Things anew…

Posted on February 17, 2011 by xiao_haozi

Things are anew with less sinew here. *See the old place if you think I’m just throwing out some new blog assonance.

I guess I should place some content within the confines of this virtual cosmos. Content should, hopefully, be making it’s way over from the old location soon. I also hope to finally gather the scattered projects, code, and postings from all of my domains and let this serve as the central portal for all things moi.

For now, I guess we should kick things off with something interesting I’ve done recently.
Hmm, let me see.
Well, I made the banner you see at the top of the site. That’s pretty interesting if you are into art or wine or colorful drinks and the like. It’s a picture I took at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, DC. The original is a photo of a display addressing science through the (modern) ages and this particular piece regarding a world’s fair. This version is a simple crop and had the cubism filter applied in GIMP.

The Serenity of Mutaku

Browse around and maybe you’ll find something else halfway interesting. Worst case scenario, you just ate another few minutes off of the clock of your workday. Congratulations and you are welcome.

-Matthew
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STOP SOPA/PIPA!

Posted on January 18, 2012 by xiao_haozi

Speak up here: https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Tell congress that we don’t want totalitarianism!

Speak up before it's too late! https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

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Monty Hall Sneak Peak

Posted on December 28, 2011 by xiao_haozi

Coming Soon: Monty Hall game player in Python.

For now, here is a little teaser:

The 10 billion iteration answer:
>>> monty_hall.play(iter=10000000000)
Ran 10000000000 iterations in 104833.082781s {'wins': 3333340564L, 'losses': 6666659436L}

The code is hosted, of course, on GitHub and can be found here: https://github.com/mutaku/Monty-Hall-Game

As soon as I get the rest of it written up I’ll be posting everything here along with a little code walk-through including a very basic example of Python decorators as well as general object-oriented approaches.

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Game Recommendations : Round 1

Posted on December 28, 2011 by xiao_haozi

Try to throw up rudimentary, sometimes cringe-worthy quality recommendations on Steam of the PC games I’m playing. Figured that with my minimalist friends list on Steam that there may be some more benefit reaped from those inexpertly written reviews by posting them here as well. So without further ado, here are the first batch:

Osmos

  • Great little game with some fun physics (think elliptical orbits). Soundtrack is superb!

 

 

Steal Storm: Burning Retribution

  • Great arcade feel and tight controls, engaging soundtrack, strong visuals and explosion sprites accompanied by well done sound effects. Addictive.

 

 

Crayon Physics Deluxe

  • Fun. Each level can be as easy or complex as you wish… Can be pretty tricky to flag levels. Cute.

 

 

Borderlands

  • Amazing! Cell shaded FPS in all it’s glory… doesn’t get much better than this for an RPG/FPS. Tough game.

 

 

Chessmaster Challenge

  • The old chessmaster I remember from systems like Gameboy but now with really great tutorials. Also has a mode that teaches you advanced strategies (openings, defenses, etc) from chess champions in a tutorial format.

 

Prince of Persia

  • Ubisoft+PoP+cell shading … greatness all around. Beautiful game and supremely enjoyable adventure. Very relaxing!

BUT — broken with steam. Overlay won’t work and does not register any playtime, etc, with steam. Can buy and launch through steam just fine though. A 3+ year issue that hasn’t been fixed but don’t let it hinder you from buying and playing the game… just a heads up.

 

Sid Meier's Civilization V

  • Total crack… that’s all I’ll say. If you don’t mind countless, back to back all-nighters then go ahead and play, you won’t be disappointed.

 

 

Trine

  • One of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. Excellent gameplay, engaging story and characters, a lot of depth across each of the 3 playable characters, and did I mention it was insanely beautiful?

Got this game on sale and actually felt really bad playing it and realizing how little I paid for it. That says everything you need to know. Buy it, play it, love it!

More to come…

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Mutaku on Google+ Pages

Posted on November 7, 2011 by xiao_haozi

We are now on Google+ Pages as you can see by way of the link on the right side of the page or by clicking here.

If you are a G+ user feel free to swing by the page. Will post software updates and anything Mutaku related to that page as well as to the other regular locations.

Happy G+ing!

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∞11022011∞

Posted on November 2, 2011 by xiao_haozi

11022011

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Netflix Stock Dives

Posted on September 15, 2011 by xiao_haozi

I have recently vetted some frustration with Netflix of late; you can catch up on here.

Today, according to the NYTimes, Netflix stock has taken quite the dive on news of a huge loss in customer subscriptions. You can read that article here.

The company on Thursday morning revised downward, incrementally, its subscriber estimates for the quarter of the year that ends in two weeks. It did not change its financial guidance for the quarter. Still, its stock dropped almost 15 percent in heavy trading when the market opened Thursday.
- BRIAN STELTER NYTimes

Seems to me that these issues need to be more publicly addressed or this could be the legitimate start of Netflix’ fall from the top.

