Mindstab.net

Well, now that school’s over I’m getting some tasks of my task list. The first was to finish writing a user quota monitoring and “billing” system. I finally finished that after a few months of staggered work. Now I’ve revamped and cleaned up the Mindstab wordpress skin. I think the layout is a bit cleaner, and it works well so far in IE as well. The front page is done, but the comments page needs some work. Then some slight tag restructuring and hopefully I’ll be content with this for a bit and I can more on to my next project.

As for my GP2X, I now have Quake1, Starcon 2 (UQM), NES (mario 1-3), SNES (Killer Instinct, Kirby, Chrono Trigger), and Sega (Sonic) all working on it. Some of them are unoptimized demos so far, but they all work. This device is still pre-official release and it rocks. I love it to bits.

Well I haven’t had too much time to play with it what with exams, but I’ve had some. The only problem so far is the bootloader wont recognize my SD cards for firmware updates but I’m sure someone will write a program to update that once the gp2x is running soon since hte problem seems rather prevelant. Other than that it’s a hoot. I’ve been reading txts on it and listening ot music. Playing around. The latest and greatest app for it is STerm, an actualy terminal running on the gp2x. Using fbgrab I took a screenshot:

My GP2X finally arrived today. It kicks ass. The first thing I did was drop Quake1 on it and it runs. They big thing to remember now is that the is a first edition unit and the official launch isn’t until January. So yes, it does crash and lock up do to beta-ness of OS and the alpha-ness of many programs being ported. But still, way cool. SD cards rock. I put a ton of music, quake1 and quake2 (not working quite yet for me), some skins, text, and other misc stuff all on one disk. I’ve already upgraded to the newest firmware. This toy is going to be so much fun. For music, it’s new my player. Beats the pants off my old Muvo which couldn’t handle ogg, was only 128mb, and had no shuffle (my favourite feature). Video wise, the codec support for videos is currently weak but I expect that to improve within a few months. Hell, everything should. There’s a hard core and dedicated team of enthusiasts out there working on this thing. It’s going to own. Probably more babling later when I’m not tired.

I haven’t been paying attention but it appears that suddenly the Google toolbar works under Linux and Firefox (I’ll see when I get home), and has spell check support, which I always need integrated with more apps. Now I can spell check anything I’m writing (webmail, news, wiki) and the spell check engine is more integrated with the browser so it functions more like integrated spell checking as opposed to the spell checking most website provide (a list of misspelled words above the entry). I’m excited. Take a look for yourself at toolbar.google.com.

Just read Ars Technica’s review of MSH, or MONAD, or Microsoft Command Shell. I have to say I’m reasonably impressed. It looks like they’ve fianlly got the message that GUI servers are dumb, and have managed to graft a language on to many of tha main parts of their OS decently elegantly so that you can configure most things from the command line. Once this ships I suspect remote maintanece of windows servers will be a lot nicer. So yeah, aside from a few cosmetic things (shit tab completion :P) they seem to have done good with this. So kudos to them I guess. Or at least the team responsible ;)

And now I’d like to smash interwiki in the face for having insane parsing and editing rules.

I’ve started putting together a wiki (mindstab.net/wiki). Most project related content should fit in there nicely and it should accelerate site building greatly.

Also, I came up with a logo of sorts.

I decided that instead of whining about the state of things I should probably try and do my part to help make them better. So I whipped up a list in tomboy of somethings I’d like to see. To that end, I played around with mozplugger and evince and filled an enhancement but to the mozilla bugzilla to see if we can’t start making them play nice together.

It’s a start. More to follow.

Also watched “Hackers 2″: Takedown. Short, better than Hackers at least.

I’ve been thinknig about it a little now on and off for about half a year. We have billions of command line text editors, but no command line spread sheet packages. I sort of passed it off as a crazy idea, but then I saw this:

Quatro Pro running under dos box care of planet KDE thanks to the april fools planet gnome and planet kde reverse.

And it reminded me of the good old days of dos. There totally were command line spread sheet packages. Now I really either want to find one for linux, or try my hand at writing a simple one. Spread sheets are handy, and if I could ssh to my home box and work on them as well as all text and code, it’d be that much cooler.