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Google's Froogle, the "Any Store, Any Thing" Wishlist

Froogle is Google's massive search engine applied to shopping. You look for an item, and google turns up hundreds of stores and lets you compare prices.

I've done Amazon wishlists in the past, but I'm always thwarted by their lack of products outside of books, dvd's, and games.

So I give you my Froogle Wishlist, which is full of, well, books, dvd's, and games, ironically.

Want one of your own? Just go to Froogle, search for a few things from thousands of online merchants, and click 'Add to list' for any item you want to add to your Shopping List. You'll need to sign in to your Google account or create one if you haven't already (if you have a Gmail account or Groups 2 login, you already have a Google account). If you want to share items, just click the 'In Wish List' checkbox and whammo, you now have a web page of your holiday wish list to share with friends and family

Go make your own list! Be sure to click "show on wish list" for each item once you've put it on your personal shopping list.

Stolen from the Google Blog

3:43 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

A Link to the Past

I started work at Common Ground just over two years ago, and one of the first things I did was install a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) Intranet server running PostNuke. Until last week when I took the server down to put a new harddrive in, it had never been rebooted. It had run for 465 days without crashing. Hell, it had run for 465 days without being touched.

Logging into the desktop was strange. KDE looked ugly, Mozilla took forever to start, and the Redhat Package Manager desktop app crashed more than it ran. The fonts were jaggy and applications seemed boxy and mismatched, and it just generally looked like crap. I remembered, briefly, what Open Source used to look and feel like, just 2 years ago.

I'm an Open Source advocate. I say that freely and without hesitation, but that does not mean I am an Open Source zealot. As an IT professional, I've been keenly aware of what the problems are with Open Source applications and Linux, and what strides we needed to make.

When I first experimented with Linux back in 1999 (on this very machine serving Glitchnyc.com, no less) "Open Source" was synonymous with a web server, an OS for servers and supergeeks, and a clunky browser with too many parts. I remember when downloading an Open Source solution meant you probably had to put up with a crappy interface, half-there functionality, and lots of compiling and hand-tweaking.

In just the past 2 years, I've watched the open source software landscape mature so quickly it's almost unbelievable. The Gimp finally got GTK 2 support and went from a quirky, ugly tool to a slick, pro-level photo-editor, both on Windows and Linux. The two major Linux desktops, KDE and Gnome, went from interfaces that looked like windows 98 on a bad day to rivaling XP and even Mac OS X in sheer sexiness. Installing and upgrading programs has gone from has gone from ./configure && make && make install (and pray you've got the right libraries installed) or rpm dependency hell to point-n-click with apt and synaptic. Mozilla has completely reinvented itself and stripped the browser down to the 4 meg work of art that is Firefox, and Thunderbird, its solid mail counterpart.

The list of amazing applications continues to grow: Scribus gives desktop publishing apps such a run for their money that *someone* is quietly trying to squash work on the win32 version. Audacity handles audio like a pro, and is getting multi-track support the upcoming version. OpenOffice.org is pushing Microsoft out in more installations than anyone cares to talk about, and Inkscape is far and away the easiest vector drawing tool I've ever used.

Do I think Linux is ready for prime time? I don't know. I think there are a lot of hurdles there, but I do know this: Open Source software is ready for prime time. The Desktop application stack is here, and it's cross platform. I'm using the same programs on Windows at work and on Linux at home, and I love it.

Pretty soon, what OS you're running just isn't going to matter, because you'll know all the best applications in both places.

2:12 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Great Open Source Games

I've just completed a long article on the current state of open source software in general that will post tomorrow morning, but I wanted to split this small piece on games out into a separate post. Without further ado, I give you 4 great Open Source games which play on Windows and Linux.

• Battle for Wesnoth

• http://www.wesnoth.org
• The Battle For Wesnoth is a turn based strategy game. Aside from the default quest being quite entertaining and extremely challenging, there is also a lively community producing tons of downloadable quests and additional graphics.

  Game-play is straightforward and fun, and figuring out how many troops to recruit, how to use them, etc, has kept me up late quite a few nights recently.

