I uploaded the aforementioned essay I wrote, entitled Why Choosing Linux Makes Sense. Keep in mind, it is greatly, greatly biased towards Linux but if you would like to comment on it anyways, blackfrog AT gmail DOT com is always accepting new messages. An update on the supercomputer I'm trying to build - construction on the case has commenced (it only took a month :P) and we have two systems (codenamed alpha and beta) a k6-450 and a p2-233 respectively) that have debian installed with a 2.4.27 kernel, but have been downgraded to a 2.4.26 kernel with openmosix support. I have both boxes booting into the new kernel but have yet to network them together and try distributing some processes. It's close tho, I just need more time to work on these things. It's hard having a girlfriend who isn't as much into computers as you are. But although I love computers dearly, my girlfriend loves me back so the computers are number 2 on my list. Anyways we went for a road trip to regina for maylong and I borrowed my friends digital camera and we got a bunch of pics (144 of them) and a crapload of video, so I copied it all on to my computer and fired up vegas (video editing software) and showed lindzaroo (girlfriend) how to use it and she spent like 5 or 6 hours putting together a sweet little video of the road trip. It's quite awesome, 24 minutes long total. My grad is coming up and I'm finding less and less time for my computer. However, I skillfully acquired 4 more monitors (little 15" ones) and I was playing around with my video card (Hightech Excalibur Radeon 9000 Pro 128 VIVO) and now have two monitors hooked up so I have a huge desktop :D pics of that will come with next post :) I got a call from someone requesting me to teach a seniors' intro to computers type class. Sounds like fun eh? We'll see how that works out...

Hello everyone. I wrote an essay on using Linux vs. using Windows (greatly biased towards Linux) and I'll put that up here in the near future. I'm part of the Beausejour Linux User Group and we've had a couple meetings already. Its much fun. I'm building a supercomputer out of a bunch of old computers right now. We have a K6-450 as the main host, and then two p2-233's and one p1-233. We're hoping to have it up and running by the end of the month. Debian is installed on all them and we're planning on getting openmosix up and running and then running vmware over that and then i dunno. It's just for fun really. We have an 8 port hub and all the necessary cabling, etc, we have 3 computers all ready to go with memory, hard drive, network cards, etc and one of the p2's still needs a psu yet. We're making a bix case for it in shops and plan to have an elaborate cooling system consisting of a huge box fan and a hepa filter system for dust. See, we plan to put it under my house in the 3 foot crawlspace, where theres raw rocks instead of flooring so dust will be a big problem, hence the hepa filter. We shoudl have it up and running later today actually, with openmosix and everything. Hopefully we'll have some pics up soon. GTG for now, email me if you have anything to contribute :) blackfrog AT gmail DOT com.

Hullo folks, long time no post, I thought I'd take a bit of time and spread some news around. I'm working on an entry to the third (actually fourth, but the third one was called 2.5 seemingly because it was only a 'mini-compo' :P) pdroms.de coding compo. More to come with maybe some sneak peak screenies when I feel its playable :P Otherwise not much happening on the coding side of things. I booted into my gentoo install the other day and did a emerge -u world and it let it go all nite and all day the next day, took about 20 hours or so to compile everything new. See I hadn't updated the install in awhile, a very long while it seems. Now everything is up to date and it all runs beautifully, I had a few little hiccups with getting the new Xorg X server working but eventually I sorted it out and its all great right now. Compiled the latest gcc, binutils and newlib for arm and I have a great gba dev setup once again and hopefully this new project wont be put off forever like so many others. I just started a new semester in school and thats going well so far, but lots of homework and I'm generally quite busy in life right now so that doesnt leave much time to do the coding which I so dearly love however I'll try harder that previously and hopefully I'll have something new to show everyone come april 10th (deadline for pdroms compo). Until then, time for great coffee.

