Category: The Undefined Remainder

Geeky stuff. Internet, Games, Free Software, Sci-fi etc.

Super Scrobbler

Db0

Audioscrobbler has finally finished its update and it seems that the default user environment is Last.fm from now on.

The update was supposed to have finished by Monday but eventually, as these things usually do, it finished on Tuesday evening. I Managed to log in briefly at 1:30 am before going to bed and saw the page and skimmed through the new features. ‘Twas a bit slow.
Today I tried logging in again after coming to work but the site had b0rked and I kept getting errors or timeouts, probably the surge of traffic was too great (everyone logging in to see the new thing) and something crashed and burned. It came up after a few hours or so (It seems it was down for ~5 hours) and everything was running almost smoothly ever since. Even my winamp plugin, which couldn’t submit for the last week, managed to finally unload the ~400 songs it had in its cache.

The site layout looks great and is completely based on a scripting language instead of simple html which makes it look very cool. I would like some choice of themes but that can wait for now. It has many new features such as tagging, which is putting keywords on artists, albums or tracks for easy management and search and a personal journal.
The Journal is open but it is supposed to be used for music related things. Its neat feature is that it can link stuff through AS and put them as related terms in a sidebar (with thumbnails), making it easy for anyone reading it to locate them. I’ve already made two entries which you can find here if you so wish. I plan to use the journal as my personal review site so if you find my music taste to your liking you should check it out often.

Tagging is a great idea and I plan to use it heavily to make my collection easy to navigate and manage. Problem is that the profile editor is still a bit buggy and stops saving after using it for a while (it’s been trying to save a new tagset for two hours now ) but it can work in small batches. There is also another way to tag items, by using the tag button from the web page. It lets you easily tag items you are browsing.

I tried the new last.fm player as well. It seems they have turned from the web-based stream to a standalone program that you must install. It’s a nice idea because the web-based was not performing very well (at least for me) but they haven’t implemented proxy authentication which means I still cannot use it from work. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to use it afterward, since I do not know if the port it uses will be open from our firewall. An choice between the player and the web-player would be great at this point since not everyone has administrative rights to their computer (think employees in a company) or may want to use it on multiple computers where installing programs is not always an option.

There are some other nifty things I’ve found out such as a nice Similar Artists sidebar in every artist’s page (I’d like to know how they calculate that), an option to see a complete chart of your listening habits and not just the most popular, enhanced neighbor and friend page where it shows more info (such as their recent journal entries if any) and they even fixed the group charts that weren’t working before.

The forums seems to have been reduced in number now. The classic ones are still there but the plugins seem to have been merged.

All in all I find this a very exciting upgrade. Once the people learn the ropes and fill the place with tags and journals the AS experience will become unparalleled.
Amarok will have many things to implement, especially after the Audioscrobbler page (which is a developer’s repository now) comes up again.

Time to relax or get bored?

Db0

Well, my [tag]vacation[/tag] time is finally here and damn if I know what to do with it. I’ve got two full weeks and I really want to get on some kind of vacation but seeing as all my friends are either working, already on vacation or avoiding me, I think that in the end I’ll be left here to rot. The only bright thing in the future is a friend of mine that has volunteered to take me with her on vacation with another friend of hers and another friend of mine that may go to Chalkidiki and may take me with him.
Bah! Couldn’t be vaguer.

It’s my fault in the end I think, I never found friends that were doing this thing and now that I’m looking, it’s too late. I haven’t even managed to find company to go to the beach with, and lets not get on the subject of “friends” that forget you so easily after 6 years. Yes I’m bitter.

In the meantime I’ve been spending my time working on Wikipedia. It’s a noble cause and at least I feel that my time is wasted on something worthy, instead of, for example, games. Currently I’ve been working on Savatage and before that on Blind Guardian, mainly filling in albums or album information. Took me a while but I got them where I like them, now I’m thinking what to move on to next. And to think that all this was inspired by Kiwilyrics ever since I’ve started putting artist links to wikipedia on its pages.

Other than that, boring stuff, I’ve been desperately trying to find some new friends to go out with, and one I did have has gone to the army. It’s sad not to have someone to call isn’t it?

Of Lyrics and Kiwis.

