Month: November 2009

Thoughts about photo/image hosting services

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Over the years, the only services that I’ve used are ImageShack and Photobucket; the former for one shots and the latter for more permanent storage. One of my best friends had opted into using Photobucket instead of IS, and quite naturally, I followed suite, although many years later… lol.

In parsing of Wikipedia, I noticed that the article noted a sequence of resource drops. Photobucket has dropped free accounts drastically, and without a functional digital camera, I simply don’t generate enough image files to warrant a “Pro account”, even if I had the financial resources for upgrading.

So I expect, in the near future to likely be moving on to something else in the future: and leave Photobucket as a relational memory. The only other services that I’m aware of, being Picasa and Flickr, which now have connections to Google and Yahoo!, respectively.

Flickr seems to offer the best content model in terms of resources, however other stuff indicated in their help/FAQ pages, I find rather discouraging for free accounts. So I seriously doubt that Flickr will replace my usage of Photobucket.

Picasa, integrates with Blogger which is nice, and would work well with purchasing extra data storage from Google. The down side however, is it is ‘yet another’ Google supported web system :-/. I have enough already, the only reason I’ve opted into Blogger for my exdous from LiveJournal, is it was LJs ‘runner up’, and I have little interest in revisiting that research. Blogger also serves my needs well enough, that I’m not amending that either.

When I had originally researched the ‘whole blogging thing’ back in mid 2006, it had included a study of services, ranging from Blogspot, LiveJournal, TypePad, Xenga, and others. LJ however won out at the time. It is also a known fact, that I would sooner stick me privates in madame guillotine, then use MySpace :-P.

Other sources that I have for storing images, include LiveJournals “Scrapbook” feature and a rather fascinating data model provided by the micro-blogging services I use; some of my friends ought to be able to guess what that is easily. While I maintain my journal (aka a blog) in public, the micro-blogging system I keep under much more private-levels. Any one may read my blog, but only those closer to me have access to the micro-blogging stream.

Since I’m shifting from Live Journal to Blogger, I don’t feel it ethically appropriate to rely on LJs scrap book functionality. As to the micro-blogging solution, the main thing that concerns me is the measure of privacy afforded; one thing that always irked me about Photobucket is it’s fairly poor privacy controls. Sharing links to images stored on Photobucket is not exactly a secure thing IMHO, and is one reason I rarely use it. My research (using help docs and friends albums) has lead me to conclude that links through the microblogging system do maintain a measure of privacy; abit at the cost of revealing the service used (acceptable enough). Some might find it odd that I prefer noting it as ‘microblog’ rather then by it’s service name, but hey, it keeps every Tom, Dick, and Harry from trying to add me over there, and it’s less public them my instant messengering details >_>.

In all probability, I’ll probably end up using that system or picasa in place of Photobucket for future affairs; perhaps another service, if I find something of appropriate interest. Of course, if I had my own website, it would be a fairly moot point, but that is not in my financial near-future. SAS does give me a small bit of webspace, which I do use for occasional odds and ends, but my personal code of conduct forbade me from abusing it lol. And actually come to think of it, I should probably host my forum signature off the site: so changing my forum sig on SAS becomes an encrypted file transfer, rather then editing my profile.

Get a life man…

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You know it’s actually amazing, how many blog posts I made to Live Journal in 2008, it was like being joined at the hip or something lol.

I do generally like to update my journal every day or two, but have no problem with updating it several times a day, especially when I’m suitably active during the day. 2008 was also a very active year…

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Wow, I had such a peaceful nap; it was like I wrote a TSR and loaded it into my brain or something lol.

The downside of course, is that I’ll probably be awake much of the night. Then again, I have plenty of crap to get done, since H.R.P. had to interrupt me constantly during most of the day….

Rambling the Metal Gears

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Been playing more of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, managed to get 2 of the C3’s planted before setting off the alarms in the hanger… So Dragunov SVD time from the top level catwalk vs goon squad below with shotguns 🙂

Although I missed the M60 machine gun again on the way to the sniper dual with The End, I did find a new toy. A russian knock off of the Czechoslovakian. Scorpian SMG, I remember using one in Raven Shield and Syphon Filter 3… But in MGS3 you get one fitted with a laser aimpoint, if that sucker had a suppressor it would be the ultimate stealth weapon xD

The Colt M1911A1 is just too weak, I got detected in the hanger because I decided rather then tranquilizing the maintenance tech and then shooting him with the .45 so he wouldn’t wake up before I was done (less sound then the knife, oddly). I put a shot in the back of his head and he ran off, emptied the rest of the mag trying to take him down… I’m used to a MK23+SD and double taps using a laser sight from MGS but I don’t mind using the pistols iron sights in MGS3, just that the M1911A1 is less then optimal for dispatching enemies.

The prototype M16 ain’t so good either, not a lot of attack power and the suppressor can’t hold up to a lot of gun fire. The Patriot is just as bad as the M16 IMHO but the unlimited ammo and small size make it more useful for firefights then the Soviet AK47 in the game.

