I would rate this one a 3 of 5.

Not his best work, but Hood by Stephen R. Lawhead is a good read. It’s the first of a trilogy, and it mostly just sets up the background story and kind of ends just when it is really beginning.

I’ll reserve final judgement until the other two books come out, but it looks like he is going to have a decent trilogy here.

My favorite of his books was Byzantium (awesome book, 5/5) followed by the Song of Albion trilogy (4.5/5), and the six book Pendragon cycle (which was about King Arthur, and was pretty awesome, 4/5).

All in all, you usually don’t go wrong with a Lawhead book, although some of them can be a bit slow at times…

If you are going to cancel your Real Rhapsody account, it actually isn’t as hard as canceling an AOL account. Which is great. However, one little thing to watch out for:

Make sure they actually cancel the account instead of just giving you a free month.

When you try to cancel the account, if you pay close attention, and are able to hear it through their thick Indian accent, you will hear the following:

1. We are “canceling” your account (they aren’t).
2. We are giving you a free month to try x,y,z features
3. If after that month you still want to cancel, click a link in some e-mail

This is my third time canceling a Rhapsody account, and the first time I actually remembered to stop them at this point and say “Nononono, just cancel the account”. The other two times I was like “cool! A free month!”. But guess what? The e-mail “cancelation” e-mail never came. So at the end of the month, my account just continued on as if I had never called.

You have to make them cancel it right there on the phone with you. Good luck, and for pete’s sake, stop renting music. It’s just stupid. Especially now that the price has gone up to $13.00 a month. That’s the price of a CD every month, and you don’t even have anything to show for it…

I took this book off of my reading list.

I started to read it (read the intro, and then maybe two chapters). Linus Torvalds intro was entertaining. The author was just dry and really “academic”. It wasn’t really about computers so much as just “work ethic” and the difference between hackers and other people. Maybe I’m just burnt out on hacker theory for the moment… I might return to it someday, but I don’t really recommend it at all.

Now on to “Dealers of Lightning”…

This book was awesome. I give it 5 of 5.

Two years ago I stumbled upon a little essay entitled “How to Become a Hacker“. I was enthralled.

I’ll be honest and say that I read that essay hoping to learn how to become a cracker. I had booted my company laptop, let it go to sleep, and then closed the lid and forgot about it for a few months, and when I came back could not remember the password. It would not let me reinstall windows, it would not let me install linux, I could not format the hard drive, it was LOCKED.

I got pissed. Here I was, a “geek”, and I couldn’t get around a stupid M$ password??? Couldn’t all the awesome computer people on tv and movies slice through passwords like warm butter? Where could I learn to control my computer instead of letting my computer control me? I was sick and tired of being told what I could and couldn’t do, and how I could do it by my computer. I should be ordering it around. I should be the master of my machine.

So I went to Google and entered the words that would change my life: “How to be a hacker”.

I clicked on the first thing that came up on the screen, and spent the next few hours reading and re-reading the essay. I had found what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a hacker. Not a cracker, (I didn’t even care about the stupid laptop anymore, and in fact, I think it got tossed after no one could crack it) no, I wanted to be a hacker.

So away I went to learn. Almost immediately I talked with one of my teachers (Andy Harris) about what I had read. His response was something along the lines of “Some random guy on the internet can’t tell you how to be a hacker, or even what a hacker is. You have to find that for yourself.” or something like that. I think what he meant was, “You can’t just learn a few languages, and then expect to be called a hacker” (which wasn’t what the essay was saying, but I must have explained it really poorly. I think his main beef was with the hacker emblem for some reason). But still, I liked the whole concept, and so I signed up for the CS certificate (it was too late to switch to the bachelors).

I had a lot going on in my life, and almost completely forgot about the essay in my obsessive grind to hackerdom. To start I honed my HTML skills, and soon got a job as a PHP programmer for IUPUI. Then I got a job programming Java. Time went by and I forgot more and more about the essay.

