An old favourite of mine revisited

For those of you who hasn't seen this game before, I can only say, check it out NOW. This is by far the most innovative and amusing game to play for all of us computer geeks.

The game starts with you signing up at Uplink to become a professional cracker (note the avoidance of the term hacker, hacker is imho something entirely different from a cracker) who makes his/her living out of compromising the security of everything from corporate mainframes to academic records to bank accounts to fulfill the tasks you are given.
Introversion's Uplink is one of the most captivating and innovative games I've played in a long time.

The best thing about this game is that the storyline is very loosely held, you play it when you feel ready for it. There are tons of other missions to complete to gain money to buy better programs, better hardware, and even upgrading your gateway (the computer frame you connect through when you crack computers).

And if you should stumble upon a bank account with a sizable content, then the only thing that is stopping you from moving those funds into your account is if you have the skill, knowhow, proper equipment/programs and backbone to do so. (my personal record is moving 900,000 credits into my own account).

It also features a fully functional stock market that you can both play and influence, have a job from a company that wants you to ruin their competitors? Buy the hiring company's stocks before the job. Do what you are asked to do, then fast forward 24 hours and watch your stocks increase in value.

A few tips along the way:

• Whenever you crack, always connect through either the Uplink test server or the interNIC server first. InterNIC preferably since there is no trace what so ever from this server.
• Always bounce through several other servers, the more servers the better. This will give you more time to perform your task.
• Always delete the reroute logs fro the interNIC log so you cannot be passively traced.
• Know when to bail when you have an Active Trace on your trail, if they get too close disconnect and try again.
• If you have time, delete the logs from the target computer as well, this will cause even further confusion.
• Connecting through a couple of goverment owned computers makes it harder for a passive trace to gain result.
• Connecting though a server where you have a useraccount makes take longer for an active trace, connecting through a computer where you have a working admin account makes gives you even more time.
• Buy the best software you can afford, there is no point in getting the v1 stuff unless you can't afford better.

Play it cool, don't download this game, buy it, Introversion is a small company with a lot of innovative ideas that pushes the limit of what we perceive as games. They deserve the income (at least imo).

Southpark? season 12, WTF!?

Ok, just watched the two first episodes of South Park season 12. Boy was I disappointed. I mean, what the fuck?

The first one about HIV, the only thing funny in it was Kyle's joy over Cartman being infected. But seriously the story was piss poor, the humor steeped to a level of idiocy it was painful to watch.

Second episode, Britney Spears. Seriously?? A whole episode about Britney Spears? I mean come on, couldn't you think about anything better to make a whole South Park Episode about?

Both episodes so far have had piss poor manuscripts, lame and pointless humor. Butters dressed as a squirrel, so much more fun could have been had from that idea yet they completely blew it. Whoever writes the manuscripts need to get a serious whack in the head for writing this crap, come on, season 11 was way better than this.

Cygwin My new Love

Cygwin

Alright, I admit it, I love the Linux terminal. But I've never known enough about linux to make the big step of migrating from windows. That's why I was completely blown away by this program.

Cygwin basically adds a lot of the functionality of the Linux bash shell to your windows installation. What this means is that the command prompt in windows has finally gotten a big fat injection of Linux steroids.

I must say I love using cygwin, it allows for advanced manipulations at the command prompt that is previously unheard of in a windows system, and it also allows you to get to know the Linux terminal before going for the full migration.

Part of the problem with linux is that installing it means you have to know a whole lot about it beforehand, if you don't, you won't be able to make very much use of it.
Cygwin helps out here, allowing you to get to know some of the power that lies in the linux system before having to deal with a full installation.

I know, there a re live CD's, but they still don't fully cut it IMHO, they have their uses but they still require some indepth knowledge about linux to be useful.

So why is Cygwin so useful? One of the base strengths of Linux is it's text manipulation functions. Something that only a handful very expensive programs can do in windows. Well, up until I found Cygwin that was true anyway.

If you wish to get to know the power of the Linux systems before you take the plunge into a full migration I strongly recommend installing cygwin.

Playing around with a webserver

If you haven't done it already, i strongly suggest playing around with some of the fun free webserver stuff out there. i've compiled a list of links to interesting places that might spark your interest in these things.

WAMP - A Website solution containing MySQL (community edition), PHP, Apache Webserver and lots more. No need to get gray hairs trying to get PHP to recognize the MySQL installation or to get both working in Apache, this solution does it for you.

phpBB - A quick and easily managed free Web Forum solution. Really neat, check out v3 with the sweet new prosilver theme.

MediaWiki.org - MediaWiki is the Wiki system that Wikipedia uses. Play around with your own Wiki and have lot's of fun.

