BeOS and Haiku, its open-sourced phoenix were the operating systems that got me excited about operating systems. This was back before I knew how to subscribe to a blog or anything. Back when I thought blogs were just online diaries.

Anway, you can download the alpha 2 here. They're offering .iso, .vmx/.vmdk and Anyboot files. I'm running it in Virtualbox right now. No internet because it only supports WEP encryption and obvs we're on WPA2 here. Maybe tomorrow I'll get all ethernetted up in between boughts of fighting with the USB interface I'm recording with and writing smooth as, stone cold jams.

(Side note: Crashes for no reason but I can't tell if it's a Virtualbox thing or a Haiku thing. I'm going to go with Virtualbox because I'm an asshole.)

I get annoyed at OSX how there is always that little line down the bottom of an application where you can see the desktop or the windows underneath the current application.

The other day I was reading Gratis Recoup or something and needed to see everything so I fullscreened it. Now I’m an addict:

Don’t forget your keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs. Obviously this is going to be harder in Safari because ctrl/command+[1-0] open the respective bookmarks as per their arrangement on the bookmarks toolbar which isn’t helpful at all. Perhaps that is configurable but I’ll never know because I uninstalled it for being a piece of shit.

Here is the Snow Leopard theme for Google Reader. Install through the green box in the top right. The “nicer navigation pane” skin on that page is worth it for the icons as well.

Catch-22

Hopefully this isn’t very illegal.

Try reading this. It’s pretty complicated but very soothing.

Now – on UNIX based systems you can just sudo or su in the shell and get root account clout but on other systems you can’t. This is where Bitch comes in. Fucking Windows keeps reverting to ‘Read-Only’ on a directory despite your continuing attempts to remind it that it’s your folder and you will do what you like with it?

Plug in Bitch and watch that fucker obey.

But this isn’t just for Windows. Last night OS X had a fucking cry at me because I was trying to use it like it was an operating system and pulled this shit on me before playing the “No, I won’t turn off. I’m going to beachball until you kill the hardware.”

If I had invented Bitch last night I wouldn’t have had to deal with this:

(But I still would’ve googled how to screenshot)

Things My New Computer Can Do That My Old One Can’t

• Stay on when unplugged for more than twenty minutes

Things My New Computer Can’t Do That My Old One Can

• Run NetHack in the shell. Seriously – I can’t “install Rosetta” because I thought the whole deal with fucking Apple computers is they are good to go out of the box and you don’t need to do a big install disk thing to get the software you want. Even the Dell desktop my Dad bought ran everything out of the box. And seriously, NetHack? We’re not talking crazy complicated shit here.
• Record from the soundcard. It doesn’t have a mic input. So much for my credible music career. I thought buying a mac would confirm me as an artist? This sucks.
• Score me mad babes. Man, when I had my Linux laptop babes would fucking die to listen to me tell them about my operating system and watch me run ‘ls’ on a directory or two. Now they don’t even come near me even though my computer is a million times shinier.

Fuck this, I should probably take this piece of shit back to the shop.

For now instead of referring to the ubiquitous “companies” I am proposing a company by the name of “Suffice.” Suffice will be a large, multi-national affair with heaps of money. Probably some kind of product of the merger of a bunch of software, hardware and engineering firms or something convenient like that. Anyway – how the company came about is not important. Suffice will probably work with, and be subsidised by, the various governments that require Suffice’s services.

Suffice will sell realisation and will be viewed as a utility, much like a telecommunications company. To encourage realisation, the government would subsidise the cost of realisation for various things. Certain sectors of the employment industry will be the first things to be realised. Any job which is largely conducted from an office or on a computer will be prime candidate for realisation.

The company would sell most, or all, of its current real estate to Suffice (or the government, depending on who is paying for the business to be realised) and Suffice would fill this space with the computing power required to virtualise the business. In the early days this would probably consist of servers in shipping crates, much like Google’s server farms. Later, these facilities would be replaced with something more permanent.

Once realisation has become more of an everyday event, businesses will be eager to convert because they will save money by not being in the physical realm. If a business does not occupy real estate they will not pay rent. Nor do they need to conduct maintenance on their building or train their staff in basic first aid. A business that formerly occupied two floors of a large, inner city building would no longer need to pay window cleaners. Staff that exist virtually will not be as prone to physical injury in the virtual world, therefore companies will not need to train employees in first aid or have fire escape plans.

Understandably, this is seems to be a very far-fetched and imaginative idea. However, technologies exist today that could very easily be the ancestors for the future that I am examining here. Cloud computing is the process where resources are provided over the Internet. These resources are virtual and are stored on servers. The users of cloud computing access these resources through a tool like a web browser. If we take this technology to it’s conclusion, we can conceive entire companies existing virtually and being access through some kind of tool – in this case networked virtual reality.