Then, one day I picked up “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” in Half Price Books. I had just finished “Dreaming in Code” (which I just now realized I forgot to review. It’s worth the read, but fizzles towards the end) and I recognized the title (of The Cathedra and the Bazaar) from references Scott Rosenberg (Dreaming in Code) had made to it throughout the book. It looked interesting so I thought I’d check it out.

It was awesome. It reminded me of something I had read what seemed like ‘a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away’ before I became serious about being a “Computer Scientist” (as I had come to call it). Then I came to the end of the book, and saw that ‘Appendix A’ was entitled “How to Become a Hacker”. Wait a minute… I’ve read that before…

So I read it again. This time with the knowledge that it wasn’t written by “some random guy on the internet” as my teacher had put it, but by someone almost as well known (in the hacker community) as Linus Torvalds. Sweet.

It was almost exactly two years ago that I read the essay for the first time, although it seems like at least five years have gone by.

On the coding requirement part of it, I now know two languages decently well (PHP and Java), which leaves me with Python (I was ‘supposed’ to learn that first, but didn’t, should be a breeze at this point), C/C++, and Lisp (I get the impression that PHP has replaced Perl). I’m thrilled at the prospect at learning these languages over the next few years.

I am also psyched about joining/starting an OS project now that I have something substantial to contribute. I’m either going to make an OS Python version of my (incomplete) Flash TD game, or I’m going to join the Chandler project. Knowing me, I’ll do both.

Now, back to the book.

It answers tons of questions about Open Source that I have had (Like: ‘How do you make money if you give everything away?’). It is a great read, and actually fun at some parts (like when the author tells about the time he led a march on Microsoft dressed as Obi-won with a giant penguin behind him that shouted the words “Let the source be with you!”). It describes the differences between developing closed source projects (the cathedral) and open source projects (the bazaar) and why closed source takes way longer, and has fewer features most of the time. You can read most of the book on the author’s website since it is just a bunch of continually updated essays.

The more I learn about hackers and OS, the more I see parallels between Lord of the Rings and the history of computers. Microsoft reminds me a lot of Morgath, who wanted to bend and hoard all of creation to himself rather than create and share creation cooperatively like the other Valar.

For clarification, in case I didn’t make it clear, a hacker is not a criminal. Hackers make things, crackers break them. When the media refers to “hackers hacking into government databases” or stuff like that, what they mean is “crackers cracking into government databases”. Crackers love to call themselves hackers, but they are not. The term hacker was invented back in the 1970s (I think) by computer experts who wanted to give themselves a label, and then misappropriated by the media in the late 80s early 90s…

I love Dragon Ball Z.

In fact, if you look on DVD #5 of the DBGT saga you will see the music video that my friends and I made which won the DBZ “Be a Star” contest. It’s kinda cheezy, but still cool that I can say that…

Anyways, like I said, I love DBZ. I have named each one of my Linux boxes after a DBZ character (and I affectionately refer to my laptop as “Yamcha” because it sucks soooo much).

My Ubuntu install is “Krillin”. Friendly, small, and moderately powerful.

My SuSE install is “Vegeta”. Not so friendly, but powerful.

My Fedora Install is “Piccolo”. A little more friendly, but still powerful.

(Goku would be my souped up box that I will be building over the next year or so, and Gohan is my Dell XPS 410 that I currently use as a windows box. Currently, but not forever…)

Well… today, Vegeta went super-saijen.

He was blessed by the linux fairy, and now, for the first time ever, I too have an awesome spinny desktop cube.

It wasn’t hard. Initially when I installed SuSE, and tried to register it so I could get the graphics card drivers (you can’t get them without registering). However, the registration process crapped out, and every time I tried to register after that, it gave a blank error message (when I tried from the console it said it was an xml parse error).

Since I didn’t have a SuSE “account”, during the registration process I clicked on a link to sign up for one. Clicking on that link screwed everything up. There is some sort of bug that muffs up the whole thing if you click that link.

The fix? Reinstall SuSE, from scratch. Sign up for the account before you try and register, then during the registration process, don’t click that link. I’m sure there is some “better” fix out there, but I don’t know of one, and as I hadn’t done any customization yet, I didn’t lose anything by reinstalling.