Db0

I am sick and tired of Lyrc, which is the default lyrics database for amaroK. It has a crappy layout and search capabilities, the lyrics are many times missing, duplicated or badly submitted and the user has no power other than submitting new ones, which as a feature is badly designed as well. I want to contribute but ignoring the fact it is very tiresome to do so, their forum is in spanish or something as well which means it is very hard to communicate with someone in charge.

Disgusted I started looking for an alternative, even prepared to go as far as to found my own wiki lyrics site if I didn’t find one. Luckily I did and it exceeded my expectations. Its name is Kiwilyrics which is a smart play on the word wiki.

— Interjection —
In case you aren’t very active on the WWW (although I can’t see how you’ve got here otherwise), a [tag]wiki[/tag] is a web page who’s content is submitted and edited by its user base. The most famous example of a wiki is of course Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Here’s what it has to say about Wikis. You can find my profile there as well under Db0.
—

Back to the subject at hand then. I got so worked up with Kiwilyrics that I even created a Firefox search engine which you can find here. My goal is to make [tag]amaroK[/tag] use kiwilyrics as a lyrics database since I know they will implement wikipedia (and thus the wiki engine) in some way at version 2. Hell, I may even become a developer just to code such a feature in myself.

So to all who might be reading this, get active. Go to Kiwilyrics and submit the albums you can’t find or fix obvious errors.

I'm not well…again.

Db0

Recent developments have dropped my self-esteem and my older friends seem to have abandoned me altogether. It becomes tiresome to find that someone that you used to hang out with very often does not even go into the trouble to call you or send you a instant message. Yeah, 6 years of friendship my ass!
Psymon and Yo!Master, if you happen read this, you SUCK! You haven’t called in ages even though I did try to contact you. Yeah, have a nice time going to the beach or playing games. I know when I’m not wanted, it would be nice to know why at least…

I’ve been working on my linux desktop for the last few days. I have been using KDE and superkaramba themes. It is still a work in progress and this is what I’ve managed ’till now I still need to get the thunderbird theme to work and find some more stuff to fill me screen with.
.

I have also been lurking on the Deviant Art for a while, checking things out. It would be nice to be able to contribute something there as well but alas my artistic abilities are limited to desktop configuration and game design. However I think my sister could benefit from it. If I could just get her to register.

I also found out about Folding @ Home. It is similar to Seti@Home but it is about helping find cures for diseases like alzheimer and cancer so I think it is a much better cause. Since I have a relative power over the company’s network where I work I have installed F@H to 125 PC and got them to work for the good of all mankind. Here’s an updating sample of my contributions so far

Speaking of my work, I have been asked to provide an Active Desktop configuration. I have already cooked something up with my limited HTML/CSS knowledge but I would welcome any hints from anyone who has invested on the subject.

My feet hurt!

Db02 Comments

So I’m back from my Iron Maiden Tour, Eddie Rips up Athens and my feel still hurt from the sheer amount of walking we did in Athens. Did anybody listen when I told them to take an organized tour with a bus and everything? No, we had to take the damn Train and suffer so many hours of waiting and boredom. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The original plan involved us getting the train to Athens and then waiting in the station for the next train to head back, my idea was to wait at a bar or something while we were there and take an early morning train. Well OSE (Greek Railroads company) had other plans for us.
For of us, Dimitris, Lampis, Athena and me were on the same trip. We met up in front of the station and started our journey uneventfully. Now allow me to rant about the quality of seats in these damn trains…they’re impossible to sleep in! While we spent most of the trip talking, I still tried to catch an hour or so of shut-eye but it was nearly impossible. The seat is just VERY uncomfortable (It’s uncomfortable enough just sitting) and there is just too much interference from around. In any case, the six-hour journey was unproblematic and I got to know Athena who I was seeing for the second time. So far, so good.

Due to a spot of good luck the train driver makes a stop, just for us metalheads, to get off in Malakasa (where the concert is taking place) and he start marching to the concert area a simple 1km trip. Luckily it was a bit overcast and we didn’t had to suffer the sun on our heads the whole time.
We reached the concert area 3 hours before the doors open and we have the joy of sitting there doing nothing but hearing the cantinas around us advertising their ridiculously overpriced goods. I mean 4 Euro for a damn Souvlaki Sandwich? WTF is that? I didn’t give them the joy of my money of course Dimitris was pretty much starving so he had no choice, especially after they enticed him with a free souvlaki.
As the four hours were reaching the end, another good event happened. A romantic acquaintance of mine showed up and brightened my day and I think that Athena got a bit moody about that but I can’t be sure. In any case, the last hour went by pretty quickly and then the doors opened.

