The Blog of Lucien Stals

Brazilian Hackers which basically just confirmed what I have experiences on Tyler.

The last two hacks on Tyler have both originated from South America.

Pimaster has been working on the Monkey's poster, I thought I should post the ByteClub poster I threw together for open day.

Link to Poster (as PDF)]]>

IT leaves Y2K wage fever behind

Makes it seem like a very good time to be studying IT.

Don't forget Open Day this weekend

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In an unrelated article,

Games breed aggression, also in The Australian.

But I can't help wondering, after reading Killing Monsters, if things !
are being represented accurately.

Even the title of the article is misleading. “Games breed aggression”! But the article only actually talks about “violent video games”. There is a big difference between the Sims, and Grand Theft Auto. And even then, I don't exactly fear for my safety when walking down the halls of the IT department. And lets face it, we have a lot of hard core gamers around here. Shouldn't they all be walking, talking sociopaths and mass murderers by now?

Killing Monsters actually points to research indicating a strong cathartic effect of gaming, violent or not.

This kind of sensationalist reporting is irresponsible.

So I have installed it and am very pleased to say that full usability has been restored.

I hope I'm not speaking too soon since all I've been able to do so far is download the latest upgrades, but that's an improvment over what I have been able to do. Safari seems to be good now as well.

Very pleased, I am.

Thanks Shane. If you hadn't stoped by my office, I would have suffered in silence a while longer before I realised things had been fixed.

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There is one thing that the show Aliass has done consistently well from the very beginning. It has always been a great vehicle for Jennifer Garner to show off how she looks in various outfits.

Apart from that, it has consistently annoyed me. I watched a few episodes of the first series but was always bothered by how silly the plots were. (for some strange reason I always imagined spies tried not to draw attention to themselves). During the second series, I actually started to enjoy it. Perhaps the writers had matured a bit and the characters had evolved. But the last series (not sure what number we are up to) really gave me the irits with all the Rambaldi stuff. They had gone from having interesting story arcs and sub plots, to just plain ridiculous. It just seemed a sort of half baked Da Vinci Code rip-off (which was half baked and derivative by itself). But they had Melissa George, so they were trying to make up f!
or the lack of story with twice the amount of booty.

Now the current series hits our (small) screens. I guess they must have fired the old writers and got a new bunch, and I’m guessing the brief they were given was something like “Make it good, like it used to be.” But somewhere along the line they must have got all confused and just tried to “make it like it used to be”. Each episode now, they have “covertly” recruited one of the old characters into the new special “Black Ops” story line, so that now they have pretty much all the original characters back in their original roles, plus a few others who must have proved to be popular along the way. But the writing just plain sucks worse than it ever did.

I think I’m going to give up on this one. And since 7 screening reruns of SG1, I think I’ll just start going to bed early on Thursdays, or better yet, get some of my research done

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It was one of my long standing gripes with Outlook was that it is an example of an application that tries to be all things to all people. Why do people think a good app is swiss army knife that does a hundred things, and can't manage to one of them well?

That's why I love Firefox and Thunderbird so much. They are stand alone apps that work well.

Apple has a similar mentality. The address book app stores all your addresses. That's it. Nothing else. Just stores your list of contacts. I did find I was able to establish relationships between address book entries; something I have always been frustrated about with Outlook.

Now what I open up the mail app, guess what it talks to to get it's address information? Right, the address book. Just like you would sensibly think it should.

When I open up the iCal app (a program I'm learning to l!
ove more and more each day) it automaticly populates itself with birthday reminders taken from information in the address book. How bloody sensible!

Even the iPod is like this. It does one thing. It does it well. I keep reading opinion articles about how Apples should develop the iPod as a PDA. Start giving it more features etc. Wisely, they are ignoring such suggestions. Just make it the best damn device at doing what it does.

The PDA I had (before my wife appropriated it) was good. But I was never satisfied that it did anything realy well. I kept wanting to recopmile the OS to trim the fat of all the useless apps it shiped with by default. Then it might have been better able to do a good job of the things I wanted it to do.

iTunes is another good app. Raj has just installed the Win version on his PC and was commenting how happy he was that since using it, it hasn't complained once about not havign the right codec, want to go lo!
oking for them , then 15 minutes later saying it couldn't find th
em and sorry it couldn't play that file.

This is not a Mac vrs thing. It's about an approach to development. Concentrate on what you want to achieve. Leave out the rest, you don't need it.

Yeah, it's the think I like about the Mac. It just works. It does what I want, and it does it well.]]>

But trying to do development work on a platform you are still trying to learn about has it's drawbacks.

Most of the barriers I have faced with my little iBook have been simply due to me not being familiar enough with the system itself.

I recently installed the latest version of BlueJ (Tiger friendly) but was unable to run even the demo programs that ship with it. Frustrated, I turned to the BlueJ FAQ and found that BlueJ uses sockets to talk between virtual machines while creating objects. I had cranked up the firewall to the point that the sockets were unable to talk to each other. A simple rule (allow localhost to talk to itself) and it is now working perfectly. (The BlueJ FAQ explains the steps).

I also recently installed the Free Pascal Compiler (also available for OSX) but had been completely unable to compile from the command line (terminal). Finaly I found the one tiny bit of information I needed. The path it installs the compiler to. Once that was set in my path, it worked well. But without that one tiny bit of usefull information…]]>

forum regarding open day. Anyone interested in attending on behalf of ByteClub, please have a read and get back to me.

Thanks. ]]>

Oh wait. Didn't this post just put me on top?

Doh!

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