Once I was successfully registered it downloaded like 200 updates. Then when I tried to enable desktop effects, it said it couldn’t, but that I could try updating my software. At that point it downloaded some video card drivers (I have an NVidia video card). After that it said I might not be able to do it, but could still try. I said ok, and it logged me out and when I logged back in, my awesome new desktop effects were in place. Wobbly windows, expose type features, dektop zooming with a mouse click (very handy), and most importantly “The Cube“.

You can see more wonders here.

I just began learning Python.

I bought “Python Programming, Second Edition” brand new at Half Price Books for $14.98 and I am on page 12, but already I love it.

Why? The “interactive window”. It’s like a scratch pad where you can test a line of code out. With Java, if you want to test out a little chunk of code, you have to create a new document, write the code, save it, compile it, run it. Then while you are refining it, every little change requires a new save compile run. Tedious. With Python (it appears) you can just jot it out, and hit enter and it will run it right there in front of you.

Now, this could prove to just be a little useless “wow, cool!” in the long run, but at first glance, it’s unique, and pretty sweet.

Finished this book a few days ago. It was pretty interesting. A good read, especially for anyone who “doesn’t believe in evil”.

He explores varying levels of evil, from people who are “on their way” to becoming evil, individuals who are themselves evil, married people who are together evil, to group evil. All of the stories in the book are based upon real patients the author had in his clinic throughout his life. This makes the book all the more fascinating, since it is true.

He postulates that the mother of evil is narcissism (pride) and laziness. Evil people refuse to believe there is anything wrong with themselves, and they also do not truly “see” other people as even being real people. The entire world revolves around them, and they have no real category of another persons feelings/wants/needs as even being valid. It also explores why it is that often you will find evil people as avid church-goers and even preachers. Evil people have no true love for anyone else, and as they are so narcissistic they don’t really even understand the concept of love.

It begins with an obsessive compulsive man who attempts to make a “pact with the devil” to rid himself of his compulsions. This man was on his way to becoming “evil”, as he was willing to cause the death of his son to rid himself of his own flaws.

It moves on to children whose parents are evil. One whose parents gave him the very gun his brother used to commit suicide as a Christmas present. These parents do not see their children (or even eachother) as being people, and have no real love or care for them.

It then explores a grown child whose parents are evil who are on their way to becoming evil themselves. They are enveloped in their own reality, and use others to fill empty holes in their life, but have no real care for them, they are simply disposable tools to fill their needs.

Then it explores the case of a woman who is evil, but seeks therapy. She was so imersed in her own world that she remade the entire world in her image in her mind. It became quickly apparent that the only reason she came to therapy week after week was in an attempt to seduce Dr. Peck (which she never succeeded at).

Finally it explores group evil in the Vietnam war and America in general. This was a point in which I had to grit my teeth a few times, since this guy is a liberal, and I am conservative. We disagreed on a few points, but as it was only one rather short chapter, it did not “ruin” the book, and he actually did have some valid points.

All in all, this book wasn’t as dramatically engaging as “Glimpses of the Devil” was, but it is still a fascinating read. I found his first book “The Road Less Traveled” at half price books for $1 today, and am looking forward to reading it. I think it focuses more on being good than examining evil…

Well, I did it. I installed Linux on 3 computers fairly easily with minimal hassle, and it worked.

Two years ago when I went to Best Buy and purchased Suse Linux 9.0 (or was it 9.2?) for $90 (since I couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone on where do download Linux, and had never even heard the term “distro” and had no clue whatsoever) it took me THREE DAYS to try and get it up an running (and I never actually did get it up and running fully. Always had sound card/printer issues).

Linux has come a long way in these two little years.

The distros I used:

Ubuntu 6.06
SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 (evaluation kit)
A non-specific “Fedora Core” that came with my “Linux for Non-Geeks” book, circa 2004

The Fedora Core one is sorely out of date, but the only other version I have is on DVD, and that computer doesn’t have DVD. I’ll check the website and see if there is a CD option I can download so I can try the latest version.

So far ubuntu is still my favorite.