I am like the greatest.. hehe.. naw im just kiddin im not so self-centered. Nooowww, Everbody DAnCe!!! merr merr. Yes well ive typed like 2 lines and now ive already run out of stuff to type but i'll just keep typing anyway just cuz idunno whut else to do so i'll just type about nothing.. yay. Man O Man im not being interesting at all, hahaha whoa man, that scene just like yesterday, when the place was a clammered and everybody hammered and the cops couldn't keep us away, whoa man. I like chocolate. I really like chocolate. I liKe BeiNG wEirD! I ReAllY HavE nO Probem Wit ThAT Tho. muahahahahahahaha. Lets all be friends.. yaaayy. I see andrew.... Starring at the t.v., drinking coke....rubbing his eyes, talking, thinking, wondering what movie it is that he is watching..., having long curly hair, looking at me weird,, looking at me weird again, he wont stop looking at me, now i think he's on to me.... now hes reading something that has to do with chemistry, becoming smart, chewing on his hoodie strings, again starring at the t.v. and it looks like he's chewing something and licking his lips and drinking more coke.. while starring at me again, now he's looking at chocolate, and eating chocolate, again with the starring at me.. now he's chewing on his chocolate.. while talking and sipping coke, That andrew. I love him. So i'll just talk about myself for a while cause andrew isn't doing anything new and interesting yet.. so im like sittin here talkin to jenna on the net and starring at andrew to see if he will do somthing interesting sometime.. yeah my nails are like annoying me, they're getting long again and i dont got ne more black nailpolish so they arent black and they're just being gay.. oh well. I want to go swimming in a pool full of jello.. that would be so kewl! hehe. Don't ya think? And I want to go skydiving, and wrestle a crocodile, and play with monkeys, and live in a castle. Omg he's coming over here to look at me writting. He thinks im weird. Hes now telling me what to write but im not cause ya kno im just stubborn. Merrrr. Damn kid had to come over here and look at what i was writting. Now he's sitting back down again.. watching that movie.. like really really into it like he's not moving his eyes from the screen.. still with his concentrating.. starring... starring... starring... well hes getting boring again,, welllll back to me.. I want to own a ferrari.. and i want to swardfight with a swardfish.. and i want to live in a mansion.. and own a yaht (oh and by the way i really can't spell anything.. haha) Well that andrew is still just sitting there.. i thought writting about that kid would be more exciting geez, oh well i still love him, but rite now he's really not doing a lot.. man i should write everything hes doing on a day when hes doing more.. lol well hes back again writting and talking to me.. oh well what a bumm. HES SMILEing..ha! well now i think ive had enough writting for tonite. IM SO GONE!

We won, we won, we finally won our first curling game, w00t! it was close but in the end we won 7-3, first end we got one, second end we got two more, third end they got one, fourth end they got one more, fifth end we got one more, sixth end they got one more, seventh we got one and eight we got two! It was awesome we took a picture then went to papa wheats to celebrate, oh yeha. w00t.

precal test tomorrow, and I'm gonna ace it. oh yeah. Also its buy nothing day tomorrow, w00t to that too. I borrowing a ti-83 plus off a comrade, and omg this thing is bloody amazing, the programmability of it is astounding, I need to get the link cable for it so I send code to it because its just phenominaly the things you can do with it, It has a 8 mhz z80! brings me memories of my gb/c days. oh yeah this is awesome I might have to start a section on ti 83 apps/games soon :D

Found out about the 'december holiday' gbadev coding compo today, I have some ideas of what to do for it but the holiday is somewhat, well, unpopular I guess. We shall see what happens with that tho.

I would like to take this space to declare my undying love for Lindsay, We've been going out for three months now and still going strong. I love you baby :).

Woooooooohooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Tomorrow is toga day at my school :D I have a toga costume all ready to go too, its just a bedsheet really but meh, im wearing shorts and sandals barefeet and i got a bunch of leaves and made a leaf crown thinger. Its gonna be good :D BTW if anyone is looking for a toga party resource, this site http://www.ron-turner.com/howtomakeatoga.html is a great resource for not only figuring out how to make a damn toga, but for hosting a toga party yourself. TOGA! TOGA! TOGA! TOGA! TOGA! TOGA! TOGA!...

