VanJohnson.com

I think it goes without saying that I am a huge supporter of Open Source but believe it or not I am also a big fan of Bill Gates. You’ve got to respect what he did for the industry and what he does for the world through his charities. The guy is a geek’s version of Michael Jordon. I don’t agree with everything the man does obviously but I think the guy has a great mind and he will be missed in the computer industry when he finally moves on.

Anyways, I enjoy watching Bill Gates talk but I kind of caught something interesting in this last interview I was watching.

Here is a link to the interview:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7462156.stm

At about 1.45 Bill talks about how finding the source code for an operating system took him and Paul Allen to the next level on tinkering. I thought to myself how fortunate we were that he had that oppurtunity to look at and study an operating systems source code. It would have been a real shame if the ability to look at source code was deprived from Bill Gates. I wonder how many great thinkers Linux has or will inspire by offering them a similar opportunity.

It’s amazing to me that I still stumble across sites like this. Especially “real” sites from “real” companies. This is a media company none the less. The funny thing is, running Internet Explore under Windows is one of the last combinations I actually use. Even under Windows, Firefox is my default browser. The show I was trying to check out was called “The IT Crowd”. Seeing how I live in the US and don’t get “Channle4″ chances are the only way I am going to see it is to stream it. Now the reality is I can easily move to one of my Windows boxes or even fire up my virtual Vista desktop on my current desktop but I am not going to do that out of general principal. Sorry Channel4.

Just a short little rant.

http://www.channel4.com/

This is taking Online Roll Playing to the next level allowing you to play a character playing a character in a game. I think it might be time to start playing games online.

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

Been a big fan and user of OpenID for sometime now. What is OpenID you might ask, well if you don’t know then you can read about it on their site.

Anyways, I was IM’ing with a good friend of mine and I just mentioned I saw a plug in for it. He asked me to install it on his blog and I did, then installed it on mine, and it was so easy I accidentally installed it on another blog I run. Within 15minutes I had OpenID installed, enabled, and configured on three blogs.

So go and get your OpenID now, I recommend MyOpenID but there are plenty of providers out there, and then you too can log into the world (un)known blog which is VanJohnson.com.

Will we have Sony to blame when computers become self-aware and start taking over the earth? I came across a news story today that leads me to think, “Yeah, maybe.”

Military Supercomputer Sets Record

Here is the piece that caught my attention.

“The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.”

Check out the full story on The New York Times Website

Interesting article over on ZDNet. I don’t know what surprised me more, “Microsoft apologizes to Open Source Initiative for policy violation” or to hear Microsoft actually has a “open-source and Linux team”.

Microsoft apologizes to Open Source Initiative for policy violation

Interesting, something to think about

Funny comic, I love UserFriendly.org

For you hard core, Assembly Language Programming hommies.

Article from http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/05/29/geek-gang-signs/

Every now and then I just post things I don’t want to forget or worried that the original website might disappear. This is one of the cases. This is a blog posting I came across on a little problem that plaques those of us that enjoy using OS X but have a need to move files to other systems like Linux and Windows.

There is a dirty little secret the Mac hides from you when you are using it but becomes a glaring eyesore when you move to another OS. Some file clean up needs to happen because OSX creates these hidden files that start with a ._ which contains some extended information about the file that no other system reads so they aren’t terrible useful when moving files to these systems. This post from a person working for Splunk, outlines how to tar up files on a OSX machine that is targeted for other systems and exclude the ._ files from the tarring process. Original article can be found here

————— POST ———————-

When building Splunk applications, I’m often working on a Mac. There
are files that begin with ._ that are resource files, which contain
extended attribute information about the files for the OS. This is
great and all but I don’t want to include these files when I package up
an application and upload it to SplunkBase.

If you don’t have deep OSX knowledge, then keeping these files out
of your tarball is harder than it looks. One of our OSX gurus pointed
me toward the answer, and I was so excited (yes, I am a geek) that I
just had to share.

To build a tarball in Leopard that doesn’t contain the ._ files, use:

COPYFILE_DISABLE=true tar cvzf filename.tar.gz dirtotar

In Tiger, use:

COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE=true tar czvf filename.tar.gz dirtotar

This is definitely going in my .bashrc so I don’t have to fuss with it again:

export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true

————— PEND OF POST ———————-