Ubuntu - Preliminary Thoughts

So I've just finished tinkering around with the most recent incarnation of Ubuntu Linux (version 9.04, or "Jaunty Jackalope" as it was referred to in development), and being both a relative newcomer to Linux* and a complete newcomer to Ubuntu specifically, I've got a few things that I'd like to get down before they leave my head.

First off, the Live CD that I ran the operating system from was relatively easy to assemble from scratch, and I appreciated that.  All I had to do was download the ISO disk image, burn the image to a CD, and that was that.  Then I shut the computer down, started it back up, and told it to boot from the CD in its drive.  All very simple, if a bit nerve-wracking for someone who doesn't do this sort of thing very often (like me).

I tend to avoid screwing with operating systems in general.  I think of tinkering with OSes as the digital equivalent of attempting neurosurgery with a rusty screwdriver and a copy of The Human Brain for Dummies.  I just don't think of myself as someone capable of wielding that sort of expertise.  But here I am trying anyway, because I've gotten so bloody sick of Windows.  The boot from CD was very smooth, in any case.

Now, the actual desktop environment of Ubuntu, once it started up?  Lovely.  As compared to the way my cluttered Windows desktop looks (which is, admittedly, partly my fault), the wide open, empty spaces of Ubuntu's working environment are incredibly Zen.  Just take a look at the screenshot (borrowed from the ever-helpful Wikipedia) above.  As in the various incarnations of the Macintosh operating system, application shortcuts are not automatically relegated to the desktop.  Applications are instead clustered rather appropriately in the "Applications" menu at the top of the screen, and are further divided into submenus such as "Internet", "Office", and "Games".  I don't know how well the menu would hold up after I added the approximately eight million other programs that I would invariably download, but it shows promise.

The "Places" menu contains shortcuts to various sections of the hard drive--"Documents", "Music", and so on--making it fairly self-explanatory.  The "System" menu is rather a lot like the Windows Control Panel--again, pretty obvious.

Now for something that may not be immediately evident from the screenshot above: Ubuntu 9.04 moves fast.  It may just be that I'm used to the plod of my five-year-old Windows XP installation, but shit.  Firefox started up considerably faster than I've ever seen it manage on Windows, and that was just the first session with it.  Subsequent reopenings of the application came up in a flash.  The image and PDF viewers also opened up very quickly, and the whole experience just felt smooth.

Ubuntu didn't seem to have any complaints about my hardware, either.  Sound and display both worked, and it even responded to the volume controls built into my laptop.  All I had to do to connect to my apartment's wireless network was choose said network in a drop-down menu and enter the key--Ubuntu had already recognized my wireless card and put it to work.  And on top of all this, I'm pretty sure it causes less heat buildup in my laptop than XP does.

Now for the things that I'm less than satisfied with.

First off, I tried to play some .mp3s and .flvs, among others, and found that I couldn't.  Out of the box, Ubuntu's media player doesn't support those formats.  I understood when it refused to let me play a .wmv--that's proprietary Windows shit right there--but it seemed especially odd that it would deny me the pleasure of listening to an .mp3, considering both .mp3's incredible popularity and the fact that the .mp3 format is not proprietary.  The program helpfully offered to search for codec packages that contained the above formats, but since I was running the whole shebang from a CD I couldn't very well install plugins.  So I had to pass.

On a related note, Ubuntu can't run iTunes--not even in an emulator like** WINE--and there is no suitable substitute for it at this time.  There are some applications that work similarly, and some that can even manage my iPod, but none do everything that iTunes ever-so-tidily does.

One of the big hangups I had was that, while Ubuntu immediately recognized my HP Laserjet 1012 printer and allowed me to print to it, the margins came out consistently wrong.  It seemed to assume that the actual physical pages in the printer were of a longer format than the 8.5 x 11 size that I had specified, and so the margins were all off.  After a bit of investigation, I couldn't find a way to fix it, so I moved along.  It was a sticking point, for sure.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on Ubuntu, having tinkered with it for a few hours.  Overall, I had a good experience with it, I think.  The big selling point for me was the elegance of the interface and the overall speed of it.  Wikipedia warns that running Ubuntu from a Live CD can cause performance loss because the computer has to load applications from the disc, but if there was any performance loss, I certainly didn't notice it.  I can only imagine how it would run without the CD.