Right now the owners of the Pirate Bay are trying to figure out a way to turn their massive, questionably legal, service into a massive, soundly legal service. They are talking to big record companies and are going to create some kind of scheme where users share their personal system resources in exchange for the Pirate Bay service. What I think this means is that the Universal Music Group are going to give people certain albums for a monthly subscription fee that is collected by the Pirate Bay. In turn, users will have the opportunity to seed these files to a large group of people consisting of other users in the Pirate Bay’s service and other people who are downloading the file from iTunes or Amazon or wherever it is they have paid for the music. The Pirate Bay will sell this pool of resources to companies and this will provide them with the resources to continue running their service.

If I understand cloud computing correctly, this will create a massive cloud of computing resources that is analogous to businesses working in realised environments: Consider the files that Pirate Bay users download and seed to be actual time a user spends on a given task. Consider the Internet to be networked virtual reality. Rather than have a user download and seed a file, have an employee complete an activity in a realised environment. Today someone might download a game and seed it to other people. Tomorrow someone might create the sequel to that game from a realised software business. The Pirate Bay provides the service for that user to seed the game today. Suffice provides the service for the development of the sequel tomorrow. Suffice will basically be turning every business it realises into clouds.

Have I done an adequate job of explaining this? I am more than happy to present examples of why I believe this is feasible. If you have lengthy thoughts on this subject, please email them to me rather than write eight-hundred words in the comment box.

Although I didn’t make it clear, the little piece of chipmusic attached to the end of the first VR essay is my debut chipmusic release. Here is my second one. They are meant to be taken in context of these essays.

But this is far into the future. Before this can happen virtual reality needs to win the hearts and minds of a young generation, who will learn to use VR for entertainment before they use it for anything functional, and their parents, who will fund the younger generation. In the same way that I started playing games on computers before learning how to use a computer to study, the younger generation will start gaming in VR before they start working in VR. My parents paid for the first computer in the house and now I pay for the computer that I use. Just like computers et al (personal mp3 players, console gaming systems) the VR product will make its way into households and handbags worldwide.

In order to get everyone throwing money at companies for VR-based products, some flagship, pioneer companies are going to need to make some pretty significant and powerful branding decisions. VR will need a catchy, easy to say and easily understandable name like, “iPod.” Apple were pretty smart when they coined the term and nothing else has really come close. I own a Sony NWA-3000 – I have for about four years – and to this day I haven’t figured out anything to call it shorter than, “mp3 player.” Generally I default to “iPod” the same way Americans call every facial tissue “Kleenex.” Different brands are going to call their different VR products different things, although this sentence is pretty vague and also fairly obvious, this will happen. What seems pretty clear to me is that the verb “virtualise” is going to be replaced.

Why? “Virtualise” is a four-syllable word. This word is too much of a mouthful to be used everyday in every situation unlike “iPod.” But before I go into that I will define what I consider “virtualise” to mean: In this context, “virtualise” is the process that an existing medium (be it television, painting, sculpture, social networking, social interaction, workplace organisation or law enforcement) goes through to become part of the world of networked virtual reality. You can say that an MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Second Life are “virtually reality” but you can not say they are “virtualised reality” if you take “virtualise” in context.

What the first few companies are going to spend billions of dollars doing is convincing the world that “virtualise” is not only one syllable too many, but that it is too literal a word for so virtual a process. I propose the verb that these companies will settle on will be “realise.” This verb is readily linked with virtual reality and it is also a verb that has many meanings. “Realise” is easy to associate with “virtual reality” as it is the verb form of the noun “reality.” In English, we already take it to mean: comprehend; make reality; make realistic; to obtain and; to achieve. One could realise that by realising an ambition to realise a realisation of Victorian society one can realise a great sum of money and subsequently realise a dream of realising wealth. Understand?

In the same way we accept this word has many meanings we will accept the new meaning. Once we have assimilated the language our realisation will be complete.

The message of the future is:

“Realise Your Dreams.”

WHAT A SHITTY QUALITY IMAGE – I KNOW BUT FUUUUUUUUUUUUU I WANT ONE OF THESE.

If you wanted to sleep with me you could do so by providing me with all of the equipment needed to build this great machine.

(oh no, did I just embed an image that was only text?)

One thing that is annoying about this, however is having to have a bunch of tabs open in the browser that you use to access all of your contacts at once. I find it unlikely that you have all of the people who you talk to on fckbk in your Gmail chat – but you might.

