Wheres the rant?

I don't know if it is because i'm in the holiday spearit, or just felling a little under the weather. I just don't have any thing to rant about. Thats why there was no rant Thursday. The only possible thing i could think about was ranting again about how my adviser screwed me and my classes up. But i don't feel like talking about school again since I'm don't and on break.

I been spending my free time playing a demo. Black and Wight 2. It is a strategy game like Age of empires, but your God, and you can be a good or a bad good to your people. You might see a review of it coming up in the next few days. Also say tune to a little how to and my experience with Dell computers.

Another video! Yippee

It was busy day for me, will be for the rest of this week. But it has been a few day with out a new post, so i grabbed this video from my favorites. I felt that it was appropriate since today was my last day of school.

Mid-Power Rockets

A week later and i finally got my video up and ready on youtube. I also updated the original post to have the same video embeded.
http://nblracer.blogspot.com/2007/12/3-2-1-blast-off.html

3 2 1 Blast Off!

Well last week my brother finished a few rockets, and they were finally able to take flight. One rocket was a four D-12 cluster, which he received 10 year ago. The other was an Arotech Cheetah, which can run on a variety of engines. We were only able to test two, since we lost it on the second. The first shot was with an E-30, and the second lunch was with a G-80. The biggest motor with out certification.

RANT:: Learn how to drive!

Fuck, you would think living in New England, people would know what snow is and how to drive in it. Today, school was canceled, so i decided to do a little x-mass shopping. I found my self stuck in traffic on the highways, since every one is doing 5 mph. That is not an exsasuration. I understand that it is important to drive safely in the snow, but it is the 21 century, cars can handle it. Only if the drivers new how to drive. For example my car is a front wheel drive with TCS (traction control system), with ABS. It also has a mode, that will start in 3rd gear, to keep the rpm low, to prevent tire spin. Even if the tires start getting loose, TCS will kick in and will start to throttle down my throttle, so the tires wont spin. It is almost imposable to get out of control in this car and it is 8 year old car. I don't wont to sound overly confident, because that can cause accidents too.

Another problem i have with drivers, they don't understand how the high way system works. What is the leftest most lane on the high way called? If you answer "Fast Lane" your wrong. It is called the passing lane. Since it called passing lane, it implies that it is only used for passing. So if your not passing get your ass out of it. I don't care if your doing a 105 mph in the passing lane, because i will be doing 110, and want to get around you.

Lastly is the speed limit bother me. 55 on a high way! Dam my peddle bike can go faster then that. What bothers me the most is how the speed limit is scaled it makes no seance. For example: Residential streets are 25mph; No problem with that since you need to be aware of kids playing, and it is not a way to travel. Then you have main streets and routes that are about 35. This OK, not too bad. If it is a multi lane it should be higher. Next are back roads, they are at 45 mph. This puzzles me since they are often narrow, single lane winedy roads. I would like to go faster but compared to a more safe means of travailing on route, it makes no seance. Now what blows my mind is high way speeds. These are multi lane, and designed to be driven at high speeds. They are often straight, but even in a corner you can do 100mph with out pulling a full G.
So why highways designed to move alot of traffic, fastly are limited to 55mph, yet you can do 45 on a back road? This is because the 1973 oil crises. where they caped speed limits to save gas. They figure out that 55mph is the most effecent speed, that maybe true at the time, but engines have dramatically improved over the 30 years. First the cars are more aerodynamic, and the engines are better tuned. A quick example of this, my 1999 Saab 9-5 has a 3.0 litter turbo charged engine that outputs 200 horse power. Today's Saab 9-5 only comes in a 2.3 litter turbo, and it outputs 260Hp. It makes more power in a small engine and consumes less gas, It is better all around. So lets change those speed limits to 75 or higher.

Ubuntu 7.10 on PS3

Over the past few years i been becoming a Linux fan, and even a bigger fan of the Linux community. The community is amazing since they spend hours programing to adapt, for no pay. My first encounter was the ipod Linux, a custom light weight Linux kernel able to run on the ipod. The use may seem limited, because the interface, but you will be surprised. There are allot of games and simple apps. My favorite of at the time was the Wikipedia, which was simple but large dump of the famous encyclopedia.

The open source of Linux allows any one to rebuild it, customize it and adapt it. I just duged up this article, on how to get Ubuntu (a full blown Linux distro) on the PS3. This will practically turns your PS3 into a roaring 3GHz multimedia system. What i like most, it justify the $500 price. Where can you get a complete 3.2GHz computer with a blue-ray drive, and hdmi ports to connect to your HDTV.

