freshbytes

First up: I do apologise for the late blog post. In my defence, I blame Chris

We’ll be having two posts this weekend, the other one will come shortly when I have no other things to work on

Weekend roundup: Meh, the usual suspects:

• Radi8 consisted of a little hangout time (enjoyable), a quasi-Radi8tion/GamesMania (Black team takes out the Radi8tion cup, for the third or the fourth time), a small iTunes workshop (both informative and interesting), some interesting pancakes (ham, pineapple – they belong on pizza, NOT pancakes), some small group time (death and sex – and interesting combination) and then praise and worship.
• -=(NoSpoon)=- group gaming session – we’ve made a couple of changes to this. Times are still the same (from 8pm-12am), but we now also run TeamSpeak (email one of the admins for server details, etc), as well as a couple of new games; Urban Terror (a CS knockoff game, entertaining nonetheless) as well as Trackmania Nations Forever. Battlefield 1942 is also expected to get going, at least once Chris finds some disk space so he can actually install the thing… We haven’t given up entirely on CZ, though, but we’re working on getting a VPN going (via Hamachi) so we can share iTunes libraries and play games over a “local” network. Chris and I have been “experimenting” with this over the last couple of days, and we seem to have got it going, with a little less lag than internet servers. Again, talk to the admins if you want to know the details. I’ve also changed my clan tag to ((NS)) verbos3, because having -=(NoSpoon)=- gamertag isn’t the best look in any game… You guys should all follow!
• Work – work as usual. Relatively quiet, though, and that goes for the entire CBD. Maybe it’s just winter, but people just don’t seem to want to come out of the warmth of their beds – and funnily enough, I don’t blame them..

If there’s anything I’ve missed (I’m not perfect, far from it) please tell me and I’ll endeavour to add it as soon as I get around to it

Oh – happy holidays, you private-school students. You deserve them!

Otherwise, it’s comments as usual. By now, surely you know where to put em

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: games, hamachi, NoSpoon, radi8, vpn

Yeah, 2nd Tech post in a day – if you’re wondering what is going on, read on… Otherwise, game on!

When it comes to internet in Australia, there is only one person that has all the info. That person is Simon Hackett, the current CEO of both Internode and Agile. Simon’s work in the area of Australian Broadband access is nothing short of extraordinary, and his blog reflects his thoughts.

Apart from being CEO of two of the best Internet-related companies in Australia (Yeah, we do love you, Cisco), Hackett is also a Mac user – which just makes this blogger respect him even more.

Recently, he has posted an article about the current state of Fibre-To-The-Node, a fast broadband access plan for all Australians. Unfortunately, this plan by the government has some major flaws, and over at his blog, he posts a slideshow of why it isn’t the optimal plan for improving broadband speeds in Australia.

Read all about it here: An Inconvenient Truth about FTTN.

Original post credit to MacTalk Australia. Their post can be found here.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: agile, fttn, internode, simon hackett

Yes, after all the time it took for the Linux kernel guys to do some hacking & patching, kernel 2.6.25 was released last night. The last release before this one, 2.6.24, was released back in January.

I’m not sure of the differences in the versions, but I do know that this release includes the ath5k wireless driver. For those not in the know, ath5k is the Open Source Atheros wireless driver. There are many bug fixes in this release, as found when checking through the Changelog.

It is well noted that the Kernel Devs did not use this release as a ‘new feature’ release. Sure, there may be a few little new features, but as far as I know, the next release (2.6.26) is going to have a few new features worth mentioning.

Check it out anyway, either ’cause you want to be up to date or you like checking out really new stuff (or you want a little cred!).

Links to checkout:

http://kernel.org

The changelog (word of warning: this will take a little while to load)

Once again, enjoy.

written by Chris Jacques \\ tags: kernel, linux

Oh yeah, FTW!

Once there was 1 great site, then there were many. Now the original great is back!
I mean, The Pirate Bay is cool, but there is only 1 other site that is more awesome…

DEMONOID!

slashdot article:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/13/007246&from=rss
actual site:
http://www.demonoid.com

And so it was. The first tracker I ever used with BT…online once again. Of course, this doesn’t mean that i’m not going to use TPB anymore. I’ll just use both. No more crap torrent search via google for rare stuff, there isn’t a need for it anymore!

Remember that in order to do some stuff, you need to have an account (yes, I have one). Though, if you read the slashdot article, some users are still wary that the whole thing might be a huge setup. I’m going to let the dust settle before I log back in (and change my IP address, thankfully from changing ISP’s).

And thus did my great torrent machine rejoice, for the grand master has returned!

Enjoy.

written by Chris Jacques \\ tags: bittorrent, onlinerights, privacy

OSX>Linux>Windows

Yeah, so the rumours are true. I DO like OSX better then Linux. Before you get all Linus Torvalds on me, just hear me out…

I used to love Linux, I did. Sure, the freeness was really, really, good – as was the security, and the feeling of “Wow, I’m using something that doesn’t contribute to MS”. But like anything, the novelty wore off a bit – suddenly, apt-get was screwing up installs of programs, numerous compatibility issues rose their head(s), and finally, after stuffing around with a binary operating system (I’m looking straight at you, Ubuntu) it was time to go hard-core – and compile things from source.

Enter Gentoo, from the Gentoo Penguin – designed for speed. Well, source code takes ages to compile when you’re running on ancient hardware, and needless to say – Gentoo was a cruel operating system. Sure, after the code compiled, it was (reasonably) fast, and all was good. That is, until the minor issues like USB drives not auto-mounting on insert, doing the deluge of incredible, arcane stuff that you had to get things working “just right” – you know what I mean, like setting the CFLAGS, USE-FLAGS, and the kernel config – just seemed like too much work. Operating systems are supposed to be easy, not a battle of wills between the OS and the user! Far out, at least in Ubuntu, things “just worked”. I didn’t need to install a program/daemon just to get USB sticks automount on insertion! You know there is something wrong when simple things like that just don’t work.

Sure, maybe I was being a bit of a n00b when I installed it. Maybe I didn’t read all the instructions properly. But everything else worked fine! I don’t understand why it has to be that hard to get things to work properly. Anyway, as a direct result of this, I have now given up Linux. Sure, I’d still use it over Windows any day (cept for games – Windows for games) but other than that, Linux is only a tiny blip on the radar of this particular blogger.

Why Mac? Well, it “just works”. No messing about. No fussing with crazy configs, man pages, or anything like that. While those features are still there in OSX, you don’t need to touch them once to become proficient in OSX. No, becuase the GUI is so powerful in OSX, you have Linux command-line tools such as netcat become integrated into an awesome GUI – albeit without the more advanced options so that even novice users can use OSX. In Leopard, FSEvents (derived from yet another Linux command-line tool) has become the background workings to the best backup system available in any OS today – Time Machine. All this just contributes to the awesome power of the GU – flawless, yet so easy to use and advanced enough for the average user.

Windows is only good for games. Enough said.

Comments below, thanks.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: apple, linux, osx, pc, windows

Hahahaha!

Just saw the funniest thing on the internets; check it out for yourself!

It’s a song made from sounds only found in Mac OSX. Awesome!

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: jam, mac, osx, sounds