I got inside the concert area with said former acquaintance and cruised the are to the stage where she decided to enter the mass of people and head for the front a few hours before Maiden were scheduled to start despite my warning that it wasn’t a good place to be. Oh well…
After that Dimitris called and we met in front of the toilets (of all the places) and slowly the rest of the crew gathered as well, including four other people that arrived in a private car.

First Dragonforce came to the stage to the dismay of everyone else in the crew instead of me. I can’t say they were perfect, at least not for the Greek crowd, but I enjoyed them and I even headed for the front at one time. Let me tell you, never head for the front in a concert this big. There are at least two thousand people wanting to get to the front and they all try like mad to get to the first line. I, for some reason, can always get to the front line if I really want to and I proved that to myself by getting to the front on W.A.S.P. and Queensryche/Nightwish at last year’s Rockwave. In any case I got till the third line where the sheer amount of pressure around me was enough to suffocate a smaller person and that’s when I thought of my friend. I threw a desperate search for her but it was just impossible to find her. I sent her a message where to find me and returned back to my cluster of friends only to hear them groan about how long Dragonforce had to play.
I don’t understand why so few people like power metal around here. Almost everyone I meet likes all kinds of metal except power for some strange reason. They either find it too happy or too stupid or something other like that. It’s very strange that I keep liking it so much.

After Dragonforce there was a half hour pause to get the stage ready for Maiden where I took the time to grab something to eat and look around the area. There were some nice clothes shops around with some shirts I really wanted to buy but the some price tags were unbelievable. I just can’t spend 65e for a damn shirt, not in my condition. Funny thing is that the guy who was selling the shirts was very enthusiastic when I looked around, telling me how they were from the US and showing me all the nice stamps and whatnot but I soon as I mentioned that I had no money, his enthusiasm died like a spider on a frying pan. I headed out and to the cluster of friends again.

At last Iron Maiden came on, among cheers and whistles and let me tell you, these guys know how to put up a really nice show. There where entrances, fires, giant eddie balloons, giant Piece of Mind Eddie’s walking around and other fun facts. I’m sure there are many sites giving an adequate review, even in Greece so I won’t go into detail about that. Needless to say that the rest of the crew, along with several thousand other people, were jumping around like insane rabid monkeys on crack. Especially Dimitris who was seeing maiden for the first time was cumming out of his nostrils, so to speak. I am sorry to say that I wasn’t as excited as I could have been because I didn’t know the song quite as well (They played only the first four albums which, while I have them, have not listened to them that much) and also because I was a bit afraid about what happened to my friend. Thus I ended up only really getting down to it at a few select songs like Running Free or Number of the Beast.
When the concert ended it caught as all in a bit of surprise as it looked like they (Iron Maiden) were waiting for a second call to stage (We Want More) which never came. I don’t know if it was because people didn’t like it that much (I don’t think so), because they were tired or because they didn’t understand. In any case I later heard that the Maiden where pissed off for some reason and this could just be it. Last song of the concert: Always look on the Bright Side of Life 😉

After that we were running or, more appropriately, strolling quickly, to the train station. Unfortunately not only did the crew not go quite as fast, but they also stopped not once but twice for water on the way. As a result we lost the final train and we stayed at the station for no good reason. At least I got something out of it when I met a girl there that Athena had started chatting with. She turned up to be a 30 years old freelancer photograph and I ended up chatting with her until we reached Athens. How did we reach Athens? well after an hour and a half waiting at the station it finally dawned on us that a train was not forthcoming and we headed out to find the bus. At one point we reached a crossroads where someone had told people the bus would come through and people stopped there and started lighting fires and stuff. Sooner or later people would be jumping over the fire in a mock pagan ceremony. In any case we headed out and finally learned that we should take the bus from the concert area groan.
At the concert area it was panic. A whole lot of tired people wanting to get on the bus without having any money and patience. Shouting at the bus drivers, shouting at the managing team, shouting at everyone, panic I tell you! Luckily we got in the bus before any riot started and I dozed off for the half hour or so it took us to reach Athens, (Happy moment: The reporter felt comfortable enough to sleep on my shoulder 😉 ).