LAFE is coming along still slowly but still surely. I have a dynmaic map scroller working that loads the maps from external files at runtime, so its modable already :D its getting about 400 fps scrolling around, thats with just the map, no player or enemises or anything, still pretty damn good i think :) I like how its going so far codewise there was a few hiccups but im very pleased with it right now, I think this could be a project I actually get somewhere far in :D. Also I'm planning on making it open source and of course free. FYI its written in c/c++ using the visual c++ 6 ide, tho it should compile with gcc or something with a few tweaks. It uses HGE, which is Haal's Game Engine, a hardware accellerated 2d game engine, more of a library of sorts, basically a 2d layer to the mess that is modern directx video programming. Its website is at http://hge.relishgames.com/. Go there for more info.

Airbands... well we decided on something completely different in the end, now we're doing ballroom blitz. we're all dressing up as 80s hair metal anyways, i think it will be damn good. we have four people so the begining will work perfectly :D ITS ITS BALLROOM BLITZ!

Curling starts tomorrow. Its going to be bad I know this already. But it will be fun. One of my curling team members has never played before in his life :P but it will still rock (ha) anyways. Maybe i'll go dressed in my toga :D that would be cool (ha again). okay enough puns i need sleep, oh and good news, lindsay is all better now :D yay :D :D :D

For the past like over a week, Lindsay my love has been sick with mono. It's horrible cause her tonsils are all infected and her nose is all stuffed so its like difficult for her to breathe and im really worried about her. I really hope she gets better soon, she was supposed to come back to school for monday but i dnnt think she will.

Look out the left the captain said, the lights down there thats where well land. Awesome song. Apeaking of songs, I'm supposed to be in an airband for a school thinger, origionally we were doing paradise city by guns n roses, I was to be axel, jon would be slash, and jeff would be izzy, but then we changed that to bohemian rhapsody, and we were going to dress up as megaman characters, but now I dunno what we're doing, if anything. It would be fun to do anything but we should really pick for sure soon.

LAFE is coming along slowly but surely. I havent had much time to work on it lately, homework is taking a huge chunk of my afterschool life away, it sucks. Speaking of homework, I have a ton of it cause I missed first two classes on friday (slept in) and I was already behind in precal so now im really behind. Actually I'm going to go do some homework right now.

Now for those wonder where "just the gloves" came from here's an excerpt from a book called Evasion:

"Unwavering self-assuredness as a weapon". Effectively proven in the chain hardware store the day I set a $2 pair of gloves on the counter, next to an expensive power drill. The gloves were scanned, and the cashier reached for the drill. I pulled it away and feigned annoyance, placing the drill under my arm--
"Just the gloves."
She gave me the change, and a smile, and I walked out! Like the books, in reverse--a confident pose to get out the door...I knew I'd stumbled onto the shameless exploitation of a psychological loophole--"Everyone is insecure and submits to those more confident." Manifesting in the absurd scenario of a customer firmly requesting to not pay for 95% of his purchase!

LAFE is being resurrected. If you want a sample of what it used to be, check the WIP screenshots page in the piccy gallery, you should be able to figure out which one it is ;). This time I'm doing it all in c++, no more game maker bullshit, and so far I've coded a dynamic map scroller (using 16x16 tiles) and its getting around 600 fps at 800x600x32 windowed (on my athlon xp 2500+ with 512mb ram and a radeon 9000 pro backing it up), so I have pretty high hopes that this will turn out okay :).

I'm on a curling team, in a league. We dont have a hope in hell of coming close to winning but it will be fun methinks :) GG NO RE :D

Van Halen is coming up, only like 15 days until the concert. WOOT its gonna be awesome.

lan party idea slowly vanished, maybe next month... hopefully... i've been playing DDR alot again tho, damn its fun especially playin with jon cause he really tries hard and its funny :D :D :D,

dammnit I already typed all this once but my lame php news posting script didnt work...!!!ARGH!!!

