Four Island

It was a dark and stormy night. On Feburary* 22nd 2008, a short man wearing a black leather coat that completely enveloped him walked up to a closed internet cafe. He taped something to the door and took two steps back. sssss A hole was burnt into the door. He reached through the hole and opened the door.

He walked up to a computer, turned it on, hacked past the login screen, and used IE to access http://www.fourisland.com. He looked at the Poll of the Week.... and let out a shriek. Someone had already voted from this location. Not only that, but the poll was a completely random one! He'd trekked all the way from Alabama so as to vote on the poll before Saturday, but it was not to be...

OK, that was REALLY random, but that just corresponds with the random poll. Here are the results:

Cat - 1 vote(s)! Dog - 2 vote(s)! Sheep - 0 vote(s)! Penguin - 0 vote(s)!

OK, with that over with, I would like to announce something about Tetrgi 2.1. I have set a release date for it on March 3rd. If anyone has any suggestions, please create a ticket for it in good time, so I have a chance to implement it and don't have to postpone the release.

And, just to compete with the randomity* of both the poll and its accompanying story, here's a random thing I found my XP machine doing yesterday: So do I, Adobe Updater, so do I.

*Note: I do have strange ways of spelling and pronouncing certain words that may seem like mistakes to other people. They were put there on purpose.

Guess what everyone? Two days ago Tetrgi 1.5 was tested on a real Windows computer, and worked. Because a 2.0 release of Tetrgi was planned for when 1.5 could be tweaked to work on Windows, Tetrgi 1.5 and 2.0 had to merge as there were no differences between them. The result is Tetrgi 1.5/2.0, the first stable version of Tetrgi.

You can get Tetrgi 1.5/2.0 at the Tetrgi Downloads page. Have fun!

As you may have noticed, the Projects section seems to have moved around quite a bit. Yes, that's because I've discovered a wonderful thing called Trac. A full-blown project system that allows each of my projects to have it's own Wiki, Ticket System (VERY useful!), Subversion Repository and Viewer, Roadmap (Milestones), Bitten (an extension that works much like Mozilla Tinderbox or Buildbot), a Timeline (Recent Changes) and to top it all off, it's all fully intergrated. From a page in the wiki, you can link to the fourth ticket by typing #4. From a ticket description, you can link to the 13th source commit by typing [13]. And so on!

Trac is a wonderful thing and I'm extremely happy to have found it. If you find bugs in any of my projects, or if you have a feature request, don't hesitate to make a Ticket for it!

Well, the GIT repository viewer seems to have been chosen... so lookie here, here are the results!

gitweb - 0 vote(s)! CGIT - 2 vote(s)! I don't know. - 2 vote(s)! I don't care. - 0 vote(s)!

In other news, a minor milestone just passed coincidentally on Valentine's day! 1337 hits!

Whew, quite a few votes this week! YAY! So, if you don't want to listen to me ramble about how much I like people voting on my polls, here are the results!

Chatting - 1 vote(s)! Programming - 2 vote(s)! Reading - 1 vote(s)! Playing games - 6 vote(s)!

Also, you may have noticed the GIT repository seems to have changed. In fact, it hasn't. The viewer has. I quite like both of them, so I'm leaving you to vote on which one I should stay with.

NOTE: The new one is CGIT, the other was gitweb.

Well, the first transfer project has been completed! Well, not really. Single Four (the insane programming language, see its project page for more info) is now pretty much exactly as it was before translation, except now it has UNIX support. Unlike the current state of Tetrgi, the Windows version appears to work.

You can get Single Four RC1 at its Subversion repository. That link goes to the RC1 tag of Single Four.

EDIT: Yes, RC1 has been tested with both HelloWorld programs found on the Single Four project page.

UPDATE: Subversion has been discarded (as CVS was) in the favor of GIT. It will take a while, however, to get the links fixed up again, though.

Yay, we had some votes this week! I don't mind if they weren't ample because it was a poll about Linux! And we all know everyone loves Linux anyway, right? So, here are the results!

Gentoo - 1 vote(s)! Debian or Ubuntu - 2 vote(s)! Red Hat or Fedora - 0 vote(s)! What's a distro? - 0 vote(s)!

