The online home of Appleman1234 / Benjamin Southall

Hey everyone,

I was supposed to blog earlier, but have been overwhelmed in a gooey mixture of assessment, my little brother’s birthday celebrations, unstable internet and slow software compiles. I still need to go shopping …, maybe I can find some time this weekend for that.

I had pork spare ribs (yesterday) last night at the Norman Hotel. (whose registered trademark (R) was Mycity’s worst vegetarian restaurant, (Mycity is replacing the city I live in just so the stalkers have to work extra hard ;P)) . They were more pork ribs than the pork spare ribs and the flavouring was more like sambal oelek, than proper spare rib seasoning, they weren’t bad but the ones I had at a BBQ were both cheaper and better tasting.

I was actually supposed to cook last night but had the plans changed on me at the last minute., only to be thrown in another unexpected situation of waiting a long time for a bus, when I could have walked home quicker. That said the internet at SLQ yesterday afternoon was quite unusually stable despite a long start up time, and the fact that it used neither baselayout (gentoo’s net scripts) nor knetworkmanager amazed me.

I just reloaded the kernel module and issued ifconfig eth1 up which is interestingly a subsection of the activities from last week’s 006 practical session. If I learnt anything from last week it would be that lectures are actually worth going despite how boring or irrelevant they may be. Anyhow I spent the rest of my day off yesterday typing / transcribing linear algebra notes from the lecture. Hooray we finally made it to eigenvalues and vectors, I thought the day would never come.

I also watched an awesome German movie”Vaya con Dios” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295001/) about three Cantorian monks and their journey from Germany to Italy, it was an interesting romantic comedy, much better than Love Actually or When Harry Met Sally etc. Daniel Bruhl did a wonderful job of playing Arbo (the young monk that had lived in a monastery his entire life, that falls in love with a journalist.) But that is kind of to be expected as Daniel Bruhl was in Joyeux Noel (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424205/) which is one of the best movies ever.

In short I recommend you watch Vaya con Dios as it displays numerous truths about the paths to God, Sin & the Church and the power of true love, not to mention Tassilo’s 3 jokes :). Prior to my day off I also had the luxury of meeting Redhatter in person and I must say it was a pleasant experience.

Cheater’s negativity is rely irritating me, it is like he has and AOE (area of effect) radius that negatively makes good things bad. I also accidently overwrote my linear algebra typed up notes (all 30 pages of matrics, formulae , worked examples and proofs). I tried to use Photorec and test disk to recover my files but as it was overwritten and not deleted.

I am now happy , mainly due to Dallas and his mac Phonebooth application and the Arnotts french fries I just ate. I also registered for ITSA, so now I am a member and probably on of their only Linux advocates. I am still trying to fix and optimise numerous packages for compilation, including creating the Netrek Vanilla Server and Cow client ebuilds.

I am also busy with finalising MAB101 quiz , 312 quiz and the group projects for both subjects, not to mention 008 , 006 and 711.

I am going to make a start and accomplish some of the many things on my todolist in Makagiga.

Other news, my webcam now works in AMSN albeit still unstable and with some colouring issues :).

Message of this post : Just keep swimming, Just keep swimming ……

BTW I will uploading more photos and some of my poetry and lyrics later on.

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Kill -9 by Monzy: See http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fow7iUaKrq4 or monzy.com enough said.

Petri Nets

I am doing my 008 Software enigeering methodology report on Petri nets, which is awesome because Petri nets pwn all other methodologies because

• They are a formal method and formal methods pawn. ( according to Week 2 Readings for 008 by Richard Thomas)
• The have interesting, cool, fun, quirky and even coloured diagrams and animations. (Go see the ones on Wikipedia, they are so much better than Waterfall model or Spiral Model diagrams and best of all they are comptiable with UML or see below)

• Now the best part (especially for me, being IT & Maths) Petri nets are and can be formally defined in mathematics and have mathematical properties. For all the mathematical goodness see the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_net .
• Also Petri nets are nondeterministic which gives you lots of freedom and options and freedom is good :).

Cheater pointed me to http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1396 , Vi vs Emacs is the best arch rivalry. A few years ago I learned vi and emacs fluently and also learned C and C++. I then used them both for a few months and then forgot them. I had to spend 15 to 30 minutes just remembering the save and quit commands for both of them. I now use nano on command line and kate or kwrite in GUI.

But enough with the history…, this moves me on to the topic of Pirate vs Ninja. I never really decided which one I was and when asked first by Gatl (I replied undecided) and now again by Cheater (I also replied undecided, to which he said that wasn’t possible…) , now that I think about it, Ninjas and Pirates are quite similar in fact the only things that seem to differ is people’s opinions and stereotypes of them.

Ninjas and Pirates both fight with sword usually. (Pirates with cutlass, Ninja with Katana or the smaller ninja sword with the really long name)

Ninjas and Pirates are generally both dishonourable characters. (Yes Ninjas have no honour, they are assassins and spies, the samurais where the ones with honours)

Ninjas and Pirates are both resourceful in combat.

Ninjas and Pirates both usually fight to train, for money / treasure or for power. (Both can also be mercenarys)

Ninjas and Pirates respectively both band together in groups.

Ninjas and Pirates both prefer stealth and surprising their opponents.

Ninjas and Pirates both use napalm / pitch, poison and gunpowder :).