I'll probably be working in Ubuntu on and off over the next few days, just to get more of a feel for it.  It's a honeymoon period right now, for sure.  If all goes well, I may deign to clear out enough of my laptop's hard drive that I can do a real installation, and dual-boot my PC like a true geek.

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* I've never used any of the graphical, Windows-style incarnations of Linux, only the bare-bones networked command line version furnished by my computer science classes at university.

** Silly me.  I did some research, and turns out that Wine Is Not an Emulator.  It's a translation layer.

Requiescat in Pace, Geocities

You have probably heard that Yahoo! is shutting Geocities down. Unlike most people, I don't have especially strong feelings about Geocities. I know that my personal experiences with sites hosted there haven't been the best in the world. They have been glittery, certainly, and generally pink, but they've not been terribly good. But I don't loathe Geocities with a great and terrible passion, as some seem to. Geocities taught all of us a very important lesson: no matter if the information on a page is the truest and most dependable in the world, nobody will take it seriously if the layout looks like sparkly, puff-painted ass.

They also taught us that hit counters are kind of tacky, regardless of the content preceding them.

One valiant fellow, though, is endeavoring to archive Geocities, which seems to me to be a Quixotic effort both in scope and purpose. He is storing it away for posterity, which I suppose is as fine a thing as anyone can do, nowadays. Though I can't imagine the sort of historian who, two hundred or three hundred years from now, will be willing to unplug themselves from the full sensory cavalcade of their immersive Hypernet (wherein textual data synaesthetically tastes like bacon), fire up a Windows emulator, and say, "I'm going to dig through thousands upon thousands of these ancient Geocities pages in order to piece together a view of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."

I further am unwilling to imagine what sort of historic viewpoint such a trawl through those archives would present. At best, we'd look to be a culture forever obsessed with meaningless ephemera and punching monkeys to win twenty dollars. At worst, we'd look to be a culture forever obsessed with Comic Sans.

Anyway, for his efforts to archive the sociological leavings of the past decade and a half, I have to salute Jason Scott. Geocities was a vital step, in its own way. Without it, we probably wouldn't have marvels like Facebook and Blogger kicking around.

That would make for one lonely Internet. RIP, Geocities.

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"Does nineteen work for you?"

Nothing Up My Sleeve...

As I'm sure is the case with a lot of you, the idea of procedural generation of content has also fascinated me ever since the release of Spore last year, which allowed players to design truly bizarre creatures and then puzzled out precisely how they moved just on the basis of the creature's form (among other things).  While I have yet to actually play Spore (as I have a relatively low-end computer), I am still duly impressed by reports of how it manages this sort of thing.

For those of you who have never heard of Spore and consider the Wikipedia article I linked to about procedural generation a tl;dr situation, let me see if I can sum it up for you: procedural generation is the creation, by way of an algorithm in a computer program (in this case, a game), of content that did not exist at the moment the program was run.  In the Spore example, the procedurally-generated content is your creature's walking animation.  There's no way that the programmers could account for all possible permutations of the various bits and pieces of the game's creatures, so they wrote a chunk of code that allows the game to create the animation on the fly.

The most impressive example of procedurally-generated content I have found thus far is a game called .kkrieger.  Here is the gameplay screenshot that is featured in its Wikipedia article.  Click on it for a larger size.

A traditionally-created game--one that has independent files for models, textures, and animations that are referenced by a core program--that looks like this one would probably occupy a few hundred megabytes of disk space at least.  Plenty of games out there run into multi-gigabyte territory (Halo and World of Warcraft are just a couple that spring to mind--my gaming is a bit dated, admittedly).  But .kkrieger occupies only 96k.  That's it.  I've seen Word files that are bigger!  All those pretty things in that screenshot?  The models, textures, animations, and even music are all generated during the game's hella long loading time.  None of it is hard-coded or included in separate files.  It builds itself from the ground up every time it's run.

Given, it takes a PC with some pretty hefty processing power to play the thing, but the fact that it works at all is fascinating to me.