• Liquid War

• http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/
• This one is the most original games I've played in years. You really just have to play it to understand it, but you control an army of tens of thousands of units, which move towards your cursor. Lead them in the right direction, and they'll surround the enemy and win. Leave their back or flank open, and you're in hot water. There's so many troops, they really do flow like liquid.
• JDuplicate
• http://jduplicate.sourceforge.net/
• JDupilcate, a Java-based scrabble clone. Would be great if more (any) people were on their server to play against.

• Neverball
• http://icculus.org/neverball/
• Neverball, which is a clone of Super Monkey Ball. If you've never played it, it's like Marble Madness + one of those wooden labyrinth games you had as a kid on speed. Very addictive. Be warned that this is 3D on SDL, which means you'll need either a modern graphics card or a really beefy CPU to make it run well

1:22 am | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

And Then There Were Three

I've finished the 3rd Vervet, Hypatia. She's named for the "earliest woman scientist whose works have been documented"

What stuck me funny as I came back to this drawing this morning after finishing it late last night was that I know these three characters. It was completely and utterly unintentional, but very obvious who they are when you look at the picture.

Does anyone else see it, or am I going crazy from too many hours of looking at monkeys and aardvarks? Leave your guesses in the comments

Download the editable SVG

9:57 pm | permalink | /life/art | 2 writebacks |

Aristotle and Galileo

Noticing a theme with the names yet? Ardvark meets these little guys as a class of little monkey scholars. There are about 8 of them in the pack, and then probably 30 in the class along with the fully grown Vervet teacher.

I want to complete at least 4 distinct designs for the babies before I start to place them on the page. Galileo here is number two, and I'm feeling a lot better about the process again. Now that I've worked out the basic design ideas for the Baby Vervets, it's a lot easier to turn them out without having to go through an endless draw-revise-redraw cycle.

I've got the first few pages of the book done in my head. I think i might try to put what I have into a fully laid out PDF "teaser" once I get the character designs I need done. The nice part about this project is that it's essentially a bunch of mini projects. SVG is completely modular, so I can use these exact designs in the fully composed page just by dragging and dropping. Each drawing I finish is another step closer to having a full book.

I can't wait to get Ardvark on the page with the baby Vervets - they're so tiny, they could ride on him like humans on an elephant!

Here's the Inkscape SVG: Aristotle and Galilelo

2:42 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Hold the Wine!

In my previous post, I mentioned firing up Wine to run old DOS games under Linux. Turns out that Wine is complete overkill. All you need is dos, (not the whole windows API,) so that's all you should emulate.

Enter Dosbox. This little program can run just about any old dos game with sound and "real mode" memory drivers, allowing you to run most of your old favorites in a window on Linux.

Best of all, it's a widely supported package, meaning that installing is as easy as doing quick

12:44 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

Finding Some Old Favorites

Kel was asking me where she could find the DOS Classic Torus (OK, well maybe it wasn't a classic, but we played a lot of it) recently, and that sent me on a web-adventure of sorts. Along the way, I saw several things I wanted to blog about.

Of course, I have our official "Geoffrey Poole*" copy running around on my server somewhere, so I pointed her in its direction, (*ahem* /gamez/ *ahem*) but I was curious to see if the old game was online anywhere.

That led me to dosgamesonline.com where they host old games like torus, and a slew of others. They've got a rating system as well that lets the best games of old float to the top. Pushover sounds kind of neat. I might have to see if I can get wine running to try some of these out.

While I'm talking about great dos games, I have to mention Zelda Classic. It's a complete remake of the old NES/SNES game from the engine up. While you can play through the official quests, they've got different sprite-sets (skins) that you can apply to the games, and whole different maps and worlds in a user contributed quest database. Very cool.

Looking back at games from a few years ago is fun, but I'm amazed how many decent projects there were like this that have completely died out. Were they open sourced, many of these would have grown and morphed along with our operating systems and would still be available and easily playable today. Not to worry though! There are many great open source games today, and I've got a round-up of a few new ones coming soon.

