from Arch, so in case I ever switch back, that along with my /home partition should mean a fairly invisible return. I may be going back to Arch soon, everything in Ubuntu is just a bit messy and old. Now I just have to find time to install it and set everything I want back up again.

More Ubuntu Automagic Setup

2008-10-19T23:10:00.000-07:00

In juxtaposition to my previous blog entry, I have little to say.
Merely, I wanted to share another Ubuntu miracle with you: I just found out on accident today that the "Back" and "Forward" buttons on my Logitech MX518 mouse work automatically in Firefox 3 in Ubuntu. Crazy. Too bad I don't care to use them.

A Serious Change of Pace: Switching from Arch/KDE to Ubuntu/Xfce

2008-10-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

One day I felt the urge to try out Ubuntu again. It's come a long way since... Hoary or Breezy, I can't remember which I tried first.

It was somewhat refreshing seeing all the things that worked out of the box on Ubuntu. Though I did have problems with my printer, the default hplip package for Ubuntu isn't up-to-date enough to contain my drivers, sadly, but many other things were a breeze to set up. Including Japanese input with SCIM, my previous blog entry. :\

This is somewhat humorous to me, because I really loved Arch's simplicity, everything could be easily changed by hand with a few config files. Ubuntu is comparatively messy as hell, but there's enough GUI tools that I don't mind that bad. So I guess as long as X starts every day for me, I'll never have any problems.

But what I'm trying to get at here is that I switched from KDE to Xfce. I remember when I was first getting hyped about KDE4. It felt like I was waiting for Christmas. And then it gets released and it was a major let down for me. Even 4.1 crashed profusely for me, and the new version of kwin doesn't even support force maximization on windows for programs such as gvim and terminal. :( Compositing is kinda cool, but as I write this entry, I have compositing turned off. Sure, a transluscent panel and window shadows are cool looking, but the speed decrease of turning on compositing is more of a turn off. I used to be a KDE zealot. When I switched to Ubuntu I told myself I'd just use GNOME, because soon Kubuntu will be switching to KDE4, and I want to have nothing to do with it. GNOME flopped quickly. I was beginning to get very frustrated and wanting to switch back to Arch and KDE3 (though, I had to use a custom repository to get KDE3 over in Arch-world, as they switched over to KDE4.1 when it came out :|). But then I remembered: Xfce. It may lack a few things I like about GNOME (autodetection and usage of my multimedia keys, I had to get an obnoxious third party app for Xfce [Hmm, maybe there's only one thing I liked about GNOME?]), but it adds in MANY things I missed from KDE, such as flexibility of the panel and window manager (configurability of applets and keybindings/mousebindings respectively). Since September or so, I've also been hacking lots of gtkrc files for custom themes, even whilst I was still using KDE3 on Arch. So I've been able to find some themes I like and hack them to perfection, and I'm totally loving it. Many of the default programs shipped with Ubuntu suck, especially Transmission, the BitTorrent client, and Totem, the movie player, but I've been able to search and find absolutely great replacements to both of these. Deluge has features I was missing even in ktorrent, and I guess VLC isn't quite as great, the UI is quite messy, but it works a lot better than totem.

So, the unthinkable has happened, I have switched off of KDE and Arch simultaneously, and I am actually happier for it.

Japanese Input in Linux

2008-09-15T19:09:00.000-07:00

I am currently studying Japanese and using KDE3 on Arch Linux.
I like to be able to converse in Japanese when possible to practice.
Setting up Japanese input was mildly annoying, so here's an account of what helped me.

Install skim, scim, anthy, and scim-anthy

Create a file called ~/.xprofile containing the following
export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM export GTK_IM_MODULE="scim" export QT_IM_MODULE="scim"

Restart X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace)

After logging back in, start up an application, such as kate.
You should be able to press Ctrl-Space to active Japanese input now, or you can select it by left clicking on the skim system tray icon.
On the skim toolbar that pops up, click on the characters after あ and select the 3rd list item.
The idea when typing is you type the romaji of everything, and then press Tab or Up and Down to cycle through the possible kanji or kana to represent it.
It's pretty intuitive, so messing around lends itself to learning it's intricacies.

It's also worth noting that the GTK interface provides some Anthy-related configuration options that the KDE version doesn't, but I prefer these defaults anyway.

Also, if your fonts are ugly and bitmap looking, consider installing the Mona font and making a file ~/.fonts.conf containing:


<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap" >
  <bool>false</bool>
 </edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="autohint" >
  <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
  <const>none</const>
 </edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
  <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
  <const>hintslight</const>
 </edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
  <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

がんばって！ (Good luck!)

First Post!

2008-09-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

I expect this blog will mostly be about solving problems I've had in my years of using Linux. I've found that much of the best help on Linux is in blogs, so I figured I'd add another thing for Google to rummage through when you're banging your head against the wall. I may occasionally blog about other things, though.