Okay so I havent been posting much...at all...yeah its cause I dont have time anymore, between homework (a fuckload), my girlfriend, fire practice, work, and um well i guess school too, I have like no time on my computer anymore. I havent developed anythign in a long time, and I miss it :/ I think once i get a NDS maybe and development starts on it I'll jump back into it but for now I guess im semi-retired :/ bah i've been spending waaaay too much money lately on stupid crap. I bring like money to school then by time i get home its all spent on junk food and drinks and crap its horrible. so from now on no more bringing money to school kthx...

I had fire practice again today, It was fun kinda. We were doing a ventilation scenario thinger on an old roof part so we chopped a hole it in with axes n stuff but then we got to use the K12 that was a blast. The K12 is like this really big portable saw thinger. Its just like a radial arm saw, except its portable and has a handle n stuff like a chainsaw, but this thing can cut thru almost anything, its really is a beast, and damn heavy too, heavier even than the jaws of life maybe. Anyways I got to cut a hole in the roof with it and it was fun. BTW the fire dept I'm part of has a website at http://www.mts.net/~bjfire/, so check it out if you want to see what im talking about. My picture is even up there if you look hard enough :P

LAN PARTY!!! me n my friends are trying to put together a little lan party for sometime in the near future (possibly the weekend after thanksgiving), the games we somewhat decided on are: Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena, Warcraft III, Serious Sam the Second Enounter (co-op mode), soldat, and motocross madness 2. Also possibly Starlancr/Wing Commander/some space-shooter. Any more ideas for good games are welcome. We have some hubs and machines we can use as dedicated servers n stuff all we need is a good place to host it and to decide on a time. yay.

QOTD: time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so

First day of fall was today! Yes I know my date/time thinger is kinda broken for the news posting, cause what it does is gets the date from the server, then adds to the server time to get my local time and doesnt touch the date so if i post after midnite, it will say the day befor. i'll fix it later as i have no time now. i never have time for anything nowadays :(

QOTD: Music in the sould can be heard by the universe - Lau Tsu

I had a law test today, spent half my lunch hour studying for it, I think I aced it but I dunno. Law is an awesome class theres only seven people in our class so we're always goofin around and stuff, that's easily my favorite class this semester. I also have physics and precal and they both kinda suck, physics because of the teacher I really dont think she likes me, and precal because of the teacher, she's new and doesnt know how to teach or what shes talking about half the time. I liked my last year's precal teacher, him I could learn from. Oh well, I should be doing precal homework now but fuck that I have better things to do :P.

I got most of what I need on this gentoo setup working great, with the exception being 3d accelleration/opengl working. Im runnin a 2.6.8 kernel and Xorg 6.7, and have a radeon 9000 pro vid card. I found a lil guide to getting opengl etc workin with what I have but my printer is currently out of service and I'd rather have a hardcopy ready when I'm messin with my X config that not. Maybe tomorrow or the next day I'll get it set up, then I can run stepmania and start makin stepfiles for heavy metal songs :D

I'm tryin to set up a dreamcast dev environment but not getting too far, If anyone knows of a nice lil buildscipt to make gcc, binutils and newlib target to sh4 for dreamcast, and mabe even grab the latest KOS from subversion and compile that too, I'd love to hear about it. If not, expect me to make one such build script and post it here sometime soon (heh soon).

My shoes still havent came. I ordered some blackspt sneakers a couple weeks ago and they're still not here, I'm starting to get impatient, I am.

The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was. (from fortune ;)

That last post was created not by editing the news.html file with nano, but by using a php form instead. I forgot to put it in the last post cause I coded it two days ago but didn't have time to actually use it as it was really late and I lack sleep badly. But yeah it works pretty good, I had to relearn file ops in php tho so it took me a little while to hack up but im very happy with it, and yeah thats about it, party on.

