Casimusings

The Revenge of the CGI!

In case anyone was wondering, I have not disappeared off the face of the planet. Upon a recent migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from SunOS, cgiwrap stopped working, and since not many people use it, it went completely unnoticed.

That is, it went unnoticed until I blogged about it on the new blog@USF site.

The upside? Cgiwrap is working again, my blosxom site seems to be working great, and I also have a new WordPress site

The always impressive Eric Pierce responded quickly and now I should be ready to port my Blosxom archives to WordPress. w00t!

GCCC 2005

Yesterday, cyclists from all over Florida gathered in pre-dawn Dunedin, clad in Lycra, and carrying liters of water in preparation for the Gulf Coast Cycling Classic, an annual 35/65/100 mile tour along the Gulf Coast. From Dunedin, the course meandered along coastal back roads, past the familiar concert ground at Coachman Park, across a causeway and south along Gulf Boulevard.

On my hybrid steed with chubby tires, I finished the tour in just under three hours. Props to my amazing one man road crew, and the sundry recumbents, tandems, and roadies that I toured with.

I look forward to seeing everyone at the next event.

Intimate Moments... with Strawberries

Online, I go by Casimir (a long story going back to a game that I wrote, and continue to write in my spare time to this day.)

In real life I don't go by Casimir. Other people do, however, and one of these real life Casimirs has started a website called devoted to those painful private moments usually shared with only a pint of Ben and Jerry's.

Cas has his own video of himself Coming to terms with his mortality while eating fresh strawberries.

Not being inspired to tears at the moment, I could wait until my Google Summer of Code rejection letter comes in. Of course, if I was really in need of a good cry, I could just read the news today, oh boy.

Nerdy Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap

This is quite possibly one of the best ideas Google has come up with yet.

It's called the "Summer of Code" and it's an effort to get some of the brightest minds on campuses around the world working towards some much needed Open Source projects.

Here are the basics: apply to complete a project for a list of approved open source mentors, get approved by Google, successfully complete the approved project, get money from $4500 from Google, and get some real world code under your belt.

The projects range from the challenging "Search Party" a server/client protocol to form ad-hoc chat rooms based on what search words, to something as simple as shaving as much time as possible from the GNOME login.

Google is one of the approved mentors, and their projects in general range from challenging to insanely challenging, so good luck to whoever wants to try their hands at those. If you're a coder with a month or two of downtime this summer, and you'd like to help the open source community and make some dollars while you're at it, check out the info at code.google.com

Blogging from literally the other side of the world?

I've been playing with this BlogMap thing that Dave blogged about a while ago. In any case, being a devoted geocacher, I pulled out my GPS and entered my home coordinates into Feedmap.

I must have made a small error in entering the East/West component, because my BlogMap appeared in Nepal. The last time I checked, I'm as far from the Himalayas as possible, so I take this as an error. As it turns out, Nepal is located at the same latitude as Tampa, Florida: 28.047500. Tampa, however is located at 082.394800 degrees West of the prime meridian. Nepal on the other hand, can be found at 082.394800 degrees East of the prime meridian. Oops.

I try to correct this any way I can. I submit my blog with -082.394800 as the East/West coordinates. No such luck. I break down and enter my address in Tampa. Nothing seems to help. I resign myself to my fate: my blog is now broadcasting from Annapurna.

There's only one NeighBlog here in Nepal. It's called Nicole's Love Story and it's hosted on MSN. But, her profile says she's from Taiwan, not Nepal. Could this be another error, are there any bloggers in this area who didn't get here accidentally?

As I read more about my blog's new home, it turns out that all media in Nepal is subject to military censorship. No articles against the King, government, or court, and no articles related to terrorism. For more information, look here. Wow, I guess Nicole and I should tread ligh

That's It?

Come on! What's inside the hatch? I at least expected to see the lost Amulet of Yendor, some Killer Gorillas, or perhaps Jimmy Hoffa.

Instead, a long ladder leading only to next season, which I will undoubtedly watch, because I'm a sucker for cliffhangers.

Alternative Fuel: The Matrix

ExxonMobil has been running a series of magazine and TV ads explaining why their energy company is good for the environment and for the future of energy.

