Updates to EJKs Desktop for year of 2007

10/28/06 - Random gripe: The standard C library trigonometric functions all use radians. Most angular math is best performed and calculated in radians. glRotate, glFrustum & co all use degrees - WTF? Thank you nVidia/ATI, I'm sure 57.295779 and .017453293 appreciate being liberally smattered all over my math code.

8/30/06 - Well, having the server think that both eth0 and eth1 were local might explain some of the technical problems that I've been having for the last few weeks. Stupid computer.

7/5/06 - A belated Happy Independance Day to my fellow Americans!

6/20/06 - Version 0.9 of a little chat program I'm writing called EPEDAT is out. Versions up to and including 0.9 are called "EJKnet". It currently does basic text chat, file exchange, and primitive encryption of communications. It should build on any Unix platform that supports TCP/IP.

6/15/06 - Sometimes, I Question my faith in humanity.

6/2/06 - Okay, I lied... or got lazy, or for whatever poorly concieved and contrived excuse for a reason have managed to wait until now to get anything done with posting all those pictures. However, galleries 11 and 12 are up and running.

Yesterday, I managed to install Cinepaint and tries using it instead of the GIMP so I could use 16-bit channels, but it didn't work out. First of all, I must be missing something in the plugins directory. How else could I end up with no scanner access and no crop tool (wtf?)? Second of all, Holy Mother Of God It Was Slow. On images that the GIMP managed to update at slideshow rates, Cinepaint would sit and churn for half a minute or longer. And yes, this was with Uint8 channels on Cinepaint, not half or full float. Perhaps it's a support library; I never managed to find Nvidia's Linux SDK, and OpenEXR wouldn't compile so I installed an RPM. Who knows... But something is definetly not right about this.

5/7/06 - GIMP issue fixed by rpm -i --force; Still no idea what went wrong. Gallery to be put up sometime tomorrow.

5/6/06 - Having some serious software issues preventing image upload; Something messed up my libgtk+-x11.so, and gimp implodes because of missing functions (wtf?).

Regardless, I just saw the video about Stephen Colbert @ the White House Correspondents Dinner... Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he pwn3d them all so hugely it was beyond belief... That was true shock and awe.

4/30/06 - Finished writing one parody page, detailing the coming War on Oxygen. Prints almost done drying.

4/29/06 - Substantial updates coming to multiple pages soon. I just got a batch of new photographic supplies, and have so far printed about 15 (4/30/06: 21 prints currently drying) pictures, which will fill out two current galleries and start a few of their own. I'm also writing a couple parody pages, which I'll post when complete. I'm also going to create a new commentary.

PS: Fuck the TelCos and their 'tiered Internet'. Save the Internet!

4/17/06 - I've started a page about a physics toy, a levitating wheel, as well as a page with current events commentary.

3/26/06 - Added two pictures to gallery 9.

3/24/06 - Updated the statistics script to exclude Google, Yahoo, and MSN crawlers from the data, at the expense of the script now taking much longer to run because of the filtering. I also made sure that all the subpages have a proper head tag in them. I printed some very good pictures today, which I plan to scan and post in Gallery 9 shortly.

3/20/06 - Is there some compelling reason that Google has to re-index me three to 5 times every single day? I may have written a fair amount, but I don't write that much...

I also have a prototype of a script to help analyze site traffic patterns. It takes almost a minute to run, generates a table containing 2000 entries, and will most likely make baby Jesus cry.

3/13/06 - WTF? DynDNS deleted my account. Good job telling me something's screwed up, rundns...

3/12/06 - Reworked the main page. Wrote a decent introduction above, and truncated updates to those occuring within the last year. I plan to write a script to move all updates to a new page at the end of a year.

3/7/06 - I've written a script that will allow me to keep the links section at the top of all the photo galleries in synch and update it at all at once. The only sacrifice is some ugly HTML, because for sed to work in a non-convoluted manner it all has to be on one line. Bleh! In other news that you might actually give a damn about, I'm going to be scanning and adding seven new photos, starting off galleries 9 and 10. But since it's only been March 7th for 2 hours, I'm gonna do that later today...

3/2/06 - I figured I'd try my hand at creating a cartoon. Here ya go. Feel free to send me comments. I'm also writing a third program that I may post in the near future - stand by. I've also got some absolutely AWESOME macro pictures I took yesterday that I hope to print soon.

Random technical errata: Why, when Apache paginates the logs by month, does it delete anything else in the directory? I looked at the start of this month and the symlink access_log.0 was gone - WTH? Eh - time to add a monthly cron job.