In other news, if any of you are thinking of getting Linux, the best Linux I would suggest for people who either don't want anything complicated, or would like it, but can't do Gentoo because of it not supporting their Internet cards, would be Xubuntu. IT'S THE BEST! It's Ubuntu with the Xfce desktop environment instead of the GNOME one. Xfce is based off of GNOME, but it looks much better, still supports all GNOME applications and uses much less RAM! It you need a Linux, try Gentoo and then Xubuntu!

Well, I updated KFM again. (Whew!) And got back from the vacation. But there's another thing going on. That's right! Remember Project Linux? No, of course you wouldn't! I never posted it on this site!

Project Linux was the idea to move some of my servers on to a dedicated server computer. And that is finally about to come true.

I've downloaded and burned a SLAX iso image. Now remember, this is just supposed to be a Live CD, not a distro, but I'm going with it because I know actually boots on the computer I'm trying (unlike Gentoo and Ubuntu), and doesn't installation sequences that may corrupt and fail (I'm lookinig at you, openSUSE). Here is how I did it:

Unmount the hard drive. I open fdisk within the prompt that SLAX gives you (before you run startx), and deleted all previous partitions. I then created a 1 GB partition, a 512 MB partition with the "Linux swap" type and another one that filled the rest of the drive. The first one is the boot partition, the second is the swap and the third is the filesystem. Run mke2fs for the boot partition, mkswap and swapon for the second and mke2fs -j for the third. CD to the place where the live cd is mounted. For me it was /mnt/live/mnt/hdd. Oh wait! Be sure to unmount the boot partition before running this step! Run: "./make_disk.sh /dev/hda1" where /dev/hda1 is the /dev path to the boot partition. Now, this step will take a while.

Then, when it is done, mount the boot partition and run "fileswap /mnt/hda1/swapfile.swap 512" where /mnt/hda1 is the mount point of the boot partition. That will also take a while.

Almost there! Now, open lilo.conf up in vi (there's no better one you can use just yet, sorry, I know emacs is soooo much better) and add " changes=/dev/hda3" to the "append=" line, right before the last quotation mark. /dev/hda3 should be replaced with the /dev path to the last partition. Replace the "/mnt/make_disk4372q84246" s with the mount point of your boot partition. I know this is getting complicated, but just bear with me. Next, run: "lilo -C /mnt/hda1/lilo.conf -m /mnt/hda1/lilo.map -s /mnt/hda1/origmbr 2>&1 grep -vi warning". Remember to replace /mnt/hda1 with the mount point of the boot partition. That will configure LILO to tell SLAX to save all changes not to memory, but to the second partition. There's only one thing left to do, and you need to restart the computer first. Horray, you're done! You can now reboot into the live system! Oh yes, remember to remove the CD from the drive or else your new system won't come up, the CD will.

Login and CD to /etc/rc.d. Open rc.local in vi and add "swapon /mnt/hda1/swapfile.swap" where the only argument there is the path to the swapfile on the boot partition you created with Swapfile. Now you can restart the computer again and Run "startx" to start KDE!

Well everyone, I hope that was an interesting tutorial that no one else really cares about! Thank you, and good morning!

There was a poll named Dustin. He quite liked to eat pumpkin. He ate it so much, no one voted on him, and that's why they called him Dustin. I guess there's always going to be a bad poll. So here are the dismal results:

C or C++ - 0 vote(s)! PHP - 1 vote(s)! BASIC or VB .NET - 0 vote(s)! I don't know any - 0 vote(s)!

Anyway, notice the "Short Reprieve" section of the title? Yes, that's what it means. Another vacation, another 3-day downtime. This is starting to get annoying, and by-something, I do something about it!

EDIT: And yes, that's why I'm updating the POTW one day early. And for those KFM fans, I'll be updating twice on Wednesday instead of Today and Wednesday, because the site won't be up anyway.

This was originally posted in the *Articles** section. It is being posted here in the attempt to move everything over to the main blog.*

Some people may say, "Four isn't that special!" If you say that, let me just warn you that you are about to be proven absolutly WRONG!

1. Pick a word, any word at all.
2. Count the number of letters in that word.
3. Count the number of letters in that number.
4. Repeat step 3, and very soon you will find yourself stuck with four.

Want to know how this works? Well, it's pretty simple. Four is the only number in the English language that has the same amount of letters as it's value. Therefore, no matter how many letters something has, it will always end up as four. This also works in German and Dutch. Try it out, you'll be amazed!