Category: Life

It’s that time of the year again!

I’ve renewed the following domain(s):
– maelys.bio

I’ve purchased the following domain(s):
– celsius-studios.com
– thompsonwatch.com

I’m letting the following domain(s) go:
– jmcardle.info
– celsius-studios.info
– staples-employees.info*
– i-love-corie.info**
– hackas.info***
– [confidential]

ThompsonWatch.com is a site about Jack Thompson – the dude who blames video games as the cause for every disease known to man.

* This was a site originally designed to host the schedules for us Staples employees. Problems: 1. The bosses didn’t want to email me the spreadsheet for the schedule (citing too much effort) 2. They let me go from Staples.
** I loved her. She didn’t love me.
*** Blearh.

I listen to Radio Netherlands as my principal source of news. I find that they provide the most unbiast reports of daily events, as well as maintain a great level of International coverage seldom seen in North American media.

They do provide MP3s of their news feeds on a regular, hourly, basis. However, they have yet to have a Podcast feed. So what is one to do? One who wishes to listen to this news regularily without manually downloading the news each time?

Cron of course! Cron is the unix tool for scheduled tasks. But as I use Windows mostly, I’ve set it up under Cygwin. Cygwin is sort of *nix for Windows.

Once Cygwin is installed, and cron setup as a system daemon, the fun begins. First off, I wrote the instructions to download the news for Cygwin to execute, and save it to the “radionetherlands.sh” file:

wget http://download.omroep.nl/rnw/smac/latestnews.mp3 –limit-rate=20k –output-document=/cygdrive/d/radionetherlands/latestnews.mp3
date > /cygdrive/d/radionetherlands/LastUpdate.txt

The script essentially downloads the news in MP3 form at a max of 20kb/s, as to not interfere with online gaming and whatnot. It saves the file in my “D:\radionetherlands\” folder with Windows. Then it outputs into a text file the time at which the download was completed. This last bit is for debugging purposes.

Then, I have to tell cron to execute the script hourly, so I create a new file, named “jmcron”:

5 * * * * sh radionetherlands.sh
0 4 * * 4 wget
http://download.omroep.nl/rnw/smac/en_documentary.mp3 –limit-rate=20k –output-file=/cygdrive/d/radionetherlands/documentary.mp3

I then incorporate the above into cron:

crontab jmcron
crontab -l

So from now on, 5 minutes after the hour, every hour, my computer will download in the background the latest news from radio netherlands. And at 4AM, every Thursday, it will also download the documentary aired on Radio Netherlands.

This is one of the forte of *nix. Windows does have a scheduler, and an easy to use one at that. However, pulling off something like the above tends to be much more difficult than need be due to the lack of a proper command line interface and applications.

This is indeed another [deadly boring] update on my life. So I recommend, for your sake, that you don’t read. You have been warned. Any ensuing brain hemorrages are not my responsibility.

Ahhh books. High School, which I was in but 2 years ago, taught me to hate them. Oh did it ever. Nothing can suck out your will to read than non-stop reading of the anals of the English language. From Pride & Prejudice to Wuthering Heights, from Anna Karenina to [insert absolutely dull title here written by an author in a land with a cyrillic alphabet and apparently no sense of joy].

When I left High School, I essentially lost any will to read books ever again. That said, I did buy a few titles… Practical C Programming; Linux Pocket Guide… a Japanese-English dictionary. Nothing that ressembled what I had touched previously.

Then, this past birthday, I got a Chapters [bookstore] gift card. I went in, and bought a book called “*Spam _Kings”, published by O’Reilly. Its a nonfiction account of a few spammers and anti-spammers accross the span of 5 years.

I got bitten by the book-reading bug. I, who also detested history, went in and bought a book on Japanese history. I noticed that they also started selling [good] manga, so I also bought Love Hina (vol. 2) and Great Teacher Onizuka (vol. 1) for good measure. I haven’t read any mangas (or anything else with pictures) in at least 10 years. The joy!

*Hugs Books*

I donated $15CAD to OpenOffice today. I know its little – but I’m somewhat strained for cash, as I’m saving it all up to pay tuition.

These guys release a great, free, product. If you use it: donate. Microsoft asks $199 for their version of the productivity suite [Student Edition], and is [I find] an inferior product. OpenOffice has a much better Math Engine, as well as the ability to export to PDF and open/save in multiple non-native formats. Spend $200 with Microsoft? [$500 if you’re not a student] Or spend $20 with OpenOffice?

Next on my list is Azureus, the popular Bittorrent client that I use religiously.

PS. If you’re a chemistry student, either in IB [High School] or University, and using Microsoft Office, you must absolutely try the Math Engine included in OpenOffice. It will save you so. much. time writing those formulas!

Could some people understand video games any less? Apparently not Jack Thompson.

Thompson is threatning action against Rockstar for Vice City, wishing to remove the game from store shelves. His reasoning? Vice City contains sexual content.

After some investigation on the part of Jack Thompson’s cited sources, who couldn’t believe themselves how he manipulated their content into some monstrous design, it was determined that Jack Thompson misunderstood the following:

“At any rate, the rest of the mod scene was rather surprised when Patrick released it, so I don’t think anyone else even thought it was there. Although not many people (in the scene) are really shocked or surprised that Rockstar was working on it. Vice City had missions involving a porn studio with cutscenes showing people wearing less clothes than Hot Coffee while filming a porn, so to most who have been playing the series for a while, hot coffee seems like a natural progression. Especially considering all the other simulation flavored aspects they added to San Andreas.”

What does this mean for Take Two and Rockstar? Nothing – the ESRB were fully aware of those cutscenes when they gave the game the M Rating. The cutscenes themselves do not feature nudity, which is quite a testament to how lax Hot Coffee really was.

There is potential that the game is placed under review by the ESRB. But as is, I find that rather unlikely. I do believe that the ESRB will defend its decision to give the game an M rating, despite its questionable ruling with Hot Coffee.

UPDATE: Reply from Jack Thompson to Next-Gen on the issue:

“The problem for the ESRB, then, is worse. The modders themselves indicate that this “cutscene” rivals what is in the “Hot Coffee mod,” and in fact it does. Thus, the ESRB has put an AO rating on GTA:SA yet has put an M on a game whose content should have been known by them to include what is described. Kiss the ESRB good-bye.”

What does it say to me? Forget the content of this message – it means that Jack Thompson didn’t get his facts straight. This above email is a classic example from “Propaganda 101”: namely never admiting a mistake, and circumventing any errors at hand to make it seem like you’re in the right facing a [silently shifted] issue.

Ladies and Gentleman: Jack Thompson is nothing other than a non-existant cause looking for a reason within the video-gaming realm. He will stop at nothing in his quest, most probably because he is attracted to the attention he receives. The above example shows that he cares nothing of the facts, and would rather circumvent his errors with new fronts rather than face them. This is not a new allegation either – he’s been operating this way for years.

Original News Source