2/17/06 - Wrote a second automatic page-update script to keep a reference to the latest gallery correct. If you want to find out where scripts are setup to do this, view any page source and look for anchors with name="sed___" in them. These get updated every day to reflect new information. Currently the updates are numerical, but a simple text substitution isn't out of the question. In addition, these alterations are run as daily CRON jobs. It's probably possible to write a program that hooks into FAM to only run when triggered by changes in the right files. Anyone wanna give it a shot?

On the other hand, I find the implications of such automatic updating on research and quoting interesting: You quote me saying one number, the next day my scripts silently change it to something else. Whose fault, if anyone's, is it for having now-bad information? Icann imagine that my English 101 professor would have had something to say about this.

2/8/06 - Fixed a small bug with the statistics generator and wrote some more on the Gravity manual.

2/6/06 - Moved the anti-sony rant to the Thought of t3h Day page. Anyone who cares already knows - the rest are eager to show Sony that the have the memory of a goldfish and the collective sheepishness of lemurs by lining up for a PS3 anyway.

In other news, there's enough bizzarity in the news lately that I just can't not say something about it. It would be sad if I were making this crap up. It's sadder that I don't have to...
An Enron-Style Defense: "Yes, that's right your honor; My clients did nothing wrong. Enron was and still is one of the shining beacons of the Free Market. Furthermore, the people who confessed to wrongdoing are the real liars, coerced into perjury by the evil government. Y... Yes, your honor, the same government that's been doing pretty much everything we want for 5 years." I am at a loss for words. I read that story and I was staring at the screen, dumbfounded. I don't know which is scarier: That they think this might work, or the thought of a jury dumb enough to buy it...
Bush's Spying Program: When I read Gonzales' response to the suggestion of streamlining the warrant-getting process, I did a double-take and said "What the F***" straight at my screen. Okay, let's see if I understand this correctly. We need to surveille terrorists to catch them before they strike [Ok, I buy that]. The FISA court, which has denied less than 1 in 4000 warrant requests and allows you to apply for a warrant up to 3 days after you start tapping calls, is too much of a hassle to deal with [???]. Therefore, the solution is to begin spying anyway, in secret, without oversight or warrants [Because we all know that the executive would never abuse such a power *coughnixoncough*]. You claim your program is being 'miscontrued' yet refuse to right our misconceptions by just telling us what you were doing [Since you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide, right]. And when several senators say they'd be OK with streamlining the FISA process (thereby rectifying the alleged original problem), you not only rebuff them but claim that public debate about what to do will help America's enemies [._O WTF? We offer to fix the problem and you say NO? And call talking about how to fix it... Dangerous?]. You claim that what you are doing is entirely within the law, yet refuse to consent to Congressional or Judicial oversight [We keep coming back here. Why do I get the feeling that this program is only legal or just within the confines of your fascist thought process?]. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Or are these men studying history with the INTENT of repeating it:
"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices" -- Voltaire
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." -- Aldous Huxley
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -- James Madison
Massive protests over cartoons: (Append 2/9/06: Suddenly, all the problems in the US government seem smaller...) This is... scary. Massive violent protests, kidnapping foreign citizens, burning embassies... Because of cartoons? All I can say here that hasn't probably been endlessly debated already is that although Christians won't react kindly to negative depictions of Jesus, rampaging mobs of fundamentalists won't hunt down newspaper workers and burn government buildings. Consider the protests during the confirmation of John Ashcroft with the LA Times' "Trust to dust... Ashcroft to Ashes" picture. Yes, a whole bunch of Christians were offended by it. Yeah, I'm pretty sure a few fundies wanted the animator killed. But in America, if you run around burning buildings and screaming "DEATH TO ______", the government does not implicitly support your actions and the vast majority of people will want to send you to jail rather than help you hide. *sigh* Man what a screwed up world we live in.

Well, I'm pretty sure that a few people will hate me for something I said here =p :: ejkeever AT nerdshack DOT com - flame away

2/2/06 - OK! After an extended downtime (half of it spent moving, the other half spent fighting my new modem), Teh D3skt0p is B4444444CK! The only sad thing is that there will be a gap with zero hits in my logs (well, not zero - I accessed it a few times while setting up the new system).

I didn't want to move, but there are a few nice things about being here. Like 3.0/640 ADSL for the same price that used to get us 1.5/256! I also learned that my new modem runs a minimal version of Linux - looking forward to hacking away at that!

There should be more new pictures in the galleries soon, as I shot 4 rolls of film on the drive to my new home (when it wasn't my turn to drive) and two more since. Neat thing I read about that's true: If you have an SLR with a removable wide-angle lens, take the lens off and turn it around == Instant ultra-macro closeup! Pictures coming soon.