There are some quirks with Ventrilo and Vista, however, and I wanted to make mention of them here in the hopes that they might be useful to other people. Note that these tips were only tested with Warhammer Online and they may or may not apply to other games, and while this was done on 64-bit Vista, both Ventrilo and Warhammer Online were the 32-bit versions so they should behave the same on 32-bit Vista. Your mileage may vary.

Push-to-Talk (PTT)

In order for your PTT hotkey — which defaults to the left Ctrl key — to be recognized when you’re in WAR, you’ll need to run Ventrilo as an Administrator. This may be because WAR needs to run as admin, or maybe it’s just something with Vent. Either way, that’s how it has to be.

Overlay

The overlay is important to me, as I still don’t know how to recognize people on Vent by their voices. I spent a couple of hours fiddling with third-party overlay add-ons, graphics settings, compatibility options, etc. Then a clever idea hit me: run WAR in windowed mode, with the resolution set to the same thing I’d use for full-screen. That worked perfectly! I was able to position the overlay such that it didn’t cover anything too terribly useful, and I also set up a hot key so I could toggle the overlay display in the event that I did need to see something behind it.

So now I’m exceptionally happy with how Vent and WAR are playing together, and I’m looking forward to a long and happy life of fart jokes via voice chat while beating in the heads of stupid Destruction players.

When the PS3 hit, it was generally lambasted as being too expensive, overpowered, and having no games worth a crap. At the time — almost a year and a half ago — these things were true. Since then there have been some price drops, developers are getting more comfortable with producing games for the hardware, and more exclusives are being planned and released. Also, since the resolution of the high-definition format war in undisputed favor of Blu-ray, such a player is no longer the extravagant, risky proposition that it once was. But there’s more to it than that.

More Hardware for the Same Price

• More powerful system
• Bigger hard drive
• Built-in WiFi
• Built-in Blu-ray

The PS3 is more powerful a system than the Xbox 360 or the Wii. The Wii doesn’t even attempt to compete in the same hardware space as the other two — they’re making their waves by offering a more compelling form of gameplay — but the Xbox 360 and PS3 base models are the same price and are generally considered hardware peers. On top of the better CPU and GPU, there’s also more hardware in the PS3’s box for the money. You get a bigger hard drive, WiFi support is included with all models, and you get Blu-ray across the board.

Having a hard drive available in all models means that game creators can count on it being there. This was one of the biggest innovations that the original Xbox brought to the table, and Microsoft threw it away, bringing us back the bad old days of tiny, expensive memory cards. The hard drive is also user-serviceable and -upgradeable with just about any 2.5″ SATA notebook hard drive. I’ll probably be buying a nice, big one from NewEgg sometime in the next year or two.

Further into the realm of optional components is the HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360. Even though it was made obsolete overnight earlier this year, if it were part of the core console developers could still use it for games. But it’s not; it’s an add-on. This means game developers couldn’t target it for their releases, instead having to rely on the smaller capacity DVD medium. Sony’s developers can cram obscene amounts of content onto the Blu-ray discs; in-game content aside, they could even include a movie or similar extras and still have enough space for the game itself.

PlayStation Network (PSN)

While not as feature-laden as Xbox Live at present, it does provide a level online playing field for Sony’s developers. One of the biggest issues with the PlayStation 2 (PS2) was Sony’s “you’re on your own” stance with online games and content distribution. This left many of the smaller shops out in the rain, and produced inconsistent online experiences. Taking a lesson from the original Xbox Live, they provided something similar in the form of PSN for the PS3. It doesn’t currently have all the stuff that Live has — no matchmaking or in-game friend list support, or achievements — but all of those things have been publicly stated as being on the radar and part of the plan. In fact, the PlayStation Home stuff that should be coming out later this year goes beyond any of Xbox Live’s lobbies and achievement tracking and display. I’m looking forward to it.

There are also no monthly or annual fees for PSN, unlike Xbox Live. That’s a big win right there, in my opinion.

SIXAXIS Controllers

The SIXAXIS controller is pretty cool. It’s got motion-sensing like the Wii Remote, is as comfortable as the DualShock 2 controllers that the PS2 used, and are wireless and rechargeable. I like them a lot, and there’s nothing quite as badass as guiding your plane in Blazing Angels 2 by changing the pitch, roll, and yaw of your controller (I downloaded the game’s demo for just that reason, and may end up buying it).