8:22 pm | permalink | /technology/games | 1 writebacks |

Meet Aristotle, the Baby Vervet

I've finally completed the base drawing for the Baby Vervets, the first characters Ardvark meets on his little adventure.

All in all, the drawing wasn't that difficult once I'd worked out how to simplify the source photo down to match Ardvark's style, but I did have quite a bit of "artist's block" trying to get myself to sit down and work on him. I was afraid it wasn't going to come out, so I wasn't going ahead with it at all.

Now that I've gotten the first draft done, I'm pretty happy with it. I have to decide if I want to leave him with articulated hands and feet or if I want to simplify them down once more to "mitts" to facilitate drawing lots of these guys, but I think I'm going to leave them as is.

Meanwhile, for those of you interested in playing around with the source drawings, I've made a bunch of updates to the SVG's. Remember, you'll need the free and open Inkscape to open these properly. Here they are:

• All 3 Drawings of Ardvark laid out on one page.
• Aristotle, the Baby Vervet

11:57 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Everything Has a Personality

While working on the second character for the "Ardvark the Aardvark" book, I decided that I should look at some other methods of drawing eyes. In particular, with this character, I want to create that big eyed "cute" look that makes people go "awww." You know, like "Puss in boots" from Shrek 2.

So, being unable to think of a proper term for that look, I was googling for the phrase "googly eyes" (mmm... recursion) and came up with this site:

Everything has a personality! Just add eyes!

Not exactly what I was looking for, but pretty funny. This is why I love the web.

10:27 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Gulf War Syndrome Isn't All In Soldier's Heads

It appears that after 10 years of crack work, a congress mandated panel have finally put it together that an epidemic of multi-symptom illnesses in US soldiers returning from the original Gulf War might actually not all be in their minds.

I don't know which non-psychosomatic symptom tipped them off: the severe respiratory symptoms, the rashes, or the fact that they're all in a goddamn disease cluster, but it seems that the Army might finally be taking some of the responsibility for looking into their conditions. Exposure to Sarin gas (which only a few troops were potentially exposed to), anti-nerve gas agents (getting warmer), and pesticides (aha!) are all being named as possible causes. Left out in the article is the cocktail of vaccines, inoculations, and other crap we shoot our soldiers up with to protect them in the event the enemy uses chemical or biological weapons.

Potentially life-saving? Yes. Potentially the cause of 70,000 US Soldiers debilitating maladies and seriously degraded quality of life? Also yes.

Hmm. Wouldn't it have been helpful to figure this all out BEFORE we went back to the gulf? Somehow, even though Congress mandated this panel in 1998, it didn't even begin it's work until 2002 when it's members were finally appointed.

Next time you see one of those stupid Taiwanese "support our troops" magnets on someone's car, rip the damn thing off. It means nothing to say that now while they're over there and we can do nothing.

Instead, put it in a drawer and bring it out 4 years from now when all of the kids in the desert now are sick as hell and the government has forgotten about them and denied them disability.

That's when it's time to support the damn troops.

1:30 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

He's Totally Excited

I've done some more drawings of Ardvark and tried to give him that excited cuteness that he exuded in the original drawings. I do really like the slick look of the SVG's but he's got to convey emotions well to connect with any of the readers.

Bringing him out of a straight side profile is a bit challenging too, especially because my art training is extremely limited. I always opted for photography and video work when taking art in school, and it shows in my difficulty with bring objects into 3D space. This revision is my best so far, but at first, Ardvark's little stumpy legs in the "quarter turned" picture at bottom here made him look like a hybrid pig-dog.

It's amazing how much creativity can spill out of you in a 5 minute doodle, and then how much you can struggle to fill in the missing bits and really bring it to life. I can feel myself burning out on this project, but I'm determined to see it through to completion. The first draft story is coming along and about 1/2 done, and then I need to begin deciding where illustrations should go. It's already too long, and I need to make some cuts to make it feasible.

At the moment my real challenge is to stay true to the deranged whimsy that Ardvark was born from and not hammer this into a complete beginning-middle-end tale. We'll see how it goes.

