Check out this excellent Linux distribution family tree and timeline. It’s been making the rounds so chances are you’ve already run across it but this is so cool I couldn’t pass up mentioning it. I’m currently running the Debian-derived Ubuntu, but for years this site ran off of Redhat 4-5-6-7. For a good part of the Redhat years I tried to get going with Debian but always failed to get x up and running on my video cards. Knoppix was the first Debian-derived distro I could run, and I almost switched to it from Redhat at one point back in ~2003. Looking over that chart brings back a lot of memories, too, of me tinkering with all the different distros over the years trying to find the one true distro to rule them all.

Anyway, worth a look, Linux fan or no, just to get a sense of the history of it all.

If you’re a valve customer who’s paid for a game using their Steam content delivery system, be aware: once again Valve has been hacked, and this time it appears customer credit card information has been stolen. I’m pretty pissed off about this. I’m a valve customer myself, and you would have thought that they would have learned a lesson about the importance of strong network security after a hacker broke in a couple of years ago using trivial means and stole their source-code and released it online. But no, apparently they still have a cavalier attitude towards security despite having millions of customer credit cards. Making matters worse, their response to the issue has been abysmal – basically the community is outing them, otherwise they would not have said a word about it to date.

Anyway be aware. I’ll follow up as more details emerge, but it’s possible if you bought from them that your credit card is on the p2p networks or sold off to some russian crime syndicate or whatever.

[via joystiq] (and Tony who mentioned it to me yesterday)

I’m a big fan of macromate’s Textmate text editor on OSX, it’s displaced Jedit as my primary text editor. Blogmates, a free new blogging extension for it, showed up in my RSS feeds today. Textmate already had a blogging extension (bundle in textmate parlance) but this is superior. It adds a control palette with several tools and a view into your blog’s recent posts etc. If you’re on mac this is worth a look.

Newegg is by far my favorite electronics retailer. They have an extensive inventory, decent prices, super fast shipping, and responsive customer service. I’ve been using them for years now with no complaints. They announced this week that they’re going to be offering threaded discussion and forums on their site, and the forums section is up and running. On the surface this seems like a great idea, though tt will be interesting to see if they can maintain a level of objectivity. As far as I can tell they’ve done ok with their customer rating feature since it’s easy to find scathing reviews of products in them. I’ve been using the forums at places like Sharkyextreme and techreport to research purchases. We’ll see if newegg’s new system can measure up over the next couple of years.

Friends don’t let friends run windows Vista. In that spirit, I offer up a link to this
exhaustively researched piece on the evils that Windows Vista does. I’m not kidding when I say you really should not run this OS – it runs counter to the whole conception of what a computer is . Rather than a machine you purchase which you control, Vista is a platform which a vendor controls, and that vendor is able to choose how the platform behaves. Imagine sticking a HD DVD in to play and discovering you can’t listen to the audio over your headphones, or discovering that your video drivers will no longer deliver video at a resolution greater than 640×480 because Microsoft has helpfully ‘patched’ them to protect against content theft – this and innumerable other horrendous ‘features’ are documented in the piece I linked to above. Anyone in a computing profession should read and consider this. It’s a lengthy but illuminating read.

It’s left with me with something of a dilemma. Gaming is my favorite pastime and thanks to the MS monopoly it’s the only real platform I can use, but there’s no way given the above that I will run Vista. I have about 2 years before this becomes a significant issue (it will take roughly that long before developers start releasing ‘vista only’ games) so I can be patient about it. I’m hoping that enough people are as pissed about this as I am that alternatives emerge. If not, maybe I’ll be a console-only gamer, or maybe a retro-only gamer, playing all the oldies to entertain myself. Who knows. All I know for certain is I’m checking out of windows-land over the coming couple of years due to this stuff.

Years ago when I quit my corporate job I tried a number of schemes to make money. One of them was playing the MMORPG Everquest and trying to pawn off the virtual stuff I gathered for cash. I abandoned it after a month or so – it was one of the worst, lowest paying jobs I ever had, and this is coming from someone who loves playing games. Anyone who camped endlessly for the Speed of Wolf boots (I think I’m remembering their name right) in the original EQ can empathize. Since then I’ve come across many instances of folks making money farming the virtual worlds, and in fact it’s a viable career path in some third world countries these days, but the numbers don’t work for a westerner. Generally you’re talking sub-$1/hour wages. I ran across a discussion about this in regards to WoW the other day on one of my favorite gaming message boards – Quarter to Three. Turns out folks are doing ok selling off their accounts or just the assets from their characters. There’s a risk if you’re just selling off assets because this is a bannable offense and if Blizzard gets wind of it you’re gone, but some quick back of envelope math led me to conclude my account is worth north of $500 on ebay, and probably closer to $900.

!!!

That’s temptation folks. To be clear, I’m not doing it, not now anyway – I’m enjoying the expansion pak, several of my friends still play with me regularly, and more generally WoW is the best MMORPG to date. But to have the abstract turn into a real and compelling number was a surprise to me. I need a car and I’m going to buy a very expensive bike for my 40th birthday present for myself and that $900 or so would come in handy towards either of those purchases.

I’m also not going to go the ‘sell assets for cash’ route, even though I could easily clear a couple of hundred that way, because I don’t want to be banned. After all, I might want to sell this account someday 🙂

Amblight was invented by Phillips a couple of years ago and since then they’ve been including it on their higher end televisions. At the recent Cebit show they announced a set of speakers for PCs which include the feature. I’m actually interested in this if the price is reasonable, though I would prefer they simply release it as a set of lights one can affix to speakers or whatever other surface is handy.

If you’re not familiar with it, Ambilight systems produce low level background lighting that’s synchronized with what’s happening on screen, supposedly enhancing your immersion in whatever you’re watching/interacting with. It all sounds pretty gimmicky I know, but I’m actually interested based on the reviews I’ve read. I’m not that interested though…~$100 is about as high as I would go for such a thing and I suspect these speakers will be a good bit more than that. I’d also like to see some reviews of whatever drivers they’re using since I have no experience with Phillips consumer software and wonder how good of a job they’ll do.

I used Creative soundcards for probably close to 10 years until finally abandoning them in disgust because of how bad their drivers were, how bad their support was, and how bad their driver upgrade process was, around the time that motherboard manufacturers started integrating reasonably good soundchips on their motherboards. I still miss having a discrete audio processor though, and have been occasionally tempted to go back to the dark side of Creative cards. The horror that is their driver situation has always kept me away though, despite the performance increase I would get. It’s not well known that using on-board audio adds a ~10% performance tax on most systems that you can alleviate with a dedicated audio card. Anyway I was pleased to see that Asus, whose graphics cards I have been using for the last couple of years, has jumped into the onboard audio scene with new, mass market cards designed to attack Creative’s cards. They can’t possibly do a worse job than Creative on the driver end of things, so once I see some prices and reviews it’s quite likely I would pick one of these up. There are some preliminary details over on techreport.

Check out this fantastic youtube video which endeavors to define what ‘web 2.0’ is all about and does a great job of it. It clocks in at a little over 4 minutes and is well worth checking out even if you don’t know much about web stuff – you will after watching it, but it’s not a dry, technical spot at all.