Their latest tagline? "More energy and lower emissions? Only one kind of power can deliver them both."

Apparently, their solution is independent research. From the ad, it seems that their solution is a neural-interactive simulation designed to turn a human being into this.

By the way, Dr. Campbell has revised his theory to place the peak in world production at 2008 with a noticable decline by 2010, characterized by "Super Spikes" in prices and production.

One of my favorite Republicans (a small and very exclusive crowd), Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, agrees with him. Dr. Bartlett also has some interesting ideas regarding stem cell research, and attempts to make everyone happy.

USF endorses Student Blogs

It appears that someone at USF caught on to what I've been doing in my free webspace, and has started blog.usf.edu It's based on Word Press and it comes fully integrated with flickr and other neat blog tools.

I was tempted at the addition of TrackBacks and all the other neat features, most notably support for gnome-blog but part of me still enjoys the challenge of writing plugins myself. A large part of me also enjoys the simplicity of blosxom. Plus, all the CSS is already uploaded, so I'd have to shoehorn my blog into something that works. I'll consider it over the next few weeks and update my decision.

But of course I can't really comment, having put my own blog on the back burner for over a month now. Allison at An Unsealed Room suggests that blogging, with all the news media attention recently may be on its way to becoming passe.

I agree, but only partly. Political blogs are running out of steam fast, and it seems like only niche perspectives have a shot at surviving the kind of intense scrutiny the community is under. Should be an interesting development. Focusing on tech reporting is getting a little dry, but I'm looking forward to shaking down the cell architecture as soon as I can get my hot little hands on one.

No Lightsabres Allowed in the Theater

I'm not sure why I'm admitting this, but I caught the midnight showing of "Revenge of the Sith" in New Tampa just nine hours ago. I must say, I don't think the internal/external conflict with Obi Wan/Anakin comes even close to the father/son conflict from "Return of the Jedi." Of course, that could be the Star Wars elitist in me coming out. Mark Hamill, if you're reading: you whine way better than Hayden Christensen and your agonized "Noooo!" from "The Empire Strikes Back" far outdoes the identical line that Hayden Christensen seems to have copied from Charlton Heston.

Highlights:

A six or seven year old dressed as Anakin Skywalker crosses toy lightsabres with a twenty-something dressed as Darth Vader while waiting in line.
Gangland style Jedi/Sith turf disputes.
Announcement from theater management: "Masks and lightsabres must be left outside the theater." Aforementioned twenty-something dressed as Darth Vader looks dejected.

Lottery Winning Sorcerer Organ Donors from Outer Space!

The more that I watch this. The more I begin to think that they're all shapeshifters.

I rarely ever watch TV, but I'm on the edge of my seat.

Come to think of it, I'm not even sure what category it fits in.

List of Things to Never Do

Compile Gentoo on a 533 MHz VIA C3

Just FYI.

More updates to come.

A Long Awaited Release Party

I apologize for the lack of blogging lately. I've been spending most of my time designing MySQL databases to pay the bills. I'll elaborate futher in the near future.

Until then, I couldn't allow this headline to go by without commenting, since I've been actively promoting it for so long.

Yesterday marked the final release date of GNOME 2.10, a great improvement over GNOME 2.8. I've been using the test releases from 2.9 for the past month.

Public opinion over at GnomeDesktop.org is mixed. Much like the spatial browsing, debate, love it or hate it. I find that spatial browsing makes more sense once you grow accustomed to it and allows for a much simpler interface. It can, however, become an encumberace with very deeply nested directories if you don't use it all the time.

The addition of the "Places" menu eliminates the need for mutiple click spatial browsing for most of your filesystem and cleans the desktop of cluttered shortcuts everywhere.

Totem, the new gtreamer media/dvd player ships officially now, so it often takes only a few clicks to get media files playing, and the HIG allows for previews in Nautilus.

This is an old point, but when combined with the work done over at Freedesktop.org the somewhat hard to define "Project Utopia" looks really solid.

Combined with support for Cairo, it looks like GNOME and GTK+ are really growing up.