Category Archives: Geek

Something Computer, Technology, or or otherwise geek related.

Unwritten Rules

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This is a rant, but it will be short.

What I’m fed up with recently, is.. “Law Enforcers” who enforce rules or laws that weren’t publicised.

A police officer arresting someone for doing something within the law is likely to face disciplinary action. However, police officers, parents, other authority figures regularly make requests regarding rules that they have never told their subjects about, and expect us to follow their requests, simply because they are in authority and we are not. That, I believe, is an abuse of power.

I made mention in my Letter to the Christian Internet Community, to a particular legal rule about IRC users under the age of 13. The network that enforced this rule has made no publication (as to date) of this particular rule on its website, on either of its widely advertised webpages of rules, or in its MOTD, viewable on connect.

I contacted the network, and they replied saying “Thanks for pointing this out” – another staff member followed up by saying “It’s in the Java chat, where most new users connect” – I still haven’t seen it, though I concede I wasn’t looking hard.

Today, it happened again. Same place, probably same op, this time asked me to remove a clone. I considered my options, and decided to save everyone some hassle and go with it. I then went and looked up the rules – and once again, there was no mention of it. The closest I could find was a rule against CloneBots, which, ladies and gentlemen, are not the same as a simple clone. The purpose of a clonebot (and the reason for banning them) is to make multiple connections from the same location, and flood a network or channel or server (not just IRC, can include web and mail sometimes also) – causing as much disruption as possible, whether it be by flooding text, flooding join/part, anything that prevents the server from being utilised as it was intended. The reason for cloning is that most flood protection systems will prevent against a single user, however if all the clones are individually not flooding, only causing disruption as a whole, they manage to stay online a little longer.

This is not my reason for cloning. My reason for cloning is simple, really. I have 2 computers that I regularly move between, one is a desktop, and is stationary at my house. When I’m at home, I use this in my living room. When I’m out, or in the bedroom, or anywhere I don’t feel like sitting in the desk chair, I use the macbook, and chat there. Sometimes, and this happens more than most might believe, I move between them quite a bit in short spaces of time. To save everyone disruption, and prevent my own confusion, I tend to leave both logged in at the same time.

This is going to be raised, once again with CCNet, and I will put to them two questions – if it’s for the purpose of saving problems rather than causing them, is it such an issue, and secondly, if it’s not a stated rule – why is it being enforced?

An authority figure making a request regarding a rule that they have never mentioned before, and expecting us to follow their requests, simply because they are in authority and we are not, I believe, is an abuse of power.

Light in the Darkness

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For the longest time, I’ve been somewhat of a purist with regards to my own photography. A “Take the photo, leave the photo alone.” type approach. More recently, however, I’ve been leaning back towards the idea of touching photos to gain a different feeling – whether it be cropping, framing, or in this case, selective colouring.

This is another shot from the EMU campus here in Harrisonburg, this time shot in colour, and selectively tinted so as the light is in colour and the rest of the shot is black and white. Generally when I do things like this it winds up looking tacky and/or cheesy, however I’m quite please with the turnout of this one.

Taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S9600 Digital, Shutter Speed 1s, a Focal Length of 17mm and an F-stop set at F/5, on ISO200.

Untitled Bench

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I used to name photos, but I haven’t yet thought of anything for this one. Maybe by the end of this post I’ll have come up with something.

This evening I took a walk to EMU, it is conveniently located a couple’ hundred yards from the apartment, and it has some cool settings to take photos, so I decided to take advantage of some of them.

This is pretty much just a bench, and I have several versions of this shot – all taken in manual mode with the same exposure time and aperture, however each different. The first was taken with flash, the second was taken with a covered flash, and the third was taken with no flash. It is amazing the differences just between these three settings.

Taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S9600 Digital, Shutter Speed 2s, a Focal Length of 14mm and an F-stop set at F/5, on ISO200.

My Media-space

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I thought it was time to give a glimpse of my media-space before I get too far. Starting from the left, the white box is my wife’s – it’s all DVD’s, it also has my NZ DVD player in it, waiting for me to buy a step-up transformer for it. To the right of that, on top is the TV, bought for us by Kelly’s sister and brother-in-law, topped with some of my card games. Below that is a DVD player and a VCR ($10.50 at a thrift store, works fine!), to the right of that is a 17″ monitor, below which is Telly – my P3 server. It is a Pentium 3 running at 866MHz, with 512MB RAM and a 160GB PATA hard disk. It runs Debian, and doesn’t do much at this point (although it has a bunch of my files, and an IRC bot that I use). Below Telly is the stereo, thanks Katie.

Behind the black to the right of the right-hand speaker, is the 550VA UPS, holding all the PC’s online and surge protecting everything else. The black, for reference, is a CD wallet containing all my music CD’s, 130-odd, and Cookiemonster, a presently unused Dell Latitude C610 – Pentium 3 Mobile, 733MHz/1Ghz, 256MB RAM, and an 80GB hard disk.

