Dujodu Blog

Ok, the fireworks article is now live. If any of you want to check it out, you can view it here. If you don’t know what fireworks is, you probably won’t find it very interesting though. At any rate, you can look at the ridiculous picture I took of myself.

I’ve finished writing an article for the macromedia developer center on creating commands for Fireworks. If anyone wants to check it out, you can view it at the fireworks developer center when it goes live tomorrow. It was pretty fun to write, and I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out! Hopefully I’ll have some more article / tutorial ideas so I can continue writing for them.

If there are any fireworks users that read this blog, you should sign this petition to get a Fireworks category on the Macromedia XML News Aggregator. Help get the word out about this great program! Senocular of Senocular.com started the petition, so be sure to check out his website for macromedia & Fireworks news and extensions.

If you are into Flash or Fireworks, you should take a trip over to www.fireworksguru.com/ and take a look at Alan Musselmans great Slideshow Album extension for Fireworks. It enables you to create picture albums in fireworks and export them along with an .xml file that can be loaded into flash (there are a couple templates included!). It’s really pretty neat, so go check it out now! Don’t forget to visit the forum.

I finally got my computer up and running and everything was going great. Then, out of nowhere, my main hard drive failed! How annoying! Thankfully all of my data was on my 320 GB drive, and I did not lose anything important. I’m running off of a 60 GB drive right now, the one that I used to have mandrake installed on. I’m kind of worried about the quality of this hard drive since I’ve kind of been beating the crap out of it while installing linux, I’ve probably reformatted it like 4 or 5 times in the past few weeks. I don’t know if I should just wait it out or get a new one. Anyway, I’ve been kind of busy lately so the blogging has slowed down. I recently started an internship with Discovery World, and school is starting to pick up a bit. I also spent an entire day playing Fahrenheit, a new action/adventure game with some very original twists. It was pretty good, the story got kind of ridiculous toward the end but overall it was a very fun gaming experience. If you aren’t into hitting keyboard combinations in a weird digital “simon” type way, I would suggest getting a console version of the game. I didn’t really mind it that much, but I know there are a lot of people that would hate those parts of the game. Check out the review for more info. I’m also happy to report that the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm is about to start. I was never a Seinfeld fan, and I still am not, but I really love Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David is as funny acting as he is writing, and the combination can’t be beat! Look for it on the 25th, you won’t regret it!!!
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I’m a little late on this one, but I’ve been thinking over a lot of stuff and I thought I’d rather post about it than just let it sit around in my head. The way the Federal and Local governments handled this situation is disgusting, and now Bush is out there trying to lead the commision to investigate what went right and what went wrong. Here are a few quotes.

George W. Bush

What I intend to do is lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong.

We still live in an unsettled world. We want to make sure we can respond properly if there is a WMD attack or another major storm.

Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people.

There are so many things wrong with these quotes that it is unbelievable. If someone was being suspected of committing a crime, I don’t think they would be allowed to “lead an investigation” to find out who commited said crime. I really don’t think Bush will be pointing any fingers in his general direction, he was after all unable to admit to any mistakes he had made during his post 9/11 presidency as of April 13th 2004 when he was asked to think of one:
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Well, after a few days of anguish I have FINALLY gotten a linux distribution running on a dual boot with my windows installation. It was definitely not anywhere near as easy and painless as I thought it would be. I “had” to re-install windows (and later found out that I didn’t even have to) and one of my hard drives got messed up while partitioning it. Thankfully I was able to recover them with a nice little program called “Recover My Files.” After I finally was able to install Mandrake it wouldn’t even boot into KDE (one of the linux desktop enviornments) after it was installed. It ended up being a video card driver. Now that I’m actually inside Mandrake thought it’s working fine. It’s very fast, and pretty similar to windows for the most part. I have to really find any gigantic advantages it has over windows. I’m going to do a little testing but I think it has an apache & mysql server built into it, so I should just be able to run pages locally without worrying about it which is pretty nice. The virtual desktops are also kinda nice, but I don’t know that I would ever use them. It’s kind of like alt+tabbing through programs but with entire desktops. Next I want to test running some windows programs emulated just to see how fast it is.

One really weird thing that I can’t explain at all is that my internet connection seems to be extremely fast for no reason. I downloaded firefox (8.2MB) in less than 10 seconds. on http://www.bandwidthplace.com/ I get 4.5mbps, which if I remember correctly is much faster than it was before. It might just be because no one else is downloading crap at 5 a.m. because I can not believe that it would be much faster from being on linux.

For the benefit of anyone out there trying to install Mandrake 10.1 and getting something that looks like this while running KDE with startx:

execve failed for /etc/X11/X (errno 2)
giving up
xinit: no such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to xserver
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error

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What the hell is wrong with the “news”? I’m consistantly disgusted at their complete lack of ability to inform (isn’t that supposed to be their main job?). We all know there was a hurricane, we have seen the damage it has done, we have seen the struggles that people are going through because of it. I can understand an update on the situation every now and then, that’s perfectly understandable. Why don’t they spend a little bit of time actually examining the situation? There are so many issues that come to the top of my mind as I watch the news casters explaining to us what they see in the live video from the on-site helicopters; as if we can’t see for ourselves. Why don’t they talk about global warming? I’d say it’s a relevant topic given the situation. I don’t think I’ve heard one mention of it. Another thing they’ve talked about a lot is gasoline. Another potentially great and informing topic for them to talk about. They just cycle through every person on their station saying “gas prices have gone up” without really elaborating on it. Why don’t they talk about our oil addiction? How about lack of quality public transportation? A lot of news casters have hinted about there being an evacuation call - suggesting that everyone was warned to leave. They fail to mention (everything I’ve seen anyway) that the bus lines stopped the day before the evacuation call. How are tens of thousands of people that rely on public transporation going to run away from a hurricane? The result of course being that everyone who can’t afford to own a car are left to try and survive. How about the pollutants that are going to be seeping into the ocean and devestating the local fish industry. Even more issues for valuable discussion. The lack of preperation is also pretty disgusting. The city is BELOW sea level. How did they NOT see this happening? Was Bush too busy on his vacation to acknowledge this as a problem before it was too late? I’ve got to give it to him though, it was so corageous and commanding when he cut his (record breaking) 5 week vacation short by TWO entire days to assure everyone that everything would be ok and offered the valuable advice to only buy gas if you need it. Even though Louisianna is down a bit on national guardsmen, they are over in Iraq, they could have been ready to mobilize much faster with federal aid.

This is going into a new “Rants” category. It’s kind of like an article but with no planning, less research, more opinion, and less structure. I’ll be able to post more rants than articles.