LAMPPIX

I do not remember ever hearing about the LAMPPIX Live CD. It's a Live CD that boots up a webserver and consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, and other applications. The nifty trick here is that you can take any kind of web project that you've worked on and then burn it to a CD along with LAMPPIX - then someone just has to plug in the CD and can view the project. It could also work as a nifty business CD to show off what you can do. There hasn't been a new version since 2004, however, which I think is LAMPPIX's weakest point. Some of the applications are at very old versions.

Alternative Sites for Web Searching

I found out about two alternative sites for doing web searches today: Scroogle.org, which claims to give you the same search that Google does but without cookies, search-term records, and deletion of the access log after 7 days. There's also Clusty.com. It appears to give good results; I am going to play with it a bit more.

E.T., the Atari 2600 Video Game

Now I know for sure that the E.T. game was written by the same guy that did Yars' Revenge, which makes sense considering that when I played E.T. years ago I must've come across an Easter Egg that had Yars fly out of one of the pits that E.T. fell into. I haven't seen or heard any reference to anyone else finding this, though.

Sometimes Linux Makes Life Difficult...

Thankfully, it is a rarity that Linux is difficult, but when it is, it can be a real major pain. Somewhere in my updates to my Gentoo machine, things got broken, but I never noticed until I shutdown the computer in the morning and restarted it later in the day. It has been up over two weeks and wasn't doing much lately, so I might as well cut down electricity usage.

So Xorg does not come up. I thought it was because it could not find xfs, the X Font Server, but I found out through the Gentoo forums that it isn't needed anymore. So I fixed that, but things still didn't work. The Xorg logs basically gave the no screen error (after removing warnings due to xfs going away). I found information telling me I had to run a script file, but it wasn't doing what it was supposed to do, so thankfully I found a quick manual way to recreate what it did. Yet still things did not work! I recompiled nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx and still no luck. I finally decided to try upgrading my kernel to 2.6.15, as I had been at 2.6.10 for almost a year. It compiled faster than I thought it would (thank you more memory). I recompiled nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx again and got further, but then it errored out trying to use startkde from kde-3.2.0 while I am at 3.4. I dug around and fixed that. Then it complained about not finding /dev/mouse (most likely because of a move to udev) - took a guess as what to change it to and fixed it. And only then did everything work.

I still have to fix the computer not detecting my DVD burner, but I am pretty sure it accidentally got unplugged while installing the memory.

Teaching binary numbers with the Socratic Method

This article talks about someone who taught third graders binary numbers. It goes through the questions he asked and how the third graders answered. If you do not know or understand binary numbers, this article may help you out! I only wish the article gave more details, like where this school was located.

Windows XP WiFi Security Flaw

This security flaw has not been as prominent in the news as I would suspect, so I am spreading the word. The basic gist of this flaw is that if you have a wireless computer and Windows XP cannot find a WiFi network, it creates an ad hoc network that any nearby wireless computer can connect to and wreak havoc with. On top of that, the fix Microsoft has for this will only be included in service pack 3, which isn't due to be out until 2007. Thankfully, a temporary fix is included in the article.

NationStates Review

I've been on NationStates for about a week now and it has been interesting to follow. I do not know if the issues it brings up is randomly selected or what, but a new issue comes up every weekday to decide upon. I've gotten issues dealing with the auto industry losing out to foreign competition, political donations, and others, including today's that dealt with the censorship of the Harry Potter books. It will be interesting to see what other issues come up. The options to choose from for each issue aren't always perfect, however. So far each issue has had two or three options to choose from. Most of the time three options is ok and has a view that I wish to choose. Two options are usually not enough and do not contain my view, so I dismiss those issues when I do not find an answer that fits my view.

For those of you who might be curious, I basically chose "No" for the censorship of Harry Potter books and my government type is currently Inoffensive Centrist Democracy, though right now I suspect this will change often until I have gone through more issues.

This looks interesting

NationStates, a game where you create a nation and run it according to your own political ideals. Once they allow people to create a nation again, it will be interesting to see what happens. Of course, how well can you simulate this if you try to simulate people? I'll try to give my thoughts on the game later.

Firefox issue

I'm not exactly sure what caused the problem, but when I opened up Firefox this morning, I was unable to use the menu or the icons; I appeared to only be able to right click the menu bar and left click the updated extensions icon. I had thought that one of the extensions I had upgraded the previous night was the problem, but deleting them manually did not fix the problem. I ended up having to delete my Firefox profile (backing up my bookmarks) and that fixed everything. I've reloaded the extensions I was using and things are still working. I'm wondering if the profile just became corrupt somehow, or if the theme I was using got updated even though it shouldn't have, as the updated extensions icon was showing up in a different place (I'm still on 1.0.7, as Gentoo Linux has not made 1.5 stable yet) and the latest version of the theme only supports 1.5 and up.

Has anyone else experienced this?