During the install Ubuntu hung the first time and I had to restart. SUSE went through the entire install twice, each time I got to the VERY LAST STEP (configuring hardware, why oh why is that the last step) it froze when I clicked “test”. I determined it was because I had three video cards installed, so I took the two extra ones out and reinstalled a third time. Worked like a charm. Fedora Core worked correctly the first time with no errors. Fedora wins the install challenge.

Next I checked my e-mail and my blog on all three. Ubuntu I had to install flash player, SUSE already had flash player, Fedora didn’t even have an easy option for installing it (assuming because it’s 3 years old). SUSE won that round.

That’s all I’ve done so far. I still like Ubuntu best, simply because it came on CD, and I had no frustrating problems with it so far. I’ll use all of them over the coming months and see what I think. I’m amazed though that I actually got all of them up and running with no real problems, and they all work fine so far.

Threw in a picture of my poor forlorne empty server rack (just for fun). Note the Ubuntu sticker…

I lost my first Hard Drive today. No it didn’t burn out or anything like that. I just literally can’t find it.

It had all my video/music/personal projects on it. 40GB (it was a 60GB HD) worth of media, gone.

This sucks…

Update: Found the HD, it was in my wife’s computer. Completely forgot I put it in there for her to browse the pictures. I really need to put it in one of my linux boxes as a shared drive for all computers on my network instead of swapping it from machine to machine…

So I went to linux fest this year again.

It was a lot of fun. Got a bunch of swag. Won a free book “Linux for Non-Geeks” which is awesome because I’ve had my eye on it for a while.

Now, one of the two or three people who read my blog might be saying, “wait… didn’t your screw up your computer majorly and have to reformat entirely last time you tried linux?”. The answer is yes. But my saga of the Dell Wars might have had something to do with it. Which is why I am going to do what I should have done, what linux is best at, from the start:

Find the absolute crappiest cheapest computer I can get my hands on and install it on that. At which point the linux fairy (a pinguin in a red cowboy hat who lives in linus torvalds pocket) will come along, zap it with it’s mystical “1337” powers, and presto the computer will instantly run 3x faster, never crash, malfunction, get infected with viruses/spyware/adware, cost money, and will also have the handy ability to simultaneously cook your breakfast, raise your IQ by 327 points, and fend off bill gates and m$ like a crucifix made of garlic and silver fends off a vampire. It’s just a FACT (It happened to my friend’s brother’s pen pal once, I swear).

I’m eager to see the awesome 3d desktop cube swivel thingy that happens once I get visited by the linux fairy. When I tried to get it to happen on my BRAND NEW Dell XPS 410 (which cost me $1,800) it continually crashed my computer. This is probably thanks to the evilness that is ATI (which also has the added benefit of crashing my computer any time I attempt to play a video game. Hooray for ATI!!!!).

Besides the book, I got two little penguins, several Ubuntu stickers to slap on my computer, and cool official distro cds for SUSE, Fedora Core and Ubuntu. I also go the latest version of DSL (on CD).

I went to 3 of the 6 presentations. The most interesting was probably the last one. Indiana decided to fund an experiment to put a computer at every desk for three classes in a middle school (or something like that). They wanted each station to cost no more than $300. They purchased dells, and installed Ubuntu on them. It worked. It worked better than M$. It worked so well, they are adding one new classroom each year to the project (I think). Cool. You can see more about this project here.

All in all, linuxfest was fun! Swag… Coke… Fellow Geeks… Linux… What else could you want? Maybe some pizza…

There was also this display, where they had hooked up 8 screens to function as one. It was awesome. I used it to find my house on Google Maps. This crappy pic I took with my cell phone only got 6 of the screens.

I’ll be blogging about my new forays into the wonderful wacky world of linux as they unfold.

Next time there is a linux fest in your area, even if you have never set eyes on a living breathing working version of linux, GO. At noon they had an “install fest” where they took anyone who wanted and taught them how to install and use linux (very quickly). It was cool. It’s probably the best way to get introduced to linux. Plus, you get swag, and who doesn’t want swag?