"
Here's how you get Ubuntu 7.10 to run on PlayStation 3

read more digg story
"

Error Sparks Mad Dash Over 33-Cent Gas

This was an interesting story:
a 6 month employ made a Monday detail by for getting to enter the last digit; a 9.
So instead of being $3.299 a gallon it was $.329 a gallon.

What a bargain!

"Forty-two people bought 586 gallons of gas in an hour and 45 minutes."

Some simple math will so that:
3.299 * 586 - .329 * 586 =
1 929.915 - 192.46500 =
1 737.45

The the gas station lost $1,737.45
that's $38.61 every minute for 45 min.
on average each person stole $41.37

Any ways the manger was very up set and said "I was very upset that there's that many dishonest people." She was up set since they took advantage of the mistake and worst passed along the message around that the gas was miss market.

For some reason i don't agree with her, i don't know why. What do you think, were they in the wrong to get the gas at 33 cents a gallon?

"Dozens of drivers made a mad rush for cheap gas after a station employee accidentally changed the price to 33 cents a gallon. An employee closing Trig's Minocqua Shell for the night meant to drop the price of gas by 1 cent.

read more digg story"

Blogging + Laptop = NO TIME!

If you you know me, you know that Time is truly my only enemy. It is one thing humans don't have full control over. And because I'm technologist i know that faster you move, time appears to slow down, but that is relative.

Anyways time is killing me, and you too. I remember the day, when i was able to flock around freely, with out a minds eye to time. Was able to ride the bike, play Counter-strike, and still have time for school work. Used to be a admin to both a large gaming community (Texangirlz) with several gaming servers, and to a worldwide anti-cheat program (SteamBans). This would take hours of my day to day life, and i enjoyed every minute. But today i have no time, and no longer part of either.

So with my new laptop, i was thinking i could do more, since my whole life is a round a computer. So more on a computer more i can do. But that may not be the case. I know spend time blogging, reading on about blogging, checking rss feeds and doing homework while chatting with the few friends i do have. What I'm missing is podcasts.

I'm a huge podcast listening fan, with about 45 subscription feeds, getting over 30 podcast a week. Now having the laptop i know longer use my main rig, with all my podcast. I cant subscribe to them on my laptop since, hard drive space is slim and the on board speakers suck. Also when I'm using the laptop, I'm in the living room watching TV in the background.

So I'm prod to say that I'm on my main rig working on a new program, and listening to podcast. I have a lot of catching up to do. Luckily my current program project is in JavaScript for iGoogle, and i never used JavaScript. Therefore it will take some time to learn the basics, giving me plenty of time to catch up.

RANT:: Silence I Say: SILENCE!

Not to pick on the same person again, but today was hilarious. Too bad i could not laugh out loud. Just would not be appropriate. I hope you can recall the older returning to school that chews like a cow student, if not read this: http://nblracer.blogspot.com/2007/11/first-rant-of-week.html

So you already know she can be very loud but today was even better. In class we had to write a paper that is weighted heavily, about an article on the importance of silence. Right next to me i have the loudest chewer. Chewing is not the only thing she does, she readers her paper out loud. After every other sentence she writes, she goes "hmm that does not sound right" and scribbles something and starts reading the paper from the top, OUT LOUD.

Oh she scribbles with a pencil, not that pencils don't have there place for example math, but in a quite English class a dull pencil makes a lot of noise. Have you ever notice that?

So if that was not disturbing enough, it gets better. Class was coming to an end and people were handing their papers in. She leans over to me with a remark of " and this was about silence " Like the whole class besides her miss understood the article. But i don't think she understands that she was reading out loud when ever one else was quite. Ahhh that bother me so much. Who miss understood it now?

What bothers me more is her age, not that she an older adult returning to school, but naturally i have to show respect to her, since I'm a stand up guy. You know if she was one of my peers i would poke them and make some kind of sarcastic joke to let them know that they're reading out loud and it was bothering me. But that cant happen with her, she most likely take it the wrong way.

I'm happy to say there are only two more weeks of school left, so the noise is almost over.
On another note, the class that i just picked, (http://nblracer.blogspot.com/2007/12/picking-classes.html) and thought i was done with; Turns out i cant transfer funds between the two schools with that class, so tomorrow i have to go though the class list and come up with another. Fun , Fun.

The real reason why I blog

After rereading my first post, i conclude that was all too much poetic.
Of course i would love to get paid.