Anyway – for my Debian installation that I am trying to maintain without the use of any GUI (graphics) I need to be able to chat with a bunch of people. Because Gmail won’t work in my text browser, I had to use other tools to be able to chat to people. I chose Finch as my solution. Finch is the non-graphics version of Pidgin, a multi-protocol IM client. It looks like this:

Those are my GMail chat contacts (some of them). To get that to happen in Finch or Pidgin (or Adium, I guess – Adium is the OS X version of Pidgin) make your account settings look like this:

You can have all of your other contacts from MSN etc in here but I don’t because fuck them.

This is one of the reasons I’ve started using Debian. But I won’t go into that yet because I:

A) can’t be bothered and

B) don’t really know what I am doing

A large part of what I do on the Internet involves some type of email thing. So I had used a CLI-based email client for a while before this on a remote computer running BSD but I’d never really figured out how to get it to do what I needed it to do in order to be useful. Today was the day that that all ended:

The following are a series of emails I sent to myself to test my SMTP and IMAP settings. The email addresses have been edited to ensure that my identity is kept a secret from the world because, as a blogger, I am very frightened of the repercussions my blogs with incur IRL. NB: I have inverted the order of the emails so you don’t have to read them from the most recent, descending.

EDIT: this was nested in pre tags before but whatever server I’m on decided to be fckn lame and made it look stupid. After that it removed all of the special characters thanks to the HTML standards or something so I just put it all in blockquotes nested and shit just like you aren’t meant to do.

Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:32:32 +1300 (NZDT)
From: Zach Doney zachdoney@gmail.com
To: zach@freeshell.org
Subject: getting my test on, boy

Basically, I am getting my test on – it’s time to
get 1337 and there is only one way to do that.

2009/3/10 Zach Doney zach@sdf.lonestar.org
Robby’s my booooooooy!

Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:13:22 +1300
From: Zach zachdoney@gmail.com
To: Zach Doney zach@sdf.lonestar.org
Subject: Re: getting my test on, boy

yeah

2009/3/10 Zach Doney zach@sdf.lonestar.org
hopefully you figure out how to get that IMAP thing working.
It’d be cool to access gmail from alpine. Then you could do
it here and be able to get your stuff whenever you needed it
like that time you haxxed at Unlimited.

On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, Zach wrote:
not yet, apparently

Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:22:19 +1300 (NZDT)
From: Zach Doney zachdoney@gmail.com
To: Zach zachdoney@gmail.com
Subject: Re: getting my test on, boy

Well, I’ve got it now. Who cares if the time of IMAP and SMTP
and non-web-based mail clients is over? I’ve got three inboxes
pointed at one client! This is what I’ve actually been wanting
to do for fckn ages! Now I don’t have to check, like, 50
different accounts! Fuck that webmail shit.

“What do you do on the Internet?”
“You know, read blogs, fckbk, steal music.”
“Oh! I read a blog once! It was about the type of music I should listen to. What type of blogs do you read?”
“Well, mostly the usual apart from this one where some guy sends emails to himself and then blogs about it.”
“…”
“The last email on the list came from the same account.”

If any of you want to know how to set up Alpine to do this I WILL POST A HOW-TO! I might even do it anyway, but we’ll see.

NO IMAGES BECAUSE FUCK IMAGES

The opportunity cost of playing with my computer is sometimes far too tempting to pass up.

Here is my tab list right now:

Yep. I’m learning how to DEVELOP THE INTERNETS. Things might start changing around here (but they probably won’t). Last night I made a shitty RSS feed up from scratch, which was fun and educational but not the great accomplishment that I had hoped.

I hope you guys liked George’s movie is really funny. You should watch it.

“Where do I start?”
“What is a good anime?”
“I don’t want to be a fanboy but (x), (y), (z).”

Here is a list of some good places to start:

Cowboy Bebop

Is a classic in the anime realm. Don’t know when it was made, don’t really care. Tells the life and times of a group of dysfunctional bounty hunters in the future (if the future was more like retro-future, where retro=Wild West).

Neon Genesis Evangelion

This is another classic. Fourteen-year-old cuties in giant robot suits saving the world. The main character is a fucking bitch but you should probably watch it anyway. I seem to remember being kind of bored when I watched this back-to-back, but now that I think about it I get really excited.
***BONUS (REALLY BAD COSPLAY) MATERIAL***

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

This is a really cute anime about a school-girl who thinks she is the centre of the universe. This anime is accesible to just about everyone and has some nice allusions to the Greek and Roman mythology as well. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy and motivated to go and “experience” things.

All of the above are series. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how to get them.

Hayao Miyazaki is a director of some madcore awesome animated feature films. They are bascially folk stories so don’t watch them if you only like sex and the Internet.