12:55 am | permalink | /life/art | 2 writebacks |

I'd Forgotten about Headphones

I've spent the last 2 years listening to music on my computer speakers at work which are, admittedly, pretty crappy. They do the job though, and I can listen to them without bothering anyone else in the office.

Sara's new ipod made me realize that I've been hearing only the "top layer" of music; the lead vocals and loudest instruments, for quite a while now.

Strapping on my headphones for a bit has made me appreciate some of the music that's been sitting in my collection unplayed for a while, and I'm currently digging heavily on VNV Nation as ambient "New York Commute" music and even more enthused about the Garden State Soundtrack.

3:20 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 2 writebacks |

In Praise of the Tungsten E

News sites yesterday carried word that new models of the Palm wouldn't feature OS6 despite earlier promises that they would.

The major benefits of OS6 are supposed to be multitasking and multimedia support.

Right now, I'm listening to mp3's on my SD card and typing using my wireless keyboard. Meanwhile, my calendar application pops up a reminder to get fixings for dinner tonight. I'm doing all of this on OS5 with the economy model palm, the Tungsten E.

Don't listen to the hype. Unless you're one of the people who will actually use WiFi or bluetooth support for your palm, just get the tungsten E. It's more than enough machine for anything your need your PDA to do.

3:10 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

This Is Ardvark

As with everything else on the site, Ardvark here is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 License.

That means that you can do anything you like with him as long as you include a credit and release your work under the same license.

Here's the Inkscape SVG file

I drew this piece in about an hour during my lunch today, using the successor to Sodipodi, "Inkscape".

It worked brilliantly and didn't crash once. The tools just work like they should and every time I thought "Hmm, I wonder if I can do this?" it turned out that there was a tool for exactly that in the menus.

Get Inkscape, the Free and Open Source SVG editor, here

3:11 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Ardvark the Aardvark with the Back Leg Named Bumpus

I've just gotten an idea for a children's book while waiting for, of all things, windows XP SP2 to reinstall on a workstation at CG.

This, of course, warrants two separate blog posts, but as I've had a bit of blogging burnout (as just about my entire blogging community seems to have had the past 2 or 3 months), I'll just do a quick sum-up here.

First: SP2 is a serious pain in the ass. If the user has any problems at all, the rollout from software update services will completely bork the machine, and fixing it means about 4 hours in front of each terminal as you uninstall the hotfix, then uninstall the service pack, then reinstall it, then reinstall a bunch of apps.

Not fun. This should have been marketed as what it was: a full OS upgrade. I'm glad we didn't have to pay for it, but it should really be done on a PC by PC basis.

If you're thinking of installing it, be sure to clean your machine of spyware and disable your virus protection before you do. Don't forget to turn it back on once you're done.

So while I was waiting there in front of Arden's computer, I began to doodle.

I had written her a note explaining that it wouldn't be done until tomorrow morning, and had been to lazy to write out her whole name, just ending up with Ard.

Naturally, after staring at that note and her abbreviated name for another 30 minutes, I doodled an Aardvark. He was a cute little guy with a snout and a smile, and I drew a thought bubble up from him saying "Hee hee.... I'm an ARDvark."

Another 15 minutes passed, and I noticed that I'd misspelled Ardvark, and decided that that would be his proper name. The problem was, I'd already drawn a little arrow to him that said "This is Bumpus"

I amended the doodle to say "This is Bumpus. Not the whole aardvark, just his left leg. He likes eating celery with peanut butter on it, with little raisins on that. He's a vegan Aardvark. See, 2 a's on aardvark, but that's not how Ardvark spells it, that's his proper name. Ardvark the aardvark with the back leg named Bumpus. "

This medium, of course, does it no justice, but after 4 hours of watching progress bars, it was hilarious to me.

I'm picturing a whole book with little drawings of Ardvark the Aardvark, who is constantly talking to his back-left leg happily, even as other, angrier animals are teasing him for it. That, and for the fact that his name is spelled wrong.

"It's not misspelled, it's homonymic!"

Hmm... Maybe I'll merge it with my forthcoming SVG tutorial and make it a CC book. It'll be my nanowri-draw-mo.

