Andrew the Hopeless Techie – Page 13 – A techie lost in the mesh of reality

Open Letter to Google

July 19, 2010 4 Comments

Dear Google,

I have enjoyed your many different services over the years, I have grown to depend on several apps you make to simplify my life. Picasa manages my pictures, Google Apps my email, and Adsense helps pay the bills. I wish I could say this all makes me happy, but honestly I feel a little cheated when I find that Picasa is not natively supported on Linux.

I can understand time is an issue, I understand encasing the windows version in a WINE instance is a easy fix, but i do not understand why a company with its own Linux OS (Android) can not take the time to make a implementation of their apps such as Picasa using native Libs and tools.

This might seem trivial coming from one person, but Google I am sure others feel the same way, Google do you really wish to fix issues pertained to a Windows version of Picasa running in Linux on a WINE instance? I ask you would the developmental process not be more streamlined if you had a native APP?

I have had issues in the past with software running in WINE, and I ask why when a company that is clearly interested in Linux could make a Linux native client?

Ok Google I know what your going to say, We just don”t have time today! Well I say, come on lets go and make the code avalible to the community today!

Thanks for your time, sorry to waste your dime, I really must stop this rhyme before i do not have time, to send this Letter.

Thanks,

Andrew Jamison – Google user and Linux Enthusiast

General Stuff, Linux, Non-Specific

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Twitter Updates for 2010-07-19

July 19, 2010 0 Comments

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Twitter Updates for 2010-07-19

July 19, 2010 0 Comments

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-18

July 18, 2010 0 Comments

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Starcraft 2 Beta – Yes I got an official Invite!

July 17, 2010 1 Comment

The good!

As the title suggests I received a Official Beta Invitation for Starcraft 2 this morning, this blog post will touch on my thoughts of the game so far.

I am not sure if I am able to post screenshots due to the game not being released yet but I will do my best to sum up my experience with the game so far.

The not so good!

Well it is not apparent that my skills in Starcraft are rusty (were never that good to begin with), I can not seem to get the upper hand on opponents that I fight in the Beta. Since the Official game does not release till July 27th 2010 the single player functionality of the game is non-existent (or at least locked out), this means that your forced to ether battle the computer in a traditional Battle.net way (similar to the online play of SC1) or go head to head (or 2v2, 3v3 and so on) with other beta players. The issue here is I SUCK AT PVP REGARDLESS OF THE GAME! You might think me exaggerating but I assure you I am not, playing vs a real person requires honing in on your strategy skills which sadly I apparently lack.

Point When playing I won only once (and that was vs the PC) this was out of maybe 20 matches i played through out the day.

General Game play VS SC 1

The core way you play the game has not changed much, the graphics are nicer and smoother, but aside from that actual game dynamics have not changed (based on the Multiplayer side anyway).

Aside from the actual functionality of the game being similar they seem to have greatly reduced resource harvesting times, the new time is similar to the speed achieved in the first game when entering the cheat “operation cwal” almost instantly your units gather resources (there is a small delay to make it more challenging), however I expect this might be tweaked and possibly lengthened by the time the game launches.

There are some units that have changed a great deal in use however I never lasted long enough to test any of these lol.

Overall impression from the few hours i played it so far!

I think the game is a huge leap forward in terms of technology and what it can do, however as far as feel, it very  much feels like an updated version of the first game. In fairness however one can not really get a feel for the new features of this game until you are allowed to play the single player game. I feel for Multiplayer at least the game will be very similar and feel almost like a new SC1 remake.

I am convinced that the story aspect of the game will be far better then the first and the dynamic aspects involved in campaign mode will make this game stand out.

In its favor it does incorporate itself into the new overhauled Battle.net system which supports RealID friends. These are essentially friends that once added to your list can be chatted with from any of the new Blizzard games, World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2 are the first two to use it Diablo 3 from what I hear will utilize it as well. Blizzard is boasting the big benefit of this is that if two friends have linked their RealIDs on a friends list then Friend A could be playing World of Warcraft while Friend B could be playing Starcraft 2 and both could see when the other is online and chat with them across games.

A WoW user could use this feature to chat with friends regardless of the realm they are on or the faction they chose.

As I continue to use the Beta I will report back should I find anything cool about the new game. Keep in mind just 9 days from today you can buy the full game so it is rather odd that i was given a Beta invite this late in the program and this close to the final launch.

Feel free to post your comments below and if you also have a SC2 Beta (official no hacked beta versions please) key as well and wish to play together some time look me up and send your RealID* to andy [at] andyjamison [dot] com if you want to be friends on the game of course.