Ninja and Pirates both like the colour black, although Ninjas do wear it more often unless they are disguised.

Ninja and Pirates both practice guerrilla warfare.

Ninja and Pirates both enjoy alcohol. (Yes belief it or not Ninjas like Saki as much as any other Japanese person or non Japanese person for that matter)

Ninjas and Pirates are both not that special, they are just people that practiced the craft of piracy or the art of ninjitsu.

Ninjas and Pirates are quick to betray … (not-loyal) .

Not sure if female pirates existed, but female ninjas definitely did. I am of the opinion female pirates should have existed.

Ninjas and Pirates both use and create chaos to achieve their objectives.

Ninjas and Pirates both like being free.

All lot of real Japanese pirates (before pirates were modernised in to the crap with guns and speedboats), had a decent knowledge of Ninjitsu.

And numerous other similarities….

I am still not decided, but think that if Pirates & Ninjas meet by accident they wouldn’t fight without reason, rather they would go their own separate ways.

Also as my webcam works some more photos of me will be available in my gallery .

And now the stupidity epidemic, The Stupidity epidemic is currently effecting humanity, please use your remaining intelligence that hasn’t been watered down by the media, reality , your country’s education system, to avert suffering stupidity and to immunise your friends against stupidity.

Another symptom of this epidemic is ignorance and that should be avoided as well where possible, question , learn , understand, think critically but don’t become a heartless cynical hypercritical atheist pure logic bastard, because another major symptom of this epidemic is emotional ignorance and stupidity.

Things you can do to promote intelligence, think, think before you speak, think deeper, play games that require thought instead of just point click, be imaginative and creative, feel, believe, love and smile, etc, etc..

Best of luck saving your friends,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

(This blog’s question is If knew you would die tomorrow, what would you do before tomorrow comes ?

Hey Everyone,

I am finally settled in, in the city. Uni is back and I am working hard and having fun, Laptop screen isn’t fixed, but HDD is upgraded to 100gb and battery is already fixed. I also now know how Brisbane transport system works. Speaking of systems reminds me of my new subjects MAD (008, Modeling Analysis and Design, information systems ) and Linear Algebra (MAB312, linear systems.)

It is good to see that the Greenroom hasn’t changed much. Still gamers, still same amount of 2 years hanging around (possibly a few more), although we are missing Adios, Everest and CS 1.6. I misplaced my gaming cd case,if anyone finds a red and black cd case full of linux games, please return to me. I really like MAB312, the matrix tricks Ian Turner showed us in the second lecture were so awesome. (spliting big matrices into small matrices and doing operations etc)

Despite all my worries I know have Maple 9.5 (I haven’t upgraded to 11 yet) working on my Sabayon Linux (Gentoo derivative ) and Minitab 15.1 working in WINE for MAB101. It is amazing I go away from Cheater’s negative / critical thoughts and my wireless reception improves, my webcam errors disappear (with a small C hack as well) and my Beryl stability improves and my networking and WINE setups are as easy as pie.

Subject summary

MAB312 : Great and lots of fun
MAB101: So far it isn’t nothing new …, but I am glad that I have great group for group project and that Minitab works
ITB008: Alright, heavy workload but good project group despite deserter.
ITB006: This subject is pretty awesome, well at least the Linux pracs, as Dallas said on the way home, the lecturer would have gotten more attention from the late night crowd if he had focused on wireless network protocols instead of wired.
ITB711: So far I don’t enjoy this subject, 1. It is C#, 2. I find its principles on Programming by Contract superfluous, just as you would find 3 seatbelts for one seat superfluous. 3. Because of the standard of communication by the teaching staff (I have nothing against different backgrounds, races etc or weird accents, but making basic grammar errors while teaching material that is already obfuscated by its nature, does make it tedious and more difficult ) Hopefully I will eventually like this subject, when I get to write some useful code.

In order to get Minitab to work I have to switch some of its DLLs with the ones provided by Klaspery (or something like that) Antivirus and get Maple working was just old export hack :). sed ftw

Other projects I have stumbled upon include Ruben’s multicast chat client, that doesn’t work cross platform yet, Meritorious (I will provide the url for this cool game when I find it again), PXE & pxelinux and many others.

I have also been asking questions religion-wise / belief wise but haven’t moved much further yet. Note to people if you want to contact me do so, if I don’t want to be contacted due to being in class or lecture I will say so. Note to people that abused be in the greenroom: you just got caught by the fish. Note to people that didn’t get any of the other notes : Hi how are you people ?

I want my copy of UT2004 and Condition Zero back. I have been singing on the way to Uni, at the moment is the same random free thought flow as normal, but if I find anything worth remembering I will publish it. BTW I also upgraded to WP 2.1.2 and I have my todo list in Makagiga, which contains lots of different things to blog about and upload.

Explanation of server downtime: It got phising, then it went AWOL, but it is all better now. (/me points to bandaid and bo bos). Also Chendo has given the Xbox AV cable that he bought to QUT FIT people, so the first years can get new TV, even though he didn’t steal the old one…., This is kind of generosity and kindness the first years should be thankful for.

If this is short, well it is because more will come and if not then Oops

Have fun and keep living

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

PS: Question is What question would you like to ask me ?

PPS: I finally to stop caring / responding when people insult me or Linux, I have been playing victim since grade 1 for the fun of it, but the same regurgitated crap is getting boring.