Downsides

It’s not all gumdrops and sunshine, though. The Wii’s innovation factor is impressive, and I’ve seen some very cool games for it. They’re still nearly impossible to find in-stock, though, and I know several people who own them already who’d probably let me play at their place if I brought a case of decent beer with me. Xbox Live is currently a stronger online community offering than PSN, as well, even though that’s in the cards to be changing. Finally, I still don’t have an HDTV; they’re still outside the range of what I’m willing to pay for a television. This means the Wii would be better able to take care of my standard-definition (SDTV) set. However, I will be getting an HDTV sometime in the near future — maybe this year, after I’ve saved a bit and prices have continued falling — and at that point I’ll be able to take advantage of my big purchase with my PS3.

In summary, I’m happy with my purchase and I firmly believe I bought the right console for the right reasons. You’re more than welcome to disagree with me — as people are with any opinion — and I’ve got comments open below for you to do so. Don’t be a jerk, though, or I’ll drop my 11-pound console on your foot. Oh yeah, that’s another downside; the thing isn’t exactly portable. But the PlayStation Portable is and has all kinds of connectivity between itself and my PS3. Hmmm… how much is one of those?

A former coworker of mine, icon, who was born in Russia, expressed his concern about the purchase.  He casts doubts on Russia’s privacy laws and a Russian company’s concern in adhering to what laws there are.  I was expecting him to speak up on this issue, and am glad to have his input.  Luis Villa also throws in his thoughts, as well as the thoughts of a former coworker of his.  Luis knows his way around law, free speech, and free software, so I was also looking forward to hearing what he thought.

My take on it is that we can’t be certain to trust LiveJournal with our private information any longer, nor can we safely consider them reputable librarians of our thoughts and ideas that we’re sharing with the world through blogs.  I have a handful of friends who are deep into LJ, but I think if there’s a good time to move your stuff off to another site, it’s now.  Six Apart — the company who previously owned LiveJournal — also owns both Vox and TypePad, which provide similar user experiences to LJ but are still held by an American company.  There’s also Google’s very popular Blogger, which is where Icon’s moved to, and I think Google’s as trustworthy as any other company at the moment.  I personally run the open-source WordPress software hosted on a server that I share, but I understand that’s beyond many people’s technical skills, for whom I recommend WordPress.com, run by the company under whose stewardship the similarly named software currently rests.

All of those options are, so far as I’m aware, either entirely free (as in $0) or free for a certain basic level of service.  If you know otherwise, or if you have any other ideas, please leave comments.  Your personal data, as well as your thoughts, are too important to leave in the hands of someone you can’t trust.

The Nerd Handbook

This explains so much about me and “my people” that it borders on the uncanny. Everyone who is dating, has ever dated, or is planning on dating a nerd/geek needs to read this.

Installing MySQL on Ubuntu

A sarcastic response to a post by Dan Benjamin about how to install the MySQL database on Mac OS X. It still floors me when Mac people talk about how great it is that you can install software by hand, from source. We got over that years and years ago in the Linux world, FreeBSD’s Ports has been a solid solution for many years as well, and they’re even getting past it in Solaris. Mac OS X has MacPorts and lots of people use it, but there’s still a great deal of software-management-by-hand done in that world.

The laptop has 4GB of memory, which means I really want to run a 64-bit operating system on it, and Dell only sells 32-bit versions of Vista, in spite of the fact that it’s a 64-bit CPU with more memory than a 32-bit OS can reasonably handle. But I’ve got 64-bit media — also Vista Business — for my home machine, so I wanted to find a way to install that copy with the license that came with the machine.

Poking around on the Internet led me to a post on the NotebookReview forums, and to a tool called ABR — Activation Backup & Restore. I installed a clean version of the 32-bit Vista Business that came with the system, which is all activated and kosher, and then I ran ABR to backup the activation data to a USB memory key. Then I did another clean install of Vista Business using my existing 64-bit media, opting to give it no CD key during installation. Then, once it was up, I re-ran ABR to restore the activation data to the system, and now it’s flying like a kite.

The other problem I ran into is that I couldn’t find fully functional drivers for the touchpad. Synaptics provides some, but they don’t allow me to enable scrolling — which I love — or disable tap-to-click — which I hate. Some more poking around, this time on Dell’s site, led me to a download page for a driver for a different laptop. I decided to give it a go, and lo! It works!

