Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

http://www.google.com/googleblog/.

More up-and-coming Google projects: http://www.google.com/blog/. Maybe they’re going to make a blog search into a separate tab/section, like images and groups. Makes me wonder though how exactly they’ll determine what’s a blog and what isn’t. Via Library Stuff.

I have one invite for a GMail account, so if somebody wants it (and actually will use it over their existing system) post here. Remember though I’ve only got one.

I got a Google Mail account courtsey of Nelson Minar. I haven’t played with it much, but the interface seems extremely well-designed. More later. I’d like to see how decent the spam filter is, so:

luke.reeves@gmail.com

Update: Only two hours after posting the address I received spam. The GMail service didn’t block or filter it.

This Perl script allows you to dig through the iTunes music database with any web browser, as well as download the preview clips (though they may have DRM wrapped around them). Via infoAnarchy.

Charles Miller is pondering the future of OpenOffice.org in light of the recent Sun-Microsoft settlement. He’s worried because though Sun has restated their support for open source software, they haven’t mentioned OpenOffice lately.

I say don’t worry; OpenOffice is already a great product, and even if Sun stopped development on it today (which is possible), it still has an amazing community of developers working on it. And even if they stopped working on it, which is not probable, it’s already a decent replacement for Microsoft Office for many people. In fact, in some cases OpenOffice has been shown to be more compatible than Office itself.

So like I said, don’t worry. Be happy.

BitTorrent 3.4 was released, with “lots of bug fixes and tracker bandwidth savings”. Since this has been about six months since the last point release, it makes sense to grab it.

A long, long time ago (maybe not that long) I ran a free e-mail service called submail.net. I used Rackspace for the hosting, and it lasted quite a while even if it was fairly costly for a personal project.

So that ended a year ago. Now once again I’m a customer of Rackspace for my current company, renting two systems from them that in terms of hardware are lightyears ahead of what I last used.

Rackspace brags about the whole “fanatical support” concept, but they’re mostly serious. They have awesome support. Even their sales people are superb. The gentleman I was dealing with stayed till past midnight to get me hooked up (damned time zones). And their network is awesome, with multiple redundant connections.

The only downside so far is that they’re using RedHat Enterprise/Advanced server for their Linux setups. I’m still getting used to RH so I’ll probably gripe about that in the future.

Bottom line is that while I’m a cynical bastard, Rackspace is one of the few companies that I’d recommend to anyone.

Now I’m no stranger to horribly slow and messed up Internet connections that claim to be high speed. But our connection here really takes the cake.

It’s supposed to be a high speed DSL line. The problem here is in the DSL modem, a Prolink 8000. The modem, God. OK. First of all, it’s USB. That’s strange. I mean, that pretty much rules out any sharing of the connection directly via a wired or wireless router since they all use an Ethernet port for the network uplink. Now, you might be quick to inform me that there are some that can work with a USB connection. Read on.

To connect to this “modem”, I needed to install a ton of software of a CD, including the USB driver for the modem and a system tray utility that maintains the connection. So on bootup, this little utility establishes a fucking ATM connection to the DSL provider.

Once the ATM connection is established I have to connect via a PPP dialup account to the provider. So I have a PPP over ATM via USB connection. It fucking sucks.

The drivers are the buggiest thing I’ve ever seen. They’re the first drivers I’ve installed that caused XP to flash up a gigantic warning stating that these drivers have yet to pass any Windows compatibility testing. And this warning was with due cause, since after one day the software mystically and utterly corrupted the shit out of itself, causing the other two people trying to work and myself lots of problems. After speaking to a nice tech support guy, it turns out that the drivers always corrupt themselves. So he walks me through the uninstall process which consists of first running the uninstaller included. And then you have to locate the DSL CD and run a utility called “cleanup.exe” that has a Visual Basic project icon (fun!).

So yeah, it’s messed up. But when it works it’s alright, though the wireless router causes problems….

Usually when I’m posting to this site, adding comments to others, or even sending e-mail, I keep it in the forefront of my mind that whatever I’m typing will probably be permanently stored and archived… somewhere. Whether it’s the Wayback machine, Google’s cache, company e-mail backups or what not I’m pretty sure that permanence is a key attribute of the Internet.

Unfortunately though, that false sense of permanence has caused me to lose a lot of computer-geek things from the past that I wish I still had.

For example: Back in the day, going back nine or ten years, I created a kickass level for the Doom game called simply “Eaket Doom”. It was based on the high school that I and my friends attended, and was a pretty damned good replica of the place. All the rooms were there, including a shitload of painstakingly modelled desks that would bring the fastest systems of the time to their knees. It was that cool.

The whole level was built using a custom editor I created in Visual Basic 5 for Windows. My computer didn’t have the resources to run Doom under Windows, so the editor had a preview command that would exit to DOS to run the game with the level (the autoexec.bat was modified to spawn a stub for the editor and Windows in a loop). The editor itself did just about everything a Doom editor should do - maps, WAD editing and packing, texture selection, and so on. It even did some half-assed BSP generation although it had an option (which I used) to spawn an external BSP program. Many a nights were spent working on that.

And now there’s absolutely nothing to show for either the fabled “Eaket Doom” or the map editor I made. I had assumed that since the Doom level (and others I had created) made it onto the big Doom FTP archives that it’d be around forever. Not so. It’s gone, and I can’t find the bastard anywhere. I’d Paypal fifty bones to anyone who could find it (as long as the bones are from Canada).

And the editor? Gone too. That sucks more. I mean, the levels were cool, but man - it was an editor! I might have uploaded a beta of it to one or two of the local BBS systems, but of course they’re long gone.

Anyways, that’s it. I’d like to make decent, long-term backups for any homegrown stuff I work on from now till I’m dead. That’d be better than losing crap that at one time was pretty cool.

As a side note: Just think of what would’ve happened to me had I released a map of my high school for Doom now after the Columbine incident. I’d be bouncing my head off of a rubber wall right now.