*RealID refers to the email address you used when you signed up for battle.net. There is also a method in Sc2 using your Character ID but this is rather buggy i hear

Games, Starcraft & Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft

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Introducing: Open Source Food – Fried Mushroom Edition

July 14, 2010 1 Comment

Open Source Food

What is Open Source Food? – To answer this I need to first summarize what Open Source means to me.

Open source is the essence of sharing in the software world, you take the source code someone else has worked to make and adapt it for your own needs and possibly make a new peace of software out of it. I have taken this philosophy and adapted it to the Food world, you take an recipe that someone puts up and allows you to use, alter it and adapt it to serve a new purpose and create a new item from someone else initial work. This to me is very similar to Open Source, so I coined it Open Source Food!

In the spirit of Open Source I took a recipe i found on a friends site and changed it slightly making it work for my needs.

Open in the sense your free to change it and Source referring to the raw ingredients

Fried Mushrooms

Recently I got a huge craving for Fried Mushrooms so I began to look for recipes online, not finding any that really interested me, Robbie Ferguson suggested trying the batter for his Parmesan Chicken and using it for the mushrooms, I agreed and tonight I did just that.

Mushrooms before being Fried

Mushrooms before being Fried

I started with some cheap White Top mushrooms shown above which I mistakenly bought way to many of. I then took the following recipie

  • 1 Cup Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
  • 1/2 Cup Grated Parmesan Cheese (I just use the freeze-dried stuff here)
  • Sea Salt (about 1 tsp)
  • Fresh Crack Pepper (about 2 1/2 tsp)
  • 2 Large Eggs (Whites Only)
  • 1/2 Cup Room-Temperature Water

This generated a nice batter which proved to not be enough for the large amount of Mushrooms I bought, so I had to make a second batch while dubbling the above incrediants.

Mushroom Batter

Mushroom Batter

When I placed the mushrooms in the batter they were easily coated as you can see which helped to create a great tasting mushroom. When i got them evenly coated I began to heat up some cooking oil in a Deep Fryer, setting the Fryer to 375 and giving it about 5 minutes to heat up. I then dropped them in one at a time and let them cook until they resembled the color below

What the Mushrooms look like fresh out of the Fryer

Freshly fried mushrooms

After that you want to make sure you have a plate with a few paper towels on it to absorb the excess oil, then place the Fried Mushrooms down on it and repeat till all the Mushrooms are done. You can tell if you did it correctly when they look similar to the image below

First Batch of Mushrooms

First Batch of Mushrooms

That is all that is left of the first batch as they were so good my Wife and Daughter seemed to woof them down as evidant by the small amount that is in the picture above. Keep in mind this was merely the first batch, finaly I repeated the steps over and over until the last batch was done, You can tell by the picture below just how many Mushrooms were made.

Final fried mushrooms

The pile of Shrooms

As you can see I made a huge amount here and that was not even all the Mushrooms I still have about 12-15 left that never got fried due to running out of Batter once again. You can see in the image below just how many mushrooms were left which is not alot

Left over raw Mushrooms

Left over Mushroom stems

Bottom Line – These things are delicious and very easy to make but be careful how many mushrooms you buy because they seem to multiply once you clean and cut them up. I had some rather large mushrooms so alot of them had to be Quartered and all of them needed to be de-stemed.

That leaves the left over stems and other Mushroom scraps seen below. You could easily include these in some kind of soup or other Mushroom dish.

Mushroom Stems

Mushroom Stems

Let me know what you think post your comments below.

Food, Recipies

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World of Warcraft – Cataclysm Information

July 14, 2010 0 Comments

G4 has 3 videos up on their site that explain more in depth the benefits of the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft.

Some of the features they explained were more on the Archeology profession – turns out this is a secondary profession so it can be learned in addition to the main two Professions, however the way the video put it, it is mostly a way to get additional Lore information and learn more about each race in Azerroth. Still this is a cool thing to do when you have nothing better to do.

Of course there is going to be other huge changes with the expansion some of which sound very interesting, the Lead Content designer (last video on that page) mentions so much audio being included that they almost can not fit it on 2 DVDs. It makes me wonder if they might release a Blu-ray version of the game for those with the proper drives, at any rate sounds like Cataclysm will be 2 or more DVDs otherwise.

With regards to flight in Azeroth they seemed tight lipped as to just what would be required to be able to fly in the Classic Zones but the way it sounded is there will be no additional requirement you can just do it, provided you are the right level and have bough flight in the past expansions.

At any rate this is a short post but wanted to get the word out, if you are even slightly interested in the expansion I suggest checking out the videos they are all about 6-8 minutes long and there are 3 of them.

http://www.av-j.com/wowcata

The link above will take you to the G4 site that hosts the interviews.

Games, World of Warcraft

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