I’ve now got a happy laptop, running a happy 64-bit version of a happy OS, with happy input devices. Maybe this information will help someone else. If not, then at least I’ll know where to find it if I have to format and reinstall again.

I’ve been playing Magic on and off for over ten years, and I’ve only ever made it past the second round of a tournament once or twice in my life. I love the game, but I’ve never considered myself to be a top player, even amongst the local player base. Maybe I need to reconsider my position on that.

I just wanted to thank Sci-Fi Genre for hosting the tournament, Wizards for continuing to make the game so engaging and entertaining long after people thought the fad would die, and mostly to the other players in the tournament for throwing their best games and best decks at me. It was an exhilarating blast, folks, and I look forward to seeing what Lorwyn has in store for us.

Calendaring

Early on, I got it synchronizing with my organization’s calendar suite. Using a piece of third-party software called NotifyLink, I have all my appointments, tasks, and notes showing up on my phone — in Pocket Outlook, no less — as well as sending entries I create on the phone back to the calendar server so they show up in the web client or fat client. It also yelps at me when I need to be somewhere.

I also found a great little third-party agenda tool called Agenda One. It looks phenomenal and is able to cram great amounts of information into screens using extremely tiny but still easily legible text, and I’m keen on trying it more and maybe buying a copy of it.

The iPhone can’t do this. Sure, I could access my calendar via the web interface and Safari but that won’t fire off reminders, and it’s not like any of what I’m doing is new or cutting-edge technology in PDAs or smartphones. I also couldn’t install a third-party client if I didn’t like the one they provided me. It apparently does sync with iCal, but iCal is an island unto itself in many ways, and I don’t want to be tethered to my desktop or laptop for syncing my calendar data. The iPhone also doesn’t support tasks or to-dos.

Music

While it’s not got a lot of internal space, the 3125 does support adding memory through microSD cards. I can get a 1GB card from NewEgg for less than $10, or a 2GB card for about $20. There are also 4GB cards on the market for about $100, and SanDisk has announced an 8GB card.

That’s funny, those last two are the same amounts of space that the two models of iPhone have.

But capacity may be a moot point. I found an application today called Mercora M that allows you to listen to streaming radio on your phone over the Internet for $5 a month. They also have a desktop client available, and with that running you can stream the music you have on your Windows PC to your phone.

Your iPhone has 8GB of music? That’s cute. My phone has 250GB. And I can add more for however much I want to spend on a new hard drive. I don’t think the iPhone does streaming radio, either.

I could also get a car kit that supports the A2DP Bluetooth audio profile, and have my phone play my music through my car’s stereo. Or any A2DP-compliant Bluetooth headphones. Or a home stereo. Or whatever else.

The iPhone doesn’t support A2DP.

The list could go on, I’m sure, but I’ve only had the phone for less than a day, so I haven’t found all the things I want to do with it. But what I’ve been driving at is this, if you’ve not seen it yet: The iPhone is a really pretty, very advanced phone, whereas my (or any) Windows Mobile device (or Symbian, or BlackBerry, or OpenMoko) is a platform. Sure, the iPhone does things my phone doesn’t, like photo editing, but that’s not something I’ve ever wanted to do on my phone anyway. Portable music and calendaring, however, do appeal to me. And even then, someone could write the applications to do those things. I could install them, and away I’d go. The interfaces might not be as elegant, largely due to the iPhone’s multi-touch screen, but that’s not my point.

What irritates me the most is that Apple used to have such a fantastic handheld platform. It was called the Newton, and it was the first serious PDA. The Newton had this amazing concept called Soups for data storage. Basically, the system would store objects — contact entries, tasks, appointments — in its long-term storage. These objects were just bundles of data with attributes, e.g. “name,” “phone number,” “email address,” and so on for a contact. Other applications could work with that data through the soup, without having to worry about harming it for the other application. If you were a doctor using a Newton-based medical practice management app, your application could store height, weight, blood pressure, or other such things in the contact object, and the address book wouldn’t care. This means that there was one storage place for all the discrete data types you’d want to track, and that each of those bundles of data would exist only once — you never needed to enter the same information twice.

