Troseph

I was wondering why my site was taking FOREVER to load… Looks like something between Comcast and level3.net (AT&T) is really bad.. Here is the trace:

troy@troy-desktop:~$ sudo traceroute troy-watson.com
traceroute to troy-watson.com (69.89.31.181), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1  * * *
2  * * *
3  * * *
4  COMCAST-IP.car1.Seattle1.Level3.net (4.79.104.110)  1051.037 ms * *
5  * * *
6  * ae-14-51.car4.Seattle1.Level3.net (4.68.105.5)  970.128 ms  829.879 ms
7  INTEGRA-TEL.car4.Seattle1.Level3.net (4.71.156.30)  840.020 ms  498.107 ms  388.462 ms
8  tg9-4.cr01.sttlwatw.integra.net (209.63.114.133)  84.859 ms  74.570 ms  77.684 ms
9  tg13-1.cr01.ptleorte.integra.net (209.63.114.98)  77.398 ms  95.024 ms  137.277 ms
10  tg13-4.cr02.ptleorte.integra.net (209.63.114.142)  895.688 ms  902.977 ms  905.247 ms
11  tg13-1.cr02.boisidpz.integra.net (209.63.114.18)  907.638 ms  910.046 ms  912.363 ms
12  tg13-4.cr01.boisidpz.integra.net (209.63.114.13)  917.004 ms  919.320 ms  921.591 ms
13  tg13-1.cr01.slkcutxd.integra.net (209.63.114.30)  923.985 ms  926.359 ms  928.767 ms
14  tg9-1.ar10.slkcutxd.integra.net (209.63.114.254)  930.246 ms  931.733 ms  933.158 ms
15  gw0-cust-bluehost-com.slkc.eli.net (70.97.59.22)  934.537 ms  74.875 ms  230.638 ms
16  * * *
17  * * *
18  * * *
19  * * *
20  * * *
21  * * *
22  * * *
23  * * *
24  * * *
25  * * *
26  * * *
27  * * *
28  * * *
29  * * *
30  * * *

1051.037 ms!?!?!? Come on! This is like dialup! 15Mb/s my ass.

Well I booted my machine to vista… And this is how it went down…

Yay! Service Pack 1!

WTF Service Pack 1?

This is the coolest thing I have seen in my life. These animated images are from photos captured by Mars lander Phoenix.

Looks like MySpace has upgraded their look and feel. Finally.. I wonder how long it will be before they update and optimize their datacenters. For those of you lucky enough not to have accounts, here is their (my) new home page… It doesn’t look bad at all.

I’ve never really been a huge fan of Sun or Solaris, but after running it for a couple hours, it seems that almost everything “just works”; its great! To an novice it would seem like any other Linux distro, but its not! Its about 20% more responsive, and very stable. Great job Sun!

Enough talk, here are the pretty pictures everyone is here to see:

Booting:

Grub:

GDM login:

Default Gnome Desktop:

About the OpenSolaris:

Firefox (joy) Flash works too!:

File Manager:

Package Manager (Installing GAIM):

I’m compiling all my tutorials on my site. I will have tutorials for Gimp, Inkscape, Photoshop, and others when I get around to them. Click here to see the tutorials.

I’m here to tell you something everyone knows, but Metallica still doesn’t get, and that is new Metallica is horrible, and that the Internet is a big place where little people can say what they would like. Metallica’s “people” have been contacting blogging providers and having them remove negative reviews of their music. This is simply bogus. Metallica doesn’t get the internet as you might remember with the whole napster thing. Which in their minds was a huge win, but they apparently don’t know what BitTorrent is because you can do a search on scrapetorrent and download their entire discography. Yeah. I’m wasting my energy typing about a much of megalomaniac old bastards. Screw you, Metallica.

I’ve been using Hugin for a couple years now, and its saved me hundreds of hours of work. Creating a great panorama is hard without a tool like Hugin, or Photoshop. With Hugin, you have greater control, and some really inteligent code to get the job done a lot faster than Photoshop. Most the time its really as easy as 1, 2, 3. Load the images, let it chug away and align them, then export the picture.

Here is the UI, its pretty damn simple:

Here are a few panoramas I’ve made with just Hugin. It wouldn’t take more than 10 minutes post work to get them looking perfect. Click the photos below to see the full size images.

Tropic Reservoir (Originally 5 Individual Pictures):

My Room (Originally 27 Individual Pictures):

Astoria-Megler Bridge (Originally 12 Individual Pictures):

Zion’s National Park (Originally 4 Individual Pictures):

Linux is gaining more and more popularity everyday. Right now Windows in the grand scheme of software is well supported legacy software. Its simply out of date. Unix, Linux, and BSD have always been lighter, and more stable. Unless you’re a gamer, there is little reason to switch. BUT if you are a gamer that can switch, you might show the game developers Linux is a platform worthy of having games ported to.

The reason I say Windows is a “legacy” OS is simple: Its updated rarely, unstable, confusing, slow, insecure, large, poorly optimized, and closed ended. Linux on the other hand, has been re-worked, re-though, and re-optimized by hundreds if not thousands of developers over its life. Its been optimized to the point it will run on a cell phone, or even a watch! Windows Mobile requires a rather robust phone, when Linux can run on a 49Mhz ARM cpu found in most calculators.

Now for the show down — the reasons Linux is better.

File Compatibility:

No time after you load Linux you can load PDFs, RAW images from your camera, Illustrator files, Photoshop files, Word Documents, Exel Spreadsheets, the list really goes on forever.

Greater Flexibility:

Want to run World of Warcraft, Ventrillo and/or TeamSpeak, and your guild’s forum amd website? No problem! You could run it all off one machine! FREE!

Lower Cost:

Windows costs over $100. End of story. It really makes no sense to install Windows for a workstation PC. Most everything is compatable, and you’re just feeding a big, old, crotchity, money hungry, beast when you pay Microsoft for their dinosaur of an operating system.

All together you’re making a much better choice with Linux. You get all the great looks as Vista, with the the stability of MacOS, and the freedom to do whatever you’d like with your OS.