Placed the last C3 charge, nice cut scene of Snake musing over the heart-shaped plastic explosive Eva gave him, molding it into a butterfly and catching it. Just like the one he failed to catch in the Cave after he lost his eye protecting Eva. Of course thing sin MGS are never so easy lol.

The melee with Col. Volgin was actually a lot easier then I remember, first time I played through the game it was hard. This time it was pretty easy though, I can see why I’ve heard rumors of people posting “speed runs” of the fight online hehe.

Creamed Volgin, survived the bullet riddled chase out of grozny grad on Eva’s motorbike — finally using the Scorpion :-). RPG’s, Scorpion, and Patriot fire to deal with the Op4 chasing in motorbikes with side cars. Sniped the C3 on the bridge with Eva as spotter… all the way through to the final show down with a pissed off Volgin driving the shagohod and another escape from the goon squad now on motorcycles and jet-platforms!

Saved after the final crash, I know the running firefight through the jungle is the hardest part. Especially with an injured Eva in tow; armed only with Snakes SAA “Peace Maker”. MGS3 does show quite well what happens when you don’t WATCH THE ROAD!!! After the crash Snake ends up breaking a few ribs on a tree while Eva is less fortunate and gets impaled.

Snake refuses to leave her behind but oy’vey what an exchange. While he’s telling Eva “I need you”, I’m thinking… If I know Snake, he’s thinking she’s the only one that can fly. And sure enough he had to point that out (^_^).

She’s only lucky to be alive after all!

The end game can wait for another night, I remember it well… With luck I can use a mixture of SVD and Grenade assistest ambushes, the patriot for suppressive fire and manage to complete it without to much damage. I don’t recall Eva being much help but between injuries and a SAA I guess that makes sense.

The final dual to the death with The Boss, eventually earning the protagonist the title “Big Boss” is not cake walk either from what I remember. Hmm, would be nice to survive a close encourter with The Boss without any broken bones or firearms hehe.

Hmm, looks like some one actually made a model of the shagohod out of LEGO bricks.

http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/11941

Not a bad job either if I do say so myself as a former LEGO addict. This persons got some talent at reproducing things for sure.

I remember back when The Phantom Menace came out I designed and built my own “super” version of the droid hover tanks in Star Wars. Even in my youth I’ve always liked designing and building things hehe. The droid hover tank I did out of LEGO bricks was armed to the teeth and weighed a freaking ton. I didn’t have the kind of parts that they used for the base when LEGO released a droid hover tank model kit of their own a few years later but I created my own hover tank with a distinctive shape with parts from an old Exploriens kit I had and used solid-blue canopies from one of my brothers old kits (~1980s) to make armoured loading bins. My setup was much detailed then the official kit,down to the torpedo and missile tubes, I think the official LEGO kit only painted there’s on, cheap bastards hehe. The one I cooked up also was scaled larger, I used the Battle Droid action figures painted with the right markings of course 😉 to crew the battle tank. I created my design in the “spirit” of the one from the films and tried to improve on the combat effectiveness of it, not reproduce it exactly as it was in the films: I wanted to make it better xD

It made a great display in my bed room for a few months until I needed the parts to build something else loool.

I’ve always enjoyed the Metal Gear games but I never thought about building one out of LEGOs when I was a kid… If I did, I probably would have done the Metal Gear REX from the first Metal Gear Solid game. Hmm, I think I must’ve been about 10 years old when MGS came out in the USA and maybe 11 around when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace hit theaters.

It’s kind of strange, 10, 20, maybe even 30 years (if I live to see) that you can still remember to stuff you used to do lol.

So much for slumber lol

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Eventually drifted off to sleep only to wake up twice, I gave up around 0500R. When you start dreaming of a woman that may as well be an angel, because she is so sweet a person, you know, it is time to wake up and wonder why you are still here, lol…

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Most of the day was totally absorbed, and the evening rather wasted. I was up so late last night, that I slept late this morning, but still had time to do some reading before it was time to leave; ma’s followup with the doctor was today.

So, much like November 2nd, I ended up sitting around the community medical centre, in the next county lol. This time howeber, I was smart enoguh to bring along my laptop. Unlike last time, it was only about a two hour affair, so there was ~40min of charge left by the time we left. After booting the computer, I chose to enable powerd in the hopes of prolonging the laptops battery life. While I’ve tried powerd over the years, most times I’ve had to give it up, either due to to high a level of performance loss or stability issues with my laptops ACPI.

One great perk of my great wealth of experience with computers, other then when I actually need a graphical program, I can function quite adeptly in text mode. Running the computer booted into text mode, rather then a fancy X11 desktop with transparency  and stuff, puts much less strain on the hardware. X pulls plenty of processor power, and should we say a windowing system requires quite a bit more use of the graphics card then drawing an 80×24 vtty !!!

Stability was good, and my CPU spent most of it’s time running just below 1Ghz, or approximately half of full speed. Repsonsiveness is much better under the newer hiadaptive power mode, then the regular adaptive mode, which takes care of my only other beef. According to FreeBSDs dmesg, I have a CPU: Mobile AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3300+ (1994.21-MHz 686-class CPU) which according the dev.cpu.0.freq_levels sysctl, is able to scale itself as low as ~99Mhz, or roughly the clock rate of a sexy Pentium from the time of Jurassic Park :-P.

