I’ve been reading a lot of near-future science fiction and speculative nonfiction lately, and as a result I’ve been contemplating the idea of transhumanism and what it means for us as a species and a culture. Transhumanism is decently defined by wikipedia, and has been explored in fiction by Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, and others. It has been discussed extensively in the non-fiction sphere as well: Ray Kurtzweil is probably the most well-known thinker discussing the topic. However, while Kurtzweil discusses the possibilities of AI consciousness and the emergence of the singularity, I am more interested in transhumanism in this article.
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Thoughts on the Transhuman revolution
2009.07.03, 09:56Twitter from the command line
2009.07.02, 15:38I’ve recently started playing with twitter. A nice way to use it via the command-line (using curl) was suggested here. I have taken that and improved slightly on it.
My new project – netjatafl
2009.06.25, 14:06I’ve been pretty busy the last month working on netjatafl. Netjatafl will eventually be a networked client for playing various board and/or card games. It was originally created for hnefatafl and other tafl games. However, I have designed it to be extensible; I’m working on adding mancala games, and it looks like my design makes it pretty easy to add a new game. (I’ve added most of the logic for mancala to the client and server in just a couple hours of work). I intend to add shogi, xiangqi, chess, and possibly even go at some point in the future.
The netjatafl server (taflserv) operates on a simple, completely open protocol; it will eventually support authenticated logins and statistics tracking. Anyone could write a netjatafl client for any platform, if they wished. My clients will all be in C++, because this let’s me reuse the ‘libboardgame’ library, which contains the game logic used by the server. I will also build in a “capabilities” system at some point, so the client and server can both advertise which games they support.
The whole thing is theoretically usable in its current state; the client is an ncurses-based text UI that is pretty cumbersome, but can be used. As far as I know, it only works in Linux. Anyone who wants to cross-compile it for Windows and send me a patch with everything you had to add, feel free! I will eventually add a proper GUI, probably gtk+-based.
Like the sound of this project? Feel free to check out the code, compile it, and let me know what you think!
Etymology notes: netjatafl is Old Norse for “net-table”; i.e. a networked table you can gather around to play games. ‘taflbordh’ is ON for ‘tafl board’ (tafl can also refer to tafl games in general), which sounds a little redundant, but it made a nice name for a client. And ‘taflserv’ is just ‘tafl server’… ’serv’ was meant to be short for ’server’, but I later noticed that it’s also a French word meaning ‘it serves”. I find this somewhat appropriate.
How to fix PulseAudio in Fedora in 2 easy steps!
2009.05.27, 22:401. su -c “yum -y remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio”
2. su -c “reboot”
The Case of the Odd NetworkManager Behavior
2009.04.27, 12:31I recently purchased an Eee PC 1000HE. This is a very nice machine, and aside from one weird bug, Linux support is great. However, I’ve run into a very annoying problem with Fedora 10, and at the root of that problem is gnome-keyring-manager.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be flamed by a fanboy.
2009.01.18, 00:53I feel the need to comment about this (and, subsequently, this and this).
First, a summary, for those who get a case of the tl;dr’s. A woman bought a laptop to use for her coursework at a local college. She accidentally bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu on it. When she realized her ISP’s setup disk wouldn’t work, she tried to get Dell to swap the laptop for one with Windows. The Dell representative apparently convinced her to keep the one she had.
She claims that this problem, combined with a lack of Microsoft Office, forced her to withdraw from classes. The local news ran the linked article; it is worth noting that the bottom portion (the part where the news agency contacted the college and Verizon, and everything got cleaned up) did not appear in the initial article.
5 things I hate about Fedora 10
2009.01.14, 16:14Every release of Fedora feels like a step in the wrong direction. I don’t say this lightly – I use Fedora at work and at home; it is my primary operating system. I have staunchly supported it in the face of critical Ubuntu fans for a while now.
First, a little background. I switched to Fedora from a mixture of gentoo and slackware around the time I started my current job, since it was far easier to keep track of one package management toolset, and several things about gentoo’s packaging system had started to irk me. The current release of Fedora at the time was 7. I have been using it since, usually upgrading to new releases (via a clean install) about a month after they release.
My needs are simple, but apparently elusive to Fedora. I use fluxbox as my window manager. I prefer to perform all of my system configuration from the command line. My graphical application use is minimal (firefox, games, pidgin).
Let’s explore the problems I’ve noticed have started creeping in, starting with the release of fedora 8. My solution/workaround for each problem is included, if I have one. For what it is worth, I realize that some of these could be the result of 3rd-party packages (such as Nvidia’s proprietary drivers). However, if any of these are the result of user error, then the solution should rightly be easy to find by searching documentation, which I have done extensively in every case.
An aside on Education
2009.01.07, 15:33I first encountered Clay Burell on his blog Beyond School, where he had started a series of Unsucky English Lectures. These posts were brilliant, engaging, and poignant, and I followed them to their tragically early conclusion. (Clay, if you’re reading this, pick those back up, man!) It turns out that Beyond School was actually a blog about revolutionizing education. I just happened in while he was doing a special series. I kept following his blog, though.
At any rate, Mr. Burell now has a new blog at education.change.org. In particular, one recent post impressed me, and I wanted to increase its distribution, at least by the tiny amount that people actually view this blog :P
Why Schoolwork Doesn’t Have to Suck
There’s some important ideas here. The concept that our technology could (should, must) become the medium through which we engage in learning is as groundbreaking as it is obvious. Enjoy.
.com is the new .org
2008.12.31, 09:26No, not an angry rant about proper gTLD usage. Instead, this is more of a Public Service Announcement: silenceisdefeat, my favorite provider of life-long free shell accounts, has had their domain name taken hostage. silenceisdefeat.org now redirects to an ebay auction for the domain name. As a result, they can now be found at:
I have updated my previous link to their site (in this article) to reflect the change as well.
Self-indulgent musings on total knowledge strategy games
2008.12.23, 16:44Total knowledge games are games in which all players involved have equal knowledge of the current state of the game, and the only factor that influences the game’s future state is the actions of the players. Chess, Go, and tafl are three such games that I play periodically.
Recently, I pondered a fairly simple question: which of these games is the most complex? All of them are complex enough that new players have room to become stronger over time. Skill in these games has been traditionally praised as a virtue by each game’s culture of origin. So, which game provides the greatest depth as a topic of study?
