Ski season

June 16th, 2009

I’m officially decked out with everything I could possibly need for the upcoming season! Including:

Snowboard + bindings
Board bag
Boots
Jacket + pants
Goggles
Thermals
Waxing iron + wax/scraper
Season pass

The mountain will be open by the time I get back from my Bali holiday. Can’t wait!

New ConsoleWrapper version

June 10th, 2009

I took the time today to make a few small changes to ConsoleWrapper which should improve usability and stability, namely:

A simple caret to show cursor position and improve text editing capability - as well as the ability to use the expected left/right, home/end, and backspace/delete keys. Note that it currently displays as a | character inserted into the text, so it will push characters to the right of it across by one position. It didn’t seem too distracting in my testing however.
Improved stability when re-acquiring the graphics device. This should prevent crashes when another application temporarily takes full-screen possession of the device.
Added very basic Ctrl+C support. I still cannot pass keystrokes to my internal CMD process, and so I cannot yet provide true interrupt functionality. Ctrl+C will simply kill the current console and spawn a new one. This has the unsatisfactory behaviour of spewing a new set of startup text, and the current directory is also lost. This is a very temporary solution to a common request. Hopefully a more satisfactory solution can be found soon.

Download it here!

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US Government Corruption

May 1st, 2009

Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis “own” the U.S. Congress — according to one of that institution’s most powerful members — demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.

One might think it would be a big news story for the second most-powerful member of the U.S. Senate to baldly state that the Congress is “owned” by the bankers who spawned the financial crisis and continue to dictate the government’s actions. But it won’t be. The leading members of the media work for the very corporations that benefit most from this process. Establishment journalists are integral and well-rewarded members of the same system and thus cannot and will not see it as inherently corrupt.

Source.

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RIAA’s Hostile Takeover of the Internet

April 30th, 2009

The recording industry is no longer targeting pirates - they are actually trying to hijack the very fabric of the Internet.

The apparent strategy:

1. Outlaw file sharing
2. Outlaw personal encryption and anonymization services
3. Set up a global, privately-run Internet surveillance program to spy on everybody all the time without a warrant — run by ISPs and paid for by the taxpayers
4. And finally, get the authority to block anyone from the Internet entirely, without the involvement of police, courts or any verifiable trail of evidence

We can not let this happen.

“It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.” - Bruce Schneier

This article sums up my thoughts quite nicely.

Posted in Intarwebs | No Comments »