I’m sure the iPhone has that level of application integration — such that when you’re creating a new calendar entry it’ll use your address book for listing the people to invite — but because the iPhone is not a platform, there’s no way for third-party tools to get at that data. Web apps will not have access to the address book, or the calendar, or your notes (of course, not even Mac OS X has access to the latter yet). If I wanted to create a medical practice management app for the iPhone, it’d have to be a web application in the first place, and would need to use its own data store, which means that doctors wouldn’t automatically have all their patients in their contact list. This is a huge step backwards for mobile computing, and it’s a step directly back along a path Apple itself walked first.

People have asked, “Well, this is a 1.0 release. What if Apple enhances it over time?” I’m sure they will; they’d be stupid not to. But when they do, I’ll judge the new releases on their own merits and flaws. In the meantime, when I see someone with an iPhone I’m more likely to say, “That’s a really pretty phone you’ve got. Have you seen my handheld computer?”

1. First, I started by adding four additional SCSI drives to my CentOS 5 virtual machine. I then booted the VM up, and partitioned the disks, creating one partition that encompassed the entire drive and setting its type to “fd”:

   for i in a b c d ; do echo "; ; fd ;" | sfdisk /dev/sd$i ; done
   

2. Then I created the new RAID5 array with four devices, none of which should be kept as spares:

   mdadm --create /dev/md0 --spare-devices=0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sd{a,b,c,d}1
   

3. Third, create a physical volume for LVM to use:

   pvcreate /dev/md0
   

4. After that, I made a volume group:

   vgcreate vg0 /dev/md0
   

5. Then I made a logical volume in that group using all free physical extents:

   lvcreate --extents=100%VG --name=storage vg0
   

6. Sixth, slap a file system on that guy:

   mke2fs -j /dev/vg0/storage
   

7. Mount it, put some data on it, and enjoy.

After you’ve been using the array for a while (or, after it’s finished resyncing if you’re just following along at home), you add some new drives to the machine that you want to add to the array. I shut my VM down, added some additional virtual disks to it, and powered it back up; your steps would presumably be somewhat similar. After the system came back up, I added the new drives like so.

1. Partition them as with the other drives in the set:

   for i in e f ; do sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sd$i ; done
   

2. Add them to the RAID array:

   mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sd{e,f}1
   

3. Expand the array to encompass all the disks (note that this will probably take a while, so you might want to do it overnight):

   mdadm --grow --raid-devices=6 /dev/md0
   

4. Expand the LVM physical volume to include the new space:

   pvresize /dev/md0
   

5. Then expand the logical volume as well:

   lvresize --extents=100%VG /dev/vg0/storage
   

6. Finally, grow the file system:

   resize2fs /dev/vg0/storage
   

With the exception of powering down to add the new drives, nothing had to be brought offline, and if your storage controller supports the hot-adding of devices then you may not even have to that (though the scope of doing so is beyond this tutorial, since I don’t have ready access to such hardware).

Hope that helps, and please let me know if you see any inconsistencies or run into any problems!

I’ve been weighing the choices between two classes of scooter: 50cc and 150cc (along with one or two 125cc models). The smaller ones don’t require any licensing or anything, and so I wouldn’t even have to get my motorcycle endorsement. Anything bigger than that does require a motorcycle license, tags, and insurance (though I’d probably have insurance in either case). The smaller ones also tend to be less expensive, of course. The drawbacks to the 50cc scooters is that most of them don’t go any faster than about 40 MPH. That wouldn’t help me on 45 MPH roads, and even then I’d still like to have a little extra room for emergency power in case I need it.

I decided that this is another instance where a round-up sorta thing might be useful, so I’m compiling a list of the models I’ve been eyeballing. I’ll end it with a table comparing some of their salient specs.

50cc Models

Little putterers that would get me around, but can’t even think about carrying two people. My concern with these is their lack of power, but the price is right and they seem like they’d make great ways to start scooting. I also like that I wouldn’t need to get any additional endorsements on my license, as dealing with the NC DMV is never fun.

Honda Metropolitan — MSRP $1899

The Metro appears to be the current benchmark in inexpensive, small scooters. It’s cute, affordable, and from what I’ve read it’s quite well made; Honda’s certainly no stranger to making quality vehicles. There’s also a Honda/Yamaha dealership right near where I’ll be living, which would be mighty convenient.

