Umbral Echoes Blog

I finally got around to setting up my desktop computer last weekend (I’ve just been using my laptop until now). While I was at it, I decided to go ahead and remove the hard drive that was going bad, and then I got the wild hair up my ass to install Ubuntu Linux (a popular distribution of Linux that actually has a nice user community that answers questions, and is built with ease-of-use in mind).

I downloaded the Live CD, and tried to rearrange one of my hard drives to make room for Linux there. The disk partition editor (GPartEd) froze up in the middle of resizing the old partition… so I rebooted, only to find that it actually did that successfully (regardless of freezing up). Then I tried to format the new area to the Linux file system type… and again, it froze up but seemed to have successfully done it anyway.

From this point, I clicked the option to install, and things went surprisingly smoothly. Ubuntu even has a neat little function that can import your Windows documents and settings. It installed a boot loader, so the next time I booted up I could choose Linux or Windows (I was halfway afraid that it would just set itself to the default OS and make it a hassle to boot back into Windows).

However, it doesn’t seem to include drivers for my wireless network card. But, Linux does have a utility that can make it use Windows drivers. After following the pleasantly complete and no-brainer-copy-paste instructions from the Ubuntu forums, I got that installed, and the drivers as well.

Linux could now see my wireless card, but it didn’t seem to be able to connect to the wireless network. It also gave no status indicator as to what might have gone wrong. And after playing with the settings a few more times… Linux froze. Linux geeks the world over have constantly ridden Windows for locking up, yet Linux does it too. This was a hardcore lockup, too — keyboard was totally nonresponsive, and I had to power off and back on again.

I haven’t tried messing with it since then, but I shall continue to chronicle my foray into using Linux as my desktop OS, for the (imaginary) people out there who might be interested to hear the tale.

So I’m reading the headlines from a computing newsletter I get, and this immediately jumped out at me:

A German Aerospace Center Space Agency research team led by Sami Haddadin has developed a robot that intentionally hits people in the face…

Now, the research is aimed at making robotic machinery that works near people able to detect if it hits a person.  But that first sentence had me laughing out loud.

Google recently revamped the interface for their Google Docs tool. For those not in the know, it’s sort of like a lite online version of MS Word and Excel. It also has ultra-keen collaboration features that let you work on things with other people, or just let other people view your stuff. It tracks changes, so if someone screws something up, you can always go undo it, etc. Anyway, the new interface is quite slick — makes it much easier to organize stuff. I’ve been playing with it for the past 10 minutes or so. No, it doesn’t take much to amuse me. Just something involving computers. Or boobs.

Kirstie and I are heading to Louisville a bit ahead of schedule, due to her grandmother’s worse-than-expected health. We’ll be leaving tomorrow afternoon, and hopefully arriving in Nashville at a time appropriate to visit Jared and Niquie. I have a 350+ page document that I’m reviewing, which I’m already most of the way through, and hope to finish on the trip up.

And just when I’ve mostly recovered from my dad’s visit and the plague taking me out of commission at work, now I get to go on another hiatus. Then when I’m done catching up with that, it’ll be time for GenCon. Then when I’m done catching up with that, it’ll be time for DragonCon. Whee!

There was a minor upgrade of WordPress available (that’s the software I use to run my blog on my website), so of course I upgraded. Or at least, I tried to. Copied the files, everything worked fine. Ran the upgrade script… PHP vomit all over the screen. Tried tinkering with things to fix it, but unfortunately my web host was having some issues at the time (read: the server was choking again), so that was an aggravating process. Today I finally got things up and running again, though. So let’s cross our fingers, NOT run the latest version, and hope the next version they create doesn’t break things.

From NewScientistTech.com:

The computing giant is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history.
…
So far it can only guess gender and age with any accuracy, but the team say they expect to be able to “refine the profiles which contain bogus demographic information”, and one day predict your occupation, level of qualifications, and perhaps your location.

The engineer in me appreciates the skill it takes to create such an algorithm.  The paranoid part cringes.  And the marketing-mind boggles at the possibilities — every day it seems like companies are getting better and better tools to learn about consumers and target advertising in a more focused manner.

Which really, I personally don’t mind.  Take such simple things as Google’s ads.  On a number of occasions while searching for something, I find a useful product or service when I glance at those ads on the side.

I think it would be completely awesome if, when I was watching TV, I could see ads about things I might actually be interested in.  Okay, I have a media center PC, so I fast forward past the commercials… but I do actually rewind sometimes to watch one if it catches my interest.  Like the Apple ads.  I don’t really like Macs, but those ads are great entertainment regardless.  But I really hate having to sit through ads for herpes medication, or Herbal Essences, or a damn My Little Pony.

Hell, if advertisers would make ads more entertaining then I might not mind them so much either.  But I suppose there’s a fine line there — I recall a study finding that when some entertaining ad was run during halftime in the last Super Bowl, only 13% of the people surveyed remembered what the commercial was even advertising.  Not a lot of bang for the buck, there.  To again bring up the Mac ads, these are the epitome of “right.”  They are entertaining, informative, and you remember exactly what they’re about.

Hmm, that went a totally different direction than I had planned when I started writing.

Just writing a test post from Flock, to see if it works.  Soon to be deleted…