Besides that, i started blogging for two other reasons. First i was late into the online social movement. Its not that i was never online, but today kids online time is around Facebook and mySpace. I for one was more into forums for communication. So with people going off to school, and losing contact with friends, i caved in and got a Facebook account. I took it a step further and started to blog. Blogging allows me to express my self, share things that may interest others and lastly i hope this will make me a better writer.

That is more of an accurate reason why i blog.

================================
Update from the writer:
================================
+ Yesterday i spent quite some time online trying to learn JS; I gave up, very hard, and poorly supported docs.

+ I'm going to write it in PHP, in my opion a much better lang, but it is not client side

+ I pushed out this blog early, to clear up my day, so i can finsh some home work :(

+ Tomorrow blog is on the Tin Man a min series/ move on the Scifi

+ Open projects: Clean up blog template, Blog pinger in Java(Finished but not tested enough to be relased), Php code for openDNS and DNS-O-Matic ( more on this next weekend)

Picking classes

Picking Classes

My final class I wanted to take just went though. The first five were simple to pick since, I saw no real option. But the sixth I had to explore new ground even though I'm very certain on my education path. Right now I'm attending a two year school and want to graduate with honors, with my major being computer science, more pacifically programing. So i first picket the basics that are needed English and calculus. Then i picked 3 other class that were recommend to me, turns out to be every computer related class (beside learning basic MS office software). I wanted to take one more class, just to stay ahead of the game. Really i wanted to take advance java or advance C. (Hopefully to get into real programing, that actually useful in the real world) The problem is that i already new java from high school, and at this college that start with C to java then either advance C or advance java. This caused me to be out of synced for a semester.

The six class was more difficult, since i wanted to work to my major and industry, and there were non available to me, or i did not meet the requirements. Therefore i turn to another school. Many more classes were available to me, making the decision process harder. I went with a Database course, since it is available as an online class. Today every thing got finalized between the two schools.

Tin man

I wanted to write a review on Tin Man yesterday, but time was short and plans changed. Instead of re-watching Tin Man, i watch the new Die Hart. Which was good, by the way.

I was about to say/type, Go check out the movie online, but it seems they are no longer showing The Tin Man any more. It was nice of them to have all the episode on line while the others were airing. But i can no longer find the link, this sucks, since i my next blog was going to be on how FireFox users not treated equally. (it had to deal with the video FireFox and Internet explorer.

Wireless keyboard encryption easily broken

This was kind of an interesting story for tonight. From my readings and understanding, the encryption on Microsoft Wireless keyboard has been broken. This is nothing to be alarmed about in my opinion.

First if you ever had a RF wireless keyboard you know the range. There great in the same room but, one room away it works ok, little iffy at times; some keys may not register all the time. Therefore the hacker has to be in within 50 or so feet. So if there some one in your living room, you don't know, you have more things to worry about. Just to cover all areas in this matter, in an office build it would be very useful. If you worked at an insurance company, with hundreds of computers on the same level you’re bound to find someone typing personal information. Only problem it is an office building, wireless keyboards are not standard issued.

Besides the range, the equipment need to scan the 20 MHz frequency is not on every ones Christmas list. It may be possible to hack up an old wireless keyboard receiver, but those who have them know how limited they are. This is not like a wi-fi wep crack, since every laptop now comes with a wireless card, which has mix mode to scan the air space.


"
The encryption on Microsoft's wireless keyboards is so simple it only has 256 possible keys. You can guess the key using only 20-50 keystrokes. Someone could potentially create a wireless key logger that captures characters from every keyboard in the office.

read more digg story
"

Wine 0.9.50 Released

Is this good?
Wine is nice to have but I don’t think this is the way we should head or good for the UNIX community.

One reason being that, when you think Linux you think free, at least to me. Most win software is not. So i would rather see newer better software that is open source.

Second the software will naturally become buggy since it is not running natively on the intentional OS. I’m no expert but, running a VM, would be better off.


This is release 0.9.50 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. What's new in this release: Completed I/O completion. Improved user credentials management, including Mac Keychain support. More Valgrinding. Lots of bug fixes.

read more digg story

I <3 gCode

gCode you ask?

G standing for two different things
First it is short for Good code, you know the good clean stuff
Second is stands for Google, the maker of the code/api

Yesterday i started to work on a program that would run in the background and check for updates on this blog, if there is an update, it then would ping some blog trackers. Very simple. But what made me so happy, how easy the Google api is to work with. I did not have to use the api, could of made an rss feed reader, but that would of been more work.

Another reason why I like the gCode, the api was simple but powerful, and already has some docs built up. With such a great api I was able to dive right into the code and explore. I have not used Java in sometime, so it was a great way for me to get my feet wet again.

