jmoiron.net

A bunch of people I know are going to be graduating tomorrow, so congratulations and good luck to all of them. This includes Mike "Super Jew" Krupnic, Jeremy "Jerumu" Mikola and Wei Alan "Just Got Married" Tsang. Two of these guys have jobs so good luck with that, and Krupnic you might want to try searching for work in the pacific north west since you've already tried in every other region!

With the graduation comes a reminder of my graduation (which I don't remember because I had maybe 5 hours of sleep the entire week before) and of course grades for my first term of graduate school. Since I'm non-metriculated, I'll have to get a few offer letters and actually apply before I can take more than 4 courses, but I'd say that so far I'm starting off on the right foot!

I really do plan on adding even more to my post on KDE 3.4, but its really tiring taking all of the screenshots and commenting on them, especially since I find anything without a propper mouse to be less than comfortable to use. Still, I want to at least cover some miscelaneous nags, some interesting new features, and the notable positive and negative changes to the control center.

I've been using (_gasp_) windows lately on my workstation. I wanted to play some games I had lying around and also finish out some FPS' that I played back when I roomed with Demarco and Jerumu all those years ago. Seldom do people come "fresh" to windows knowing linux, and ideed most of my computer use before 200½002 was in windows, but I've found myself completely absorbed by features that windows does not have out of the box, and completely out of the loop for leet haxor programs that give me the functionality. The mouse in XP seems to really lag behind from where I think it's going to be; I remember feeling the same exact way about X when I first started using it, but X has gotten noticably more reactive in the past few years and it seems that windows has somewhat lagged behind. Most of the other features I sorely, sorely miss have to do with window management. I miss having "alt + left click" dragging a window, "alt + right click" to resize, and scrollwheel/doubleclick to do a window rollup (which isn't even provided at all by windows; I have to use the nvidia driver nonsense to get it).

Those gripes aside, I've been having fun (almost too much fun) playing some games; mostly dividing my time between The Longest Journey and GunBound. I started playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but the mouse issue I had within windows was far more severe in that shooter (Oh how I miss the crisp accuracy of Half Life!) and I have come to realize that FPS are on the whole only fun multi-player.

Finally, I've been actually doing some work on the server. I still haven't set up an IRC server, but that's because I don't know which ircd is the best or even anything about running an ircd and what the associated vulnerabilities are. I set up mail to work within the local host, but have not enabled the world to get to it yet because I want to read up a little more on configuration of the server and in specific what security issues there are with it. I wrote a script that emails me a digest of what is upgradable in apt and threw it into cron which has helped stay on top of keeping up to date, and finally I've examined the error logs and found a lot of asshats sniffing for the awstats.pl vulnerability but other than that just a bunch of bots upset at a lack of robots.txt.