Howl’s Moving Castle

Is the business as far as I’m concerned. Great concept, great animation, great story. Some cute chick gets transformed into an old lady and ends up on some crazy semi-living robot house with Howl. Good times.

Spirited Away

I remember not caring about this at all when it came out because I liked Slipknot or something. Cute little girl finds a spirit land and a giant bath-house. She gets roped in to the bath house and the spirit land and spends the movie trying to esccape. I love this movie and I just remembered that this Japanese dude gave me a Spirited Away book! Ha-ha! Wait, I got it out just then and it’s all in 日本語. Oh well there are some cute sketches and concept art.

Call it “nerdy” or “geeky” or whatever but WoW is way more fun than going outside. If I could afford it I would play it.

Goss has started ending his blogs with ♥ so I used Google to help me find other things on the Internets that are spreading unconditional love AND NOTHING CAME UP. This is moderately interesting because there are heaps of sites on the Internet with the html heart all over the place.

What this taught me is that you can highlight some text, right click it and “Search Google for ‘[highlighted text]‘” will be in your context menu. I don’t know how useful that is but I guess it is kind of useful. This is how it works in Firefox, you can do it in Opera as well – it is basically the same. I don’t know about IE (you should have uninstalled this long ago) or Safari. Maybe if you highlighted the text, held down ‘super’ and clicked it? I guess that might make it search the text in a new tab. Who knows?

Right click in some blank space on the Start Menu toolbar and unlock the taskbar. Arrange those little things in the Quick Launch toolbar so they make some sense to you.

Remember:
1) You don’t need a link to My Computer, that is what “super+E” is for. (NB: “super” is the “windows” button)
EDIT: LOZ I just realised that I still had the ‘My Computer’ link in my quick launch bar, which I’d left in those images down there. I guess I had grown used to it, like an old genital wart.
2) Delete Internet Explorer because it is fucking lame and slow and shit and boring and lacking in good features.
3) Remove the Windows Media Player shortcut because you don’t need that one either. Use a better media player like MPC.
3a) Actually, while I am on the subject – don’t bother with any other media players if you just want a player that plays everything. Follow this link to get the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack. You should probably download the VLC player as well because you’ll another one. These applications are great because they are lightweight and powerful, unlike Windows Media Player.
4) When you have added some useful links to the Quick Launch toolbar, resize the toolbar so your last icon (or two – it probably depends on your OS. In XP, go for two) get put into the >> thing (I’m not that sure what to call that thing) then lock the taskbar again. This will ensure you have a good use of space.

5) Vista has a couple of icons there for cascading the windows and returning to the desktop. I don’t know why you’d want to cascade the windows, so delete that one. You don’t need the ‘return to desktop’ one because you can do that with “super+D”

Main points from this blog:

Sorry Mac and Linux users who don’t care about this. Sorry to Windows users who already knew this. Just keeping it simple, just keeping it real.

Your monitor resolution is something you should know. I know what your monitor res is because Google have provided me with a tool to do so. I do know that most of the people that come here have a screen res of 1280×800 which is 16:10 widescreen as per most laptops that were bought early last year and weren’t that expensive. It may only be a semi-truth that the largest percentage of people who come here have that screen resolution because that is what I have and I visit sleep500 more than anyone else because I have to fight off the aliens and spammers who like to comment on my CLit posts (no prizes for this one).

To all the math majors out there: the aspect ratio 16:10 is not written as 8:5 as it would be in your textbooks because it is close to the common widescreen ratio of 16:9 and is easier to think about like that, I guess.

There are many good places to get nice wallpapers from on the Internet. You can go to Google Images and search your screen res. You can go to /wg/ – the Wallpapers/General forum on 4chan (this is where I get most of my things). You can also go to places like deviantart but I wouldn’t bother with that (actually, I’ve only been there twice or something – I didn’t have a good time).

The main point of this post is don’t put porn on your desktop because that is stupid. I have some walls of Emma Watson and Michelle always looks at me weird when my wallpaper changer cycles through them.

Here are some pictures because pictures are nice. These papers are 1920×1200 which is 16:10 so they will resize nicely if you have a smaller monitor. Sorry to those people with squarer aspect ratios. Clicking on the images takes you to their original sources through the wonder and magic of the Internet.

Good:

Bad:

AHAHAHAHAHAHH AS I WAS CHANGING SOME SEARCH PREFERENCES IN GOOGLE I ACCIDENTALLY CHANGED MY LANGUAGE TO AFIKAANS AND THEN I WENT TO CHANGE IT BACK TO ENGLISH BUT I ENDED UP GOING WITH ELMER FUDD INSTEAD.