We've moved!!

My blog has moved. You are visiting the wrong site.

Just trying to make that clear. My site has moved from blogger to toto in the hopes of being more lightweight and just more clean-looking in general. You can visit it at http://akam.me, all of the posts that are on this blog have been transferred to the new one, so there's really no reason for you to be here. Shoo!!

Moving past WYSIWYG

One thing that I have always loved about owning a domain is the ability to host multiple services at one address. For instance, I could have my blog address at one subdomain, a file server at another, and maybe throw in a tumblr or soup account for fun. At the moment, the only service that I currently have running at this domain is a blog and a catchall email address, which have now just realized hasn't been checked since I created it. Hmm. Anyway. The advantage to having these subdomains is that while they make your site slightly more complicated (which can be easily rectified with a know-how of when to put what links when), they add significant customization options.

While it may not be 100% evident that I'm using Blogger right now (seeing as I've removed the navbar and the only hint is a tiny bit of text at the bottom of each page), it is very much my preferred blogging engine. I'd go with WordPress, but as I've said previously WordPress.com tends to put a price on a lot of basic features that Blogger gives to me for free (thank you, Google Business Model). A nice feature of Blogger is that not only do they let me publish my blog to a specific domain, but they let me specify a missing file server as well. This means that if I request a page to my domain that doesn't exist as per my blogger account, Blogger will defer to the missing file server to see if any other files exist on that specific file path. I'm planning on setting one up soon, just as soon as I finish coding some other stuff first.

What exactly does this give me? Well, for one, it transcends the limitations of a WYSIWYG-nature site like Blogger. WYSIWYG, short for What You See Is What You Get, basically means that I can be sure that the blog post that I am typing right now will indeed appear on my site as these exact words, in the format that I have specified using the toolbar above this text box. Unfortunately, this also means that I can't program in any sort of dynamic content into my site. Let's take a simple PHP script as an example:


What you're currently looking at is not WYSIWYG. If it were, that's exactly what you'd see if you were to query that PHP script from a webserver. Instead, what we simply see is two friendly words: hello world!

Of course, WYSIWYG works in the majority of simple situations. Ironically, WYSIWYG is practically nonexistent on the web; although I am currently typing this post in a text box, there's a script that's going to be called when I hit the "post" button that will automagically format all of this text into the proper HTML equivalents. You're simply viewing this text like this because your browser is interpreting the HTML tags around everything I type and is translating it into something that looks much more attractive to your eyes. Try viewing the source to this page (usually found in the Edit menu, search around on Google to find the appropriate function in your browser). That is what this site really looks like. Hurting your eyes? Try looking at it for hours on end; the code you're seeing is the sweat and blood of many web developers' hard work.

Got my keyboard!!

Hello internet!

My keyboard arrived in the mail, so I decided to make a post out of sheer excitement. It honestly types like a dream, I've never typed on a keyboard more awesome. The give is perfect, and it's completely unmarked, so I really look like a pro while I'm typing. Now on to some real news... or at least, what I consider real news.

I managed to get my club passed after being asked and turned down by 3 faculty sponsors. That was slightly more than I would have expected, but whatever, at least we have a sponsor now! The activity is going to be reviewed over Spring Break by the activities committee, and hopefully they'll approve it. I have a feeling though that, given the amount of faculty sponsors that turned me down, I shouldn't feel too optimistic about the outcome of their decision. One thing's for sure though: if it's passed, it'll be a lot of fun, and the logo looks absolutely kick-ass!!

Also, during cycling practice today (or what little we had), my coach's bike got hit by a car and subsequently ran into 3 members of a team. There was a bit of an accident but everybody was fine. At least it offered us a good chance to get to know the rest of the team; me and my co-captain sat with them on the side of the road and had a fun discussion.

That's kind of it in terms of updates, I'm just geeking out about my new keyboard. I need to come up with a name for it/him/her. I also need to decide s/he/it's gender.

Starting A Club At School

I've thought on the idea for a while, and I think that I've ironed a lot out and I've gotten quite a few people behind me. It's not going to be a club about technology, as many would expect from me, but rather a political club. My old school had a Young Republican's Association, and though my current school doesn't (if I remember correctly), they do have the "Fellowship of Christian Athletes", which basically means the same thing, not to sound too politically charged or anything. Bref! I want to start the Young Proletariat's Union, which is going to be an appropriate euphemism for a Socialist / Communist club.

Now, you might be thinking that I'm planning on staging a mass revolt that's going to take place throughout the entire United States -- I'm not planning an uprising, that would be ridiculous. Instead I'm just providing an experimental environment (assuming that this can get through) where we schedule frequent meetings, discuss current events, and potentially design a system of our own. I was also planning on some historical discussions involving the USSR, the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of North Korea), and the PRC (People's Republic of China), put more simply the first three communist powers that usually come to mind.