So we are at Athens’ train station and after I give my goodbyes (and phone number 😉 ) to the reporter, we learn that the first train to Thessaloniki is approximately 7 hours away Groan! again. We decide to visit a local bar and grab a drink so we catch a ride to the central square of Athens and we almost get into a fight with the Cab driver. After I calm the spirits and we reach the square, we get to eating. For some reason Lampis takes a dive in a eats one Everest sandwich and two Croissants. Talk about hunger. After the we argue a bit where to head to and finally we decide to go out to Psiri. We almost get lost, get past a few hookers and find a nice enough bar playing rock but not quite. Unfortunately at this point exhaustion was creeping in and my usual talkativity was giving way the sleep. After about two hours we pay the very expensive drinks and head to the station again.

Now the waiting was just awful. While at the bar, I could sleep wherever but at the station, due to the noise and commotion, it was impossible to sleep. Whenever you drifted into the arms of Morpheus at fucking train would come by and whistle you into the land of bitter consciousness. Athena decided to get the Intercity train in order to get to Thessaloniki 3 hours sooner, paying 18e in the process, but we, as eternal brokes waited until the 9:45 train. It finally came and after a brief struggle with the train staff about where it was appropriate to sleep (we were in a kid’s playground at the time) we got into our chairs and tried to sleep. I ended up getting cramps in my lower back and sleeping approximately three hours our of six.

Now, I’m back in my room after a good solid 5 hours of sleep in my comfortable bed and I’m ready to head out into the night!

Oh, and my feet hurt!

Well, at least I don't have to deal with this…

Db0

I also found out this blog ((UPDATE: 09/02/09: Removed link as forum has gone away and I’m linking to a placeholder ad page)) about the life of a clerk within a video club holding a sizable porn section. Definitely worth a read. I’ve also wasted some perfectly good time trying to find some other nice blogs like this.

Yesterday I also saw the Doors Movie (or rather more appropriately, the Jim Morrison biography) and while a friend of mine enjoyed it I found the later half of the movie to be extremely irritating. The dude was an asshole, wasting his life and brains away and finally dying at 29. He lived in a time filled with lcd tripping hippies that adored him and he indulged unconditionally in all his hedonistic vices. My respect for the Doors and especially for Morrison has gone down ofter seeing this movie. Aside from his creativity, he has nothing redeeming and I truly can’t understand the people that have him as a role-model.

Finding the Doorman

Db0

The past tree days at work I’ve been vehemently reading this blog. It’s written by a part-time bouncer with very good writing skills and a healthy dose of humor and sarcasm. It describes the events that occur on the job as well as commenting on various parts of night life. From this blog I’ve managed to completely despise the “Guido’s” as he calls them. Apparently they are similar to our own Greek “Trendy Boys” or as I like to call the Κάγγουρες; you know the look: Jelled spiky short hair, fit stretching t-shirts, shiny necklaces but fortunately not waxed eyebrows (at least not from what I’ve seen). They have also made me completely despise the word “Yo” as Guido’s they seem to say it all the time in a strange imitation of Black lingo. It just ends up sounding stupid.
I’ve seen our kind of Guido march around Ladadika like so many peacocks while I was going from one Metal club to another. They always seem so…poseur-ish to me that I never fail to laugh at them. Truly, I now cannot bring myself to enter the places of Guido gathering only to watch chicks shake their asses and not have one in 10 chance of meeting someone I can have a nice night out with.
In any case that blog is a great reading, I just couldn’t stop and he’s written quite a lot as well. I only wish I had his gift for written speech and I had some kind of experience to write about as well.

Which reminds me; 7 fucking euros for a drink at a small Rock Bar! Who the fuck do they think we are? I was expecting a max of five and I ended up wasting more than I would for drinking 2 beers. FFS!
This was the cost for going out yesterday night with a friend of mine and, just for the hell of it, ordering a B52. And to think that she was asking to go for a beer as well…

Monday I finally had my left ear cleaned from all that…stuff that had gathered inside. The experience was almost painful but luckily not. However I didn find out that I didn’t have to wait one fucking week to clean it out. It was just that the original doctor was old school and din’t know the modern procedures. Now that sucked! I had to go a week half-deaf because the friggin’ doctor couldn’t keep up with the times!