There is no need to make a full blown serious website, just play around on your home LAN. Set up an internal web server for your house, family etc. Tons of potential and lots of fun playing around with.

Bringing the beauty of the stars to your desktop

Stellarium

I'm a sucker for good GPL applications, and this one really is one of a kind, Like many other programs out there (that costs a ton of hard earned cash) it is a live map of the sky. Some of the more interesting features is that you set your location in Longitude and Latitude (can be found either in Google Earth or with a handy GPS) then it will display how the sky looks at your location.

It has a ton of fun features with a good sized database of objects, you can zoom in and out (the graphics aren't as spectacular as the Sky Mode in Google Earth but good enough) lock onto a target (star, nebulae, planet, etc.) and have the system track it.

You can go back and forth in time (the algorithms are estimated to be accurate for at least a thousand years into the future) and see how the sky looked yesterday, or this time next year.

It has automatic constellation view, that lets you toggle the lines connecting the stars of the constellations, you can toggle the constellations themselves and if you feel like it toggle artistic interpretations of the constellations.

It also has several very exotic features, such as a special projector feature that allows you to create your own planetarium with a projector and a spherical mirror.
The ability to control up to 10 motorized Telescope mounts, (such as NextStar and LX200 mounts) yes control, meaning you select a star and the send the command through the program to a telescope server that in turn translates it into commands for the telescope to point at that star (forget the measly databases that comes with these kinds of mounts, Stellarium has over 600,000 objects in it's default intall database, this database can in turn, easily be extended A LOT further..)

Among all these features is a very easy and intuitive GUI that allows you to cruise the sky's and find your way among the stars.

Nexus Radio now with forced toolbars

In a previous post I wrote about the Nexus Radio application, as it turns out the developers have changed direction with the program and I must say I am sourly disappointed in the turn they have taken with it. These blasphemous toolbars we all have learned to hate and fear are now a requirement to even run the application.

Safe to say I have now uninstalled the spyw.. err. program.

And a small joke to lighten up the mood of this post:

Q: What does the net-experienced person hear when someone utter the word toolbar?
A: Spyware/malware/adware ofcourse..

Nexus Radio - My new favourite

Nexus Radio - Free Internet Radio

I was amazed at finding this pice of software, it's surprising that so few actually listen to the thousands of Webcasts out there. I strongly recommend you try this program out since it is not just one of the best ways of finding new Internet radio stations it also contains several very useful features such as:

• Recording either everything the station broadcasts or only certain songs or artists etc. (TiVo Style)
  
• A full database with several thousands of radio stations
  
• A neat little effects editor to trim away annoying starts and ends in the songs
• A very sweet little equalizer

I've been looking for a good companion when dealing with web radio, but Winamp, although a good player all in it self doesn't contain the features I wanted. Nexus contain all of them and several others.

So if you want to check it out, just click the link on top of this post, I seriously doubt you are going to be disappointed.

OpenOffice.org Base

If you haven't tried out the free officesuite http://www.OpenOffice.org I would strongly recomend you to do so. But is it capable of replacing the MS Office or Star Office suite? Short answer, No, not yet. Several things need to be adressed before it can be conciderd a serious contender in the office market.

One of the most recent additions to the OOo suite is extending the database of OOo and making it a standalone application called Base. This is what I'm going to discuss in this post. I've been a casual SQL student for a while now, trying my best to find uses for pure text based database front ends but never finding anything that would allow me to make much use of it. Thanks to my busy schedule i don't have the time it would take to learn a dynamic page language such as PHP to build fun applications with.

Well that all changed when I accidentally clicked the unknown Base icon in my OOo installation, Databases. Fun fun fun.


Base is a very recent addition to the OOo suite, and suffers from a great deal of problems (among other things smoothing out the integration with the other OOo components, general stability issues etc.) that needs to be adressed before it becomes a real alternative to the Access database. But besides that the whole thing is amazing to work with for somone who might not be a hardcore SQL hacker.

Everything is visual, more or less, you can hack the code if you want but for all the different ways of doing things there is bound to be a visual way of doing it as well.

Anyway I digress, because it is so new, there aren't much written about it, but I did find a good place with some decent tutorials for the Base application.

http://sheepdogguides.com/fdb/fdb1main.htm

This place is very simplistic in it's layout but it covers all the basics you need to know to start using Base to play with.

Due to the still unreliable nature of Base I would suggest not to make it the main database for your business just yet. It still has a lot of kinks and problems that needs to be smoothed out, but aside from that it is a great application for building your own databases over your home library, record collection etc.

Timbland - The Way I Are

Another really good song, Just love Keri Hilson's voice in this video.