If this gets out of hand, I might end up having to shut it down. It's probably not going to pass, and if it does, it might get shut down before I have the chance to do it myself, but the main goal of the club is to soften the American mind to the idea of services provided by the government. Of course a fully communist system would be ridiculous. History has proven that the best system is a mix of these two. And it's for this reason that America needs to become less afraid of the idea of communism. Sure, it's the exact opposite of the current system that we have. Sure, we fought several wars and spent a lot of money to make sure that this never happened. But look at Europe; they felt the effects of these wars far more than we ever did, and yet much of their daily lives are regulated by the government, they're run well, and many of these countries still manage to be within the top 10 economic powers of the world. It's like one of my best friends said back in France: America's great, but it could be so much better! This starts with us opening our minds to new ideas and letting our system change with its changing environment.

Also, on a completely different note, my Das Keyboard is arriving on Wednesay! Super excited. :)

TGV Photos Have Arrived!!

A good friend of ours is a TGV train conductor. This basically means that he has the best job in the entire world, because he gets to drive a bullet train at 320kmh (200mh) on a daily basis. I had the extremely lucky chance of being able to ride along with him, and actually drive the train at its top speed. I just got a letter in the post from him, attached was a CD full of the pictures and videos that I took and that his daughter took while I was driving the train. We had the most awesome time; here are a few photos/videos of the experience!!

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Get your own

Grounded -- hopefully.

Forgive me in advance for my pathetic grammar, it's early and I'm trying to pass the time by writing a blog post while my kernel compiles.

I have to stop naming my titles ambiguous names. No, I am not grounded. I'm grounded in terms of my distribution-changing madness. It's over. For now. I've settled with Debian, using the GNOME interface. I realize that that's pretty much exactly where I started, but I stuck with Debian instead of Ubuntu because I like to tell myself that I actually got somewhere with this whole thing. Also, I've decided to not go with as much eye candy because it's starting to detract from my need to actually do work.

So Debian it is. And it's very minimal, which I like a lot. The brightness control works (ditched KDE because it didn't support it), and I'm fairly sure that I could get the keyboard backlighting working with some effort. At this precise moment I'm hardening my kernel with grsecurity, a tool that basically fills in a few security holes in the system to prevent intrusions. Lightweight...ness and security are the two things that I'm going for and I intend to achieve them if I can't have anything else. Also, there are a few slight differences between Debian and Ubuntu, and I like a lot of them. My only complaint is that it's not very keen on giving me compositing support, which could be due to the NVIDIA driver that my MacBook Pro uses.

I installed my system as per this guide, and the disk encryption is fantastic. Only hitch is that I deleted the Mac OS X partition that I had installed (oops) for the purpose of installing rEFIt, which is an EFI bootloader designed to not suck as much as Apple's. Thinking that this software would, you know, be written to the bloody EFI partition was apparently too much of an assumption, because it disappeared as soon as I got rid of Leopard. Oh, well. I'm currently just booting off of their handy rEFIt CDROM, which then points the computer to the GRUB partition that I have installed. So that's nice.

Amidst all of this distro panic and exam worries (thankfully I only got one B+, the rest were above!), unfortunately, I wasn't able to work on my PHP project. I'm going to try to explain myself to my teacher tomorrow, hopefully he'll forgive me. I feel pretty guilty about wasting my parents' money for an hour of us sitting around not going over the code that I've written.

On a happier note, if any of you are interested in a screenshot of my new and (hopefully) here to stay system, feast your eyes!!

iPhone and moving.

No, not that kind of moving. Just moving distributions -- yes, that's right, I'm really having a distribution identity crisis at the moment, but the only reason that it's happening is because I'm frustrated with Ubuntu's slowness and lack of customization options. So instead of Xubuntu, which honestly has served me quite well, I'm moving on to Kubuntu instead, because while Xubuntu was nice and fast, I don't have it quite like I want it, the device support is shaky (couldn't get keyboard backlighting to work and apparently sound recording is a nono on any of their machines), and I absolutely love the KDE desktop widget functionality. So KDE it is! For now. If sound recording doesn't work on that I might go berserk.

Speaking of sound recording, my last post was a video whose audio was made possible by my new trusty iPhone, courtesy of a friend of a friend. And while we're (sort of) still on the subject of customization, he jailbroke it for me so that it would work on my carrier (AT&T) without a data plan, so that I wouldn't have to pay $30/month extra to get it to work (although now, funnily enough, I've purchased their 200MB data plan because a friend got me hooked on Foursquare). Wasting no time, I immediately customized everything customizable on the machine, although sadly enough Jobs isn't releasing the 4.0 update to the iPhone 2G, which is the generation that I have, so I can't download most of the things on the Cydia store like tethering or multitasking. Which I actually don't mind, because I only have a 200MB data plan and the iPhone 2G's CPU definitely isn't the fastest thing in the world. With some Locktool and Fontswap magic I was able to completely change my lock screen:

That's the Ubuntu title font combined with the HTC Clock, with the slide to unlock removed (the gesture still unlocks it, the button's just gone). I'm so proud of myself. Also, I installed a terminal app, so I can ssh into my Mac and make it say dirty things. Hehehehe.