Other examples of games that use procedural generation can be found in the Wikipedia article about it.  Right off the top of my head, I know that Dwarf Fortress uses it to create entire worlds, including their histories and legends (pretty spiffy), and a lot of the games over at Java4k use it to keep their file sizes down at the 4k maximum size for the competition.

I'll warn you, though, those games at Java4k can be damned addictive.  Enter at your own risk.

Anyway, this was just something that I thought was awesome and consequently wanted to share.  You may all go about your lives now.

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"The Tao did not wish for him to pass."

Running the Gauntlet

As much as I've bitched and bellyached about grad school, I think it has done me some good. I've gotten some of the best literary exercise I could possibly imagine during the past two semesters, and I think it was exercise I sorely needed. As much as I really, really hated writing sci-fi and fantasy when every other person in the bloody world seemed to be writing realism, I think it was the best thing that could have happened. It forced me to pay as much attention to the human aspects of the story as I do to the fantastical parts.

I think I'd really, truly managed that in only one story up until I started grad school. And that story is still my absolute favorite of everything I've ever written. It was one of those that was like silk off a spool, right from the very beginning. At least, it feels like that, looking back on it. And I knew I had something special by the time I was even partway done. I just didn't realize why until much, much later. It was because, deep down at the heart of it, past the wizards and the royalty and the fantasy bric-a-brac, the two main characters were absolutely human, and they acted it. And their personal realness extended out to the rest of the story, despite its fairy-tale-ish trappings, to make the world they occupied real.

So I guess I understand what was going through Christian Bale's mind when he initially turned down the role of John Connor in the new Terminator. True, special effects are awesome. And that's what a lot of the trappings of fantasy and science fiction are: special effects. That is in no way meant to belittle them, either. I love the conventions of fantasy and sci-fi. They're great fun. And you can build a fun story based on special effects alone. It's absolutely possible. You get the literary equivalent of a popcorn flick, which runs on sheer enthusiasm in order to get its paper-thin protagonists from one plot point to the next. The problem is that, unless it is particularly uninhibited in its exuberance, few people are going to remember that sort of thing two days after they've read it. Just like with a movie that's all CGI flash and zero storytelling substance.

So if you really want to fill out a story, to give it genuine weight, to make it memorable, then your characters have to be people. In all their beautifully ugly glory. And that's really all there is to it.

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We were going to use the time machine to prevent the robot apocalypse, but the guy who built it was an electrical engineer.

Well, Here I Am

I return! It's six months later, and not much has really changed. Time marches on, as does entropy. We're that much closer to the eventual heat death of the universe, and I still haven't gotten my fucking copy of CthulhuTech. But such is life, and so it goes.

I have gotten a copy of the Sailor Moon RPG put out by Guardians of Order in 1998. For, like seven dollars. Why yes, I am a huge nerd. Was there ever any question? I was actually surprised at how well-assembled it was. I got it for a chuckle, but now I'm seriously considering running a game with it.

That, though, will have to come after the Serenity one-shot I'm going to run in the next couple of weeks, and the Exalted 2e one-shot I fully intend to run sometime after that. It's been way too long since I've had an Exalted fix--since I've had a tabletop roleplaying fix of any sort, really. But that'll be rectified soon.

During my absence I've done a ridiculous amount of writing (some of it good, some of it bad, some of it poetry). My most recent endeavor has been in league with a friend of mine, and it is a webcomic called Fancy That. There's a big friendly banner for it in this blog's sidebar now, if you'd like to take a look. It updates Monday/Wednesday/Friday, like Penny Arcade, which I love so very much. Unlike PA, though, Fancy That suffers from, to borrow a phrase coined by Jerry Holkins, dreaded continuity. I hope you'll enjoy it anyway.

I'm going to try to keep this blog updated on a fairly regular basis. There are no guarantees, though the possibility of there being a post any given day will probably go up sometime in May. Just because. I'm also going to try to keep this blog closer to its stated topics. I was rather lax about that in the past, but no longer. If it's not about writing, gaming, or geekery, it will not appear in these hallowed pages.

I'm sure you'll sleep better at night knowing that.

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I'm going to run away to the lesbian circus!