Yamaha Vino Classic — MSRP $1899

I love the retro styling on this, and Yamaha also makes great motorcycles, so it’d stand to reason that the quality of their scooters would be similar. The Honda/Yamaha dealership is also a swing in this model’s favor, and the other two Yamaha models listed below.

Yamaha C3 — MSRP $1999

A new Yamaha model, what the C3 lacks in looks it makes up for in utility — that big box upon which you sit is a trunk with a nine-gallon capacity. The larger wheels also lend it greater stability, and I’ve heard that because it’s a fuel-injected engine it’s a big peppier than a 50cc scooter usually is. It’s a face only a mother could love, though, and that combined with the small engine are what I don’t like about it.

Kymco Agility 50 4T — MSRP $1599

I’ve seen a few people speak very highly of the Kymco scooters, but I’m wary of a Taiwanese brand that I’ve never heard of. Still, I’d be willing to give it a test ride just to see how well it performed. I also wish I could find a side-on photo of this scooter as the 3/4-angle shot looks weird with the other photos on this page.

Piaggio Fly 50 — MSRP $1799

While the Piaggio/Vespa dealer is over in Raleigh, Piaggio’s quality and style might make it worth my while to head over that way and take a test ride on one of these.

Genuine Buddy 50 — $1899

The nearest Genuine dealer is in Greensboro, about an hour from here, but their scooters are so damned compelling that I might drive out there and take a look. The Buddy is cute, has great reviews, and is imported by a company whose style I like. Also, the guys over at Scooter Nerds answered a question I had via email promptly and courteously, and I’d like to try to do them the return favor of giving them a chance to sell me a scooter.

125cc & 150cc Models

Larger and better able to carry two people — at least, the 150cc models are — they would give me more options in terms of which roads I could safely use, and at what speeds. I would, however, have to jump through the DMVs hoops in order to get my motorcycle endorsement, which may require my getting new glasses. Admittedly, I could probably use new glasses, but that’d be an additional cost.

Yamaha Vino 125 — MSRP $2549

The bigger brother of the Vino Classic, I’m not sure if 125cc would be large enough to carry two people effectively, but it’d be worth looking into.

Genuine Buddy 125 — MSRP $2599

Identical in looks to its smaller brethren, the greater power in the larger Buddy would probably make me happier. Honestly, this is the one to which I’m most attracted, with its biggest drawback being that I’d have to go to Greensboro to get it.

So, What Now?

Here’s my plan. Some parts of this might get done before we move, but the majority of it will take place after we’re in the new apartment.

1. Get my motorcycle learner’s permit.
2. Test drive as many scooters as possible.
3. Get the one that I like, putting a little bit of money down on it but financing the majority, and start using it as my daily driver.
4. Work on taking the MSF Basic Rider Course training class, and getting my full motorcycle endorsement. Even if I don’t need it for the scooter I buy, it’d be nice to have and the course is a damn good idea anyway.
5. Once I’m comfortable using the scooter as a daily driver, sell my car — probably to CarMax — and use the proceeds to pay into the scooter loan.

This is something I really want to do. I think it’s a good idea, and others have expressed similar sentiments. What do you think?

To help in this decision-making process, I’ve crafted a table.

RubyForge is great, and there’s a lot to be said for hosting this project somewhere other than Duke or on my sluggish TextDrive shared hosting account. But I’d like some sort of site content management beyond just SFTP to the site and manage static HTML files in a document root. There’s an optional wiki, but it’s UseMod… bleh. It would also be nice to have integrated mailing lists.

I think Trac has the best feature set overall, and is used by many high-profile and highly respected projects, so I can be reasonably certain that it’ll do what I need. The only major drawback is that I’d have to maintain it on a server myself, though this does have some benefits in the customization department. I’m not worried about its lack of mailing list management, either; I could always use GoogleGroups, or simply install Mailman or set up a Sympa virtual host in Duke’s Sympa site.

I’m not even sure why I’m considering Launchpad, to be honest, other than due to my positive experiences with it as an Ubuntu Linux user. It doesn’t really seem to offer any of the features I’m after other than being hosted and managed by someone else, and it doesn’t even directly integrate with the VCS software I’ve been using and which works well with the IDE I’ve been rather enjoying. That doesn’t exactly make it sound like a winner to me, for this project.