In text mode, I spent my time with a screen session open: one window for testing software, one with vim for editing software, one for the language tools,, and another window for looking up documentation as needed. During the wait, I was able to get four git commits fired away on the Encapsulated Installer (EPI) project. My parters approved the use of Git for our implementations SCMS/VCS needs, much to my joy :-).

Currently I’m focused on a topic branch that seeks to develop “Extras” for epi-unpack and epi-verify, that can have wider usage throughout the toolset, not to mention make EPI management easier to script for system administrators and developers.

The ideals of maing the EPI system powerful, flexible, and easy, are very much at the heart of it’s design: and I have taken the influence of UNIX to heart in my development habbits.

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It’s been a bit of a busy day, managed to complete importing all the LiveJournal entries from 2007 into Blogger, as well as taking the time to properly study Blogger templates, and spruse up the place ;).

Sadly, the highlight of my day, was getting to watch a few episodes of Stargate SG-1 while doing it lol. Beyond that, it’s all been kind of acline to torture…

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Well, so far my family has managed to annihilate any chances of enjoying TV, or getting work done tonight, so I took some time to study blogger themes.

Managed to get most of my Live Journal entries from 2007 transferred here, and I’ve some what an idea of how I want this blogger page to look. Tomorrow, I’ll likely strip out the templates code and design something more to my taste. Two things that I do like about Blogger, is that most trivial things can be changed without touching the code, and you don’t have to pay up to modify the code! Live Journals S2 system, has always interested me, but I’ve never dug into it, due to the feature splits they employ.

Now if I could actually get some sleep before dawn, it might help… *sigh*

Old razor, still sharp.

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Decided to join the action on Proving Grounds EU tonight, for a little Raven Shield ;). It’s been about two months or more, since I really bothered playing RvS, but went pretty slick. I breezed through the first few maps with the skill you would expect a WO1 to display, and survived until the clock ran out on staying up late 8=).

Even more comforting, is that I’m not rusty, even though I play without an aiming reticle lol. Then again, if I expect to be shooting beyond ~10 metres fairly often, I generally will equip my weapon with a scope: as opposed to using the CQ style employed throughout RvS.

I just find it more natural and instinctive without the aiming reticle, and usually my reaction times are elevated, since I’m engaging the target in a fluid motion; there’s no point of reference from the centre pip.

The Blogger Experiment

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I spent much of the afternoon manually importing my posts from Live Journal to Blogger. I have all the posts in LJs XML export format, but efforts to convert that into something workable have proven, shall we say to great a lossage to put forward.

LiveJournal2Blogger was only able to download a portion of my posts, importing about ~63 od them to Blogger :-(. Thus, I deleted all of those and started doing it the Old Fashioned Way. At first I figured I would just do something like this:

$ cat *.xml | vim -

but that quickly proved in efficient, due to the nature of LiveJournals XML export format: it rather wreaks havoc on any HTML entities used in posts. Simply put, I have used a heck of a lot of pre and blockquote tags, between code/command snippits, song lyrics, and quotations. Fairly regular use of strong/em and more anchors then you can shake twenty sticks at, this is not a good thing. I also tend to use angle brackets as part of my asciibody language >_>, so it is rather important to avoid the pain & anguish, if you get my meaning.

All across the web, I’ve seen shotty looking snippits in blogs, and well, for as much as I hate those, I am not interested in having them in anything I call *mine* so no content mutilation will be tolerated.

LiveJournal has an excellent system for browsing archived posts, at least until you want to actually /search/ for something. So I merely started at my first journal entry and began working forwards through the archive. Whenever you edit a post on LJ, at least when you composed it in raw HTML mode, as I always do 😉 you get back just what you put into the editor way back when.

So copy/pasting that into Blogger’s snazzy editor, in “Edit HTML” mode, works like a charm :-D.

Most of 2006 is transferred, and the word verification limit wasn’t even reached until entries from late November or early December were processed. Later tonight I’ll finish up on that. The operation has however been lossy by nature: things encoded into LJ posts have been omitted for speed. So they no longer carry information such as my location, mood, or music. I have tried to keep the date/time accurate with respect to the numbers on LiveJournal, which is the slowest part. One good thing though, it lets me walk through my journal, “Label” entries accordingly for recollection, and it really does help put things in perspective. I’m good with faces and objects, bad with names and times, lol.

In some cases, such as my Vi User How To, I have elected to copy the comments along with the entries, by adding them in a singular comment of my own. But for the most part, I’ve left the comments behind as part of the lossy translation from LJ to Blogger. To be honest, I rarely get comments on my entries, so it is not to big an issue with me. I think between 2006-09-09 and 2009-11-13, I’ve only received about 150 comments or so.

Later tonight I’ll experiment with the look/feel and informational aspects of this blog. When the experiment is complete, I’ll set up a self referential link between the relevant Blogger and LiveJournal entries: it should appear seemless. Well, the comments and misc meta info aside.

Right now, I am off to SWAT 4 for a few good games :-).