This post is the first test with my code, so wish me luck...

First Rant of The Week!

Like I said, I want to keep some thing regular on this blog. So you can expect a post very similar to this one. No, not the same words, the nature and tone will be the same though. This idea came from one of my favorite podcast Maximum PC www.maximumpc.com/articles/Podcast, if you like it; buy the magazine, since it’s by far the best pc mag on the self. Anyways, they have a section with a guy who goes off in a rant, on funny topics. I don't know if mine will be as funny, as much as personal therapy for my self.

So here it goes......

So in of my class, I have one of those older people returning to school kind of thing. That is not my problem, I have no problem with those who want to continue there education, good for them I say. The problem is she chews' her gum so obnoxiously; Not like your basic cow chewer but a cow chewer with 1/2 gallon of spit and saliva in her mouth. Causing very disgusting sound that has to be audible across the room, but I the fortunate one sit right next to her.

Upcoming events and news or posts:
The real reason why I blog
is it murder when, feeding tube removed
Talk more about iPhone

Current Project
A pinging program for blog

Tracker and stats

It has only been a few days since my first bog and I'm really loving it.

Just driving around I came up with different things, that I want to talk/blog about. So stick around and please subscribe to my feed. There is both an atom and rss2.0 options. http://nblracer.blogspot.com/atom.xml http://nblracer.blogspot.com/rss.xml
At this time I know I'm the only one viewing the blog, thanks to some nifty tracking data

So here is the run down for next month:
"Rant of the week" <-- a weekly post I want to do. To keep this blog at least some what regular; this will be on Thursdays, right after my last day of the week of my longest classes.....
The art of programming:
Trillian Astra: I been an alpha member for a while now, and the open beta should be out soon, so I should bog the hell out of before others :p

I had one more, just cant think of it

Video Transfer = BitTorrent?

I was shocked when I heard, what the female contestant on Jeopardy last night (November 26, 2007) answered to a question dealing with i.Link and Video; Bit-Torrent is what she answered with. I was shocked. Shocked that it made me think on why I would be so shocked. First I came up with the bad connotation Bit-Torrent has; The illegal downloading of copyrighted content. Second reason being her, a female in her late 30's, early 40's. What does she know about Bit-Torrent? When would some one of here status come about this word and meaning? This all puzzled me, a great deal. In the end why would she link Bit-Torrent as a means of transferring video?

Has Bit-Torrent saturated are lives enough, that it has became common knowledge? Yes and no. Yes in the sense Bit-Torrent is a practical way to sync data transfer over many users. Those like me, who game and use the Steam platform, may know or not know that it is based off a Bit-Torrent system. Another example that came up in recent debates is that IBM Open Office Lotus Symphony also has torrent built into itself. The no part; The term "Bit-Torrent " is never used in the mass media, most likely they use the term peer to peer and at most P2P. Yes the internet is part of the mass media and defiantly has knowledge of Bit-Torrent, but online it mostly used in the negative form.

So how did this contestant come up with her answer? I have to think she or better yet she knows some one who uses Bit-Torrent for boot legged video. Now that's jumping to conclusions.

Why we blog?

The idea of a blog is so far vast and abstract, yet we all think we know what one is. My idea can be very different then the guy next to me and his is different then the girls next to him, sipping down another four dollar coffee. But the tech world fell in love with the term "blog", so much so it becomes common knowledge and recognized by all. Even the most computer illiterate soccer mom or waitress, still makes the time to push out a weekly article. Even stranger are the pro blogers, not the person but the carrier. Getting paid to write a personal diary is just too much.

Because of this I feel as the author, I should personally address the purpose of writing this blog, but frankly I'm still not quite sure. I have ideas, I want to run with; my mind can spool them up, now I just want to throw them down. Essentially it will become a personal diary, of thoughts and opinion. Don't be surprised to see topics on subjects all over the place, from review of products, to rant on life, or an upcoming project.

More I write, more I'm unsure what really makes a blog a blog, or how to write a good one. This is going to be, a working art, so old on and come for a ride into My World.


Because of this I feel as the author, I should personally address the purpose of writing this blog, but frankly I'm still not quite sure. I have ideas, I want to run with; my mind can spool them up, now I just want to throw them down. Essentially it will become a personal diary, of thoughts and opinion. Don't be surprised to see topics on subjects all over the place, from review of products, to rant on life, or an upcoming project.

More I write, more I'm unsure what really makes a blog a blog, or how to write a good one. This is going to be, a working art, so old on and come for a ride into My World.