3:13 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

SharpDevelop GNU .NET / Mono IDE

We're developing a small in-house database application again here at CG, and due to the fact that we're a nonprofit, we simply can't afford to migrate the whole organization to Office 2003 just to make my life a little easier while coding.

Working with Access 2000's "access project" link to mSQL is far superior to developing a straight access database, and as a quick and dirty Rapid Application Development platform it really does get the job done. The problem is that this is now a very old, VB6 based platform, and the rest of the world has moved on to vb.net. There were so many quirks and problems with the VB runtimes that the whole system was scrapped in favor of the .NET shared runtime and a new vb compiler.

Fed up with things simply not working the way they should, I went in search of an alternative to Microsoft's wildly expensive Visual Studio.net.

After a few minutes of googling for "Mono IDE" (mono is the GNU implementation of the .NET api) I came up with a few choices. For windows, which I use at work, the most mature seemed to be SharpDevelop, so I took the plunge.

I've worked with many IDEs over the past 7 years, and I don't think I've ever been as impressed with one as I am with SharpDevelop. It's quick, light, and smart, and the GUI development tools are right on the money. So far I've hit 0 bugs and effortlessly went from a little HelloWorld form to an MDI (Multi Document Interface) design complete with windows-style professional looking menus and functionality.

If you've been waiting to try out .NET because you don't have a copy of Visual Studio, download SharpDevelop now.

As a quick aside - VisualStudio comes on 4 CDs and loads your system with MSDN docs, the .net runtimes, and loads of other stuff you don't need.

SharpDevelop is 5 megs, most of us already have the .net runtimes (if you don't you can get them at WindowsUpdate) and google works a heck of a lot better for me than MSDN ever did.

3:57 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Please Let Me Be Wrong

I've had a surprising number of my ruminations about the direction of our country come true in the past 4 years, but this doesn't make me happy, it makes me scared. Among my predictions:

• We would go to war with Iraq (predicted at the onset of the offensive in Afghanistan)
• Abu Ghraib abuses were rooted in policy trailing all the way back to the White House
• The Democrats would nominate a lame duck to open the "Hillary" window in 2008 rather than 2012

For posterity, now that we are assured another 4 years of Bush, GOP dominated Government, and religious extremism, I am going to put my predictions for the next 4 years here. I hope more than anything that I am wrong.

On the war and terrorism

• Iraq will not only last 3+ more years, but we will also begin cold war style sanctions and non-military offensives against:
• Iran
• North Korea
• At least one other "terrorist center"
• One of these will blossom into a military confrontation
• The Draft will be reinstated.
• Here on the home-front, there will be another attack, this time with the terrorist cell claiming to be centered within the US itself.
• Patriot II will be pushed through, further limiting our Civil Liberties and permitting discretionary wiretaps on all citizens. Those who speak out will be on terrorist watch lists. Neighbors will be encouraged to report any suspicious activity.

On domestic policy

• Bush will appoint 2 more Conservative extremists to the Supreme Court.
• They will overturn Roe v. Wade
• And ban stem cell research
• Congress will uphold and expand the DMCA.

Get out your tinfoil hats - there's some doozys up there. Please, 4 years from now, let me look back at this post and say "Thank god I was a nutcase and none of that happened."

12:45 pm | permalink | /life | 3 writebacks |

Go Vote.

No matter who you choose tomorrow, no one can deny that the stakes are higher for this election than they have been in the past half-century. Some things to consider:

• Half of America did not vote in the 2000 elections
• Half of this year's "likely voters" polled are pro-Bush
• Citing a strong post 9/11 connection with Bush, these voters continue to convince themselves that certain things are true, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary:
• They believe there were weapons of mass destruction. There were not.
• They believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to Al Qaeda. He was not.
• Half of them believe you can win a military war on Terrorism, a thing you cannot see, find, or kill. You cannot.
• Bush himself has publicly admitted all of these things are untrue, yet continues to wage war, spread fear, and allow these untruths to spread throughout his campaign.

In 2000, I didn't know who to vote for. The Republican and Democratic parties looked almost identical.

This year, I know one thing. I know who I'm voting against.

11:28 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |