Microsoft alternatives that work? As if!

So now that I'm actually in computer classes that aren't freshman level, I've noticed a sharp increase in the anti-Microsoft atmosphere. Even the professors take time to make irrelevant jabs and jokes at Microsoft's expense. It's really, really distracting and annoying. One of these days I'm going to start making jokes and Linux and Apple's expense. I've already had a few opportunities that have presented themselves... Ironically because they were trying to make fun of the Windows market. One particular opportunity arose when they were talking about how Dell would use generic hardware, lock it down, and slap their brand name on it to sell at a profit, to which I immediately remarked: "Oh, you mean like Apple?" Nobody said anything, but such things from my mouth will be more common if they keep up the tirade.

Anyway... At one point in the class, the conversation turned to how horrible Microsoft Office was and how awesome OpenOffice is and how the ODF standard is awesome and how DOCX is just an evil money-making scheme. I mean, there was some interesting things mixed in between the rabid open source arguments, such as how governments were concerned that old documents might not be able to be opened in 50 or 100 years and how they needed a document format standard. So I decided, hey! If you would have just given the facts instead of taken the opportunity to make fun of a capitalist business that is supposed to make money, I would have considered using OpenOffice because of ODF. But, ya'know what? I tried it anyway.

Unfortunately, once I actually started using options in OpenOffice that I take for granted in Word 2007, I started running into some pretty interesting problems. Most notably the automatic bibliography features. A professor told me OpenOffice makes writing papers easy because you don't have to remember APA formatting. Great, I said! Let's try that! I have a paper due this week that needs APA formatting, so let's give it a shot. Load up a new document... Tools... Bibliography Database... Instant crash. In Linux. How awesome is that? Okay, maybe it's because I'm not using Ubuntu Stamp of Approval OpenOffice. Let's try Bibliography Database on Windows. Load up a new document... Tools... Bibliography Database... Instant crash. In Windows. How awesome is that?

Seriously? A modern feature with the prominence to be on a first-level menu crashes the entire application without any warning? I wonder what would happen in Microsoft Word did that. Which, I might add, it doesn't. I tried it just now. Guess which word processor I'm going to stick with? I'll give you three guesses and a hint: It's not OpenOffice. So much for the arguments that open source bugs get fixed before proprietary stuff. I try to look up solutions and I get bugs reported from 2007 and 2008 for version 2.0. Hello? This is 2009 and version 3.1 and the bug is still there? Excuse me while I laugh at your precious open source ideals.

The same goes for Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I put it on my Dell Mini because I was tired of Dell's version being old. All was well... That is, until I wanted to switch from the new-fangled UNR desktop interface that turns your entire desktop background into a task bar. I want to see my background image, thank you very much. So I switch! Simple, right? Something as basic as switching between Netbook interface and normal interface shouldn't have any problems, right? Hah! How could I be so naive? Not only was there a bug that prevented the window manager from running on start up, but the bug persisted even when I switched back to the stupid "new" desktop interface. Applications would load, but the window manager wouldn't technically be there, so I couldn't move, resize or even close the windows. They'd keep opening on top of each other and run in the background.

Yeah, I'm totally convinced open source is superior to Microsoft products, guys. Gee, I wonder what would happen if editing the Start Menu properties on Windows suddenly caused windows to freeze open, even on reboot, until you managed to limp along to find a patch you had to download from deep within a bug repository. It wasn't even in the automatic update, yet. For some reason, this massive bug managed to sneak through a severe lack of Ubuntu testing and I'm still not even sure it's up for automatic update. To be honest, I spent a day browsing bug reports so I could fix something as basic as changing desktops. I would never recommend Ubuntu to anyone who wants to use their computer easily.

And then there's Apple, of course. The iPhone, pride of the cell phone market, of which I own, relying solely on iTunes, the single most laughable chunk of programming I've ever had the honor of using. Right now, it's idling at a lovely 50MB of RAM. Doing absolutely nothing. When it wants an update, it vomits dialog boxes all over my desktop until I either update or hide the warnings. I finally just hid the stupid things. I would rather be entirely clueless as to updates than have boxes popping up in the middle of my work and games. Of course, I can't even use the Apple Update thing that have going... I have to install new versions of iTunes from full-install scratch. And I mean I have to uninstall the iTunes I have, too. Why? I don't know. It makes no sense, but whenever I use the update feature, my iPhone invariably ceases to sync. It'll toss up a cryptic "can't connect" error that not even Apple's knowledge base can pinpoint. Only after I uninstall and reinstall from a full 100MB installer file will it ever actually work.

So folks, there's a reason I use Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2007: They just work.

Yep. Ugh. Crawlers...

Apparently, beemp3.com managed to find a folder I'd hidden away on my site for personal MP3 uploads, ignore my robots.txt rules, and put up links to all the music I have uploaded all across Rivenwolf.net. Can you say "UNHAPPY?" I sure can. How it found the folder in question, I'll never know. Maybe it just guessed... It seems shady enough to do something like that. Shame on my for having the folder indexed for easy access, because that allowed it to link to all the files I had uploaded. Bah!

So, in response to that, I'm not even going to bother flagging them all. What I did, though, was change all my links (so at least beemp3 is linking to dead things now), remove all my indexes (a major inconvenience, but I can't afford to leave them), and rewrite my hotlink prevention rules. Because of that, there may be some nasty side-effects with RSS feeds when I post links to stuff I have hosted. I provided a rule for Google Reader, since it seems to break things by being a referrer. I think most readers, though, treat things as a direct connection (at least the offline readers do), so there shouldn't be too much of  a problem.

If there is, though, let me know?

Well, apparently, what was intended to stay in the committee for an extended period has already been leaked to the community at large, so I have to hack together a quick explanation before the rumors start flying and things are attributed to people that simply aren't true. (Come on, I live in a small town. I know exactly how news turns into gossip!)

I don't know how many people actually read this blog, though. Especially since I haven't said anything for ages. Hopefully that'll change now that I've repaired my RSS feeds and moved to a faster server and have actually started saying things again. That said, feel free to circulate this post far and wide so people who are interested actually get an explanation. An explanation for what, you ask? Well, my resignation from the Mysterium Committee, of course, as the title so clearly insinuates!

Here follows a very much modified (for the public) version of my resignation letter:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my part in the Mysterium Committee. I first considered joining when I was asked by a friend of mine to help them, and my final reason for joining was because I thought it would be fun and that it would be a nice way to do something good for the community. Unfortunately, due to recent events, I no longer find my participation to be fun.

The committee felt tense when I first joined, but I attributed that to some key teams being in disarray with Mysterium 2009 being so close at hand. People were spread too thin and I hoped that with my joining, things would lighten up and make things more fun for everyone, but now that Mysterium 2009 is over, I sense the mood hasn’t lightened even without hard deadlines.

So the reason I joined the committee? I thought it would be fun and I thought my help would be wanted. At first, it was, but now it seems like it isn’t. All of my reasons for joining the committee are gone, for a variety of reasons, and I have no other reason to stay. In light of that, I formally resign all of my positions (Web Development, Communications and Location) on the Mysterium Committee, effective immediately.

To those of you who I’ve discussed this with off and on, I’m sorry for finally doing this to you, but I’ve thought about this for weeks, and with college starting so soon, I really can’t afford to spend all this energy on Mysterium. If things were different, I would find a commitment like this to be a relaxing diversion from the academic grind, but as things are, it would only distract me and adversely affect my grades.

If you want more information, well... You're out of luck. I'll leave it entirely in the hands of the committee as to whether or not they want to leak the details of my departure. If they do say anything, feel free to ask me what the heck happened and I'll give you my side of the story. But until then, nada! To say it's not important? Eh... I won't say that. I think it is important, but the rest of the committee doesn't, and since I'm not part of the committee anymore, I don't think it's in anyone's best interest for me to go running around spouting internal information.

Let's just say that for a variety of reasons, my participation on the committee has become more stressful than I would like from a position that is entirely volunteer. I would prefer to spend that type of energy on something like a job or a political blog or something with a little more at stake for me personally than where the next location for Mysterium is or when the next communication is going to be distributed to the forum. I'm spending too much energy doing some very simple things.

So there you are... Now all you need to remember is that my @mysterium.net contact information is no longer valid and I have no idea who will handle incoming messages addressed to Communications, so just be aware that if you contact me from this point on, you will be talking to someone else if they don't deactivate all my accounts. I must add, though, that all forum accounts are my own personal accounts, so private messages and such will still work as intended. (I will remove my Mysterium signature in the future, but there are still some posts out there that people are actively reading, so I'll leave that up for a bit.)

(Otherwise known as Edrick-speak for "Hi, guys!")

After much, much, much, much, much pressure on TW to get his new servers working properly, and a few days of the two of us fooling around with reconfiguring his network, I finally have a site that's actually responsive! Woo! Guess what that means? More posts! There's been a lot that's happened since my last post, so I suppose I'll write up a little something every day until I get caught up.

Some quick points on what I've been seeing and doing, though, that I will hopefully follow up with complete posts:

• Feedburner was purchased by Google, who took the opportunity to wreck the service.
• I did, in fact, purchase an iPhone 3GS and have been loving it in spite of its Apple-ness.
• I've become far more active on Facebook and Twitter, if there are people who care about that.
• I've joined the Mysterium Committee in the areas of Web Development, Communications and Location.
• Someone got angry and went around blocking all YouTube videos of Kumikyoku.
• I've been on a Star Trek marathon, nearing completion of TNG and readying TOS.
• My WoW guild has been falling apart for reasons nobody wants to explain.
• I'm ramping up for another semester of university that starts on September 8th.
• I saw District 9 today and hereby order you to watch it at all costs.

And I'm sure there's more to discuss once I get my creative juices flowing once more. But until then, I would encourage everyone to see if you can break the site. I've updated lots of things, reconfigured lots of other things, and had to change the feed back to my standard WordPress RSS address because the Feedburner service has been completely destroyed by a Google that doesn't seem to care that there are tons of people who are unable to get access to their Feedburner dashboards after the merger. (Seriously, how long has it been? I still can't get access to mine. I don't care anymore. I'll find a feed manager later, but it'll never be Google.)

Okay. I've lived without a cell phone for years now. I keep getting asked for my number (especially at school) and I keep saying "cell phone? NOPE!" Well, the time has come for me to seriously consider getting one. I'll need one definitely before school starts, and preferrably as soon as possible, especially with my current escalating involvement with the Mysterium Committee. As such, I've broken down two plans that I would use:

iPhone Nation Family Plan:

• Fee for family plan: $69.98 per month.
  • Nation 550 Family Plan, starting with 2 lines: $59.99 per month.
  • Additional 3rd line: $9.99 per month.
• Fee for iPhone data plan: $60.00 per month.
  • First iPhone data plan: $30.00 per month.
  • Second iPhone data plan: $30.00 per month.
• Unlimited nights (9pm to 6am) and weekends (Friday 9pm to Monday 6am).

Grand total per month: $129.98 (Taxes apply.)

Splitting family plan fee with three people: $23.32 per phone per month.

Each iPhone user pays individual data plan. Added to family plan fee: $53.32 per iPhone per month.

iPhone Individual Plan:

• Fee for Nation 450 Individual Plan: $39.99 per month.
• Fee for iPhone data plan: $30.00 per month.
• 5000 minutes nights (9pm to 6am) and weekends (Friday 9pm to Monday 6am).

Grand total per montht: $69.99 (Taxes apply.)

So that, folks, is the breakdown. Basically, I save $16.66 a month by sharing monthly minutes with three other people. I don't know how feasable that will actually be. Personally, I can see myself using a lot of minutes over a month just with emergency school-related calls. Team projects and such. I was asked many times last semester for my cell number, and I imagine if I gave one out, I'd be dinged with multiple 5 minute calls that would eat up the family pool of minutes. So would it be worth it for me to pay extra for a guaranteed 450 minutes every month (plus insanely high, though not unlimited, minutes for nights and weekends) or do you think I could fit within the family share?

Another concern is that once I'm locked into a contract, I couldn't move from, say, family plan to individual plan with my iPhone. Capella, however, was able to switch from individual to family, and since going from family to individual means more money in AT&T's pocket, I would assume it's okay to do that. I don't want to be stuck in family or individual for 2 years. (Although I don't see myself moving a considerable distance away from my family while I'm in school, which will last at least 2 more years.)

Yet another concern is about getting a texting plan. Should I? I won't text. At all. I'll use the 3G data plan I'm paying out the wazoo for to use IMs or something instead. The iPhone 3GS supports background applications, right? AIM in the background is all I'm asking for and texting I would never use. Then again, the question was never if I would use texting but if other people insisted on sending them to me anyway. Then I'd still have to pay for all their little crappy messages. Is there a way to block texts? Is this even that much of an issue? How many people have trouble with people sending them unwarranted texts?

Then, of course, there's the coup de grace: Which iPhone do I get? I've waited all year to get a cell phone because I knew Apple was coming out with a new one and I wanted it. Above all, I wanted a bigger, better still camera that also functioned as a video camera. Wish granted! Clearly, I want a 3GS, but which size? To be perfectly honest, I'm thinking about getting the 32GB version. I can see myself extensively taking photographs and videos and perhaps recording lectures and definitely putting music on the thing, not to mention downloading all those awesome Tower Defense games from the App Store. My only issue lies with the fact that there is no iPhone disk mode like the iPods have, otherwise it would double as a portable hard drive like I use my iPod for all the time. Then I would totally justify the cost of the 32GB version.

We shall see... Anyone have any advice?