Right of that is the desk. 3 Computers here – The Dell is a Celeron 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM and I believe a 40GB Hard disk, this is the wife’s, however she has the laptop so it connects the other machines around the desk to the wireless upstairs. It also runs another IRC bot, that links two channels across two networks. (See http://www.livebravely.ca/)

Above the Dell, are 2 external hard disks connected to the white PC beside it. They are 160GB (Silver) and 320GB (Black) and are mostly used for backup and video editing. The white PC is the Windows Desktop, it is an Athlon 3200+, 1GB RAM, 320GB Internal PATA hard disk, running Windows XP Pro. Above this is another Dell Latitude laptop, this one a Pentium 4 Mobile 1.8GHz, with 512MB RAM and a 40GB hard disk, it is in testing as an Asterisk PABX (phone system) server. To the right of all this is just storage for various cables.

Don’t say it, I already know. I’m a geek. Or a nerd. Or both. Or some combination. However you choose to look at it.

Letter to the Christian Internet Community

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Prologue:

For the longest time, Christian IRC channels and networks have been targets for individuals looking to become power-hungry by getting onto staff, for dirty old men to pick up gullible teenage (or even pre-teen) girls (or boys) for a dirty evening of dirtiness, for annoying losers with too much time looking for an argument, or merely looking to annoy as many people as possible. They have been sought by people legitimately looking for help, for spiritual guidance, for a replacement to a real church with physical fellow-shipping, whether that be for lack of acceptance in their church, lack of ability to go to a church (e.g. physical and/or mental disabilities), or laziness.

Personally, I don’t feel the Christian IRC community (or the church as a whole) takes all of these seriously enough, nor does it allow for open discussion of certain topics deemed inappropriate for whatever reason. I believe the Christian Internet Community as a whole needs to work together more to promote our God in a positive manner, without the unnecessary bad-press created by negligence, by arrogance, by meanness, by downright idiocy and stupidity.

Not that I like telling the world how to change, in this post I will outline how and why I feel the Christian Community on the Internet needs to change, with a strong focus towards the IRC community. To the owners, to the operators, to the users, and to the attackers and disrupters, this is my letter to you all.

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Pleasing response to a complaint

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This is the kind of response that all organisations dealing with complaints should take notes from.

CCNet, or the Christian Chat Network, is well known in many circles as being very strict regarding rules and enforcements. For a long time, one could expect that even for writing this, I would be banned for a month, no questions asked.

Allow me to outline the complaint I had.

Here are my (edited outside chatter) logs from earlier today.

Jul 31 12:21:59 <Guest26178> this site is ok, but it is bare bones.
Jul 31 12:22:05 <PurpleHighlights> it’s been almost a year now I think since I’ve been on Second Life
Jul 31 12:22:12 <Kathe> whats second life?
Jul 31 12:22:18 <BrianB> it’s an online virtual world
Jul 31 12:22:23 <BrianB> i created an account and never used it
Jul 31 12:22:32 <Guest26178> they have come out with a new browser for it.
Jul 31 12:22:39 <Guest26178> it is free for basic membership
Jul 31 12:22:40 <Kathe> well i’m sorry you don’t like the set up here Guest26178
Jul 31 12:22:43 <Guest26178> but you can’t own land.
Jul 31 12:22:51 <Guest26178> it is ok
Jul 31 12:22:51 <PurpleHighlights> though for the other membership you pay, the basic is free
Jul 31 12:22:55 <Guest26178> for what it does
Jul 31 12:23:02 <BrianB> secondlife isn’t exactly moderated either
Jul 31 12:23:11 <BrianB> in fact there have been law suits over people’s, uh, “actions” in the game…
Jul 31 12:23:12 <PurpleHighlights> I’ve payed for imvu, I got hooked on imvu & bought my avatar, now a vip member have a access pass
Jul 31 12:23:17 <Guest26178> well Brian, you can get banned in SL. So it is moderated.
Jul 31 12:23:29 <BrianB> it isn’t moderated like this place
Jul 31 12:23:36 <PurpleHighlights> yes ppl can also get banned from imvu if they’re not careful
Jul 31 12:23:40 * Kathe things ccnet has enough ‘characters’ for her
Jul 31 12:23:45 <Guest26178> to use second life you need to download their browser.
Jul 31 12:24:01 <BrianB> well i was on IMVU last night and about fell over when i saw the first chatter’s nickname that i ran into, very ugly
Jul 31 12:24:04 <PurpleHighlights> I’ve had a friend banned from imvu, I don’t know what she did or said, but she went against the imvu tos
Jul 31 12:24:17 <BrianB> that’s why i chat here, it is safer 🙂
Jul 31 12:25:08 <Guest26178> here is an example of what you can do in SL.
Jul 31 12:25:27 <All_TGB_to_God_[Deut_18_13]> and btw….
Jul 31 12:25:32 <Guest26178> I went there one Sat. night and there was a Christian concert going on.
Jul 31 12:25:35 <All_TGB_to_God_[Deut_18_13]> i think ShoutLife is much better….
Jul 31 12:25:41 <BrianB> well
Jul 31 12:25:45 <All_TGB_to_God_[Deut_18_13]> even though i have never been to SecondLife, though…
Jul 31 12:25:46 <All_TGB_to_God_[Deut_18_13]> BUT..
Jul 31 12:25:51 <Guest26178> you sat in an ampitheater and watched it on a big screen.
Jul 31 12:25:53 <BrianB> the problem is waht else gose on around you….
Jul 31 12:25:55 <All_TGB_to_God_[Deut_18_13]> i really do like it HERE, though !! 🙂
Jul 31 12:25:59 <BrianB> that’s why we keep a clean environment

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