Monthly Archives: November 2005

GameSlut

Games, Movies

If you’re acting as a carrier for viral marketing, you know you’re acting as a carrier for viral marketing, and you persist in doing it anyway, what does that make you? A typhoid moron?

Anyway, these ads for Xbox and Xbox 360 are pretty cute. (If any of the games released for the 360 at launch showed half the cleverness or ingenuity that the ads do, I’d have been standing in line to get one at midnight along with all of the other suckers.)

First, there’s a touching vignette about the transience of existence. This is followed by a meditation on the importance of a willing imagination. My favorite, though, is this cautionary tale about the dangers of hot-rodding. “Alles klar, Jungs?”

Original infectious vector provided by Faisal. Thanks, Faisal!

Firefox 1.5

Software

…was released yesterday. So far, I see no radical differences from its predecessor, which in this case is a good thing. You can now reorder tabs by dragging-and-dropping them, which is neat, and the preferences dialogs have been substantially re-organized for ease-of-use. Also, there’s an option to capture new windows opened by web sites as tabs instead. Given how annoying and distracting I find it when sites insist upon opening new windows, I suspect that this may become my favorite feature in short order.

Details and downloads can be found at Firefox’s home.

Time, Time, Time

Hardware, Software

I’ve mentioned that PC clock hardware is a raging piece of shite, right? Ah, yes, I see that I have. Good. Then I don’t have to repeat myself. I just need to elaborate: it’s even worse than I realized. I thought that the uncorrected Linux box was in a bad way, but one of my Windows XP boxen appears to be gaining minutes a day. I’m hesitant to use a gratuitous explosion of profanity like “holy fuck” in a public forum, but little else comes to mind that’s capable of fully conveying my astonishment.

So: weekly synchronization with an external time server is clearly not going to suffice, and more-frequent synchronization might be considered rude by the target servers’ owners — especially since I’ve got my own perfectly servicable stratum 3 server at home. It’s therefore time for me to figure out how to make Windows talk to said server — often enough to keep its own sorry ass in some reasonable approximation of sync.

A bit of Googling later, I discover that there are Registry keys you can tweak to both add a server and change the polling frequency. I’ll have to play with them.

Some of these values may be more-easily manipulable using the command-line w32tm utility.

If all else fails, I can have the machine run its own instance of ntpd slickly packaged by the good folks at Meinberg. I’m sort of hoping it doesn’t come to that, though.

Dick is a Killer

Music

If you’re suffering an acute deficit of hearing the Preznit say what he really means, The Party Party has the rx for you. Given the veep’s recently-expressed feelings about the permissibility of torture, “Dick is a Killer” seems particularly timely. (Note that the server on which the songs are hosted seems to have a fondness for resetting connections: if you’re going to download them, you’re advised to use a tool that will recover gracefully. wget seems to fit the bill; others may, too.)

Gigapxl

Art

The Gigapxl Project (“Gigapixel” wouldn’t fit on a license plate, apparently) is a fascinating study in what happens when an engineer with too much time on his hands decides to pursue photography with a vengeance. Popular Science recently ran an intriguing article on the subject.

The project’s web-site gallery is worth checking out; the photos don’t look all that impressive until you follow the chain of zooms and realize that their detail just goes on, and on, and on…

Kung-Fu Fuck You

Movies

I have no idea who The Ministry of Unknown Science are, although it seems not beyond the realm of possibility that their Eric Trueheart is the same as the one who worked on the late, great, lamented Invader Zim as a writer.

In any case, their short film Kung-Fu Fuck-You is a work of brilliance on a par with the cutscenes in Rag Doll Kung Fu, and marks them as a group to watch.

No, I have no idea what the Leprechauns are doing there either.

Sony: Pigfuckers

Idiots, Music, Software

Mark Russinovich, one of the more badass ninjas of low-level Windows programming and the co-maintainer of the excellent Sysinternals website, recently discovered, while testing his rootkit detector, that Something Unwholesome had made its way onto a system that should by rights have been clean.

Upon investigation, he discovered that he’d inadertently installed it himself when listening to a DRM-encumbered CD, the ironically-titled Get Right With The Man.

This discovery has led to a media furor and very visible tug-of-war, chronicled on Russinovich’s blog, with Sony and Sony’s purveyor of DRM technology, First 4 Internet. First 4 Internet’s programmers clearly don’t understand the nuts and bolts of deep-down Windows programming nearly so well as Russinovich, leading to their advancement of some blatantly false assertions which Russinovich has proceeded to casually blow out of the water. It’d be amusing if the stakes — to wit, users’ right to use media they own on computers they own without worrying that one is going to try subverting the other — weren’t so high.

Russinovich is one of my heroes; his autoruns is on my very short list of absolutely essential Windows utilities. And yet there’s a certain irony lurking just under the surface here. Free-software advocates have argued, sometimes stridently, that proprietary systems are to be avoided because they tilt the balance of power away from ordinary users and towards the Powers That Be. This episode would seem to offer evidence that even extraordinary users like Russinovich are at risk of being bent over the barrel for as long as they choose to be serfs in someone else’s kingdom. Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess. I suspect it’s too much to hope that the experience will lead him to focus his considerable skills upon free software, but it sure would be nice.

Tim suggested that I make T-shirts declaring “SONY ARE PIGFUCKERS” as an alternative to having the phrase tattoed across my chest. I replied that I could probably cover my costs by selling a few. I’m not sure about an exact design, though.