UPDATE 1: Then there's also the Unity family plan which costs 10 more dollars per month, offers 700 monthly minutes, plus doesn't cost said monthly minutes when calling both AT&T cell phones AND land lines! For $10 more total ($3.33 per person that will be using this plan), I think I would pick that. Calling home for free would be nice.

Five things I learned this year during my July 4th vacation:

Thing 1 is learning that Bolt is my new favorite movie, taking the solid place of Wall-E, which tenuously took the place of The Black Hole. I found myself wanting to watch it this weekend and, not being able to, I was a very sad puppy. I figured there was no use denying the fact that I've seen Bolt more times in 3 months than I have my old favorite movies over the course of my entire life. I was so distraught, as a matter of fact, that I completely forgot my personal tradition of watching Independence Day... Well, okay, that's not the reason, but still. Pretty close. (You know, I should make a list of my favorite movies.)

The reason I couldn't play Bolt is Thing 2. I learned that my old laptop can't play HD movies. Whether it's because the video file for an hour-and-a-half movie in 1080p weighs in at 7GB and there was a hard drive bandwidth issue or because 1080p at 30 frames per second is too much for the video card bandwidth to handle, the end result was the same on 3 different video players and 2 sets of codecs: A split second of clear video immediately followed by either insane garble or lots and lots of audio/video skipping. The laptop is a 2.0GHz Pentium M with 2GB RAM and a 256MB nVidia GeForce 6800 Go. My Dell Mini 9 played the thing better than that laptop. (Although we're talking maybe two seconds of legible footage compared to merely one second.)

Thing 3 was learning that even a certain board-controlled privately-owned lake can get caught up in such a power struggle that they can't install tornado sirens without ruining everything. It is sad, though comforting, to know that it's not just a certain community based around a certain adventure game that can't seem to get along from one group to another, but the whole of humanity itself! In the immortal words of the last poor sap who was utterly destroyed because of the words themselves: "Can't we all just get along?"

Thing 4 was learning that I haven't blogged in such a very, very long time. Why? No idea. Not a whole lot to say and not a whole lot to say that I want to tell the whole wide world. I figured I would make Capella happy and post a list of things I learned over the weekend! Which leads me to Thing 5 that I learned:

It is entirely possible to get sunburn by driving for 3 hours in a convertable with the top down on a cloudless day. I'm not saying I did, but I certainly came close. I think it was the combined effort of yesterday's standing outside all day and today's 3 hour drive home in bright, bright sunlight. Either way, convertables are fun, and I didn't even lose my World of Warcraft hat in the wind tunnel of a car!

You know what would be nice?

It would be nice to have an honest comparison of IIS and Apache without it being an open source fanaticist article by a guy on a crusade against anything bearing the name Microsoft. Apparently, according to them, IIS is one giant exploit waiting to happen because... Oh wait. They never say why. They just assume that sites running IIS are hacked because of IIS itself and not because the admin left something open on his own negligent self. But then you have Apache, which is clearly superior for the simple fact that it runs on Linux. And we all know Linux makes things better just because it's Linux, don't we? If it runs on Linux then it must be secure!

Anyway, I'm thinking about shifting my router and web services over to Windows Server 2008. (I would install R2, but apparently that's only for x64 processors now, which is awesome, but not for me, since my server system isn't going to have a 64-bit processor.) My primary reason for this is... Well, let's face it. I'm a Windows kind of pup. I'm running Windows 7 RC on my main machine, for crying out loud. Everything I have is built around Windows... Except for my router server, which is, sadly, running a copy of Ubuntu Server. It's alright, but definitely not plug and play on a Windows network. Every time the thing restarts, I have to manually restart the Internet connection (thanks to a poor Linux-wide implementation of ADSL PPPoE) and then manually start folder shares, which have suddenly blocked out the family computer for no apparent reason. On the bright side, it's rather stable. Although my copies of Vista and Windows 7 has less downtime than my server due to problems. (And then there's Ubuntu on my Dell Mini that acts like Windows ME.)

I don't know though... I might just decide to shift the work load to larger computer by installing a newer release of Ubuntu Server. It's hard telling. It really is. On the one hand, I'm growing increasingly sick of the arrogant open source community. Whenever you go look for help, you're innundated by it. On the other hand, I already know a lot about running one, so I don't need a whole lot of help. Plus, it just sits there and does its thing once it's all set up, but, see, Windows Server will do the same thing once it's set up, too. I guess it's a question of: Do I want to stick with what I know, or do I want to take the time to learn something new? And face it. Windows Server is going to be a lot closer to my intended field of work than Ubuntu Server will ever be.