I got a GBA dev environment all set up with wntermute's build script for devkitARM. Yup. Now I need a DC dev envroment and I'm all set (till the release of the DS anyways) I had some cool ideas for small dreamcast projects but first I'll finish up some old projects and release those. more updates to come, im busy atm tho.

Well fiefox is up and runnning, I can check my gmail again, and I got a nice reply from a manitoban CRTC rep saying basically that they acknowledge my opinion or watever. Yay, I think. Now that this computer is running nicely, I put my older computer back in my garage, set up as a dedicated DDR machine running stepmania, and with one metal dance pad and one plastic soft pad. It kinda sucks tho cause after maybe 4 or 5 songs it gets all laggy like the arrows and such, and you habe to reload stepmania in order for it to work good again. My Van Halen tickets came in the mail today :D

Well, my gentoo install finally get useworthy this afternoon, I'm now running a custom 2.6.8 kernel with kde 3.3.0. Right now im just emerging all the various software i need to function (xchat, firefox, xmms :P) and I should have everything running smoothly by tomorrow evening I hope. I need firefox because Konqueror (KDE's web browser) doesnt work with gmail, so I have no way currently of checking my email. Bollocks.

I had a fire call today, during my spare at school, I booked it to the fire hall and made it out on the first truck. It was a motor vehicle accident and luckily noone was hurt too badly. The only thing I did was direct traffic but even that was fun to do :).

I've been updating this by manually editing this news.html file, but once I get this system back to normal I plan on making a little php news system, nothing major, just something that I can enter in a topic and some text and it will generator the date etc and add it to the news.html file, and while I'm at it, I'll make an archiving system for say 20 posts old or soemthing to be put in an archive file to keep page loading times down. Oh yes, it will be good.

Well, I'm going to try a blog format for a bit again (if anyone remembers when I did that before, plese presently forget about it) and have some updates on whats going on with me.

I got a base gentoo install all set up nicely, altho I had to compile the kernel again because I forgot some network drivers, it appears to have gone without a hitch. Right now its emerging KDE and I'll probably let it go overnite as it shows no signs of being done anytime soon. Its on package 18 of 53 right now so I might even have to let it go tomorrow during the day.

I just finished sending off an email to Charles Dalfin, the chairperson of the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) with my opinions on the recent legal actions that AdBusters took against four of Canada's biggest television broadcasters - CTV, CanWest Global, CBC and CHUM. I encourage any Canadian who values our freedoms as outlined in the charter to do the same. More info can be found at the Media Carta website.

School has been eating up alot of my time lately, homework and such I just can't escape. I want to become active in the various homebrew development communities again however and hopefully once I have a nice gentoo system up and running I can get back into it. I've been missing lots of sleep lately because of homework and other life issues but somehow I've managed to make it on time to classes every day this week :D. This will soon change unless I smarten up though, so I'm going to try re-prioritizing my after school activities to ameliorize my sleeping habits.

I got some Van Halen tickets the other day. Thats gonna be an amazing concert. I recently acquired Halen's latest album, the Best of Both Worlds 2-disc set and I'm waitin in anticipation becuase it's going to rock hardcore. I went to a metallica concert a short while ago and it was OK but I reallly think this will be better. This time we have floor seats instead of up in the bowl and its just going to be awesome.

The site isnt quite all looking the way I want it yet, altho it is completely functional and thats more important at this time. If you have any comments or suggestions on the site design, send me an email, blackfrog AT gmail DOT com

I re-designed the site again because my old site was kinda lame, the colors didnt work well and it looked really bad imo. Hope you like this new format, it works best in firefox which you can get here http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. As for real news, nothing major that anyone woud be intrested in, I'm back in school now and thats eating up a lot of my time but I'm going to get a fresh gentoo install up and running and from there start on finishing up old projects like the jumble solver for dreamcast and a couple gba projects I havent bothered to release. I'll try to post at least weekly from now on and with that will come updates on just how much work is getting done on this stuff. Hopefully by next week I'll be updating this from gentoo...

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