SaidinUnleashed's blog

Therapy, Blog Style

Well, I'm not really sure where to begin on this entry. I'm so pissed I can't see straight and I need to vent a little, so if you could care less about my emotional concerns, musings, insights into my (often deranged) mind, or whatever, skip this entry.

This is more of a LiveJournal style post.

And I disabled comments on this post and didn't put it on the front page (I can do that, ya know ^_~) because I really don't want feedback.

Anyways. I'm mad.

In late November, or maybe early December, Will and I came up with an idea for an offsite database of how-to's, tips, tricks, etc for DSL. So we set upon the quest of designing a site to access this. Okay fine, Will did the site, I did the document structure and most of the documents, how they would be read onto pages. Background stuff like that.

Wasting space?

Through the efforts of many people, searching for, and finding orphaned files left over from the reduction from Knoppix, we managed to find about half a meg of new space to play with.

And this is good.

The powers that be have deeded this space for the newly created DSL default theme, and various other eye candy.

While I understand their goals of making DSL "presentable" for our 1.0 debut, making the DSL desktop "unified" or whatever. I also find this use of space a little disappointing.

Am I the only one who feels that this space could be better used to squeeze more functionality out of our little 50mb monster?

Beat 'em over the head.

Okay, I know I said I'm very anti-flame (when it's not deserved) but sometimes it just needs to be done.

What's with flaming? I really don't understand it.

For those of you who don't know, in 'net lingo, flaming is the (usually uncalled for) large-scale verbal berating of a person for having an idea or opinion that differs from your own. It usually contains lots of 4 letter words, wonderful mental inagery, and threats of physical harm if the opinion/idea shows up again.

Anyways, this practice often ends up making the flamer look stupid, and making the flamee, usually a newb, or other inexperienced person, feeling angry and hurt. (face it. stuff people on the internet say affects you the same as what anyone else says.)

Flaming has it's roots in the early days of the internet. It takes the place of things like ritual hazing in fraternities and other clubs/institutions. The same mindset of "since i've been here longer than you, i must somehow be better/smarter/more-attractive-to-the-opposite-sex-even- though-i-have-no-life-because-i-stay-on-the-computer-all-day-and-never-see-a-girl than you".

Pondering n00bishness...

In the last few weeks, I have discovered something. Before I tell you this though, let me tell you how I came to this realization.

Over the last month or so, I have dived head first into the world of software documentation. Don't get the wrong idea, I love it! Finally I can help contribute to my favorite project, despite my lack of expert linux knowledge and programming skills. Its great.

Anyways, a lot of the individual documents are simply copied and pasted forum posts, but don't think that all I did was copy the work of others. Everything that is in the Docs I have tried, tested, learned the inner workings of, and now (for the most part) understand. This took up a lot of the time so far of my Christmas vacation.

having one of those days.

Some kind of Christmas.

Well, I may not be able to do much of anything for a while, at least as far as DSL goes.

You see, the motherboard on my desktop has decided to go off and die on me.

At least, I hope it's the $70 mobo and not my nice $200 corsair ram.

Thanks to my D-bracket diagnostic panel, I know that it's failing to initialize the ram. So that means that either both sticks of ram are bad (I tested both of them one at a time) or the memory controller on the mobo is shot.

Please let it be the mobo.

...also need a nvidia card, because the Linux ATI drivers weren't worth the trouble to compile, and most definately aren't worth the trouble to pack up into a .dsl.

Someone set my pants on fire...

...or something.

I think I'm dreaming.

Yesterday, I recieved my new mp3 player (beautiful, lovely iRiver H340). If you ever drop into my domain, irc.freenode.net #damnsmalllinux, you know that I have been having epileptic seizures just thinking about this thing for a few months.

Anyways, it's here.

And the crazy thing is, this thing is easier to use with DSL than with Windoze.
That's right folks. The Linux hardware support is better than the M$ support.

In Windoze, in order for it to automatically update the song database when you drop a song on it, you have to install this little applet.

In DSL, it automatically updates when I dump stuff over with EmelFM. Or MC, or Rox, or an Xterm. Or anything.

And I do believe that DSL writes to and reads from it faster than M$.

Also, in DSL, it detects it immediately when I plug it in, compared to between 6 and 20 seconds with M$. And that time is not just with my box, that's with every box I've hooked it up to.

Really the only complaint I have about this thing, and it's not really major, but gave me a lot of frustration untill I read the instruction manual (RTFM, I know...) is the fact that it will not do a data connection at all unless the battery is full and the charger is plugged in.

Today Will Suck...

If you have ever had your wisdom teeth out, you know that that is not a pleasant experience.

That is what I'm doing today. -_- All sorts of fun.

Anyways, I'll probably be mostly non-existant here for a few days.

On what I've been doing, and intend to do...

I've been trying to make a .dsl of TeamSpeak2, but am having problems with premissions. Very annoying. I'll keep fiddling with it.

Also, I need to start hacking together a nice html page of the new FAQ we have been creating in the forums. Read over it if you haven't already. Add stuff to it if you need to.

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