Tuesday, January 25, 2005

My First Unix Experience

It's not really as exciting as my title makes it sound, but today was the first time I used a Unix workstation. I now have access to a 24/7 Unix lab in the RLM on the 8th floor for my Linear Algebra class. It was running a GUI called KDE and it looked kinda like this:

Eat it Gates!


I must say that I was impressed with how fast it worked and how smooth everything looked. It seemed to be pretty stable, but I only spent a half an hour playing around with it. We have the lab to use Matlab, but I'll probably use it for more than that. Hopefully though, I'll become a Junior Officer for ACM and then I'll get my Unix shell account for the 24/7 Taylor lab early. I'm surprised that more developers don't develop for Unix and encourage it. It would certainly end Gates's reign if that were to happen, but we all know that won't happen. I guess I'll find out soon enough if programming on a Unix machine is easier than on a Windows machine.

I have lots of other stuff to talk about today. It turns out that Coldplay is putting the finishing touches on their new album (finally) and it will be released in March. Insiders are saying good things about it so let's hope it's on par with their normal stuff.

Not a whole lot of movie stuff today. I just noticed that the Batman Begins website has put up a synopsis of the movie for those of you who are still clueless. Academy Award nominations have now been announced and they make me realize how many movies I wish I had seen last year. Especially Hotel Rwanda and The Aviator (receiver of 11 nomination). I will, however, be seeing Ray at the Union in a month or two. Sounds like a lot of worth nominations though for the most part.

TI and Nokia have teamed up to make single chip cell phones. What does this mean for you and me? Now those cheap phones you get when you sign up for a new plan will actually be cool because this new technology makes production cheaper. I'm really excited to see what kind of new capabilities they'll be able to venture into with the new technology's power consumption improvements.

The New York Times was on fire today with an abundance of great articles. First off, a bunch of whack-job Christian fundamentalists are threatening to pull support of Bush's Social Security reforms if he doesn't fight more aggresively for an amendment to ban same-sex marraige. I don't think I've seen a more despicable group of individuals. How can these people call themselves Chrstians when they hate on a certain type of people? They're as much Chrstian as those crazy 9/11 terrorists are Muslim. It doesn't make sense to claim to be part of a religion of tolerance and at the same time try to ignorantly deprive a group of people of their happiness and their life commitments. The next article talks about how search engines are now starting to index television show archives so people can search for a show based on a quotation. Lastly, our country is coming under fire for the decline of the value of the dollar. Why do they care? Because cheap dollars means that imports cost more (because of the exchange rate) so our demand for imports goes down while exports skyrocket because our goods seem so cheap. Administration officials claim that it's just because we're so cool, but the bigger factor is our deficit (budget and trade) and the article goes more in depth.

I'm going to end the post that never ends with some gaming news. There was a leak yesterday morning about a new silver PS2. No information about it yet, but it looks cool.

Isn't it shiny?


That retailer is gonna get the smackdown from Sony I'm sure. The other tidbit I wanted to mention is this interesting piece from BBC about next gen consoles. It all sounds about right and very cool, expecially the advent of more accurate physics engines.

Without further ado, the Tuesday Twosome:

1. How often do you update your blog/site and why?
Every day since I'm a loser. Also because it forces me to actually stay on top of current events and it allows me to provide a commentary that I can come back to and read if I ever felt so inclined to do so.

2. How often do you comment on other people's sites and why?
I only comment on entries I find interesting, and that's probably a coule of times a day on average. I spend too much time writing on my blog to read a whole lot of other blogs.

3. How often do you change the layout of your site and why?
I'll probably only change it once every few months. I just want to keep it fresh, but it looks good for now.

4. Do you ever feel guilty that you don't reciprocate comments or you really don't care?
No because I do comment when I feel a post is deserving.

5. How many sites on average do you visit daily and of those, how many do you comment on?
I probably visit 5-10 blogs a day and I'll probably comment on one or two of those.

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