In [tag]Linux[/tag] news: At least I managed to find the cause for the back-right speaker not working. It seems that for some reason the alsa-mixer surround was not full up on the right (how that happened, I do not know) and by simply turning it up, all was back to normal. Gkrellm2 has also stopped segfaulting when I disabled the two plugins I use (which I didn’t use anyway) and [tag]amarok[/tag] does not segfault as long as I use the xine engine…dunno why.
Problem is that my /usr mount is running out of space (only 150MB left at this time) so I don’t know how many more progs can fit/update. I have no idea how I managed to fill up 4GB of space with programs…what the hell is in there?

I'm Booooored!

Db0

I’ve been playing Ivan most of the day now because I’m bored as hell at work. There is absolutely nothing to do right now. So I manage to equip one character with some pretty decent stuff and what happens? I get carried away, step on a large mine which incidentaly breaks my wand of lightning which releases a lightning surge and fries me…arrrgh!

In any case, I’m still extremely bored. Maza Fora don’t have a lot of traffic and RPG.net’s Tangency is boring me quickly.
I’ve got one hour left to waste and I’m out of options.

I don’t even know what to do this evening, I haven’t contacted anyone and I’m bored to do so. Who should I call in any case…everything seems so…plain right now 🙁

Carnage Blender

Db0

I just found out carnage blender. It’s a game where you take the role of managing a team of gladiators and you take on other team constantly increasing your stats and abilities. It’s pretty addictive and it also sports a nice chat feature to use while you fight around. (I currently can’t due to the damn firewall at work 🙁 ). In any case I happily wasted a few hours kicking some butt until I answered wrong a bot-test question and got locked out for 60 mins…damn those letters are hard to make out.

Yesterday night something irritating happened at my outing. I went out originally by myself because as always I couldn’t find anyone to come with me. So I found a friend at the [tag]X Club[/tag] and hanged out near her for a while. She was there with her friends and at some point I said something that could be taken both humorously and as an insult to one of her friends. Well guess how she took it…In any case, I apologized if I offended in which her reply was literally “To by balls!” How’s that for woman’s grace. In any case I didn’t waste any more time with that bitch but turned my attention to the rest of the crowd. At some point later someone spilled a glass or something behind me, wetting even me. I didn’t give much notice until I saw said girl pointing at me. Confused I assumed they were making a joke or something so I smiled at which point she came with the same bitchy attitude and demanded that I pay for the drink that I spilled. Things degenerated quickly and I decided to bail out because she was both drunk and bitchy and I wasn’t going to ruin my mood for her. Unfortunately it seems she didn’t waste time to tell our common friend that I was to blame. I don’t know how it will develop the next time I see her (them?). Oh well.

The rest of the night sucked.

Browser Games

Db0

Well, I’ve started playing two games on the net. The Kingdom of Loathing is an excellent humorous MORPG that anyone should play at least once. Loads of fun and a complete waste of time to boot.
As I was looking to find one on the same style only a bit more serious and maybe with better gameplay I stumbled onto Strive for power which is very nice. However the fact that you can’t really play if you are not a subscriber (20 ap per hour is not enough to even move around) and that I can’t shell out the kind of money a subscription costs (it is only slightly less than a MMORPG) makes me search around for something else.

Now, I’m at work again and boredom is creeping slowly but steadily in. I have to check our network for virii and the tools never seem to work right. It seems one of them snuck into an unprotected win98 machine and started flooding the network with packets. The routers held but the accelerator puked and started doing whatever it wanted. A technician from it’s mother company had to connect to locate problem and trace it back to the original machine. Needless to say this was blamed (mildly) on me and I had to recheck all the machines for correct definitions and scan engines. bleh.
Now I have to send 4 laserjets to stores around Greece and I hate carrying.

My Linux enthusiasm has waned as well, I just can’t get off my lazy butt and find out why gkrellm2 segfaults all the time. At least Amarok seems to have stabilized since I started using the xine engine. It seems it was something to do with the alsa driver but the steps I took didn’t trace the problem.

Relationship is a mixed deal as well. I’m still hanging out with my new friend but it isn’t going to happen. There were some close encounters but unfortunately nothing special. At least an older acquaintance showed up and may be available for coffee soon.