 

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Bash Snippet for Git Users

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Erik

Keeping track of what branch you are using while in a git repository can be a bit of a pain. Adding the following code to your ~/.bashrc file can make it a bit easier since it will prepend your prompt with the current branch.

function parse_git_branch {
    GIT_BRANCH=$(git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | awk '{if ($1 == "*") { printf "(%s) ",$2}}')
    PS1="$GIT_BRANCH\u@\h:\w\$ "
}

PROMPT_COMMAND="parse_git_branch"
Here it is working:
matt@desktop:~$ source /etc/bash.bashrc
matt@desktop:~$ cd programming/bits
(master) matt@desktop:~/programming/bits$
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Another Netflix Change … for the worse

Posted on September 7, 2011 by xiao_haozi

It seems you can’t go a day without reading tech news and finding another cringe worthy change to Netflix service. Of late it started with the change in pay scales and the separation of streaming and mail DVDs. Then came the news that they lost their deal with Starz and would no longer be offering many new titles over the streaming service (e.g. Disney or Sony). Now there is news that users with streaming or streaming and one DVD subscriptions would no longer be able to stream content on more than one device at a time.

If we look at these changes individually, they may be justified considering the Netflix model and business versus customer benefits. Heck, it’s capitalism. Individually a customer could easily turn their cheek and continue being entertained for a reasonable fee. However, these issues and announcements have come one after another in a very short time frame. Customers are now faced with three very large changes to their service that simply boil down to less content for more money and greater limitations on access.

Netflix's new payment scale - This is what I used to pay for 3 DVDs at a time

The first negative change, in my mind, during my Netflix customer tenure was the addition of a separate charge for access to Bluray content. The fee was small in and of itself, but when it’s a change of greater than 10% of your total monthly bill it’s not a simple shoulder shrug. However, I bit the bullet and am still accessing Bluray content for an additional fee. Meanwhile, we still do not have Linux support for streaming content. This has always been a big deal for many of us (read: nerds/geeks) but we got around this by installing virtual machines or using a video game console. These were issues that I ultimately brushed off and continued supporting and consuming the Netflix model.

Now we add to the ever growing list of negative changes the announcements of the past several weeks and things begin to come to a different light. Do we continue to support a service which continually raises fees while delivering less content and more limitations? When do we say enough is enough? Where would we go to get the content we want? These are questions which now seem more pertinent than ever and are becoming more pressing as our dollar takes us less far than it used to.

I’ll leave with one last thought that I know would, sadly, win me back over; Netflix natively on Linux.

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End of an Era : Uptime FAIL!

Posted on August 17, 2011 by xiao_haozi

Well, we had a huge power problem on Sunday that resulted in 2 fire trucks and 2 electric utility crews coming to the house. Long story short, this picture should sum up the sadness involved:

As a friend pointed out, "You had 1019 days which is 2.7917 years. That's close to Euler's constant e."

 

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Migrating to XFCE

Posted on August 7, 2011 by xiao_haozi

The following was from a Google+ post that I figured I would share here as well.

Well I think I’m finally switching my main desktop from KDE to XFCE. Too much flash and pizazz and having to turn off behaviors and mannerisms for my liking. I guess I’m just getting too old for these young peoples’ desktops.

It was a decent 9+ years, KDE. Sorry you had to turn into GNOME.

A later follow-up comment:

[warning: non-proofread, off-the-cuff rant ahead]

Made the switch last night. Very refreshing!

Not sure if others get the same feeling, but I believe desktops have a measurable weight in terms of interaction and feel. As of late (read KDE 4.*), KDE has lost weight and felt ungrounded. Delayed click responses, bouncing icons, crashing UI effects, windows partially disappearing, and the ‘improved’ graphics all tend to lend way to a flighty feel and experience. But not in a good way, but rather a lack of solidity that I want from a desktop. I want a concrete user experience that shows of it’s strength in the back-end by portraying a solid and consistently reliable front-end. I’ll trade ‘sleek’, ‘cutting-edge’, and ‘feature overflowing’ for solidity and reliability any day. When productivity calls what really matters?

Is it just me feeling the departure of usability? I am one who spends 75% of my computing time tied to a terminal emulator. Maybe I am simply disconnected from what is truly meant to be the modern desktop experience. I look to OS X and Windows Vista/7 for comparison and see similar qualities to KDE 4 and GNOME 3. It’s quite possible that these are the ways of today and are in response to what the majority of users demand from their desktops.

One of the major selling points for Linux is obviously the stability and reliability of the kernel. Therefore, I would expect that the layering OS and desktop should reflect such qualities and do nothing but to bring out the best possible performance and usability of the Linux kernel. KDE4 and GNOME3 seem to have diverged greatly from these ideas. Is it time for distributions to begin defaulting their OSes to a more reasonable (see qualities above for a definition of reasonable) desktop? Maybe Xubuntu should really become Ubuntu, leaving Kubuntu and Gubuntu (?) as unique, non-default variations.


 

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